Abstract
Today, art history is concerned with the issue of non-linear time in relation to the image. Transhistorical history is based on the deconstruction of the conventional narrative of art history.
In my search to find a framework to bridge the non-linearity of time and still preserve the coherence of history, I will focus on the possibilities offered by the “language of rivers” that James Joyce used to write his novel Finnegan’s Wake (1939) and place it in confrontation with the fluid nature of time. The fact is that this writer succeeded in doing what is now the subject of art history discussions.
Although the flow of Joyce’s narrative is a tangle of associations and word games, it still retains a logical structure. It is this that might be a useful analogy for thinking about the transhistorical canon: images, like Joyce’s words, are full of details that disconnect them from the time in which they were made and bind them to various moments in the past.
Joyce’s language is a hypertext, much in the same way that history is when viewed from a transhistorical perspective. I will contend that there exist similar fluid frameworks of artistic styles, which may be used to consider the transhistorical canon.