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.