h itself and confirms itself. Just as great thinkers often agree with each other, so too one’s own experience often agrees with the observations of great thinkers. Here again, truth agrees with itself and confirms itself. An idea drawn from experience is confirmed when one finds the same idea in a book. Likewise, the ideas in a book are confirmed when one finds that they agree with one’s own experience. 24. Joyce While the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky express ideas and reflect their authors’ struggles for spiritual peace, the novels of Joyce have a different purpose. Joyce said, “Ulysses is fundamentally a humorous work,” and Joyce said that Finnegans Wake was “meant to make you laugh.”(16) Ulysses andFinnegans Wake belong in the comic tradition of Petronius, Rabelais and Sterne. Joyce’s short stories, on the other hand, remind one, by their simplicity and by their realism, of Chekhov’s short stories. Joyce had no interest in politics and little interest in philosophy. He disliked Shaw’s plays, which set forth ideas. When World War II was breaking out, and his brother asked him what he thought about the political situation, Joyce said, “I’m not interested in politics. The only thing that interests me is style.”(17) Like many imaginative writers, including Ibsen, Tolstoy and Proust, Joyce observed and wrote about parapsychological phenomena. In A Portrait of the Artist, for example, Stephen Dedalus is lying in bed, thinking of his girlfriend, and he wonders what his girlfriend is doing: “Might it be, in the mysterious ways of spiritual life, that her soul at those same moments had been conscious of his homage?....Conscious of his desire she was waking from odorous sleep.” Joyce’s interest in parapsychology sets him apart from Kafka; Kafka never discusses parapsychology or aesthetics or religion. Kafka stays in the world of fantasy, and ne...
