“Paris Profanely Illuminated” explores the “Circe” episode’s relation to 1920s Paris. It situates “Circe” at the origins of the Surrealist movement, showing the influence on the episode of the first Surrealist play, Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and the influence of the episode on the first Surrealist novel, Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris. Tracing the influence of Joyce’s sentient thinking, it reexamines Benjamin’s reception of Surrealism, uncovering the influence of Joyce’s materially embedded reflection on the literary and conceptual experiments of a theorist who struggles with the nature of theory following the collapse of critical distance. The chapter examines Benjamin’s conceptions, in his 1929 essay “Surrealism: Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia” and the Arcades Project, of the profane illumination and the body-image space. It argues for the relevance of the nonrational, sensual modes of engagement Benjamin describes in the Arcades Project for the interpretation of Finnegans Wake.

“Paris Compounded” argues that the text of Finnegans Wake prompts readers to engage in sentient thinking. Joyce’s last work stages a heterogeneous and potentially limitless profusion that resists any preconceived order and disallows the passive reception associated with the commodity and with authoritarian discourse. The chapter situates the Wake’s textual assemblages within the literary practices of Paris of 1910 and 1920, showing that Joyce’s problematization of value and meaning are indebted to Apollinaire’s verbal montages but also, and more particularly, to Alfred Jarry, whose pataphysics deploys scatology, Lucretian materialism, and coincidentia oppositorum in an avant-garde mode. The chapter draws on the aesthetic theories of Benjamin, John Dewey, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas to argue that, as the Wake compounds the city under capitalism, it calls for ideal communities that respond to its material features with imagination, spontaneity, and joy.