Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Rivka Galchen and Pankaj Mishra discuss James Joyce’s legacy today.

By Rivka Galchen

Every attention paid to the quotidian links back to him, as does every joke, every game, every difficulty and every epiphany.

Joyce’s work is so canonical that in some sense we are all inescapably his heirs. It’s as if he were some eyeglassed philanthropist who broke the dam, improved the quality of the water, reintroduced several gone species back into the park, and then also built the town square, the railway tracks, the hospital, the playhouse and, of course, the public restrooms that we can almost never find anymore. We are his heirs because we live in the spaces he built. I say this without even being what one would call a big Joyce fan, because although, sure, I love most all of “Dubliners,” and I love the Circe episode of “Ulysses"and other sentences here and there, the majority of Joyce’s work I merely admire, and maybe coldly at that. But still: Every attention paid to the quotidian seems to link back to him, as does every highly allusive and densely detailed creation, every lounging in the texture of language, every joke, every game, every difficulty and every epiphany. Even the video game Minecraft has something Joycean about it. His writing may not be what my heart beats for most, but I would never pretend it wasn’t his DNA that contributed to the shape and desires of that selfsame heart.

Image Rivka Galchen Credit... Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

But maybe I’m avoiding what most of us would mean by “modern heir.” Of what inheritance, then, do we speak? Isn’t it of a kind so long and expertly contested that its distribution risks being preceded by its complete transubstantiation into legal fees? Joyce wrote poems, a play, a terminally perfect collection of short stories, a terminally perfect künstlerroman, a nearly terminally perfect “Ulysses,” and then that other book, the one supposedly published in English but written in no language anyone fully understands. Occasionally we come across people claiming to have read all of “Finnegans Wake,” but one hears them as if listening to a rashy traveler returned feverish from distant jungles, telling of a city built entirely of gold.