James
Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish Séamus Seoighe; 2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish expatriate writer, widely considered to be one of the most influential
writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his landmark novel Ulysses (1922) and its highly
controversial successor Finnegans Wake (1939), as well as the short story collection Dubliners (1914) and the
semi-autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).
Although he
spent most of his adult life outside Ireland, Joyce's psychological and
fictional universe is firmly rooted in his native Dublin — the city which provides the settings and much
of the subject matter for all his fiction. In particular, his tempestuous early
relationship with the Irish Roman Catholic Church is reflected through a
similar inner conflict in his recurrent alter ego Stephen Dedalus. As the result of his
minute attentiveness to a personal locale and his self-imposed exile and
influence throughout Europe, (notably in Paris, France), Joyce became paradoxically one of the most cosmopolitan yet one of the most
regionally-focused of all the English language writers of his time.[1]
[edit] Dublin, 1882–1904
In 1882, James
Augustine Joyce was born into a Roman Catholic family in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was the oldest of 10 surviving children; two of his siblings died
of typhoid. His father's family, originally from Fermoy in Cork, had once owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's
father and paternal grandfather both married into wealthy families. In 1887,
his father, John Stanislaus Joyce, was appointed rate (i.e., a local
property tax) collector by Dublin Corporation; the family
subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Around this
time Joyce was attacked by a dog; this resulted in a lifelong canine phobia. He also suffered from a fear of thunderstorms,
which his deeply religious aunt had described to him as being a sign of God's
wrath.[2]
In 1891, Joyce
wrote a poem, "Et Tu Healy," on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was angry
at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church and at the resulting failure
to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even
sent a copy to the Vatican Library. In November of that same year,
John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (an official register of bankruptcies) and suspended from
work. In 1893 John Joyce was dismissed with a pension. This was the beginning of a slide into poverty for the family, mainly due to John's drinking and general financial
mismanagement.[3]
Photograph
of James Joyce taken by fellow University College student Constantine P. Curran in
the summer of 1904. When asked later what he was thinking at the time, Joyce
replied 'I was wondering would he lend me five shillings' (in Ellmann).
James Joyce was
initially educated by the Jesuit order at Clongowes Wood College, a boarding school near Sallins in County Kildare, which he entered in
1888 but had to leave in 1892 when his father could no longer pay the fees.
Joyce then studied at home and briefly at the Christian
Brothers school on North Richmond
Street, Dublin, before he was offered a place in the Jesuits' Dublin school, Belvedere College, in 1893. The offer was
made at least partly in the hope that he would prove to have a vocation and
join the Order. Joyce, however, was to reject Catholicism by the age of 16, although
the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas would remain a strong influence on
him throughout his life.[4]
He enrolled at
the recently established University
College Dublin in 1898. He studied modern languages, specifically English, French and Italian. He also became active
in theatrical and literary circles in the city. His review of Ibsen's New Drama, his first published work, was published in 1900 and resulted in a
letter of thanks from the Norwegian dramatist himself. Joyce wrote a number of other
articles and at least two plays (since lost) during this period. Many of the
friends he made at University College Dublin would appear as characters in
Joyce's written works. He was an active member of the Literary and Historical Society, University College Dublin, and presented his
paper "Drama
and Life" to the L&H in 1900.
After
graduating from UCD in 1903, Joyce left for Paris to "study medicine", but in reality he squandered money his
family could ill afford. He returned to Ireland after a few months, when his
mother was diagnosed with cancer.[5] Fearing for her son's
"impiety", his mother tried unsuccessfully to get Joyce to make his
confession and to take communion. She finally passed into a coma and died on
August 13, Joyce having refused to kneel with other members of the family
praying at her bedside.
After her death he continued to drink
heavily, and conditions at home grew quite appalling. He scraped a living
reviewing books, teaching and singing — he was an accomplished tenor, and won the bronze medal in the 1904 Feis Ceoil.[7]
On 7 January 1904, he attempted to publish A Portrait of the Artist, an
essay-story dealing with aesthetics, only to have it rejected by the
free-thinking magazine Dana. He decided, on his twenty-second birthday,
to revise the story and turn it into a novel he planned to call Stephen
Hero. This was the same year he met Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway city who was working as a chambermaid at Finn's Hotel in Dublin. On 16 June
1904, they went on their
first date, an event which would be commemorated by providing the date for the
action of Ulysses.
Joyce remained
in Dublin for some time longer, drinking heavily. After one of his alcoholic
binges, he got into a fight over a misunderstanding with a man in St. Stephen's Green; he was picked up and
dusted off by a minor acquaintance of his father, Alfred H. Hunter, who brought
him into his home to tend to his injuries.
Hunter was rumored to be Jewish and to have an unfaithful wife, and would serve
as one of the models for Leopold Bloom, the main protagonist of Ulysses.[9] He took up with medical
student Oliver St John Gogarty, who formed the basis
for the character Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. After staying
in Gogarty's Martello Tower for 6 nights he left in the middle
of the night following an altercation which involved Gogarty shooting a pistol
at some pans hanging directly over Joyce's bed.[10] He walked all the way
back to Dublin to stay with relatives for the night, and sent a friend to the
tower the next day to pack his possessions into his trunk. Shortly thereafter
he eloped to the continent with Nora.
[edit] 1904–1920:
Trieste and Zürich
Joyce and Nora
went into self-imposed exile, moving first to Zürich, where he had supposedly acquired a post teaching English at the Berlitz
Language School through an agent in England. It turned out that the
English agent had been swindled, but the director of the school sent him on to Trieste, which was part of Austria-Hungary until World War I (today part of Italy). Once again, he found there was no position for him,
but with the help of Almidano Artifoni, director of the Trieste Berlitz school,
he finally secured a teaching position in ***, then also part of Austria-Hungary (today part of Croatia). He stayed there,
teaching English mainly to Austro-Hungarian naval officers stationed at the
*** base, from October 1904 until March 1905, when the Austrians — having
discovered an espionage ring in the city — expelled all aliens. With Artifoni's help,
he moved back to the city of Trieste and began teaching English there. He would
remain in Trieste for most of the next 10 years.[1]
Later that year
Nora gave birth to their first child, Giorgio. Joyce then managed to talk his
brother, Stanislaus, into joining him in Trieste, and
secured him a position teaching at the school. Ostensibly his reasons were for
his company and offering his brother a much more interesting life than the
simple clerking job he had back in Dublin, but in truth, he hoped to augment
his family's meagre income with his brother's earnings.[11] Stanislaus and James
had strained relations the entire time they lived together in Trieste, with
most arguments centering on James' frivolity with money and drinking habits.[12]
With chronic
wanderlust much of his early life, Joyce became frustrated with life in Trieste
and moved to Rome in late 1906, having secured a position working in a bank in the city.
He intensely disliked Rome, however, and ended up moving back to Trieste in
early 1907. His daughter Lucia was born in the summer of the same year.
Joyce returned
to Dublin in the summer of 1909 with Giorgio, in order to visit his father and
work on getting Dubliners published. He visited Nora's family in Galway, meeting them for the first time (a successful
visit, to his relief). When preparing to return to Trieste he decided to bring
one of his sisters, Eva, back to Trieste with him in order to help Nora look
after the home. He would spend only a month back in Trieste before again
heading back to Dublin, this time as a representative of some cinema owners in
order to set up a regular cinema in Dublin. The venture was successful (but
would quickly fall apart in his absence), and he returned to Trieste in January
1910 with another sister in tow, Eileen. While Eva became very homesick for Dublin
and returned a few years later, Eileen spent the rest of her life on the
continent, eventually marrying Czech bank cashier František Schaurek.
Joyce returned
to Dublin briefly in the summer of 1912 during his years-long fight with his
Dublin publisher, George Roberts, over the publication of Dubliners. His
trip was once again fruitless, and on his return he wrote the poem "Gas
from a Burner" as a thinly veiled invective against Roberts. It was his
last trip to Ireland, and he never again came closer to Dublin than London,
despite the many pleas of his father and invitations from fellow Irish writer William Butler Yeats.
Joyce came up
with many money-making schemes during this period of his life, such as his
attempt to become a cinema magnate back in Dublin, as well as a
frequently discussed but ultimately abandoned plan to import Irish tweeds into
Trieste. His expert borrowing skills saved him from indigence. His income was
made up partially from his position at the Berlitz school and from taking on
private students. Many of his acquaintances through meeting these private
students proved invaluable allies when he faced problems getting out of
Austria-Hungary and into Switzerland in 1915.
One of his
students in Trieste was Ettore Schmitz, better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo; they met in 1907 and became
lasting friends and mutual critics. Schmitz was Jewish, and became the primary
model for Leopold Bloom; most of the details about the Jewish faith included in Ulysses
came from Schmitz in response to Joyce's queries.[13] Joyce would spend most
of the rest of his life on the Continent. It was in Trieste that he first began
to be plagued by major eye problems, which would result in over a dozen
surgeries before his death.
In 1915, when
Joyce moved to Zürich in order to avoid the complexities (as a British subject)
of living in Austria-Hungary during World War I, he met one of his most enduring
and important friends, Frank Budgen, whose opinion Joyce constantly
sought through the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. It was
also here where Ezra Pound brought him to the attention of
English feminist and publisher Harriet Shaw Weaver, who would become
Joyce's patron, providing him thousands of pounds over the next 25 years and
relieving him of the burden of teaching in order to focus on his writing. After
the war he returned to Trieste briefly, but found the city had changed, and his
relations with his brother (who had been interned in an Austrian prison camp
for most of the war due to his pro-Italian politics) were more strained than ever.
Joyce headed to Paris in 1920 at an invitation from Ezra Pound, supposedly for
a week, but he ended up living there for the next twenty years.
[edit] 1920–1941:
Paris and Zürich
During this
era, Joyce traveled frequently to Switzerland for eye surgeries and treatments
for Lucia, who, according to the Joyce estate, suffered from schizophrenia. In her 2003 work, Lucia
Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, Carol Loeb Shloss alleges that there may have
been incest between Lucia and her father and quite possibly between Lucia and
her brother Georgio.[14] She cites the admission of the
current heir of the Joyce estate, Stephen Joyce, that he burned thousands of
letters between Lucia and her father that he received upon Lucia's death in
1982.[15] There is much correspondence of
Joyce's showing that Lucia was his muse in Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. All three works include a
voyeuristic father with a libidinal interest in nubile pre-pubescent and
adolescent girls—very often his own daughter.[16] Finnegans Wake ends with a father having sex with his daughter.[17] There is correspondence
from Joyce proving that he spoke with Lucia in a language similar to that of
the fragmented multi-language style in Finnegans Wake. There is much
evidence that Lucia was not diagnosed with schizophrenia by several doctors. In
fact, she was analyzed by Carl Jung who was of the opinion that her
father had schizophrenia after reading Ulysses.[18] Jung noted that she and
her father were two people heading to the bottom of a river, except that he was
diving and she was falling.[19][20]
In Paris, Maria and Eugene Jolas nursed Joyce during his
long years of writing Finnegans Wake. Were it not for their unwavering
support (along with Harriet Shaw Weaver's constant financial support), there is
a good possibility that his books might never have been finished or published.
In their now legendary literary magazine "transition," the
Jolases published serially various sections of Joyce's novel under the title Work
in Progress. He returned to Zürich in late 1940, fleeing the Nazi
occupation of France. On 11 January 1941, he underwent surgery for a perforated ulcer. While at first improved,
he relapsed the following day, and despite several transfusions, fell into a
coma. He awoke at 2 a.m. on 13 January 1941, and asked for a nurse to call his wife and son before losing
consciousness again. They were still en route when he died 15 minutes later. He
is buried in the Fluntern Cemetery within earshot of the lions in the
Zürich zoo - Nora's offer to permit the repatriation of Joyce's remains was
declined by the Irish government. Nora, whom he had finally married in London
in 1931, survived him by 10 years. She is buried now by his side, as is their
son Giorgio, who died in 1976. Ellmann reports that when the arrangements for
Joyce's burial were being made, a Catholic priest tried to convince Nora that
there should be a funeral Mass. Ever loyal, she replied, 'I couldn't do that to
him'.
[edit] Major works
[edit] Dubliners
Main article: Dubliners
Joyce's Irish experiences
constitute an essential element of his writings, and provide all of the
settings for his fiction and much of their subject matter. His early volume of
short stories, Dubliners, is a penetrating analysis of the stagnation
and paralysis of Dublin society. The final and most famous story in the
collection, "The Dead," was made into a
feature film in 1987, directed by John Huston (it was Huston's last major work).
[edit] A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Main article: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Portrait
of the Artist as a Young Man is a nearly complete rewrite of the abandoned novel Stephen Hero, the original
manuscript of which Joyce partially destroyed in a fit of rage during an
argument with Nora, in which she asserted that it would never be published. A Künstlerroman, or story of the
personal development of an artist, it is a biographical coming-of-age novel in which Joyce depicts
a gifted young man's gradual attainment of maturity and self-consciousness; the
main character, Stephen Dedalus, is in many ways based upon Joyce
himself.[21] Some hints of the techniques Joyce
was to frequently employ in later works — such as the use of interior
monologue and references to a character's psychic reality rather than his
external surroundings — are evident in this novel.[22] Joseph Strick directed a film of the book in
1977 starring Luke Johnston, Bosco Hogan, T.P. McKenna and John Gielgud.
[edit] Exiles and poetry
Main articles: Pomes Penyeach and Chamber Music (book)
Despite early
interest in the theatre, Joyce published only one play, Exiles, begun shortly after
the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and published in 1918. A
study of a husband and wife relationship, the play looks back to The Dead
(the final story in Dubliners) and forward to Ulysses, which was
begun around the time of the play's composition.
Joyce also
published a number of books of poetry. His first mature published work was the
satirical broadside "The Holy Office" (1904), in which he proclaimed
himself to be the superior of many prominent members of the Celtic revival. His first full-length
poetry collection Chamber Music (referring, Joyce explained, to the
sound of urine hitting the side of a chamber pot) consisted of 36 short lyrics.
This publication led to his inclusion in the Imagist Anthology, edited by Ezra Pound, who was a champion of Joyce's
work. Other poetry Joyce published in his lifetime includes "Gas From A
Burner" (1912), Pomes Penyeach (1927) and "Ecce Puer"
(written in 1932 to mark the birth of his grandson and the recent death of his
father). It was published in Collected Poems (1936).
[edit] Ulysses
As he was
completing work on Dubliners in 1906, Joyce considered adding another
story featuring a Jewish advertising canvasser called Leopold Bloom under the title Ulysses.
Although he did not pursue the idea further at the time, he eventually
commenced work on a novel using both the title and basic premise in 1914. The
writing was completed in October, 1921. Three more months were devoted to
working on the proofs of the book before Joyce halted work shortly
before his self-imposed deadline, his 40th birthday (2 February 1922).
Thanks to Ezra Pound, serial publication of
the novel in the magazine The Little Review began in 1918. This magazine was
edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, with the backing of John Quinn, a New York attorney at law with an interest in contemporary
experimental art and literature. Unfortunately, this publication encountered
censorship problems in the United States; serialization was halted in 1920
when the editors were convicted of publishing obscenity. The novel remained
proscribed in the United States until Judge John M. Woolsey lifted the ban in
1933.
At least partly
because of this controversy, Joyce found it difficult to get a publisher to
accept the book, but it was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach from her well-known Rive Gauche bookshop, Shakespeare
and Company at 12 Rue l'Odéon, Paris. A commemorative plaque
placed in 1989 by JJSSF (James Joyce Society of Sweden and Finland) is to be
found on the wall. An English edition published the same year by Joyce's
patron, Harriet Shaw Weaver, ran into further
difficulties with the United States authorities, and 500 copies that were
shipped to the States were seized and possibly destroyed. The following year, John Rodker produced a print run of
500 more intended to replace the missing copies, but these were burned by
English customs at Folkestone. A further consequence of the
novel's ambiguous legal status as a banned book was that a number of 'bootleg'
versions appeared, most notably a number of pirate versions from the publisher Samuel Roth. In 1928, a court
injunction against Roth was obtained and he ceased publication.
The year 1922
was a key year in the history of English-language literary modernism, with the
appearance of both Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land. In Ulysses,
Joyce employs stream of
consciousness, parody, jokes, and virtually every other literary technique to present
his characters.[23] The action of the novel, which
takes place in a single day, 16 June
1904, sets the characters
and incidents of the Odyssey of Homer in modern Dublin and represents Odysseus (Ulysses), Penelope and Telemachus in the characters of Leopold
Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, contrasted with their
lofty models. The book explores various areas of Dublin life, dwelling on its
squalor and monotony. Nevertheless, the book is also an affectionately detailed
study of the city, and Joyce said that "I want to give a picture of Dublin
so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it
could be reconstructed out of my book".[24] In order to achieve this level of
accuracy, Joyce used the 1904 edition of Thom's Directory — a work that listed
the owners and/or tenants of every residential and commercial property in the
city. He also bombarded friends still living there with requests for
information and clarification.
The book
consists of 18 chapters, each covering roughly one hour of the day, beginning
around about 8 a.m. and ending sometime after 2 a.m. the following morning.
Each of the 18 chapters of the novel employs its own literary style. Each
chapter also refers to a specific episode in Homer's Odyssey and has a specific
colour, art or science and bodily organ associated with it. This combination of
kaleidoscopic writing with an extreme formal, schematic structure represents
one of the book's major contributions to the development of 20th century modernist
literature.[25] Others include the use of classical mythology as a framework for his
book and the near-obsessive focus on external detail in a book in which much of
the significant action is happening inside the minds of the characters.
Nevertheless, Joyce complained that, "I may have oversystematised Ulysses,"
and played down the mythic correspondences by eliminating the chapter titles
that had been taken from Homer.[26]
Joseph Strick
directed a film of the book in 1967 starring Milo O'Shea, Barbara Jefford and Maurice Roëves. Sean Walsh directed another
version released in 2004 starring Stephen Rea, Angeline Ball and Hugh O'Conor.
[edit] Finnegans Wake
Main article: Finnegans Wake
Having
completed work on Ulysses, Joyce was so exhausted that he did not write
a line of prose for a year.[27] On 10 March 1923 he informed a patron, Harriet Weaver: "Yesterday I wrote two pages
— the first I have since the final Yes of Ulysses. Having found a
pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double
sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. Il lupo perde il pelo ma non il
vizio, the Italians say. The wolf may lose his skin but not his vice or the
leopard cannot change his spots".[28] Thus was born a text that became
known, first, as Work in Progress and later Finnegans Wake.
By 1926 Joyce
had completed the first two parts of the book. In that year, he met Eugene and
Maria Jolas who offered to serialise the book in their magazine transition. For the next few
years, Joyce worked rapidly on the new book, but in the 1930s, progress slowed
considerably. This was due to a number of factors, including the death of his
father in 1931, concern over the mental health of his daughter Lucia and his own health
problems, including failing eyesight. Much of the work was done with the
assistance of younger admirers, including Samuel Beckett. For some years, Joyce nursed the
eccentric plan of turning over the book to his friend James Stephens to complete, on the
grounds that Stephens was born in the same hospital as Joyce exactly one week
later, and shared the first name of both Joyce and of Joyce's fictional
alter-ego (this is one example of Joyce's numerous superstitions).[29]
Reaction to the
work was mixed, including negative comment from early supporters of Joyce's
work, such as Pound and the author's brother Stanislaus Joyce.[30] In order to counteract
this hostile reception, a book of essays by supporters of the new work,
including Beckett, William Carlos Williams and others was
organised and published in 1929 under the title Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination
of Work in Progress. At his 47th birthday party at the Jolases' home,
Joyce revealed the final title of the work and Finnegans Wake was published
in book form on 4 May
1939.
Joyce's method
of stream of
consciousness, literary allusions and free dream associations was pushed to the limit
in Finnegans Wake, which abandoned all conventions
of plot and character construction and is written in a peculiar and obscure
language, based mainly on complex multi-level puns. This approach is similar
to, but far more extensive than that used by Lewis Carroll in Jabberwocky. If Ulysses is a
day in the life of a city, then Wake is a night and partakes of the
logic of dreams. This has led many readers and critics to apply Joyce's
oft-quoted description in the Wake of Ulysses as his
"usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles"[31] to the Wake
itself. However, readers have been able to reach a consensus about the central
cast of characters and general plot.
Much of the
wordplay in the book stems from the use of multilingual puns which draw on a
wide range of languages. The role played by Beckett and other assistants
included collating words from these languages on cards for Joyce to use and, as
Joyce's eyesight worsened, of writing the text from the author's dictation.[32]
The view of
history propounded in this text is very strongly influenced by Giambattista Vico, and the metaphysics of
Giordano Bruno of Nola are important to the interplay of the "characters". Vico
propounded a cyclical view of history, in which civilisation rose from chaos, passed through theocratic, aristocratic, and democratic phases, and then lapsed
back into chaos. The most obvious example of the influence of Vico's cyclical
theory of history is to be found in the opening and closing words of the book. Finnegans
Wake opens with the words 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of
shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to
Howth Castle and Environs.' ('vicus' is a pun on Vico) and ends 'A way a lone a
last a loved a long the'. In other words, the book ends with the beginning of a
sentence and begins with the end of the same sentence, turning the book into
one great cycle. Indeed, Joyce said that the ideal reader of the Wake
would suffer from "ideal insomnia"[33] and, on completing the book, would
turn to page one and start again, and so on in an endless cycle of reading.
[edit] Legacy
Joyce's work
has been subject to intense scrutiny by scholars of all types. He has also been
an important influence on writers and scholars as diverse as Samuel Beckett,[34] Jorge Luis Borges,[35] Flann O'Brien,[36] Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Salman Rushdie,[37] Robert Anton Wilson,[38] and Joseph Campbell.[39]
Some scholars,
most notably Vladimir Nabokov, have mixed feelings on his work,
often championing some of his fiction while condemning other works. In
Nabokov's opinion, Ulysses was brilliant;[40] Finnegans
Wake, horrible (see Strong Opinions, The Annotated Lolita or Pale Fire[41]), an attitude Jorge Luis Borges shared.[42] In recent years, literary theory has embraced Joyce's
innovation and ambition. Jacques Derrida, who wrote a book on the use of
language in Ulysses, tells an anecdote about the two novels' importance
for his own thought; in a bookstore in Tokyo,
|
“
|
...an American tourist
of the most typical variety leaned over my shoulder and sighed: "So many
books! What is the definitive one? Is there any?" It was an extremely
small book shop, a news agency. I almost replied, "Yes, there are two of
them, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.[43]
|
”
|
Joyce's
influence is also evident in fields other than literature. The phrase
"Three Quarks for Muster Mark" in Joyce's Finnegans Wake is
often called the source of the physicists' word "quark", the name of one of the main kinds of elementary particles, proposed by the
physicist Murray Gell-Mann.[44] American philosopher Donald
Davidson has written on Finnegans Wake in comparison with Lewis Carroll. Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used Joyce's writings
to explain his concept of the sinthome. According to Lacan, Joyce's writing is the
supplementary cord which kept him from psychosis.[45]
The life of
Joyce is celebrated annually on June 16, Bloomsday, in Dublin and in an increasing number of cities worldwide.
Each year in Dedham, Massachusetts, USA literary-minded runners
hold the James Joyce Ramble, a 10K Road Race with each mile dedicated to a
different work by Joyce.[46] With professional actors in period
garb lining the streets and reading from his books as the athletes run by, it
is billed as the only theatrical performance where the performers stand still
and the audience does the moving.
Much of Joyce's
legacy is protected by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, which houses thousands
of manuscripts, pieces of correspondence, drafts, proofs, notes, novel
fragments, poems, song lyrics, musical scores, limericks, and translations by
Joyce.
Not everyone is
eager to expand upon academic study of Joyce, however; Stephen Joyce, James' grandson and
sole beneficiary owner of the estate, has been alleged to have destroyed some
of the writer's correspondence,[47] threatened to sue if public
readings were held during Bloomsday,[48] and blocked adaptations he felt
were 'inappropriate'.[49] On June 12, 2006, Carol Shloss, a Stanford University professor, sued the
estate for refusing to give permission to use material about Joyce and his
daughter on the professor's website.[50][51]
The main
library at University College Dublin today bears his name.