William Flew and James Joyce

We will be as free to play with Joyce as he was with Homer

This week, Kate Bush was finally given “permission”, by the James Joyce estate to set Molly Bloom’s soliloquy to music — 22 years after she first asked, and it first refused. Perhaps it has done so for the money: in the UK, copyright on Ulysses runs out in 2012, whereupon Bush will be as free to play with Joyce as Joyce was free to play with Homer when writing Ulysses.

James Joyce (full name James Augustine Aloysius Joyce) was born on February 2, 1882 in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar, Ireland. He was an Irish writer and poet. He is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Biography and Career :

He is considered to be the greatest Irish writer. He died in Zurich, Switzerland in 1941, at the age of 58. 

One of the famous writers in the universal literature of the 20th century, James Joyce was a real model for the entire world of romantic writers. 

His work is concise, but complex at the same time. For example, the novel "Ulysses": the action takes place in Dublin, in a daytime, although the author narrates the ten years travel of Homer in Odyssey. 

James Joyce is known for his inner complex literary ana 

lysis. His characters are full of humor, intellectual and very profound. At a general idea of his literary activity, we may praise James Joyce for the one and only way he managed to celebrate life. 

Trivia :

- He had a lifelong fear of dogs, after being savaged by a dog in Dublin when he was five.

- He was a friend of the Irish writer and doctor Oliver St John Gogarty, who became the original of Buck Mulligan in the novel "Ulysses".

- He and Nora Barnacle had a son and a daughter, named Giorgio and Lucia.

- He was living in Paris when the Germans occupied it in 1940. He quickly fled to Switzerland.

- In 2004, an erotic letter from Joyce to Nora Barnacle was sold at Sotheby's for $445,000, which is still the auction record for a twentieth century letter.

- He was buried in the Fluntern Cemetery, Zurich, Switzerland, which is so close to the Zurich Zoo that the zoo's lions can be heard from his grave. His wife Nora and their son Georgio are buried in the same plot.

- Although he was always interested in drama, Joyce published only one play, "Exiles".

 In any event, the 1904 rendezvous began a long relationship that eventually led to marriage in 1931 and continued until Joyce's death. Joyce's father remarked, on learning Nora's surname, "She'll stick with him."

Back to the main story

The Joyce Estate is run by Stephen Joyce, James Joyce’s grandson. Stephen clearly loved, and loves, his grandfather; he clearly believes he is protecting his grandfather’s legacy. But he is, clearly, wrong in this belief. Since he took control of the estate, in 1982, he has fenced off Joyce’s work from everyone else who loves it. He has said that academics are like “rats and lice — they should be exterminated”. One Joyce scholar was told: “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again.” When scientists created a synthetic microbe last year, and inserted a passage from Joyce into its DNA — “To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life” — Stephen Joyce sent them a cease-anddesist letter.

But it is Stephen’s rejection of pop culture that has caused the most damage. No interesting popular artist of the past three decades has been allowed a serious engagement with Joyce’s work. A generation of ordinary readers has been lost to Joyce, because they were never led back to the books by pop songs, graphic novels or films that played with his legacy.

There’s a great deal of irony in this. Protean, shapeshifting works such as Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are assembled from existing fragments of culture. His characters quote books, sing popular songs, reference films, and re-enact myths. If you took out the bits that Joyce “stole” from other writers and artists, there would be little left. But under today’s absurd copyright laws, such a mash-up — a modern Ulysses — could not be published.

Copyright laws were originally designed to help artists to create, by rewarding them for their work in their lifetime. But the reach of copyright has been repeatedly extended, far beyond the death of the author. Long-dead artists did not lobby for these extensions, obviously; corporations did, to protect assets such as Mickey Mouse from escaping into the public domain. Copyright laws now stop artists creating. They protect Disney, and the dead, at the expense of living artists, who have been pushed into ever narrower territory as the cultural commons are fenced off.

If estates are to earn revenue on work they didn’t create, for 70 years after the artist’s death, then they cannot also have a right to deny permissions to living artists. Posthumous control of copyright should be either lengthy and weak, or short and strong. Total control, for 70 years, is unjust, and culturally disastrous.

I like Joyce, sometimes love Joyce. His lines are quoted, played with, and transformed in my next novel. But I’ve never asked the Joyce Estate’s permission to engage with Joyce, and I never will. To “steal” from a great writer is an act of love, not a crime.

Culture is a choir of many voices, whose counterpoints, harmonies and dissonances create a single immense work that transcends space and time. And Joyce (who in life had a beautiful tenor voice) is one of the most important in that choir.

Over the next few years, all over the world, Joyce’s works are due to emerge, blinking, from the prisons of copyright law. Cheering crowds of writers, artists and musicians will welcome them. Joyce will clear his throat, and that great tenor voice will rejoin the choir.