The Nameless Shamelessness of Ulysses - Palgrave

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44 Scandalous Fictions that Ulysses was lodged. Joyce scandalously recorded ‘nameless shamelessness about everybody he ever met’ and in so doing at once courted libel suits and revealed the fragility of the legal constructs on which they depend. As he learned from Roberts, even his own intention could not constitute a defence, nor could it legally guarantee the meaning of any particular passage. In Ulysses, therefore, he creates a work that is both blatantly libellous and yet everywhere capable of eluding that charge, in its welter of misdirected names, its aesthetic difficulty and its deconstructive ironies. As this chapter has argued, this constituted a vital aspect of the book’s scandal – announced so boldly on the cover of the Sporting Times. Moreover, it continues to do so, though critics and readers have ignored, suppressed or failed to recognize this fact. Like the laws of obscenity and copyright which Joyce incorporated and critiqued in this novel, defamation too plays a vital role in the text’s exploration of the limits of fiction and the legality of literature. In a 1909 meeting after their friendship had collapsed, Gogarty told Joyce ‘I don’t care a damn what you say of me so long as it is literature.’ 58 Joyce took him at his word and in the process attempted to undermine the very concept of literature itself, exposing the limits of its imagined autonomy while simultaneously challenging the law’s ability to delimit the nature and structure of art. Long after Woolsey’s decision and the novel’s ascension in the canon, this remains one of the scandals of Ulysses that we have yet fully to confront. Notes 1. This photograph, in fact, has appeared on the cover of two previous works focusing on Joyce and his scandalous fictions: Bruce Arnold, The Scandal of Ulysses: the Life and Afterlife of a Twentieth-Century Masterpiece, revised edition (Dublin: Liffey Press, 2004), and Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and Censorship: the Trials of Ulysses (London: Macmillan, 1998). 2. Aramis, ‘The Scandal of Ulysses’, Sporting Times, 34 (1 April 1922), 4. 3. James Joyce, Ulysses (California: Collectors Publication Edition, nd). This is a pirated edition, printed some time in the late 1960s, which advertises an array of pornographic novels and magazines, often with delightfully lurid illustrations. 4. Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3. 5. James Joyce, Selected Letters of James Joyce (New York: Viking, 1975), 285. 6. U.S. v. Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182 (District Court, Southern District of New York, 6 Dec. 1933, sec VI); reprinted as ‘Foreword’, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), xiii. 7. A complete discussion of autonomization and modernity is impossible here, but for a very brief introduction see, for example, Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 77–128; Jürgen Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science and Politics (Boston: Beacon, 1970); and Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Market for Symbolic Goods’, in The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 112–41.
The ‘nameless shamelessness’ of Ulysses 45 8. For a summary of many of the legal issues involving copyright and Ulysses see Robert Spoo, ‘Injuries, Remedies, Moral Rights, and the Public Domain’, James Joyce Quarterly, 37 (2000): 333–66. Spoo’s argument that the 1922 edition of Ulysses may, in fact, not have copyright protection in the United States appears in Spoo, ‘Copyright and the Ends of Ownership: the Case for a Public Domain Ulysses in America’, in Joyce Studies Annual 1999, ed. Thomas F. Staley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 5–62. 9. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 47. 10. Paul Saint-Amour, The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 11. Hugh Kenner, ‘Joyce and Modernism’, in James Joyce, ed. Harold Bloom (Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003), 101. 12. Cited in Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Hass, 1934), 69. 13. James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin, 1939), 179, 182. 14. Cited in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 310. The various manuscript copies of the story contain different versions of this passage, which was continually rewritten in an effort to secure publication. For a full record see The James Joyce Archive, ed. Michael Groden et al. (New York: Garland, 1977–1979), 4: 181–269. The final version of the text simply refers to Queen Victoria as Edward VII’s ‘old mother’. James Joyce, Dubliners (New York: Viking, 1967), 132. 15. Joyce, Dubliners, 132. 16. Ellmann, 314. 17. Ellmann, 315. 18. James Joyce, Letters of James Joyce (New York: Viking, 1966), 2: 291. 19. Francis Holt, The Law of Libel (London: W. Reed, 1812), 84. 20. Ellmann, 328. 21. Ellmann, 329–30. 22. Collected Letters of James Joyce, 1:64. 23. Parmiter v. Coupland, 151 Eng. Rep. 340 (Exch. Pleas 1840). 24. Holt, The Law of Libel, 49. The Constitution of Ireland (Bunreacht na haÈireann), adopted in 1937, states in article 40, section 3 that ‘The State shall, in particular, by its laws protect as best it may from unjust attack and, in the case of injustice done, vindicate the life, person, good name, and property rights of every citizen’, thus explicitly granting its citizens protection from defamation. 25. Dan B. Dobbs, The Law of Torts (St Paul, Minn.: West Group, 2000), 1120. 26. This is one of the many ways in which the law governing libel differs from that of slander. Thus, in order to bring a general case for slander (called slander per quod), a plaintiff must not only prove that the defendant uttered injurious words, but that this act directly caused some financial or pecuniary loss beyond mere damage to one’s reputation. There is a special subset of slanderous speech, however, termed ‘slander per se’, which, like libel, presumes damage without any special proof. This includes speech which charges that the plaintiff has committed a criminal offence, is ill with venereal disease, has committed some sexual offence, or is unsuited for his or her profession (see Dobbs, The Law of Torts, 1140–1). 27. Dobbs, The Law of Torts, 1128. 28. In the published text of Dubliners as well as in the manuscript and typescript drafts preserved in the James Joyce Archive, the name of the railway company in ‘A Painful Case’ is not directly given. Since Joyce mentions this specific objection
Page 1 and 2: Contents Acknowledgements Notes on
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Page 25 and 26: 210 Index Backus, Margot Gayle 52 B
Page 27 and 28: 212 Index Eglinton, John 41, 42, 43
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Page 33 and 34: 218 Index Saint-Amour, Paul 29 Sand

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