Joyce’s penchant for privacy was inherited. (Stephen’s aunt Lucia was already in a mental institution elsewhere in France.) In the poem, James links Stephen’s birth to the death, only very shortly before, of his great-grandfather, John Stanislaus Joyce. Helen Joyce wrote that when Stephen had to make vital decisions about the estate, he would go to Joyce’s grave site in Zurich to consult him.Still, it could be said that the struggle between the estate and Joyceans was generated by the author himself.
Joyce, center, in 1992 during the official release of the James Joyce/Paul Leon papers at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin. As the 1980s went on, however, and especially following controversy over the Gabler edition of Ulysses in 1984, he began to be more actively involved. He said he was safeguarding the material’s literary integrity and defending them from critics and biographers, whom he likened to “rats and lice” that “should be exterminated.”“I am not only protecting and preserving the purity of my grandfather’s work, but also what remains of the much abused privacy of the Joyce family,” he told With most legal constraints lifted and the material controlled by Stephen Joyce now part of his estate, its fate uncertain, the most likely immediate impact of his grandson’s death will be the freeing of aggrieved scholars to ventilate, without fear of retribution, about how Mr. Joyce had thwarted their research for decades.“I think now there will be more open reflection on the role Stephen Joyce played in impeding so many projects,” Prof. Anne Fogarty, director of the Hans Walter Gabler, a German Joycean who edited a critical edition of “Ulysses” in 1984, began that reflection bluntly. Stephen's family will receive relatives and friends from 12:30 - 1:15pm on Friday, July 24, 2020 at the Henry Walser Funeral Home, 507 Frederick Street, Kitchener, 519-749-8467. In an email, he accused Mr. Joyce of having exercised his vigilance over the Joyce archive “with a vengeance,” and that “with refusals of permission and/or exorbitant fee requests, he terrorized scholars and critics as well as publishers into passivity and nonaction in an attitude of ‘anticipatory obedience.’”Mr.
Examples abound: a hypermedia Ulysses project involving the American scholar Michael Groden was completely stymied by a modest request for a fee of two million dollars (later lowered to between half a million and one million dollars); an effort by Cork University Press to reproduce some pages of Joyce’s work in an anthology led to a costly legal action and defeat that for some years greatly curbed the press’s work. Famously, Ireland was not officially represented at James Joyce’s funeral; it most certainly was at his grandson’s, with the Ambassador to France, Patricia O’Brien, present at the ceremony in La Rochelle.