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Chapter 6 ' The traits featuring the 
chiaroscuro coalesce' 
There can be no compromise between the artist and his society when the artist
chooses isolation, is committed to a vocation which requires and justifies
the refusal of other responsibilities and ties, and defines his own values
largely in terms of opposition to those of society. This may be an extreme
and romantic notion of the artist's nature, but it is one which Joyce as
a young man certainly adopted, and there is nothing to suggest that, in later
years, he abandoned it. What he did was to recognize in his own nature and
present in his writings another and opposed position, equally necessary and
valid. Ulysses implies that opposition, not integration, is the natural and
healthy state, both in the individual and in society; the citizen and the
artist are of value to each other precisely because they strive in different
directions. There is ' a touch of the artist' about Bloom, and more than
a touch of the citizen about Stephen (hence his remorse and bitterness),
but their relationship does not depend on these. They meet on the basic ground
of their common humanity: the need for some kind of genial human intercourse
predates and underlies all arts and societies. Ulysses combines the recognition
of that common elementary need with the acceptance of division; the reconciliation
it images is a reconciliation to the necessity, if there is to be any vital
living, of conflicting forces operating in every man and every society. The
society and the individual become morally paralysed if one opposite is subdued
in the interests of the other or for the sake of comfort and consistency
— if the egoistic, aspiring spirit is subjugated to the service of
family, nation, current mores, ideology or Church, or the altruistic goodwill
of the citizen replaced by egoism masquerading as responsible citizenship,
patriotism, morality or religion. Artist and citizen are, as it were, forces
on opposite points of a wheel, pushing in opposite directions, but it is
their energies, not ' the still centre', which make the wheel turn. 
 The wheel image and the polar interaction of artist and citizen, implicit
in Ulysses, are elaborated in Finnegans Wake into an intricate and involved
apparatus of general ideas, theories, schemes and patterns, embodied in an
unprecedented density of form and language. No commentator has, as yet, provided
a comprehensive, coherent and widely accepted account of the book's total
ordering and significance. In so complex a work it is difficult even to distinguish
what is central from what is subordinate or incidental,