Joyce’s heirs. Joyce’s imprint on recent global literatures

Abstract

The figure of James Joyce is intangible, an almost all-encompassing figure whose height and breadth bypasses countries, continents and even time constraints and limitations. Many writers have confessed to their being indebted to his works and readings, as have many scholars over the years. However, not everything said about Joyce has always been praising; his contemporary D.H. Lawrence is known to have criticised him on the basis of his Biblical references or his journalistic-indebted narrative, which he defined as “old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new”. Many more writers have, however, found inspiration in Joyce’s narratives and stories than not. Admirers and detractors aside, it is clear that Joyce’s figure is larger than life. Almost as a reversed parallelism to D.H. Lawrence’s criticism, Joyce can be pronounced a figure of almost Biblical proportions. One may like him or despise him; however, no one is left indifferent by it. This lofty, academic assertion has its more mundane mirror image in the widespread myth that all Dubliners, upon entering a conversation of literary dimensions, will firmly state their own opinions on the Dubliner’s work, even discuss some of his passages, only to later acknowledge (perhaps in the intimacy of one of those public houses Joyce himself so well depicted) that they have not read the book at all. This, rather than taking away literary value form Joyce’s work, proves how all-encompassing and ever-arching his work can be. Discussed alike by highranking academics and Dublin taxi drivers, Joyce’s oeuvre is an ever-continuing metaphor of life and its essence at the core of the city which he left but always inhabited.