Article+on+the+Epiphanies

From “Joyce’s Dubliners as Epiphanies” by Francesca Valente
"Epiphany" refers to a showing-forth, a manifestation. In the Christian tradition the Feast of the Epiphany celebrates the revelation of Christ’s divinity to the Magi [3 Wise Men]. For Joyce, however, it means a sudden revelation of the whatness of a thing, the moment in which ‘the soul of the commonest object...seems to us radiant’ (Joyce, //Stephen Hero//, 213). The artist is supposed to search for an epiphany not among the gods but among men in ‘casual, unostentatious, even unpleasant moments’ (Ellman, //James Joyce//, 87). Since for Joyce ‘all art is a shadow of the Incarnation’ (McLuhan, Joyce’s Portrait, 251), his choice of the religious term ‘epiphany’ is very appropriate because it underlines the conception he had of the artist as a priest of the eternal imagination, a revealer.

Throughout his works, from //Dubliners// to //Finnegans Wake//, Joyce carried out his creative task by means of a series of epiphanies, a sequence of related moments of insight and understanding. The central meaning of Joyce’s works is provided not so much by plot but by the revelation they suggest of a certain universe in a certain order. These moments in which ‘the soul is born’ (Joyce, //Portrait of the Artist//, 203) are seen as revelatory either to the fictional character who experiences them, or to the reader, or both; the figure inside the story is shown the truth about himself and the situation he is in, whereas the reader is shown the whole process which, in its turn, becomes an epiphany for him.

...What emerges from //Dubliners// as a whole is the revelation of the city itself, perceived in its spiritual, intellectual and moral paralysis... Figure and ground become one in an all-inclusive static moment of ecstasy and gestalt revelation. Joyce understood that his epiphanies, in order to become what they were supposed to be, had to give up their disembodied existence to become parts of an organic narrative, where all the elements have a precise function. (con'td. below)

Joyce maintained that in this dissolving time the purpose of life must be to retain for an instant as intense an impression as possible, and that the purpose of art must be to seize that instant and to represent it as it is.... The world Joyce reveals is neither beautiful nor exalting; in //Dubliners//, it is weak and invalid, stricken by aphasia.

Paralysis, a living death or total anesthesia of the senses, seems to be the existential condition of Dubliners and its crux. Joyce himself confirmed this in a letter of July 1904 to Curran, where he said that he intended Dubliners ‘to betray the sould of the hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city’ (Joyce, //Letters//, 55). Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of ‘fifteen epiphanies’ which were written to let Irish people take ‘one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass’ (Letters, 63-64).

Joyce’s tales, faithful to his intentions, portray impotence, frustration and death. His city is the heart of moral, intellectual and spiritual paralysis and all the citizens are victims. The paralysis gradually becomes more powerful and all-encompassing. It starts as individual paralysis through the three stages, childhood, adolescence and mature life; it widens to collective paralysis in the three stories of public life so as to invade the political, religious and artistic spheres of Dublin. Finally, ‘The Dead’ marks the spreading out of paralysis at every level to universal dimensions, underlined also by the imagery of the snow enveloping the whole of Ireland. Individually, the characters of this story – the partygoers – are living dead; they are physically alive but fail to live. Politics is dead and lowered to the narrow-minded and fanatic nationalism of Miss Ivors. Religion is also atrophied, as is pointed out by the eloquent image of the monks lying in their coffins; and art has equally come to a still point, degraded as it is, to mechanized piano pieces and the ineffective singing of Bartell D’Arcy, the hoarse tenor.

The whole collection of //Dubliners// evokes in fact a fallen world characterized by sterile fragmentation and by the abnormal isolation of the senses. The citizens of Dublin depend solely upon the eye for comprehension and, what is more frustrating, they do not see clearly but in a blurred way. For example, note the way Gabriel’s eyes in ‘The Dead’ are ‘irritated by the floor which glittered with beeswax under the heavy chandelier.’ There is no interplay of the senses in these stories.... An epiphany therefore is a functioning of all the senses in unison that produces a change or metamorphosis, because it leads from unawareness to the sudden awareness of one’s own predicament. The epiphany is provoked by the clash of the visual with the acoustic; all the stories can be read in this light.

“The Dead," which is both the synthesis and the climax of //Dubliners//, is a single epiphany of multiple meaning (death in life, life in death, evocation of the dead). The Morkan party, which some critics note takes place on January 6, the feast of Epiphany, is a perfect Joycean choice. Christianity as a dynamic force has dwindled to a mockery of itself, though in the very mockery there is a glimpse of salvation. On the night of Epiphany, Gabriel (the archangel) follows his star to the Morkan house, where he will come face to face with his own self, the past and the future. The acoustic epiphanic moment, which reveals that Gretta has been living a dead life in contrast to the remembered romance of her youth, is a revelation that destroys the bubble of his unreal existence. Gabriel finds himself guilty not of withholding love but of lacking it entirely. He reviews from a new perspective his inner self until he is able to overcome his proud isolation and to become one with the living and the dead – in other words, the whole of humanity. Therefore, he is ready to accept, to give and participate.

Gabriel reaches the awareness of his own predicament by putting to use all his senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste. Through the uniting of his senses, Gabriel penetrates the darkness and discovers his image in the mirror. He now realizes that he must begin his self-discovery be recovering his Irish soul, the most ancient and forgotten part of which is the integrity of feeling associated with the West of Ireland. The ancient Irish soul has been destroyed by a degenerated faith and by political and cultural subjection to England. Gabriel must rediscover himself by rediscovering his race and vice-versa.