T. S. Eliot was one of the first to recognize this continuity, and in his foreword to the catalogue of the 1949 Joyce exhibition in Paris he made a plea for criticism based on a total assessment of Joyce's achievement:
Joyce's writings form a whole; we can neither reject the early work as stages, of no intrinsic interest, of his progress towards the latter, nor reject the later work as the outcome of decline. As with Shakespeare, his later work must be understood through the earlier, and the first through the last; it is the whole journey, not any one stage of it, that assures him his place among the great.
Eliot's insistence on the unity of Joyce's art has been supported by our examination of the manner in which Ulysses and Finnegans Wake developed. Earlier chapters have shown that the methods Joyce employed in the last stages of his 'journey'--the techniques which shaped Ulysses and the Wake--evolved from the formal aims of his previous fiction. It remains to take some measure of the relationship between these final methods and the visions of reality found in his last two works.
For a variety of personal and and environmental reasons Joyce ceased during his later years to assimilate significant new experiences into his artistic imagination. With all their complexity and freshness of technique, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are but new visions of the world described in Dubliners, Stephen Hero and A Portrait. We can find evidence of Joyce's tenacious hold on the concrete elements of his early experience on every page of his notebooks and rough drafts. No incident capable of symbolic extension was ever wasted...
Viewed as a single achievement, his writing recapitulates three generations of literary experiment. This is one of the reasons why Joyce has not been a seminal force in modern literature, but rather the terminator of traditions.Joyce lived through an age in which the traditional forms of mind and society had become problematical, perhaps even illusory. As a stay against this chaos he fell back on the arbitrary forms created by language, and it is no wonder that as we trace his art from Dubliners through Finnegans Wake words cease to be signs or symbols of external reality and become dynamic units which create a new vision of reality. It is customary to compare Joyce's elaborate correspondences with those of Dante, but the comparison is specious. The extrinsic order of the Divine Comedy reflects a view of man's destiny which informs Dante's entire work, whereas Joyce's mechanical frames are too often neutral patterns, arbitrary scaffolds. This is but to say that in Joyce we find many of the medieval impulses freed from the experiences which gave them life: techniques tend to exist for their own sake, imposing order rather than reflecting it
--- Walton Litz. The Art of James Joyce: Method and Design in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake 284-5, 288