Joycean Lice and the Life of Art

This essay offers an analysis of the problem of literary 'parasitism' in James Joyce's work. Joyce's recurrent use of parasitism as a trope for the absorptive properties of literary texts, and of his own art in particular, illuminates various issues important in Joyce studies today, including recent scholarship on Joyce's work as metatextual commentary on its own extreme allusiveness, the evolution of his thinking about aesthetics, his vision of the relation between art and the body, his intense focus on life's quotidian details, his attitude toward Catholicism and the Jesuits, his perceived relationship to his time and his colonized people, and the function of cultural and individual memory in Ulysses. Joyce the aesthetician and Joyce the lover of the minutiae of everyday life find common ground in his earthy, ironic conception of words and ideas as contagious parasites, entities to be both coveted and dreaded for their stealthy, propagatory power.