by J Thomas Walden

Created on: May 19, 2008

When James Joyce defined "epiphany" in Stephen Hero as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself," he intended to remove God from its meaning, and place a constructionist context around his previous work. For an object to be "epiphanised," one of Joyce's key figures throughout his body of work, Stephen Dedalus, describes three separate processes that must occur. First, the object must be removed from its environment, lifted "away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing." Second, "the mind considers the object in relation to itself and to other objects," in order to understand it in it's natural state. Finally, the epiphany itself occurs when "we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance." The idea that every object and issue has its own essence which can be coerced out of every day life is central to Joyce's idea, in that it creates an escape from religion. The soul of every thing exists unto itself, and without the power of God to direct it.

Joyce uses epiphany in his most well-known work, Ulysses, in order to drive his characters through twenty-four hours in Dublin. Stephen, now older, has come to the dead end of his thesis on epiphany. Rather than the simple objects he epiphanised in Stephen Hero, he is now bent on finding the essential "whatness" of existencehis so-called "signatures of all things," including religion, history and language. However, he is no longer able to find beauty because each concept is all-consuming. Each purports to control all that it perceives, and Joyce's post-colonial, post-modern sensibilities shine through the text.

Each broad subject claims to pursue some higher end, and each attempts to claim stake in all existence; however, Stephen is not interested in playing subject to a master, and his views on nationalist sentiment correlate to this. Remembering his time in Paris, Stephen considers the sad state of Irish nationalism that he found there. He references a poem by Robert Browning "of lost leaders, the betrayed, wild escapes," written as an indictment of William Wordsworth's betrayal of his initial literary cause. He makes this reference in order to reflect on Kevin Egan, an Irish nationalist who Stephen once knew in Paris. The nationalist movement he had so thoroughly devoted himself to, however, had ultimately abandoned Egan. Stephen,

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>