Reading Joyce's oeuvre is, as an ever-renewed activity, more than a lifetime's work (or play); and when we take into account the massive heap of books written about that oeuvre towering around it--and growing larger at an ever-increasing rate--the task of even beginning to feel at home with Joyce may make the newcomer quail. But there is no need for alarm: none of those books is essential to the reader of Joyce in search of pleasure and understanding, and at the same time all of them are potential allies. Although complaints about the overproduction of secondary commentary on Joyce (as with Shakespeare) will always be heard, it is a real problem only for the diligent librarian or the obsessive scholar. It is possible to think of the growing pile of books "on Joyce" as neither a threatening rampart casting deeper and deeper shadows over the original brightness of Joyce's genius nor a heroic monument to the task of total elucidation whose final moment draws nearer and nearer.

National Portrait Gallery, London

James Joyce is read by far more people than are aware of it. Such was the impact of his literary revolution that few later novelists of importance in any of the world's languages have escaped its aftershock.

This metatextual mountain is not in any simple way outside Joyce's own writing at all: it could be seen as continuous with the text it surrounds, extending that text to something much larger and richer than it was when Joyce first wrote it; and there is also a sense in which it is inside Joyce's original text, interleaving and interlineating it, dilating it to many times its original size. Take the library shelves which hold a hundred books containing interpretations of Joyce: they also hold, inside those same books, much of Joyce's text itself, quoted, paraphrased, fragmented, dispersed, rearranged, expanded. In reading through those books you are reading, and rereading, the Joycean text itself, seen from constantly-changing viewpoints and enhanced by ever new juxtapositions.

However, there is no need to move beyond the original work at all to experience its special rewards. Help in reading Joyce is not confined to the books that surround his own; his texts themselves teach us how to read them, provoking laughter at our naiveté when we fall into the trap of thinking of the world they create as a world that existed before they brought it into being, encouraging us to do without our need for singleness of meaning or certainty of position, showing us how our language is a powerful, and powerfully funny, determiner--but also underminer--of our thoughts and acts. Many of the most influential literary theorists of the past twenty years, whose views have percolated into thousands of classrooms, have testified to the importance of reading Joyce in the development of their ideas.

So Joyce's work has actually been growing over the years, and the number of ways of reading it has also been growing, all of them of some value, none of them final or definitive. There could not possibly be a "correct" way of reading, or even starting to read, the textual mass that consists of Joyce's texts themselves, all the texts of which they are readings (and we are only just beginning to appreciate how many of Joyce's words come not freshly-minted from his brain but copied out from other books), all the works of Joycean criticism and biography which read them, all the transcripts and facsimiles of manuscript material, and all the other texts which have a potential bearing on Joyce. At one extreme are the readers who will read one or two of Joyce's books, relying entirely on the general familiarity I have already mentioned to help them find enjoyment and stimulation; at the other extreme are the professionals and the monomaniacs, who may attempt to read not only the Joycean texts themselves several times but, impossibly, all the other works with which they interrelate.

In between are a multitude of options, all of them valid and valuable; there is no justification for saying that a reading of Ulysses by a Dubliner born towards the end of the nineteenth century is "better" or "truer" than one by a reader born in 1970 who has never set foot in Ireland, and the same applies to readers who have and who have not read the rest of Joyce's work, or biographies of Joyce, or the available manuscripts, or a pile of critical books, or a cross-section of early twentieth-century fiction, or the history of Europe. But what is undoubtedly the case is that all these encounters with Joyce are different, and to keep coming back to Joyce after detours through these and other readings (whether readings of books or of the world outside books) is to keep on engaging with recreated texts and thereby discovering new pleasures. If there is a way of reading Joyce that could be thought of as less than fully worthwhile, as something of a waste of human energy, it would be one that fails to bring together an active and curious attention to the words on the page with whatever store of knowledge and experience the individual reader has accumulated.