“Nobody Owns”: Ulysses , Tenancy, and Property Law

Abstract

The period of Joyce’s early life is one of huge turbulence around the question of land and property law but also of unresolved tensions which do not start to relax until 1904. Between 1878 and 1904, a period running more or less from Joyce’s birth to his departure from Ireland, the question of land and property law assumed a new dimension and took on an altogether new intensity. In thinking about Joyce and property law in a British-Irish historical context, at least four crucial factors are worth keeping in mind. First, there was the historical priority of Brehon Law. Second, however, the cause of the nightmare was not the imposition of the colonizer’s alien legal system. Had English property law been comprehensively and scrupulously applied in Ireland, the political benefits would have been substantial, if not decisive. Hence, third, throughout the nineteenth and into the early-twentieth century, land law and politics were inextricable from one another. Fourth, as far as land and property law is concerned, imaginary oppositions of agrarian issues to urban ones are delusive. The Joyce of Ulysses responds to this situation in complex ways: by presenting his registrations or perceptions of a state of affairs as less strictly nationalist than nationalist-oriented; by providing a critique of nationalist responses, a skepticism as to their integrity, and a desire to get them in (comic and ironic) proportion; and by offering us, somewhere quite deep beneath the surface of Ulysses , an obscure, melancholic, socialist dream of the end of property law.