(David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, London, The Ronald press Company, 1960, vol. IV, pp.1161-1164)

 JAMES JOYCE (1882-1941) faced the implications of the loss of a world of public values. He early adopted the view, developed in the late nineteenth century, of the alienation of the artist. The artist had to be outside all conventions, all normal society, and this not only because those conventions and that society as Joyce found them in Dublin represented a "paralysis", a dead set of gestures having no meaning in terms of genuine human experience, but because the artist must be outside society in order to be objective, and he must be objective if he is to adopt the peculiar microcosmic view which was the way Joyce solved the modern problem. For Joyce sought a method of presenting a limited tract of time and space as microcosm, as a small-scale model of human life, to which all attitudes were possible, depending on your point of view. The artist’s function was thus not to render his own personal viewpoint, but to take all points of view and to construct in his fictional world an enormous interrelating, punning, kaleidoscopic verbal universe which, it might almost be said, presents everything as also everything else.

Joyce began, in the collection of short stories he called Dubliners (1914), with carefully etched pictures of Dublin life which were meticulously realistic in detail and atmosphere and at the same time were so organized that each detail became symbolic and each story had a symbolic relation to the other stories, the whole constituting not only (as he claimed) a picture of "the centre of the paralysis" but a projection of the basic crises of human experience and the archetypal rituals with which men confront them.

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) he transmuted autobiography into objective action and organised his account of a potential novelist from infancy to the moment when he realised that art implies exile in such a way as to emphasise at every point the connection between the artist’s objective, comprehensive, microcosmic vision and his inevitable alienation. Stephen Dedalus, the hero, is at the beginning of the novel firmly anchored in his family and in the institutions of his country. They continue to put forth claims on him throughout the period of his growing up. But when he realises at last that his destiny is to be free of all these claims; he has to learn to escape from them, to cultivate the terrible neutrality of the artist. Like the Greek Daedalus who made the labyrinth for King Minos and afterward made wings to enable him to escape across the sea from the tyrannous king, Stephen Dedalus seeks to escape from the labyrinth of Dublin life and claims. Stephen was the first Christian martyr, Daedalus the first craftsman; in giving his hero the name of Stephen Dedalus, Joyce was emphasizing his view of the artist as outcast.

Ulysses is the work of the exiled artist re-creating, at a distance but with total knowledge the life he has escaped from. In its rendering of events of one day in Dublin (16th June 1904), Joyce achieves a realistic surface so brilliant, so convincing in its life and colour and movement, that the book can be enjoyed merely for its superficial vitality. But its true vitality goes much deeper. Joyce expands the action of Ulysses into microcosm, he makes his account of the adventures of Leopold Bloom, the unsuccessful advertisement canvasser, Stephen Dedalus, would-be artist a few years after we left him in the Portrait, and others, into a symbolic picture of all history and all experience. He does this by providing overtones of meaning for every literal action, by the deft use of allusion and suggestion, references to the other arts, and by the use of devices, such as the viceregal procession in the tenth episode, for the simultaneous presentation of different streams of action that are happening at the same time. The seedy and unheroic Bloom is a true hero; not only is he the homme moyen sensuel, humane, inquiring, but always inexpert, always the layman; he is also the Ulysses of Homer, who in turn was husband of Penelope, lover of Calypso, wanderer and home-lover, brave warrior and cunning schemer. Bloom, too, an Irish Jew, is both of Dublin and not of Dublin, both a member of his community and an exile; his humane curiosity shows him as the Baconian scientist, concerned with "the relief of man's estate", while his relative lack of formal education and the streak of vulgarity in him shows him as simultaneously the antiscientist, the prey of popular half-truths. He is the complete man, now hero and now fool, and in the devastatingly complete presentation of his consciousness in the course of the day during which we see him, Joyce not only shows all of him, including his whole past (for his whole past is contained in the texture of his present consciousness), but also shows him as everybody else. All points of view are applicable; the same man is hero and fool depending on how you look at him. Ulysses is the comedy of multiple identity. To the question: "What is significant in human experience" Joyce seems to answer: "Nothing, and everything. It all depends on how you look at it. I shall present a picture of a slice of life so organised that you will see this: I, as the objective artist standing outside all human commitments, will be able to show all of human history contained in my one carefully patterned set of events, for the significant is also the insignificant, the trivial is the heroic, and the familiar the exotic, and vice versa: it is a matter of point of view, and the artist has all points of view because he has no point of view". It is a daring and at the same time supremely logical view of art; no one else pursued the logic as far as Joyce did.

Joyce pursued it even further in Finnegans Wake (1939). In Ulysses he had displayed his brilliant linguistic ingenuity in the use of puns and portmanteau words in order to indicate relationships and identities and simultaneities. In Finnegans Wake he develops this to the point where the work becomes a vast, complex, and multiple pun, each word helping to build up several threads of meaning, which interweave and combine in a highly complex manner in order to make the trivial events narrated in a popular Irish ballad contain everything – absolutely everything – that can be said about human history and psychology. It is an astonishing and in its way a highly comic work. One feels that what Joyce was really after was one, final infinitely reverberating pun which would say in a single fantastically multiple word everything that can possibly be said about man from every point of view simultaneously. Joyce founded no school; he developed an aesthetic theory and practice as far as it would go; there was no further road that way.