Patterns of Ritual in the Works of James Joyce

Abstract

Any critical study of the works of James Joyce is from the outset impiously reductive. Two alternatives immediately confront the Joycean who embarks on such a study. He can follow the narrative structures of the individual works as W. Y. Tindall does in his A Reader's Guide to James Joyce or formulate an hypothesis on a single characteristic of the works and trace this idea through the canon as Richard M. Kain does in Fabulous Voyager. . . . Ironically, a combination of these two critical techniques would be the ideal method for approaching the works since the two literary qualities which each isolates are precisely those which Joyce unites so masterfully in a celebration of the written word that recreates and affirms the world in which his fictional characters interact. This study is an attempt to reunify these divergent emphases in an analysis of the patterns of ritual within a significant portion of Joyce's works. It will take into its focus the realistic narrative and pay tribute to the accomnlishment of a writer who by combining the mundane with the spiritual, the comic and pathetic with the heroic, provides his reader with an artistic body of works, the consumption of which gives rise to an affirmation of existence found in few other pieces of literature, particularly in the twentieth century. [From introductory section]