James Joyce and appeal: between law and ethics

This essay will consider the legal, ethical and psychological value of concepts of “appeal” in the Irish modernist author James Joyce’s work. I explore Joyce’s complex sense of law as a standard that can be appealed to, but which might also be appealed against in specific miscarriages of justice, as well as in general terms. As Jonathan Goldman comments, “the law is a set of languages that can create a world, an intricate system that acts as a shaper of events, absorbed and deployed by the godlike author whose godlike presence it mirrors,” reflecting on places “where ethical matters of literature are in dialogue with legal doctrine” and on connections between scholarship in law and literature with activism. Throughout Joyce’s life and career, a person’s legal right to appeal was being gradually developed in response to activist campaigns and changing social and legal norms. In situations of miscarriages of justice where legal and political reform might be necessary, I analyze in turn Joyce’s early journalism, the “Aeolus” episode of Ulysses, and, finally, subsequent developments of similar ideas in Jacques Derrida’s legal thought. I aim to show that Joyce turns towards an ethics of justice in his writing, in which the power of appeal implies a claim about what would be more just and gestures to an imagined more adequate law.