Joyce's four major books, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake, all go off like inventive and spectacular fireworks, and one response is to sit back and enjoy them – enjoy their intricate construction, their subtle phrasings, their play with conventions and expectations, their engagement with the twists and turns of history, their often hilarious exposure of prejudice and pomposity. Joyce effects are dazzling, funny, sometimes disconcerting, occasionally astringent or even lethal. Like the special effects of the pantomime tradition, or those of which Hollywood is currently so enamoured, Joyce effects, while they amaze or entrance the audience, openly invite admiration for the skill of the artificer. Whatever argument I pursue in the different parts of this book, I try always to reflect my own pleasure in these effects and to do them some kind of critical justice. Although I have been able to touch on only a few textual moments in Joyce's writing, examined in the light of wider concerns, my hope is that the reader's enjoyment of his æuvre as a whole will be enhanced and some of the characteristic effects of each of the four works given renewed power to awe and entertain.

The Joyce effects that form the main focus of my attention, however, are of a different kind.