Status Updates From Ellmann's Joyce: The Biogra...

But is Joyce a great writer? Connolly is not sure. To begin with, 'he asks too much of his ideal reader.' 'Am I the only person,' Connolly wonders, who finds 'the plans and keys and clues and commentaries on Joyce's books more exhilarating than the originals?'

He was no longer a Christian himself; but he converted the temple to new uses instead of trying to knock it down, regarding it as a superior kind of human folly and one which, interpreted by a secular artist, contained obscured bits of truth.

Wit can be a way of seeing the world. Johnson describes it as an 'unexpected copulation of ideas, the discovery of some occult relation between images in appearance remote from each other.'