"I think a child should be allowed to take his father's or mother's name at will on coming of age. Paternity is a legal fiction"
About this Quote
Joyce slips a grenade into the cozy parlor of “family values” by treating the surname not as heritage but as paperwork. “Allowed” and “at will” are the operative provocations: the child becomes a self-authoring subject at the moment the state typically stamps them with a lineage they never chose. Coming of age isn’t just a birthday here; it’s a declaration of narrative control. If you can rename yourself, you can rewrite the plot you’ve been assigned.
“Paternity is a legal fiction” lands with Joycean relish because it’s both coldly bureaucratic and quietly scandalous. He’s not arguing that fathers don’t exist; he’s pointing out that fatherhood, as society recognizes it, is mediated by documents, presumptions, and property law. In other words, kinship is less a fact than a regime. The phrase smuggles in a broader modernist suspicion: identity is constructed, and the constructions that feel most “natural” often do the most social work.
The context matters. Joyce wrote against a backdrop of Catholic Ireland’s heavy moral architecture, where names encoded legitimacy, inheritance, and respectability. His own life - estrangement, exile, an allergy to parochial authority - sharpened his instinct for how institutions police intimacy. You can hear echoes of Stephen Dedalus’s famous distrust of paternity in Ulysses: the father as role, performance, and contested claim rather than sacred origin.
The intent isn’t sentimental liberation; it’s a surgical demystification. Joyce takes the romance out of bloodline and shows the gears: law, patriarchy, and the anxious need to make private life legible to the state.
“Paternity is a legal fiction” lands with Joycean relish because it’s both coldly bureaucratic and quietly scandalous. He’s not arguing that fathers don’t exist; he’s pointing out that fatherhood, as society recognizes it, is mediated by documents, presumptions, and property law. In other words, kinship is less a fact than a regime. The phrase smuggles in a broader modernist suspicion: identity is constructed, and the constructions that feel most “natural” often do the most social work.
The context matters. Joyce wrote against a backdrop of Catholic Ireland’s heavy moral architecture, where names encoded legitimacy, inheritance, and respectability. His own life - estrangement, exile, an allergy to parochial authority - sharpened his instinct for how institutions police intimacy. You can hear echoes of Stephen Dedalus’s famous distrust of paternity in Ulysses: the father as role, performance, and contested claim rather than sacred origin.
The intent isn’t sentimental liberation; it’s a surgical demystification. Joyce takes the romance out of bloodline and shows the gears: law, patriarchy, and the anxious need to make private life legible to the state.
Quote Details
| Topic | Family |
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