I believe that James Joyce set out to accomplish the revolution that he has his young protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, declare in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round the persons and the action like a vital sea….The dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of esthetic like that of material creation is accomplished. The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, pairing his fingernails.” [James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson, Viking Press, New York, 1968, p. 202.]

He did this in twenty-four stages each of which represents a chapter, episode, or book in his body of narrative fiction, as follows:

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.................. 5 Chapters

Ulysses....................................................................... 18 Episodes

Finnegans Wake........................................................ 1 loop in 4 books,

or…

…the 24^th hour of the Joycean Opus Day