Asurly English overseer is standing at the entrance to a construction site in London. It’s a filthy, wet day. He sees approaching him a shabby figure, with clay pipe clenched in mouth and a battered raincoat, and scowlingly thinks, Another effing Mick on the scrounge. The Irishman shambles up to him and asks if there’s any casual job going. “You don’t look to me,” says the supervisor, “as if you know the difference between a girder and a joist.” “I do, too,” says the Irishman indignantly. “The first of them wrote Faust and the second one wrote Ulysses.”

This is my favorite “Irish” joke, not just because it revenges itself on generations of nasty English caricature—to have represented the Irish, the people of Swift and Wilde and Shaw and Yeats, as stupid, of all things— but because it is itself Joycean. His universe of words was a torrent of puns, palindromes, parallels, parodies, and plagiarisms (with a good deal of Parnell stirred into the alliteration). Every now and then I will see a word as if for the first time, and suddenly appreciate that Evian is “naïve” spelled backward, or that Bosnia is an anagram of “bonsai.” Preparing some salad the other day, I murmured, “I knew Olive Oyl before she was an extra virgin.” Joyce could do this, at an infinitely higher standard of multiple entendre, drawing on several languages, for pages on end, so that—depending on your level of awareness, and your capacity to spot new allusions and analogies—you never reopen the same book of his, or even the same chapter, without realizing that you are holding a new text in your hands and haven’t really read it before.

Word games and word jokes are the special province of growing children who are coming into language for the first time (lucky them). And, lucky for us, Joyce was a startling case of infantilism and arrested development. Why, just for a start, did he pick June 16, 1904, as the day on which Mr. Leopold Bloom of Dublin, at first alone and then in the company of Stephen Dedalus, mimics the several stages of Homer’s Odyssey before dropping anchor with his blowsy Penelope, the dirty-minded Molly Bloom? On that day the newspapers reported on a terrible ferry accident at New York’s Hell Gate and a war—between Russia and Japan—that would curtain-raise the Great War of 1914. These events are mulled over in the city, along with a spectacular reversal of fortune at the horse races, as Bloom goes on his way. But this wasn’t what had fixed the date forever in the mind of James Joyce. On that day, he had made a rendezvous with a chambermaid, by the marvelous name of Nora Barnacle, who had newly arrived from Galway. She had failed to keep their first appointment (after he had initially picked her up in the street) and by a nice coincidence kept him standing outside the house of Oscar Wilde’s father, on Merrion Square. But the second date exceeded his expectations. The couple took a walk out to Ringsend, beyond the city’s docks, where, as Joyce later told her in a molten letter, it was not he who made a move but “you who slid your hand down inside my trousers and pulled my shirt softly aside and touched my prick with your long tickling fingers and gradually took it all, fat and stiff as it was, into your hand and frigged me slowly until I came off through your fingers, all the time bending over me and gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes.”

A century later, the literary world will celebrate the hundredth “Bloomsday,” in honor of the very first time the great James Joyce received a handjob from a woman who was not a prostitute.