ABSTRACT
Joyce tried to be a realist but, such is the inconsequentiality of matter, reality collapsed under his fingers into a million mad distortions beyond the power of Merodack-Jeanneau to conceive. He did, however, create a convincing world; not an abstract of a world but, according to my definition of reality as sensation in the blood, a world I can feel and smell. He creates all the dimensions of a convincing world but, regrettable lack, puts nothing in them…. Joyce made a mistake in believing that there was a difference, a distinctive difference, between the mass of sensations that flow through the semiconscious of a bus conductor and those that are the only content of a bishop’s mind. To create character, or rather to convey character, he would have to do more than merely set these down in their diffuse incoherence. Selected they might faintly unentertainingly etch the outlines of an individuality, but Joyce scorns
artificial selection. Character is vividly developed, however, only by showing the individual’s peculiar conscious or semi-conscious effort to justify or ennoble or escape or realise in self-consciousness the processes in the back of the mind.
