James Joyce has hijacked our words. Not only has the skinny Irishman repurposed some of our most cherished letters, but ensuing scholars have spent thousands of books worth of words trying to catch up to him. The attempt to understand Joyce is an industry unto itself, and it is hard to argue with the millions of words that are currently in orbit around his name. As far as this paper is concerned, “He addle liddle phifie Annie ugged the little craythur,” (Finnegans Wake, 4) can mean anything anyone wants it to mean.

Why try to dissect the indivisible? The atom has been electron-ified and the uncertainty principle quantified. Joyce, though, remains unqualified. One more dissertation on Joyce won’t be too offensive. What is left to prove, the ensuing nine pages hope, is that the endless parade of words that has lined up to define Joyce is as unrelentingly void of tangible interpretation as the prose that the man himself profligated. Using a rational deconstruction of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the short story Araby as the means, and the abstraction of memory as the ends, sufficient evidence should be provided herein to affirm the relativity of knowledge that defines both modernity and the Joyce academia.

Progress and rationalization have given us war, capitalism, petroleum products and iPods – a pretty dodgy record. Joyce’s work inverted the linear time signature of progress and brought rationalization to its knees. A truly modern artist, Joyce betrayed the uncertainty that propels every man and woman to wake up in the morning. Specifically, he detonated the language of misconstruction and simultaneity that we see today in television advertisements and pop-up windows. Paraphrasing: “...language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted its words.” (Portrait, 189)

Memory constructs the past and projects a future. Can you recall, with exact certainty, the color of the leaves on the nearest maple tree the first time you felt like loving a girl? Neither can Stephen Dedealus. James Joyce uniquely utilizes this powerful fallibility of memory to abstract his world of words. Imperfection and incertitude are synonymous with the past.

The body of Joyce’s published work embodies evolution. From Dubliners through Finnegans Wake, the evolutionary deviation is quite evident. Where memory serves its most tactile ends, though, is in Joyce’s direct reconstructions of youth. His illumination of innocent naivety in Araby is a perfectly honest account of youth, time and memory. Conversely, his careening semi-autobiographical Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reinterprets distorted recollections into an abstracted text.

In his book, Joyce, Chaos and Complexity, Thomas Jackson Rice goes to great lengths to draw parallels between Joyce’s abstractions in language and the abstractions of thought perpetuated by leading French thinkers of the era. Authors such as Rice have critically reinterpreted the non-Euclidean geometry put forth by turn-of-the-century mathematicians like Poincare, Woleshevsky and even Einstein through the lens of Joyce. What remains relatively unexplored is Joyce’s relation to the cutting edge philosophers of the era such as Henri Bergson and William James, particularly their ideas about memory and time.

Rice claims that the character Stephen Dedealus is ruled by a subjective objectivity, playing upon the illusion of objectivity provided by geometry and modern science. (Joyce, Chaos and Complexity, 73) Memories are undeniably subjective. Intimately personal, memories of past experiences sculpt the lives we lead today. Duration is the term Bergson uses to define the sum of our experiences leading up to the present. Whereas time is a subjective term, duration is an objective feeling of chronological experience.

“The past has not ceased to exist, it has only ceased to be useful.” (Matter & Memory, 193) This assertion by Henri Bergson is typical of his anti-intellectual philosophy in which he posits that true understanding can come only from our irrational intuitions. Memories too, are irrational. The indiscriminate selectivity of memories is evidenced throughout Portrait.

There are pivotal moments of development in the book–the abuse from Father Dolan, the hellfire sermon, the confession, his discussion of his future with Cranly–but a great deal of the book spans those intricate moments that fall between the cracks of significance, but somehow lodge themselves within us eternally. Aside from the four events listed above, the moments that Joyce chooses to highlight in Stephen’s life seem rather arbitrary.“Dante had two brushes in her press. The brush with the maroon velvet back was for Parnell.”(Portrait, 7) This passing detail helps the reader to construct a conception of the world of Stephen’s youth, but is otherwise a random thought from the author’s mental microwave.

For some reason I still remember on my ninth birthday that I was wearing pink shorts. I thought it odd because it was snowing, and I shouldn’t be wearing shorts. Time may have eroded my recollection of this moment somewhat, but I vividly recall the shorts. Our minds are filled with this seemingly impertinent information. There is no reason that I should remember those shorts, and not my Dad’s birthday - a recurring event. This same pattern of inconsequential reference could be applied to certain passages of Portrait.

On a larger scale, the idea of memory’s indiscriminate nature can be applied to the five chapters on a whole. The chapters proceed chronologically, but they can barely be described as linear. The jump from different formative periods in Stephen’s life is, again, reminiscent of how memory, seemingly of its own accord, picks and chooses the details that remain ensconced. From early childhood to young adult, Joyce grabs scenes from his (Stephen’s) youth, bringing to the surface the most important events that occurred during a randomly generated time period.

Painter Albert Gleizes painted his Portrait of Jaques Nayral from memory with no recourse to the model using successive or accumulated mental images to reconstruct the form. (Cubism and Culture 87,96) After struggling through several sittings, Picasso famously painted his Portrait of Gertrude Stein from memory. These abstractionists of visual form provide excellent examples of the subjective energy of memory. In the visual world, constructing a portrait from memory is noteworthy for its modern approach. Should Joyce’s literary Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man then not be as equally noteworthy? In our age of mechanical reproduction, realism in art is superfluous. Artists create fractured, interpretative beauty by illuminating the mystery of the universe not its practical application. “The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.”(Portrait, 185)

The role of the individual in modern art is undeniable. Revolutions in thought put forth by Bergson and others illuminated the relativity of knowledge, taste and experience thus crowning the individual perspective as the only reliable arbiter of understanding. This philosophy is inherent in modern art. The concern for the timeless, universal conception of beauty has been forsaken for the individualistic moment or idea. Memories are the most individual of possessions.

“Though their art bears a highly individual stylistic mark, their style does not represent a simple retreat into the self, as some have argued. Rather, in their work, style and technique reflect a sensitivity to the way in which the process of perception mediates even the closest attention to the details of the exterior world. The stylistic excesses which characterize other modernist art as well, derive in Matisse and Joyce from an attempt to include reflections on art–on the manner in which the artist’s relationship to the world affects his art–in the artistic work. In the process of including such reflections Matisse and Joyce added an element to the field of aesthetic representation. It is important to see this use of self-reflection is meant to complement that which these artists aim to represent; it is not simply an attempt to replace the reproduction of nature with the reproduction of interiority.” (“Joyce and Matisse Bound”)

Further emphasizing Portrait’s construction as memory is the increased coherence of the text as the novel progresses. Moving from Stephen Daedalus’s early childhood through his university years the language of the novel crystalizes just as with memory. With the exception of intensely personal events, the strength of memories has a direct relationship with chronology. It is easier to recall yesterday’s weather accurately than last year’s.

This excerpt from the first chapter is indicative of the loose, unreliable wordplay in the first two chapters: “...That was the way a rat felt, slimy and damp and cold. Every rat had two eyes to look out of. Sleek slimy coats, little little feet tucked up to jump, black shiny eyes to look out of. They could understand how to jump. But the minds of rats could not understand trigonometry. When they were dead they lay on their sides. Their coats dried then. They were only dead things.” (Portrait, 22)

Conversely, the last chapters are more straightforward, consisting primarily of direct or internal dialogue from Stephen, his peers or the priests. The chronological progression of clarity in Portrait is actually two-fold. The action of the narrative itself becomes more vividly conceived with the turn of the pages, but more dynamically, the strength and concreteness of the prose increases with the page numbers. This dynamism is echoed in the functioning of our own memories.

There are a handful of allusions to memory within the text of Portrait. When describing a dream Stephen recollects, “masked memories that pass quickly before him.” (Portrait, 157) The description of memories as masked is perfectly transferable to the abstracting qualities of memory. Memories are indeed masked by duration. We can grasp the contours and the meaningful points in our past, but duration buries a clear conception of our experience underneath mountains of time. The years and months are layers of paint continually added to our “masked memories.”

Serving as a counterpoint to the abstract reconstructive elements in Portrait, is Joyce’s own short story Araby. The short story is told with wit, but ultimately lacks the multi-dimensional depth of his later work. Araby only hints at the massive abstraction which would define his later career, whereas Portrait is infested with abstraction.

The single thread that links his early work to his later is Joyce’s “conviction that the artist dare not ‘alter in the presentment...whatever he has seen and heard.’” Clearly, Joyce began his career as a realist “accepting the scientific conception of naturalist fiction.” (Joyce, Chaos and Complexity, 7) Rice continues to make the intriguing point that Joyce remained a realist throughout his career. He terms Joyce’s development as that from a “scientific” realist to a scientific “realist.” (Joyce, Chaos and Complexity, 7) Joyce’s work develops from a dedicated, subjective straightforward point-of-view into a studied, multi-dimensional objective point-of-view. Along the course of his evolution Joyce remains faithful to reality – it is his reality that waivers.

Araby first differs from Portrait in that it is told in the first person present. This convention automatically disallows the role of memory in the narrative. The narrator must be taken as omniscient in the telling of his feelings and the events. Still, this youthful creation of Joyce’s takes selective memories of Joyce’s Irish childhood and builds a fiction around them. This short story proves then, the distinction between an author using his personal memories to create a naturalist’s realism and the abstracted realism of Portrait. The memory is a tool authors use to construct literature. As depth-of-field is a visual consideration, memory is literary. In his painting The Dessert, Matisse removes all depth from the canvas. This abstraction of the depth concept is similar to Joyce’s abstraction of the memory concept. Just as depth-of-field is not commensurate with abstraction, neither is memory. These are just the ends that Joyce chooses to pursue.

In Araby Joyce captures a single moment in adolescent development. Growth and evolution are composed of hundreds, maybe thousands, of such events. These sometimes mundane occurrences add up to form adult lives. This story’s portrayal of childhood obsession is strikingly relatable. Children find it so easy to attach themselves to an idea, a concept or a girl. They allow themselves to become passionate and obsessive about the things in their lives – a sports team or favorite band. Simple innocent childhood passions like these seem to fade as we get older. As adults, the ability to become completely involved in one person or event is lost. We just come to the slow, sad realization that if we do not care as passionately about something, it cannot hurt us if/when it fails.

The worlds that Joyce constructs have an undeniably amorphous feel of intangibility. Similarly, memories, no matter how vivid, refuse to adhere to the governable laws of the universe. As Joyce was writing during a period of great social and scientific flux, he incorporated a number of the burgeoning cultural precepts into his art form. During the period from 1870 to 1920 politics, transportation, science, geography and art were annihilated and reconstructed. It is the artist’s responsibility to act as a prism through which cultural truths are illuminated, leading society into new environments as evolution builds them.

“The artist studies the distortion of sensory life produced by new environmental programming and tends to create artistic situations that correct the sensory bias and derangement brought about by the new form.” (Through the Vanishing Point, 238) From this point of view, Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker’s artist is an indispensable social construction that helps to navigate the masses through periods of change. “Joyce [and others] turned their attention to language as a probe. Long used as an environment, language became an instrument of exploration and research.” (Through the Vanishing Point, 245)

These insights into the role of the artist in society are also applicable to Joyce’s use of the memory tool in his writing. His works reflect the uncertainty of his era. When everything around you is changing it creates a feeling of incertitude and instability. These are the exact feelings that the reader experiences when tackling Joyce’s work for the first time. As previously detailed, the fallibility of memory plays a crucial role in creating this feeling of unsteadiness.

In using words as his weapons for social illumination, Joyce is aware of their abstract power. Arbitrary two-dimensional representations of our environment, words rely on the meaning that society assigns them. These meanings evolve, becoming news with time, similar to memory.

There are thousands of imperceptible forces that shape a work of art. In the work of James Joyce these influences are as indiscernible as they are multitudinous. A dissection of the sexual deviation or non-Euclidean geometry in Joyce is as valid as an exploration of the number of vowels or use of memory. Like true artists, Joyce’s literature works on both the content level and the form level. If the reader is looking for an in-depth search of the artist’s soul or a dynamic construction of abstract text, both can be taken from Portrait.

Memory, abstraction and uncertainty are key elements in Joyce that make his stories and novels continually interesting to read. While it is always stimulating to look at his body of work from different perspectives, a definitive approach to interpreting Joyce remains elusive. No matter how many words are expended in trying to understand him, his depth of abstraction and creativity make it impossible. This uncertainty is the very aesthetic of a modern world in which science, politics and religion have become mutually exclusive leaving the citizenry to fend for themselves and develop their own realities.