Introduction Joyce and the G-Men

Abstract

Several years ago, following a hunch that seemed ridiculous even to me, I wrote to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and asked whether they had kept a classified dossier on the Irish writer James Joyce (1882–1941). After three years of back-and-forth correspondence, a slim, 20-page dossier marked “James Joyce” arrived from bureau headquarters in Washington, D.C. It was almost entirely blacked out. Since then, I have turned my attention to researching and investigating the mysterious and complex relationship between James Joyce and the FBI, trying to imagine what it was that Joyce might have represented to J. Edgar Hoover and the bureau. In this book, I trace Hoover’s career and reveal his doggedly persistent intervention in one of the most important critical constructs of his time: literary modernism, a movement rife with diverse, inconsistent, even over-determined approaches, practices, and responses to early twentieth-century cultural, aesthetic, and political events and attitudes. That his reach extended to American, British, German, Irish and other writers participating in the literary movement is particularly important today at a time when the cultural foundations of modernism are undergoing sharp academic and critical reevaluation.1