Jinbad the Jailer

Every Bloomsday I pause for a moment to remember (and briefly mourn) the Joycean I might have been (evidence here). In March of 1993 I was completing a Master's Thesis at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The focus of the thesis was my spotlighting of the ridiculous charge -- levied by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson -- that Thornton Wilder had plagiarized James Joyce's Finnegans Wake in his stage play The Skin of Our Teeth. (And yes, this is that Joseph Campbell, the Power of Myth guy who finally found a market for his work once George Lucas cited it as foundational for the development of the Star Wars mythos.) Campbell and Robinson were, in my estimation, creating a market for their book, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by publicly savaging Wilder for a loving homage to Joyce. The Skin of Our Teeth is no more plagiaristic of Finnegans Wake than Joyce's Ulysses is of Homer's Odyssey. Which is to say that the earlier works serve as jumping-off points for Joyce and Wilder, both of whom produced something new enough and original enough to pass any reasonable ethical standard.

So anyway, I was trying to finish this thesis and had already traveled to the Beinecke Library at Yale to look over Thornton Wilder's annotated copy of Finnegans Wake when some smart guys down at UIC's sister campus in Champaign-Urbana came up with this cool new way of accessing information on the Internet. If my timeline is correct, I spent part of late April of 1993 looking for the one piece of electronic information that could dramatically speed up my research as I tried to complete my thesis. That item was an electronic edition of Finnegans Wake. And I found it . . . on a Canadian website that is still maintained by Donald Theall. And I found it only after encountering this notice suggesting that as an American scholar I could not legally access this copyrighted work.

I needed the e-text, because as a young scholar I often struggled to understand and interpret the Wake which was produced, in part, by Joyce sending Samuel Beckett out to look up foreign words to interweave into his parodic recastings of well-known songs and poems, like, for example, Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" here braided together with what seems to be a newspaper account of the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird (no known relation) demonstrating television for the first time (Joyce is arguably inventing the mash-up). Here's a smidge of the kind of baggy monster I was chasing after, and the available print concordance just wasn't getting the job done:

In the heliotropical noughttime following a fade of
transformed Tuff and, pending its viseversion, a metenergic reglow
of beaming Batt, the bairdboard bombardment screen, if
tastefully taut guranium satin, tends to teleframe and step up to
the charge of a light barricade. Down the photoslope in syncopanc
pulses, with the bitts bugtwug their teffs, the missledhropes,
glitteraglatteraglutt, borne by their carnier walve. Spraygun
rakes and splits them from a double focus: grenadite,
damnymite, alextronite, nichilite: and the scanning firespot of the
sgunners traverses the rutilanced illustred sunksundered lines.

Now I love this, but I struggle with this. I have never encountered a greater intellectual wrassling match than Joyce's text, and I've never pinned him once. The best I could hope to do was to pin the guys who were making Thornton Wilder miserable back when there were about a dozen people who had actually read and understood the Wake.

So I started researching the availability of a legal U.S. electronic edition of Finnegans Wake and I found out pretty quickly that 1) The Joyce estate had vague plans to produce an electronic Wake and sell this at a premium; and 2) given the Joyce estate's stewardship of his works, I shouldn't hold my breath waiting for that authorized e-text, and that I might be lucky to see it before I died. And let's pause to observe . . . still waiting on this one.

I finished the thesis, but not without cultivating a deep sense of anger at the degree to which the capriciousness of the Joyce estate was impeding scholarship. This was particularly galling to me because Joyceans who were active on the Internet and who worked with digital media saw in these technologies a toolkit that responded to and resonated with Joyce's love of complex, interwoven, interlinked language.

And this anger eventually drove me out of literary scholarship altogether, and into Rhetoric, where I found the tools and resources I needed to address what I see as one of the core questions for this new century: whether the Internet will be legally used to increase access to cultural artefacts, or used chiefly to police, circumscribe, and collect fees for this access.

So it was with bitter recognition that I read Lessig's Blog and learned of a new lawsuit against Stephen James Joyce, the current keeper of the Joyce estate, for one of his many efforts to disrupt legitimate scholarship.

Mr. Joyce has evidently persuaded himself that the work of academics and scholars is entirely unnecessary. He somehow believes that because he can read his Nonno's texts without difficulty, that those of us who are not quite so close to his grandfather might just as well do so, without the work of Richard Ellmann, Brenda Maddox, Roland McHugh, and so many others to guide us. The import of this New Yorker article (cited by and citing Lessig) is that Stephen James Joyce appears to take particular pleasure in making Joyce scholarship so limited and burdensome that many Joyce scholars are driven to other pursuits. Just like me.

So, in a very real sense, it was Stephen James Joyce who made me the rhetorician I am today. And as a freshly tenured Associate Professor of Rhetoric, I suppose I should thank him for that.

And nothing else.

Mr. Joyce's vicious assertion of his grandfather's rights would be more palatable if he had ever offered something of his own in writing. Perhaps then he would have a better understanding of the necessary dependancies involved in the act of writing, how one's claim of ownership over a text is always necessarily partial. One can be a prime mover, a leader among many competing voices, but never the sole cook and bottle-washer. His grandfather obviously understoood this.

Stephen James Joyce's primary source of income is his grandfather's writings. Stephen James Joyce does not write. He suggests that those who write books analyzing, interpreting, and ultimately honoring his grandfather's tremendous literary and intellectual accomplishments are engaging in parasitic behavior. Stephen James Joyce's primary source of income is his grandfather's writings.

Stephen James Joyce is the poster grandchild illustrating why heirs and assigns are not necessarily the people who should determine the fate of their late ancestors' artistic achievements. In this case, the public (who used to have a domain where they took pretty good care of works like Finnegans Wake) could do a better job.

When we, a la Wavy Gravy, suggest that nobody could do a better job of managing the Joyce Estate than Stephen James Joyce, we mean it. Someday, nobody will inherit the Joyce estate, and this will be the best thing that could happen to the works now under Stephen James Joyce's arbitrary lock and key.