James Joyce's Classical Passwords

This essay explores the tension between mastery and irreverence in Joyce's evolving representation of his reading of Greco-Roman classics in his first three major works: Dubliners, stephen Hero, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. These early texts show his movement from absorbing and imitating the classics to approaching writers such as Ovid as an enabling, productive site of creativity and experimentation. Over the course of Joyce's early writing, we see him throwing overboard notions of classical precision in favour of classical errors, which I call passwords, that serve to bind together ludic communities of rebellious readers who are joined not by knowledge, but rather by mistakes.