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.