Introduction: The Legal Fictions of James Joyce

“To say that James Joyce was litigious,” writes Robert Spoo, “is simply to recognize that he was as obsessed with the dialectics of injury and remedy in his practical affairs as he was in artistic matters.”¹ These words open the previous James Joyce Quarterly focused on Joyce and legal concerns and invite us to see the intersection of Joyce and legal studies as a new ingress to established material: the repeated scenes in Joyce’s fiction and biography in which plaintiffs sue for redress.² Spoo cites the example of the first chapter of A Portrait, when Stephen Dedalus is wrongfully pandied and goes over Father Dolan’s head to complain, appealing to the good will of a higher authority (P 50-58). It is a passage central to many conceptions of Joyce’s work, showing a child’s sense of injustice and an individual measuring his notion of right and wrong against the realities of the world, and thus contributes to the sense that litigiousness inflects Joyce’s oeuvre.

We do not, however, have to focus so precisely to view Joyce as litigious or to see the law itself as crucial to his writings, because legal regimes, their boundaries and violations, undergird Joyce’s work from start to finish. Indeed, his two longest books are made of the stuff. The narrative of Ulysses is spurred by Molly Bloom’s adultery, which would have been prosecutable in 1904 Ireland, a tort crime that would have allowed, for example, Leopold Bloom to sue his wife for damages under the category of “criminal conversation.”³ The legal aspects of Molly’s transgression lead to her husband’s fleeting consideration of a “[s]uit for damages by legal influence” that would be “not impossibly” a future course of action (U 17.2203-04, 2205). Here the invocation of a potential legal remedy, and Bloom’s decision to defer it, is revelatory about both the regime of socio-sexual power and Bloom’s attitude toward justice: that he is at least temporarily bypassing legal remedy despite his legal rights illuminates Joyce’s portrayal of the hero of Ulysses. Joyce’s next book, Finnegans Wake, often returns to the protean “crime in the park,” a plot event or events whose source materials include the 1883 Phoenix Park murders for which five defendants were executed, a notorious case that figures prominently in Ulysses as well.⁴ In the Wake, the alleged perpetrator H.C.E. attempts to defend himself against the charge, claiming that “there is luttrelly not one teaspoonspill of evidence” against him (FW 534.09-10). Both Ulysses and the Wake, then, are predicated not simply on the psychodrama of injury and repercussion but actually on the breaking of laws, violations of identifiable legal codes, and their legal consequences, whether pursued or eschewed.

Contrasted with Molly’s infidelity and the allegations against H.C.E., the scene Spoo enlists from A Portrait captures the place of litigiousness in Joyce but incompletely. The law, in its official form, is absent from the passage. That is to say, there is no legal regime—no state system, no government language—in place at Clongowes Wood College to deter or punish spurious pandying. On the other hand, in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, when a soused Stephen confronts two British officers on the streets of Nighttown, the law hangs over the scene like a scythe. As Robert Brazeau explains in “Pro Bono Publico: Urban Space in ‘Cyclops,’” his essay in the present volume, the Inebriates Act of 1898 authorized British law enforcement to levy a three-year sentence on any admitted or confirmed habitual drunkard who commits a crime while intoxicated. This legal context makes the intervention of Bloom and Corny Kelleher that much more vital, since without them Stephen would be facing the possibility of serious jail time for fighting with Private Carr—his pyrrhic eschewal of physical engagement notwithstanding. The Inebriates Act and its implications are not mentioned in Ulysses, but Brazeau’s essay makes them available to us, and we may as a consequence read the “Circe” moment, and moments such...