Joyce [antikvár]

chapter 1 THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE ARTIST When Joyce started writing, his intention was both pure and simple: to express his own feelings honestly and to tell the truth about the world he knew. Hardly had he started, however, when he realised that his feelings were part of that world—and then that his world was part of him. To tell the whole truth, he had to portray himself truthfully as well. This he was willing enough to do, of course; after all, what subject could he be more interested in or more truthful about? But now the truth was rapidly appearing less pure and less simple—for how could he distinguish, in what was formed by his imagination, between what he saw and what he felt, and yet imless he did so, how could he discern what was of objective, and therefore of universal, significance in his experience? To see this difficulty was the first step to understanding a good deal more both about himself and about other people. Thus he came at last to realise that the central thing he had to tell the truth about was his ovm attempt to tell the truth, to search for the meaning of his own experience. The subject of his art became the nature of art and its tangled relations with life, personal and social. And with this step he moved out of the comparatively clear-cut world of nineteenth-century fiction into the bewildering, multiple, self-reflexive "realities" of the twentieth century. His early sketches and poems had brought the young man to Dubliners and Stephen Hero, these in turn to A Portrait of the Artist as a Toung Man, and thence to his masterpiece, Ulysses; after that, there remained the all-embracing ambitiousness of Finnegans Wake, "a history of the world."^