He was, of course, a wordplay fiend, as is evident from his late novels. But in daily life, too, he displayed a penchant for the kind of wordplay that's the stock-in-trade of crossword constructors. An Irish writer friend of his, Frank O'Connor, recalled once visiting Joyce and remarking on a landscape that was displayed on his wall in an unusual-looking frame. He asked what it was, and Joyce replied "That's cork." O'Connor, who was a native of the Irish city of Cork, said "I know it's Cork, but what's the frame made of?" In reference to Joyce's visual pun, O'Connor later reflected that Joyce must have suffered from some sort of "assocation mania." The complex chains of wordplay associations in Finnegans Wake put me in mind of Freud's account of parapraxes - verbal slips that arise from an unconscious train of associations. Joyce apparently didn't think much of Freud, though in a characteristic bit of wordplay, he did note that his own name comes from joyeux and is thus the French equivalent of Freud (from Freude, meaning "joy"). Still, I think it's undeniable that there's a strong literary kinship between Joyce and Freud. (Lionel Trilling: "James Joyce, with his interest in the numerous states of receding consciousness, with his use of words as things and of words which point to more than one thing, with his pervading sense of the interrelation and interpenetration of all things, and, not least important, his treatment of familial themes, has perhaps most thoroughly and consciously exploited Freud's ideas.")
That use of "words which point to more than one thing" is the bread and butter of the crossword constructor. In that sense, one of the most cruciverbal puzzles in Joyce's work is the "man in the macintosh," a mysterious figure who pops up at various points in Ulysses. At one point, a newspaper reporter misinterprets this description and assumes that he's a man named M'Intosh. In his novel The House of Ulysses, Julián Ríos takes this wordplay one step further and reinterprets him as the man with the Macintosh, typing away on his computer.
This sort of thing was mostly to come later in his career, though. His early books, like Dubliners, were much less linguistically playful. At this point, Joyce was working out his concept of the "epiphany." He used this term for some of his early, very short prose pieces, which were either prose poems or sketches of overheard conversations. But he also structured several of the stories in Dubliners around the sort of epiphany that he defined as "a sudden spiritual manifestation," such as Gabriel Conroy's moment of self-understanding occasioned by his realization of the depth of his wife's feeling for her deceased lover in "The Dead." In Stephen Hero, an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen feels a duty as an artist to record these fleeting realizations for posterity. There's an affinity here with the epiphanic moment of hearing a phrase and realizing exactly how it can work as a crossword revealer, and the parallel epiphany that, hopefully, the solver experiences.
The epiphany is a small, crystalline moment, and it seems appropriate here to make a Dubliners-esque collection of such epiphanies. So this puzzle (pdf, puz, pdf solution) is a series of revealers for which I haven't found enough theme entries to make a full theme - in each case, there's just one theme entry for each revealer. I couldn't turn any of them into full-blown puzzles, but, like Stephen, I also don't want to let them evanesce.
Created by Will Nediger with the online crossword creator from Amuse Labs
