Lighting-Up Time for Nighttown

Innumerable column inches were devoted to the seeming addition of a new work to the Joyce oeuvre in 2012. The furor surrounding The Cats of Copenhagen, now available as a trade hardback and, at the time of writing, in four translations, centered on the lack of any courtesy request to the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, the document owner, for permission to publish Joyce’s letter.¹ The apparent incivility of the Ithys Press, of which Danis Rose is a director, occasioned widespread condemnation.² By contrast, the announcement in April 2012 of a six-volume edition of the National Library of Ireland’s millennial Joyce acquisitions (Rose’s subsequent venture into print) was thoroughly eclipsed by the holding institution’s response.³ After an initial flurry of excitement, anticipation of the Dublin “Ulysses” Papers played a distinct second fiddle to the news that the material concerned would appear free of charge and in high-resolution digital facsimile on the National Library of Ireland’s website.⁴ In a final twist to this curious history, Rose countered that the National Library was in ongoing infringement of his copyright in Joyce’s prepublication writings, and, not to be outdone, he duly launched his own website, the Ulysses Hypertext, in early June.⁵

The Papers provide transcripts of all of the National Library’s recent Joyce acquisitions from the Quinn draft of “Circe” to the Joyce Papers 2002 and selections from the post-Ulysses Joyce Papers 2006.⁶ In what follows, the focus will primarily be on Rose’s treatment of “Circe,” in part owing to my own familiarity with the episode’s prepublication strata but also because the surviving draft record for “Circe” offers the most complete account of the composition of a single episode of Ulysses. Four holograph manuscripts are known to survive; two are now in Dublin. Such is the complexity of “Circe” in draft that the episode serves as a pointed test case for the entire collection.

Given the remarkable circumstances that saw the Papers into print and the high-profile response from the National Library of Ireland, I attend first to Joyce’s increased web presence before assessing the Rose collection, for the real and lasting boon to Joyceans is surely the availability now of so much primary material on the National Library’s website. If the publication of the Papers accomplishes nothing else, then, it did accelerate plans for the series of enhancements to the National Library’s online catalog, a move that saw a veritable spate of Joyce documents published in digital facsimile on the web. This plenum makes for one welcome outcome to 2012’s season of much vaunted freedoms and firsts. Indeed, it reaffirms the optimism surrounding the expiration of certain copyrights in Joyce when that watershed moment seemed swiftly to sour into the new year.

The first phase of the National Library’s “ongoing catalogue development programme,” undertaken in the second week of April 2012, made available all of the Dublin Joyce holdings that are reproduced in the Papers.⁷ These PDF files have a pixel density of a modest 200 ppi and are thus of limited legibility. In any event, they were withdrawn one month later when the National Library launched its browser-based image viewer. Users of the online catalog can now access high-resolution images of both the cache previously available in PDF and a sizeable portion of Joyce correspondence, much of it otherwise unpublished.⁸ Copyright compliance imposes one limitation, however. The National Library uses Internet Protocol (IP) address screening to filter out requests originating in countries where Joyce’s prepublication materials are still under copyright. Trying to access this portion of the catalog in the United Kingdom, for instance, returns the message: “This content is not available at your location.” Curiously enough, then, some ninety years after the first edition, Ulysses’s availability is once again geographically inflected.

The same question of access holds for the Rose collection...