detribalized Irish world. Such a frontier is the modern world of 
the advertisement, congenial, therefore, to the transitional 
culture of Bloom. In the seventeenth or Ithaca episode of 
Ulysses  we read: “What were habitually his final meditations? 
Of some one sole unique advertisement to cause passers to 
stop in wonder, a poster novelty, with all extraneous accretions 
excluded, reduced to its simplest and most efficient terms not 
exceeding the span of casual vision and congruous with the 
velocity of modern life.”

     In the Books at the Wake , James S. Atherton points out 
(pp. 67­8):

          Amongst other things Finnegans Wake  is a history 
     of writing. We begin with writing on ‘A bone, a pebble, a 
     ramskin . . . leave them to cook in the mutthering pot: and