Memory in its various aspects and functions is a fundamental feature of Joyce’s entire ouvre. This paper begins with a brief discussion of what we can call the "memory of the word". Joyce's very personal use of the English language, which reached its most provocative and distorted version in Finnegans Wake, can be read as a constant attempt to free words from the memory of the English of the British Empire, the language of the invaders who had endangered and attempted to erase for good the Emerald Island’s native tongue. And just because the English word is (and was) burdened with accumulated meanings from over the centuries, Joyce felt the need to give it new life, and he did so by bestowing upon that word a new texture, a texture that would be less transparent than the veil covering its most common meanings. The second topic discussed here is what can be termed the "memory of a character", i.e., what the reader remembers about a character (the readers’ memory of characters), and what the character remembers about him/herself and others (the characters’ memory of characters). Two examples from Ulysses are analyzed in detail. As a third point, the authors argue that memory's cohesive potential spills out of Joyce's works and reaches into the real world by keeping a community of Joycean scholars together, thus becoming truly "collective". It does so not only by means of perpetuating reminiscences of Joyce and his characters, but also by passing on the history and stories of the community itself. The Joycean community, one might say, coalesces around Joyce, but at the same time takes on a life of its own, which gives it a collective dimension that it could not have if it were just a group of individuals carrying out their own respective research into a common object of study.