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James Joyce was a complicated man

Ireland rejected him; did he reject it back?

That his mind was ‘Irish’, ‘Catholic’, and even ‘medieval’ thus seemed less important than the fact that he conceived of the world of culture as a huge jigsaw of interlocking pieces in which no one narrative, still less one national tradition or one religious dispensation, easily prevailed. Joyce does erupt into commentary on Ireland, most notably in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when the family has Christmas lunch and quarrels about the Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell. All of Ulysses is written in the service of human love, of the rejection of distemper and riot, in opposition to the view of life that calls foreigners “bugs” and wants to squash and deny the impulse of lust.

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