Ulysses

Published three years after Ulysses, directly influenced by it — single day, London, stream of consciousness, two parallel figures moving through a city. Woolf's answer to Joyce: lyrical where he is encyclopedic.

Faulkner read Ulysses while writing his masterpiece and it shows — the multiple first-person voices, the fractured time, the interior consciousness as the primary reality. Southern gothic meets Dublin modernism.

The other 1922 masterpiece. Same year, same modernist project, same fragmentation and mythological scaffolding — but poetry rather than prose. Eliot and Joyce were contemporaries and rivals; reading both together is reading the full 1922 modernist argument.

The other great modernist novel of consciousness and time — Proust's memory is tidal and involuntary where Joyce's is encyclopedic and willed. Together they define the limits of what interior fiction can do.

The prequel: Stephen Dedalus's formation from infancy through his departure from Ireland. Essential for understanding who Stephen is in Ulysses and why his guilt and paralysis have the specific shapes they do.

The American inheritor of the Ulysses project: encyclopedic, stylistically various, maximalist, organized around hidden structures the reader must assemble. Pynchon without Joyce is unthinkable.