Abstract

The inner word, the subject of Victor Egger’s book La parole intérieure. Essai de psychologie descriptive (1881), is understood both as the inner sign of thought and as the expression of one’s thoughts to others. The definition of the monologue proposed by Egger within the tradition of the «spiritual exercises» (from Plato to Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine and Rousseau), represents above all an attempt to translate the fundamental assumptions of Fichte’s philosophy into literature. The inner monologue is thus configured as the continuous dialogue that the philosopher’s narrating self has with itself in order to escape the succession and dispersion of time. When James Joyce rediscovered Dujardin’s novel, Les lauriers sont coupés (1887), after reading it by chance during a trip to Paris (1901-1903), he helped to shed light on the latter’s debt to Egger