Dubliners; not The Dubliners. Yet teachers and proof-readers will know that readers of this collection of stories suffer from an irresistible compulsion to supply the definite article that Joyce withholds. The desire to turn Dubliners into The Dubliners may be partly an effect of the desire to see Joyce's works as a complete organic sequence, and therefore to read back the future of his work into its beginnings. Joyce himself looked to such organic metaphors when describing the structure of his works. He pointed out that the sequence of stories in Dubliners followed through the stages of growth of a single person, from childhood, through adolescence, and into public life (L. ii. 111, 134). A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man follows through the same movement; it is a Künstlerroman, that particular species of the Bildungsroman, or novel of growth and education, which deals specifically with the growth of an artist. Joyce's great technical discovery between Stephen Hero, the first, abandoned version of the novel, and its rewriting as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was that growth could be the governing principle of the style as well as the principal theme of a work. Thus the growth of the artist into self-consciousness and self-command is paralleled by the gathering of the writing into the condition of a ‘work’. Despite the apparent impediment to the idea of growth imposed by the restriction of the action of Ulysses to a single day in June 1904, Joyce was at pains to build up a structure which relates the unfolding of human history to the progress of individual human lives, most obviously perhaps in the episode known as ‘The Oxen of the Sun’, in which the evolution of English literary style is set in parallel with the gestation of a foetus. Whatever else it is, Finnegans Wake must also be seen as a massive filling-out of this analogy between ontogeny and phylogeny, the growth of the species and the growth of the individual, the macro and the micro, the all and the one.

Given this, it is understandable that readers have wanted to extend the genetic analogy in order to find the principle of organic growth operating between Joyce's works as well as within them.