Sir, - I am just an ordinary reader who gets enormous enjoyment from re- reading Ulysses and who makes no claims to being a Joycean scholar, hut I wonder how many others like me are getting thoroughly sick of the pompous pronouncements of the Joyce Estate in general and Stephen Joyce in particular?
Stephen Joyce clearly sees himself as some sort of guardian of a holy grail. Yes, it would be interesting to have a definitive version of Ulysses, particularly after the fiasco of the now notorious Gabler "corrected" text and the murky involvement of the Joyce Estate in that episode, as well as the subsequent (and seemingly still frustrated) attempt by John Kidd to bring out such a version. But works of art are not set in aspic. Imagine if the heirs of J. S. Bach wrote letters to the paper protesting at the use of his music in cigar advertisements or if the Beethoven family where perennially objecting to the abuse of the "Ode to Joy" theme as a European anthem? Or what if the descendants of Shakespeare tried to stop the recent film of Richard III because it was set in the 1930s?
One does not need to be a post-modernist to realise that all works of art are subject to re-interpretation and re-presentation by later ages. I have not yet read Danis Rose's edition of Ulysses, hut I look forward to what I hope will be an enjoyable perspective on Joyce's masterpiece. Mr Stephen Joyce would deny me this pleasure on the specious grounds that Ulysses is some kind of holy writ. Who is he to deny me this? If Rose has made a mess of Ulysses let the paying public reject it? I, for one, do not feel the need for a literary nanny. - Yours, etc.,
Blackrock, Co. Dublin.