In the Physics Aristotle describes time as something that either does not exist or exists barely and in an obscure manner. Ruben Borg argues that an attempt to grapple with this problem informs the narrative structure, imagery and complex rhetorical strategies of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. By examining the relation between time and processes of figuration in Joyce’s fiction, this study engages with the challenges of grasping time as a multiplicity that resists representation and objective measurement. Joyce’s lexical and rhetorical inventions are viewed as an attempt to describe time’s characteristic movement in terms of waste, measureless excess or fading.