ABSTRACT
I have sketched a tradition whose traces can be found in Ulysses, A Vision and Finnegans Wake. The features of this tradition can be summarised: an anachronised cyclical history; the belief that the sensible world is made through prolific poetic activity, but that culture is only possible through this activity’s opposite, the logical or ironic devouring portion of being; opposite forces must be acknowledged as in a perpetual dialectic that leads them inevitably to become each another within an allencompassing One. This tradition has been presented as in opposition to dominant culture, which believes in linear time, instrumental reason and the laws of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle. In the works of Yeats and Joyce this dominant culture is identified with the modes of Imperialism, the former, Reprobate culture with a form of Irishness.
