Revenire Cuprins

EPIPHANIES IN JAMES JOYCE’S ULYSSES

Lector dr. Arleen Ionescu, Universitatea Petrol-Gaze din Ploieşti

The paper is an attempt to define epiphanies and to apply the term to Joyce’s “Ulysses”. In
the early draft of “A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man”, entitled “Stephen Hero”, James Joyce
adapted the term to secular experience. He meant a sudden revelation while observing a
commonplace object. Stephen’s earlier ambition is to compose momentous epiphanies.
In Joyce’s “Ulysses”, the most important revelations which are derived from phases of the
mind are the dream epiphanies. In his work, “Epiphany in the Modern Novel- Revelation as Art”,
Morris Beja divided Joyce’s epiphany into two major types: retrospective epiphanies and the past
recaptured. My paper also deals with the irrelevance of epiphanies which is connected to a more
general notion which might be called the criterion of incongruity.

Definitions on epiphanies vary according to different dictionaries of literary terms: the

epiphany is “a manifestation” of God’s presence in the world. 1. It is a symbol of a spiritual state.
This aspect of aesthetic theory is left out of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but a
knowledge of it is essential for an understanding of Joyce as an artist2. The epiphany
commemorates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the form of the Magi. It is celebrated
on Twelfth Night, January 6, according to Hugh Holman’s A Handbook to Literature.
Initially the epiphany was not given a wide currency as a critical term. James Joyce took a
theological word and applied it to a literary tradition; he used it to designate an event in which the
essential nature of something – a person, a situation, an object – was suddenly perceived.3 The first
appearance of the term in criticism is recorded in Joyce’s Stephen Hero. Dubliners, A Portrait of an
Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are in fact series of increasingly complex and
revealing insights of grace as well as intuitions of immortality. In the early draft of A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen Hero, the Irish writer adapted the term to secular
experience. By epiphanies, in Joyce’s words, Stephen 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 moments4.
Putting all these definitions together we may say that the epiphany is a revelation, a sudden
insight while observing a commonplace object. Stephen’s earlier ambition is to compose
momentous epiphanies. Stephen also calls epiphanies spiritual ones, so we can easily interpret the
concept of epiphany religiously. In fact until the past few centuries moments of revelation were
almost invariably regarded as just what the phrase implies: moments in which an external divine
force reveals the truth5.
In Joyce’s Ulysses, the most important revelations which are derived from phases of the
mind are the dream epiphanies. Richard Ellman shows that Joyce was indeed fascinated by
Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, even if the main difference between the two great
twentieth century personalities consists in the fact that while Joyce was looking for revelation,
Freud was in search of scientific explanation.
In his work, Epiphany in the Modern Novel- Revelation as Art, Morris Beja divided Joyce’s
epiphanies which arise from memory into two major types: retrospective epiphanies and the past
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recaptured6. The main difference between the two consists in the fact that former are the ones in
which an event arouses no special impression when it occurs, but produces a sudden sensation of
new awareness when it is recalled at some future time7; the latter reminds us of Proust and his À la
recherché du temps perdu.
Sometimes an epiphany may originate in a direct statement, yet the revelation produced is
somehow irrelevant to that statement. Such epiphanies are connected to a more general notion
which might be called the criterion of incongruity or the criterion of insignificance. After all, it is a
trivial incident, a triviality that makes Stephen think of collecting epiphanies.
An epiphany may also arise, as Stephen tells Cranly from the apprehension of a concrete
object, such as the clock of the Ballast Office – which they were passing by at that moment:
-Yes, said Stephen. 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.
-What?
-Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision
to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised8.
The exposition of aesthetics in Stephen Hero begins as Stephen tells Cranly: it is just in
epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty9. That is what he calls claritas, the
moment in which after perceiving an object (integritas) and apprehending it (consonantia), we
recognize the thing in itself – its soul, its whatness: This is the moment which I call epiphany10.
Stephen states the matter explicitly the thing the Ballast office Clock is out there; the
perceiver needs to adjust his focus carefully under ideal conditions, an epiphany occurs: object and
observer coincide to produce a pellucid reality.
Similarly, in A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man, Stephen Dedalus explains to Lynch
how, confronted by a basket, the mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible
universe which is not a basket in order to apprehend it as one thing. This phase of perception is
called by Stephen the discovery of the object’s integritas. Two successive phases, the discovery of
consonantia and of claritas yield a radiant manifestation of the whatness of a thing. Epiphany is
central not only in Joyce’s concept of the function of the artist. It plays a very important role in his
theories of aesthetics.
Many writers, especially religious poets and mystics have conveyed experience of
epiphanies: George Herbert, Henry Vaugham, Gerard Manley Hopkins are to be mentioned for
striking instances of epiphanies. A special place should be given to Wordsworth, as the most
influential Romantic statement on inspiration probably belongs to him. In the Preface to the Lyrical
Ballads, William Wordsworth suggested that we should be aware of the poetic value of moments if
illumination: a state of vivid sensation, to choose incidents and situations from common life… and
to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings11.
Wordsworth’s stress was on the artist, not on a divine source, therefore on the subject, not
on the object, as in the case of Joyce. The Prelude almost amounts to a theory of epiphany:
There are in our existence spots of time
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue…
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life that give
Profoundest knowledge to what point, and how,
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The mind is lord and master outward sense

The obedient servant of her will. Such moments
Are scattered everywhere, taking their date
From our first childhood. (12.208-20)
The pleasure which lies in the spots of time for Wordsworth is called the bread of everyday
life in Joyce’s terms, as his brother remembers: -Don’t you think, said he reflectively, choosing his
words without haste, there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am
trying to do? I mean that I am trying in my poems to give people some 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 … for their mental, moral, and spiritual uplift, he concluded glibly12.
Wordsworth’s view of experience foreshadows not only Joyce, but Proust as well. Proust
was to put an emphasis on the past and memory. What Wordsworth did was to emphasize that the
poet’s emotion is not so much recollected as recaptured.
In his poem, when the daffodils flash upon his inward eye13, he is happy not because he
remembers an image that had once been pleasant but because he regains his past feelings. His
constant meditation on his memories also leads him to give to many of his childhood experiences
meanings they did not originally have14, to make them what Morris Beja calls retrospective
epiphanies.
Wordsworth is not the only Romantic poet who made a great deal out of spots of time.
Shelley recorded in a number of poems occasions when he became a dedicated spirit (in
Wordsworth’s terms). It seems that it is from Shelley’s remarks in the Defence of Poetry on the
transitoriness of poetic inspiration that Joyce drew the image of the fading coal, a term which he
employed when referring to the state of mind during the mysterious instant of claritas, in other
words in the moment of epiphany.
We may mention Blake as well for his Auguries of Innocence holding Infinity in the Palm of
your hand/ And Eternity in an hour. Therefore we may consider Romantic poets took up the interest
in the relativity of time. As George Poulet shows, Romanticism desired to give the moment all the
profundity, all the infinity of duration of which man feels capable15. Romantic poets had thus long
anticipated Proust’s realisation in The Past Recaptured that the subjective chronometers allotted to
men are not all regulated to keep the same time…16
The appearance of epiphanies makes the reader’s task difficult in the sense that he has to see
beyond the lines. For instance the reader should understand that in Proteus Stephen has just
connected the Hellenistic past (Alexandria) with theosophy (mahamanvantara), and both with
epiphanies.
Erlene Stetson discusses the third chapter of Ulysses as being less dependent on the outside
world than the first two and takes into account the first paragraph as being dominated by ideas from
Aristotle, Berkeley and Jakob Boehme, even if none of them are named: Reading two pages apiece
of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward
to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-
one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer
Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply
deep, copies to be sent if you died to all great libraries of the world, including Alexandria?
Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della
Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one
feels that one is at one with one who once… (James Joyce, Ulysses, with an introduction by Declan
Kiberd, Penguin Books, 1992, p. 50)
Weldon Thornton’s lead, that probably Stephen was introduced to Pico della Mirancola
through Pater’s The Renaissance, is useful. Reference books on Ulysses state or imply that Pico
della Mirandola (1463-1494), an Italian humanist, attempted to bring together earlier religions, or
mysticism, with Christianity and became a natural forerunner of Joyce. This is what Stephen tries to
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do in Proteus. We shouldn’t forget that Stephen’s name reminds us of the Greek myth. An
invocation to the archetypal architect Daedalus would perhaps serve as a fitting prelude to our
demonstration. To hide the bull born Minotaur and save king Minos and Pasiphae from disgrace,
the cunning craftsman Daedalus built a fabulous labyrinth in Crete. This masterpiece of creativity
later served as a prison-tower to the creator, and flight from the maze turned out to be his sole
means of escape. With newly designed waxen wings, Daedalus strove to overcome the menace of
his own creation. Daedalus’ maze is in fact a small act of creation included in God’s Creation; it is
also an alternative to the perfection of Nature: Art is the perfection of Nature: were the world now
as it was the sixth day, there were yet a Chaos: Nature hath made one world and Art another. Now
Nature is not at variance with Art, nor Art with Nature, they being both servants of Providence. In
briefe, all things are artificiall; for Nature is the Art of God17. As Mulligan says, the mockery of it
is the absurd name of Stephen, an ancient Greek. (James Joyce, Ulysses, p. 2) who tries to find a
way to mix mythology and religion.
Pater describes the frame of mind of Pico della Mirandola, the modern scholar who would
bring about a reconciliation between Christianity and the religion of ancient Greece, which is very
close to Stephen’s frame of mind in both A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses: A
modern scholar occupied by this problem observe that all religions may be regarded as natural
products, that, at least in their origin, their growth, and decay, they have common ways, and are
not to be isolated from the other movements of the human mind in the periods in which they
respectively prevailed; that they arise spontaneously out of the human mind, as expressions of the
varying phases of its sentiments concerning the unseen world; that every intellectual product must
be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced18. Joyce’s
Stephen might have noticed that each has contributed something to the development of the religious
sense, and ranging them as so many stages in the general education of the human mind, justify the
existence of each. This places him again very close to Pico della Mirandola for whom the basis of
the reconciliation of the religions of the world lays in the inexhaustible activity and creativeness of
the human mind itself, in which all religions alike have their root, and in which all are reconciled;
just as the fancies of childhood and the thoughts of old age meet and are laid to rest, in the
experience of the individual19.
In fact what else is his interior monologue if not a commentary on The Genesis? He sees
beyond appearances and he uses his eyes for that: Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if
no more, thought through my eye. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and
seawrack, the nearing tide, that rusty boot. (p. 45) The world seen by Stephen leads to a series of
images referring to the way colours create the world and the human beings: Snotgreen, bluesilver,
rust: coloured signs. Limits of the diaphane. But he adds: in bodies. (p. 45) This hierarchical image
originates in the first sublime moment in Genesis, where God said, let there be light: and there was
light. And God saw the light that it was good and God divided the light from the darkness. As the
quotation from the Bible suggests that light was preceded in fact by sounds, as God said that there
should be light. Stephen is thus aware of that: Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the
audible. Open your eyes. No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o’er his base, fell through the
nebeneinander ineluctably. I am getting on nicely in the dark. My ash sword hangs at my side. Tap
with it: they do. My two feet in his boots are at the end of his legs, nebeneinader. Sounds solid:
made by the mallet of Los Demiurgos. (p. 45)
Yet what makes Stephen think of the genesis is the sound of his boots: Crush, crack, crick,
crick. (p. 45). That gives him the impression that he is walking into eternity along Sandymount
strand. (p. 45) Therefore, the reader of Ulysses must take into account the fact that Joyce’s
epiphanies mean that the opposites mix: sacred-profane, saint-like- trivial, etc. In fact Stephen
believed that the manifestation essential to epiphany may result from a variety of causes: the
vulgarity of speech or of gesture or …. a memorable phase of the mind itself20.
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From this first act of division, images- sounds, Julia Kristeva demonstrates all the other
divisions, including that between the sexes: Yahweh Elohim created the world and concluded
alliances by dividing (Karath) light from darkness, the waters of the heavens from the waters of the
earth, the earth from the seas, the creatures of the water from the creatures of the air, the animals
each according to their kind and man (in His own image) from himself. It’s also by division that he
places them opposite each other: man and woman divided from man, made of that very thing which
is lacking in him, the biblical woman will be wife, daughter or sister or all of them at once, but she
will rarely have a name.21
An act of division creates an epiphany in the case of Leopold who performs a Druidic act of
divination in June, before the summer solstice; Stonehenge sits in his hand, making him control the
sun and become king. With this tiny, detached, highly ironic gesture, Bloom extinguishes the
universe – and then, playing the game of Genesis, brings it back. It is obvious that again Joyce had
some Renaissance engraving in mind. Yet we should also take into account the light emanating
from the eyes of Bloom: For Joyce these light rays – knowledge, sexuality, identity, creativity
originate not in the physical world but rather within the darkening eyes of the artist in the act of
divination. To see: to perceive; to understand: to believe22.
Time means life as well as death and it is human beings’ omnipotent adversary, that they
slice into discrete linear segments (days, hours, minutes, seconds, even lifetimes) which become a
shield against our fear of unlinearity which has a climax in eternity, and an anticlimax in
obliteration and death. The reconciliation of Christianity and the religion of old Greece is also felt
in terms of the reconciliation of past and future: I am – Stephen thinks – a stride at a time. A very
short space of time through very short time of space. Five, six: the nacheinander. (p. 45).
The character understands that God is present in the world, what he has to do is just to
realise that, to open his inner eyes and see: Open your eyes. (p. 45) becoming aware means
becoming responsible, understanding that life is followed by death: No. Jesus! If I fell over a cliff
[…] (p. 45)
As Shiv K. Kumar noticed, the present moment in “Ulysses” has the same fluid tendency of
continuously fading into the past and future in complete defiance of any arbitrary divisions of time.
The minds of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus remain in a perpetual flux and cannot be said to
coincide with any particular „mathematical instant.”23 Even if characters live in the present, the
past is commanded by the present experience. Experiences from the past are distilled by elaborately
intellectual metaphors. There is – as Kumar suggested- a significant resemblance between Joyce’s
conception of the continuous present tense, Gertrude Stein’s “prolonged present”, William James’s
“specious present”, and Bergson’s real, concrete live present.
As Richard Ellmann suggested, Stephen’s apostasy is accordingly presented as a choice for
himself, and not necessarily one for others. On the other hand, he is an exemplum, not only in his
capacity as artist, but in his character of emancipated man. His initial submission, in fear and
remorse, to the terrifying sermons about death, judgement, and punishment, changes to revulsion at
their cruelty24.

Bibliographical notes:

1
M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, fourth edition, Saunders International Editions, 1984, p. 54
2
J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, Revised Edition, Penguin Books Ltd., Harmindsworth, Middlesex,
1985, pp. 237-238
3
C. Hugh Holman, A Handbook to Literature, fourth edition, based on the original edition by William Flint Thrall and
Addison Hibbard, Bobbs-Merril Educational Publishing, Indianapolis, 1980, p. 164
4
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, edited by Theodore Spencer, revised by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, Norfolk,
Conn: New Directions, 1963, p. 7
5
Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel – Revelation as Art, Peter Owen Lmt., 1971, p. 14
6
Ibid., p. 15
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7
Ibid., p. 15
8
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. cit., p. 211
9
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. cit., p. 211
10
Ibid., p. 213
11
Apud. Morris Beja, 1971, p. 24
12
Stanilaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years, ed. By Richard Ellmann, New York, 1958, pp.
103-104
13
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils. (I wandered lonely as a cloud).
14
Morris Beja, 1971, p. 25
15
George Poulet, Studies in Human Time, translated by Elliot Coleman, Baltimore, Md. John Hopkins Press, 1956
16
Apud Morris Beja, 1971, p. 35
17
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, Ed. Norman Endicott, New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday and Co. Inc., 1967,
p. 23
18
W. Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Pico della Mirandola, London: Macmillan, 1990, pp. 33-34
19
Ibid., p. 34
20
James Joyce, Stephen Hero, p. 211
21
Julia Kristeva, 'About Chinese Women ', The Kristeva Reader, 1986, Toril Moi, Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
pp. 139-140
22
Richard Ellmann, James Joyce: Light Rays, prologue to ***, Light Rays: James Joyce and Modernism, , New
Horizon Press Publishers, New York, 1984, p. 13
23
Shiv K. Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel, Blackie and Son Limited, London and Glasgow,
1962. p. 105
24
Richard Ellmann, 1984, p. 2