It needs to be understood that only short discontinuous shots of such a work as Joyce's are possible. Linear or continuous perspectives of analogical structures are only the result of radical distortion, and the craving for “simple explanations” is the yearning for univocity.
“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol. 28, No 1, (1953), in The Interior Landscape (1969), pp 36-37 
 
Blake’s view was that [quoting Northrop Frye] “history as linear time is the great apocrypha or mystery which has to be ‘rejected’ since “the whole of human life is seen and understood as a single mental form.” (p. 340) The linear view of history began with Petrarch and Leonardo da Vinci and ended with Gibbon and Hume. So obsessive a metaphor as that of linear perspective is important enough to deserve some explanation, especially since we are now deep in the process of extricating ourselves from it.