Essential McLuhan 62 those of radio, television, newsreel, and the stuttering verbal gestures of H. C. E., it is the newspaper as seen by Mallarmé that provides most of the symbolist landscapes of Ulysses. As a daily cross-section of the activities and impulses of the race the press is an inclusive image affording possibilities of varied orchestration. A passage in Stephen Hero suggests the direction in which Joyce has modified the superficial cross- section of the popular press: The modern spirit is vivisective. Vivisection itself is the most modern process one can conceive…. All modern political and religious criticism dispenses with presumptive states…. It examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption. If you were an esthetic philosopher you would take note of all my vagaries because here you have the spectacle of the esthetic instinct in action. The philosophic college should spare a detective for me. (p. 186) The key terms here, vivisection, community in action, reconstruction, detection, are related to every phase of Joyce’s aesthetic. In Modern Painters Ruskin discusses the discontinuous picturesque techniques in medieval and modern art under the term “grotesque,” noting it as the avenue by which popular and democratic expression enters the serious levels of art: A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself, the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character…. Hence it is an infinite good to mankind when there is a full acceptance of the grotesque…an enormous amount of intellectual power is turned to use, which in this present century of ours, evaporates in street gibing…. It is with a view to the reopening of this great field of human intelligence, long entirely closed, that I am striving to introduce Gothic architecture…and to revive the art of illumination…the distinctive difference between illumination and painting proper, being, that illumination admits no shadows, but only gradations of pure colour. Ruskin in describing the grotesque gives the very formula for “vivisection” or the community in action, though he hadn’t the faintest idea of how to adapt this ideal to contemporary art. It was not misleading