The story contains no trace of that bundle of bias, enthusiasm, motive, morality, personality, and mind which we might term “the author.” Where is Joyce? The work is seamless. I do not mean that Joyce does not intrude his opinions into his story—that is a pleasing but not uncommon virtue—but instead I mean something more profound and less easy to name. The sentences have in their rhythms an austerity that is complete. They exhibit, by their perfect concealment of it, an absolutely controlled tension, like that of a mastered grief or longing. I suggest that the austerity with which a writer wholly subsumes his thoughts to his fictional materials reminds us of—or is even identical to—the difficult dignity with which some people control strong and private feelings. We are people, and we call this “power”; it will always command our respect.

Perhaps, then, this high degree of tension and control in prose, this sense of great emotional passion at short rein, attracts our mind and leads us to inquire into the sources of the tension and the principles of control. And perhaps, too, the absence of any hint of explanation or motive on the author’s part will lead us to seek it, lead us to inquire, as we do of “Leaving the Yellow House” and, somewhat differently, of “The Dead,” what these things are doing here in the first place. I hope so.