Here Comes Everybody

This is an introduction to the work of James Joyce, designed for the ordinary reader. The author has become increasingly worried by the tendency of the academics to regard Joyce as their special property, and has feared that the man and woman in the bookshop or public library may come to feel that a great popular writer was concerned only with a readership of professors. Here, then, is a very lucid and commonsensical account of what Joyce was up to, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. The title is derived from one of the nicknames of Joyce's last hero - the publican of Chapelizod outside Dublin, whose name Humphery Chimpden Earwicker rings, in its initalled from HCE, throughout Finnegans Wake, with those same initials frequently filled out to some such slogan as Here Comes Everybody. The nickname is appropriate for a Joyce hero, since Joyce was always concerned with those elements of human nature which are in all properties which we all share - love of family, worry about debts, the tendency to drink too much, original sin. His admiration for ordinary human beings is best exemplified by his willingness to shower the jewels of language upon their everyday doings, to exalt them to myth or to godhead. The author feels that Joyce's books say not only 'Here Comes Everybody' but 'Everybody Come Here'. In other words, we are all welcome - not just the learned professors - at the great feasts of language which he spreads on a table of common wood, at the ceremony of exaltation of the ordinary at which he is the smiling, joking, presiding priest and host. We feel that this book represents a genuine breakthrough in the process of bringing a great Irish writer to terms with those who, despite their fear of him, are the best qualified to understand his aims and relish his poetry and humour. His heroes and heroines are ourselves, just as his city of Dublin is all cities. The language and techniques are not all (description from as previous edition),