James Joyce spent seven years writing Ulysses. It was banned in the United States for obscenity. It was smuggled across borders in suitcases. It was declared by some critics to be the greatest novel of the twentieth century and by others to be an unreadable mess. Both groups had a point. Neither group has won the argument, and the argument has been going on since 1922. The book follows one man, Leopold Bloom, through one day in Dublin, June 16, 1904. That is the entire plot. What happens in those pages is everything and nothing simultaneously.

He Made Language Do Things Nobody Knew Language Could Do

Joyce's early work was brilliant but recognizable. Dubliners was a short story collection of crystalline precision. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was a coming-of-age novel that traced a consciousness becoming aware of itself. Both books could be read by a determined amateur with a cup of tea and an afternoon. Ulysses cannot be read that way. Joyce wrote each of the eighteen chapters in a different style. One chapter is a play script. One is a sequence of newspaper headlines. One is a series of questions and answers. One is a hallucinatory nightmare that shifts tenses, speakers, and reality without warning. Literary scholars at Trinity College Dublin have spent a century annotating the text and have not finished. The difficulty is not arbitrary. Joyce believed that consciousness itself is not a clean narrative but a chaotic stream of sensation, memory, association, and desire. He tried to put that stream directly on the page. The result is writing that feels, at its best, more like being inside a mind than reading about one.

Finnegans Wake Made Ulysses Look Like a Beach Read

After Ulysses, Joyce spent seventeen years writing Finnegans Wake, a book composed almost entirely of multilingual puns, portmanteau words, and sentences that appear to be in English but are simultaneously in French, Italian, German, Norwegian, and several other languages. The first sentence begins in the middle of a word. The last sentence ends in the middle of the same word. The book is a circle. Scholars of modernist literature at the University of Oxford have described Finnegans Wake as either the most ambitious literary experiment in the history of the English language or a prank that lasted seventeen years. Joyce himself said that the book was designed to keep critics busy for three hundred years. He was seventy-eight years into that estimate, and the critics are still at it. Joyce went nearly blind writing these books. He dictated much of Finnegans Wake. He lived in self-imposed exile from Ireland for most of his adult life, carrying Dublin with him in his memory so precisely that he claimed a reader could reconstruct the city from his novels. Cartographers have checked. He was not far off. He died in Zurich in 1941, during a war he barely noticed. He had been too busy building Dublin inside language. The language he left behind is still being decoded, still being argued about, still doing things that nobody else has figured out how to do.