Joyce's Citational Odyssey
--In short, a complex personality, an enigma, a contradictory spokesman for the truth, an obsessive litigant and yet an essentially private man who wished his total indifference to public notice to be universally recognised --in short, a liar and a hypocrite, a tight-fisted, sponging, fornicating drunk.
Henry Carr in Tom Stoppard's Travesties
It might be said that Joyce criticism from the start has been preoccupied with Joyce as a lawbreaker, an apostate, and a rebel, with earlier work exploring the rebellion in his works (as a theme) and later criticism exploring the rebellion of his works (as a textual resistance). Early, and enduringly, Joyce is a "revolutionary" ( Jolas, 1929; MacCabe, 1978), then an "alien," if a "sympathetic" one ( Morse, 1959); now he is "illicit" and "postmodern" ( Dettmar, 1996). 1
If quotation is a law, what was Joyce's relation to law? 2 As we might suppose, complex. In his youth, and through his doppelgänger Stephen Dedalus, Joyce grandly rejected various systems of legal control: property (he claimed to be a socialist and spent wildly whatever he earned or borrowed), marriage (he did not offer Nora Barnacle marriage when he invited her to flee Ireland with him), citizenship (he left Ireland in 1904 and wandered through Europe), religion (he rejected first the priesthood, then the Roman Catholic Church). For Joyce, even paternity was a "legal fiction," exposing patriarchy and law as equally oppressive, contingent and constructed.
Nevertheless, Joyce's resistance to legal systems did not preclude his energetic litigiousness over what may seem to us now astonishing trivial issues: Henry Carr's name-calling? The price of a few theater tickets? ( R. Ellmann , Joyce, 426-28). His rejection of marriage did not preclude his
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