rough and sundry stuff

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.