Stephen James Joyce is an Asshole

It’s honestly difficult for me to phrase it any other way. Take a look at this New Yorker article and try to tell me that you don’t agree. I have no doubts at all that Joyce-The-Mediocre sees himself as protecting the legacy of Joyce-The-Genius-and-His-Family, but I very much think what he’s really doing is placing his own mark—a mark he has no more earned the right to place than the scholars he so derides—on the work of a man whose shadow he grew up in and whose legacy has entirely failed to live up to.

Stephen has made his presence felt on a much broader front. Most prickly literary estates are interested in suppressing unflattering or intrusive information, but no one combines tolltaker, brand enforcer, and arbiter of taste as relentlessly as Stephen does, and certainly not in such a personal way. In 2003, Eloise Knowlton, a Joycean and a novelist, asked permission to publish a fictional version of “Sweets of Sin,” the risqué novel that Bloom picks up for his wife, Molly. (“Ulysses” offers only a glimpse of its contents.) Stephen wrote back, “Neither I nor the others who manage this Estate will touch your hare-brained scheme with a barge pole in any manner, shape or form.” When turning down a request for permission from an academic whose work was going to be published by Purdue, he said that he objected to the name for the university’s sports teams: the Boilermakers. (He considered it vulgar.) Michael Groden, a scholar at the University of Western Ontario, spent seven years creating a multimedia version of “Ulysses,” only to have Stephen block the project, in 2003, with a demand for a permissions fee of one and a half million dollars. (Before Stephen controlled the Joyce estate, such fees were nominal.) Groden’s sin was to have praised Danis Rose’s edition of “Ulysses” as “confident and controversial,” in a reader’s report for Rose’s publisher; he had also helped the National Library of Ireland to evaluate some Joyce drafts prior to acquiring them. “You should consider a new career as a garbage collector in New York City, because you’ll never quote a Joyce text again,” Stephen told Groden.

I’m not entirely certain that I agree with the the Laurence Lessig lawsuit (there’s some nifty alliteration) going on, because it may, as F. Scott Kieff says towards the end of the article, turn out to be disasterous if Larry wins. But this fool needs to be taken down a peg.