One focus of this book is an investigation of the overdetermined links between Joyce and the Parisian avant-garde of the late twenties, of his often tortuous negotiations between an international Modernism and an ethical sense he kept of his being above all an Irish writer in exile. I have to admit that an earlier investigation had been motivated by a wish to ascertain whether Joyce's decision to stay in Paris at the time of the completion of Ulysses had been no more than a strategic move, or whether he had indeed found a congenial atmosphere of artistic experimentation. I would now like to investigate whether Joyce did not so much wish to present himself as a “Parisian” as to identify himself more subtly with Paris, the Trojan hero and archetype of the seducer in the Greco-Roman world – for Vico, as I will show in chapter 9, the prototype of the arch-villain because he breaks the most fundamental law, the unwritten law of hospitality.