Situating Joyce in relation to the avant-garde is a matter of affinity rather than affiliation, though this is no uncomplicated distinction. Another no less difficult distinction inherent in any discussion of this matter lies in the question of whose affinity is being discussed, for the taxonomy of authors is, if nothing else, a reflection of the expectations and agendas of readers, critics, teachers, and publishers. Joyce's separation from the contemporaneous avantgarde movements (among whose members he moved, amid whose writings he published) is the effect of a combination of authorial self-styling, biographers’ spin, and a persistent but limiting conception of the avant-garde as more or less restricted and conspicuously marked social clubs. While certainly Joyce kept his distance from any orthodoxy, his demurrals are funny because they are often fantastical: when Finnegans Wake protests, “you’re too dada for me to dance” (65.17), it's as though the town drunk were passing up an offered glass of wine with the excuse that the vintage was not quite his favorite year. It is far from easy to determine which is the greater: the reluctance of (justly) cautious scholars to fit Joyce within a specific avant-garde, or Joyce's own resistance to being “put” into a “category.”

“Avant-garde” ought to be understood as a political term rather than a political position, and this term is more often than not employed as retrospective identification. How is a given artist determined to be “avant-garde,” “ahead of his time,” “on the cutting edge,” and so on? The process is just another subroutine in the designation of an “author function”: if the novelist X is exemplary of a manner of novel that has become accepted as the norm, then Y, who writes a very different sort of novel from X, a sort that does not lend itself to ready emulation or is strikingly singular but cannot be ignored, requires a categorization that will instruct others that the manner of Y's novel is, according to one's views of the norms represented by X,