ABSTRACT
In 1906, James Joyce was living in Rome and avidly reading every Irish and English newspaper he could get his hands on. Like T.S. Eliot, he had a taste for the less publicspirited elements of the modern newspaper: he schemed to win the Ideas “missing word” puzzle, praised the adventure novelist Edgar Wallace’s “sometimes farcical” column in the Daily Mail, and read that paper’s melodramatic, serial novellas (L II 89, 188, 190). His disappointment, in 1906, at having missed a story on an interesting Dublin divorce shows that he was in a sense a pretty typical newspaper reader. Joyce’s stated interest in the “Jewish divorce case” would probably have sunk beneath notice if it hadn’t coincided with his fi rst mention of a project called “Ulysses,” conceived then as a story to be added to Dubliners and reworking the story of a Dublin Jew named Hunter who was rumored to be a cuckold (Ellman 238-9). But Joyce’s interest in the divorce case is also noteworthy because it came at a time when controversy was swirling around newspaper coverage of divorces in England-where the inclusion of “spicy bits” was seen as salacious and potentially corrupting-and in Ireland, where proponents of “de-Anglicization” were characterizing sensational journalism as a debased English import.1 In his inclusive reading of newspapers in these years, Joyce’s political consciousness was taking shape-and it was a consciousness that would ultimately depict sensational journalism as a deeply oppressive invasion of privacy. If sketchy accounts of the “Jewish divorce case” as an early, partial inspiration for Ulysses are true, then the novel paradoxically was born out of a controversial journalistic practice that Joyce would ultimately subject to extended scrutiny in that very novel.
