Vicki Mahaffey is passionate about the importance of reading as a mode of interpretation that needs to be more than a socially-conditioned reflex. In her new book, The Joyce of Everyday Life (Bucknell University Press; September 2024), she brings a depth of scholarship and a lively interpretive voice to show how James Joyce himself read, drawing from his entire corpus for her examples. With no omniscient narrator, Joyce’s work requires a reader to observe and listen anew, thereby finding connections that revive a rich appreciation of daily life: sleeping, washing, writing, eating, religion, and love. This book offers a way to slow down and return to the present moment when reading, using Joyce as a roadmap.

The Joyce of Everyday Life distills what Mahaffey, who has taught literature for forty years in both the U.S. and England, has learned about reading and language. Her work on Ireland illuminates the banshees in “On Dirty Sheets” and the salmon of knowledge in “On Salmon”; her experience teaching gender and sexuality leads to the shattering conclusions of “On Adultery and Virginity” and “On Fat.” Shakespeare, together with Plato and Aristotle, enrich the treatment of beds in “On Beds.” She also takes on bigger interpretive challenges in the sections “On Love” and “On Religion.”

1. The first line of Richard Ellmann’s biography has become famous: “We are still learning to be James Joyce’s contemporaries.” Is that still true, and if so, how?

Absolutely, and what Joyce has to show us now is more relevant and even urgent than ever. Part of what makes his work extraordinary is that he uses humor (not angry denunciation) to combat such pernicious attitudes as sexism and racism. Joyce sympathizes with the impulses that fuel hate for the “other,” but he also makes fun of them, while remaining acutely aware that they can erupt into violence.

2. Joyce is sometimes dismissed as the greatest unread writer of the twentieth century: unread because of his work’s reputation as unreadable. What do you make of that?

Like many readers, when I first encountered Joyce’s work I hated it: it was so different from the other kinds of literature I knew. Very slowly, I came to realize that his method of reading was different from the one I was using, and that my way of reading or interpreting had been relearned. If I wanted to “read” Joyce, I needed to learn to engage with words and narrative differently, and the result revolutionized my perspectives on many things. This book is designed to help readers see how Joyce read the world through language, with effects that are both funny and deeply poignant.

3. How can we reconcile Joyce’s association with fearsome erudition with the ordinariness of daily life?

Ulysses, Joyce’s greatest work, is set on a single day, yet it is an epic—and epics normally span years. What made it an epic was his fine-grained attention to individual moments in a single day seen from different perspectives. Unlike traditional novelists, who tell retrospective stories across time, Joyce’s narratives are more like what we might overhear in an elevator: they are firmly rooted in the present, the diurnal. Meaning is not conveyed retrospectively by a narrator who has already synthesized a set of experiences, but accrues cumulatively by those who have heightened their senses and sharpened their memory.

4. Joyce’s work was banned for obscenity across the English-speaking world. Does that affect your treatment of his achievements?

Of course. But his work isn’t obscene, you know; it’s simply honest. And honesty about bodily functions is still offensive to many. The problem is that censoring bodily functions—refusing to think or write about them—comes with a cost: it helps us fictionalize who we think we are. Unconsciously, it airbrushes the human body in ways that make our actual bodies embarrassing by contrast.

5. How has this book grown out of your previous published work?

My first book was also on Joyce. It investigated the nature of an author’s authority, teasing out the differences between an author who was authoritarian and one who was authoritative. Authoritative authors respect the freedom of the reader to a much greater degree, which also means they increase the likelihood that their works will be misunderstood. My second book was on Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, and Joyce. I wanted to understand the extent to which each of these Irish authors could live what they had learned; did their work affect the way they lived their lives, and if so, how? The next book focused on Modernist literature more generally: it argued that challenging literature
was a response to the widespread obedience to authority that allowed Naziism and Fascism to flourish. Much of what I have written about has been concerned with the problem of authority, and how the ease of coercion (especially when it takes the form of a pressure to conform) makes it much more important for readers to read with confidence and independence of mind. The Joyce of Everyday Life is designed to show that such reading is not only illuminating but delightful.