ABSTRACT
The Joycean method, or if you wish, the technique of investigation, composition, writing, is going to constitute the first level of our inquiry. The writer who wants to tell a story and paint a soul has, it seems, only two or three ways of proceeding. The simplest way is confession. He writes in the first person, and tells the events in which he has been involved, from his point of view, and he analyzes the
sentiments which he has experienced. This is the subjective, direct method, which casts the most glaring light on the central hero, but can only conjecture about his confederates, since it only allows the author to speak of himself. The writer can, next, tell the events to which he has assisted, but only as a spectator and, after the exterior witnesses, reconstruct, in the indirect style, the development of this action. He will remain exterior to the narration. It is only through an artifice of presentation that he will pretend to offer the event which he tells to the adhesion of the mind of the reader. These artifices of presentation are multiple. The closest to the real (although not the most likely) is the epistolary artifice. The author is only an editor: he publishes the letters of characters in the action, and finds, there, the subjectivity of confession in some sort reduced…. [six paragraphs of illustration of these points, moving toward a discussion of the interior monologue as practiced by Larbaud, Proust and Joyce]
…James Joyce is the great worker of interior monologue. Ulysses would not exist without it.
