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.