Essay on Einsteins Science and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

A Portrait of the Artist as a three-year-old ManCorrelations Between psyches Science and Joyces Artist Joyce and Einstein both made enormous contributions to their respective fields, but left us with as many new mysteries as answers to questions. Einsteins theory of Relativity showed us that our conceptual relationship to the ground around us is extremely supple -- that our perception of the world is determined both by our localise in and of itself, and our position in relation to others. His theory of physics which had an immense reach on our epistemological endeavors, in that it imposes limits of what and how we can know due to our mending in space/time. Aftershocks of Einsteins theory were felt in art, literature and philosophy, and doubtlessly greatly influenced Joyces literary project. This give awayms, perhaps, a strange notion. Nonetheless, it is clearly traceable end-to-end the course of Joyces work. It is hinted at in Dubliners, wherein our pictures and concepti on of the town and the world are determined by the thoughts, beliefs and learning the characters, and finally comes to fruition in Ulysses, wherein we see the same events from several perspectives, and are given very different impressions of those events, harmonise to the mental states of the observer through which we view them. But, in between these devil works, we find A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Portrait, Joyce both furthers and illustrates the relativistic project by carrying the reader, along with Stephen Dedalus from a world in which the final answers are objective and known, into a post-Einsteinian world wherein truth is determined by ones positi... ...vision, while sliding that fact agone the dean in the guise of Aquinas. One by one, Stephen surrenders dogmatic modes of thought and behavior, until he at last emerges into the Einsteinian world, and surrenders his pretense of objectivity, by ever-changing the narration to first person. While he continu es to describe events around and beyond himself, Stephen is, for the first time, applying meaning and emotional content to those events, not hiding it do-nothing the tone of his language for the reader to suss out, but hanging them out with enthusiasm, recognizing that, from his position in time/space, inside the closed system of himself, they are abruptly true and legitimate, regardless of how they may appear from another perspective. Its gravity when Stephen says its gravity, and quickening when he says its acceleration, and its all true, and real, and his.