JAMES JOYCE’S interest in law and legal topics was little noted, Supreme Court judge Mr Justice Adrian Hardiman said last night.
There were 32 court cases in Ulysses, 18 of which were criminal trials, he added. Many were real cases tried in Dublin between 1899 and 1926.
“Joyce responded to such cases on a number of levels,” said Mr Justice Hardiman.
“Firstly, he loved the ‘gruesome-case’ aspect and the public desire for gory details.”
Mr Justice Hardiman, who was speaking on “Law, Crime and Punishment in Bloomsday Dublin”, at the Royal Irish Academy, said that Joyce’s particular interest was in doubtful cases.
Those were where there was a genuine question as to guilt or, still better, those where an apparently overwhelming case fell apart when tested at trial, as in the Glasnevin murder trial of 1899, R v Childs.
“Joyce attended this trial in Green Street courthouse and never forgot it,” said Mr Justice Hardiman.
“This in turn led to a fascination with the legal processes for discovering the truth of past events, as opposed to the popular habit of jumping to conclusions based on bias, of which the novel provides many examples.”
Unlike many writers, he said, Joyce knew that the dramas and sorrows of life were revealed in civil as well as criminal cases.
He was “especially interested in the desperate financial strategies of those clinging to the lower slopes of middle-class respectability, as his father did for many years”.
Mr Justice Hardiman said that most of the cases Joyce mentioned were of legal, social and historical interest, and preserved, accurately if incidentally, ways of life and aspects of social and material culture now vanished from recollection.
