Today was a Joyce day, illuminated by a very good blog entry by Adam Benson about the term epicletie, which Joyce valued over "epiphany" in regards to Dubliners. Why? Because epicletie refers to the invocation to the Holy Ghost to sanctify the wafer and the wine for the ceremony of Eucharist. It also carries connotations of a court summons. Joyce aims to have the "oh" and "ah" moments in the Dubliners stories to have this quality of sanctification and of summons to right action.

This is really what Joyce strove to do; to have secular epiphanies for the modern world in which we live. Since we are no longer in the age where epiphanies were had everyday in the act of observing plants grow and the hunting of animals for food and these things were linked with divine significance. Hence why the Elysianian mysteries had something told, something seen and something shown, and how the something shown being a stalk of wheat(as far as guesstimation can have it)would've been a powerful epiphanic experience. Now in our secular context the important thing is ultimately telling, not showing. And this is why the stories in Dubliners seem insignificang: we aren't being told of their significance, we are being shown them.

However much Joyce appears to be Realistic or Naturalistic here, he is in fact a Symbolist, since every single word has meaning and operates in a very specific way. Such as the importance of the word "blind" at the beginning of Araby and how at the end, his eyes are burned and scorched with anguish. Ala Oedipus Rex.

A philosopher named Giambatisto Vico was very important to Joyce's aesthetics as well. Vico, who constructed an entire mythology around the importance of the clap of thunder, which he felt marked the turning point for human development. Perhaps not coincedentally, there are ten thunderclaps in Finnegans Wake, all onomatoepaically spelled out with one hundred letters.