from the particular that he made the general shine out

It is obvious, but none the less a matter of great interest, that James Joyce, an artist of unique qualities and of enormous stature, though so 'cosmopolitan' a figure and highly 'contemporary' and thought of by many a a 'rebel' destructive of standards of all sorts, an enemy of tradition, etc., was, in reality, the artist who more than any other, not only employed as his materia poetica all that which those historical, mythological, anthropological, archaeological, etc., studies had to offer, plus the new researches into psychology of Freud, Jung, etc., plus the abiding influence of the medieval scholastic modes of thought inseparable from his early years under the tuition of the Fathers of the Society of Jesus in Ireland, plus a complete familiarity with the popular devotional practices of a peasantry and those practices transferred to the streets, slums, saloons, bars, etc., of the city and port of Dublin, but also the artist who, more than any other, for all the universality of his theme, depended upon a given locality, for no man could have adhered with more absolute fidelity to a specified site, and the complex historical strata special to that site, to express a universal concept. It was from the particular that he made the general shine out. That is to say he was quintessentially 'incarnational'.

- David Jones, Notes on the 1930s in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings