JJQ

In an interesting article by Terrence Killeen published last Saturday in The Irish Times, Stephen Joyce revealed that he has “in a safe place” an archive of Joyce material that might some day be made public.  Mr. Joyce, unfortunately, had little more to say on the subject, aside from issuing his usual laments about scholars.  Indeed, he even claimed that the Irish state has a duty to make sure Joyce’s work isn’t “misused.”  As I’ve suggested here in the past, the passage of works into the public domain should ensure that neither a government nor a single rights holder retains the power to censor or suppress scholarship.  The copyright dispute between Danis Rose and the NLI over the Ulysses notebooks has serious ramifications for teaching and research in the EU since it it precisely an argument about freedom of access.  I continue to hope, perhaps with undue optimism, that these materials can be fully and freely made available so that we can come to better understand the making of one of the world’s greatest literary masterpieces.

The entrance of Joyce’s corpus into the European public domain has provided different media with unprecedented access to the work.  As might be expected, this event has presented some unusual difficulties.  Two German radio stations are in the midst of a disagreement about their separate but overlapping airings of Ulysses.  Both stations will stage readings of the novel.  The first, by Berlin’s RBB Kulturradio, began on Monday and will consist of 80 episodes that will culminate on Bloomsday.  A sister station, SWR2, out of Stuttgart, has criticized the RBB because they claim their episodic reading interferes with their own 22-hour marathon reading, which will take place on Bloomsday.  Both productions cast armies of professional actors to play the various roles in the work.  Despite this conflict, it’s great to find ourselves now overwhelmed with readings and performances.  Here is a link to an article in the Irish Times about the airings.

Controversy continues to swirl around the legal status of the National Library of Ireland’s Joyce papers.  Following the announced publication of an edition earlier this month by Danis Rose, the NLI quickly made their collection available as downloadable image files freely available to the public.  In a letter to The Irish Times published on 12 April Mr. Rose protested this action, writing that his prior act of publication entitled him “in Irish law [to] an ‘economic right’ equivalent to copyright for a term of 25 years.”  He then goes on to argue that the Library “is in continuing infringement of my copyright,” a phrase that seems to imply impending litigation of the matter.

I am not in a position to judge Mr. Rose’s legal claims, but I do regret the idea that the arrival of Joyce’s unpublished works into the public domain in Europe will be marked by the same kind of worrisome policing of rights and permissions that have for many decades now inhibited the publication of textual scholarship on Joyce.  Thus I also find troubling the warning that appears when one attempts to access the NLI images: “We also remind you that the National Library of Ireland owns these materials and makes them available for the purposes of research and private study only. Any other use is strictly prohibited without prior written permission from the National Library of Ireland.”  There is not a direct assertion of copyright here, but it does appear that the NLI (perhaps inadvertently) is imposing the same kind of prior restraint on publication and quotation that has long troubled Joyce scholarship.

As the dispute between Rose and the NLI unfolds, I continue to hope that Joyce’s unpublished works will remain freely accessible in the EU and be available to critics, teachers, and scholars who want to use them to advance our understanding of the twentieth century’s greatest literary masterpiece.  Doing so requires that we be able to publish transcriptions, quote the materials, and freely contest their meaning.  Rose’s threat of legal action, however, as well as the NLI’s stringent notice suggest that our celebration of the arrival of Joyce’s unpublished works into the public domain in the EU might have been sadly premature.