In the works of Dickens George Orwell saw a face:

It is the face of a man about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is a1ways fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

No face shines through the novels of James Joyce, and this is disturbing. He is cut off from his own creation, as he is cut off from God's, and he has no comment to make about either. He cannot be enlisted in the cause of Irish nationalism, Fascism or Communism, though--like Shakespeare, a man legitimately faceless because he wrote plays and not novels--he has been invoked in the name of every ideology. Perhaps, among novelists, only Flaubert approaches him for self-effacement. But, to the novel-reader brought up in a cosier tradition, such self-effacement looks like hauteur, the nose in the air, the swollen head, the snob, It ought not to look like that, Joyce's aim was the ennoblement of the common man, and this could best be achieved by letting the common man speak for himself. To watch over one's hero, coddle him, discuss him with the reader, offer him praise or pity--is not this perhaps the real posture of superiority, the imitation of God? We are given Leopold Bloom and Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker without apology and without the intermediacy of attitudes imposed on the reader. We have to make up our own minds as to whether we like them or approve of their actions (Bloom's masturbation, for instance, or Earwicker's incestuous fantasies); ultimately, liking and approbation do not apply--we become concerned with the harder discipline of love. The priest is the agent of solemn ceremonies, and we are never drawn to look at his face or consider what thoughts and feelings move behind it, Joyce, without blasphemy, saw his function as priestlike the solemnisation of drab days and the sanctification of the ordinary. It is this preoccupation, even obsession, with the ordinary that should endear him to ordinary readers. Nobody in his books is rich or has high connections. There is no dropping of titled names, as there is in the novels of Evelyn Waugh, and we enter no place more exalted than a pub or a public library. Ordinary people, living in an ordinary city, are invested in the riches of the ages, and these riches are enshrined in language, which is available to everybody. Given time, Joyce will flow through the arteries of our ordinary, non-reading, life, for a great writer influences the world whether the world likes it or not, and the blessing of the ordinary must eventually transfigure it. We see Gerard Manley Hopkins in cornflake advertisements ('gold-toasted, sugar-tossed, lighter-than-air, a crisp, they crunch and crackle') and we hear Joyce's interior monologues in the 'think-tape' of television plays and documentaries, even hear something of his word-play in radio shows. But 'Introibo ad altare Dei' is the first spoken statement in Ulysses, and we are wisest if we get up early and deliberately go to the great comic Mass, rather than merely let its deformed and thinned echoes trickle through to us. It is not a Black Mass, even though Guinness is drunk and bawdy songs punctuate the golden liturgy; it is a solemnisation without solemnity. (Re Joyce)