Joyce brought story-telling to actualize in its most extreme possibility. Finnegans Wake binds the entire history of human culture. All philosophical moves, all scientific paradigms, all modes of story-telling, have been tried out and exhausted in the Wake. After Joyce, novelists are no longer able to tell another naive fiction. The artistic value of such aesthetic repetition is close to zero in the face of Joyce's accomplishment. In other words, if one wants escape or spiritual development or creativity, one only needs to consult Joyce's four novels and nothing else.
Given this situation, the question arises for fiction writers: what role must a newly written novel play?
It's common sense knowledge that the rise of multimedia products dethroned the novel-form as the dominant way to entertainment. This is thanks to the development of electronics and cybernetics. Nowadays, the novel is hopelessly incompetent in the face of movies such as Iron Man.
Joyce was already facing this situation during the early 20th century. His solution was to sharpen his psychological descriptions. That which is "inner" and "hidden from view" is the only aspect of human culture which the novel form has privileged access. The other aspect which Joyce took interest in is time. Our sense of time is essentially non-linear, that is, we go to the future and return to the past all the time in our daily lives. Not physically, but that doesn't mean that we are always only alive in the present. And this complex collage of different moments in history is most vividly described in the novel form. No movie, no painting, no music has ever reached the peak at which the Wake weaves together the different moments of history.
With "psyche" and "time," Joyce found a way to write a valuable novel in the 20th century. But the same cannot hold for the 21st century. A mere repetition is thoughtless, boring, uninteresting, shameful. However, as far as I know no author has demonstrated a new vision for current novelists. Ryu Murakami came closest when trying to define the task of the novel form in the 21st century. Murakami said that the novel form must be viewed as a "strategic device" for conveying the appropriate information in the appropriate context. This view is super-pragmatic. It makes the novel form subordinate to a higher, non-artistic goal. While Murakami's statement is compelling and convincing, it doesn't quite vindicate the novel form in the way Joyce did.
Reading Joyce in bed at night, after I finish another section of the Ulysses, I stayed awake past 2am, wondering what is left for a novelist to do if not nothing.
