Politics & Power Quote by James Joyce

Posterity doesn’t reward discovery so much as it rewards closure. Joyce’s jab at Columbus is less about nautical history than about how cultures launder messy, collective realities into a single, commemorative name. “As everyone knows” is doing the heavy lifting: a deadpan nod to received wisdom, the kind of classroom certainty that collapses under the slightest pressure. Joyce pretends to affirm the common story while quietly exposing it as a social convenience.

The twist - “the last to discover America” - flips the heroic narrative into a punchline. America was “discovered” repeatedly: by the people already living there, by earlier visitors, by competing European powers, by merchants and mapmakers and rumor. Columbus gets honored not because he was first, but because his voyage becomes the administrative turning point: the discovery that sticks, the one backed by empire, paperwork, and a future in which Europe’s account becomes the official account.

Joyce is writing from a modernist Ireland acutely aware of what it means to be narrated by someone else. The line rhymes with his larger project: puncturing the authority of “everyone knows,” showing how history hardens into myth, and how myth serves power. It’s also a sly comment on fame itself. Great men are often the people lucky enough to arrive when institutions are ready to build monuments - not the ones who actually changed the world first, but the ones whose timing lets them be remembered as if they did.