I haven't read it in so many years I don't feel qualified to comment - I was a very young woman. Time to find a copy and read it again.

For your pleasure, though, here's a Joycean anecdote, which I first read as described by another Paris based artist, found again last year and saved for just such an occasion. It speaks of the modern artist in Joyce, I think.

.....

Though he liked having Samuel Beckett with him, Joyce at the same time kept him at a distance. Once he said directly, `I don't love anyone except my family' in a tone which suggested, `I don't like anyone except my family either.' But Beckett's mind had a subtlety and strangeness that attracted Joyce as it attracted, in another way, his daughter. So he would ask the young man to read to him passages from Mauthner's Beiträge zu Einer Kritik der Sprache, in which the nominalistic view of language seemed something Joyce was looking for. Once or twice he dictated a bit of Finnegans Wake to Beckett, though dictation did not work very well for him; in the middle of one such session there was a knock at the door which Beckett didn't hear. Joyce said, `Come in,' and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, `What's that "Come in"?' 'Yes, you said that,' said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, `Let it stand.' He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator.
— Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959), pp. 661-662.