“A personality cult …has made Joyce what he never

was, in the name of a cause that is dubious in the

first place: the sustaining of the Joyce industry itself in its own attempt to refashion the modern novel

along the lines of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The

problem is that, to turn Joyce into a totem, the

industry has had to tell a lot of lies.

The lies began after the war, when the so-called New

Critics needed a modern novelist to represent their

art-for-art’s- sake views that made the pleasure-pain

of complexity and contradiction the height of

aesthetic experience.” New Statesman