{"id":70624,"date":"2014-05-01T15:07:51","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T19:07:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70624"},"modified":"2019-02-04T11:54:13","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T16:54:13","slug":"i-did-not-approve-this-message","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/01\/i-did-not-approve-this-message\/","title":{"rendered":"I Did Not Approve This Message"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and the trouble with public image.<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2010, just under two years after David Foster Wallace\u2019s death, the journalist David Lipsky published Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace<\/i><\/a>, a memoir of transcripts from an interview he\u2019d conducted with Wallace in 1996 for Rolling Stone<\/em>. The book was well reviewed\u2014it made the Times<\/em> best-seller list\u2014and late last year it was announced that it would become a film starring Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky and Jason Segel as Wallace. The End of the Tour<\/em> is already in postproduction and slated for release in late 2014, but last week, the Wallace Literary Trust issued a public statement making it \u201cclear that they have no connection with, and neither endorse nor support\u201d the film: \u201cThere is no circumstance under which the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust would have consented to the adaptation of this interview into a motion picture, and we do not consider it an homage.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was struck by similarities between this situation and the case of James Joyce and Samuel Roth, which began in 1926. In his recent book Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain<\/em>, the scholar Robert Spoo devotes two chapters to Joyce\u2019s desperate attempts to defend his intellectual property against Roth, an infamous American \u201cbooklegger\u201d who reprinted the entire text of Ulysses<\/em>, as well as large portions of Finnegans Wake<\/em>, without permission. Roth\u2019s actions, like those of the filmmakers of The End of the Tour<\/em>, were not illegal: Joyce didn\u2019t possess the U.S. copyright on his works, which were originally published in Europe and\u2014after a brief window during which he could have established copyright by securing American publication\u2014fell immediately into the U.S. public domain. <\/p>\n

Nonetheless, Joyce retaliated. His campaign began with a letter of protest signed by more than 160 authors and intellectuals including T.\u2009S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, H.\u2009G. Wells, W.\u2009B. Yeats, and Albert Einstein. Roth was widely excoriated in the literary press, sometimes in viciously anti-Semitic terms. Joyce was held up as a kind of martyr. When the author did finally take legal action against Roth, in March 1927, he alleged not copyright infringement but name misappropriation; his complaint was filed under Section 51 of the New York Civil Rights Law, which protects \u201c[a]ny person whose name, portrait, or picture is used \u2026 for advertising purposes or for the purpose of trade without \u2026 written consent.\u201d In other words, Joyce was challenging not the piracy of his work but the commercial exploitation of his name and reputation. For this indignity, he sought half a million dollars in damages.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

The case never went to trial. Roth, bleeding funds and facing separate criminal charges for obscenity, settled by agreeing to a \u201cconsent injunction,\u201d which prohibited him from making use of Joyce\u2019s name in the future. Though Joyce saw no money from Roth and failed to establish a legal precedent for authors seeking to protect their reputations\u2014his stated reason for bringing the suit in the first place\u2014he was able to use the opportunity to reframe his reputation in ways that went far beyond Roth\u2019s piracy.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy presenting himself as a sufferer under American law, Joyce rewrote a narrative that had cast him as the law\u2019s subverter,\u201d Spoo writes. Ulysses<\/em>, to the extent that it was known at all, was widely regarded as an immoral and indecent book, but \u201c[i]n the wake of Joyce\u2019s revisionary campaign, Ulysses<\/em> came to seem more sinned against than sinning, less a corrupter of morals than a scene of trespass.\u201d Spoo argues that the Roth case was a turning point in Joyce\u2019s career that ultimately led to the authorized American publication of Ulysses<\/em> with Random House in 1934\u2014and that Roth \u201cin the end was immolated on the altar of Joyce\u2019s aggrieved celebrity.\u201d<\/p>\n

I called Spoo and asked for his opinion on the Wallace estate\u2019s stand against The End of the Tour<\/em>. (Besides being a professor of law, Spoo is a former editor of the James Joyce Quarterly<\/em> and served as co-counsel for Professor Carol Shloss\u2019s successful suit against the Joyce Estate in 2009<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe public statement seems to hover between an admission of helplessness and a threat of reprisal,\u201d Spoo observed, in a lawyer\u2019s careful tone. \u201cI think they\u2019re hedging. They\u2019re saying, \u2018We know we can\u2019t stop the production, but we reserve our rights in the future.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Spoo emphasized that there were important differences between Joyce\u2019s actions and the Wallace estate\u2019s: in 1927, Joyce was alive, and thus protected under privacy and antidefamation laws that don\u2019t extend to Wallace as a deceased person. \u201cIn the United States there are severe limitations on preventing anyone from talking about the dead,\u201d he told me. \u201cYou can\u2019t libel or slander the dead. They don\u2019t really have any privacy rights to speak of.\u201d<\/p>\n

But because they hold the copyrights to Wallace\u2019s works, the Wallace estate\u2019s case may be stronger than Joyce\u2019s was. Even though the estate doesn\u2019t own the rights to Lipsky\u2019s memoir, Spoo speculates that \u201cthere could be a copyright issue if the movie were to make use of any of [Wallace\u2019s] published writings without permission.\u201d Then, too, the transcripts of the interview Wallace gave to Lipsky in 1996 could be copyrighted and claimed by the Wallace estate, since taped interviews, according to Spoo, present a gray area, legally speaking.<\/p>\n

A more likely legal recourse for the estate would involve not Wallace\u2019s intellectual property but his name, reputation, and what is called the right of publicity or \u201cpersonality rights.\u201d Could the Wallace Literary Trust sue the filmmakers of The End of the Tour <\/em>on the basis of name misappropriation, as Joyce had done in 1927? Possibly, though the legal strategy wouldn\u2019t be the same. The 1903 privacy rights statute under which Joyce\u2019s complaint was filed is still on the books, but only in New York State, and only for the living; there are no federal laws pertaining to publicity rights. But California\u2014the most obvious state in which to bring suit, since it was Wallace\u2019s place of residence at the time of his death, and the case involves a Hollywood production company\u2014has very stringent personality rights laws. (In 1985, the legislature passed the Celebrity Rights Act, which grants personality rights for seventy years after death.) \u201cThe Wallace estate are probably thinking about this,\u201d said Spoo. \u201cThey probably are wondering to what extent will the movie be using Wallace\u2019s name, and will it be in such a way that they could possibly have a cause of action.\u201d<\/p>\n

A further complication: in the eyes of the law, is the version of Wallace played by Jason Segel a real person or a character? If the estate makes a fuss, the filmmakers could easily argue the latter. \u201cIf somebody\u2019s name is used in a book\u201d\u2014even a biography or a work of nonfiction\u2014\u201cit is typically very difficult,\u201d according to Spoo, \u201cto sue for a violation of publicity rights.\u201d<\/p>\n

How much damage could the Wallace estate do to The End of the Tour<\/em>? Legally, their options may be limited, but, as the tale of Joyce and Roth shows, there are always options for famous authors to pursue in the court of public opinion. If they continue to be vocal about their displeasure, they could have a substantial effect on the film\u2019s fortunes among its core audience of Wallace diehards. While they might not succeed in making David Lipsky or the film\u2019s director James Ponsoldt into cultural pariahs\u2014the modern-day equivalents of Samuel Roth\u2014they could definitely make their lives more difficult.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Some literary estates are more obstructionist than others. Joyce\u2019s estate is, notoriously, one of the worst: on principle, his grandson Stephen refuses many requests to quote from Joyce\u2019s work. On the face of it, there\u2019s nothing wrong with the Wallace Trust\u2019s attempt to distance itself from a film it has nothing to do with, if that\u2019s as far as it goes\u2014but some Wallace scholars are already worried that this statement may augur ill for the future.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve been troubled by the idea that one has to reach out to the estate of a deceased person to get permission for things,\u201d Spoo said. He allowed that some uses of an author\u2019s name and work might be legally sound but ethically questionable, and it\u2019s appropriate, in such cases, to reach out to an estate to ask their blessing. \u201cBut I don\u2019t know where that line is, so I refuse to draw it,\u201d he went on. \u201cEvery time I try to draw it, I find that I\u2019m silencing something that could be valuable to talk about. I just don\u2019t think there should be a limit on how we interpret an author.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wallace is heir to a literary tradition that has historically sought to limit interpretation in just this way. Modernism and postmodernism are aesthetic movements that evolved alongside the strengthening of intellectual property laws and the growth of a hyper-protectionist rights-based culture, particularly in America. \u201cModernist authors thought of their work as ownable and resented assaults on it,\u201d Spoo writes. \u201cThe idea of literary property was talismanic, emblematic of respect for artistic labor, an acknowledgment of the dignity of the attic.\u201d Like many of the ideas modernist writers espoused, this one was tinged with anxiety: \u201cThe fear of failed copyrights lay behind many developments of modernism.\u201d<\/p>\n

I asked Spoo whether this fearful, protective attitude toward intellectual property persisted, in his opinion, into the postmodern period. The question seemed to catch him off guard, but he did his best to indulge me: \u201cIf modernism is a period of concern over copyright\u2014or of trying to find reasonable substitutes for copyright\u2014is postmodernism a postcopyright period?\u201d he wondered aloud. \u201cThe writing changes, the whole sense of one\u2019s relationship to one\u2019s own writing changes. When you look at the voice of a Pynchon or a Gaddis or a Burroughs, is it a voice that is claiming singular ownership of these words? I\u2019m not sure it is. There seems to be a postproprietary attitude in the writing itself. Whether that reflects a postcopyright attitude towards one\u2019s work, though, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some readers of Wallace have attributed such a postproprietary ethos to him. Writing in The Awl<\/em>, Maria Bustillos<\/a> sensibly warns us not to \u201ceven speculate on the sad and unfathomable question of what Wallace would or would not have consented to\u201d\u2014but criticizes the estate for attempting to police his reputation. \u201cAny honest effort to discuss, to understand, and to build upon the conversation Wallace\u2019s work began should be honored by readers in the spirit of intellectual curiosity and open-heartedness he himself embodied in his short life,\u201d Bustillos writes.<\/p>\n

Yet we know from D.\u2009T. Max\u2019s biography, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story<\/em>, that Wallace was intensely concerned with his public image. In this he follows in the footsteps of his heroes Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and Don DeLillo, all of whom have been, in their way, just as controlling of their reputations as Joyce was, even if they exert this control through anonymity and refusal rather than through protectionist aggression. Is there a connection between the kind of encyclopedic, all-encompassing fictions that both Joyce and Wallace wrote\u2014what Tom Le Clair has called \u201cthe systems novel\u201d and James Wood \u201chysterical realism\u201d\u2014and the slightly hysterical attempts of writers and literary estates to shape the public\u2019s impression of their legacy? I think of Oscar Crease, the playwright at the center of Gaddis\u2019s A Frolic of His Own<\/em>, obsessively pursuing a futile lawsuit against filmmakers he thinks have stolen his idea: a grotesque version of the artist as rights-holder, disfigured by his sense of injustice.<\/p>\n

Whether the Wallace estate\u2019s attempt to dictate the terms of his public image is in the author\u2019s spirit or not, one thing is certain: it\u2019s doomed to failure. Writers\u2019 reputations, particularly after their deaths, are not carefully crafted works of self-expression but palimpsests by diverse hands. \u201cWith somebody as big as Wallace or Joyce, it\u2019s ultimately impossible for one entity to shape their authorial image,\u201d Spoo told me. \u201cThere are too many people interested in them to control it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evan Kindley is an editor at large at the <\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books and a contributing editor at <\/em>The Pitchfork Review.\u00a0He teaches at Claremont McKenna College.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and the trouble with public image. In 2010, just under two years after David Foster Wallace\u2019s death, the journalist David Lipsky published Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace, a memoir of transcripts from an interview he\u2019d conducted with Wallace in 1996 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":689,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[6461,601,154,13754,947,13755,13757,13758,13756],"class_list":["post-70624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-celebrity","tag-copyright","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-david-lipsky","tag-james-joyce","tag-jesse-eisenberg","tag-public-image","tag-reputation","tag-robert-spoo"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow Far Should a Writer Go to Police His Public Image?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Evan Kindley on David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and the trouble with public image.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/01\/i-did-not-approve-this-message\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"I Did Not Approve This Message by Evan Kindley\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 1, 2014 \u2013 David Foster Wallace, James Joyce, and the trouble with public image. 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