In Stephen Hero, the
protagonist is walking down Eccles
Street one evening when he passes a young woman
"standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses
which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis." A young
man is leaning on the railings talking to her, and Stephen
hears her softly speaking flirtatious, tempting words. The
incident makes him think of "collecting many such moments
together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a
sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of
speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind
itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to
record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they
themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments."
Stephen tells a dubious Cranly that even "the clock of the Ballast Office was
capable of an epiphany. . . . I will pass it time after time,
allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only
an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then
all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany"
(211). He goes on to explain that this is the instant in which
the object reveals its quidditas or "whatness"
(213)—when, Gifford infers, "the metaphoric potential of an
object (or a moment, gesture, phrase, etc.) is realized."
Like Stephen with Cranly, Joyce was telling his
companions about these spiritual revelations at the same time
that he was writing Stephen Hero. Theodore Spencer's
introduction to Stephen Hero notes that Oliver Gogarty mentions
the term in his autobiography, As I was Walking down
Sackville Street (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1937). Joyce
excused himself from a certain gathering and left the room,
prompting Gogarty to write, "I don't mind being reported, but
to be an unwilling contributor to one of his Epiphanies is
irritating. / Probably Fr. Darlington had taught him as an
aside in his Latin class—for Joyce knew no Greek—that
'Epiphany' meant 'a showing forth.' So he recorded under
'Epiphany' any showing forth of the mind by which he
considered one gave oneself away. / Which of us had endowed
him with an 'Epiphany' and sent him to the lavatory to take it
down?" (295).
Joyce certainly did think of epiphanies in this way, but he
also had religious connotations in mind, since he was
beginning to think of his fiction as performing secular
functions comparable to the magic of church rituals. Richard
Ellmann notes that he was coming to think of Christianity as
"a system of metaphors, which
as metaphors could claim his fierce allegiance." Literary
fiction could be conceived as a kind of transubstantiation,
"transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant
body of eternal life" (A Portrait, 240).
In August 1904 Joyce wrote to a friend that he was writing "a
series of epicleti" called Dubliners that would
"betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many
consider a city" (Letters, 55). The term epicleti,
taken from the Greek Orthodox liturgy, refers to the moment of
transubstantiation. In a letter to his brother Stanislaus,
Joyce wrote that "there is a certain resemblance between the
mystery of the mass and what I am trying to do." He was
trying, he said, to give his readers "a kind of intellectual
pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of
everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic
life of its own" (quoted in Robert Scholes and A. Walton Lizt,
eds., Dubliners: Text, Criticism, and Notes, 250).
The Epiphany, in the Christian calendar, is usually
celebrated on January 6. The word can refer to the showing of
the Christ child to the Magi or, alternatively, to the baptism
of Jesus in the River Jordan, during which the "Spirit of God"
descended "like a dove" and a voice from heaven said, "This is
my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased" (Matthew
3:16-17). Both stories describe a manifestation of divinity.
Joyce did not use the term in quite the same way. His
epiphanies were insights into the essential nature of mundane
realities, not into godhead. As Gogarty recognized, they could
be a manifestation or "showing forth of the mind by which he
considered one gave oneself away"—or a moment in which an
object revealed something essential about itself. They might
give spiritual exaltation to the reader, but only by
symbolizing the ways in which Dublin worked—not by symbolizing
otherworldly realities. In Proteus Stephen seems to
be mocking himself for the air of spiritualism, "deeply
deep," that nevertheless clung to the use of terms
like epicleti and epiphanies.
The concept of the epiphany has real relevance to Joyce's
literary practice. He used the label for at least 40 (and
perhaps more than 70) short sketches that he wrote between
1898 and January 1904. Some of these are summarized on a
webpage published by The James Joyce Centre at http://jamesjoyce.ie/epiphanies.
Although he never followed through on what apparently was his
intention to collect them in a book, Joyce did later
incorporate some of his epiphanies in Stephen Hero, A
Portrait, Dubliners, and Ulysses. A critical
book by Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, The Workshop
of Daedalus: James Joyce and the raw materials for A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Northwestern UP,
1965), details some of these reuses.
Various scholars have used the term to name the effects that
conclude stories in Dubliners, in which an image of
some human action or thought, or of some object or event,
seems to capture the hopelessness of the characters' lives.
And for all his embarrassment about his earlier epiphanies,
Stephen seems to be heading down the same road. At the end of
Aeolus, he tells a vignette
about "Dubliners" which concludes with the image of two aged
virgins spitting plum seeds off the top of Nelson's pillar.
