On 14 February 1915, he wrote to Hugh Walpole that he was, after many months, returning to work. He wondered, however, whether it was possible to write under such alien circumstances:

The subject-matter of one’s effort has become itself utterly treacherous and false—its relation to reality utterly given away and smashed. Reality is a world that was to be capable of this—and how represent that horrific capability, historically latent, historically ahead of it? How on the other hand not represent it either— without putting into play mere fiddlesticks?

This volley of questions, as profound as it is desperate, touches on an his­torio­graphic dilemma latent in all realistic representation and anticipates the pre­dic­a­ment in which Joyce found himself two years later at the start of his own project of historical recreation. James wants to know how, if literature is supposed to reflect reality—and we should remember that, up until the war, he had been working on The Ivory Tower, a novel about the „present“—how it can do so without also acknowledging reality’s latent treachery, a treachery that had recently become all too overt.

—Robert Spoo, „‚Nestor‘ and the Nightmare: The Presence of the Great War in Ulysses„, in Joyce and the Subject of History, Wollaeger, Luftig, Spoo, eds., (USA: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 118.

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