The Syphilis Code

A deep meditation on whatever it was that plagued James Joyce.

For some, the uncertainty surrounding Joyce’s condition has turned the issue into his most captivating puzzle. Erik Schneider, an independent scholar, became particularly fascinated. Schneider had dropped out of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972 and spent years educating himself at the school’s library. His abiding interest in Joyce eventually drove him to Dublin, and later to Trieste (following a brief period in London inspired by a similar devotion to the Sex Pistols), where he read Ferris’s groundbreaking book in the late 1990s. The emergence of this new dimension in Joyce studies — something glossed over by Ellmann, something that divided Joyceans — inspired Schneider to begin avidly pursuing Joyce’s medical records.