Fundamental to the argument surrounding epiphany is that the phenomenon assumes two opposing manifestations: In the first, it is the realization of an essence “with its radiance attached to itself rather than to a perceiving consciousness” (Hendry). In the other, the epiphany is not a revelation of truth or character, but merely appears to be truth to the perceiving consciousness. It is the question of the absolute and essential versus the tenuous and subjective.
What can epiphany do to help us understand Joyce? Joyce himself endeavored to pave a “new way” to fiction. Stephen sets out at the end of “Portrait” to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race.” What does it mean to forge a conscience? It is to establish a sense of right and wrong--a shared moral viewpoint. There seems to be a distinctly moral impulse beneath Joyce’s work. He is not interested merely in pedantic demonstrations of wit, but in building a moral world. Mencken, who fought for Ulysses’ release in the U.S., later called the work “puerile.” An understanding of epiphany as a fundamental moral structure would have meant that the book’s meaning was not lost on Mencken. Joyce is responding to the disarray and chaos of his own consciousness. He is responding to the moral and political chaos particular to his nation (as postcolonial theorists have justly pointed out); but Joyce is also responding to the moral chaos of his age. His loss of faith is microcosmic of the great spiritual disenchantment endured by all of Western civilization. His personal anguishes and anxieties are the anxieties of the Enlightened world. His cure for those trepidations is open to the world. Epiphany, despite its ingenious and sometimes impenetrable form, is a tool of communication. It is a reconciliation between the lost universe of absolute essences and the new universe of volatile, various and disordered objective and moral forms. In the epiphany, subjectivity itself is made certain good, and such experience can only be expressed in words.
Epiphany was articulated originally as a pedantic aesthetic theory, based on an equally-pedantic theory of knowledge expounded my Thomas Aquinas. But it grew to be something much more powerful. Indeed, Joyce rejected epiphany as an ideal philosophy that promised to provide access to some platonic realm of unseen forms, but he did not discard it. To Joyce, the process that epiphany posited: the isolation of a word or gesture that arrested individual attention with the pure radiance of its esthetic image, need not be limited to the sensitivities of the working artist. The great resilience and genius of the epiphany was such that although it was depreciated by a mature Joyce as a youthful pretension, it was not discarded, but reshaped and grown. Far from being a phenomenon of perception concerned with objects alone, the mature epiphany, though never expounded, became a way of experiencing individuals, situations and even psychological states. The soul of an object still “leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance”; epiphany is modified such that the objects in question become increasingly complex. Epiphany itself is a state of the mind--an arresting moment initiated by a single word or gesture, but significant only in its relation to its narrative context. The epiphany, we find, is a phenomenon existing not in the world, but in the mind. The early epiphany was achieved by an object. In the entirety of Joyce’s work following Stephen Hero, epiphanies are achieved by individuals.
It is crucial to take Ulysses in its context within Western literary tradition. Joyce endeavors to perfect a technique focusing on the actual experience of individuals in the world. His task is mimetic, although the virtuosity of his effort has spurred accusations that the work is not realistic. Nonetheless, Ulysses concerns itself with the most various a tawdry aspects of objective experience. Indeed, Joyce endeavors to express the mundane through the most elaborate means devisable. Through the structure of epiphany, Joyce is able to endow the littlest aspects of existence with drama and meaning. The “essence” of the event is not absolute or essential except in the mind of the individual experiencing them. Hendry describes the whole of Joyce’s fiction as a “tissue of epiphanies, big and small.” The genius of the epiphany is that we, the readers, are incorporated into that tissue. With every flutter of the pulse epiphany excites in us, our nerves are proved entwined with those who breathe in Joyce’s world and with the author himself. We are consubstantial, and epiphany has achieved its moral purpose--to create the shared conscience of an entire race, a race not confined by the craggy shores of Ireland, but free to crawl importantly over the face of the earth, and not necessarily imprisoned by individual skins.
Friday, November 6, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
In Honor of Levi-Strauss
Reading the obituary of Levi-Strauss today in the New York Times, I was struck with an epiphany of my own--one that reached across the chasm of time and space, and which lead me finally to James Joyce. There is something of Joyce’s epiphanies in the theorist’s own conception of storytelling. To Levi-Strauss, human consciousness is shaped by the realization of a few essential binaries common to all peoples that exert force on unconscious understanding, and which manifests itself in myths across disparate cultures and traditions. Images that appear in the myths of secluded South American tribes also appear in Russian folktales or, say, Homer. The idea of an essential truth revealed to the understanding and given form in an image removed from its narrative context sounds a lot like the platonic ideal Joyce delineated in his early explanation of the epiphany. Interestingly, the cultural philosophy of the 20th century repeated a conceptual journey Joyce seems already to have tread. The poststructuralists eventually displaced Levi-Strauss; writers like Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida rejected “timeless universals” and argued that “history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.” For Joyce, the inspiration offered by the epiphany was at first a metaphysical phenomenon, an essential “whatness” achieved by the beholder which emanated from the essence underlying the objective world. The mature theory of epiphany as it was manifested in his work, however, was something quite different: no longer a platonic essence, it was an internal event occurring in the mind--as susceptible to delusion as any other subjective experience. Levi-Strauss was certainly not concerned with platonic essences, but the appearance of a universal subconscious meant that psychology achieved similar effects. Structuralism matters to Joyce because both are interested in the way particular knowledge and experience is pitted against the universal. Joyce finally winds up, I think in a similar place as Levi-Strauss, realizing that stories, though diverse in their details, and varied in their particular effects on readers coming from diverse individual histories, are told and consumed for reasons wrought deeply in the makeup of our species. It is why Ulysses is a myth retold. It is the very reason why Joyce’s epiphanies and those of his characters, though reliant on the subjectivity of those who experience them, have as much dignity as our own. The particular details and assembly of each one may differ--indeed, the epiphanies Joyce builds for us may manifest themselves differently in our minds than they did when they were first ignited in his--but the basic feeling, the radiance, the quidditas is the same. Like Bloom and Stephen, the ideas common to our species make individuals consubstantial. Particular differences matter little; everyone, when myth is at its most distilled, is everybody else.
Monday, November 2, 2009
Thesis Proposal: Final(ly)
James Joyce’s Epiphanies: Resurrecting a Key to Understanding
A. Introduction: Topic
A young boy, remarking the English accents in a conversation overheard, achieves an epiphany, killing the idealized love he nurses for Mangan’s sister. He leaves the bazaar irreversibly changed, and in the final lines of “Araby,” we are left with a final recollection of that moment: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” That the boy actually was such a creature is uncertain and, probably, unlikely; what is most important is that he felt that he was, and that his feelings were as potent and real to him as the great jars standing like eastern guards at the entrance of the stall.
Moments such as this one are suspended forever, embedded in the prose of every one of James Joyce’s works. He called them epiphanies, and the principle underlying them is the center around which the artist’s created universe revolves. But what are readers to make of Joyce’s so-called epiphanies, of his notion about a theory of epiphany, and of the likelihood that such a theory might cast valuable light on any of his major works? For decades, critics have toyed with all of these questions, and still have not come to a definitive answer. Our understanding of Joyce’s epiphanies is incomplete because theorists have failed to pursue it to it’s ultimate and irreducible end: that it describes an experiential process not limited to textual character’s or to Joyce himself, but extended, finally, to the experience of the reader.
At the end of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Stephen Dedalus resolves to set out and “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” From Dubliners to Finnegan’s Wake, we are confronted with characters paralyzed by a desperate and unfulfilled need to communicate. Indeed, Dedalus declares his greatest ambition is “to express myself in some mode of life or art as feely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning.” Joyce contrived the most elaborate and cunning means for this self-expression; the epiphany, far from being the pedantic theory of knowledge, lyrical device, or negligible rhetorical plaything envisioned by prior theorists, is a basic principle that is foundational to an ingenious process of communication which was his life’s work. The epiphany implicates the reader in a living process of textual engagement, in which we are invited to experience the lives of others as if they were our own. Joyce’s theory of epiphany is not a sentimental one, nor is it a hollow ideal easily achieved by careless poets. The epiphany requires the most brilliant and skillful of architects to succeed. When all its parts are tuned perfectly, it takes an equally vigilant critic to release the experience that has been preserved. The epiphany is the foundation of Joyce’s art, and its apex as well. The epiphany achieved in the mind of the reader is the end of the process the artist began. Our brightened understanding of the theory sheds new light on Joyce’s understanding of biography and art, objective experience and linguistic representation, and offers new answers to that question which plagued the modernists and continues to persist: why write?
B. Background , Context and Questions
1)There has been much debate within Joyce scholarship concerning this controversial--and little understood--theory. In the early 1940’s, as critics were first embarking on that indefinite and daunting train of inquiry--of how to read and interpret Joyce--the theory was uprooted from its obscure sources (a single passage in Ulysses, and an explanation of the theory given in Stephen Hero) and employed as a way to explain Joyce’s method and principle. In addition to the theory as concept, some readers took an interest in the epiphanies--those fragments of prose written by Joyce in his youth, capturing moments of epiphany in his daily life--as important sources for his later material. In short, Joyce’s epiphanies tantalized scholars, offering a key to their understanding of the author’s structure, method, language, biographical inspiration; even his philosophical intent. To some, epiphany promised to illuminate some of the darkest corners of the Joyce mystery.
And then the light began to fade. The theory was rejected by some critics as completely inconsequential to our understanding of Joyce. Far from being an ideal that guided the author’s method and principle from Dubliners to Finnegan’s Wake, it was called a juvenile theory, rejected by Joyce himself, which was being adopted and fallaciously applied to the author’s method and principle by scholars who were desperate for answers. The conversation surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies began to wane, and we were left with a mysterious, and still-incomplete, explanation of their significance.
My hope is not to revive old theories, but to pursue the conceptual path they first tread to their final end, and to re-offer the epiphany, newly gleaming in its complete imagination, as a way of understanding Joyce’s methods and artistic principles and, more importantly, as a theory equipped to condition the reader to receive and interpret the ingenious system of communication offered by the artist.
2) We are faced now with a number of crucial questions: a) What is an epiphany, exactly? More specifically, what are its multiple manifestations, and what is the significance of each one? b) Why was the development of the discourse surrounding the theory arrested? c) How can our understanding of epiphany be developed further? d) In light of this new understanding, what is newly revealed concerning Joyce’s method and principle? e) What are the consequences of this new understanding for readers of Joyce?
3) What is an epiphany? It is a number of things. First, it is an esthetic theory, expounded in Stephen Hero, that is based on three cardinal principles taken from Thomas Aquinas’ theory of knowledge, consisting of the integritas, consonantia and claritas. Second, epiphanies are actual literary relics left by Joyce, written on small ovals of paper to be sent (as maintained in Ulysses) to the great libraries of the world. They have been described as prose poems, and efforts have been made to prove them to be the germs major passages in Joyce’s later work. Third, epiphany is a structural phenomenon in Joyce’s work, one that may be used to describe the method of the artist. Finally, epiphany is a lyrical phenomenon, used to define an internal even in the mind of a character which, in its solipsism, is not the realization of “whatness” at all, but is a flawed, self-assured delusion--a reinforcement of the separation between objective reality and subjective experience.
In order to advance the discourse surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies, we must have a firm understanding of the arguments already in place. One of the earliest references to Joyce’s theory came from Harry Levin, who had access to Stephen Hero in his New Directions study and from Theodore Spencer, who edited and wrote the preface to the published version of the fragment (Hendry 450). Both Levin and Spencer recognize the “lyrical” quality of epiphany: “its effect on the observer and his relation to the object ‘epiphanized’” (Hendry 450). Irene Henry’s essay “Joyce’s Epiphanies” expanded Joyce’s theory to the domain of structure, arguing that, in addition to being an explanation of characters’ experience within the texts, it also dictated the method of the artist himself. Robert Scholes can likely be thanked for this decline or, at least, for effectively halting the development of the theory as a way of understanding Joyce. In his essay “Joyce and the Epiphany”, Scholes calls the epiphany idea “trivial, supercilious, florid” and “lugubrious”. He notes that there is no mention of the theory in Joyce’s notes or letters after 1904. He cites the famous passage in Ulysses--which recalls Stephen’s “deeply deep” epiphanies--as proof of a mature Joyce rejecting the Platonic artistic pretensions of his youth. Scholes contends that although Joyce’s epiphanies are called a structure in fiction, they were not so in Stephen’s theory or in Joyce’s mind. To Scholes, the phenomenon is in no way related to the creative process.
C. Methodology
I will endeavor to answer my initial questions by reviewing the important critical works that have defined our conception(s) of epiphany. I will proceed to offer a fully formed theory of my own, with some relevance to previously theory, but depending mostly on close readings of key parts of Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. My theory will implicate the reader in epiphanies themselves, and will claim that Joyce intended them to be linguistic exchanges--a kind of outreach to a differentiated multitude, consisting of countless individuals. A tentative chapter outline looks something like this:
Chapter 1: Origins Joyce’s theory of Epiphany; Critical Theory and Reception; Critiques and problems concerning the theory.
Chapter 2: A new understanding of the theory, aimed at the lyrical experience of the reader.
Chapter 3: Close readings of epiphanies in Joyce’s works; exploration of how the lyrical project is extended to the reader.
Conclusions
D. Hypotheses
While epiphanies afford a lyrical texture to the experience of characters, and sketch a discernible structure (sometimes) defining Joyce’s method, theorists have missed the most crucial manifestation of epiphany--its lyrical effect on the reader. The reader of Joyce experiences these kinds of epiphanies, whose ordering pieces are distinguished and arranged by the text itself; where the chaos of reality is arranged to a point and made radiant. The question of epiphany is not one regarding Joyce’s use of it as an ideal principle--he condemned his neo-platonic presumptions early on--nor is it an important question of biographical source--less “epiphanies” as relics can be traced to Portrait than Stephen Hero, and less to Portrait than Ulysses-- rather, it is important as a conceptual structure which defines the experience of characters, and which is mirrored in the experience of the reader himself. In fact, I think that epiphany remained for Joyce an important part of his psychological technique, and guided him as he endeavored to transform objective experience into esthetic excitement. The “sublime” is not, in fact, a spiritual manifestation, in the most arcane sense of the term, but the result of a psychological manipulation, part of a complicated system of linguistic manipulation of objective realities. The consonantia is all that is offered by a text. The claritas is achieved by the reader in his response to it. The fact that the terms are not mentioned in Joyce’s notes is unimportant--remember, they were originally terms created to describe the acquisition of knowledge, defined by Thomas Aquinas. They probably became so ingrained in Joyce’s self-understanding that they went without saying.
The experience of characters in Joyce’s works, who experience epiphanies as a result of ordering the chaotic stimuli given to them (think of Bloom and the flies in the windowpane) is the same process that governs a reader’s experience of a text. The beauty of Joyce’s work is that there is a method lurking in the seemingly disjointed images and words that are presented. The chaos is, in fact, a great web mediated, arranged and interlocked by the mind of the writer himself, and given to the reader as an undeciphered whole: the text itself. Epiphany is a key because it shows us a method of lyrical understanding twofold:
1) Of the characters’ understanding of their own world, which we acknowledge as imperfect.
2) It offers a solution to the stream of chaotic stimuli given to us in the language of Joyce’s work.
Epiphany is, in fact, a literary structure inspired by a psychological quality inherent in the mind. Joyce only inherited the scholastic description of the process (from Aquinas), applied it to literature, and proceeded to implicate readers in the ingenious process. The greatest implication of epiphany is that it reveals the gorgeous folly of the human mind--that in taking random events and assembling them so that meaning shines forth in their accumulation, meaning is wrung from an otherwise senseless existence.
Joyce offers in Ulysses a world that was lost to him when he lost his faith. In making seeming chaos and endowing it with a complex system of decipherment in the epiphany, Joyce essentially plays the God of his own creation. Joyce’s theory, astoundingly, is important mostly because it holds the power to alter experience. It is not didactic, but conditioning. It offers a kind of paradise to supplant the one that was lost--whose radiance originates not from some hidden, shadowy reality, but from the life of the mind itself.
A. Introduction: Topic
A young boy, remarking the English accents in a conversation overheard, achieves an epiphany, killing the idealized love he nurses for Mangan’s sister. He leaves the bazaar irreversibly changed, and in the final lines of “Araby,” we are left with a final recollection of that moment: “Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.” That the boy actually was such a creature is uncertain and, probably, unlikely; what is most important is that he felt that he was, and that his feelings were as potent and real to him as the great jars standing like eastern guards at the entrance of the stall.
Moments such as this one are suspended forever, embedded in the prose of every one of James Joyce’s works. He called them epiphanies, and the principle underlying them is the center around which the artist’s created universe revolves. But what are readers to make of Joyce’s so-called epiphanies, of his notion about a theory of epiphany, and of the likelihood that such a theory might cast valuable light on any of his major works? For decades, critics have toyed with all of these questions, and still have not come to a definitive answer. Our understanding of Joyce’s epiphanies is incomplete because theorists have failed to pursue it to it’s ultimate and irreducible end: that it describes an experiential process not limited to textual character’s or to Joyce himself, but extended, finally, to the experience of the reader.
At the end of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Stephen Dedalus resolves to set out and “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” From Dubliners to Finnegan’s Wake, we are confronted with characters paralyzed by a desperate and unfulfilled need to communicate. Indeed, Dedalus declares his greatest ambition is “to express myself in some mode of life or art as feely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use--silence, exile, and cunning.” Joyce contrived the most elaborate and cunning means for this self-expression; the epiphany, far from being the pedantic theory of knowledge, lyrical device, or negligible rhetorical plaything envisioned by prior theorists, is a basic principle that is foundational to an ingenious process of communication which was his life’s work. The epiphany implicates the reader in a living process of textual engagement, in which we are invited to experience the lives of others as if they were our own. Joyce’s theory of epiphany is not a sentimental one, nor is it a hollow ideal easily achieved by careless poets. The epiphany requires the most brilliant and skillful of architects to succeed. When all its parts are tuned perfectly, it takes an equally vigilant critic to release the experience that has been preserved. The epiphany is the foundation of Joyce’s art, and its apex as well. The epiphany achieved in the mind of the reader is the end of the process the artist began. Our brightened understanding of the theory sheds new light on Joyce’s understanding of biography and art, objective experience and linguistic representation, and offers new answers to that question which plagued the modernists and continues to persist: why write?
B. Background , Context and Questions
1)There has been much debate within Joyce scholarship concerning this controversial--and little understood--theory. In the early 1940’s, as critics were first embarking on that indefinite and daunting train of inquiry--of how to read and interpret Joyce--the theory was uprooted from its obscure sources (a single passage in Ulysses, and an explanation of the theory given in Stephen Hero) and employed as a way to explain Joyce’s method and principle. In addition to the theory as concept, some readers took an interest in the epiphanies--those fragments of prose written by Joyce in his youth, capturing moments of epiphany in his daily life--as important sources for his later material. In short, Joyce’s epiphanies tantalized scholars, offering a key to their understanding of the author’s structure, method, language, biographical inspiration; even his philosophical intent. To some, epiphany promised to illuminate some of the darkest corners of the Joyce mystery.
And then the light began to fade. The theory was rejected by some critics as completely inconsequential to our understanding of Joyce. Far from being an ideal that guided the author’s method and principle from Dubliners to Finnegan’s Wake, it was called a juvenile theory, rejected by Joyce himself, which was being adopted and fallaciously applied to the author’s method and principle by scholars who were desperate for answers. The conversation surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies began to wane, and we were left with a mysterious, and still-incomplete, explanation of their significance.
My hope is not to revive old theories, but to pursue the conceptual path they first tread to their final end, and to re-offer the epiphany, newly gleaming in its complete imagination, as a way of understanding Joyce’s methods and artistic principles and, more importantly, as a theory equipped to condition the reader to receive and interpret the ingenious system of communication offered by the artist.
2) We are faced now with a number of crucial questions: a) What is an epiphany, exactly? More specifically, what are its multiple manifestations, and what is the significance of each one? b) Why was the development of the discourse surrounding the theory arrested? c) How can our understanding of epiphany be developed further? d) In light of this new understanding, what is newly revealed concerning Joyce’s method and principle? e) What are the consequences of this new understanding for readers of Joyce?
3) What is an epiphany? It is a number of things. First, it is an esthetic theory, expounded in Stephen Hero, that is based on three cardinal principles taken from Thomas Aquinas’ theory of knowledge, consisting of the integritas, consonantia and claritas. Second, epiphanies are actual literary relics left by Joyce, written on small ovals of paper to be sent (as maintained in Ulysses) to the great libraries of the world. They have been described as prose poems, and efforts have been made to prove them to be the germs major passages in Joyce’s later work. Third, epiphany is a structural phenomenon in Joyce’s work, one that may be used to describe the method of the artist. Finally, epiphany is a lyrical phenomenon, used to define an internal even in the mind of a character which, in its solipsism, is not the realization of “whatness” at all, but is a flawed, self-assured delusion--a reinforcement of the separation between objective reality and subjective experience.
In order to advance the discourse surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies, we must have a firm understanding of the arguments already in place. One of the earliest references to Joyce’s theory came from Harry Levin, who had access to Stephen Hero in his New Directions study and from Theodore Spencer, who edited and wrote the preface to the published version of the fragment (Hendry 450). Both Levin and Spencer recognize the “lyrical” quality of epiphany: “its effect on the observer and his relation to the object ‘epiphanized’” (Hendry 450). Irene Henry’s essay “Joyce’s Epiphanies” expanded Joyce’s theory to the domain of structure, arguing that, in addition to being an explanation of characters’ experience within the texts, it also dictated the method of the artist himself. Robert Scholes can likely be thanked for this decline or, at least, for effectively halting the development of the theory as a way of understanding Joyce. In his essay “Joyce and the Epiphany”, Scholes calls the epiphany idea “trivial, supercilious, florid” and “lugubrious”. He notes that there is no mention of the theory in Joyce’s notes or letters after 1904. He cites the famous passage in Ulysses--which recalls Stephen’s “deeply deep” epiphanies--as proof of a mature Joyce rejecting the Platonic artistic pretensions of his youth. Scholes contends that although Joyce’s epiphanies are called a structure in fiction, they were not so in Stephen’s theory or in Joyce’s mind. To Scholes, the phenomenon is in no way related to the creative process.
C. Methodology
I will endeavor to answer my initial questions by reviewing the important critical works that have defined our conception(s) of epiphany. I will proceed to offer a fully formed theory of my own, with some relevance to previously theory, but depending mostly on close readings of key parts of Stephen Hero, Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. My theory will implicate the reader in epiphanies themselves, and will claim that Joyce intended them to be linguistic exchanges--a kind of outreach to a differentiated multitude, consisting of countless individuals. A tentative chapter outline looks something like this:
Chapter 1: Origins Joyce’s theory of Epiphany; Critical Theory and Reception; Critiques and problems concerning the theory.
Chapter 2: A new understanding of the theory, aimed at the lyrical experience of the reader.
Chapter 3: Close readings of epiphanies in Joyce’s works; exploration of how the lyrical project is extended to the reader.
Conclusions
D. Hypotheses
While epiphanies afford a lyrical texture to the experience of characters, and sketch a discernible structure (sometimes) defining Joyce’s method, theorists have missed the most crucial manifestation of epiphany--its lyrical effect on the reader. The reader of Joyce experiences these kinds of epiphanies, whose ordering pieces are distinguished and arranged by the text itself; where the chaos of reality is arranged to a point and made radiant. The question of epiphany is not one regarding Joyce’s use of it as an ideal principle--he condemned his neo-platonic presumptions early on--nor is it an important question of biographical source--less “epiphanies” as relics can be traced to Portrait than Stephen Hero, and less to Portrait than Ulysses-- rather, it is important as a conceptual structure which defines the experience of characters, and which is mirrored in the experience of the reader himself. In fact, I think that epiphany remained for Joyce an important part of his psychological technique, and guided him as he endeavored to transform objective experience into esthetic excitement. The “sublime” is not, in fact, a spiritual manifestation, in the most arcane sense of the term, but the result of a psychological manipulation, part of a complicated system of linguistic manipulation of objective realities. The consonantia is all that is offered by a text. The claritas is achieved by the reader in his response to it. The fact that the terms are not mentioned in Joyce’s notes is unimportant--remember, they were originally terms created to describe the acquisition of knowledge, defined by Thomas Aquinas. They probably became so ingrained in Joyce’s self-understanding that they went without saying.
The experience of characters in Joyce’s works, who experience epiphanies as a result of ordering the chaotic stimuli given to them (think of Bloom and the flies in the windowpane) is the same process that governs a reader’s experience of a text. The beauty of Joyce’s work is that there is a method lurking in the seemingly disjointed images and words that are presented. The chaos is, in fact, a great web mediated, arranged and interlocked by the mind of the writer himself, and given to the reader as an undeciphered whole: the text itself. Epiphany is a key because it shows us a method of lyrical understanding twofold:
1) Of the characters’ understanding of their own world, which we acknowledge as imperfect.
2) It offers a solution to the stream of chaotic stimuli given to us in the language of Joyce’s work.
Epiphany is, in fact, a literary structure inspired by a psychological quality inherent in the mind. Joyce only inherited the scholastic description of the process (from Aquinas), applied it to literature, and proceeded to implicate readers in the ingenious process. The greatest implication of epiphany is that it reveals the gorgeous folly of the human mind--that in taking random events and assembling them so that meaning shines forth in their accumulation, meaning is wrung from an otherwise senseless existence.
Joyce offers in Ulysses a world that was lost to him when he lost his faith. In making seeming chaos and endowing it with a complex system of decipherment in the epiphany, Joyce essentially plays the God of his own creation. Joyce’s theory, astoundingly, is important mostly because it holds the power to alter experience. It is not didactic, but conditioning. It offers a kind of paradise to supplant the one that was lost--whose radiance originates not from some hidden, shadowy reality, but from the life of the mind itself.
Plan of Attack
Thesis Schedule
11/2- Proposal Finalized
11/6- Partial Chapter Draft Due
12/1- Revised Chapter Due
Winter Break- Continue close readings of Primary Sources (Portrait, Dubliners, Ulysses)--WRITE!
1/15- Outline of Chapter 2
2/1- Rough Draft of Chapter 2 Due
2/15- Chapter 2 Revised/ Chapter 3 Outlined
3/1- Rough Draft of Chapter 3
3/15-Chapter 3 Revised; Conclusions
4/1- Concluding Chapter Due; Comprehensive revision complete
4/15- Thesis Due
11/2- Proposal Finalized
11/6- Partial Chapter Draft Due
12/1- Revised Chapter Due
Winter Break- Continue close readings of Primary Sources (Portrait, Dubliners, Ulysses)--WRITE!
1/15- Outline of Chapter 2
2/1- Rough Draft of Chapter 2 Due
2/15- Chapter 2 Revised/ Chapter 3 Outlined
3/1- Rough Draft of Chapter 3
3/15-Chapter 3 Revised; Conclusions
4/1- Concluding Chapter Due; Comprehensive revision complete
4/15- Thesis Due
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Proposal-Draft 1
James Joyce’s Epiphanies: Resurrecting a Key to Understanding
A. Introduction: Topic and Questions
1) Joyce’s theory of epiphanies is crucial to our understanding of the artist and his work. There has been much debate within Joyce scholarship concerning this controversial--and little understood--theory. In the early 1940’s, as critics were first embarking on that indefinite and daunting train of inquiry--of how to read and interpret Joyce--the theory was uprooted from its obscure sources (a single passage in Ulysses, and an explanation of the theory given in Stephen Hero) and employed as a way to explain Joyce’s method and principle. In addition to the theory as concept, some readers took an interest in the epiphanies--those fragments of prose written by Joyce in his youth, capturing moments of epiphany in his daily life--as important sources for his later material. In short, Joyce’s epiphanies tantalized scholars, offering a key to their understanding of the author’s structure, method, language, biographical inspiration; even his philosophical intent. To some, epiphany promised to illuminate some of the darkest corners of the Joyce mystery.
And then the light began to fade. The theory was rejected by some critics as completely inconsequential to our understanding of Joyce. Far from being an ideal that guided the author’s method and principle from Dubliners to Finnegan’s Wake, it was called a juvenile theory, rejected by Joyce himself, which was being adopted and fallaciously applied to the author’s method and principle by scholars who were desperate for answers. The conversation surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies began to wane, and we were left with a mysterious, and still-incomplete, explanation of their significance.
This project is a revisiting of that incomplete conversation. Implicit in the entire endeavor is the conviction that Joyce’s theory is important, and that interpretations and applications of the theory are either incomplete, wayward, or completely inaccurate. My hope is not to revive old theories, but to improve them, and to re-offer the epiphany, newly gleaming in its re-imagination, as a way of understanding Joyce’s methods and artistic principles and, more importantly, as a theory equipped to condition the reader to receive and interpret the ingenious system of communication offered by the artist.
2) Thus, having established Joyce’s epiphany as my topic, we are faced now with a number of crucial questions: a) What is an epiphany, exactly? More specifically, what are its multiple manifestations, and what is the significance of each one? b) Why was the development of the discourse surrounding the theory arrested? c) How can our understanding of epiphany be developed further? d) In light of this new understanding, what is newly revealed concerning Joyce’s method and principle? e) What are the consequences of this new understanding for readers of Joyce?
B. Background and Context:
1) What is an epiphany? It is a number of things. First, it is an esthetic theory, expounded in Stephen Hero, that is based on three cardinal principles taken from Thomas Aquinas’ theory of knowledge, consisting of the integritas, consonantia and claritas. Second, epiphanies are actual literary relics left by Joyce, written on small ovals of paper to be sent (as maintained in Ulysses) to the great libraries of the world. They have been described as prose poems, and efforts have been made to prove them to be the germs major passages in Joyce’s later work. Third, epiphany is a structural phenomenon in Joyce’s work, one that may be used to describe the method of the artist. Finally, epiphany is a lyrical phenomenon, used to define an internal even in the mind of a character which, in its solipsism, is not the realization of “whatness” at all, but is a flawed, self-assured delusion--a reinforcement of the separation between objective reality and subjective experience.
Clearly, in order to advance the discourse surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies, we must have a firm understanding of the arguments already in place. One of the earliest references to Joyce’s theory came from Harry Levin, who had access to Stephen Hero in his New Directions study and from Theodore Spencer, who edited and wrote the preface to the published version of the fragment (Hendry 450). Both Levin and Spencer recognize the “lyrical” quality of epiphany: “is effect on the observer and his relation to the object ‘epiphanized’” (Hendry 450). Irene Henry’s essay “Joyce’s Epiphanies” expanded Joyce’s theory to the domain of structure, arguing that, in addition to being an explanation of characters’ experience within the texts, it also dictated the method of the artist himself. Robert Scholes can likely be thanked for this decline or, at least, for effectively halting the development of the theory as a way of understanding Joyce. In his essay “Joyce and the Epiphany”, Scholes calls the epiphany idea “trivial, supercilious, florid” and “lugubrious”. He notes that there is no mention of the theory in Joyce’s notes or letters after 1904. He cites the famous passage in Ulysses--which recalls Stephen’s “deeply deep” epiphanies--as proof of a mature Joyce rejecting the Platonic artistic pretensions of his youth. Scholes contends that although Joyce’s epiphanies are called a structure in fiction, they were not so in Stephen’s theory or in Joyce’s mind. To Scholes, the phenomenon is in no way related to the creative process.
2) An ordered re-examination of the question of epiphany is crucial because if, as I contend, existing interpretations and applications of the theory are incomplete, then much our understanding of Joyce--especially concerning his method and the artistic principles underlying them--is incomplete. New revelations concerning epiphany would refresh and sharpen a tired way of reading Joyce which, despite its opaqueness, is mentioned in its incomplete form in undergraduate courses all over the world.
C. Methodology
I will endeavor to answer my initial questions (i.e. a) What is an epiphany, exactly? More specifically, what are its multiple manifestations, and what is the significance of each one? b) Why was the development of the discourse surrounding the theory arrested?) by reviewing the important critical works that have defined our conception(s) of epiphany. I will proceed to revise/ reinvent the theories presented by other scholars, offering a crucial reinterpretation of the theory, which would reintroduce it into the discourse surrounding Joyce’s method and principle, and prove it to be a crucial ordering concept for readers of Joyce. I will support my claims through close readings of exemplary passages taken from primary sources within Joyce’s work, especially drawing from Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.
In answering the question: How can our understanding of Joyce’s epiphanies be developed further?--my argument will delve into a realm very near pure theory, which will be supported by arguments that take concepts given by prior theorists, apply strategic amendments and refutations, and push the resulting theories to their logical conclusions.
I will then take these conclusions, based on this rather tenuous conceptual argument, and prove them through their application in close readings of important passages and evidence taken from Joyce’s biography. Thus, I will demonstrate the new revelations concerning Joyce’s method and artistic principle, and explore the repercussions of these theories for readers of Joyce and, hopefully, show that the final theory may be applied not just to works by Joyce, but to other realms of perception, thought and knowledge.
D. Hypotheses
While epiphanies afford a lyrical texture to the experience of characters, and sketch a discernible structure (sometimes) defining Joyce’s method, theorists have missed the most crucial manifestation of epiphany--its lyrical effect on the reader. The reader of Joyce experiences these kinds of epiphanies, whose ordering pieces are distinguished and arranged by the text itself; where the chaos of reality is arranged to a point and made radiant. The question of epiphany is not one regarding Joyce’s use of it as an ideal principle--he condemned his neo-platonic presumptions early on--nor is it an important question of biographical source--less “epiphanies” as relics can be traced to Portrait than Stephen Hero, and less to Portrait than Ulysses-- rather, it is important as a conceptual structure which defines the experience of characters, and which is mirrored in the experience of the reader himself. In fact, I think that epiphany remained for Joyce an important part of his psychological technique, and guided him as he endeavored to transform objective experience into esthetic excitement. The “sublime” is not, in fact, a spiritual manifestation, in the most arcane sense of the term, but the result of a psychological manipulation, part of a complication system of linguistic manipulation of objective realities. The consonantia is all that is offered by a text. The claritas is achieved by the reader in his response to it. The fact that the terms are not mentioned in Joyce’s notes is unimportant--remember, they were originally terms created to describe the acquisition of knowledge, defined by Thomas Aquinas. It is my belief that they became so ingrained in Joyce’s self-understanding that they went without saying.
The experience of characters in Joyce’s works, who experience epiphanies as a result of ordering the chaotic stimuli given to them (think of Bloom and the flies in the windowpane) is the same process that governs a reader’s experience of a text. The beauty of Joyce’s work is that there is a method lurking in the seemingly disjointed images and words that are presented. The chaos is, in fact, a great web mediated, arranged and interlocked by the mind of the writer himself, and given to the reader as an undeciphered whole: the text itself. Epiphany is a key because it shows us a method of lyrical understanding twofold:
1) Of the characters’ understanding of their own world, which we acknowledge as imperfect.
2) It offers a solution to the stream of chaotic stimuli given to us in the language of Joyce’s work.
Epiphany is, in fact, a literary structure inspired by a psychological quality inherent in the mind itself. Joyce only inherited the scholastic description of the process (from Aquinas), applied it to literature (in the experience of characters in Dubliners) and proceeded to implicate readers in the ingenious process in Ulysses. The greatest implication of epiphany is that it reveals the gorgeous folly of the human mind--that in taking random events and assembling them so that meaning shines forth in their accumulation, meaning is wrung from an otherwise senseless existence.
Joyce offers in Ulysses a world that was lost to him when he lost his faith. In making seeming chaos and endowing it with a complex system of decipherment in the epiphany, Joyce essentially plays the God of his own creation. Joyce’s theory, astoundingly, is important mostly because it holds the power to alter experience. It is not didactic, but conditioning. It offers a kind of paradise to supplant the one that was lost--whose radiance originates not from some hidden, shadowy reality, but from the life of the mind itself.
Bibliography
1) Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
-Nuanced and exhaustive study of the life and letters of James Joyce. Index is an excellent guide in tracing epiphany as a conceptual strand throughout his life and work.
2) Bowen, Zach. Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach. The Journal of Modern literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1981-1982), pp. 103-114. Indiana University press.
-Interesting especially for its chronological position within the discourse: it stands, mostly alone in the 1980’s, trying to raise new questions on a topic that had been left alone since the late 60’s.
3) Hendry, Irene. Joyce’s Epiphanies. The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No.3 (Jul.-Sept., 1946), pp. 449-467. Johns Hopkins University Press.
-An initiatory essay in the conversation concerning Joyce’s epiphanies, Hendry recalls the structure of the epiphany, as outlined in Stephen Hero as a way of discerning Joyce’s method and principle throughout his career.
4) Scholes, Robert. Joyce and the Epiphany
Very important to the picture of the discourse surrounding epiphany--Scholes argues that, for many reasons, the epiphanies are “trivial, supercilious, florid” and “lugubrious” to the study of Joyce.
A. Introduction: Topic and Questions
1) Joyce’s theory of epiphanies is crucial to our understanding of the artist and his work. There has been much debate within Joyce scholarship concerning this controversial--and little understood--theory. In the early 1940’s, as critics were first embarking on that indefinite and daunting train of inquiry--of how to read and interpret Joyce--the theory was uprooted from its obscure sources (a single passage in Ulysses, and an explanation of the theory given in Stephen Hero) and employed as a way to explain Joyce’s method and principle. In addition to the theory as concept, some readers took an interest in the epiphanies--those fragments of prose written by Joyce in his youth, capturing moments of epiphany in his daily life--as important sources for his later material. In short, Joyce’s epiphanies tantalized scholars, offering a key to their understanding of the author’s structure, method, language, biographical inspiration; even his philosophical intent. To some, epiphany promised to illuminate some of the darkest corners of the Joyce mystery.
And then the light began to fade. The theory was rejected by some critics as completely inconsequential to our understanding of Joyce. Far from being an ideal that guided the author’s method and principle from Dubliners to Finnegan’s Wake, it was called a juvenile theory, rejected by Joyce himself, which was being adopted and fallaciously applied to the author’s method and principle by scholars who were desperate for answers. The conversation surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies began to wane, and we were left with a mysterious, and still-incomplete, explanation of their significance.
This project is a revisiting of that incomplete conversation. Implicit in the entire endeavor is the conviction that Joyce’s theory is important, and that interpretations and applications of the theory are either incomplete, wayward, or completely inaccurate. My hope is not to revive old theories, but to improve them, and to re-offer the epiphany, newly gleaming in its re-imagination, as a way of understanding Joyce’s methods and artistic principles and, more importantly, as a theory equipped to condition the reader to receive and interpret the ingenious system of communication offered by the artist.
2) Thus, having established Joyce’s epiphany as my topic, we are faced now with a number of crucial questions: a) What is an epiphany, exactly? More specifically, what are its multiple manifestations, and what is the significance of each one? b) Why was the development of the discourse surrounding the theory arrested? c) How can our understanding of epiphany be developed further? d) In light of this new understanding, what is newly revealed concerning Joyce’s method and principle? e) What are the consequences of this new understanding for readers of Joyce?
B. Background and Context:
1) What is an epiphany? It is a number of things. First, it is an esthetic theory, expounded in Stephen Hero, that is based on three cardinal principles taken from Thomas Aquinas’ theory of knowledge, consisting of the integritas, consonantia and claritas. Second, epiphanies are actual literary relics left by Joyce, written on small ovals of paper to be sent (as maintained in Ulysses) to the great libraries of the world. They have been described as prose poems, and efforts have been made to prove them to be the germs major passages in Joyce’s later work. Third, epiphany is a structural phenomenon in Joyce’s work, one that may be used to describe the method of the artist. Finally, epiphany is a lyrical phenomenon, used to define an internal even in the mind of a character which, in its solipsism, is not the realization of “whatness” at all, but is a flawed, self-assured delusion--a reinforcement of the separation between objective reality and subjective experience.
Clearly, in order to advance the discourse surrounding Joyce’s epiphanies, we must have a firm understanding of the arguments already in place. One of the earliest references to Joyce’s theory came from Harry Levin, who had access to Stephen Hero in his New Directions study and from Theodore Spencer, who edited and wrote the preface to the published version of the fragment (Hendry 450). Both Levin and Spencer recognize the “lyrical” quality of epiphany: “is effect on the observer and his relation to the object ‘epiphanized’” (Hendry 450). Irene Henry’s essay “Joyce’s Epiphanies” expanded Joyce’s theory to the domain of structure, arguing that, in addition to being an explanation of characters’ experience within the texts, it also dictated the method of the artist himself. Robert Scholes can likely be thanked for this decline or, at least, for effectively halting the development of the theory as a way of understanding Joyce. In his essay “Joyce and the Epiphany”, Scholes calls the epiphany idea “trivial, supercilious, florid” and “lugubrious”. He notes that there is no mention of the theory in Joyce’s notes or letters after 1904. He cites the famous passage in Ulysses--which recalls Stephen’s “deeply deep” epiphanies--as proof of a mature Joyce rejecting the Platonic artistic pretensions of his youth. Scholes contends that although Joyce’s epiphanies are called a structure in fiction, they were not so in Stephen’s theory or in Joyce’s mind. To Scholes, the phenomenon is in no way related to the creative process.
2) An ordered re-examination of the question of epiphany is crucial because if, as I contend, existing interpretations and applications of the theory are incomplete, then much our understanding of Joyce--especially concerning his method and the artistic principles underlying them--is incomplete. New revelations concerning epiphany would refresh and sharpen a tired way of reading Joyce which, despite its opaqueness, is mentioned in its incomplete form in undergraduate courses all over the world.
C. Methodology
I will endeavor to answer my initial questions (i.e. a) What is an epiphany, exactly? More specifically, what are its multiple manifestations, and what is the significance of each one? b) Why was the development of the discourse surrounding the theory arrested?) by reviewing the important critical works that have defined our conception(s) of epiphany. I will proceed to revise/ reinvent the theories presented by other scholars, offering a crucial reinterpretation of the theory, which would reintroduce it into the discourse surrounding Joyce’s method and principle, and prove it to be a crucial ordering concept for readers of Joyce. I will support my claims through close readings of exemplary passages taken from primary sources within Joyce’s work, especially drawing from Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses.
In answering the question: How can our understanding of Joyce’s epiphanies be developed further?--my argument will delve into a realm very near pure theory, which will be supported by arguments that take concepts given by prior theorists, apply strategic amendments and refutations, and push the resulting theories to their logical conclusions.
I will then take these conclusions, based on this rather tenuous conceptual argument, and prove them through their application in close readings of important passages and evidence taken from Joyce’s biography. Thus, I will demonstrate the new revelations concerning Joyce’s method and artistic principle, and explore the repercussions of these theories for readers of Joyce and, hopefully, show that the final theory may be applied not just to works by Joyce, but to other realms of perception, thought and knowledge.
D. Hypotheses
While epiphanies afford a lyrical texture to the experience of characters, and sketch a discernible structure (sometimes) defining Joyce’s method, theorists have missed the most crucial manifestation of epiphany--its lyrical effect on the reader. The reader of Joyce experiences these kinds of epiphanies, whose ordering pieces are distinguished and arranged by the text itself; where the chaos of reality is arranged to a point and made radiant. The question of epiphany is not one regarding Joyce’s use of it as an ideal principle--he condemned his neo-platonic presumptions early on--nor is it an important question of biographical source--less “epiphanies” as relics can be traced to Portrait than Stephen Hero, and less to Portrait than Ulysses-- rather, it is important as a conceptual structure which defines the experience of characters, and which is mirrored in the experience of the reader himself. In fact, I think that epiphany remained for Joyce an important part of his psychological technique, and guided him as he endeavored to transform objective experience into esthetic excitement. The “sublime” is not, in fact, a spiritual manifestation, in the most arcane sense of the term, but the result of a psychological manipulation, part of a complication system of linguistic manipulation of objective realities. The consonantia is all that is offered by a text. The claritas is achieved by the reader in his response to it. The fact that the terms are not mentioned in Joyce’s notes is unimportant--remember, they were originally terms created to describe the acquisition of knowledge, defined by Thomas Aquinas. It is my belief that they became so ingrained in Joyce’s self-understanding that they went without saying.
The experience of characters in Joyce’s works, who experience epiphanies as a result of ordering the chaotic stimuli given to them (think of Bloom and the flies in the windowpane) is the same process that governs a reader’s experience of a text. The beauty of Joyce’s work is that there is a method lurking in the seemingly disjointed images and words that are presented. The chaos is, in fact, a great web mediated, arranged and interlocked by the mind of the writer himself, and given to the reader as an undeciphered whole: the text itself. Epiphany is a key because it shows us a method of lyrical understanding twofold:
1) Of the characters’ understanding of their own world, which we acknowledge as imperfect.
2) It offers a solution to the stream of chaotic stimuli given to us in the language of Joyce’s work.
Epiphany is, in fact, a literary structure inspired by a psychological quality inherent in the mind itself. Joyce only inherited the scholastic description of the process (from Aquinas), applied it to literature (in the experience of characters in Dubliners) and proceeded to implicate readers in the ingenious process in Ulysses. The greatest implication of epiphany is that it reveals the gorgeous folly of the human mind--that in taking random events and assembling them so that meaning shines forth in their accumulation, meaning is wrung from an otherwise senseless existence.
Joyce offers in Ulysses a world that was lost to him when he lost his faith. In making seeming chaos and endowing it with a complex system of decipherment in the epiphany, Joyce essentially plays the God of his own creation. Joyce’s theory, astoundingly, is important mostly because it holds the power to alter experience. It is not didactic, but conditioning. It offers a kind of paradise to supplant the one that was lost--whose radiance originates not from some hidden, shadowy reality, but from the life of the mind itself.
Bibliography
1) Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959.
-Nuanced and exhaustive study of the life and letters of James Joyce. Index is an excellent guide in tracing epiphany as a conceptual strand throughout his life and work.
2) Bowen, Zach. Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach. The Journal of Modern literature, Vol. 9, No. 1 (1981-1982), pp. 103-114. Indiana University press.
-Interesting especially for its chronological position within the discourse: it stands, mostly alone in the 1980’s, trying to raise new questions on a topic that had been left alone since the late 60’s.
3) Hendry, Irene. Joyce’s Epiphanies. The Sewanee Review, Vol. 54, No.3 (Jul.-Sept., 1946), pp. 449-467. Johns Hopkins University Press.
-An initiatory essay in the conversation concerning Joyce’s epiphanies, Hendry recalls the structure of the epiphany, as outlined in Stephen Hero as a way of discerning Joyce’s method and principle throughout his career.
4) Scholes, Robert. Joyce and the Epiphany
Very important to the picture of the discourse surrounding epiphany--Scholes argues that, for many reasons, the epiphanies are “trivial, supercilious, florid” and “lugubrious” to the study of Joyce.
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Hendry and Joyce's Epiphanies
I have finally sharpened my topic enough so that when asked what I'm writing about, I'm not immediately obliged to answer with something like: "er...Joyce...but, you see, I'm really interested in the linguistic consequences of...let me rephrase that..." James Joyce's epiphanies are my subject, and my immediate objective is to learn as much about the discourse surrounding them as possible, form questions of my own, and--ultimately--join the conversation.
I have just read closely Irene Hendry's pivotal essay, "Joyce's Epiphanies". Published in the July 1946 issue of The Sewanee Review, the essay initiates a discourse looking at Joyce's then "little-noticed" theory of epiphanies, and was the first (as far as I can tell) to argue that the theory was central to Joyce's method and principle. Hendry takes her cue from Levin and Spencer, who "emphasize only the obvious aspect of epiphany: its effect on the observer and his relation to the object 'epiphanized'." In Hendry's model, the theory of epiphany, expounded in Stephen Hero, is a central ordering principle in Joyce's work, which guides his method from Dubliners to Finnegan's Wake, and which holds the key to what Joyce called the "task" of the artist.
In summary, Hendry applies the Thomistic aesthetic explained in Stephen Hero to Joyce's method in Dubliners, locating the Integritas, Consonantia, and Claritas in each story. I will not bore you with a detailed explanation of each term, but suffice it to say that they are the elements of a method, described by Hendry, in which an aesthetic image is isolated, dismantled and re-synthesized through language, and ultimately made radiant. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Well, Hendry acknowledges that Joyce, in giving us his theory of epiphanies, shared a "systematic formulation to a common esthetic experience, so common that few others--writers, if not estheticians--have thought it worth considering for its own sake". Hendry makes good use of the theory given to her, offering a few versions useful in tracing Joyce's method--the "block" technique in Dubliners, in which claritas is achieved when an apparently trivial detail or event at the end of the story serves to illuminate the preceding details. Then there is the "moment of revelation without its narrative base"--a technique that realizes all three principles, integritas, consonantia and claritas in a single image, purged of all irrelevancies, particularities and ambiguities. In this model, characters are reduced to their "essences" by a narrative distillation in which only the most relevant objective properties are acknowledged (Father Dolan becomes the paddle). We approach here a lyrical method that requires us to be aware of an effect on the beholder --"Stephen, or ourselves through Stephen--not of an objectively apprehensible quality in the thing revealed...we must try to identify ourselves with Stephen or wrest a meaning of our own from the revelation". This version of the theory, I should note, would be potentially useful to the New Criticism, and may explain the the attention the epiphanies received from critics in the 50's and 60's.
--Dimp (damned important): Hendry cites epiphany as one purpose of Joyce's "amazing virtuosity of language". In other words, when a character is broken down into parts and re-synthesized, the consonantia and claritas are achieved through the carefully balanced rhetorical properties of language itself. In fact, Hendry argues that Joycean patterns of language tend to become too mechanically ingenious, and convolute the re-assembly of the image which culminates in the epiphany.
--"the artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."-Stephen to Lynch.
--"revealing" an individual essence by means of a detail or an object to which it has only a fortuitous relation
--Joyce's conception of the symbol is much closer to the conception of the medieval Church: a symbol has a specific function to perform in a given situation, and when that function has been performed, nothing prevents the use of the symbol again in a totally different context.
Most importantly, Irene Hendry introduces Joyce's theory of epiphanies as an ordering principle not just for readers of Joyce's work, but as a way to explain the method of the writer himself. Joyce's work is a "tissue of epiphanies, great and small, from fleeting images to whole books". Hendry opened up a discourse that endured through the New Criticism and, curiously, hushed to little more than a murmur in the last half-century. Why did this formidable theory lose steam? Perhaps it is time to revisit the epiphany as a central tool for reading and understanding the method and principle of an artist who remains, in many ways, a mystery.
I have just read closely Irene Hendry's pivotal essay, "Joyce's Epiphanies". Published in the July 1946 issue of The Sewanee Review, the essay initiates a discourse looking at Joyce's then "little-noticed" theory of epiphanies, and was the first (as far as I can tell) to argue that the theory was central to Joyce's method and principle. Hendry takes her cue from Levin and Spencer, who "emphasize only the obvious aspect of epiphany: its effect on the observer and his relation to the object 'epiphanized'." In Hendry's model, the theory of epiphany, expounded in Stephen Hero, is a central ordering principle in Joyce's work, which guides his method from Dubliners to Finnegan's Wake, and which holds the key to what Joyce called the "task" of the artist.
In summary, Hendry applies the Thomistic aesthetic explained in Stephen Hero to Joyce's method in Dubliners, locating the Integritas, Consonantia, and Claritas in each story. I will not bore you with a detailed explanation of each term, but suffice it to say that they are the elements of a method, described by Hendry, in which an aesthetic image is isolated, dismantled and re-synthesized through language, and ultimately made radiant. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Well, Hendry acknowledges that Joyce, in giving us his theory of epiphanies, shared a "systematic formulation to a common esthetic experience, so common that few others--writers, if not estheticians--have thought it worth considering for its own sake". Hendry makes good use of the theory given to her, offering a few versions useful in tracing Joyce's method--the "block" technique in Dubliners, in which claritas is achieved when an apparently trivial detail or event at the end of the story serves to illuminate the preceding details. Then there is the "moment of revelation without its narrative base"--a technique that realizes all three principles, integritas, consonantia and claritas in a single image, purged of all irrelevancies, particularities and ambiguities. In this model, characters are reduced to their "essences" by a narrative distillation in which only the most relevant objective properties are acknowledged (Father Dolan becomes the paddle). We approach here a lyrical method that requires us to be aware of an effect on the beholder --"Stephen, or ourselves through Stephen--not of an objectively apprehensible quality in the thing revealed...we must try to identify ourselves with Stephen or wrest a meaning of our own from the revelation". This version of the theory, I should note, would be potentially useful to the New Criticism, and may explain the the attention the epiphanies received from critics in the 50's and 60's.
--Dimp (damned important): Hendry cites epiphany as one purpose of Joyce's "amazing virtuosity of language". In other words, when a character is broken down into parts and re-synthesized, the consonantia and claritas are achieved through the carefully balanced rhetorical properties of language itself. In fact, Hendry argues that Joycean patterns of language tend to become too mechanically ingenious, and convolute the re-assembly of the image which culminates in the epiphany.
--"the artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."-Stephen to Lynch.
--"revealing" an individual essence by means of a detail or an object to which it has only a fortuitous relation
--Joyce's conception of the symbol is much closer to the conception of the medieval Church: a symbol has a specific function to perform in a given situation, and when that function has been performed, nothing prevents the use of the symbol again in a totally different context.
Most importantly, Irene Hendry introduces Joyce's theory of epiphanies as an ordering principle not just for readers of Joyce's work, but as a way to explain the method of the writer himself. Joyce's work is a "tissue of epiphanies, great and small, from fleeting images to whole books". Hendry opened up a discourse that endured through the New Criticism and, curiously, hushed to little more than a murmur in the last half-century. Why did this formidable theory lose steam? Perhaps it is time to revisit the epiphany as a central tool for reading and understanding the method and principle of an artist who remains, in many ways, a mystery.
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