James Joyce and the Common Man

Joyce differs from most of the great modernist novelists in that he is convinced that history is not an essential dimension of humanity. Joyce’s fictional worlds dissolve history into everyday time, the time of individuals’ lived lives. Nor is he a standard-bearer for the literary absolute or of the artistic absolute in general : the youthful enthusiasm for the religion of art is no longer endorsed by the author of Ulysses. Rather, his indifference to grand History is based on the conviction that the only measure of time suited to human beings is the individual life of each of them. To open up to the beauty of things, one must accept the inevitably contingent and open nature of life. Finnegan’s Wake represents the epitome of this radical equalization, reducing to equal perplexity the cultured or ignorant reader, and even the author himself, faced with the proliferation of a work adhering rigorously to contingency.