Again, Sally Rooney:

This, to me, is the beauty—we might even say the magic—of the novel as a literary tradition: its ability to involve us emotionally in the relationships of its protagonists. This feeling is produced, of course, by meticulous technical construction, in the work of James Joyce just as much as that of Henry James or Jane Austen. But if we are to acknowledge that fiction has any effect on us other than what is strictly intellectual, then I think we have to admit that the feeling itself is important. Works of art don’t succeed or fail on their technical or logical merits: they succeed or fail according to how they work on their audience. Yes, the language of Ulysses is radically inventive; yes, its symbolic structure is dense with significance; yes, it destablilizes textual conventions; but it seems at least to me that it does these things so that we can meet all the more directly, the more vividly and beautifully, with Molly and Stephen and Leopold Bloom.