"Joyce was a realist, but his reality was not ours," writes John Gordon
in his new book. Here, he maintains that the shifting styles and
techniques of Joyce's works is a function of two interacting realities
the external reality of a particular time and place and the internal
reality of a character's mental state. In making this case Gordon offers
up a number of new readings: how Stephen Dedalus conceives and composes
his villanelle; why the Dubliners story about Little Chandler is
titled "A Little Cloud"; why Gerty MacDowell suddenly appears and
disappears; what is happening when Leopold Bloom stares for two minutes
on end at a beer bottle's label; why the triangle etched at the center
of Finnegans Wake doubles itself and grows a pair of circles; why the
next to last chapter of Ulysses has, by far, the book's highest
incidence of the letter C; and who is the man in the macintosh.
Gordon, whose authoritative "Finnegans Wake" A Plot Summary received
critical acclaim and is considered one of the standard references,
revisesand challengesthe received version of that reality. For instance,
Joyce features ghost visitations, telepathy, and other paranormal
phenomena not as "flights into fantasy" but because he believed in the
real possibility of such occurrences.