 | Stephen has returned from Paris, where he has had experiences much like Joyce's, and he is recovering from the death of his mother. But in the fourth chapter of the book we are introduced to a new character, a Jewish advertising canvasser named Leopold Bloom whose wife, Molly, is planning on committing adultery with a man named "Blazes" Boylan that afternoon. Bloom knows Stephen's father, but has no obvious connection to the boy; nevertheless, the meeting of the two is as much of a dramatic climax as the book admits. The entirety of Ulysses' seven-hundred-odd pages takes place on the same day, during which we go deeply into the minds of both main characters--and, finally, of Molly as well--and meet a bewildering variety of subsidiary ones. But perhaps the book's most striking feature is its narrative innovations. Starting around the ninth chapter, the narration, which had begun in a mode something like the last chapter of Portrait (although with more internal monologue), begins to vary wildly. |
| There are interpolated episodes in play form, a chapter narrated by an unnamed barfly, one that is told as if it were a poorly written domestic romance, one told in ludicrously abstract question-and-answer form, and so forth. Perhaps the most noticeable shift in tone from Portrait is due to the humor of the book: it is crammed with jokes, from high intellectual verbal play to the most vulgar slapstick. On several occasions Joyce remarked that he wished reviewers, instead of worrying about the book's obscenity, would at least notice that it was funny. While writing Ulysses Joyce had returned to Trieste, and then in 1920 at the urging of Pound the Joyces had gone to Paris for a week's excursion. They wound up staying twenty years. With the enthusiastic support of Pound, T. S. Eliot, and a Parisian bookstore-owner named Sylvia Beach, Joyce soon gathered an admiring circle of friends, French literary luminaries, and aspiring young writers from England and America. When the Little Review editors were prosecuted for obscenity because of an episode of Ulysses that appeared there, it only added to Joyce's international fame. By the time Beach's bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, published the first edition of the complete book in 1922, Joyce was already the literary toast of Paris, and had been acclaimed by many as the greatest modern writer of English prose. | 
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| From its first fragment, published in Ford Madox Ford's transatlantic review in 1924, the Wake caused trouble for Joyce. Many of his friends and supporters were dismayed. Pound confessed himself baffled, and even Harriet Weaver expressed disappointment, which caused Joyce considerable pain. The book is written in a "night-language" far removed from ordinary English, jammed with portmanteau words and multilingual puns. When a friend objected that some of the puns in the Wake were trivial, Joyce replied that some were indeed trivial, and some quadrivial. Worse, there are no fixed characters or events in the book--or, alternately, there are too many for comfort. |
| As with Ulysses, Joyce tried to orchestrate the reception of the Wake. He encouraged twelve of his friends, including Stuart Gilbert and Samuel Beckett, who had informally apprenticed himself to Joyce, to produce a volume treating the book. This was published as Our Exagmination round His Factification for Incamination of "Work in Progress" in 1929. But events conspired against him. By the time the book was finally published, in 1939, the world was on the brink of war. Joyce's own health and eyesight were failing during his last decade. Most painfully, his children, whom he had grown to cherish passionately, were in trouble. |
| By 1929 it was becoming clear that his daughter Lucia, a bright and talented girl, was mentally unstable. Joyce fought the realization as long as possible, arranging projects in which she could express her artistic impulses and encouraging her in everything, but by 1932, when she had conceived a hopeless passion for Samuel Beckett, even he had to seek treatment for her, and finally institutionalization. In 1931 for various reasons, including the wish to make a gesture of reconciliation with his father, who was dying, Joyce took Nora to a London registry office to legalize their marriage. | 
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| Joyce's son Giorgio was unable to undertake a successful career, and his marriage was troubled; in 1939 his wife had a breakdown and the two were separated. Perhaps the brightest spot in this period was the birth of Joyce's grandson Stephen James Joyce in 1932, less than two months after Joyce's father's death. Perhaps Joyce's most moving poem, "Ecce Puer" ("Behold the Child"), commemorates these two events with stunning simplicity. In 1940 the Joyces were forced to leave Paris for Vichy, where they stayed with a family friend while Joyce carried on protracted negotiations to be allowed to enter Switzerland. Meanwhile, he was assisting a number of Jewish friends to escape to neutral territory. |
