The Aesthetics of Phenomena Joyce's Epiphanies PDF

The Aesthetics of Phenomena: Joyce's Epiphanies
Jūratė Levina
Joyce Studies Annual, 2017, pp. 185-219 (Article)
Published by Fordham University Press
For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/682772
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The Aesthetics of Phenomena
Joyce’s Epiphanies
.
J Ū R AT E L E V I N A
To Hans Walter Gabler
This study began as a sample reading of an ostensibly marginal and man-

ageable corpus of Joyce’s work in which I tried to see whether phenome-
nology, as a specific perspective of looking at things, has anything at all
to offer to our understanding of Joyce. The perspective turned out over-
whelmingly productive, every discovery was followed by another, and the
textual field of my examination expanded until Joyce himself emerged,
essentially, as a phenomenologist: an original and rigorous thinker who
developed a phenomenology of aesthetic experience in his own terms,
and an artist whose creative work is comprehensively grounded in the
conception of art put forward in his theoretical reflections.
The reading that follows is an exposition of this vision of Joyce and of
the phenomenological aesthetics of literature that Joyce elaborates in his
writing across different genres. Epiphany remains at the epicenter of this
vision, but the vision itself expands far beyond the limits of what epiphany
encapsulates as a concept or what it appears to be as a literary genre. This
conception of literary experience is not defined by epiphany or any other
single notion but reshapes our prevailing assumptions about art and litera-
ture, just as phenomenology does in relation to analytic or metaphysical
philosophy.
As a perspective grounded in distinct philosophical positions, phenom-
enology has not yet enabled a comprehensive reading of Joyce. Separate
aspects of Joyce’s writing have been examined as expressing phenomeno-
logical insights (which, unsurprisingly, cluster around epiphany) from
early Joyce criticism to the present, but there has been no attempt to
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186 j ūr at e. le vi na
expand these implications to an understanding of Joyce’s work as a whole.

Rudd Fleming back in 1952 and Shiv K. Kumar several years later seem to
identify the phenomenological grounding of Joyce’s notion of epiphany,
without drawing sufficiently forceful conclusions.1 Antoine Levy, in a far
more recent reading, derives a phenomenological notion of epiphany
directly from Aristotle and uses it to foreground Stephen’s perceptual
apprehension in “Proteus,” but he does not position his reading or Joyce’s
work in the context of phenomenology.2 Richard Kearney swerves in the
opposite direction: He draws on Joyce’s epiphany to build a hermeneutic
phenomenology of religion, language, and otherness, yet his engagement
with Joyce is mostly interpretative, focused on the manifestation of these
phenomena in Joyce’s narrative plots but not on his work as a medium
for expressing them.3 Sharon Kim opens her monograph on literary
epiphany with a chapter on parallels between Joyce’s epiphany and Hei-
degger’s epiphanic aesthetics, but misses the phenomenological thrust that
quite clearly underlies both conceptions she presents.4 Carole Bourne-
Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg, in their editorial Introduction to an essay
collection on phenomenology in Modernism, list Joyce among the
“orchestrators of modernism” next to the paradigmatically phenomeno-
logical writers, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust; but the representation
of Joyce’s work in the collection is limited to a section in an article that,
both thematically and methodologically, is closer to postcolonial criticism
than phenomenological commentary.5
To go beyond such fragmentary insights and appreciate the full signifi-
cance and interpretative value of the phenomenological outlook in Joyce’s
art, we must begin with the philosophical grounding of phenomenology
itself.
PHILOSOPHICAL PRELIMINARIES
In the neo-Kantian frames of reference that dominate our current critical

discourse on art, we see aesthetic experience as a special, disinterested kind
of contemplation of an art object, considering the object itself and so the
experience autonomous from the rest of the world by definition. This
approach ascribes to a work of art an idealistic immanence and, conse-
quently, associates aesthetic experience with spiritual elevation and tran-
scendence, leaving the mundane experiences of the lived world behind.
However powerful, this conception of aesthetic autonomy is relatively
new in the history of philosophy, reaching back to the eighteenth century
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j oy ce ’s ep ip ha ni es 187
only. Kant himself in his early work uses the term “aesthetic” in the Greek
sense of the word—meaning sensuality as such, as opposed to intellect—
and defines the aesthetic in the way we know it only in the third Critique
against the work of his contemporary, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten.6
Edmund Husserl revives the original sense of the term by returning it
into its original dichotomy: The aesthetic here does not belong to the
domain of the artistic, as opposed to the other domains of experienced
reality, but denotes the sphere of the sensuous as opposed to the realm of
intellectual apprehension. This opposition grounds the operative logic of
Husserl’s phenomenological project and enables the hermeneutic concep-
tion of aesthetic experience developed by Martin Heidegger and Hans-
Georg Gadamer after Husserl in contrast to Baumgarten and Kant, as
well as the phenomenology of aesthetic experience developed by Mikel
Dufrenne.7
The phenomenological-hermeneutic return to the classical notion of
aesthetics takes place as a shift of analytic attention away from the work
of art as an object-in-itself, the central focus in neo-Kantian descriptions
of art, toward the conditions that mediate our perceptual apprehension
of the work and thus enable its self-manifestation to us in all possible
ways, including but not limited to its Kantian conception. To put it in
less abstract terms, a phenomenological examination does not quite try to
determine whether or not, say, a work of art indeed is what one claims it
to be but, rather, is guided by the question of what makes it possible for
a work to be perceived in a given way. To assume this perspective effec-
tively means to acknowledge the fact that all reality we know is perceived
reality by definition and, by consequence, to (re-)consider the object’s
constitution strictly within the framework of perceptual apprehension.
This qualifies the ontological examination of things crucially because per-
ceptual framework itself is endowed with a constitutive force: Not only
does perception mediate the manner in which things are manifest to us
but it also shapes their objective identities, as every given thing manifests
itself to us for what we understand it to be in the given conditions of its
self-manifestation. This reframing of ontology, performed in an insistence
on its embeddedness in perception and demanding an account of the
implications of this embeddedness, is the constitutive move of phenome-
nology itself, and it is referred to as the phenomenological reduction. To
assume and sustain this perspective means to approach all things of reality
we know as, irreducibly, perceived objects—or phenomena—rather than
objects-in-themselves.
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Insightfully performed and well sustained, phenomenological reflection

quite mercilessly reshapes all fundamental notions and reshuffles all basic
distinctions that constitute the operative framework of our thinking. The
phenomenological reduction significantly modifies categories such as sub-
jectivity and objectivity, body and mind, consciousness and the world,
interiority and exteriority, ideality and materiality, language and sensuous
perception, fiction and fact, imagination and knowledge, and experience
and reflection, repositioning them in relation to one another and to what
we perceive as reality itself. It is, therefore, an essentially philosophical
and complex project to reconsider our neo-Kantian assumptions about
art strictly in the framework of our perceptual experience of it.
Joyce himself undertook and successfully completed this project, draw-
ing on available terminologies to consider the general structure of percep-
tual apprehension and think how works of art function within it. These
reflections have enabled him to develop literary forms that are embedded
in the phenomenal structure of experience and that convey the effects
they do by virtue of this embeddedness. Anticipating phenomenological
re-descriptions of artistic expression, Joyce presents the work of art as not
quite an object-in-itself in the neo-Kantian sense but, rather, a medium
that evokes and intensifies the perception of things it expresses, making
them appear to the reader’s apprehending eye in the course of reading.
Understanding art as such a medium in theory and realizing this power
of artistic expression in creative practice, Joyce’s aesthetics as a whole is
the aesthetics of phenomena.
Epiphany, both as a concept and the genre of literary miniatures he
wrote, appears to have been instrumental in the development of Joyce’s
phenomenological understanding of art and its functions. To perform the
phenomenological turn with Joyce, we must face and deconstruct our
own neo-Kantian assumptions, which have long guided interpretations of
epiphany and the aesthetics Joyce builds around it.
THE RISE AND FALL OF LITERARY EPIPHANY
Epiphany is one of those enigmatic Modernist terms that resists conceptu-

ally rigorous re-definitions and that despite—or maybe because—its
ambiguity has an immensely wide field of practical application. While
epiphany rarely figures in theoretically grounded contemporary critical
discussions of Joyce, there is a substantial and still growing body of inter-
pretative criticism that presents Joyce as the originator of this concept and
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deploys it to read a variety of creative work. It seems that the Joycean

epiphany encapsulates a fundamental structure of literary representation,
found in virtually all major Modernists, from Dostoyevsky and Huysmans
to Proust, Woolf, Faulkner, Mann, Pound, Stevens, and Rilke.8 Epiphany
has also enabled several critics to read Joyce alongside Pater, Wordsworth,
and Browning.9 While many credit Joyce with giving “the phenomenon
its critical reputation,” the origins of epiphany as a literary technique have
been located in Katherine Mansfield and Chekhov, and its manifestations
found in the nineteenth-century sonnet and Gothic fiction, Emerson and
Whitman, George Moore and Yeats, Bowen and Beckett, Larkin and
Heaney, and even in the cinema of Stanley Kubrick.10
It would be a separate and rather ambitious project to examine such a
vast body of critical work in order to determine whether there is a com-
mon meaning of epiphany in this corpus and if it relates to Joyce’s work
beyond those few sentences from Stephen Hero usually quoted to define
the term.11 Yet the way in which epiphany was introduced and established
as a key concept within Joyce studies shows that it has been taken to name
the most general—representational—structure of signification in general.
Such a structure is characteristic of all language and artistic expression,
and it has been identified in the theoretical re-definitions of Joyce’s epiph-
any, effectively highlighting the double structure of the linguistic sign,
comprising the signifier and the signified. Hence, Don Gifford redefines
epiphany in ostensibly linguistic terms, as an instance “when the meta-
phoric potential of an object (or a moment, gesture, phrase, etc.) is real-
ized.”12 David Hayman follows Joyce in ascribing this structure to reality
itself by presenting epiphany as an artist’s exceptional capacity for “mak-
ing reality the vehicle for its own transcendence.”13 Transcendence—the
driving force of all signification—plays a crucial role in David Weir’s
idealist understanding of epiphany as a somewhat modified version of
the Kantian noumenon: an object that is apprehended by pure reason
and thus a purely ideal object, as opposed to phenomenal—sensuously
perceivable—reality.14 If epiphany could be taken to designate the basic
structure of signification within these and more specific definitions, it
could indeed be identified as an operative structure in any work of art.
Harry Levin, in his 1941 Critical Introduction, was the first to introduce
epiphany into critical discourse on Joyce and Modernism. Levin takes
into account the etymological meaning of the notion as a revelation of
the divine, while also relating it to the distinctly Modernist—namely,
Proustian—experience of a meaningfulness in modern life shining
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through its apparent chaos at certain, epiphanic, moments.15 Clearly, the

common denominator here is the double structure of a linguistic sign: the
perceivable surface of that through which the divine manifests itself, or
the chaotic surface of modern life, functions as the signifier to the signi-
fied, here identified with the divine, or the meaningful. Identifying this
structure in Joyce’s work, Levin redefines an epiphany as “any showing
forth” of an “inner meaning” (28) of someone or something. He goes on
to read the entire corpus of Joyce’s work as a series of “attempts to create
a literary substitute for the revelations of religion” (29). Levin thus seems
to have found a key to unlock Joyce’s unconventional, difficult narratives.
The problem is that he does not quite derive this key from Joyce. To
arrive at “a clinical definition” of epiphany, Levin quotes Oliver Gogarty,
a friend of Joyce’s (28). And, to claim the grounding of epiphany in
religious experience, he endows the words Joyce uses to characterize
epiphany—“spiritual manifestation”—with a generally assumed meaning,
as if they referred to the manifestation of Jesus Christ to the Magi (28),
disregarding the fact that the narrative episode where these words appear
does not link epiphany to Christ or even, arguably, to the divine.16
Levin’s version of epiphany established itself with remarkable speed and
force. Irene Hendry, publishing her seminal study of Joyce’s revelatory
aesthetics five years later in 1946, presents her reader with a fuller quote
from Stephen Hero to provide a guiding description of epiphany.17 But
her reading remains entrenched in Levin’s notion of epiphany and rein-
forces it even further by presenting Joyce as a systematic thinker and
practitioner of an ostensibly metaphysical, Thomistic aesthetics that
makes epiphany an experience of the transcendental. Like Levin and many
commentators today, Hendry does not consider the significance of the
narrative context in which Joyce gives his definition of the term, even
though the novel had been published two years before, in 1944.18 By
1964, this theoretical, allegedly Joycean concept of epiphany was firmly
established. Robert Scholes argues against this dominant tradition in
Joyce criticism, noting that the epiphanies Joyce actually wrote do not
reveal any transcendental, divine realities.19 A selection of Joyce’s collected
epiphanies had already been published, in 1956,20 and Scholes himself
edited them in full for publication in 1965,21 but his demand for taking
them into account in defining the concept remained unheard. Jacques
Aubert’s study of Joyce’s aesthetics is symptomatic in this respect: He
places epiphany at the core of Joyce’s thought on aesthetics and covers
all relevant texts and contexts of the early period in Joyce’s intellectual
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development, but he ignores Joyce’s epiphanies, written during the same

period.22
Admittedly, Joyce makes it easy for his commentators to identify in
epiphany the representational structure of signification. In Stephen Hero,
he gives two encapsulations of the term’s meaning, positioning them at
the beginning and the end of what seems to be a single narrative move.
Stephen happens to experience an epiphany, spontaneously names the
experience as such and then privately defines what he means by the word.
This is immediately followed by a much more detailed explanation of
what epiphany is and how it constitutes the core of aesthetic experience,
which Stephen gives to his friend Cranly (SH 211–13). The first encapsula-
tion of the term’s meaning specifies that by an epiphany Stephen “meant
a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of
gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself” (SH 211). The second
definition summarizes and closes Stephen’s elaborate explication of the
concept: At the climactic moment of an epiphanic self-manifestation of a
thing, the thing’s “soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its
appearance” and “seems to us radiant” even if this is “the commonest
object” that “achieves its epiphany” in the event (SH 213).
Joyce’s linguistic choices indeed appear to mark epiphany as both aes-
thetic and religious experience, ascribing to it a metaphysical dimension
that distinguishes this kind of apprehension from everyday experiences
of things. An epiphanic manifestation comes through the “vulgarity” of
verbal or bodily gesture, while itself being “spiritual”—that is, something
other than the vulgar gesture or the common object that brings it forth.
In the other definition, an object’s “soul” is said to break through “the
vestment of its appearance”—as if the soul was, again, something other
than the vestment through which it must break as the thing’s true,
authentic identity. Thus, Joyce seems to localize the sacred in the everyday
in order to build around it an aesthetics. Epiphanic experience is regarded
as a kind of religious revelation, while art turns out to be a secularized
manifestation of the divine. It seems that for Joyce, just as for medieval
man, everyday unreflected actions, ordinary unnoticeable events, and
common objects of the lived world have a symbolic divine meaning that
shows forth in an epiphany.23
This reading may be relatively easy to follow by virtue of building on
our common assumptions, but the validity of its interpretative reasoning
depends on the reader’s inclination to see the “soul” as purely metaphysi-
cal, fully removed from the sensuously perceivable manifestation of a
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thing, and to conflate the spiritual with the divine and thus the true.
Twentieth-century critical thought has exposed the operative mechanism
of these conflations extensively, questioning their ontological validity and
dismantling them in order to show that metaphysical idealities do not
necessarily have the value of eternal truths, and that truth, instead, is
grounded in the material, physically manifest and lived reality as it shows
itself to ordinary people in the routine circumstances of their daily lives.
Such critique of the metaphysical is the bread and butter of post-
structuralist readings of Joyce as a rebellious proponent of this turn of
Western thought, entangled in an ongoing self-critical effort to dismantle
symbolic structures that inform our thinking and to expose ungrounded
metaphysical assumptions that embed it.
This turn in Joyce’s intellectual development has been noted well before
post-structuralist self-awareness came to dominate Joyce studies. “A rejec-
tion of idealism leads ultimately to a rejection of esthetics itself, which
deals not with things but with ideas,”24 Scholes generalizes back in 1964,
while observing that Joyce shows interest in both epiphany and theoretical
aesthetics only in early years. Indeed, even then Joyce defines epiphany in
the voice of his fictional alter ego in a novel he left unfinished (SH 211–13),
removes the term from the published version of Stephen’s theory (P 204–
16), and has the Stephen of “Proteus” mock himself for ever believing that
he had been creating art of eternal value in the form of epiphanies (U
3.141–44). Joyce’s intention to publish his own epiphanies faded away (LII
28, 35), though he used most—but not all—of them in his published
fiction with more or less substantial revisions.25 He does not seem to have
cared for their survival even in manuscripts.26 With all these gestures of
self-dismissal in place, Joyce himself seems to undermine the significance
of epiphany for both his conception of art and his practice of creating it.
This helps to account for the neglect of epiphany in contemporary criti-
cism. Quite simply, epiphany seems to belong to the kind of discourse
that by now has been fully discredited for its metaphysical assumptions,
and that Joyce cast aside in the course of his artistic development.
However, there is another story to tell, if only the ideal “spiritual” is
not conflated with the sacred so readily but is considered instead as a
necessary, constitutive condition of all human perception. In this alterna-
tive story, Joyce turns out to be a consistent thinker and practitioner of
art as a medium that enables and intensifies the experience of apprehend-
ing lived reality. Epiphany proves to be central in his thought on aesthet-
ics, while his epiphanies appear to be instrumental in developing his own,
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distinctly Joycean form of narrative, in which he realizes his theoretical

conception of the fundamental functions of art. This is a consistency that
shows Joyce himself to have been, in effect, a phenomenologist.
JOYCE’S AESTHETICS OF EPIPHANEIA
Phenomenology does not contrast the body and the mind but, instead,
approaches consciousness as both sense-giving and embodied. Conscious-
ness is inseparably grounded in the sensuous body, for apprehension, by
definition, is sensuous experience as well as the work of the sense-giving
mind. From this point of view, every objectivity that constitutes itself in
perception is an intelligible ideality that manifests itself as a sensible iden-
tity. Hence, the constitution of an object does not quite refer to knowing
a Kantian noumenon—a pure ideality—by pure intellect but, rather, des-
ignates an event of grasping an object in the composite mode of both
intellectual understanding and sensible apprehension. Even Kant himself
concludes his analysis of the phenomena-noumena dichotomy with a
statement that, in reality, neither of these modes ever functions without
the other.27
In Husserl far more explicitly, the sensible and the intelligible consti-
tute two aspects of every perceptual act. A perceptual act is directed by an
ideality, or an eidos, which is the condition for anything to manifest itself
as an objectivity to the perceiving consciousness. Yet this act can only be
performed by a living consciousness: a consciousness that lives in the
sensing body and thus is grounded in the sensuous—that is, matter (or,
in the Husserlian Greek terms, hyle), which is organized into the percep-
tion of things.28 Considered in this perceptual framework, all things
appear to be perceived objectivities, or intentional objects. And because
intentional perception itself is the given condition of the human grasp of
all things, there is no “true” object as opposed to the intentional one: an
object must manifest itself somehow, and it manifests itself by way of
appearing to a perceiver. Thereby every object is also a phenomenon—
“that which appears” in the original, Greek meaning. It is only for Kant
that, as Heidegger puts it, “everything present has already become the
object of our representation” and has thus been torn away from its pre-
sumably true nature, while for the Greeks this distinction does not exist;
they think of “phainomena as phenomena”:
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phainestai means to them that being assumes its radiance, and in that
radiance it appears. Thus appearance is still the basic trait of the
presence of all present beings, as they rise into unconcealment.29
That is, reality shows in appearance, rather than being veiled or deformed
by it. The real manifests itself by appearing to human apprehension in a
moment of simultaneous self-manifestation and grasp of truth.
This moment is named an epiphany in Joyce. The word derives from
the Greek epiphaneia, and the semantic content Joyce gives it in Stephen
Hero makes it a synonym of the phenomenon.30 Here, Stephen defines
and describes epiphany as a phenomenal appearance of a thing, rather
than a symbolic structure of signification as it has been commonly under-
stood. To see that this is the case, it is crucial to keep in mind that Ste-
phen, explaining the concept to Cranly, is not describing a particular,
aesthetic object or experience, as opposed to other, non-aesthetic objects
or experiences, but is trying to understand “the mechanism of esthetic
apprehension” (SH 212). He points to an object that happens to be
there—the Ballast Office clock or a basket (SH 211, P 212)—in order to
show how any object is necessarily a perceptually apprehended object,
and he does this through theoretical reflection, trying to figure out what
exactly is going on when we are apprehending anything at all. In effect,
by asking himself this particular question in this particular way, Stephen
performs the phenomenological reduction and carries out a phenomeno-
logical analysis of perceptual experience.
In his ostensibly Thomistic description, Stephen indeed considers the
general conditions in which an object manifests itself in perceptual appre-
hension. To start with, he notes that perceiving an object is necessarily
grounded in the grasp of a certain perceptual field as potentially a “self-
bounded and selfcontained” entity against the background of what it is
not (P 212). Such a grasp is the originary condition for anything to mani-
fest itself as “one thing,” or “a thing” (SH 212, P 212)—that is, as a certain
wholeness, with a characteristic integrity to it. This also means that, on
examination, an object reveals itself as a consistent and internally cohesive
identity: It does not turn into something else if looked at from a different
perspective, nor does it disintegrate in the course of manifesting itself as
“multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts
and their sum” as the perceiver moves from “point to point” while observ-
ing it. On the contrary, these multiple appearances organize themselves
into an integrity—which Stephen associates with harmony and rhythm—
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whereby this identity appears to be “a thing,” “a definitely constituted

entity” (SH 212, P 212). Finally, while these are the general conditions of
perceptual apprehension, every given thing manifests itself within this
framework as having a distinct, even singular identity: an identity to itself
and thus a whatness that is recognizable as “that thing which it is and not
other thing” (P 213).
As an identity, a thing shows as identical to itself through multiple
appearances—hence, the perceiver’s grasp of this identity is the moment
of the constitution of an ideality. Husserl uses the word “eidos” for this
identity. Joyce marks this ideality by naming it a “spiritual manifestation”
and acknowledges its dependence on perception by binding it to “a spiri-
tual eye” that perceives it (SH 211). This is a conscious, sense-giving
eye: grounded in the bodily organ, it is, rather, a way of looking at a
thing, marked by an ability to tune into the mode of the thing’s self-
manifestation, “to adjust its vision to an exact focus.” Seeing the thing in
the best possible way constitutes an epiphany—an insight into what this
thing is (SH 211).
In Stephen Hero, Stephen does not have much more to say about this
eye as the organ that mediates aesthetic apprehension. Its description here
is limited to a quasi-metaphorical analogy between aesthetic perception
and the processes of the physiological body. Assuming that the human
body has the same physiological structure across the world, Stephen sees
“no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of diges-
tion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar” (SH
212). In a similar way, he concludes, it must be possible “to find the
justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the
earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension”
whereby human beings perceive the world in the symbolic terms of their
native cultural traditions, even though traditions themselves are incom-
patibly different (SH 212).
A Portrait proposes a more nuanced and fuller explanation. Here, Ste-
phen explains to Lynch that aesthetic apprehension, while evidently
involving both the sensuous living body and the apprehending sense-
giving mind, must not be confused with either physiological functions or
the projection of a metaphysical ideality on experience. On the one hand,
aesthetic response is not purely physiological: The sexual excitement one
might happen to feel looking at the Venus of Praxiteles in the Museum
does not constitute an aesthetic contemplation of the sculpture but is a
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“pornographical” (P 205) response to the female body the sculpture pres-

ents to the spectator’s view. On the plane of such physiological respon-
siveness, “we are all animals,” Stephen explains to Lynch (P 206), while
the response itself is the subject matter of a Darwinian “eugenics” con-
cerned with the reproduction of species rather than aesthetics (P 208–9).
On the other hand, aesthetic perception is not the contemplation of the
metaphysical either. Stephen takes some time to explain that the Thomis-
tic claritas seems to refer to “the artistic discovery and representation of
the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalisation which would
make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper con-
ditions” only to dismiss this implication as “literary talk” (P 213). Ste-
phen’s more adequate version of Aquinas looks into the “proper
conditions” of aesthetic apprehension themselves: “the scholastic quiddi-
tas, the whatness of the thing,” or given reality; the artist’s imagination, or
conscious intellectual apprehension, that conceives an aesthetic image as
the eidetic-spiritual form of this whatness; and “the enchantment of the
heart,” or the sensing body, that mediates all perception by definition (P
213). An aesthetic grasp of whatever appears in epiphanic experience
involves an overlap and mutual reinforcement of these conditions to the
effect of the self-manifestation of truth in the appearance. To manipulate
perceptual apprehension toward such an appearance is the fundamental
function of art and thus the ultimate task of an artist.
In effect, Stephen’s exposition of his theory elaborates on the signifi-
cance of every one of these constituents, although he carries it out in
rather abstract scholastic terms with very few examples to clarify the rela-
tionships between them. Yet Joyce’s own non-fictional writing on these
issues fills in the gaps, presenting us with a quite complete and internally
coherent phenomenological conception of literary aesthetics. Joyce’s notes
on aesthetics in the Paris and Pola Notebooks, parts of which he revised
for Stephen’s speeches in A Portrait, show him playing with the Aristote-
lian and Thomistic distinctions between the sensible and the intelligible.
Joyce must have been composing these notes while reading an English
translation of Aristotle along with Summa Theologica by Aquinas in the
original Latin or English.31 In either case, Joyce would be juggling the
basic terms of his would-be aesthetics in their Latin forms, sensatio/sensiti-
vus (sometimes aestheticus) for the sensible and intellectus/intellectivus for
the intelligible. These are the Latin equivalents for the Greek aisthēsis and
noesis referring to, respectively, intellectual and sensual apprehension,32
and providing the respective English words for the same concepts with
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Latin roots. The Greeks thought of apprehension in terms of the dichot-

omy of the sensible and the intelligible; neither Aristotle nor Aquinas
develops a comprehensive conception of beauty as the object of aesthetic
experience.33 It is, then, Joyce himself who splits the Aristotelian binary
opposition into a triad in his definition of art as “the human disposition
of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end”34 (P 207), introduc-
ing the aesthetic as a composite of the sensible and the intelligible in the
act of apprehending what a work of art brings into appearance. In his
critical writing, Joyce draws on this notion of art by demanding that
artistic expression expose three interrelated qualities: It must be clear,
which is achieved by controlling creative energies; it must control these
energies by being truthful to the vision of the things it expresses; and it
must achieve the effect of such truthfulness by animating the sensuous in
the perception of that which it represents.
As early as 1898, Joyce speaks of the necessity to control creative
imagination—especially if it proved “too prolific”—for the sake of clarity
in artistic expression, which poets of “high, fanciful temper” failed to
perform. Shelley, becoming lost in “regions of loveliness unutterable,
which his faculties scarcely grasp, which dazzles his senses, and defies
speech,” ends up producing poetry that is “vague and misty” (“Subjuga-
tion,” OW 7–8). Such an unruly, “impatient temper” is characteristic of
the Romantic sensibility, and it is precisely for this reason that “the high-
est praise must be withheld from the romantic school,” as Joyce puts it in
the 1902 essay on James Clarence Mangan (OW 53). In the 1903 review of
Henrik Ibsen’s Catilina, written on the occasion of the play’s translation
into French, Joyce says that “the imagination has the quality of a fluid,
and it must be held firmly, lest it become vague, and delicately, that it
may lose none of its magical powers” (OW 73, 304). In contrast to the
romantics, Ibsen is in full control of his imaginative power and, further,
“has united with his strong, ample, imaginative faculty a pre-occupation
with the things present to him” (“Catilina,” OW 73). It is not some tran-
scendental, ideal, artificial aesthetic order that holds the fluid of artistic
imagination; on the contrary, it is in “the things present to him” that an
artist finds a form to hold the waters of his imaginative sensibility. And it
is by virtue of this embeddedness in the given, as Joyce had said it even
more directly in 1900, that art performs its fundamental function of
expressing “the interplay of passions to portray truth” (“Drama and Life,”
OW 24).
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By 1906, two years after Joyce jotted down his scholastic sketches on
aesthetic apprehension, this demand for both precision and truthfulness
in artistic expression grows into a fully developed position on what literary
writing must be. Herbert Gorman summarizes Joyce’s response to the
Irish and English literature he had been reading extensively at the time:
“fuzziness of conception, disregard for exactitude of expression, sentimen-
talism, compromise of any sort with one’s literary integrity, the failure to
intelligently circumscribe an idea”—these were flaws that Joyce refused to
forgive.35 As a reader, he wanted to see the writer expressing something
he had understood, while, Gorman adds, “by understanding he meant to
see the thing, the situation, the emotional resolution exactly and wholly
for what it was . . . and so convey it to the reader.”36 It is this aim of
getting a clear sense of a reality and finding an exact expression for it that
Joyce pursues as a writer committed to the paramount imperative of
truth-telling. It is an aim he refuses to renounce even in the direst circum-
stances. In May 1906, defending his right to publish Dubliners in the
form he wrote it, Joyce answered endless demands for revisions, proposed
aiming to make the collection more palatable to the Irish public: He
refused to modify his work, explaining, “he is a very bold man who dares
to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen
and heard . . . I cannot alter what I have written” (LII 134).
In the 1902 essay on Mangan, Joyce makes it clear that truth is an
essential, constitutive condition of beauty:
Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imag-

ination contemplates intensely the truth of its own being or the visi-
ble world . . . These are realities and these alone give and sustain life.
(OW 60)
Truth, that is, shows in a self-reflective turn of imagination on itself or on

the world that is not the world-in-itself but rather the visible world: the
world as it reveals itself to perceptual vision. In A Portrait, Joyce has
Stephen explaining that visibility must be understood as apprehensibility
in the widest sense of the word: the visible refers to all that is perceivable
by “esthetic intellection” (P 186). In his paraphrase of Aquinas, Stephen
deliberately replaces vision with apprehension: “that is beautiful the
apprehension of which pleases,” he says (P 207). Corrected by Lynch,
who quotes the original Latin saying “Pulcra sunt qœ visa placent” instead,
Stephen seizes the opportunity to explain that the word visa in Aquinas
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covers “apprehension of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or

through any other avenue of apprehension” (P 207). He also adds that
it is the thing itself—rather than the senses of the physical body—that
determines the way it is apprehended: an “esthetic image is presented to
us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what
is visible is presented in space” (P 212). One’s perceptual capacities are
animated by what is audible or visible or otherwise apprehensible in one’s
surroundings and what, therefore, shows itself as a “sensible object” (“Pola
Notebook,” OW 105–6). It is this object that organizes and subsumes the
flow of the perceiver’s sensuous energy into a perceptual grasp of the thing
that it is. The self-manifestation of objects to sensuous perception in this
way makes them self-evident “realities,” as stated in Joyce’s definition of
the quasi-synonymy of beauty and truth above. These realities—for Joyce,
“these alone”—indeed “give and sustain life” because the animation of
the sensing living body constitutes the experiential ground of life itself.
Bringing to light the truth of being thus understood is a complex task
because this kind of truth cannot be told or told about but, rather, must
be (re-)presented in a way that mediates the (re-)grasp of what is presented
to the perceiver of the work of art. This kind of truth, by definition,
cannot be encapsulated in a concept because a concept reduces what it
represents to an intelligible object; it can refer to experience but it does
not reproduce it. This is why Joyce insists, in a 1902 essay on Irish poetry,
that good writing must not be dominated “by those big words that make
us so unhappy” (“An Irish Poet,” OW 62). Joyce himself uses some big
words when, for instance, he speaks of Mangan as a poet who “can tell of
the beauty of hate” (OW 59). Yet, crucially, he speaks of the beauty of
hate, rather than hate itself, immediately adding that “pure hate is as
excellent as pure love” (OW 59). That is, Mangan does not infuse his
poetry with the notion of hate, in contrast to Irish poets (such as William
Rooney) who subject their aesthetic sense to feelings (such as patriotism)
that have nothing to do with literature or aesthetic value and hence make
their art serve other purposes. Mangan, on the contrary, foregrounds the
beauty of whatever feeling his poetry re-animates for the reader. For Joyce,
to re-animate the beauty of anything means to capture that thing for what
it is, thereby fulfilling the task of an artist to bring a reality to life.
Such reanimation of the sensuous takes place in the act of apprehending
a work of art, which Joyce describes as the processual, kinetic aspect of
aesthetic experience over against the stasis of the self-manifestation of a
work of art as itself an object. “It is false to say that sculpture, for instance,
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is an art of repose,” Joyce writes in the Paris Notebook in 1903, and he

then proceeds with an explication: “Sculpture is associated with move-
ment as much as it is rhythmic; for a work of sculptural art must be
surveyed according to its rhythm and this surveying is an imaginary move-
ment in space” (OW 104). A literary work is “surveyed” by reading it, as
its language—just like a sculpture’s spatial form—directs the movement
of the reader’s apprehending energies. Language, of course, works as a
conceptual medium, but Joyce finds examples of overcoming the inherent
conceptuality of his artistic medium already in place in the history of
literature. Post-Renaissance literature across the world, he says in 1912,
plays on the “epidermis” of “modern man” and draws on “the sensory
power of his organism” by presenting the reader with the excess of “cir-
cumstance” given in detail at the expense of an “ideational” economy and
coherence (OW 188–89). That is, for Joyce, the erosion of the linguistic
order is not an end in itself but has the purpose of embedding literary
discourse in sensuous apprehension. He wants to draw on “the sensory
power” of the body to perceive things even if things themselves are not
present to perception. To achieve this end, an artist must find a language
that will manipulate the reader’s sensuous energies in ways that will con-
vey this effect. In the same essay on Mangan, Joyce writes:
A song by Shakespeare or Verlaine, which seems as free and living

and as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a
garden or the lights of evening, is discovered to be the rhythmic
speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, at least so fitly.
(OW 54)
In order to be “free and living,” aesthetically organized language must

suspend all conscious projections ingrained in its conceptuality and adjust
itself to the rhythms of sensuously perceived reality, such as rain or eve-
ning lights. These are particularly fragile objectivities that emerge in
immediate perception only. I hear rain falling in a garden as a particular,
distinct rhythm. This music I identify as rain is not the concept of rain,
nor does it refer to rain as a thing out there like the word “rain” does; it
is instead a distinct, sensuously grasped (self-)manifestation of rain that
cannot be captured otherwise than in this sensuous experience. This expe-
rience is sensuous but, on the other hand, its dynamic is organized—
informed in the full sense of the word—by an eidetic grasp, a direct
immediate identification of this music as rain rather than anything else.
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Further: only against the background of the eidetic grasp do I acquire an

awareness of the sensuality of my experience as a corporeally felt directed-
ness toward a given phenomenon of reality. Further: in Joyce’s descrip-
tion, language appears to play a decisive, constitutive role in making the
phenomenon appear, for it is the language of a poem that intensifies and
stabilizes the perceptual rhythms of apprehended reality. Joyce does not
simply hear rain falling in a garden through the poetry of Shakespeare or
Verlaine: They are “discovered” in “the rhythmic speech of an emotion
otherwise incommunicable” that this poetry evokes.
It is this kind of discovery that, in Stephen Hero, Stephen spontaneously
names an epiphany, but the object of his discovery is desire, a far more
complex phenomenon than rain. Wandering around Dublin and brood-
ing on the reasons why he has been rejected by Emma, “with all these
thoughts dancing the dance of unrest in his brain,” Stephen walks on a
couple flirting on the stairs of a house on Eccles Street (SH 210–11). Their
body language and their half-whispered speech are suggestive enough to
identify the exchange as an act of flirtation, and Stephen makes that iden-
tification before he knows it: On seeing the couple and hearing them,
he “receive[s] an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very
severely” (SH 211). Such an affliction can only be a pang of the frustrated
desire Stephen is trying to walk off at the time of this involuntary quasi-
involvement in the exchange. Joyce leaves a gap in the narrative at this
point: As if submitting to his own aesthetic imperative not to encapsulate
lived experience in a word, he carefully avoids naming what it is that
Stephen is both exposed to and immersed in. Instead, he makes Stephen,
as a would-be artist, think of this event in more general terms than his
private experience: Stephen identifies in this experience an event of an
intuitive insight, a moment of recognition that he names an epiphany.
Such an insight draws on the double nature of every appearance. An
experience such as desire (as well as hate, love, or patriotism) can only be
“a spiritual manifestation” because there is no way for it to manifest itself
other than “in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable
phase of the mind itself” (SH 211) in the moment of one’s understanding
what it is that those unreflected bodily and verbal gestures express. The
spirituality of the manifestation here does not mark a symbolic relation
but names instead the general structure of expression: Just as the distinct
rhythm of rain is not rain itself, so the gestures and the talk of the couple
are not desire although these gestures express the feeling. Significantly,
Stephen’s unsatisfied desire makes his “thoughts” dance in “his brain”
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while he is walking, yet it is “his sensitiveness” that is afflicted with “an

impression keen enough” to bring the epiphany about. Psychological and
moralizing speculations do not lead Stephen into understanding of the
nature of desire, but a sensuous response to this scene, in which desire
manifests itself, instantly puts it into Stephen’s grasp.
For Stephen, this is an artistic initiation grounded in—but not con-
fused with—erotic experience. The first definition of an epiphany, which
he formulates to himself before engaging in a conversation with Cranly,
has a split reference: Stephen wants to collect epiphanies in a book as
“moments” of insight into lived reality—moments of the kind he has just
experienced; and he immediately notes that “these epiphanies” must be
recorded by an artist “with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are
the most delicate and evanescent of moments” (SH 211). A man of letters,
that is, must create a literary form that will—like those songs of Shake-
speare or Verlaine—uncover for the reader the most fragile things of
apprehended reality, things that do not show themselves otherwise than
in the perceptual rhythms directed and controlled by the flow of language.
We do not see Stephen creating such form: He thinks of writing a book
of epiphanies but does not start it on this occasion, embarking instead
on “composing some ardent verses which he entitled a ‘Vilanelle of the
Temptress’ ” (SH 211). Yet Joyce, at the time of writing this scene, had
already had some experience of composing in this kind of aesthetic form.
He translated Verlaine in 1899, and his own poems, published in the
collection Chamber Music in 1904, were compared with Paul Verlaine’s
poetry by one reviewer, and characterized as “tiny evanescent things” that
“evoke, not only roses in midwinter, but the very dew of the roses” by
another.37 Joyce was writing epiphanies alongside these ventures into
poetic form, and it seems his experience of working in the medium of
poetry gave him a sufficiently firm grasp of an aesthetic sense that a liter-
ary work must (re-)produce. Yet his search for ways to express this sense
in the medium of an extended narrative did not draw on poetry directly
but took place within the framework of dramatic action.
THE GENESIS OF THE EPIPHANIC NARRATIVE FORM
For good reasons, Joyce’s epiphanies are often characterized in terms of

formal insufficiency, as tending toward but not quite belonging to any of
the major literary modes. Their typographical layout invites their classifi-
cation into two types, dramatic and narrative, while their aesthetic effects
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have earned them the names of “prose sketches”38 and “prose poems.”39
They have been placed among Joyce’s “minor works” for their formal
indeterminacy making it difficult to see them as “successful, original, or
even finished compositions.”40 Scholars have even doubted whether they
deserve to be referred to as “form” at all, given that Stephen, in the event
of the inaugural epiphany, speaks of an artist’s duty “to record” (SH 211)
epiphanies, as opposed to creatively composing them as ostensibly literary
pieces (Workshop 3).
All these assessments are enabled by the underlying distinction between
literary form (as manifested in the major generic modes of poetry, narra-
tive and drama) and other—non-literary—writing (such as a record of
one’s experiences or a chronicle of historical events).41 This distinction
proves ineffective in describing epiphanies because their operative mecha-
nism is grounded in the general structure of perceptual apprehension,
rather than any conventional literary form. To animate the sensuous—as
Joyce expects a work of art to do—an expression does not have to con-
form to a conventional literary form but must, instead, direct sensuous
experience toward the grasp of the phenomenon it brings to self-
manifestation in perception. Hence, to record one’s experience of such a
grasp in lived reality already means to give it an aesthetic form, but only
if the recording satisfies the condition of reinvoking the direct—
sensuous—re-experience of what has been recorded. The form of the
recording itself—as writing that achieves the required effect of mediating
a (re-)grasp of the phenomenon—may or may not manifest literary
“form” in the received sense of the word.
Joyce’s epiphanies are precisely such recordings. The variety of formal
patterns they expose and the evident absence of a common formal struc-
ture among them suggest that, as a textual corpus, they are a testing
ground where Joyce plays with the writing techniques and representa-
tional modes made available by the literary tradition, trying to find a form
that will satisfy his demand for a work of art to mediate the manifestation
of things in aesthetic perception. In terms of traditional genres, epiphanies
are a transitional form: a bridge for Joyce’s passage from what might be
called the First Text—the text that registers direct experience—into a
generically literary form of expression, extended fictional narrative.
The narrative of A Portrait enacts this passage in the plot, which tells
us that Stephen “chronicled with patience what he saw” and stages the
process for the reader, presenting us with a sequence of scenes Stephen is
recording, including two of Joyce’s epiphanies—namely, epiphanies 3 and
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5—into this sequence (P 67–69, cf. Workshop 15, 13). Epiphany 3 recurs,
along with epiphany 26, further in the novel, in another extended narra-
tive passage, which stages the process of artistic creation: Stephen, half-
asleep at dawn, relives his experiences while writing a villanelle. His
recollections and the poem’s lines intertwine until the villanelle emerges
complete (P 217–24; 219, 222 cf. Workshop 36, 13). This scene immediately
follows Stephen’s conversation about his aesthetic theory with Lynch,
which ends with a revised version of another epiphany, 25 (P 216; cf.
Workshop 35).
All these epiphanies appear as Stephen’s re-experiences rather than
transformed pieces he wrote to chronicle the events of his surrounding
reality. Yet they are written pieces nonetheless: Joyce certainly had to write
them, shaping them formally in a certain way to stage them for the reader
of his narrative. While writing them, Joyce was in fact recording his own
lived experiences: the surviving epiphanies do not manifest any intertex-
tual references or structural models,42 yet their action is easy to locate in
the specific contexts of his individual biography. It seems that here Joyce
himself “chronicled with patience what he saw” (P 67–69), as if a note-
book of epiphanies were his diary. There are no diaries in the extant
corpus of Joyce’s biographical documents. If that means he never wrote
one, it seems that Joyce—as an artist to the core of his being—chose
instead to record his lived experience in a way that would lead him toward
a fully developed form of irreducibly aesthetic literary expression.
The most immediate problem Joyce faced in undertaking the task of
merely recording what one sees was choosing the best form to represent
this directly perceived reality on the page. It seems that Joyce, at this
stage, opted for the model deployed in representing drama. Hans Walter
Gabler has proposed that Joyce must have written dramatic epiphanies
first, as the simpler form, and then moved to narrative, gradually increas-
ing the complexity of the narrative structure, although the textual and
contextual evidence for this claim remains inconclusive.43 To complicate
it further, Joyce also appears to have started working on his first long
fiction, Stephen Hero, while still writing epiphanies,44 which means that,
for some period, he might have been trying his hand in all three forms,
including dramatic and narrative miniatures along with extended narra-
tive fiction. Within this generic paradigm, the line of logical progression
from dramatic scenes through narrative epiphanies toward extended fic-
tion is quite clear, whether or not this was also the factual chronology of
Joyce’s move from form to form. This is, indeed, a progression from the
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basic—dramatic—action through more complicated narrative miniatures

to extended fiction, with the ultimate effect of preserving the affective
and signifying force mediated by each of these genres.
Joyce’s choice of drama as the form in which experienced reality mani-
fests itself to perception—and in which, consequently, it can be put on
the page in writing—could not have been accidental. Drama affected
Joyce most profoundly, inspiring him to associate the aesthetic force per
se with the dramatic, for he saw it ingrained in all forms of art and in
human existence itself, as the object of artistic expression. Joyce proposes
and passionately defends these positions in his first programmatic state-
ment on art, “Drama and Life,” in 1900 in response to the work of the
playwright Henrik Ibsen (OW 23–29). Further, Joyce must have formu-
lated this profound response while reading Ibsen’s drama rather than
watching his plays performed. Joyce’s love for performative arts in general
is well documented, and he will see Ibsen performed in 1908 in Trieste,
and again in 1934 in Paris (JJ 266, 669). However, back in 1900 he learned
Dano-Norwegian to be able to read Ibsen’s drama in the original, and he
also studied German in order to translate for the Irish Literary Theatre the
work of Gerhard Hauptmann, whom Joyce considered Ibsen’s principal
disciple (JJ 76, 88).
Plowing his way through their plays and trying to reproduce them in
his own language, Joyce would have been entangled in the dramatic action
mediated by its typographical representation on the page. He would be
following this action in the virtual space of a play while looking at charac-
teristically straightforward references to spatial objects of the setting,
speech-indexes naming dramatis personae, transcriptions of their speeches
and verbal gestures (exclamations, hesitations, and pauses, marked by
ellipses and inventive spelling), and descriptions of their bodily move-
ments in stage directions. In other words, he would be following the
language on the page to experience the reality represented in drama in the
shoes of the actors who inhabit it.
On the virtual stage of the dramatic action Joyce would have had to
imagine, he would have seen these actors expressing themselves precisely
in the way that provided Stephen with the inaugural epiphany. The expe-
riences, attitudes, feelings, and even their individual human nature would
be available to the spectator’s grasp only as epiphanic “spiritual” manifes-
tations (SH 211), showing in, but not identifiable with, the gestures and
words that express them. This is the way drama mediates the self-
manifestation of phenomena such as love and hate Joyce speaks about in
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relation to Mangan, or desire that afflicts Stephen’s sensitivity with a force

he recognizes as paradigmatically aesthetic in Stephen Hero.
In the dramatic epiphanies, Joyce reproduces this effect on a minimal
scale. He stages the drama of human existence—rather than that of a
fictional, invented world—by enacting the dramatic epiphanic scenes in
the undeniably, self-evidently true—his own—lived reality. They are set
in Joyce’s biographical settings, such as Mullingar, Dublin, and London,
sometimes specifying the exact place (such as “the North Circular Road”
or “the house in Glengariff Parade” in the epiphanies 18 and 19, and “at
Sheehy’s, Belvedere Place” repeatedly, in the epiphanies 11–14, 17). Their
actors, too, are historical persons from Joyce’s environment: Joyce himself,
his family members (1, 4, 11, 19, Workshop 11, 14, 21, 29), the Sheehys, and
the others who used to gather in their house (12–14, 18, Workshop 22–24,
28), and Joyce’s friends and acquaintances such as Skeffington (22), Eva
Leslie (35), or Gogarty (22, 35, 40, Workshop 32, 45, 50). The action itself
is kept to a minimum: Epiphanies present just enough of it for us to
sense, for example, the shame and fear of a little boy hiding under the
table from the consequences of his misdeed (1, Workshop 11) or of the two
children facing the anger of the lame beggar they must have mocked (15,
Workshop 15).
Such dramatic staging, however, has a limit, which Joyce overcomes by
deploying narrative. Drama gives Joyce a framework for mediating lived
reality, teaching him to anchor it to human self-expression by placing
multiple actors on the virtual stage of action and enacting their respon-
siveness to one another and their immediate surroundings. Yet dramatic
representation offers no means to represent the perceptual multi-modality
of lived experience and show a human being perceiving and interpreting
reality as well as acting in it. A perceptual act of sense-making is an act of
consciousness, even if it lives in the body; it is, as Joyce voices it Stephen’s
definition of an epiphany, “a memorable phase of the mind itself” (SH
211), in which consciousness grasps the sense of what it perceives and,
subsequently, can relive it in a variety of modes, such as memory or imagi-
nation. This kind of activity cannot be staged as a dramatic action; it
demands narrative, and Joyce uses it both to focus the perceptual vision
of his characters and to split it into multiple modes of apprehension, so
that reality in his epiphanies appears as perceived and, also, remembered
or dreamt or imagined. The dramatic structure remains in place: Epipha-
nies stage scenes, in which the observing-and-experiencing “I” is involved
in some interaction with another being and tries to assume the other’s
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viewpoint and grasp their experience. Thus, by keeping his narrative

within the confines of dramatic interaction, Joyce brings to life living
beings without objectifying them, as their observer (and so the reader)
finds himself drawn into reliving the gesture of their self-expressive bodies
and trying to grasp the significance of the experience these movements
seem to express.
Epiphany 39, for instance, pictures a girl reading: the watching eye of
the narrative draws the lines of her posture and her face to bring her
pictorial image to the reader’s perception and ask what she is living
through in the moment: “What is the lesson that she reads—of apes, of
strange inventions, or the legends of martyrs? Who knows how deeply
meditative, how reminiscent is this comeliness of Rafaello?” (Workshop
49). The narrative does not tell us if we are looking at a living girl or a
girl’s image in a painting, for it is the self-expression of a human being
and the possibilities of its perception that are being staged. The eye of
Joyce’s epiphanies always sees through bodily gestures and postures into
the heart of the experience they express, even if these expressive bodies are
not actually living beings anymore. Even sculpturally represented bodies,
“the images of fabulous kings” that are “set in stone,” have their hands
“folded upon their knees” not for the reasons of their sculptural form, but
“in token of weariness, and their eyes are darkened for the errors of men”
(29, Workshop 39).45 A dead brother, in a dream epiphany that gives relief
to grief, appears as a living, “whirling body” in a breathtakingly beautiful
dance that is “sudden and young and male,” and then “falls again to earth
in tremulous sobbing to die upon its triumph” (23, Workshop 33). An
unidentifiable beast speaks an unknown language in response when poked
with a stick (16, Workshop 26), and a dog “utters a prolonged sorrowful
howl,” as it seems to those who pass it by and “hear the utterance of their
own sorrow that had once its voice but is now voiceless” (8, Workshop 18).
The “sensible object” (OW 105–6) that Joyce’s epiphanies illuminate is
nothing like a clock or a basket; it is, rather, the nature—the phenomenal,
experiential essence—of being human, in every form of its often blind-
ingly radiant self-expression.
The tram epiphany (3, Workshop 13) stands out within the corpus of
these literary miniatures because here Joyce presents us with a perfectly
balanced drama of aesthetic experience. The action he stages here con-
nects the actors within a single lived space and a moment of shared,
mutually acknowledged significance. This is a scene of mutual attraction
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between a girl and a boy, or of budding desire, which in itself is a para-

digmatic illustration of the aesthetic, sensuously grounded experience Ste-
phen comes to learn (SH 211). As a scene staging the expression of desire
in human interaction, this is one of a great number of variants Joyce
replays across his narratives, including the inaugural epiphany episode in
Stephen Hero. This epiphany has also been integrated into the narrative of
A Portrait, recurring here in two different textual variants at two different
points in the novel (68–70, 222). With all these characteristics in place,
this epiphany presents us with an exceptional opportunity to trace the
development of the Joycean narrative form on the textual level: to fore-
ground the basic structure Joyce creates to keep readerly perception
embedded in the sensuous and then examine the precise transformations
he makes as he takes the scene, and thus the structure, into a larger narra-
tive. The epiphany reads:
The children who have stayed latest are getting on their things to go
home for the party is over. This is the last tram. The lank brown
horses know it and shake their bells to the clear night, in admonition.
The conductor talks with the driver; both nod often in the green
light of the lamp. There is nobody near. We seem to listen, I on the
upper step and she on the lower. She comes up to my step many
times and goes down again, between our phrases, and once or twice
remains beside me, forgetting to go down, and then goes down . . . . .
Let be; let be . . . . And now she does not urge her vanities—her fine
dress and sash and long black stockings—for now (wisdom of chil-
dren) we seem to know that this end will please us better than any
end we have laboured for. (Workshop 13)
The narrative begins with the spatiotemporal preamble setting the stage
for the event. The children are getting dressed to go home in a hall after
a party. It is late, and everybody is focused on getting home. To enact
their impatience, the narrative leaps into another spatiotemporal location
without warning, into “the last tram” that is pulled by the horses who,
too, are impatient to finish the last trip of the day. The tram is itself an
enclosed space in relation to rest of the city; and it is also perceived as a
vacant space: “The conductor talks with the driver” out there, “in the
green light of the lamp,” while “[t]here is nobody near,” over here.
Nobody is intruding into the space where the event is about to take place,
and now the narration locates the participants of this event in a way that
................. 19072$ $CH8 12-12-17 09:49:20 PS PAGE 208

also ascribes to them an intention to isolate their space from the rest of
the environment: They “seem to listen” to the conversation out there and,
as it turns out, to one another, while actually focusing on themselves, he
“on the upper step and she on the lower.” They speak, but we learn
nothing about the content of this conversation: It is the fact of conversa-
tion itself that matters, the dance-like link and the choreography in which
this link holds their minds and bodies tied to one another. Their attention
is focused on each other’s bodily movements—or gestures—that express
their immersion in this experience of the connection, their bodies moving
in a conversational harmony, while the content of this conversation, inevi-
tably communicated in the words they must be saying, is completely dis-
regarded. He only watches her coming up and down the steps and relishes
the moments she stays near him as the conversation pauses, wishing to
hold it for a little longer: “Let be; let be. . . .” No spontaneous distractions
interrupt this shared moment of bliss: “now she does not urge her vani-
ties,” and he—while noting “her fine dress and sash and long black
stockings”—cares for the fact of her unawareness rather than the “vani-
ties” themselves. They both “seem to know that this end will please
[them] better than any end [they] have laboured for.” “This end” is not
specified: It refers to the interaction just staged, returning the reading eye
to something it has just observed while reading. Thus, the epiphany closes
in a fully circular, self-referential structure.
Early in A Portrait, Joyce expands the epiphany textually into a narra-
tive passage that is four times longer (68–70). He uses almost all of the
epiphany’s text , omitting just a few words and introducing some stylistic
and semantic changes. Stylistically, Joyce consistently repositions gram-
matical deictic references to the time of action and the actors. He narrates
in the past tense rather than in the dramatic present that, in the epiphany,
placed the reader in the midst of action and sustained a sense of the scene
as unfolding in the here-and-now of the narration-and-reading act. The
first-person narration also contributed to this effect of immediacy in the
epiphany: The first person placed the reader in the position of the experi-
encing “I,” whereby experience unfolded in the course of narration as
“mine,” and the “we” of it united “myself” with “her” in a single action
and experience. In A Portrait, the episode is narrated in the third person:
Here the narrator—and, by consequence, the reader—observes the action
rather than acting it, and then “we” must be transformed into “them,”
marking the two actors as “him” and “her.” These simple grammatical
shifts have the overall effect of distancing the action from narration,
................. 19072$ $CH8 12-12-17 09:49:20 PS PAGE 209

which also involves splitting the acting subjectivity from the observing-
and-narrating “I.”
Splitting subjective spaces takes place on the semantic level of the narra-
tive as well: In A Portrait, the tram episode no longer enacts the intersub-
jective bond staged in the epiphany. The preamble to the narrative action
here does not demarcate the space of intimacy between the couple over
against the outside space of the tram and the city, as it did in the epiph-
any, but instead presents us with a two-paragraph description of Stephen’s
solitude over against the mirth of the party. The girl here is given the
specific role of Muse. She excites him so he must put some effort into
“hiding from the other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood” while
trying to catch her eyes, as “through the circling of the dancers and amid
the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner” (P 68–69); the
following day he will try to write poetry, feeding on this excitement (P
70). The narrative here does not leap from the hall right into the tram
but, with Stephen, watches the girl’s movements as they leave the house
and walk together: her gesture as she wraps herself in her shawl, “sprays
of her fresh warm breath [that] flew gaily above her cowled head,” and
her steps as “her shoes tapped blithely on the glassy road” (P 69).
Such close attention to detail characterizes Stephen’s gaze around the
entire space of action. Focus on details and separate objects fragments this
space into a sequence of separate perceptions instead of concentrating
attention on an undisturbed, self-enclosed spot that was marked as a scene
for potential intimacy in the epiphany. Joyce performs this fragmentation
in revision, by splitting semantic units—which are also perceptual
images—into their constituents: The concentrated expression of an
empty, undisturbed space, encapsulated in the straightforward sentence
“There is nobody near” in the epiphany, here breaks into the composite
image of “the empty seats of the tram” and “no sound” around (P 69).
Using the same technique of splitting a continuity into its constituent
images, Joyce distinguishes two independent subjectivities from the origi-
nal unity of the single inter-subjective act. He breaks the single flow of
the harmonious conversational movement of the original epiphanic act
into a complex of reflections by duplicating images and, ultimately, by
making the narrative enact for us a self-reflective consciousness—and thus
a fully constituted subjectivity—involved in an effort of communication.
To achieve this ultimate effect, Joyce must separate the participating
body from the perceiving consciousness. The harmony, in the epiphany
played out as the couple’s dance-like interaction, here is encapsulated in
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the metaphorical image of Stephen’s heart that “danced upon her move-
ments like a cork upon a tide” (P 69), up and down to mirror the rhythm
of the girl’s physical movements. This is also an image of subjective self-
reflection: It focuses our view on Stephen’s sense of himself, as opposed
to their commonly performed act. And it is complemented by the self-
awareness of the girl, too: Stephen sees “her urge her vanities” (P 69),
which she emphatically did not do in the epiphany. Once the narrative
enters the realm of conscious self-reflective perception, memory and imag-
ination open a whole world of possible associations, so Stephen finds
himself reflecting on an experience that mirrors the one he is living in the
present. He remembers a day in the past, when he and another girl (Eileen
rather than E– C–,with whom he is on the tram) were looking at a “fox
terrier scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn” of a hotel, another
image of an oscillating movement. Stephen’s recollection is brought about
by finding himself in the same position, as he stands “listlessly in his
place, seemingly a tranquil watcher of the scene before him” (P 69). This
complex multiplication of reflections and splits, narrated in the past tense
and thus enacted as a memory rather than an action in the here-and-
now, is itself placed at a distance from another pair of seemingly tranquil
observers, the narrator and the reader.
With such a divide between Stephen and the girl in place, there is no
sense of the “we” that enabled the narrator to know what they both
wished for in the moment. In A Portrait, the girl’s attraction to him is an
object of Stephen’s ongoing speculation until he decides that “She too
wants [him] to catch hold of her. That’s why she came with [him] to the
tram.” The ending has another crucial split of reference: The unspecified
“end,” with which the epiphany enclosed its narrative in a self-referential
structure, here turns into Stephen’s calculation of what he might do in
accepting her “gift”: “catch hold of her” and “kiss her.” He does neither
of those things, and thus finishes his tram journey alone, staring “gloomily
at the corrugated footboard.” Instead of the bliss of being together, we
are presented with a faint implication of dissatisfaction about a missed
opportunity. This is also a moment that constitutes subjectivity as self-
enclosed consciousness striving for but not achieving connection with
another being. This appears to be the pathos of the scene, quite the oppo-
site to its epiphanic original that celebrated one’s unity with the other in
a common act.
To make it even more anticlimactic, Joyce provides an epilogue in Ste-
phen’s failed attempt to write poetry the following day, trying to draw on
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the inspiration from his muse (P 70). He performs all preparatory rituals
for writing: sets a writing scene, with a new pen, a fresh ink bottle, and a
new exercise book laid on the desk, and puts down a dedication to his
muse for the poem’s title, just as Lord Byron did. But an inspiration does
not come. Instead of poetic lines, Stephen automatically writes down a
list of names and addresses of his classmates, as if his writing hand simply
extended the gesture of scribbling the same kind of language he started
with, putting down a sequence of names after the first one because his
brain had “refused to grapple with the theme” and bring anything at all
to his mind.
The epiphanic sense of the bliss returns in the second revision of the
epiphany in A Portrait many pages later, in Stephen’s memory of the
tram:
He had written verses for her again after ten years. Ten years before
she had worn her shawl cowlwise about her head, sending sprays of
her warm breath into the night air, tapping her foot upon the glassy
road. It was the last tram; the lank brown horses knew it and shook
their bells to the clear night in admonition. The conductor talked
with the driver, both nodding often in the green light of the lamp.
They stood on the steps of the tram, he on the upper, she on the
lower. She came up to his step many times between their phrases and
went down again and once or twice remained beside him forgetting
to go down and then went down. Let be! Let be!
Ten years from that wisdom of children to his folly. If he sent her
the verses? They would be read out at breakfast amid the tapping of
egg-shells. Folly indeed! . . . (222)
Ten years later Stephen appreciates his inaction as the “wisdom of chil-
dren” and cherishes the moment for what it was. There is no party setting
at all; the setting here is Stephen’s look at her shawl about her head and
his feel of “sprays of her warm breath into the night air,” whereby the
narrative directly states his attraction to her and their connection. Com-
pared to the epiphany, let alone its expansion in the first instance of its use
in A Portrait, the narrative here speeds up. Joyce combines the epiphany’s
sentence “This was the last tram” and the description of the horses into
one sentence. He also omits the statements that “[t]here is nobody near”
and that the couple “seem to listen” while actually busy with one another,
as well as the details about her vanities. The narrative presents their
................. 19072$ $CH8 12-12-17 09:49:21 PS PAGE 212

mutual immersion in each other only by reporting their movements on

the steps. There is no semantic redundancy, and all distractions are
removed until the tension culminates in a shout, “Let be! Let be!,” as
opposed to the whisper of the epiphany, which has a semicolon and an
ellipsis instead of the exclamation marks.
By the means of such concentration, Joyce gives us a narrative that
purifies and intensifies the experience of bliss in which Stephen—and
thus the reader—finds himself immersed far more unequivocally than in
the there-and-then of the event itself described some pages earlier. The
experience of this bliss is sharpened even further by a contrast: The joy of
the remembered past is far more intense than the “folly” of the present in
which any connection between them is poignantly absent, nor is there
any sense of a self-evident purpose of existence that permeated the original
epiphany.
The epiphanic closure does not occur either. Intensified as it is, the
tram epiphany now appears in a sequence of images brought forward by
Stephen’s half-dreaming consciousness early in the morning, as he wakes
up at dawn, falls back to sleep, and writes a villanelle verse after verse
until the poem comes out complete (P 217–24). In this larger narrative
framework, the recollection of the tram trip, with the phantasmal experi-
ence of the inter-corporeal bond and the re-animation of the excitement
that accompanies it, marks a pre-climactic moment. The phantasmal
vision of the tram trip incites desire in Stephen’s body and soul, and he
is carried into another phantasmal experience, of being caressed by her:
She “enfolded him like water with a liquid life” until his desire spilled out
of his living flesh into the form of the villanelle, as “the liquid letters of
speech, symbols of the element of mystery, flowed forth over his brain”
(P 223). This is a merciless parody of the neo-Romantic notion of poetic
genius: This drama of the effusion of creative energy barely veils another
act, of a wet dream.46 And yet, even in such a disguise of a self-subversive
parody, this scene stages an irreducibly aesthetic creative act. A work of a
most complex and formally rigid genre, the villanelle, is not constructed
in the course of linguistic play or creative rituals; it emerges instead from
the most intensively corporeal self-manifestation of desire that flows out
of the living flesh into the vestment of poetry.
Such a complex integration of the epiphany into a framing narrative
marks the endpoint of the development of the Joycean form: It started
with dramatic mini-scenes Joyce put on the page to capture human reality
on the immediately perceivable plane of its self-manifestation in action,
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moved to narrative epiphanies that Joyce constructed by infusing the basic

dramatic structure of human self-expression with signifying perception,
and ended up with the expansion of this epiphanic narrative into an
extended fiction. The factual chronology of this progression is not deci-
sively important because no structure has been dropped on the way. Joyce
keeps the skeleton of the dramatic action in all his narratives to present
reality as necessarily someone’s vision, and this focus conveys a corporeal
and multilayered consciousness implanted in the living flesh and engaged
in perceiving, remembering, and imagining simultaneously. All structures
of expressing human reality, which Joyce finds while playing with the
forms of literary expression, pile up to create the poly-centric and multi-
modal narrative style that has been described in a range of terms as Joyce’s
style.
The genesis of this form through epiphanies also shows that Joyce cre-
ates this style as an aesthetic form: a form that plays on the mechanism of
aesthetic apprehension, which is the mechanism of making sense of our
lived world, or of producing meaning. The three variants of the tram
epiphany make it clear that this is, effectively, the mechanism of textualiz-
ing lived reality. In these variants, Joyce works with seemingly the same
text, and yet the significance of the experience he stages differs in every
case. What phenomena show in narrative mediation evidently depends
on the limits he sets as the beginning and the end of the experience being
staged, on the scope and intensity of Stephen’s involvement in the event,
and on the specific topography of significant elements that constitute the
sense of what he has experienced in the event. We have seen Joyce think-
ing these conditions through as he outlined through Stephen’s voice the
phases of the epiphanic self-manifestation of a thing. His revisions of
the epiphany manipulate these conditions to present a moment of bliss in
the original epiphany, then turn it into a pang of disappointment in an
expanded and more detailed presentation, and finally incite an ecstatic
experience as it is relived in memory. Not only does Joyce stage the reality
of phenomena for us to relive, but he also lays bare the operative mecha-
nism of lived experience itself.
CODA
The very fact that Joyce integrates the tram epiphany into a larger narra-
tive and the ways in which he does it also testifies to the fact that Joyce
never left epiphany behind but, rather, wove a narrative that stages and
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mediates epiphanic experiences throughout. An extended narrative cannot

do without narrative pillars that support coherence, such as character and
plot development, by definition. These are rather abstracted, intelligible
structures, as opposed to the sensible ones, but Joyce makes these struc-
tures emerge out of aesthetic, sensuous experience, recorded on a minimal
scale in his epiphanies and then expanded by working with the texture of
their language. He reshapes it to reinforce the immediate effects of textual
micro-transformations and thus foreground emergent meanings, multi-
plying them, letting them split, overlap, and compete, as well as assimilate
into and refine one another until they bring to presence most complex
phenomena: living subjectivities, their lived environments, and our com-
mon world in which we find them. With this multifaceted structure in
place, Joyce gives us narratives in which, as the post-phenomenologist of
our time Jacques Derrida has said of Ulysses, “the virtual totality of experi-
ence . . . tends to unfold itself and reconstitute itself by playing out all its
possible combinations.”47
To keep this process going, Joyce stages for us a continuous, never-
ending activity of what Derrida calls “the autobiographic-encyclopedic
circumnavigation” of his characters in their virtual world, and he stages it
in a way that entangles his readers in the same quest, so that everyone—
including Derrida—finds herself writing “the chronicle of my experiences”
while interpreting his texts.48 This is because Joyce, by embedding his
narrative in the perceptual structure of apprehension as such, inevitably
grounds it in every particular act of reading and thus in the only living
“mechanism of esthetic apprehension” (SH 212) that makes itself available
in such an act: the reader. It is, then, our individual, personal participa-
tion that enables the aesthetic effect of Joyce’s narrative, as it invites and
satisfies our intellectual apprehension by keeping apprehension itself
firmly bound to an unreflected involvement of our living sensuous bodies
in the experience of making sense of his text, grasping a myriad of realities
it brings to our view as a network of perceptually intelligible appearances.
NOTES
1. Shiv K. Kumar, “Joyce’s Epiphany and Bergson’s ‘L’intuition Philosophique,’ ”

Modern Language Quarterly 20 (March 1959): 27–30; Rudd Fleming, “Dramatic Invo-
lution: Tate, Husserl, and Joyce,” The Sewanee Review 60, no. 3 (July–September
1952): 445–64.
................. 19072$ $CH8 12-12-17 09:49:23 PS PAGE 215

2. Antoine Levy, O.P., “Great misinterpretations: Umberto Eco on Joyce and

Aquinas,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 13, no. 3 (Summer 2010):
124–63.
3. Richard Kearney, “Epiphanies in Joyce,” in Global Ireland: Irish Literatures for
the New Millennium, ed. Ondřej Pilný and Clare Wallace (Prague: Litteraria Pragen-
sia, 2005), 147–82.
4. Sharon Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950: Constellations of the Soul
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31–48.
5. Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond, ed. Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane
Mildenberg (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 17; Minna Niemi and Justin Parks, “Home,
Homelessness and the Wayward Subject in the Novels of James Joyce and Claude
McKay,” 249–72.
6. Paul Guyer, in the Editor’s Introduction to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the
Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), xiii–lii, gives a concise account of the development of Kant’s conception in
the setting of his contemporary thought on aesthetics (xiii–xxiii), including, in addi-
tion to Baumgarten and other thinkers, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Original of
Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful by Edmunde Burke (xv). For a concise and
comprehensive account of Baumgarten’s attempt to initiate a rationalist aesthetics,
see Mary J. Gregor, “Baumgarten’s Aesthetica,” The Review of Metaphysics 37, no. 2
(December 1983): 357–85. For the history of the emergence of the modern system of
the arts and of aesthetics as a field of philosophical concern, inaugurated by Baumgar-
ten, against the background of art as a cultural practice from Plato to Kant, see Paul
Oscar Kristeller, “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History Aesthet-
ics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (October 1951): 496–527; 13, no. 1 (January
1952): 17–46.
.
7. Arūnas Sverdiolas, Būti ir klausti: Hermeneutines filosofijos studijos—1 (Vilnius:
.
Strofa, 2002), 181–204; Aiškinimo ratas: Hermeneutines filosofijos studijos—2 (Vilnius:
Strofa, 2003), 9–60. Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience,
trans. Edward Casey (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973 [1953]). Also see
Günter Figal, Aesthetics as Phenomenology, trans. Jerome Veith (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2010).
8. Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (London: Peter Owen, 1971); Gerald
Gillespie, “Epiphany: Applicability of a Modernist Term,” in Proust, Mann, Joyce in
the Modernist Context (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2003),
50–67; Robert K. Weninger, “The Epitome of the Epiphany: Stephen and Malte,
Joyce and Rilke,” in The German Joyce (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2012),
158–73.
9. Robert M. Scotto, “ ‘Visions’ and ‘Epiphanies’: Fictional technique in Pater’s
Marius and Joyce’s Portrait,” James Joyce Quarterly 11 (1973): 41–50; Alan D. Perlis,
“Beyond Epiphany: Pater’s Aesthetic Hero in the Works of Joyce,” James Joyce Quar-
terly 17, no. 3 (Spring 1980): 272–79; and Jay B. Losey, “Pater’s Epiphanies and the
Open Form,” South Central Review 6, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 30–50, esp. 48. Herbert
................. 19072$ $CH8 12-12-17 09:49:23 PS PAGE 216

F. Tucker, “Epiphany and Browning: Character Made Manifest,” PMLA 107, no. 5
(October 1992): 1208–21.
10. Wim Tigges, ed., Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999).
11. Morris Beja’s account of criticism on epiphany and related issues in Joyce
studies remains most concise and useful; see his “Epiphany and Epiphanies,” in A
Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens (Westport, London:
Greenwood, 1984), 707–25, esp. 716–21.
12. Don Gifford, “Ulysses” Annotated: Notes for James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988), 51 (3.141).
13. David Hayman, “The Purpose and Permanence of the Joycean Epiphany,” JJQ
35, no. 4 (Summer-Fall 1998): 633–55, 638.
14. David Weir, “Epiphanoumenon,” JJQ 31, no. 2 (Winter 1994): 55–64, esp.
57–58.
15. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (New York: New Directions,
1960 [1941]), 28–29; further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
16. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer, John J. Slocum, and Her-
bert Cahoon (New York: New Directions, 1963 [1944]), 211–13; further references will
be cited parenthetically in the text as SH.
17. Irene Hendry, “Joyce’s Epiphanies,” The Sewanee Review 54, no. 3 (July–
September 1946): 449–67.
18. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, edited with an introduction by Theodore Spencer
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1944).
19. Robert Scholes, “Joyce and the Epiphany: The Key to the Labyrinth?” The
Sewanee Review 72, no. 1 (Winter 1964): 65–77, 65–67.
20. James Joyce, Epiphanies, with an Introduction and notes by Oscar Ansell Sil-
verman ([Buffalo]: Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo, 1956).
21. James Joyce, “The Epiphanies,” with the editors’ “Introductory Note,” in The
Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Materials for “A Portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man”, ed. Robert Scholes and Richard Morgan Kain (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1965), 3–51; further references will be cited as Workshop parentheti-
cally in the text.
22. Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univer-
sity Press, 1992 [1973]).
23. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans.
Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 7, cf. 24–27.
24. Robert Scholes, “Joyce and the Epiphany,” 70.
25. Morris Beja provides a full documentation of Joyce’s re-use of the epiphanies;
see “Epiphany and the Epiphanies,” in A Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Zack Bowen
and James F. Carens (Westport, Conn., London: Greenwood, 1984), 712–13.
26. This is witnessed by the fact that only forty epiphanies, out of at least seventy
Joyce must have written, have reached us, with seventeen of them surviving in his
brother’s hand rather than Joyce’s own; see Hans Walter Gabler, “Preface,” in Portrait
................. 19072$ $CH8 12-12-17 09:49:24 PS PAGE 217

of the Artist as a Young Man: A Facsimile of Epiphanies, Notes, Manuscripts and Type-
scripts, gen. ed. Michael Groden ([New York, London]: Garland, 1978), xxiii–xxv.
27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 364.
28. See esp. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a
Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenol-
ogy, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers,
1983), 203–7 (§85).
29. Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language,
trans. Peter D. Hertz (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1971), 37–38.
30. Cf. Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950, 7–12, 23.
31. Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, trans.
Ellen Esrock (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 6, 10.
32. Sverdiolas, Aiškinimo ratas, 13.
33. Aubert, 105. Drawing on William T. Noon, Joyce and Aquinas: A study of the
Religious Elements in the Writing of James Joyce (New Haven: Yale University Press;
London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Aubert also notes that Joyce did not have a
systematic training in scholastics (4–6, 100), which must have been the enabling
condition for his re-interpretation of these notions.
34. James Joyce, Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing, ed. Kevin Barry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 104; further references will appear paren-
thetically in the text by the title of the piece when relevant and the abbreviation OW
followed by the page reference.
35. Herbert Gorman, James Joyce: A Definitive Biography (London: John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1949 [1941]), 182.
36. Gorman, James Joyce, 182.
37. Thomas Kettle made the comparison (JJ 261), and Arthur Symons is the
author of the description, qt. in Gorman, James Joyce, 192. Gorman (59) and Ellmann
after him (JJ 76fn) quote from Joyce’s translation of Verlaine.
38. Vicki Mahaffey, “Joyce’s shorter works,” in The Cambridge Companion to
James Joyce, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 172–
95, 179; Gabler, “Preface,” xxiii.
39. Gabler, “Preface,” xxiii.
40. Mahaffey, 172.
41. Hans Walter Gabler assumes the same distinction when he qualifies Stephen
Hero as “the ‘perception text’ ” rather than fictional narrative as literary, aesthetically
organized form; see “ ‘He chronicled with patience:’ Early Joycean Progressions
between Non-Fictionality and Fiction,” in Outside His Jurisfiction: Joyce’s Non-Fiction
Writings, ed. Katherine Ebury and James Frazer (London: Palgrave, forthcoming
2017), originally presented at the International Conference “ ‘Outside his jurisfiction:’
Joyce’s Non-fiction,” University of York, UK, March 23–25, 2012.
42. I am grateful to Kevin Barry for drawing my attention to this rather obvious
shared characteristic of the epiphanies, which he did in response to the first version
of this study I presented at the University of York in March 2012, pointing to its
potential significance to my reading of Joyce.
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43. Gabler, “Preface,” xxiii–xxvii, xxvii.

44. Gabler provides evidence that Joyce must have started writing the novel
months before August 1903 (“Introduction: Composition, Text, and Editing,” in
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Norton Critical Edition, ed.
John Paul Riquelme, text ed. Hans Walter Gabler with Walter Hettche [New York,
London: Norton, 2007], xv–xxiii, xv–xvi), while at least two Epiphanies (6, 21, Work-
shop 16, 31) were written after Joyce’s mother’s death that month. Also see Hans
Walter Gabler, “The Genesis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in Critical
Essays on James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, ed. Phillip Brady and
James F. Carens (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 83–112, 83.
45. Frank Budgen remembers that Joyce understood plastic arts exclusively in
terms of their capacity to mediate a human character by capturing it in the bodily
posture they represent rather than appreciating any formal characteristics of it or
technical challenges a work might be overcoming; see James Joyce and the Making of
“Ulysses” and other writings, with an introduction by Clive Hart (London: Oxford
University Press, 1972), 188–89.
46. Zack Bowen and Paul Buters, “The New Bloomusalem: Transformations in
Epiphany Land,” Modern British Literature 3, no. 1 (1978): 48–55, 49.
47. Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” in Acts of
Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York, London: Routledge, 1992), 253–309, 291.
48. Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone,” 262, 265.
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The Aesthetics of Phenomena: Joyce's Epiphanies

Joyce Studies Annual, 2017, pp. 185-219 (Article)

Published by Fordham University Press

For additional information about this article

To Hans Walter Gabler

This study began as a sample reading of an ostensibly marginal and man-

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expand these implications to an understanding of Joyce’s work as a whole.

In the neo-Kantian frames of reference that dominate our current critical

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Insightfully performed and well sustained, phenomenological reflection

THE RISE AND FALL OF LITERARY EPIPHANY

Epiphany is one of those enigmatic Modernist terms that resists conceptu-

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deploys it to read a variety of creative work. It seems that the Joycean

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through its apparent chaos at certain, epiphanic, moments.15 Clearly, the

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development, but he ignores Joyce’s epiphanies, written during the same

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distinctly Joycean form of narrative, in which he realizes his theoretical

JOYCE’S AESTHETICS OF EPIPHANEIA

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whereby this identity appears to be “a thing,” “a definitely constituted

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“pornographical” (P 205) response to the female body the sculpture pres-

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Latin roots. The Greeks thought of apprehension in terms of the dichot-

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Beauty, the splendour of truth, is a gracious presence when the imag-

Truth, that is, shows in a self-reflective turn of imagination on itself or on

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covers “apprehension of all kinds, whether through sight or hearing or

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is an art of repose,” Joyce writes in the Paris Notebook in 1903, and he

A song by Shakespeare or Verlaine, which seems as free and living

In order to be “free and living,” aesthetically organized language must

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Further: only against the background of the eidetic grasp do I acquire an

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while he is walking, yet it is “his sensitiveness” that is afflicted with “an

THE GENESIS OF THE EPIPHANIC NARRATIVE FORM

For good reasons, Joyce’s epiphanies are often characterized in terms of

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basic—dramatic—action through more complicated narrative miniatures

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relation to Mangan, or desire that afflicts Stephen’s sensitivity with a force

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viewpoint and grasp their experience. Thus, by keeping his narrative

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between a girl and a boy, or of budding desire, which in itself is a para-

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