Joyce might even go so far as to manipulate reality for literary ends. Friends sometimes noted that Joyce seemed to be steering conversations in a deliberate way.502 “While one talked to him one could not help but feel, at times, that he was using the conversation as a sort of counterpoint to his own thoughts, which ran in an altogether different vein as he mentally composed ‘Work in Progress’ (published as Finnegans Wake),” wrote his friend Arthur Power.503 He took such manipulation to perhaps its most egregious extreme when he urged his wife, Nora, to sleep with other men so he could write
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