Joyce subjected race to comic treatment without lessening its seriousness. He does this by broadening his perspective and deferring judgment about differences (“prejudice” literally means prejudgment). Human racial competition takes the form of a car race (in “After the Race”) and a horse race (in Ulysses). This play on different meanings of “race” allows Joyce to make fun of racism while simultaneously belittling it. People “pre-judge” the results of racial competition by betting. Racial hatred is no longer comic in Finnegans Wake, where Shem the Penman is excoriated as black, Jewish, and oriental. Joyce exposes the superficiality of race prejudice by suggesting that darkness is internal to everyone, and it can be transformed into a form of communication that is communal instead of being driven by self-interest and greed.

Margot Norris has defined a generation in Joyce studies in at least two senses of the term. She has been, for upward of four decades, an exemplary voice on Joyce's oeuvre, the ideal reader of our title. Invited to keynote more Joyce conferences than anyone in the history of the field, and by a wide margin, Margot Norris has combined preeminence as a theoretician, an exegete, and a historical critic of all things Joyce. She has anchored what has come to be known as the “Joyce industry” like no other figure since the heyday of Hugh Kenner. But she has also defined a generation of Joyce studies in the sense of delineating the outline or form of our collective project, of simultaneously marking and pushing the boundaries of the field in all directions. No approach to Joyce's work has been foreign to Norris’ imagination or intractable to her powerfully prehensile intellect. To trace her career, accordingly, from the mid-1970s to recent times, is to follow the march of our investment in and engagement with Joyce's literary creation and its critical heritage—not that she has followed the prevailing footsteps, but that she has led the parade.

Appearing two years before Colin McCabe's James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word, widely credited with initiating the post-structuralist turn in Joyce studies, Margot Norris’ The Decentered Universe of Finnegans Wake had already executed that paradigm shift with respect to Joyce's most challenging, experimental opus, a foray beyond not only the avant-garde bourne of modernism, but beyond the pale of a postmodernism yet to be born. In her own words, Joyce's last work assaulted “not only the conventional literary modes but also many of the epistemological presuppositions of our culture.” Its means for accomplishing this radical demarché, on Norris’ account, is to enact a narrative anatomy of the infrastructure of language as such, in which our “empirical belief in the separation of inner and outer, subjective and objective, mental and physical—completely disintegrates.” By casting this Wakean “colliderscape,” an environment where human characters are periodically “melting into their landscape to become river and land, tree and stone,” Norris not only captures Joyce's disruption of the logic of identity at its most cosmic, but anticipates today's ecocritical indictment of the Enlightenment construction of the Anthropocene.

I would like to start by clarifying something about the nature of freedom, as Joyce was fighting for it. Joyce's main concern was not with freeing Ireland from British control, but with freeing the mind. As a writer, his technique for doing so was to challenge the (learned, socially conditioned) assumptions of his readers. As Stephen says in “Circe,” pointing to his forehead, “In here it is I must kill the priest and the king.” And in his early essay “Ireland: Island of Saints and Sages,” Joyce makes a related point about Catholicism, which enslaves the soul: “I do not see what good it does to fulminate against English tyranny while the tyranny of Rome still holds the dwelling place of the soul.” In 1967 in the U.S., Martin Luther King said something very similar: “As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.” In Portrait, the prequel to Ulysses, Stephen wonders in his youthfully superior idiom about freeing the minds and touching the conscience of “the patricians of Ireland” sitting in Maple's Hotel, along with their daughters: “How could he hit their conscience or how cast his shadow over the imaginations of their daughters, before their squires begat upon them, that they might breed a race less ignoble than their own?”4 Stephen again expresses his determination to create a conscience for his compatriots at the end of the novel, when he vows to “encounter the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race” (P 213).

In Portrait, Stephen is angry, seeing his contemporaries as ignoble and without a conscience. In Ulysses, though, haunted by the pathos of his mother's death and humbled by the pricks of his own conscience as he recalls his treatment of her, Stephen is trembling on the brink of greater selfawareness and concern for the other: “Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart” (U 1.102). He does not yet know how to do what Leopold Bloom can do so admirably, or what Joyce positions the reader to do over and over in Ulysses: to look again, not only at the other but also at himself.

This dedicated volume proposes to honor the rich, varied, trenchant, and tremendously influential scholarship of Professor Margot Norris in a series of essays amplifying her illumination of Joyce's literary oeuvre along with several prominent lines she introduced and investigated. Our title is intended to mark the common denominator running, like Ariadne's thread, throughout Professor Norris’ many-sided explorations of Joyce's labyrinth. For Professor Norris, the quiddity of Joyce's work, its elusive whatness, resides in its unfolding of multiple what elses, its opening up of alternative ways of regarding the novels themselves, the narrative or generic forms they destabilize, the world to which they refer, the heritages they tap, and above all the readers they address. These five categories, in fact—textual plurivalence, formal innovations, possible worlds, emergent histories, and variegated readerships—serve as anchoring points of the collection, each corresponding with one of the significant projects delineating Professor Norris’ esteemed career. Prominent Joycean, Modernist, and Irish studies scholars of different nations and generations supply the essays under each heading.

At first glance, Joyce's shorter works - his poems and epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce, and Exiles - seem to bear only the most tenuous relationship to the books for which Joyce has become famous. It is only by an exercise of the imagination that the epiphanies and Giacomo Joyce can even be called 'works'; Joyce published neither in its original form, choosing instead to loot them for the more ambitious undertakings that followed, and neither received the painstaking polish that Joyce lavished on his more ambitious productions. Only forty of at least seventy-one epiphanies are extant and their relationship to one another had to be reconstructed from manuscript evidence; the sketches that comprise Giacomo Joyce were similarly composed, arranged, and abandoned, but not destroyed. Chamber Music, although published in 1907, was orphaned when Joyce delegated the final arrangement of the poems to his brother Stanislaus. Pomes Penyeach, as the title suggests, is a modest offering of twelve and a tilly poetic 'fruits'. Only Exiles continued to hold Joyce's interest as an autonomous composition not destined for immediate verbal recycling.

The status of the shorter works as successful, original, or even finished compositions has always been in question; even in more subjective terms, however, they seem to offer few of the rewards of their longer and better known counterparts. First, and most damagingly, they are humourless; what humour may be discerned in them is bitter or ironic, inspired by pained defiance (as in ‘Gas from a Burner’) or jaded cynicism (‘In my time the dunghill was so high’ – E 43). Secondly, they are spare, denuded of the variable styles and elaborate contexts that make Ulysses and Finnegans Wake seem inexhaustible. Finally, they are easily dismissed as immediately derivative of both Joyce’s experiences and his reading.