Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism

Finnegans Wake carries the tendencies of high art and of popular culture to their outer limits, there where all tendencies of mind may meet, there where the epiphany and the dirty joke become one. If this still be elitism, it is elitism of a special kind.

With infinitely more cunning than silence in his exile, Joyce succeeded in making Finnegans Wake the most famous of unread books.

You cannot put characters on paper, or places on paper: only words on paper. And Homer, or whoever it was wrote Homer down, had done nothing more, absolutely nothing more. It was only in 1870, the year of Molly Bloom's birth, that Heinrich Schliemann had proven with his spade that there had even been a Troy. For centuries men had believed that Troy existed solely in Homer's words.