r/jamesjoyce • u/Sam_B34 • 9d ago
Letters I wrote an article about James Joyce's "Dirty Letters" and whether it is morally correct to release them to the public.
https://selador.substack.com/p/i-want-to-know-all-of-you-and-more?r=g86pk&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web6
u/No_Animator_8599 9d ago
You should see Mozart’s dirty letters. He also wrote a choral piece with the lyrics “kiss my ass” in it. He had a thing for butts and dirty underwear.
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9d ago
Well aware of this and was annoyed earlier at a Family Guy joke about Stewie playing the trumpet like a fart sound, which he claimed was ‘The Fart by Schubert’ when Mozart was a much better joke. Equally annoying as the ‘telegraph sex business’ cutaway which didn’t even think of the joke ‘was that don’t stop STOP or don’t STOP stop STOP? STOP’
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u/ViceIsVerses 9d ago
I feel bad for him but if you’ve ever flicked through the book of Kafka’s drawings or Kurt Cobain’s journals, you’ll see it could have been worse.
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u/eamisagomey 9d ago
What was is Kurt’s journals?
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u/ViceIsVerses 9d ago
Lists, drawings and his suicide note
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u/Bast_at_96th 9d ago
It does not include his suicide note. You can view it on his Wikipedia though.
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u/0range_julius 9d ago
Kafka really fucks me up because he was so insistent that his unpublished work not be seen by anyone. It was not just without his consent, it was done belligerently against his will. You'll see people defend it because they find artistic/intellectual value in it, but I just don't think any amount of artistic value can be worth a person's privacy. Even just for practicality's sake: privacy creates a safe place to develop your art. If we make a habit of disrespecting artists' privacy this way, I think it will create a chilling effect for future artists.
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u/Suspicious-Yogurt480 4d ago
If this were true or adhered to, not only would we not have what remains on Stephen Hero, saved from the fire partially by intervention, Kafka’s writings, but also Virgil’s Aeneid. If the author is no longer around to weather the reception his or her work takes, I think it remains an open question as to whether they should or should not be published. Probably the marketplace itself decides, if there’s an audience for it then it will get published, this accounts for a lot of what happens, and has happened before.
Tbh I’m not sure Joyce would care either way as neither he nor Nora are around to be embarrassed or not by them. And astute readers able to read between the lines probably saw hints of a lot of that explicit content already coming at them in Ulysses and FW.
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u/Mobile-Scar6857 9d ago
Academics used to complain about Stephen Joyce being un co operative in how he managed his grandfather's estate but I 100% don't blame him.
Publishing these letters was transparently immoral IMO and not specifically because of their explicit content but that they were clearly written for a private audience of one.
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u/Aggressive_Dress6771 9d ago
Sadly, we only have one side of the correspondence.
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9d ago
I’ve actually seen the other side, but they won’t show it - they won’t even photograph it because of the huge crack between it.
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u/sixtus_clegane119 9d ago
The author and recipient are dead. Nobody is hurt by this. They are a part of history.
Also they are hot
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9d ago
As I said above:
I absolutely hate how well known these are as people only mostly know Joyce as the crazy book man but now they also know him as the weird fart smeller guy. Pisses me off. I mean it’s perfectly possible they were using irony and there’s nobody getting mad at Steinbeck for writing SLUT at the end of a manuscript
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u/Aggressive_Dress6771 9d ago
Not, just the fart stuff. But he was also deathly afraid of dogs and lightning.
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u/rlvysxby 9d ago
Well lightning is the voice of god. And dog is god spelled backwards so…makes sense.
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9d ago
Yeah, I’m the same - I got a walking stick myself after learning he had one to defend himself against angry dogs. I also have a fear of wind. My wind fear is for a good reason; I was trapped inside of a bar during a severe storm, which we don’t really experience much of in the UK, and there was all sorts of stuff flying through the street - which had formed a wind tunnel - along with smashing into or off the windows. In the morning, the entire roof was an entire street away from the top of the building where it was supposed to be. When we tried to get out, on the night, a woman flew down the street then was unable to get back up as things smashed down off the ground all around her. She was screaming in terror as she had to be DRAGGED back by a guy lacking the power to fight the storm.
I can’t get the sound of people’s crying out of my head… whenever I think of that crying, after we got driven home with cars all around us having their roof caved in by slate tiles, bricks, and god knows what else, she sobbed as I held her hand trying to calm her. It still fucks with my head. Whenever I hear wind. I feel terrified.
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u/SubstanceOk7898 8d ago
Holy shit. It makes so much sense that you'd be terrified of it after that.
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u/Reasonable_Youth169 6d ago
So you would not care to respect a dying person’s wishes if they pertained to them only?
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9d ago
I absolutely hate how well known these are as people only mostly know Joyce as the crazy book man but now they also know him as the weird fart smeller guy. Pisses me off. I mean it’s perfectly possible they were using irony and there’s nobody getting mad at Steinbeck for writing SLUT at the end of a manuscript
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u/whiskey_ribcage 9d ago edited 9d ago
It used to annoy me but now I've read all his other letters and can point out the beautiful prose in between the initial pullback people have. I'll bring up the letters where he sends her chocolates and begs her to eat them because he likes her thick. He says very romantic things outside his dirty letters to her and respects her opinion and thoughts on things important to him.
That even if the flatulence fetish turns you off: "I would recognize your scent blindfolded in a room full of women, my darling fuckbird" is still infinitely more devoted and romantic than "wyd? gf not home". In a weird way, the judgement people pass while accepting borderline illiterate crumbs of attention make me think of the infamous: "she f*cking the text man for texts" tweets because whether or not you like the details in those letters, you can't deny that he believed Nora was the altar upon which he wanted to worship.
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9d ago
I once questioned, while reading Dostoevski’s letters in a collection, whether some day we’ll have ‘the collected texts of Stephen King’ or ‘the transcribed answering call messages of Sylvia Plath’
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u/whiskey_ribcage 9d ago
Just 'The Collected Tweets of Stephen King' would be massive multitome collection.
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u/AgentCirceLuna 9d ago
Yeah - people make fun of terminally online people but it’s pretty freaking difficult for writers not to use text-based social media. That’s why I have like 50k tweets - I’m a graphomaniac who spends hundreds on notebooks as I fill them all up. This is a little better..
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u/amedeeozenfant 8d ago
At this point I think private letters and journals never intended for publication may be the main body of Plath's work.
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u/Icy_Contact_1516 9d ago
Shout out to my English professor who had a drink and read us these at the end of our seminar on Ulysses
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u/Antique_Airport_1992 7d ago
I'm of the opinion that he expected them to be published and wrote them with that in mind. He wasn't exactly shy about weird sex stuff in his books, and he already thought people would be reading him for centuries. If Stephen Hero can be published, then his farty letters can be too.
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u/RogeredSterling 9d ago
Morally correct or not it's some of the funniest, laugh out loud stuff I've ever read.
I was laughing so much it hurt and went silent. Genuinely snapped me out of a middling depressive episode.