It is no surprise that work so brimming with the pleasures of pop art and entertainment would inspire pop artists and entertainers in its wake. The crowd-pleasing novels of Stephen King and Danielle Steele, replete with Slurpees and Rolex watches, respectively, would be unimaginable without Dubliners' product placement. Films have been made of Ulysses and A Portrait, and not just a film but a Broadway musical adapted "The Dead." Movies structured according to associations made by their characters between memories and fantasies — words spoken and music heard — owe Joyce and his stream-of-consciousness technique a debt of gratitude, if not actual royalties. (An excellent example of this is Woody Allen's Annie Hall.)
In fact, royalties were very much at issue when the Irish art-rocker Kate Bush set Molly Bloom's famous soliloquy to music. Failing to receive permission from Joyce's estate, Bush wrote her own lyrics in the spirit of Molly and released the results in the song "The Sensual World" on her 1989 album of the same name. Another Irish performer, Van Morrison, mentions Joyce in not one but two of his songs. And many have theorized that John Lennon's free-associative lyrics in the Beatles' songs "I Am the Walrus" and "Come Together" were at least inspired by Joyce, though evidence of an explicit connection is so far lacking.
Mistaken for a highbrow by many who do not know his work and some who do, and considered by many acquaintances to have been a snob in real life, James Joyce remained in his literature fiercely egalitarian. Anyone genuinely shocked by this fact need only revisit the bawdy bits and topical references to be found throughout Shakespeare, another low-born writer whose characters frequent pubs and regularly burst into song — some of them the popular tunes of the Elizabethan era before the Bard adapted them. If Shakespeare's own favorite song wasn't "Oh, the Brown and Yellow Ale," it might have been something close. The obsessive references to Hamlet throughout Ulysses show that Shakespeare influenced James Joyce's fiction, written three centuries later. Similarly, Joyce's own approach inspires artists and entertainers today.
