“…like an egg without salt”:

On Joyce’s Scandal Works

Abstract

Joyce’s “scandalmunkering” began in his college days with the stall on the publication of his incendiary pamphlets and the president of the Literary and Historical Society of University College Dublin refusing to allow “Drama and Life” (1900) to be read before the Society. Although he faced similar situations with Dubliners (1914) the climax of the Joycean battle with censors was surely the long and much cited legal battle ‘“The United States of America v. One Book Called “Ulysses”’ (1933). However, Finnegans Wake (1939) though no less “scandalous” never faced governmental censorship. This paper attempts to understand how Joyce managed to continue his “scandal work” (as Margot Backus terms it) across his oeuvre while at the same time developing a modern “poetic method” (in Benjamin’s sense of the term) which aimed at recycling cultural waste utilizing the Postal system and even protectionist copyright policies. The paper thus hypothesizes how Joyce’s scandal work also similarly presupposes its own ideal reader, who could either be a “genetic” reader, forced to read backwards or as Lacan suggests, as Joyce himself privy to his own jouissance slipping from letter to litter. Both readers in this view are forced to confront the “scandalous” –– understood in its etymological implications.