On February 2, 1922, James Joyce‘s 40th birthday, a young American bookseller named Sylvia Beach placed the first copies of Ulysses into his hands at her Paris shop, Shakespeare and Company. No major publisher in Britain or the United States had dared to touch it; the novel had already been serialized, prosecuted for obscenity, and banned before it was even finished. Beach, running a small English-language bookstore on the Left Bank, took on the risk that established publishing houses would not. The novel that emerged—dense, funny, formally unlike anything written before it—would go on to be regarded as one of the towering achievements of twentieth-century literature.
That improbable birth says something essential about Joyce. He was a writer who never separated ambition from risk, who treated the novel not as a fixed form to master but as something to break open and rebuild. From Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man through Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, his work grew stranger, funnier, and more demanding with each book, as if daring readers to keep pace with him.
Yet Joyce is often misunderstood, reduced to a reputation for difficulty that scares readers away before they begin. His books are treated as puzzles to be solved or monuments to be admired from a safe distance, rather than what they often are: playful, sensuous, deeply funny meditations on ordinary life—on beds and baths, letters and love, the small rituals that make up a single day. Beneath the formal daring lies a writer devoted to human intimacy, self-understanding, and the pleasures of language itself.
Vicki Mahaffey has spent her career helping readers find their way into that intimacy. Her first book, Reauthorizing Joyce, distinguished between authors who demand obedience and those who—like Joyce—grant their readers real freedom, even at the risk of being misunderstood. In States of Desire, she turned to Joyce alongside Oscar Wilde and William Butler Yeats, asking whether these writers actually lived what they wrote. In Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions, she argued that difficult literature was itself a form of resistance to the obedience that allows authoritarianism to take hold. And in her most recent book, The Joyce of Everyday Life, she shows how Joyce transforms the most mundane objects—a bed, a piece of glass, a strand of hair—into occasions for wonder. In the conversation that follows, we explore why Joyce still resists easy reading, what his difficulty is actually doing for us, and why an author so often called impenetrable may be one of literature's most generous.
Charles Carlini: Joyce is often called the most difficult major novelist in the English language. Is that reputation earned, or has it obscured what actually makes his work so rewarding?
Vicki Mahaffey: That reputation comes from a misunderstanding, and it does obscure the real novelty of the work. It is neither pleasurable nor particularly meaningful to read Joyce the way you read other works of fiction. We read most novels by erasing ourselves, by disappearing into another world, but Joyce’s work is actually a series of prompts for dialogue—the reader’s questions and reactions (both bad and good) are crucial to the book’s effect. You have to read with unusual self-awareness.
CC: Ulysses was banned and prosecuted for obscenity before it found a publisher willing to take it on. What do you think the censors were actually afraid of, and were they right to be?
VM: I think the censors feared its honesty. The question of whether this is a legitimate fear is an important one, because it takes us to the question of how life is related to art. The real fear is that people will unthinkingly replicate fictional actions that they have read (or watched) in their lives, and some people will! When a young man saw Batman, it inspired him to dress like the Joker and shoot people in a movie theater. But if we paid more attention to the difference between imagination and reality, it would help. Imagination is–and should be–boundless so that we can better assess where to draw the lines in reality.
CC: Your first book, Reauthorizing Joyce, distinguishes between authors who are authoritarian and those who are authoritative. What's the difference, and why does Joyce belong so firmly in the second category?
VM: It's the difference between totalitarianism and governance. Authoritarian authors only want to influence their audience, to carry them away, whereas authoritative authors know their craft and use it to empower their readers to read with greater alertness and responsiveness.
CC: You've written that Joyce's demanding style carries real risk; the more freedom he grants readers, the more likely his work is to be misread or abandoned. Why was that trade-off worth making, in your view?
VM: Great question. It‘s because Joyce, like a great teacher or psychoanalyst, knows that, to quote Oscar Wilde, ”it is only in voluntary associations that man [sic] is fine.“ A reader has to want to learn, to see things differently, for transformation to occur.
CC: In Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions, you argue that difficult literature can function as resistance to the kind of obedience that allowed fascism to flourish. How does that argument apply to Joyce specifically?
VM: Reading is interpretation. Most people don't stop to realize that when you learn to read a certain way, you are ceding your interpretive authority to an author or narrator. Joyce doesn't do that; he makes his readers stop, wonder, and make provisional hypotheses at every step. That is the kind of skeptical, self-aware, responsible attitude Stanley Milgram found to be missing in most of the people involved in his obedience experiments. Those are the experiments in which people were asked to shock people they couldn't see when they gave wrong answers. People did what they were told in large numbers, which caused them problems later when they realized what they'd done
CC: States of Desire puts Joyce alongside Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats. What did you learn about Joyce by studying him next to these two very different Irish contemporaries?
VM: I really love Wilde and Yeats, and I realized that Joyce learned a lot from them. Wilde was frighteningly brilliant as well as wickedly funny, and Yeats is not only an incredibly versatile poet, but he also has an exceptional emotional range. Joyce wanted to develop both intellect and feeling, not only in himself but also in his readers, so he couldn't have better teachers than Wilde for intellect and Yeats for feeling, given that both were also virtuosos with words.
CC: Your most recent book, The Joyce of Everyday Life, finds entire worlds of meaning in things as small as a bed, a piece of glass, or a strand of hair. What drew you to focus on the everyday rather than the epic set pieces Joyce is best known for?
VM: Yeats was a student of William Blake, who wrote, in ”Auguries of Innocence,“ about the value of seeing a World in a grain of sand and a Heaven in a wild flower. It‘s easier to see the big picture than to hold infinity in the palm of your hand. A lot has been written about Joyce and the epic, but I wanted to concentrate on the poetic aspect of his vision. As Virginia Woolf once said, ”Small things matter. That‘s where the leakage begins.“
CC: You've described your own first encounter with Joyce as one of real frustration—you initially preferred Henry James. What changed, and what do you say to readers who are stuck at that same point of resistance?
VM: Hate is a mode of relation! It's so much better than indifference. It contains energy. I used my dislike to power a deeper investigation, and the deeper I dug, the more I understood about my own blind spots. My important blind spots were not due to my lack of erudition (although my range of knowledge was not even close to that of Joyce); they came from my unconscious presuppositions about what literature was supposed to be.
CC: Ulysses unfolds over a single day yet is regarded as one of literature's great epics. How did Joyce manage to make one ordinary day carry that much weight?
VM: A day can and possibly should be an epic, if we pay as much attention to the internal world as we do the external one. That‘s what makes Ulysses an epic: its attention to the minds of its characters, and even to their unconscious minds. In our fast-paced information age, we would all really benefit from slowing down and turning inward with a magnifying glass like Joyce‘s.
CC: Joyce grants his readers an unusual amount of freedom, including, as you've said, the freedom to simply walk away. Why is that freedom, and the risk that comes with it, so central to what his fiction is trying to do?
VM: It‘s an act of respect for his readers. As Hamlet said to Horatio near the end of the play, ”The readiness is all.“ I've written an article about this on Joyce, Yeats, and Beckett called ”Darkening Freedom.“
CC: If Joyce could see how his work is read and taught today, what do you think would surprise him most, and what do you hope new readers still discover in him?
VM: Richard Ellmann began his biography of Joyce with a sentence that has become justly famous: ”We are still learning to be James Joyce‘s contemporaries.“ I think Joyce may (or may not!) have been surprised that his work, which still attracts adulation and denigration, rarely stimulates the kind of close and extended engagement he wanted. I believe that Joyce wanted to make reading into a communal act that facilitated cooperation and development, something that countered the competitive destructiveness of the two world wars he witnessed. He put his life into his effort to create a new kind of literature, once proclaiming that ”all literature is a damned lie.“ I think he may have been disheartened (but perhaps not surprised) to see that the community of Joyce readers, while committed, is still so small. More importantly, he may have been saddened to see that the humanitarian values he worked to disseminate are still far from being the dominant ones.
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