ABSTRACT
All writers, we say, are conditioned by their youth; they get their subject from youth’s grievance, Joyce has been obsessed by his youth to the exclusion of all else. The world has always been for him the Ireland he has not seen for thirty years; God has always been the cultivated, inexorable, rather sadly remote God who presides over the Dublin intelligentsia. His subject has always been the Dublin of 1900-10; the people he knew in it, the superstitions and aspirations they shared, his universe. He has turned round and round in that universe as Dante suffered in the sight of God. Like the great Catholic spirits of the Middle Ages, Joyce has accepted the common experience of mankind as an abstraction. It is something he has known and pondered by instinct, a symbol among the paraphernalia of man’s fate.
