ABSTRACT
Meanwhile, however, the student of the human soul should read attentively Joyce’s writings in which it is mirrored, for Joyce made no distinction between actual life and literary creation. His work is one long self-confession, and in this respect he is akin to the greatest of the romantics…. Joyce, however, seeks to attain to absolute sincerity, to all that is most human within us; he seeks to do away with writing that merely aims at covering the blank page, to do away with conventional self-expression, to do away with the very body which intervenes between the most secret ‘I’, Pascal’s ‘I beyond the soul’, and the exterior world. He also seeks to do away with the writing hand, the listening ear, the seeing eye…and on this last point a pitiless fate met him more than half-way…But should one then accept to be silent? Joyce’s work offers brilliant proof of the contrary, but it serves also as proof that he had the necessary courage, perseverance, inner strength and energy of mind-any one of which might easily have been insufficient-to overcome all obstacles, all suffering, and to attain perfection. When his work comes to be judged according to its true value, as posterity will judge it, it will appear overwhelming, if only because of the crushing labour that it obviously represents, and one man’s life will seem to have been conceived on too small a scale in comparison with the immensity of the effort involved.
