The difficulty in apprehending Joyce comes from the fact that we are given a frozen corpus of an idiom whose distinction is its fluidity. If these tales were transmitted orally they would never be twice the same, but we know that Joyce corrected and post-corrected every detail: freezing not just the text, but the storyteller and his audience. The result is a braid of category errors, a text that says "I am that I am not." The only option is to receive it sensually.
The difficulty in apprehending Joyce comes from the fact that we are given a frozen corpus of an idiom whose distinction is its fluidity. If these tales were transmitted orally they would never be twice the same, but we know that Joyce corrected and post-corrected every detail: freezing not just the text, but the storyteller and his audience. The result is a braid of category errors, a text that says "I am that I am not." The only option is to receive it sensually.