Universitatea din Craiova Facultatea de Litere

THE VOCATIONAL SELF. A STUDY OF JAMES JOYCES EPIPHANY FROM DUBLINERS TO A PORTRAIT

Tez de doctorat

Coordonator: Prof. univ. dr. Felicia Brbu (Burdescu Foceneanu)

Doctorand: Iliescu Elka - Georgeta (cstorit Tu)

Craiova 2012

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction______________________________________________ 3

Chapter 1 James Joyce and the Spiral of Identity___________________ 9
1.1 Between National and Artistic Identity____________________ 9 1.2 Joycean Resistance to the Celtic Revival__________________ 12 1.3 Joycean Catholicism-(Anti) Religious Joyce_______________ 19

Chapter 2 James Joyce and Epiphany_____________________________22

2.1 Former Attempts of Literary Epiphany___________________22 2.2 Joycean Epiphany within Its Critique____________________ 24 2.3 Claritas beyond Phenomenological Perception_____________ 26

Chapter 3 Epiphanic Mnemotechnique in the Philosophical Labyrinth_ 63

3.1 Memory and the Construction of Epiphany________________ 64 3.2 Memory and Imagination_______________________________ 68 3.3 Personal Memory and Collective Memory_________________ 79

Chapter 4 Love from Dubliners to A Portrait______________________ 86

4.1 Queer Feminine Resonance___________________________ 87 4.2 Feminist Reading of Womens Role in Joycean Narrative___ 114 4.3 Mapping Joycean Epiphany through the Feminine Sublime_ 131

Chapter 5 Restructuring Textual Epiphanies ____________________ 145

5.1 The Celtic Muse in Joycean Textual Voices _______________ 146 5.2 Water: Another Mater Genitrix of Epiphany _____________ 153 5.3 The Journey of the Water Imagery in Dubliners___________ 163 5.4 The Epiphanic Sublime: Water Imagery in A Portrait_______188

Conclusion _____________________________________________ 204 Rezumat _______________________________________________ 213 Summary ______________________________________________ 221 Rsum________________________________________________ 229 Bibliography____________________________________________ 238

Introduction
James Joyce said: Ive put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and thats the only way of insuring ones immortality.1 Taking a close look at the above-mentioned artistic confession, the readers mind is at once set alert in front of the intricate architecture on which the work is built, and which is also permanently accompanied by the unavoidable presence of the self that intentionally invests its power to serve this scope. Joyces confession proves to be a prophecy from the past as well as not so modest a recognition of the value of his art which remains an unquestionable and inexhaustible source of critical interpretations after all these decades. As a real testimony for the Joycean arts triumph in its struggle with history and for the artmaking process in itself stands a veritable industry of criticism [that] has grown up around his work.() Even though we are still some several hundred years away from Joyces jocoserious intention of keeping the professors busy for centuries in order to ensure his immortality (JJ 521) () it remains a fact that there is now so much material written on Joyce the man, his life and his work, that it has become impossible for any one person to read, let alone retain, it all. So what is a new reader of Joyce to do?2 Indeed, the question posited above is quite a pertinent one as it further broadens the rebellious and indecisive character of the Joycean work of art. The question cannot be answered but through a translation of the complexity of the work of art into the openmindedness of the reader who should be able to grasp the polyvalence of the text and mould it afterwards with the innocence3 of a child in order not to alter or deform the entire legacy that Joyce has bestowed upon humankind. Not being inscribed in the honorable list of the
1

James Joyce quoted by Richard Ellmann who is also quoted in Joseph Kelly. Our Joyce: From Outcast to Icon. U.S.A.: University of Texas Press, 1999 p. 180. 2 Mahon Peter. James Joyce. A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum International publishing Group, 2009, p. x. 3 In this case the word innocence does not refer to actual childish innocence, but to the freshness of mind usually connected to innocence when speaking of philosophers; they are believed to ponder on the serious questions of life with the innocence/fresh mind of a child.

Noble Prize awards does not diminish his work, but offers a concrete explanation of his choice of heresy in almost every domain: social conventions, religious canon, political views, and most importantly the artistic trend of the time. The 15000 critical studies written so far on James Joyce testify not only to his creative genius that cannot be grasped and underpinned entirely but also serve to render a more triumphant artist who has indirectly had his revenge on all those, be they people or institutions, that have initially condemned him or his work. As unexplainable as it may seem there has not yet been dedicated an entire study solely to the epiphany of James Joyce, even though certain classifications and sources have been delineated from his four major works: Dubliners, A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In this sense it is our duty to mention some of the most illustrious names that have dared to comment upon the epiphany: Hlne Cixous, Robert Langbaum, Margot Norris, Morris Beja, Ashton Nichols. The epiphany is of crucial importance when discussing any of Joyces works as every critical undergoing cannot analyze the Joycean text without at least hinting at the Joycean epiphany; the epiphany is the light that illuminates the Joycean architecture from the inside and lets the reflections transcend the pillars of symbols, motifs or themes and engulf its viewer, it is the essence towards which all the pathways of the self converge. Following Ricoeurs distinction, Felicia Burdescu gives the distinction ipseityalterity: In his work, Paul Ricoeur defines the subject through a circuit of reflection in the dialectics of double identification: ipseity (with ones Self) and illeity (with the Other of alterity).4 In Joyces case the discussion of the Self and the Other can be grounded in the becoming of the artist through the metamorphoses of the other all tacitly participating to his evolution which also appears to be twofold: the evolution of the artist-protagonist, Stephen, and the evolution of the artistic self of the authorial instance. This simultaneously requires and brings a more thorough decoding of epiphany as it unfolds in the myriad petals of the self reflecting onto the world in a multidimensional light. Beyond the epiphany-effect the reader encounters an obvious tension posed by the seeming aloofness of the Irish geniuss work on the one hand and by the multitude of its
4

Burdescu Foceneanu, Felicia, Sinele si Cellalt-probleme ale dedublrii n poezia lui Lucian Blaga i William ButlerYeats (Self and Other-problems of doubleness in the poetry of Lucian Blaga and William Butler Yeats),: Universal Dalsi, Bucureti, 1999, p18.

critical interpretations on the other. As far as A Portrait is concerned, it has been interpreted from quite a number of modernist critical views, besides the traditional ones: it was perceived as buildungsroman, as a novel reflecting social reality (W. Trevor, Reading Joyce Politically), feminist novel (B.K. Scott, James Joyce, Feminist Readings) and also from modern perspectives among which we mention Umberto Ecos The Aesthetics of Chaosmos, Poeticile lui Joyce (The poetics of James Joyce), Hugh Kenners The Portrait in Perspective and The Cubist Portrait, Anthony Burgess Martyr and Maze-maker. This is to mention but a few of the former critical receptions of A Portrait, which are crowned by contemporary critical interpretations such as: psychoanalytic criticism in Sheldon Brivics The Disjunctive Structure of Joyces Portrait, reader-response criticism as it can be read in Norman N. Hollands A Portrait as Rebellion, a revisiting of feminist criticism in Suzette Henkes Stephen Dedalus and Women, deconstruction applied by Cheryl Herr in Deconstructing Dedalus, the New Historicist perspective as it appears in R.B. Kershners Genious, Degradation, and the Panopticon. A special attention was paid to Florentina Anghels James Joyce-Portret al artistului n tineree: O lectur poietic (James Joyce-A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a poietic reading) as it represents a more recent and illuminating approach to A Portrait, and special attention was allotted to Felicia Burdescus Sinele si Cellalt-probleme ale dedublrii n poezia lui Lucian Blaga i William ButlerYeats (Self and Other-problems of doubleness in the poetry of Lucian Blaga and William Butler Yeats) as it represents an elaborate comparative study of the self in the midst of poetry. The critical reception of Dubliners especially in the thread of modern and contemporary criticism stands also as to engulf the reader. Among such studies we can enumerate: Dubliners Dozen: The Games Narrators Play by Gerald Doherty, Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective by Garry Martin Leonard, ReJoycing New Readings of Dubliners by Rosa Maria Bosinelli Bollettieri and Harold Frederick Mosher, New perspectives on Dubliners by Mary Power, Ulrich Schneide, Suspicious Readings of Joyces Dubliners by Margot Norris. In addition to all the above mentioned studies there are some more contemporary interpretations which touch upon and/or go beyond the scriptural space of the two envisaged works in our dissertation: Universul urban n opera lui James Joyce (The Urban Universe in 5

James Joyces Work) by Vasile Cucerescu, Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis by Morris Beja, Literary Paths to Religious Understanding by G. Douglas Atkins, Joyce through Lacan and Zizek by Shelly Brivic, How James Joyce Made His Name. A Reading of the Final Lacan by Roberto Harari. The Joycean text would be expected to render itself plainly to the reader, but instead it still continues to challenge the reader in a never-ending play of give and take, be it at the level of images, symbols or myths, not surrendering itself completely, still posing some tension exactly when the reader thought he caught it all; then each door of meaning that the reader opens is in fact the opening of a gate towards new labyrinths and resplendent symbols. With a strenuous effort to conquer the tension posed by the text, instead of dissolving it in the power of logic or reason, the discovery that follows this effort bears more tension than the one already existent and surpassed. The Joycean text still defies the laws of time, and most importantly, it emerges triumphant on top of the immense critique that was built upon it. As an interpreter of the Joycean epiphany from Dubliners to A Portrait we have done nothing but keep the two works in contemporaneity. Starting from the idea that the epiphany represents the specific Joycean sine qua non in the artistic becoming we have analyzed how the artist manages to discover his vocation and reaches what apparently could be his final telos: the sublime. The journey from Dubliners to A Portrait traverses the preliminary epiphanic instances with rooted triggering in Stephen Hero and the collection of Epiphanies accompanying the more contoured hero in his artistic becoming reflected in a more distilled form of epiphanies in A Portrait. In this sense we owe an explanation for the title of our research: according to Roberto Harari, when discussing Joycean epiphany from a Lacanian perspective, the epiphanies were extremely significant in Joyces decision to become a writer: he had a strong sense of what is ordinarily called a vocation. Vocare entails hearing a voice calling out something that is certainly written into the epiphany. It is perfectly possible to isolate this dimension in the speaking being () It is a question of the occurrence, without it being sought.5 Therefore the epiphany becomes a vocatio/ crying and calling out of the artistic self all throughout Joyces works reaching its ultimate goal in the actual
5

Roberto Harari. How James Joyce Made his Name. New York: Other Press, 2002, p. 70.

vocation the realization of ones call or vocation through the seemingly ultimate dimension of the epiphany: the sublime due to the fact that both self and epiphany adopt a dialogic stance by means of Joycean textual voices. It is Bakhtins merit to have observed and analyzed the dialogism that functions not only between cultures but among the constitutive elements of the same deposit of memories, of ones personal history. According to this principle, a plurivalent dialogic stance arises: a primary conversation established between the epiphanies and the self, a second dialogic stance occurring between the epiphanies themselves and lastly between them and their constituents. The present dissertation stands as a direct text-reader communication reaching a consensus towards the identification of Joycean epiphanies, their sources and closely analyzing their malleability to interpretations as if anticipating any forthcoming study of the Joycean epiphany. They emerge as all pervasive Joycean artistic essence or noumenon, which all his works are inescapably impregnated with. Although the epiphany in general has its roots in the Romantic tradition of idealism6 and Joyce himself shares with the Romantics the taste for rebelliousness, the aesthetics of nature, the fondness for the feminine sublime, he singles out his epiphany on a unique trajectory as he does not restrict it to these themes solely, neither in terms of literary technique nor as spiritual elevation. Joyce remains true to his heretic-rebellious confession and transcends the Romantic rebelliousness and, at least at the level of his work, reincarnates a newly born epiphany out of the mundane realism. According to Arthur Power, Joyce said: What makes most peoples lives unhappy is some disappointed romanticism, some unrealizable or misconceived ideal In fact you may say that idealism is the ruin of man, and if we lived down to fact, as primitive man had to do, we would be better off. That is what we were made for. Nature is quite unromantic. It is we who put romance into her (). In Ulysses I tried to keep close to fact.7
6

Epiphanic art can take the form of descriptions of these which make this reality shine through, as Wordworth and Holderlin, Constable and Friedrich do, each in his own way. Taylor Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard Univerity Press, 2001(tenth publishing), p. 456. 7 http://www.ricorso.net/rx/az-data/authors/j/Joyce_JA/quots/quots3.htm; James Joyce: Quotations (3) Comments on the Works Arthur Power. Conversations with James Joyce. London; Millington 1974, p. 98. quoted in Hugh Kenner. Ulysses. London: George Allen & Unwin 1980, p. 14.

Tributary to his fondness for the mundane realism is also Joyces influence with Ibsen and his rather ambivalent attitude towards the Irish Revival. As Olson Liesl notes, Joyce points to a fork in his path: Ibsen on one side and the Celtic Twilight on the other. Joyce declares a necessary shift toward everyday experience, implicitly rejecting a style () that looked back to the mythology and folklore of Irish culture as a source of Irish exceptionalism and Irish nationalism.8 In consciously choosing Ibsen as his master, Joyce strives for realism over romanticism and, as Ellmann argues in his biography of Joyce, attempts to make himself into a European, leaving the visions of the fin-de-sicle poets, especially in Ireland, behind him. But the allure of the Irish Literary Revival and the related aestheticism still mark Joyces style, from his early collection of poetry, Chamber Music, to romanticized moments throughout his later work, which linger even as they are satirized and renounced.9 The pillars of our demonstrations are imposed by the economy of the text in which contraries coexist in a harmonious and continuous symbiosis. The reconciliation of oppositions arises only after one thesis has been surpassed through an antithesis reaching the synthesis. The synthesis reached at the level of Joycean epiphany is not plainly visible in the scriptural space and it demands a sinuous process (similar to the spiral-like evolution of water epiphanies) on behalf of the reader in order to catch a glimpse of the transparent totality that the re-envisaged epiphanies emanate. As Joyce quoted from Bruno in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver: Every power in nature must evolve an opposite in order to realize itself and opposition brings reunion.10 Following the same token, our dissertation proposes a new way of grasping Joyces epiphanic mode by analyzing it in terms of initial descent or initiatory plunge into the mundane, of flight from it through the inner transcendence in the midst of the mundane and brought to light by the viewers mind-eye. In this respect the epiphany resembles a lotus flower that draws its beauty and splendor from the dirty mud echoing also the title of one of Oscar Wildes plays: De Profundis in Excelsis.
8 9

Liesl Olson. Modernism and the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 37. Liesl Olson. Modernism and the Ordinary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 37. 10 Richard Ellmann (ed). James Joyce. Selected Letters .New York: Viking Press, 1966, p. 306; (from a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 27 January 1925). Also available as online source at Bob Denham The Educated Imagination http://fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca/category/bob-denham/page/4/.

Florentina Anghel sustains in her poietic reading of A Portrait that the epiphany is born under the sign of hazard and hazard in its turn is placed somewhere at the borderline between matter and spirit.11 This definition of hazard perfectly accommodates and sustains our perspective on the phenomenological versus the metaphysical dimension of epiphany. Therefore our research of the Joycean epiphany is based upon the apparently opposing pillars which are also just as many sources of Joycean epiphany: a geniuss autobiografiction,12 religion and aesthetics, memory, love, water, myth, and the sublime. We consider all these coordinates prevalent and crucial for the analysis of Joycean epiphany since they show their availability in their quality of being just as many constituents that can reverberate the epiphany throughout the scriptural space.

1. JAMES JOYCE AND THE SPIRAL OF IDENTITY 1.1 Between national and artistic identity
Our demonstration deals with a preliminary clarification regarding Joycean resistance which manifests itself in a twofold way: on the one hand there is the resistance to the countrys nets and on the other hand we notice Joyces resistance to a disguised form of Girardian mimetic violence. The Irish brilliant writer does not reject his artistic father figures who indeed had some influence upon his writing. More specifically, applying the New Historicist reading grid we mention Ibsen with his fondness for realism and the ordinary, Byron and Shelley with the Romantic refined nuance and sense of rebelliousness as well as the taste for the nature aesthetics and the scent of supreme ideal. Joyce chooses to distance himself from the countrys nets prefigured in an erroneous concept of nationalism in his time. An abandonment of the Irish Revivalists credo who so fervently proclaimed themselves as the promoters of Irish national identity is noticeable as the envisaged author repudiates their borrowed aestheticism ( to use Fanons expression). The Revivalists idea
11

Florentina Anghel, James Joyce-Portret al artistului in tinerete: O lectur poietic (James Joyce- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a Poetic Reading), Craiova: Scrisul Romnesc, 2006, p 249. 12 The term autobiografiction was borrowed from Max Saunderss Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

of resurrecting nationalism emerged under the form of an acute plunge into the primitive world of the ancestors, the Celts. Not only that Joyce left aside the ancient myths pertaining to this culture but he also created his own modern myths. It appeared as his primary task to challenge this form of imposed authority (of the redemptive role of the primitive Irish realm) in order to make room for the only authority that seemed valid for him as an artist: the authority of authenticity. He redirects the center of attention from a forgotten world, which in fact threatened to engulf national identity, to the authentic life of a representative of that nation who filtered through his own conscience the acquired culture of the country. This is happily accommodated by Stephen Dedaluss conscience which is rendered as an aesthetic presentation of autobiography, what can be termed as fictionalisation. The evolutional journey deals with two apparently antagonistic levels: fiction and reality which rather go along the experiences that the two selves (narrative and biographic) more or less share. As it was perhaps predictable, the Irish writers contemporary with Joyce were very much preoccupied with the question of the Celtic Revival. The Irish, being colonials, it seemed for their writers, especially Synge and Yeats among the most illustrious names subscribing to the Revival, like a moral duty towards their country to try to keep intact its folklore, myths and legends, and symbols that laid in the forgotten origins of Ireland. Wellintended as they could be, they hoped that with their resurrecting of this primitive world they could reinstall the specificity of the race, the indestructible cultural independence and the authentic Irish identity that no colonizer could take away from them. The promised redemptive role of the Celtic Revival becomes adumbrated as soon as Gregory Castle records Fanon's reaction to it: Celtic Revival was capable of a limited form of autoethnographic resistance to an array of social authorities, Revivalism as a cultural practice conceived as a borrowed aestheticism, as Fanon puts it, that seeks to redeem primitive societies threatened by modernity proved inadequate for the articulation of an authentic Irish identity.13 Subscribing to this critical view of the presupposedly authenticity reached through the writing of literature at the shelter of the authority of ancient myth, James Joyce challenges precisely this imposed authority. Moreover, according to Gregory Castle, Joyce challenges
13

Gregory Castle. Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.173.

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both the cultural assumptions of the Revival (idealizing Irish peasantry, placing authenticity in folklore and so on) and the redemptive mode of ethnography. 14 Not only does he disbelieve the possibility of creating authentic literature and thus authentic national culture and identity through a continuous parallel of myth, but by challenging the Revivalists premises he successfully forges his own personal myth. He challenges, yet he does not and cannot erase the history of his homeland which has been rigorously inoculated into his conscience. If the invention of the much longed for New Irish Soul could not be founded on a wellspring of myth, it could not emerge out of a totally imagined nation and race either. Therefore, we cannot understand the complexity of Joyces attitude towards Revivalism if we place him outside its influence15 and we might add that one could not grasp the complexity of his work by ignoring his partial and rarefied tribute to myth in general, and Celtic symbolism intertwined with its precursive Catholic form in particular that is more exactly, in A Portrait. Without disregarding the various views on Joyce's attitude concerning the Celtic Revival (Gregory Castle saw him as a less sarcastic critic than William O Neill whereas William Johnsen, a fervent analyst of Girardian mimetic theory, showed him in the same family with Woolf and Ibsen as a promoter of non violent discourse towards tradition and folklore) we shall focus our paper on the presence of a distant Celtic and implicitly Catholic perfume that pervades the scriptural space of A Portrait. Joyces refined taste for the Celtic and biblical elements permits one to actually reach this hue, but only after having dug deep for the symbols that lie in the archaeologies of his homelands unconscious and identify those elements that resonate in his creative conscience and not ultimately establish correspondences which are in fact imposed by peculiar myths or legends, certain figures or symbols that pervade the text. Let us now follow what are the main sources that Joyce drew from both religions and to what extent and in what direction he reconverted them, as these aspects which are about to be unveiled represent also the pillars of our demonstration. Leaving aside the presence of the primordial elements from the forgotten world, water, fire, air and earth, there are traceable three main aspects or directions of mythical inspiration in Joyces A Portrait: the aspect of
14 15

Ibidem, p. 178. Ibidem, p. 173.

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triplism, the presence of the cow as a symbol later turned into myth, and of course the image of the bird. Therefore, the Irish brilliant writer borrowed the figure of the cow, bull, bous existent in both Celtic and Catholic cult but under three different aspects corresponding to the three different denominations (materiality in the cow dung profane, colleagues as cattle Catholic, and the unveiling of his predestinated name Bous Stephanoumenous sacred bull in Celtic and sacrificial animal in Catholic and finally the discovery of his own nature through the name Bous Greek myth with minotaur); the number three connects us to the authors next mythical adoption, which, according to Umberto Eco, consisted in keeping from the Catholic religion the trinitary model, which preexisted in the Celtic cult, we might add, but used it for the sake of art in Stephens famous esthetic theory. Then there is also the symbolism of the bird and of the bird girl that shares certain aspects/significance with the Celtic and Catholic image of the bird, but which eventually Stephen will abandon in favour of his own myth: the artist as Icarus. It is worth noticing that the three aspects are very strongly interconnected two of them are projected into myth (i.e. bird and cow), the other two are bound to their triple dimension (cow and principles of aesthetics), so that towards the end of the novel all three converge and yield to their true unique role, that of delimiting and enlightening Stephen towards his artistic path, his authorial ego (the principles of aesthetics, the bird girl-epiphany and also the bull as in the artificer myth).

1.2 Joycean Resistance to the Celtic Revival

The next aspect of our analysis regards Joyces location within the Irish Revival context. After consulting the works of Vincent Cheng, Gregory Castle, Declan Kieberd and Emer Nolan, to mention but a few of the critics preoccupied with this matter, we discover that the Irish authors attitude towards this current is an ambivalent one. He insists on not replicating the already too present Irish myths in the national literature of the time, but keeps from these the emphasis on the simple and humble life while also alloting a special place for 12

the appraisal of the triumphant hero. The Joycean ambivalent attitude regarding the Celtic Revival is traceable also in the unitary aspect of epiphany, its reconciled paradoxes. Before digging too deep in the exploration of epiphany, one must explain Joyces attitude towards the Celtic Revival, which indirectly sheds several illuminating points on his use of Celtic elements as we are going to demonstrate the manner in which the Celtic Revival becomes a kind of Celtic Twilight in his mastery of play with Celtic myth allusions. As we have seen, the Celtic Revival was supposed to provide the Revivalists with the means for an ethnographic redemption. Nevertheless, some critics such as Fanon considered that Revivalism, as a cultural practice, was borrowed aestheticism that seeks to redeem primitive societies, threatened by modernity but proved inappropriate for the articulation of an authentic Irish identity,16 which was precisely Joyces most important aim. He challenged both the cultural assumptions of the Revival, which consisted mainly in idealizing Irish peasantry, thus placing cultural authenticity in folklore, myth etc, and the redemptive mode of ethnography. However, Joyce, just like Yeats, in Gregory Castles point of view, desired the creation of an imaginary Irish nation and race which is not quite true; he merely depicted things as they were in the Irish society of his time through the nicely polished looking glass of his conscience. If he wished indeed to create a new Irish nation first he would have had to adopt an attitude of mimetic violence17 against his actual country, which, according to Johnsen, is not the case with James Joyce. Beneath this black and white like antithesis of views, Joyces stand permits one to believe that the Irish writer did not yield to either extreme that of inflicting his present nation in order to build up a new imaginary one- but he simply committed to the supreme credo of revealing the Irish nation in its most genuine form. Thus Stephens statement at the end of A Portrait becomes a promise not of inventing a new Irish soul, but of merely liberating it from traditional and inauthentic interpretations through his authentic creative and powerful conscience. This process could be called isomorphism.18
16 17

Gregory Castle. Modernism and the Celtic Revival, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p.173. William A. Johnsen. Violence and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce and Woolf. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003, p.13-14. 18 The idea behind an isomorphism is to realize that two groups are structurally the same even though the names and notation for the elements are different. We say that groups G and H are isomorphic if there is an isomorphism between them. Another way to think of an isomorphism is as a renaming of elements. Source: http://www.math.csusb.edu/notes/advanced/algebra/gp/node19.html.

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From another point of view, Yeatss choice of reviving the autonomous and autochthonous folk guarantees the success of the project whereas Joyces strife to create a national literature by engaging in a rough critique of Revivalism proves as challenging as authentic. Both Irish writers appeal to the ethnographical: Yeats, as a method of cultural preservation and authentication, whereas Joyce, as a strategy of cultural critique.19 It is worth noting the distinction between Irish nationalism and Celtic Revival, Joyce being a critic of the second even though he is not antipathetic of the whole ethnographic tradition. He holds up a mirror along the peoples lives and places tumult without an obsessive urge to discover or create Celtic correspondences at any cost. He locates and invests his objectivity and depersonalization as a writer precisely in his attitude which is rather passive. He is one of the few modernist writers (Woolf and Ibsen also) that resists mimetic violence directed against their cultural tradition or artistic father figures. From where he stands it seems that it is only the inauthentic dimension of the Revivalist attitude that he criticizes even though not withholding Emer Nolan's consideration that Joyces critique of nationalism is unintelligible outside the Revivalist context.20 For a more eloquent explanation of this paradoxical phenomenon one must analyze the authors attitude as it is disclosed in Dubliners as well as in A Portrait. For instance, Gabriel Conroy, one of the characters from The Dead, experiences a conflict on the Irish national values as they are exposed in his talk with Miss Ivors about the Aran Islands. He denies Irish language as his own although he recognizes Ireland as his nation. His identity crisis is fully exposed the moment when he is contrasted with Michael Fury, since the latter emerges in Grettas eyes as a more authentic Irishman. This identification leaves Gabriel Conroy with the status of the other, consequently an inauthentic representative, whereas Michael Fury is seen as a representative of the Celtic code of Chivalry. In Michael Furys culture, which is in fact Irelands inherited culture, Gabriel feels like both an insider (better said intruder) and an outsider. By contrast, Gretta becomes a figure of sacrificial sovereignty duplicating the belief in the legendary: when asked by her husband about Michael Furys
19

Gregory Castle. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; chapter A Renegade from the Ranks: Joyces critique of Revivalism in the early fiction, p.173. 20 Emer Nolan. James Joyce and Nationalism. London, New York: Routledge, 1995, p. 17.

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death, her answer, I think he died for me, echoes the reply of the old woman in Cathleen Ni Houlihan by Yeats and Lady Gregory.21 Ironically, Gabriel and Grettas souls appear to be united not because of their marriage or love, but due to Michael Fury who becomes the symbol of an empty center suitable for the emergence of a hybrid identity caught in conflicting demands: Revivalist mythology, nationalism, Catholicism, etc. According to Emer Nolan, it is the nationalist mythology of authenticity and not the encouragement of modernity, traceable in Little Chandlers tone and allusions, that frustrates Gabriel, precipitating his feeling of decenteredness. The Irish living characters stand in fact as the authors emblem of irony directed towards the Revivalists themselves who seek authenticity in outdated traditions instead of grasping and experiencing the authenticity of the reality in their lives or experiences. Following Gabriels line of evolution, his confrontation of the hybrid identity in an attempt to actually solve the identity crisis is ambivalent and epiphanic. His strife echoes also Little Chandlers inarticulate sensitivity (from A Little Cloud) and James Duffys distance from the mundane world in which he longs to participate (from A Painful Case). Little Chandlers desire to sound the Celtic note and write something original depends on his ability to imitate the Celtic School22 which Joyce was very critical about. But then again the narrative continues to infuse the poems he has not yet written with a melancholy tone and allusions (Dubliners, p.73-74) exposing the desire for artistic conscious development that lies precisely in the mastering of those Celtic hues (which could be replaceable with other myths) and not just offering a continuous parallel of them. As one could easily observe from these examples, Joyce was very intensely preoccupied with the problem of authenticity which he regarded as a sine qua non factor in delivering the true identity. He developed an anti mimetic style (employed also in Ulysses due to the artists ability to enter into something like a natural process in which something new is produced) insisting upon the authority of his own experience with the subjects of his analysis and, like Synge, has appealed to his own intimate knowledge of Irish society
21

22

Read more in Gregory Castles study. Gregory Castle. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 chapter A Renegade from the Ranks: Joyces critique of Revivalism in the early fiction, p. 183.

15

invoking a personal authority (...) His art reveals the constructedness of the real and the reality of constructions(....) But the revelation of inauthenticity which characterizes many of Joyces epiphanies becomes an empowering anthropological fiction in its own right, capable, for good or ill, of inventing Irish souls.23 Resisting the temptation of erasing history, the author chooses to create his own myths drawing from the Irish culture and mythology only the hues that become poignant for the authority of his conscience. Allusion and its play together with Joyces poetic images, be they included or not in epiphanies, seem to be the most powerful means for setting the pillars of his modern myths. A more radiant image of the personal authority is delivered in A Portrait as the protagonist is granted the authenticity of the here and now of an instantaneous experience as it is instantaneously absorbed by his conscience. However, Stephen will be able to undergo a process of crystallization towards the sacramental authority of the priest of eternal imagination only with the help of certain sovereignty figures, and relying on, but without imitating, former ancient myths. It is also of major importance to our theory to observe what nuance do Stephens relationships with peasant boys, Madden from Stephen Hero or Davin from A Portrait, acquire in the light of a Revivalist anthropological redemption. As Gregory Castle insists, there seems to be an affectionate familiarity between Stephen and the other two characters, an intimacy which allows Stephen to achieve a kind of intersubjective rapport and overcome the distance that guarantees his constant observance.24 Stephens relationships with Madden or Davin are reminiscent of what Yeats attempted in The Celtic Twilight: the artist observer is allowed the apparently contradictory privileges of distance and intimacy. This is due to the fact that both Madden and Davin belong to peasantry and are thus representatives of the Irish anthropological ideal. In A Portrait, this character remains as Stephens only reference to the attitudes regarding peasantry and by condensing this image, Joyce turns Davin into a type: the peasant student, a man in thrall to myth. Joyces attitude towards this character discloses a slightly Celtic Revival preference but only to a limited extent. The affectionate familiarity present in Stephen Hero becomes rather a confessional intimacy in A Portrait, as Davin relates his restless encounter with a peasant woman.
23 24

Ibidem, p. 180, 182, 183. Ibidem, p. 195.

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At last after a bend of the road I spied a little cottage with a light in the window. () After a while a young woman opened the door and brought me out a big mug of milk. She was half undressed as if she was going to bed when I knocked and she had her hair hanging (). She kept me in talk (). And all the time she was talking Stevie, she had her eyes fixed on my face and she stood so close to me I could hear her breathing. (A Portrait, p. 217) I didnt go in, Stevie. I thanked her and went on my way again, all in a fever. At the first bend of the road I looked back and she was standing at the door. The last words of Davins story sang in his memory and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth, reflected in other figures of the peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane () as a type of her race and his own, a batlike soul.(A Portrait, p. 218) The story becomes important as far as it serves as a means of providing an iconic function: the peasant married woman who lures Davin encapsulates a dimension comparable to that of Celtic Goddesses. As unreal as she may seem, she is the more engendered in the realm of local Irish myth, representing also a living reminder of those forgotten times to her descendants who seem devoid of such interpretation. Unlike Michael Fury, also a reminder, though dead, of a past glorious world, who came to be an empty center for a hybrid identity, the peasant woman from A Portrait, shares a dimension of the mythic world and keeps also to her identity of a woman, appearing as a figure of sovereignty: she is the one who messes with Davins mind and not the other way around (the fact that Davin remembers everything about her in minute detail stands as a proof of this.) Thus, one could say that she is somewhat constructed from Michael Fury, sharing with him the Celtic legacy, and from Gretta, who is a figure of sovereignty, this very female power. As a peasant woman inviting adultery, Joyce turns her into a figure of pagan female sovereign, calling to the primitive laws of nature. The fact that the whole portrait is contoured in dark tones (the episode took place during nightime) encourage the narrator to seal her image as a batlike soul. Thus, her image is also seen as descending from the birds reign, but profoundly wrapped in and committed to 17

darkness. The complexity that the image of the bird implies is abruptly blunt by this confinement in darkness, revealing its evil side (the claws of ignorance that reach from an ancient past). The tension between two opposing tendencies to idealize and demystify is apparent in almost every encounter that Stephen has with Irish women. The description of the flower girl is a visible proof of both tendencies, reflecting once more Joyces way of entangling paradoxes. A similar bipolar attitude is found in the villanelle written for Emma Clery who appears here as a temptress embodying both the profane desire and the religious adoration which Stephen manages to aestheticize through his writing of the villanelle. A feeling of intertwined Eros and agape are awakened by the same woman and materialized by the artist under the form of aesthetic creation. Stephens anti mimetic resolution by resisting both temptations, yielding to her charm or giving up her image, is precisely what enables his creative process. However, later, after having written the villanelle, he mocks her image by repeating phrases formerly used to depict the peasant woman, thus leading to the idea that she is just another type of primitive Irish womanhood. This reconstruction of the sovereignty figure as projection of the artists profane sacramental love reveals a somewhat balance between icon parody and repetition of those very iconizing strategies.25 According to Vincent Cheng,26 Emma Clery is Hibernia (bat like soul), the seductive lure of Ireland and Irish Nationalism which Stephen must put aside although his attitude towards Nationalism is rather ambivalent than repudiative. Stephens artistic priesthood reinstalls the discourse of primitivism implicating Emma Clery as sovereignty figure with a priested peasant (Father Arnall with whom Stephen believed that she flirted) and a priestly aesthete, that Stephen imagines himself to be. Another, perhaps the most powerful example of female sovereignty of Celtic origin, is considered to be (according to L. F. Radford and Anthony Roche) the bird-girl. As Gregory Castle states, she embodies and resignifies Revivalist iconography in an aesthetic vision situated in the liminal time of the sidhe, a transitional zone of transformation and
25

Gregory Castle. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 chapter A Renegade from the Ranks: Joyces critique of Revivalism in the early fiction, p 190. 26 Vincent J. Cheng. Catching the Conscience of a Race: Joyce and Celticism in Morris Beja and David Norris (eds.). Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1996, p. 23.

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timelessness through which the artist passes, a space between this world and the other world of Tir na nOg (Land of Youth).27 Leaving aside these images of Irish feminine sovereignty, Stephen discovers his own sacramental authority, that of the priest of the eternal imagination. Undoubtedly it is due to women (mainly emerging as sovereign) figures that he came to the realization of his authority by developing an eroticized aestheticism or a voluptuousness of aestheticism. There was a long road to go through all the authorities encountered in his life (social, family, religious, sexual etc), but by conquering them, he will be able to look down on each and every one of them from his ivory tower. Conquering the world around him the artist forges his own.

1.3 Joycean Catholicism - (Anti) Religious Joyce

Further aspects of the nature of epiphany are detected in its kinship with the Catholic religion, tracing its spring back to Celtic times. Firstly, what the artist leaves aside from the religious dogma is the blindfolding faith that it presupposes and demands, a fact that has determined many critics to accuse the writer of being antireligious. Nevertheless, the path towards the authorial self proves much ampler than this presupposed religious abandon as he transposes the liturgical tone (to use Umberto Ecos expression) into his own writing. Religious rituals and customs are abstracted into his mode of moral introspection, more specifically, and more generally, in his narrative testifying in fact the authors taste for the sacred discourse. As ambivalent as he proves to be in front of religion also, Joyce chooses to settle for his own vocation which is voiced through the protagonist of A Portrait. Stephen, despite the nets imposed by his Jesuit education, will succeed in discovering the true self only after pondering and overcoming the potential priestly calling and transposing the correspondence between beauty and divine entity into beauty and divine-like creation, thus calling himself the priest of eternal imagination. The stamp of the divine is further ensured as soon as he decides to entitle his literary device epiphany, thus borrowing the term from the religious denomination. Moreover, the mystery of the Church Mass prolongs its sacredness into the mystery present within Joycean epiphany.
27

Gregory Castle. Modernism and the Celtic Revival. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 200.

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Talking of Joyces Catholicism is similar to discussing about filial love between Oedip and Iocasta.28 Having abandoned his faith, the Irish writer did not let go of certain ritualistic forms and habits. He transposed religiousness into his own mode of moral introspection or more concretely in his narrative punctuated by a liturgical rhythm enhancing his entire taste for the sacred oratory; not to mention that even the term epiphany was borrowed from the religious discourse. The author finds suitable the blasphemy celebrated according to the ritual of the liturgy, 29 taking everything to a personal level. According to Harry Levin, a certain tendency towards abstraction has always reminded one Joyce reached aesthetics through theology.30 Despite the fact that modern works of art challenged the vision of an apparently well-organized universe thus paralleling the idea of order imposed by the Catholic myth, Joyce, having been raised in a religious spirit, employed this dimension of orderliness in the process of creation delivering a total work of art, a sacred cosmogony of symbols that radiate. In Joyces work symbols conjoin both religious and Celtic dimensions especially through the persistence of trinity present in the Catholic Church under the form of the Holy Father, Son and Ghost but which was adopted since mythical times when most of the Celtic goddesses manifested themselves in triple aspects. Among these we can enumerate Macha, who shared with the crow-goddess and great queen, Morrigan, the responsibility for the fortunes of the community. There was also goddess Brigit who ruled over healing, poetry and metalcraft.31 The dark Gods gave away to Christ, Himself one part of an all-powerful and indivisible trinity. Triplism - the merging of three elements to create one whole, the number three having an especial sacred and magical symbolism manifested itself in Celtic art, too, not only under god form.32 An abstracted form of triplism has reached Joyce beyond spatiotemporal boundaries under the form of Aquinas quidditas containing thus the three indivisible qualities of the aesthetic object: consonantia, integritas and claritas. One unintentionally witnesses Joyces use of religiously related terms in the scope of his narrative
28 29

Umberto Eco, Poeticile lui Joyce, trad. Cornel Mihai Ionescu, Piteti: Paralela 45, 2007, p. 41. Ibidem, p. 42. 30 Ibidem p. 44. 31 David Sandison. The Art of the Celts. Bounty Books, London, 2006, p. 39. 32 Idem.

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reaching a deep level of artistic theory. The coexistence of the Celtic and Catholic origin in the economy of an orderliness based on triplism contributes to the indestructibility of Stephens theory. The hero appeals to the most immediate myth available for his countrys religion, but he selects it in such a way that it reverberates throughout the primitive form of his nation. Stephen empties religion of its content, retaining the form and creating a new priesthood, that of the eternal imagination. As he cannot subside outside his own conscience which is imbued with the cultural, national and religious background in the midst of which it took shape, the artist chooses to act upon his own becoming and not let himself be derided or deluded by external values. After redefining his status rapported to his nation, he reinvents the relationship of art and religion. Joyce the artist sees both art and religion as intertwined (since the Greeks). The Romantic art and aesthetics take the place of the Church. Though Stephen declines to join that priesthood seen in A Portrait as the discharging of a formal rite (221) when he is actually invited to look for his priestly vocation, he does not reject priesthood entirely. The hero converts this potential vocation into what seems to him of higher degree: his own becoming as the priest of the eternal imagination. Moreover, the Non Serviam reply that he gives to his mother, who asks as final wish of him to attend the Easter Mass, deeply and irreversibly seals his chosen vocation. The reasons with which he sustains his refusal paradoxically pertain to the religious (more precisely Catholic) sphere. The only salvation possible is grasped by remaining true to oneself, by believing in ones creative ego, while slowly detaching the self from imposed forms of authority. From another point of view religious terms used in the service of aesthetic discourse serve him quite well in the economy of his spiritual heritage. He talks of beauty in the same spirit that a Catholic would talk about the holy trinity; only the concepts already mentioned are not employed in the same sense as when they would describe the holy trinity. There is a correspondence between the three phases of the trinity and three objective aspects of the beauty that Toma dAquinas establishes and Stephen applies. This analogy is slowly built up only to further sustain the correspondence between beauty and the instance of the divine entity. Joyces ambivalent attitude towards religion in general and Catholicism in particular

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will be further commented upon in a close-text analysis in the subchapter entitled Claritas beyond Phenomenological Perception.

2. JAMES JOYCE AND EPIPHANY 2.1 Former attempts of literary epiphany

The epiphany study per se begins as we analyze the former attempts of epiphany as they have been examined by critics like Martin Bidney, Ashton Nichols, and Robert Langbaum. Martin Bidney, in the study entitled Patterns of Epiphany, exposes the radiant geometry of the Romantic Wordsworthian epiphany and the elemental epiphanies of the Romantic Coleridge and the Victorian Arnold, and then proceeds with the analysis of Tennyson and Pater disclosing also the fact that certain writers share a recurrent pattern of epiphanic elements (for example: flower and fire). Towards the end of his study the historical dimension of epiphany is analyzed in the texts of authors like Carlyle, Tolstoy and Barrett Browning. Although renowned writers seem to had been preoccupied with epiphanic nuances before Joyce, the authors Bidney presents as epiphany-builders have not coined the term themselves, nor have they acknowledged the literary device; it is the critics merit to have identified and analyzed the epiphanic recurring patterns. Besides the already mentioned writers, there was still another author, contemporary with Joyce, more exactly, Virginia Woolf, who manifested preliminary epiphany awareness, but grasped merely the temporal dimension of this literary device by calling it: moment of being. She used this term as a synonym of epiphany particularly in Mrs Dalloway.33 Unquestionably the authentic birth of epiphany took place in the twentieth century when Joyce made his appearance on the literary scene. He is the true creator of epiphany since it was he who chose to baptize this literary device with the term borrowed from religious discourse. Moreover, Joyce developed what can be named the religion of epiphany as he looked for it in his everyday life, rendered / remembered, collected and recreated it in his own writings.
33

Then for that moment she had seen an illumination; a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed. But the close withdrew; the hard softened. It was over - the moment. From Marc Maufort Transgressive Itineraries: Postcolonial Hybridizations of Dramatic Realism, Peter Lang, Brussels, 2003, p. 15.

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What is epiphany in literature? It is quite tantalizing to find a perimeter of the literary epiphany since it seems to have sprung exactly where patterns of any kind (be they logical, rational, imaginary or aesthetical) have ended. It is not to be confused with a chaotic literary element or concept since it emerges as a literary device that permeates and is built from all those rules without strictly obeying to them (a spontaneous yet disciplined act of creation). Not totally abandoning the religiousness that the term epiphany34 carries within it, this concept and technique in literature, as Ashton Nichols observes in his Poetics of Epiphany, fulfills three criteria: expansiveness, atemporality, mysteriousness.35 Agreeing with the first and last criterion but somewhat doubting that of atemporality, since epiphanies can also be retrospective, Martin Bidney feels compelled to add the criterion of intensity 36 while also borrowing Morris Bejas incongruity criterion37 that the literary epiphany should fulfill. Another way of saying much the same thing would be to use the term criterion of insignificance, an insistence on the triviality of the epiphanic occasion that Beja finds prominent in Joyce.38 Much emphasis is placed upon the context when dealing with this criterion. However, neither this criterion nor the others reduce the literary epiphany to a mere poetic description, a moment of insight or psychological introspection. With a new set of epiphanic criteria in mind (expansiveness, mysteriousness, intensity, incongruity), Martin Bidney offers in his book a varied analysis of epiphanic attempts in literature, leaving precisely Joyce out. However, his work aids considerably our analysis in the sense that his study demonstrates right from the beginning that Joyce was not the only one preoccupied with epiphany in literature. Thus Martin Bidney dedicates each chapter of his book to a different author in whose work the critic detects recurring epiphanic patterns, although none of the writers he chose to analyze did not call the literary device and concept by its name, like Joyce did. The first part Elemental Diversity and Conflict
34

Epiphany is a Christian holiday on January 6 celebrating the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus, according to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, Pearson Education Limited, 2003. 35 Ashton Nichols. Poetics of Epiphany. University Alabama Press, 1987, p. 28. 36 Martin Bidney sustains his theory by noting that Nichols, too, speaks of psychic intensity and emotional importance as characterizing the epiphanic imagination in Martin Bidney. Patterns of Epiphany from Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. USA: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997, p. 3.
37

Quoted by Wim Tigges in his study.Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany. Netherlands: Rodopi, 1999, p. 211. 38 Martin Bidney. Patterns of Epiphany from Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning. USA: Southern Illinois University Press, 1997, p. 3.

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deals with the poetic writings of the Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge and with the work of the Victorian Arnold. He exposes the radiant geometry in Wordsworthian epiphany and the elemental epiphanies of the other two poets and then proceeds in the second part, Elemental Deaths and Illuminations to Love and Liminality in Tennyson, and Beauty and Pain in Pater. Here he unveils the most powerful epiphanies of the Victorian Age disclosing the fact that both writers share a recurrent pattern of epiphanies: the flower of fire. In the third and last part of his book, Bidney accords much space to the historical dimension of epiphany as he registers and analyses it in authors like Carlyle, Tolstoy and Barrett Browning. As it can effortlessly be noticed, Bidney tracks and analyses the epiphanic nuances traced up to the early nineteenth century and tries to group them according to a pattern that is dictated more or less by the four criteria mentioned earlier. In fact, it is precisely this pattern that he holds as validating his identified epiphanies, all seen from a refreshed Bachelardian phenomenological perspective. Interestingly, most of the criteria that Bidney agrees that an epiphany should fulfill apply to the Joycean epiphany as well.

2.2 Joycean Epiphany and its Critique

After delineating a clear history of epiphanic attempts in literary works of art, the focus of our demonstration in the second subchapter of chapter two will naturally fall upon the classifications of Joycean epiphany as they are present in precisely the writers work or in the studies of critics like Margot Norris, Morris Beja, Robert Langabaum, Irene Hendry Chayes. From an acute urge to find a way of decoding the Joycean epiphany sprung the critics need to built up a patterning of the literary device and thus to establish in this sense various denominations and classifications: climactic, retrospective, prospective, belonging to character or reader and the list may continue. In our view all these denominations point to just as many coordinates consecutively accepted as systems of reference. However, attempting to deal with all that the artists conscience is sensible to, the epiphany in itself becomes even more unreachable and ungraspable, the strife for its unveiling in terms of canonical and recurring patterns would prove a never ending endeavour. 24

With Joyce each epiphany is fully plunged in and also diffused from the vocational self that even the initially apparent repetitive symbols and images, for instance ivory, water, woman are obssessively abandoned and then transcended to deliver fresh, new ones. In our view, the Joycean epiphany succeeds in refreshing literature through its feeling of totality and imponderability confessed through Stephens evanescence of moments. Blending the refined Romantic nuance with the triviality of Realism and going beyond these dimensions, Joyce does nothing else but to ensure his epiphanys totality reaching also a sense of the sublime. Nonetheless, the classifications that the Joycean epiphany bears are far more numerous than these quadruple criteria, thus making the Irish writers epiphany more ungraspable and nonconformist to any pattern. For instance, according to the critic Morris Beja, the Joycean epiphany can be retrospective, dream-epiphanies, of instantaneous nature (In a notebook now at Cornwell University, he writes under Aesthetic that the instant of inspiration is a spark so brief as to be invisible.39), of subjective nature, readers epiphanies as well as characters epiphanies and of course Joyces own epiphanies and, last but not the least, there can be climactic epiphanies, integrated in a certain context whereas the subjective nature of epiphany refers precisely to ones introspection or just to the awareness of subjectiveness. The instantaneous nature of Joycean epiphany very much hints at Bidneys intensity criterion in the sense that time or emotion is concentrated. Morris Beja pays considerable attention to the sources of epiphany as well, which he considers to be: triviality (that incongruity criterion that Bidney chose to accept in his critical analysis) and incidents, external object, memories (from these arise the retrospective epiphanies) and dreams (or we could call them reverie epiphanies since they are the moments when the protagonist dreams with open eyes). The multiplicity of the Joycean epiphany cannot be exhausted here; this may stand as a mere guideline. Moreover, with Joyce the epiphany is not just a literary element but a literary technique. Irene Hendry Chayes identifies in this sense four main epiphany techniques: 1) the block technique apparent in Dubliners where the claritas is enabled through the trivial incident, 2) the realization of the three principles (claritas, consonantia,
39

Morris Beja. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. London: Peter Owen, 1971, p. 73.

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integritas) in one image, 3) distillation/ compression of characters/ events thus remaining only the essence, 4) objective characterization (revealing an individuals essence through a detail/ object to which it has only a fortuitous relation).40 So far the complexity of such literary novelty becomes apparent, but what is exactly the novelty that the Joycean epiphany brings beyond the fact that it is multifaceted? In our view, what the Joycean epiphany brings as an innovation in literature is the feeling of totality and imponderability reflected in Stephens confessed evanescence of moments. And by bringing the Joycean epiphany he also states his vocational self in this direction. Grasping all that the artists conscience proves sensible to, the epiphany becomes in itself ungraspable, an immensity of emotional, aesthetical, retrospective, elemental, mythical experiences. Thus trying to decode this epiphany in terms of pre-established patterns would prove a never ending strife.

2.3 Claritas beyond Phenomenological Perception

To the influences played upon Joyces becoming from incipient, Babel-like self to authorial ego, inseparable from the auspices of epiphany, is added the free interpretation of the Thomist aesthetics developed in the economy of the religious Trinitarian ideal. From the three stages of aesthetic apprehension that Stephen exposes, integritas, consonantia and claritas, we have singled out claritas as being specific to Joycean epiphany while also sharing the sense of the sacred borrowed from religion. Therefore the reader witnesses a continuous dispersion of the writers biographical self into just as many auspices of the egos vocation, more exactly just as many epiphanic experiences. We have chosen John Armstrongs theory of empathy together with Merleau Pontys system of phenomenological perception as they offer themselves as reading grids for the analysis of the first two stages of Joycean aesthetic apprehension -integritas and consonantia. Then the reader assists at how the transcendental Ego of the artist becomes God-like (like the artist, who sits behind beyond or above his artwork paring his fingernails (A Portrait, p. 193)) in the process of grasping and later rendering claritas. The biographical
40

Thomas Connolly. Joyces Portrait. Criticism and Critiques. Meredith Publishing Company, New York, 1962, p. 203-220.

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self is trancended by the authorial one, the unifying conscience becoming as incandescent as a fading coal can be luminously apprehensive, consequently reaching the enlightened state. Only in that moment can the artist embrace and shed light on the noumenon of the aesthetic object. What imposes more specifically this explosion of light if not a dispersion of boundaries at all levels and in all possible directions? The pluri-transcendence operates not only at the level of temporal or spatial dimensions that uselessly strive to limit / concretize / ephemerize the subject and object but it involves a self-and-other-transcendence. The subject first transcends itself and then the object, identifying with it, and transgresses or goes beyond it, reuniting thus a new-self-and-other. Claritas may be the climactic phase of aesthetic apprehension but it coincides also with the Joycean epiphany since both stages share a certain level of transcendence beyond phenomenological perception as Ponty41 would probably state. Furthermore, the author himself admits to the fact that this instant refers to epiphany as we shall see throughout our demonstration. The itineraries of the epiphanic attempts in Dubliners converge to the more matured and distilled versions present in A Portrait. Aesthetic apprehension and epiphany cannot leap the three stages that Stephen mentions and thus they cannot subside without a form of transcendence. Certain spiritual games (referring to the ways in which the imaginative capacity, uniting both intellect and intuition, operates in the direction of epiphany) evolve around and because of the contemplated object, as they are sustained by the artists early education, sensitive memory, insightfulness. At another level, as the quest for vocation presupposes so many abandons from the subjects behalf, the spiritual games become just as many games of transcendence. The sine qua non coordinates of the Joycean epiphany are represented by the many contexts that enable its appearance. There are, as we have seen, those guided by the mnemonic journey according to the instantaneous and spontaneous flashes of recollections (the rememorizing of Stephens meeting with Emma in the tram determines the creation of the villanelle eight years later), those guided by biographic self (Joyces worrying whether Nora would agree to accompany him without getting married triggers the depiction of the
41

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge, 2002, p. 386.

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spiritual torment of Eveline, the character, when Frank, her suitor, asks her to leave her home), trivial / ordinary perceived aesthetically (when Joyce, through Stephen, states that the clock was not epiphanised yet), mythical (the ancient symbols of bird and bous are revived in the novel) and so on as we shall see in the following chapters. When discussing about the Joycean epiphany one cannot omit the aesthetic joy, or that enchantment of the heart which may be generated by simple ordinary objects. However, in order to reach that aesthetic joy, the owner of the sensible conscience must first grasp the vocation in this sense. But what is the vocational self if not the melting pot for a wide variety of its sources: memory, sensibility and sensitivity, introspection, religion and transcendence! The personal identity and the individuals memory is transcended in order to leave room for the authorial ego, all of whose coordinates trigger just as many types of epiphanies. Although the epiphany cannot exist outside the vocational self, the epiphany is not necessarily conditioned by the aesthetic pleasure generated by the contemplation of a work of art. The sources are multiple and some of them are not even related to the most pleasant moments in the protagonists life as these are able to bestow an epiphanic state on the reader. As an example of renouncing ones personality in favour of epiphany stands the protagonists willingness to fructify even the not so pleasant moments in his life: when Little Chandler strives to sound the Celtic note but fails to do so or when he is irritated by the cry of his own son, or when Stephen shivers with cold after having been ditched into the slimy water by Wells and after that he imagines his death are all epiphanic instances which did not arise from the artists enchantment of the heart the moment he experienced them. The protagonists of Dubliners and A Portrait transform themselves into the contemplators of their own life and render it aesthetically to the reader. It is the intensity of those experiences that made the artist include them in his oeuvre, beyond their pleasant or unpleasant nature. By adopting a detached position from his very life, the artist manages to create an epiphany that transcends the scriptural space and works its way out further, into the readers conscience. One can establish a certain correspondence with Richard Kearneys classification of epiphany in relation to its scriptural support as follows: intra-textual, extra-textual and trans-textual. 42
42

But if Joyce is correct when he claims it would be a brave man would invent something that never happened, is it not legitimate to wonder if Joyces intratextual epiphanies might not repeat certain extratextual experiences in Joyces own life? in Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust by Richard Kearney in

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Thus, the aesthetic coordinate of the epiphany becomes omnipresent, playing its influence within but also outside the text, at the level of the biographic self as well as at the level of imagination. Certain clarifications need to be made before singling out claritas as the specific coordinate of the epiphany resulting from an aesthetic act. The question of beauty was posited by many philosophers of antiquity like Plato and Aristotle, and later by Aquinas also whose theories are filtered by the artists conscience. The recurring need to unveil the mystery of what beauty is proves prolific for the avant-garde modernist artist who keeps from tradition what he considers as essential but also upgrades the whole theory to the new tendencies of the nineteenth centurys aesthetics which makes his entire method analyzable from a contemporary view also. Thus, according to Florentina Anghel, there is a direct relation between epiphany and Theodor Lipps concept of empathy43 after having stated what Stephen keeps (and keeps not) from certain philosophers theories of beauty. Moreover, as we can observe, the Joycean epiphany invites to a direct comparison with the act of contemplation as it is disentangled by John Armstrong and permits the reader to establish whether or not the claritas (Joycean radiance) manages to take the leap away from the initial phenomenological perception. As the Joycean epiphany is directly connected to the idea of beauty manifested through aesthetic apprehension irrespective of what it is exactly that enables the artists expression of his vocation, we shall present Stephens aesthetics as it appears in the step by step explanation in A Portrait. As it comes out clearly from the protagonists talk with Lynch, Stephen uses part of Platos, Aristotles and most importantly Aquinas ideas on beauty to set the pillars of his own theory. The tensions and abandonments that occur along the way serve to crystallize Stephens aesthetic theory. Thus, from Platos definition, according to which beauty is the splendor of truth the idea of purely intellectual apprehension arises, as Joyce himself notes in his essay Aesthetics,44 and this obstructs the appearance of the beautiful.
Peter Gratton, John Panteleimon Manoussakis (eds.) Richard Kearney Traversing the Imaginary. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois, 2007, p. 193. 43 Florentina Anghel, James Joyce-Portret al artistului in tinerete: O lectur poietic, (James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a Poetic Reading. Craiova: Scrisul Romanesc, 2006.
44

James Joyce. Aesthetics. Published in Kevin Barry. James Joyce. Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p.102-108.

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Moreover, he states that truth mainly addresses the intelligible/intellectual appetite and this would imply a severe limitation of the artists access to any potentially aesthetically charged object. The rigors of the logically framed mind would act as barriers to the flight of imagination which is strongly connected to the sensible conscience, the poetic fiber of the spirit. Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the splendour of truth. I dont think that it has a meaning but the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. (A Portrait, p. 248) The first step in the direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection. () The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. (A Portrait, p. 248) Apparently, Stephen denies any implication of the intellectual apprehension within the aesthetic perception, but he insists on the scope of imagination which precisely plays upon the hazardous associations of mental images. These images cannot exist outside the intellect; therefore what Stephen rejects from Platos definition is the idea of a canonical or patterned experience of intellection as directly related to the aesthetic one. He pleads for the freedom of intellection in the process of aesthetic contemplation and in the course of epiphany and connects it directly to the sensible. Therefore the hazard of mental images is governed by the emotions empire or by the intensity of the lived experiences. The implication of intellect is not seen as totally exterior to the process of aesthetic contemplation, but its rigorous and rigid rules surrender in front of the more mysterious and logically inexplicable ways of sensible conscience, as Stephen states the supremacy of the sensible over intellection but also sets the role of intellect during aesthetic perception. The act of intellection is outside aesthetic apprehension although the intellect plays its part through the role of imagination. A purely intellectual analysis of an object would inevitably blunt the aesthetic charge that the artist may discover in it by means of his sensible conscience and it 30

would merely become a documentary description at its best. It is the artists duty to sense the appropriate rhythm between the right amount of objectivity and depersonalization (derived mainly from intellection) and the just degree of subjective agency (enabled by spiritual dimension).45 After reinterpreting Platos definition of beauty, which seems to have kept its influence up to Kantian views of aesthetic perception,46 the protagonist of the novel operates a gradual advancement from the logical, objective apprehension to the subjective one. By denying Aristotles theory that all art is mimetic in Aesthetics,47 Joyce sustains that art comes out as a natural process but holds Aristotles idea from Poetics that the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connection belong to and not belong to the same subject. (A Portrait, p. 248) The naturalness of the creative process lies precisely in the power of subjective agency while also grasping the essence of the object perceived which cannot be anything else but that which it is.48 We shall return later to this point regarding the Aristotelian essence of things, as it anticipates Aquinas concept of quidditas which Stephen adopts for the shaping of his theory. The preliminary clarifications smooth the way towards what constitutes Stephens applied Aquinas, even though in the novel the order in which they are exposed does not coincide with that of a logically oriented mind; the artist succeeds even in a certain dispersion of the scholastic style, as the views of Plato and Aristotle are mentioned in the middle of the Aquinan explanation as if wanting to defend this philosophers theory against the other two philosophers potential critical remarks. The protagonist opens his theory on art by quoting Joyce from Aesthetics: Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end. (A Portrait, p. 247) It is now that he clearly admits that art and implicitly its apprehension addresses the sensible and the intelligible unifying these two coordinates in what he later calls spiritual appetite. At this stage the artist
45

Joyce further explained in his Aesthetics the difference between aesthetic/spiritual appetite and intellectual appetite. 46 Kant also sustained, in a visible consubstantial thread with Platos definition, the supremacy of pure intellectual contemplation. 47 Aristotle does not here define art; he says only,Art is an imitation of nature and means that the artistic process is like the natural process James Joyce. Aesthetics. Published in Kevin Barry. James Joyce. Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 104. 48 Aristotles Poetics at www.forgottenbooks.org, p. 3.

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recognizes openly the role of the intellects presence in the process of creation but without undermining the importance of emotion/sensible. The enunciation of the artists scope situates Stephen as a true aesthete of his times. This last part of his definition is in fact an upgradation of Aquinas definition that seems to deal only with beauty leaving aside the aesthetic scope. Pulcra sunt quae visa placent.(A Portrait, p.248) It is perhaps understandable that Aquinas does not mention the term of aesthetics, since it only appeared in the late seventeenth century pointing from the beginning to the difference between Joyces theory and that of Aquinas. The artists effervescent genius does not stop here, as he grasps that the word visa could not have referred to beauty, which is apprehendable merely visually, but is perceived as an umbrella term enlacing all kinds of apprehension. His Flaubertian care for le mot juste makes him consider this word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces also a stasis of the mind. (A Portrait, p. 248) If the act of thinking implies dynamism related to the flow of thoughts and the kinesis may also be reflected in the turmoil of the soul due to the appearance of desire/ loathing, their condition is reversed when the mind is arrested in front of truth and the spirit dwells in esthetic contemplation. At this point both mind and spirit experience that state of imponderability, or what Stephen calls enchantment of the heart. The achievement of this state in which the artist resembles, as Stephen quotes Shelley, a fading coal is made possible through the process of contemplation. Joyce sequences the aesthetic apprehension into cognition, recognition and aesthetic satisfaction49 while Stephen upholds the free interpretation of the Aquinan concepts on beauty. Both theories (of Joyce and Stephen) of aesthetic apprehension invite correspondences with John Armstrongs theory
49

Now the act of apprehension involves at least two activities, the activity of cognition or simple perception and the activity of recognition. If the activity of simple perception is, like every other activity, itself pleasant, every sensible object that has been apprehended can be said in the first place to have been and to be in a measure beautiful;() For by the activity of recognition is meant an activity of decision; and in accordance with this activity in all conceivable cases a simple object is said to be satisfying or dissatisfying. () The act of apprehension, however, in its most complete form involves three activities-the third being the activity of satisfaction. By reason of the fact that these three activities are all pleasant themselves every sensible object that has been apprehended must be doubly and may be trebly beautiful. In practical aesthetic philosophy the epithets beautiful and uglyare applied with regard chiefly to the third activity in Aesthetics published in Kevin Barry(ed), James Joyce - Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 105, 106.

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of empathy. The point of our departure shall lead not only to a fresh perspective on the difference between claritas and phenomenology but it will also relocate and reinterpret the formers supreme function. The first phase of apprehension consists in cognition and is viewed as a mere perception of the object as it is in its entirety/ wholeness equivalent with the first feature of the Aquinan beautiful: integritas. The image of the perceived object is first singled out from the rest of its context / background and then is perceived as distinctively standing out in its wholeness. Even though it is not a voluntary process, the perceived object is endowed with the necessary qualities to draw the attention of an artistic conscience that can grasp it. By focusing just on this object, all the other sounds, or colours that surround it regress to a rear, less intense plane. In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An aesthetic 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. (A Portrait, p. 253) But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcountained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as a whole. You apprehend its wholeness.(A Portrait, p. 253) The concreteness contained within this exact localization links this phase of perception to the sphere of the phenomenological. More exactly the two coordinates (space and time) outside which perception or cognition - Joyces preliminary stage of apprehensioncould not exist involve a direct empirical level between the subject and its object. The starting point of Merleau Pontys critique of empiricism is strongly related to the doctrine of sensation. Sensations are seen as the foundation rocks of experience, used for building the elements of which the whole of experience is constructed.

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As such, sensations are supposed to be something absolutely originary, the first elements out of which and from which experience is built up. In fact, as MerleauPonty points out, there is nothing original about the traditional notion of sensation. The notion of sensation was not a concept born of reflection, but a late product of thought directed towards objects, () the furthest removed from its original source, and therefore the most unclear.50 The blurriness out of which sensation, even an aesthetic one, is born indicates the artistic conscience as an empty vessel, a pre-originary innocence ready to capture or remark those objects and events that are perceived as aesthetically endowed. The perception of a thing is made possible through the junction of the subjects most ordinary senses: hearing and sight by means of which the subject distinguishes an object from its surrounding background simultaneously apprehending its singularity and its wholeness. According to empirical thinking, a world is governed by causal relations, in which the sensory consciousness appears as a thing among things. Moreover, ordinary objects are able to resonate upon the consciousness in such a way as to (re)produce, in the subject, an idea of this world. The intellectualist holds that there is a world for itself, thereby effecting a reversal of the empiricist thesis. The world becomes what consciousness is conscious of. The already constituted world through which, for the empiricist, consciousness is itself constituted becomes a world to be constituted by a constituting consciousness. The state of consciousness becomes the consciousness of a state.51 Beyond the visible opposition and interdependence of subject and object there is an experience that precedes this dichotomy, a primordial experience which has to be understood even in the middle of the peculiar details of our everyday life, which are characterized by a certain forgetfulness/anesthesia or paralysis, as Joyce would sustain. The world offers itself to the sensory subject, who, in turn, responds, qualifying the world in the way that he sees it. Beyond the worlds which are opened up by the different senses there is an intersensory unity, a synaesthesia: what is audible is presented in time what is visible is

50 51

Christopher Macann. Four Phenomenological Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 165. Ibidem, p. 80.

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presented in space.52 In fact what Joyce succeeds through Stephen in A Portrait is not only in exposing the stages of aesthetic apprehension but he also guides the reader towards the path of learning how to see. The proclamation of integritas as the first dimension of the potentially beautiful object coinciding also with the first phase of aesthetic apprehension (cognition) could also be equated with the hololespsis53 phase of contemplation even though, applied to paintings, this counts as merely the third stage within the contemplation process. Even though the perception of a thing seems rather simple there are at least several aspects that need to be considered. As we have noticed earlier, the sensorial perception takes place in the spatio-temporal delimitations but also beyond the inherited intellectionapprehension. However, conscience must be alert to the variety and richness of the surrounding world but it also requires that we first forget or overlook what we have already taken the trouble to learn, that we recover the childlike innocence while also retaining our critical legacy needed to set this original way of seeing off against the intellectual prejudices of both empiricism and intellectualism.54 However, Stephen seems to admit to a primary supremacy of the objects independence in the world beyond the subjects capacity of upholding it, yielding to a certain extent to the empirical thinking according to which the object shapes and influences conscience and not the other way around (like in the intellectualist view): According to Merleau Ponty, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcountained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it.55 The adjective selfbounded enforced by his
52

Christopher Macann. Four Phenomenological Philosophers. Routledge, London and New York, 2005, p. 190. The process of contemplation complements that of reverie; whereas reverie follows a personal trajectory of associations, contemplation is given over to scrutiny of what is there to be seen. It is, literally, spending time with the object - not just time around it or standing before it, but time devoted to looking at it. 'Contemplation' has an august history used in Western thought to describe the mind's approach to God and in Eastern philosophy to characterize the highest state of existence, but it remains - even in more modest uses - an obscure term. What goes on when we contemplate something, what are we actually doing? The process of perceptual contemplation of an object has, classically, five aspects: 1. Animadversion: noticing details. 2. Concursus: seeing relations between parts. 3. Hololepsis: seizing the whole as the whole. 4. The lingering caress. 5. Catalepsis: mutual absorption John Armstrong, An Intimate Philosophy of Art, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st American edition, 2000, p.50. 54 Merleau Ponty quoted by Christopher Macann. Four Phenomenological Philosophers, London and New York:Routledge, 2005, p. 187. 55 Ibidem, p.160.
53

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synonym selfcontained marks Stephens stress on the objects being independent, autonomous irrespective of its viewer or the immensity of its background. Still, the object is first luminously apprehended, thus implying the existence of an agent, owner of sensible conscience, capable of noticing an aesthetically remarkable object. The adverb luminously punctuates the agents innocent initial attention while also admitting to the fact that the thing perceived in itself proves both illuminating and luminous. So far at this level, Stephen merely allows his reader to catch a faint glimpse of what his theory will turn out to be, as his theory luminously anticipates the crowning dimension of the beautiful: claritas. The question of space is presented by Merleau Ponty in a similar way to the problem posited by time at the confluence between empirical and intellectualist views. As it would probably be expected, for the empiricist, space is a physical concrete setting which is passively perceived by the subject just like any other thing. For the intellectualist, space is a geometrical construction put together by a subject who has no specific location in the spatial construction. Once again, Merleau Ponty appeals to an anonymous, pre-personal, natural self which generates space by its own action in a world which antecedes thought. Empiricism assumes a normal distance and perspective and then tries to explain the deviations from the norm. This fails to answer the question how one apparent size and shape is adopted as the objective norm, and it also fails to address the more important question how objectivity arises in the first place.56 Intellectualism relativizes all objective relations and conceives of the thing as the point of intersection of distances and directions each of which varies concomitantly with the other. 57 Just like in the vanishing point painting technique the bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended58 becomes identifiable with the pictural representation of the horizon line which remains quite blurry and serves only as a background in front of which the attention is to be caught by a totally different thing that constitutes the center of ones
56

Christopher Macann. Four Phenomenological Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 190. 57 Christopher Macann. Four Phenomenological Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 190. 58 John Armstrong. An Intimate Philosophy of Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st American edition, 2000, p.. 86.

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attention. In Joyces A Portrait the temporal and spatial dimensions serve to both delineate the object from the rest of the universe and to dissolve / blend somewhere in the rear spectrum in order to better out-front the object to be apprehended. If initially the artists attention is detained involuntarily by the object, the next immediate step that occurs during integritas is a voluntary and focused attention on the act of apprehension of the respective object: in order to see that basket. Disposition and intention tend to absorb each other at this level; the intertwining of the two parallels the bidimensional localization of the object: temporal and spatial. The dialogic nature of its framing dimensions reminds of the Bakhtinian chronotope, which on the one hand, it is the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature () The time is empty in the sense that events are not connected to each other in any causal relation; none of the events is linked in a sustained consequence. These hours and days leave no trace, and therefore, one may have as many of them as one likes. The chronotope and the space of this chronotope are abstract.59 Initially perceived as empirical coordinates involved in the process of perception, they (spatial and temporal together with audible and visible) are immediately surrendered to their blending and fusion up to the point of their relativization by the intellectualist view only to prepare the reader for the next dimension of the beautiful: consonantia. Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia.(A Portrait, p.253)

59

Michael Holquist. Dialogism, Bakhtin and his World, London New York: Routledge, 2nd edition, 2002, p. 107.

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The attention still dwells on a formal plane and therefore a phenomenological field. Words like point to point, formal lines, limits invoke a concrete sensation of a concrete object that appears rigorously delineated before our eyes. Though the contemplated object is still rooted in its formal spatio-temporal finitude, the aesthete goes beyond the limits of the objects perimeter and without leaving the phenomenological domain he points to a more subtle aspect involved within the act of apprehension: the grasping of the complex formal structure of the object. A certain invitation to deconstruction is suggested by Florentina Anghel who states: we identify the components of the object within its deconstruction without ripping them from the whole to which they belong, for this whole is justifiable only through their summing up which is the object that is a reconstruction. 60 We should add that deconstruction must be operated also due to the writers calling as a witness the reader, an aesthete to be, or more specifically the listener who in this particular case is represented by Lynch, a witness to the deeper structure of the object which is about to become radiant. This first stage of consonantia may be viewed as an aesthetic prophecy for the first phase during the act of contemplation, as the contemporary British writer and philosopher John Armstrong sees it: animadversion (noticing details). Beyond the difference of denomination (Stephens criteria for the beautiful and Armstrongs contemplation theory), both show their immense and intense preoccupation with aesthetics and plead for the formal apprehension that should be adopted by the art consumer at its early stages. Although we are certain that the Irish genius could not have met the British philosopher of our days, the consubstantiality of their theories over centuries is visible. By our deconstructing of the consonantia stage itself, a triad of phases emerges: the seizing of the complexity of the formal structure, already discussed, the grasping of structural rhythm / balance which occurs and strikes the viewer naturally (concursus in John Armstrongs terminology seeing relations between parts), analysis of initial apprehension (recognition in Joycean aesthetics) concluding with the capturing of the pre-claritas requisite: harmony. Rhythm and balance should be viewed in strong kinship with their
60

Se identific prile componente ale obiectului - o deconstrucie - fr a fi rupte de ntregul din care fac parte, deoarece el se justifica numai in nsumarea lor care este obiectul - o reconstrucie. Anghel Florentina, James Joyce-Portret al artistului in tineree.O lectur poietic, Scrisul Romnesc, Craiova, 2006, p. 67.

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Joycean definition in Aesthetics and also prefiguring Armstrongs concursus (seeing relations between parts). The rhythm of the objects structure unfolds naturally before the beholders eyes once the interdependence of the parts has been remarked. Both rhythm and equilibrium are sine qua non conditions of what becomes an aesthetic object due to the fact that no part can be taken away and no further detail can be added without spoiling its delicate balance. The kinship between integritas and consonantia becomes unbreakable since causing the slightest damage to the objects structural balance means destroying it as a whole, rendering it no longer as self-contained or self-sufficient. Rhythm seems to be the first or formal relation of part to part in any whole or of a whole to its parts or parts, or of any part to the whole of which it is part Parts constitute a whole as far as they have a common end. This phrase is falsely rendered as The Art is an imitation of Nature. Aristotle does not here define art; he says only, Art imitates Nature and means that the artistic process is like the natural process.61 It is false to say that sculpture, for instance, is an art of repose if by that he meant that sculpture is unassociated with movement. Sculpture is associated with movement in as much as it is rhythmic; for a work of sculptural art must be surveyed according to its rhythm and this surveying is an imaginatory movement in space. It is not false to say that sculpture is an art of repose in that a work of sculptural art cannot be presented as itself moving in space and remain a work of sculptural art.62 Even though Stephen does not mention anything about the way in which rhythm is grasped by the viewer or achieved by the object of art, Joyce thoroughly clarifies the question. By interpreting Aristotles statement in a personal way, he claims that the artistic process is like a natural process. Not only that the artist delivers an aesthetically balanced
61

Kevin Barry (ed). James Joyce. Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 103, 104. 62 Kevin Barry (ed). James Joyce. Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 103, 104.

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oeuvre into the world, but his entire artistic effort should have manifested naturally (since he is an artist). However, Joyce, and not Stephen, admits to a certain extent that rhythm can be viewed as kinetic in as much as surveying the rhythm is an imaginatory movement in space. Undoubtedly the explanation he offers does not refer to what could falsely lead to a kind of kinetic art,63 but it is rather confined into the limits of natural imaginatory surveying of the objects rhythm - a sensible consciousness that operates a mental recuperation of the achieved rhythm from its initial to its current point. Now the phrase from point to point acquires a new meaning. To the objects internal rhythm corresponds the viewers rhythm of attention. If Joyce enforces his explanation of rhythm with a pertinent example from sculptural art, John Armstrong presents his concept of concursus by providing a fruitful example from the art of painting, both interpretations being applicable to many more arts: Concursus, then, involves seeing together many individual elements of the picture. Its pay-off comes in an enrichment of visual significance, of meaning. Scrutiny of a work of art frequently involves a rhythm of attention to individual parts and to the relations between those parts. This rhythm is required by art and it is also native to the perceiving mind.64 Certain clarifications impose themselves: the rhythm of attention is to be found in the midst of synthetic attention but should not be confused with Stephens synthesis of immediate perception. The aesthetes attention implies a much more complex process than the simple synthesis of perception. First of all it is an intentional and guided operation that, due to its manifestation in both time and space, and as we have seen according to Merleau Ponty, can belong either to the concrete or to the transcendental sphere. The intentionality of the
63

As we shall see when discussing claritas, Stephen clearly says that we are dealing with a stasis and not a kinesis. Moreover, Stephen, as well as Joyce clearly sustains the difference between kinetic emotion triggered by impure art and static emotion generated by pure art. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to posses, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing. (A Portrait, p. 244) 64 John Armstrong. Move Closer. An Intimate Philosophy of Art. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st American edition, 2000, p. 91.

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process is clearly stated by Joyce when he describes the second phase of aesthetic apprehension, recognition: For by the activity of recognition is meant an activity of decision.65 At this stage the contemplator reconciles both the phenomenological realm, as he still deals with formal aspects of the object even if they go beyond perimeter and formal structure, and the abstract realm, as he mentally scrutinizes and recuperates the objects intricate rhythm. The synthesis of attention is a reunification of a phenomenological attention and of an abstract attention; it is in fact what Stephen calls analysis of perception.66 The double belonging to the two opposing planes is paralleled by the simultaneity of the objects uniqueness and wholeness: Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. The extent to which uniqueness and wholeness lend themselves either to phenomenological or transcendental spheres is just as debatable as Pontyan time and space are not fixed to either realm. What emerges triumphantly from Stephens demonstration in an almost mathematic precision is qod erat demonstrandum: the second quality of a beautiful object is consonantia / harmony.67 He thus uses the pillars of logic in terms of what comes out as being naturally true, as well as the scholastic and religious hue from Thomas dAquinas to let his theory advance freely towards what appears to be its climax: claritas. The directions towards which Stephens last stage of the aesthetic apprehension tends do not show themselves plainly, but take the reader to a higher level of understanding only after having traversed the first two necessary stages. Just like the artist, to be able to grasp claritas, means to be able to enhance / deliver the artistic conscience. The labyrinths of paradoxes that arise even at this level amplify the universality and mystery of Stephens theory. Due to the fact that the protagonist keeps Aquinass terminology and his fondness for the trinitary model together with the ambiguity of the source of the objects illuminating effect, Stephens aesthetic theory has made the critic Cornel Mihai Ionescu interpret the
65

James Joyce quoted in James Joyces Aesthetics in James Joyce. Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Kevin Barry (ed). Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 106. 66 Analysis, thus mental activity, and perception as phenomenological observation / apprehension. 67 A further argument in favour of this mathematic rigurosity of method is retrievable also by linking Joyces recognition in Pola Notebook and Stephens analysis of apprehension in A Portrait; both analysis and recognition presuppose an initial stage of perception followed by a certain intentional conscious drive. The subtle difference between the two kin-related concepts manifests itself at the level of their complexity since analysis implies a more elaborate process than the act of recognition. Still this does not in any way underscore the crucial role that recognition plays in the whole operation of aesthetic apprehension - it is precisely through recognition, after having undergone a thorough analysis, that the regarded object is considered eligible for the aesthetically climactic phase: claritas.

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Joycean claritas in a religious, archetipal sense. He strongly sustains that in the trinitary economy of the beautiful, integritas as a prime value can be associated with the paternal instance, whereas claritas as a reiteration of the former is analogous with the filial instance. () In a subtler form of the paternal principles introjection, not in the scope of oedipal transgression, but to ensure his apotropaic efficiency, does he translate the term claritas into radiance.68 Taking into consideration Joyces early religious upbringing and his later rebel-like attitude this accounts for the indefiniteness of his break with Catholicism, making available and consistent interpretations both for and against his religiosity. He remains religious in form, making much use of the liturgical rhythm (Umberto Eco), but at a more subtle level he remains faithful to his profound aesthetic. In fact, the spiritual break with religion in the dogmatic sense comes as a necessary one for the artistic conscience. Had the writer remained in the spheres of the religious credo, like Thomas DAquinas, would he have been able to develop freely an artistic conscience? On the other hand, the creative freedom remains rather guided since not being able to escape his own religiousness he chose to transfigure it into art. Therefore the break with religion is understood by us as a partial one: the artists abandonment of religious dogma (he is not searching for divine light or grace within radiance), but not the abandonment of religious form, colour, perfume, ritual, music and ultimately sacred essence which transcends the religious faith or dogma in order to be able to mystify the self-made artistic dogma. The clash with religion is further disentangled as Stephens claritas distances from that of Aquinas who believes that the divine essence of an object outshines from within irrespective of its viewer. On the contrary, Joyce lets us see that radiance is enabled by the viewer and after all stages have been successfully transgressed the contemplated object is free to shine by itself. This is the leap from Aquinas which lets the contemplator and the object experience a mutual absorbance, transcending thus the initial stage of phenomenological perception. Now we witness the revelation of an intrinsic essence that is sacred beyond religious grace or faith. The grasping of quidditas is what brings the artist to that state of im68

Cornel Mihai Ionescu. Cercul lui Hermes, Univers Enciclopedic, Bucuresti, 1998, p. 77:n economia trinitar a frumosului, integritas ca valoare prim poate fi asociat cu instana patern, iar claritas ca reiteraie a ei este analog cu instana filial. () O form mai subtil a ntroiectarii principilui patern, nu n scopul transgresiunii oedipiene, ci pentru a-i asigura eficiena lui apotropaic, este traducerea termenului claritas prin radiance.

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ponderability. The form and later the essence of the object is transcended but so is the self of the contemplator. It is this seemingly unrepresentable state that Joyce manages to capture through the use of radiance as a successful epiphanization of an object. A different view of imponderability is traceable in Richard Kearneys analysis of Joycean epiphany whose already mentioned feature appears to him in strong relation to Prousts complex apprehension of time. More strictly, he explains: Stephen explicitly links Aquinas notion of quidditas (whatness) to his aesthetic account of claritas or (radiance) in A Portrait, thereby suggesting that epiphany is linked to the causa formalis or essence of something. But Noon expresses the view that what Stephen seems to mean by claritas may have been expressed better by the haecceitas of Duns Scotus than by the quidditas of Aquinas. Ettienne Gilson, an expert on both Aquinas and Scotus, has described the haecceitas of Scotus as lextrme point dactualit qui dtermine chaque tre rel la singularit.69 Haecceity is, in other words, the noumenal become phenomenal, the sacred perception of things translated into profane perception, in a manner so luminous and unexpected that it appears - to cite Hopkins - like an explosion out of darkness.70 In religion the intellectual will is associated with the luciferic light and therefore it makes explainable religions somewhat reluctant attitude towards art which may endanger the mystery of the divine through the act of tasting the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Contrary to first impressions, Joyces aesthetics does not yield to Platos definition wholly; instead, his aesthetics also values the Shakespearean truth in beauty died pointing to the supremacy of the sensible over the intelligible when aesthetic apprehension occurs. However, the artist keeps the intellectual coordinate inasmuch as it serves as a component together with the sensible dimension in the spiritual appetite. Therefore, in Joyces view whatever may be transformed into art by means of the aesthetic apprehension of the artists conscience
69

Richard Kearney. Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust. Manoussakis (eds.). Traversing the Imaginary. Richard Kearney and Northwestern University Press Evanston, 2007, p. 192. 70 Richard Kearney. Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust. Manoussakis (eds.). Traversing the Imaginary. Richard Kearney and Northwestern University Press Evanston, 2007, p. 192.

in Peter Gratton, John Panteleimon the Postmodern Challenge. Illinois: in Peter Gratton, John Panteleimon the Postmodern Challenge. Illinois:

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supports / undergoes this process bidimensionally: through the intellect and the sensibility (emotive conscience). Conferring the due importance to the power of reason and that of subjective agency through sensible involvement, his aesthetics masterfully rounds off the definition of beauty while also solving the conflict between reason and emotive conscience. This view, settling a balanced rhythm for both emotion and mind within the aesthetic apprehension, situates itself much closer to Wildes stated credo art for arts sake as Joyce shows through the various types of epiphanies that it is the artists duty to be able to master the minds disposition for the intelligible or sensible towards an aesthetic end. As we can easily observe the mystery contained within Stephens concept of claritas is inexhaustible lending itself to a myriad of interpretations, and yet not yielding completely to either. Imagining that one can grasp the key behind the third Joycean aesthetic feature would delude the powers of logic. The interpretability of Joycean concepts in general and of claritas in particular allows the reader-critic to freely embellish, and recreate the text. Therefore, continuing the reinterpretation of the Joycean text, we shall analyze claritas from the phenomenological and transcendental perspective owing much of our demonstration to the application of Merleau Pontys philosophical system of phenomenology of perception.

Claritas and epiphany

Before embarking upon an even steeper analysis certain clarifications need to be made. As we have said in the beginning of the subchapter the epiphany has a spring-like resource as it is not conditioned by the apprehension of an art object, nor by the aesthetic apprehension of an object / situation. The epiphany makes its apperance only when in the mind of the subject occurs a flash generated either by a spontaneous recollection, a trivial situation, a moment of introspection, an unusual mental connection. Whether these are aestheticised or not is of no importance, but they are clearly epiphanised, since they are experienced as epiphanies either by the subject-narrator, subject-character or subject-reader. But how are exactly epiphany and claritas related? Being an illumination of the subject enabled by an exteriour stimulus this feature directly links the epiphany to the concept of claritas. The same illuminating effect is seen by Stephen as indispensable as far as claritas is concerned. Viewing it as directly connected to the aesthetic end the reader may easily and falsely slip in the 44

error that according to Stephens theory claritas being apparent as a feature of the beautiful cannot exist outside this beautiful. On the contrary, the illuminating effect which becomes synonymous with the revelation of essence can produce itself outside aesthetic telos also. As far as it manifests in this way the reader can state that this is the binding element of both claritas and epiphany. Even though Joyce omits this direct explanation from A Portrait, the acknowledgment is quite clear in Stephen Hero: - Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. (Stephen Hero, p. 250) And he continues: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. (Stephen Hero, p. 250) The interdependence epiphany-claritas goes beyond the aesthetic parameters in which it seems to be confined in the aesthetic theory that Stephen exposes in A Portrait: - Bulls eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar.
-

The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the 45

aesthetic image a' universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and aesthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelleys, called the enchantment of the heart. (A Portrait, p. 254) The ambiguity of the term used by Aquinas further testifies to its more general application as the mystery contained within the notion shares something of the religious as well as of the artistic mystery. Joyce first notices the queerness of the Thomist notion in Stephen Hero where it is simply called figurative word and then in A Portrait he proceeds to a broader preoccupation where its discovered vagueness and inexactness determine Stephen to link it to a certain symbolism or idealism brought about from another world. In Thomist corollary the light that shines out from within the perceived object conjoins both artistic and divine quality. The light from some other world is very much impregnated with the idea of transcendence in the sense of the essence of religious grace, a divine essence intrinsic and autonomous, a prioric, but not in an intuitive sense, without the necessity of experience, but pure and simply this divine essence being the only one that imbues its existence since its beginnings, being inseparable; consequently this object will flood the divine light so as to be grasped by the contemplator irrespective of his intention. Its universal acquired character would manifest with or without the subjects contribution, given its self- sufficient ray-like 46

quality. What would be then the role of the aesthete in front of such an autonomous object? Given the philosophers theological interpretation, the aesthetes Stephens strenuous effort to explain the origin of claritas is a remarkable step towards what comes to be contoured as the protagonists own interpretation of the concept. The mystery of the art-religion kinship is partially abandoned since the theological view of an art object does not imply the subject in any important way. Even though the Thomist influence proves fruitful, Joyce, does not feel content to simply adopt this theory, moreover he amplifies it even if it involves certain dissociation, through a nuanced digression from the religious charge71 he appeals to the laws of logic and aesthetics: Like Brncui, Stephen goes directly to the essence which is no longer in the close vicinity of an intersensory synthesis, as it was the case with the two former stages, integritas and consonantia. The synthesis of which he speaks at this level of his expose transcends the spatio-temporal coordinates, but does not repudiate them. Here the moment of revealing quidditas stands under the sign of the phenomenological beyond. According to Merleau Ponty, phenomenology, he tells us, is both a philosophy of essences (Husserl) and a philosophy of existences (Heidegger), both a philosophy which starts with the reduction (Husserl) and a philosophy for which the world is always already there (Heidegger), both a rigorous science (Husserl) and a description of the immediate structures of the life world (Husserl or Heidegger).72 Moreover, these contradictions, Merleau-Ponty insists, are not resolved by distinguishing between the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl and the ontological phenomenology of Heidegger (...) It is this both-and which defines Merleau-Pontys own conception of phenomenology as he proceeds through the four themes which furnish the topic of his Introduction, the themes of description, the reduction, essences and intentionality.73
71

According to Aquinas, unity, harmony, and luminous intelligibility are not primarily products of artistic creation or even of nature; rather, they are transcendental properties that reflect both the order and design of the universe and the internal beauty and harmony of the triune Christian God. John Y. B. Hood. Essential Aquinas. Praeger, Wesport Conneticut London, 2002, p. 183. 72 Macann Christopher. Four Phenomenological Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 161 73 Macann Christopher. Four Phenomenological Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 161.

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Similarly, the contradictions between the two former empirical stages within aesthetic apprehension and the seemingly abstract notion of essence are solved not by deepening the distinction but by discovering a concept which both encloses and transcends the others. It both surpasses and contains them; it is their natural and logical conclusion and more importantly, aesthetically illuminating. The naturalness of the objects essence finds its roots not in the theological divine light but in the sacred essence of art that operates a plurivalent transcendence: though similar to the religiously divine it goes beyond religious sacredness and transcends both object and subject. However, it is only in the power of the artist to transform the thisness or haecceity, to quote Kearney,74 of an object into an aesthetically revealing one. But after stating what quidditas is at least at theoretical level how could the artist actually grasp this light? To be able to grasp and embrace the light of the essence the artist adopts a somewhat regressive bi-level stance: a certain distance from the object (which is being contemplated) imposes itself together with a stepping out from the subjects self in order to achieve the realization of the Joycean radiance. This depersonalization stance, as it is named in literary criticism, is reachable through the opening up of the subjects conscience to that pre-reflective stance, that innocent-like state, empty mind as Buddhists say.75 From Joyces quoting the Italian physiologist, Luigi Galvani, when he describes epiphany it results that it is both an empirical and an a prioric process that takes place: empirical as long as it goes along the path of the first two stages and a prioric when it transcends the former phases and the revelation of quidditas appears to take place intuitively, almost without the necessity of experience recalling the mystery of the divine light of which Aquinas spoke.

74

Richard Kearney. Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust. in Peter Gratton, John Panteleimon Manoussakis (eds.). Traversing the Imaginary. Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge. Illinois: Northwestern University Press Evanston, 2007, p. 192. 75 The fact that at a certain moment in the novel Stephen replies - I dont want any budding Buddhists and the fact that Joyce wrote the review of Mr. Fielding Halls book The Soul of A People is indicative of the fact that he was acquainted with this religion. In his review entitled A Suave Philosophy he mildly criticizes Mr. Hall for not having disclosed enough of the Burmese peoples life and legends, showing thus his own appreciative attitude towards the eastern religion. More strictly, the reply in the novel is used both for the sound effect of the alliteration as well as to disclose the importance of a full-embrace attitude necessary most of all in religion, somewhat indirectly addressing Mr. Hall.

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However, Stephens concept of radiance differs from the divine light in the sense that although remaining sacred in its essence the radiance that he proposes is profoundly faithful not to religion but to aesthetics. Here the rigurosity of a logically framed mind applies no more and the whole peak of apprehension leaves free room for mutual absorption / catalepsies,76 to quote John Armstrong. Aesthetic / artistic intuition comes into play. The contemplative stasis requires at this stage the conscience of an artist and not just of an ordinary subject in order to be able to connect the world of his sensible conscience to the world of the apprehended object. To be able to perform this leap from mere directed attention to pure revelation takes more than just contemplative taste. Thus the apprehension of illuminating essence clearly demarks a merely contemplative subject from the artistically vocational subject. Reflection upon the unreflected is much more difficult than it might appear. For it not only requires that we reflect upon the pre-reflective, upon that lost world which antecedes science and common sense. It also requires that we reflect upon the theoretical limitations of this same science and the practical prejudices of common sense. More still, it requires that we reflect upon that which transcendental phenomenology installs as an ultimately irreducible presupposition, the transcendental Ego itself, together with the entire apparatus of transcendental reflection.77 Here the transcendental Ego is the artist who becomes God-like while grasping and later, in tranquility, rendering claritas, in the process of creation much like Joyce, the artist, who sits behind beyond or above his artwork paring his fingernails.(A Portrait, p.53) His mind, as incandescent as a fading coal, can be luminously apprehensive and apprehendive reaching the enlightened state. Only in that moment can the artist embrace and shed light on the noumenon of the aesthetic object. But is it only the artistic consciences merit to have achieved such a climactic phase during his contemplation process? The importance of the object should also be taken into ac76

Catalepsis corresponds to the fifth phase of aesthetic contemplation in John Armstrongs view. John Armstrong. Move Closer- An Intimate Philosophy of Art. 1st American Edition Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, p. 50. 77 Christopher Macann. Four Phenomenological Philosophers. London and New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 169.

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count since it gives the subject a sense of worthwile to his contemplative attention.78 In a game of give and take, transferring the role of agent between subject and object, both involved elements are rewarded at the end of the aesthetic journey: primarily the light appears to be directed from the subject to the object (thus the subject acts as agent), but this light is sent because the object itself was perceived as containing a noumenal light / essence waiting to be discovered, and now that the subject lit this objects quidditas, the latter bestows its amplified radiance back to its viewer / artist (now the object acts as agent). The contemplative illuminating conscience of the artist is amplified by the objects inner light and like in a process similar to melting fire with fire the actual catalepsies takes place. It unfolds as a multi-lateral explosion of light/ essence that floods its aura in pure concentric waves up to the point where it becomes quite difficult to determine in a scholastic manner where it begins or ends this epiphanic fusion. What imposes more specifically this explosion of light if not a dispersion of limits at all levels and in all possible directions? The multi-transcendence operates not only at the level of temporal or spatial dimensions that uselessly strive to limit/ concretize/ ephemerize the subject and object but it involves both a self and other transcendence of the object and subject, themselves. The subject is both in the object, identifying with it, and transgresses/ goes beyond it, transcends it. Claritas may be the climactic phase of aesthetic apprehension but it coincides also with the Joycean epiphany since both stages imply a certain level of transcendence, beyond phenomenological perception, as Ponty would probably state. Furthermore, the author himself admits the fact that this instant refers to epiphany, for which he poetically quotes the Italian physiologist, Galvani: that enchantment of the heart. The object is no longer the only one that is epiphanised, as both object and subject act as agents they are both epiphanising and epiphanized in the instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of aes78

Our sense of the worthwhileness of the whole episode of giving attention is liable to be linked to our sense of the importance of the thing we are engaging with. (Consider a parallel with listening: one can listen with more or less devoted attention to anything; but it makes sense to give one's best attention to the most important subject and there is a feeling of waste when we devote efforts to things which, upon reflection, seem paltry.) John Armstrong, Move Closer.An Intimate Philosophy of Art. 1st American Edition Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000, p. 63.

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thetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful of Shelleys, called the enchantment of the heart.(A Portrait, p. 254) Much indebted to the sphere of transcendence is the aesthetic pleasure also, which, for the aesthetic conscience, springs forth naturally and unconsciously accompanying the experience of claritas. If the subject is able to achieve this joy it means that the essence of the object was sent and received successively, its validity being directly proportional with the nature, degree and duration of the satisfaction resultant from the apprehension of any sensible object.79 If Joyce leaves Aristotles idea of catharsis according to which both pity and terror are feelings that arrest the mind, he chooses the supremacy of joy, which comes right after the experiencing of the other two, as the climactic suspension of the mind and he proceeds this way only to prepare the grounds for Stephens conclusion.80 Stephen takes up the concept of aesthetic pleasure and establishes that it is the enchantment of the heart, therefore the suspense of both mind and emotion, or, according to Eco, the tension of sensitivity at the limits of the ineffable.81 Appearing as a three-fold suspension, of the senses, of the mind and emotion, the Joycean stasis points to the curative virtue of art (a panacea under the form of a cardiac condition) as during the subjects contemplation all mental activity is suspended including thus even those distressing thoughts circling more or less around the phenomenological world. It becomes a means of relief from anxiety, a means of setting one free from the constraints of his / her own ego, a way of transcending the self, an inscape 82 as Gerard Manley Hopkins would probably call it, an escape outside one self without leaving oneself in the concrete sense. In this moment of imponderability which conjoins the trinity of claritas, epiphany (as long as it deals with art objects) and aesthetic pleasure the sensitivity of the artist dissemin79

James Joyce. Paris Notebook, published in Kevin Barry. Occasional, Critical and Political Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 106. 80 As Umberto Eco states: By catharsis Joyce means the arrest of the feelings of pity and terror and the rising of joy. It is a rationalistic interpretation of the Aristotelian concept. At the appropriate moments, passions will be () made objective, will be defamiliarized and rendered universal, thereafter impersonal()Walter Pater, the symbolists and DAnnunzio have replaced Aristotle. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos. The Middle Ages of James Joyce. Translated from the Italian by Ellen Esrock. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. 1989, p. 28. 81 Idem. 82 Dolf Sorensen. James Joyces Aesthetic Theory-Its Development and Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1977, p. 7.

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ates wholly and also holy. After having transcended the object and the subjects self the subject lingers on in this silent and beneficial transcendence, he savours the discovery that he made. If earlier the entire world outside the two involved elements (artist and aesthetic object) is reduced to silence / is transcended totally reaching that state of imponderability, now the artist is immersed by the feeling of the multidimensional bafflement. The centre of attention having moved from object to subject and then back to object reaches now a climax of transcendence. The artist is overwhelmed by the amplitude of his own experience. Slowly both object and details that initially detained his attention become rear elements that fade away in the intensity of apprehension. The fact that the whole aesthetic joy is produced at the shelter of silence further prolongs its effect as if unfolding gently through the water-like sensibility of the artist. Given that claritas evolves from the subject and returns under amplified form (aesthetic joy) to the subject (now validated as artist) might determine the reader to think that the trajectory of light draws a closed circle. Quite the contrary, it enables a spiral through poetic translation of revealed quidditas as a challenge to express the unrepresentable which is claritas or unreal perfection. The luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure may refer to an aesthetic enlightenment similar to the zen- like mokusho silent enlightenment which does not comport any necessary aesthetic aspect, none the less it relies heavily on the revelation of the noumenon, which is ku/ emptiness/ cosmic law etc. After each illuminating experience it is thus the artists duty to transpose it into art. If the theoretical explanations of the first two features of the beautiful object together with the three stages of contemplation relied heavily on the laws of logic now the aesthetic pleasure appeals highly on intuition and its expression emerges triumphantly from the artists genious. For this matter Joyce adopts the only possible means of expressing the ineffable, unrepresentable: the poetic language, ineffable in itself. The trajectory that the epiphany under poetic form, undergoes from Dubliners to the novel A Portrait reveals the evolution and the maturing process of an artistic sensitivity.

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Intended as a series of epiclecti as Joyce himself stated in a letter to Constantine Curran,83 Dubliners was promoted by a number of critics, in strong accordance with Joyces wish also, as a collection of the epiphanies of the paralysis of Irelands capital city. The idea of quidditas / revelation of essence of the artists hometown is already insinuating itself. Although the word epiclecti may be seen as invoking the idea of transubstantiation existent in the Catholic Church, through a close analysis of Joyces declaration in one of his letters to his brother, Stanislaus: Dont you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do? I mean what I am trying to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own for their mental, moral and spiritual uplift 84 the focus of attention falls upon what time and time again conjoins Joycean writing and religion: mystery; a mystery in front of which the subject feels diminished and baffled and tries to conquer his bafflement by transposing it all into art (forging thus his own religion at the center of which he becomes the God). The form under which the stories are written betrays also Joyces taste for mystery, his wish to transmit (and transmute) indirectly and in such a way that when the reader finally grasps the message he should feel enchanted. Blending Ibsens cult for realism and the free interpretation of Aquinas concept of beauty and the stages of apprehension, Joyce sprinkles in the short story collection - just as many exercises of epiphany, the incipient ingredients of the aesthetic theory that comes fully and explicitly revealed in the novel A Portrait. The auspices of aesthetic contemplation in Dubliners are prefigured in Gabriels description of his wife, Gretta, in the story entitled The Dead. He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he
83

Dolf Sorensen. James Joyce's Aesthetic Theory: Its Development and Application. Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1977, p. 36. 84 From Stanislauss recollection of his brother, quoted in James Joyces Aesthetic Theory - Its Development and Application. Dolf Sorensen, Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1977, p. 37.

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would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panel of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (Dubliners, p. 240) Gabriels arrest of motion points to his bafflement in front of the life tableau that gains contour before his eyes through the intersensory synthesis. Phenomenological details that appeal to visual and audible effects (the hearing of the music and the sight of his wife) set the background of his contemplative incipient stage. He empirically observes these phenomenological details from a detached position. His detachment from all social/ contingent ties places Gabriel outside his own marital context calling his wife a woman - thus he objectifies her through contemplation while also elevating the image of woman to that higher level resembling the iconic figure of Blessed Virgin Mary: gazing up at his wife. The beautiful momentary atmosphere further deepens his urge to grasp the mystery and grace before him. The elements that amplify her mystery: grace and mystery, symbol, a woman (as if she were no longer his wife but the representative of universal beauty in his eyes), shadow (shows the fondness for the chiaroscuro painting technique reminding of Rembrandt or the German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich), Distant Music (although clich-like in tone the epiphany that Gabriel experiences is unquestionable.) all contribute to an over mystification not of Gabriels wife, but of the Joycean woman in general as the representative of feminine beauty, a beauty that conjoins the religious mystery and grace and the mystery of the eternal feminine. The description takes the form of a chiaroscuro painting through the appropriateness of chromatic contrasts: the blue felt hat and the bronze of her hair are viewed against the background darkness, also the dark panel of her skirt out-fronts with the light ones. On the rear darkened plane, thus wrapped up in mystery, the object of contemplation has the tendency to shine forth, but the epithets that Gabriel utilizes do not capture the radiance of which Stephen will later speak. The revealing of mystery would be equivalent to quidditas only now he still dwells in the analysis phase, wandering what this symbol might be. This first phase corresponds to the perception stage and analysis of apprehension as Gabriel ponders overtly upon the symbol of feminine beauty. The sensitivity of his conscience perceives the object of contemplation as a 54

symbol but he lacks the necessary artistic means/ that poetic language in A Portrait to render her as a symbol also to the reader. Gabriel is highly intellectual and educated but not an artist, although he possesses the necessary aptitude or disposition towards aesthetic apprehension. The preoccupation with the decoding of the symbol stands as a proof of his aesthetic/ artistic potential. He is able to contemplate even if contemplation requires an emotional absorbance simultaneous with a distancing from the immediate concreteness of the apprehended image. The tension between the contemplation and absorbance is given form through the felicitous living of aesthetic thought - feeling (the aesthetic spiritual state which Gabriel experiences and timidly tries to render). On the background of phenomenological perception and mysterious atmosphere the protagonist manages to intuit that his wife might be transcending this concrete plane through her seeming so abstracted. Although initially Gabriel is exalted by the feminine beauty, whose symbol he tries to grasp and render, his experience passes from this spiritual ambition, to the more specific quidditas of the woman whom he contemplated and who descends from the pedestal of ideal beauty by being acknowledged as his wife. The quidditas that she herself reveals does not over mystify her being, but regresses her from universality into the more down to earth, humane plane. Her mystery does not coincide with the ineffable of the universal woman, she is just the owner of a strange mood, whose secret is revealed plainly in a faraway, lost love that her soul was challenged by in her youth. The aesthetic environment appropriate for contemplation dissolves into what appears as quidditas of the same object (since Gretta is objectified) that was contemplated. The power of its mystery proves too far off (beyond aesthetic, intellectual or emotional intuition) and foregrounded in forgotten times so that Gabriel cannot actially grasp the mystery of Grettas mood. Since quidditas in this first stage is not grasped but merely told it means there is no radiance. Her confessing to her husband how in her youth a lad, Michael Furey, had committed suicide for her sake reveals that Gretta has been living a dead life in contrast to the remembered romance of her youth. [This] is a revelation that destroys the bubble of his unreal existence. Gabriel finds himself guilty not of withholding love but of lacking it entirely. He reviews from a new perspective his inner self until he is able to overcome his proud isolation 55

and to become one with the living and the dead- in other words, the whole of humanity.85 Thus a triple quidditas reaches Gabriel (as subject) after a sinuous trajectory: he intuits its incipient phase in the object, and then the object renders this essence to the subject who just now is able of experiencing the radiance of his selfs quidditas and, finally, of the world at large. Even though the trajectory subject - object - subject that is accomplished required more scriptural space, the image at the end of the story is emblematic for Gabriels revelation. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world. The solid world itself was dissolving and dwindling() He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight () It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. (Dubliners, p. 255, 256) The full apprehension of the radiance of the epiphany requires a total immersion in its light together with the experience of being eclipsed. This is not an intentional but a natural process of transcending ones ego as the protagonist feels that his own identity was fading away. In this sense the snow falling faintly becomes the symbol of a calm and peaceful out-of-this-world (through the universe) light as if the entire cosmos were bestowing its evanescent smile upon all the living and the dead. The quest for the expression of the symbol of feminine beauty has been replaced by a more general, universal one, (the smallness of the human being in front of the greatness of the universe) the subjects strife being freed from the constraints of his former intentionality. Under the same sign of unintentionality develops Stephens epiphany on the sea shore in A Portrait.

85

Francesca Valente. Joyces Dubliners as Epiphanies. Article published in The Brazen Head, 16 Iun 1995, p. 6.

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A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a cranes and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek. - Heavenly God! cried Stephens soul, in an outburst of profane joy. He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him. Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was it? (A Portrait, p. 204-5)

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The image of the girl is prefigured on the background of the sea, thus a reflective surface amplifying the iridescences of the object being contemplated. The epithetic phrase alone and still designates the fact that Stephen singles out the girl from the rest of what is surrounding her, naturally acknowledging the first feature of the beautiful object (as the girl is indeed aesthetically objectified by the end of the description): integritas. Then, through a fascinating symphony of colours, sounds and forms, he proceeds to the next phase of apprehension: consonantia (harmony). The intersensory stimuli that invade the text have made Florentina Anghel state that Stephen is launching in an absolutely fantastic description of forms and colours adopted from different birds, which makes the whole be perceived like a broken, cubist image, which is delightfully reorganized through the blending of colours and creating the impression of something seraphic, almost unreal, and of course transient.86 Indeed, Stephen is exposing here, by making use of sensorial perception, the intricate harmony that unifies the part to part and the parts to the whole of the subjects chosen object for contemplation. Unlike Gabriel, who does not have the means to express the mystery of a symbol, Stephen delivers a skillfully poetic portraiture. The poetry that he succeeds dwells in the illuminating effect that the image of the girl in its entirety diffuses. Utilizing elements of description specific for romantic painting technique Stephen manages to render / recreate this pure light through expressions like: bare, (implying also the image of unheeded reality, transparent noumenon) slender,(thus delicate) pure,(innocent and genuine) softhued, (as if the paintbrush delicately breezed on the canvas) bared, ivory, (also pure but in an ungraspable / abstract sense) white (the obvious chromatic representation of purity). The slateblue skirts are contrasted with the legs whiteness and the overall aura is adumbrated in the comparison of her bosom with the breast of some darkplumaged dove, and the mark of mortal beauty. This chromatic ineffable is sustained by the elusiveness of forms. Her legs borrowing the delicacy that of the cranes, her skirts dovetailed behind her, her breast like that of a darkplumaged dove, all point to her consubstantiality with the evanescent image of the bird. Appropriating her to bird hood, she becomes the symbol of freedom (insinuating also the artists freedom of creation through the
86

Florentina Anghel, James Joyce-Portret al artistului n tineree. O lectur poietic, Scrisul Romnesc, Craiova, 2006, p.75 Stephen se lanseaz ntr-o descriere absolut fantastic de forme i culori mprumutate de la diverse psri, ceea ce face ca ntregul s fie perceput ca o imagine sfrmat, cubist, care este reorganizat ncnttor prin mbinarea culorilor i crearea impresiei de serafic, ireal aproape, i bine-neles trector.

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recreation of the contemplated object) and ungraspability / elusive mystery pointing to the eternal mystery de la femme. Stephen captures exactly this mysterious ungraspability through a description that appeals more to the empirical details / sensorial aspects of reality in front of him but filtered poetically. In the process (both of apprehending and rendering) his whole being is transfigured. Just like the Romantic painters he broadened the scope of the indefinable,87 without pointing to that inescapable lugubrious dimension of life except through the allusion of the ephemeral, impermanent nature. What was specifically Romantic was the aspiration (Sehnsucht88) to all this. Since this aspiration cannot be characterized historically, then Romantic is a label that can be attached to any art that expresses such an aspiration, or perhaps all art is Romantic in so far as it expresses nothing other than that aspiration. Beauty ceases to be a form and the beautiful becomes the formless and the chaotic.89 Although not a declared Romantic, Joyce manages through Stephen, such a romantically evanescent effect while depicting the wading girl through shades of colour: fair hair, emerald trail of seaweed, soft hued which seem to mutually entangle and intertwine and dissolve in one another (almost like in aqua painting technique). The entire poetic image sustains the feeling of dynamic rhythm of beauty and for this reason also its immensity and impossibility of pinning it down to one single definite form of expression. The idea of immensity and eternal change is prefigured in the image of the sea which acts no longer as a mere background against which the wading girl can better outshine. The sea prolongs its nature through chromatic interference. A double effect is achieved through the image of the whole descriptive episode: it testifies the harmony of the whole portraiture while also ensuring the girls sense of belongingness to the eternal uncertainty of the sea. At a closer analysis the emerald trail of seaweed stands as a metaphor for the girls vein, pulsating with genuine (hence the green) life, her whole existence being impregnated by the en87 88

Umberto Eco. On Beauty. London: Secker & Warburg, 2004, p. 303. Sehnsucht (pronounced [zenzxt] or sane-zookt) is a German noun translated as "longing", "yearning", or "craving",[1] or in a wider sense a type of "intensely missing". Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht. 89 Umberto Eco. On Beauty. London: Secker & Warburg, 2004, p. 303.

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tangling mysteries of the sea. Thus the ideal of feminine beauty is imagined at the crossroads of aerial and watery planes not yielding fully to either but sharing features from both, this double origin amplifying the aspiration to the unrepresentable, to the absolute. Stephen stages her individuality thus as the representative of ideal feminine beauty that presides over and is consubstantial with the elements of nature; she is the angel of mortal youth and beauty the sovereign and muse of the artists aesthetic sensitivity / mood. The actual experiencing of quidditas takes place in the following paragraph of the description; the sight exchange, which confirms the actual acknowledgement of quidditas manifests later when Stephen sees her cheeks were aglow. The light also impregnates Stephen; thus there is a plurivalent transcendence. Once the revelation of essence takes place, the ascendence to the metaphysical realm begins. Almost every epiphany in order to reach its radiance implies a direct transcendence of the formerly apprehended structure and wholeness. This both-and (both phenomenological and metaphysical), specific to Merleau Pontys thought comes out clearly from this epiphany that Stephen lives. At the shelter of the apprehension of the formal features of beauty (the beautiful girl becomes a symbol of ideal feminine beauty) the protagonist is led to the revelation of its (beautys) noumenal core. The blending of reality and concreteness with the spiritual is present also in Stephens moment of grasping quidditas which is marked in the text through the exchange of sight. At first glance, the reader would be tempted to think that, since the contemplated object (as the girl is objectified) is capable of responding to the subjects sight, we are dealing with two possible subjects. Furthermore, their eyes, as reflectors of images liken the two protagonists with two mirrors facing each other, each shining forth and capturing the others noumenon. This situation remains valid up to the point where the light from the subject (initial observer that is Stephen) is transmitted to the object, whose preliminary light is now sent back but amplified to the subject. In a boomerang-like effect the objects light a faint flame trembled on her cheek becomes the subjects radiance his cheeks were aflame, his body was aglow. Certainly, the light that has as source the initial contemplator prevails in the whole epiphanic process since it is the artists conscious experience that the reader is provided with. (The artist is able to go beyond the immediate self due to the sensitivity of his conscience).

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The ambiguity within the relativity of perception (considerating the transmittance of subject-object quality) is dissolved as soon as we notice that the wading girl and the narrator exchange sights. Although, a human being, but still an objectified one in the scope of aesthetic apprehension, the girl keeps the (active) passivity and peacefulness so required of the aesthetic object and her eyes remain indeed a mirror inasmuch they serve to reflect the subjects insightful experience. Thus she becomes a mirror of God90 (according to Lacan), God being represented by the artist himself. As her noumenon is grasped she becomes the reflective surface for Stephens poetic strife. As reflective enhancement, helped also by the reflective surface of the sea, with which she is consubstantial, she magnifies the light explosion that launches through the subject-object fusion / mutual absorption or catalepsies, in John Armstrongs terminology. However, this is not her single quality, through the fact that she manages to trigger such living in the artist, the Joycean woman becomes the aesthetic muse; as external as necessary for the creative process to take place. In Romantic notions, she is the embodiment of inspiration, Stephens cry of profane joy voicing the heros expression of aesthetic triumph. Having grasped the essence of the contemplated object, the latter has proven aesthetically satisfactory. The next step to the next curlicue of the spiral of Stephens identity is ensured. In Joyces A Portrait more than in Dubliners the self is overtly seeking for his vocation, more specifically the aesthetic one. Stephens clear delineation between proper and improper arts connecting them to static and kinetic emotions explains why he resists the temptation of desire (which, according to his aesthetic theory, is kinetic and for this reason related to improper arts) in favour of the aesthetic emotion which arrests the mind. Therefore, Stephen chooses to keep the image of the girl forever in his heart. The slice of life is melted into the creative pot of the sensible conscience. Surely, to be able to convert the raw material into art one must have lived that epiphany. The choice of aesthetic emotion over desire testifies for the artists depersonalization while the selfs quest for vocation becomes a continuous depersonalization, translated as selftranscendence, not a denial of the self but a natural transfiguration for arts sake.

90

Roberto Harari. How James Joyce made his Name. A Reading of the Final Lacan. Other Press, 2002, p. 93.

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It is obvious that the girls beauty which makes him adore her does not have any connection with the multiple functions of the woman, in the sense of species propagation, the sentiment is much higher, culminating with creation. To create life out of life may have the sense of giving life to a work of art that presupposes the authors leaking into the work up to the point of disappearing.91 As Stephen is becoming an artist, art becomes a religion, a form of transcendence at the centre of which he is its own God. Thus, the quest for quidditas in Dubliners (through Gabriel Conroys strife to capture the mystery of his wifes strange mood) is refined through Stephens actually grasping of claritas while also being able to render it poetically (through the portraiture of the wading girl) in A Portrait. Aesthetic apprehension and epiphany cannot skip the three stages that Stephen explains and thus they cannot subside without a form of transcendence. Although in Dubliners the poetic language is not mastered quite like in A Portrait; the visible inclination towards spiritual games brood upon the contemplated object is obvious as they are sustained by the artists early education, sensitive memory, the imaginative ability in aesthetic scope. Spiritual games (referring more exactly to the the ways in which the writer (dis)entangles, recreates new images and symbols out of these already present coordinates of the biographical self) and transcendence emerge as key elements to the path of the selfs quest for vocation.

3. EPIPHANIC MNEMOTECHNIQUE IN THE PHILOSOPHICAL LABYRINTH

Our demonstration embarks upon exploring the mechanism of individuation from a different perspective. We render the epiphany-making process more transparent through the mnemotechnique92 of epiphany. The epiphanogenic function that memory acquires within
91

Florentina Anghel, James Joyce - Portret al artistului in tineree. O lectur poietic, Scrisul Romnesc, Craiova, 2006, p.78: Este evident c frumuseea femeii care l face s o adore nu are legatur cu multiplele funcii ale femeii n vederea propagrii speciei, sentimentul este mult mai nalt, culminnd cu creaia. S creezi via din via poate avea sensul de a da via unei opere care presupune scurgerea autorului in oper pn la dispariie. 92 The term mnemotechnique reached the reader by means of the title Joyces Book of Memory Mnemotechnic of Ulysses, the critical study having been written by John S. Rickard.

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Joyces work places the author in Prousts sphere of influence concerning the mmoire involuntaire, while also showing an indirect tribute to Bergsons flux of experience. 93 We have also adopted a philosophical and religious approach built upon the theories of Vico, Plato, Aristotle, Locke and Casey. Moreover, Lakoffs principle of gestaltic experience together with Ricoeurs intertwined memory - image appealing to the case of the Greek eikon with the phantasia enable the reader to show what role memory plays in the making process of Joycean epiphany. Starting with Platos theory which presents in the dialogues entitled The Sophist and Thaeitosus the question of eikn (the representation of an absent thing), the question of memory and imagination immediately comes into play. Eduard S. Caseys theory should be considered also, since he is the one who introduces the distinction between active memory (according to Bergsons theory) and passive memory as it is represented in the English empiricism of John Locke. Applying also Plato and Aristotles as well as Locke and Caseys theories of imagination (although the text invites an analysis from Bergsons activist theory on personal memory as instants) our close-text analysis is apparent in Stephens memories of his father, playing a crucial role in Stephens mnemonic journey towards acquiring an artistic identity. The analysis of personal and collective memory (according to these notions as they are defined by Augustin, at Husserl and Maurice Halbwachs) comes into play and is sustained by significant textual examples (the famous childhood apologize scene which when recounted becomes the eagle epiphany, the epiphany with the marshall) resulting thus in a detailed account of the various stages that the protagonist undergoes, in order to discover his true self. Therefore the labyrinth of memory is transposed and also doubled by the philosophical labyrinth both of which converging towards the epiphany of vocation, which apparently is an epiphany of the hero but more abstractly an epiphany of the writers own creative authority / of the author himself.

3.1 Memory and the Construction of Joycean Epiphany

93

Mary Ann Gillies. James Joyce: Fiction as the Flux of Experience. Published in Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Queen University Press, 1996, p.132-151.

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As you are now so once were we.94- James Joyce According to both psychological and philosophical studies, memory is part of the self and unquestionably contributes to ones finding his/ her true identity. The self cannot be outside its deposit of memories or recollections, as if in a perpetuum present, a permanent reiteration of the emotion of discovery enabled by the same external force. By gathering and retaining memories, the self is actually provided with the basis of biographical identity. Contemporary subjectivity theories have emphasized the role of culture and experience over nature and inheritance up to the point that the reader perceives the idea of inherited knowledge or innate information legacy as absurd. According to Andrea Moros study, the tabula inscripta theory is renounced in favour of, not the tabula rasa as it might be thought, but in favour of what is called the inscripting tabula. 95 But what is it that dictates which life episodes are stamped into memory and which are not? The intensity of those moments, be they pleasant or not, inscribe them into the deposit of memories. The emotional aspect intervenes as it is due to emotions that the memorable moments are filtered from the insignificant ones and step by step, from the beginning of childhood, the biographical self or the personal self is being constructed. Things are like this for any common, not necessarily artistic, conscience. However, for the artistic conscience, there appears a second self, besides the personal self, that is the artistic authorial ego. If the biographical self, which is synonymous with the personal self, only records the intense life moments some voluntarily and others involuntarily, the artistic self not only that proves sensible to the moments that are aesthetically intense, but he/ she also records (as a proof stands Joyces collection of Epiphanies in which he gathered those not only aesthetically intense episodes) with extreme care those aesthetically charged episodes. Some episodes, apparently common at first sight, might be later, through remembering, reconverted by the artistic conscience from personal memories into artistic episodes, or epiphanies in Joyces case (at a ertain moment Joyce speaks of the clock that was
94

Quoted fom http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/384451-as-you-are-now-so-once-were-we. Andrea Moro. The Boundaries of Babel: The Brain and the Enigma of Impossible Languages. U.S.A.: MIT Press, 2008, p. 108.

95

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not yet epiphanized). Here intervenes the process of depersonalization, which was analysed by T.S. Eliot in his essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent, at the shelter of which the authorial creativity can manifest itself freely. Could we situate the Joycean epiphany in terms of subjectivity and memory inasmuch the artists transfiguring of personal memory as well as collective memory contribute to the assertion of the vocational self? It is our chapters attempt to situate Joycean epiphany in terms of subjectivity and memory inasmuch the artists transfiguring of personal as well as collective memory contributes to the completion of the vocational self. According to Frank Budgen, Joyce said that imagination was memory, 96 and many critics speak of the writers prodigious memory. 97 Joyces fondness for mnemonic power was recorded by Frank Budgen who said that Joyce prized memory above all other human faculties.98 According to John S. Rickard, Joyces friend, Jacques Mercanton, claimed: Joyces company forced me to train my memory: he expected people to recall things precisely, and in detail. () He was never a creator ex-nihilo; he recomposed what he remembered, and he remembered most of what he had seen or had heard other people remember.99 The crucial role that memory plays in Joyces writing goes beyond his mnemonic abilities of reworking and refiguring the past. John S. Rickard said: His writings, more than those of most writers of prose, depend on elaborate repetitions, reworkings, and distortions of their own materials. () His writing is famous as well for recollecting and reworking the other texts, other languages, and other traditions that he encountered and remembered in his travels throughout Europe.100
96

Quoted in John S. Rickard. Joyces Book of Memory-The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p.1 97 Frank Budgen. Myselves When Young. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 187. 98 Hart Clive. Structure and Motif in Finnegans Wake. Evanston III: Northwestern University Press, 1962, p. 53 John S. Rickard. Joyces Book of Memory-The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p. 2. 99 John S. Rickard. Joyces Book of Memory-The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p. 2. 100 John S. Rickard. Joyces Book of Memory-The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p. 2.

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According to the above-mentioned critic, Joyces writings show a special fondness for the nature and workings of memory. The Irish writers fascination with memory springs from writers obsession with both the philosophical and psychological domains. Taking in consideration the fact that A Portrait was more than often viewed as Buildungsroman (novel of education and maturation) or Kunstlerroman (which focuses on the development of the artist), the respective novel constitutes a brilliant example of how memory works from early infancy to maturity. Examining the novel through the coloured lens of memory, we manage to outline the connection between memory and subjectivity and look at the ways in which memory has contributed to the protagonists epiphanies. Although the novel has no plot it is constructed on the pillars of the most significant memories in Stephens life and these memories are filtered through the protagonists consciousness adding the flavours of the age in the narrative discourse. If an unexperimented reader attempts to lecture the book hoping for a linear journey in which the hero, after fighting and defeating both interior as well as exterior demons, eventually reaches the Promise Land, he will be extremely shocked to discover Stephens chaotic display of memories. Employing the stream-of-consciousness technique, Joyce reveals a narration of the self through his alter-ego, Stephen, who voices the representations of national, religious and artistic influences, that eventually shape his (the protagonists as well as the writers) personality. Instead of a comfortable artistic journey, the reader strives to follow Stephens attempts to define himself as he experiments with the roles of a sensualist, religious devotee, and so on, finally setting on the persona of the artist as the most appropriate. However, despite Stephens attempts to (re)-build a self, to construct a stable sense of himself and his sense in the world, the reader sees rather a series of selves, a sequence of attempts to secure himself in one or another orientation social, religious, artistic. So, the reader, after having taken the risk of accompanying Stephen through the thick jungle of his mind and soul, does not reach the accomplishment of the happy ending which he or she was looking forward to. The fragmentariness of Stephens mnemonic journey is well captured by Ellman when he says that identity is a process of reopening and rehealing the scar of identity, a process 66

of brisure - of cleaving and joining- that belongs not only to the subject but to the text itself, which both suffers and enacts the mutilation by which identity reconstitutes itself Once named and maimed, the subject, rather than a plenitude, erupts henceforth as punctuation, as a gap or wound that rips the fabric of the text at regular intervals.101 On the other hand, according to John Rickard, the formation of identity in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man occurs within a tension between the disremembering or dissolution and the remembering that seeks continually to shore up the fragments of experience into a coherent and purposive narrative.102 From the various perspectives on Joyces attitude to memory and as much as he perceived it as vocational constituent resulted his retrospective and reminiscent epiphanies of which we have picked the most representative for the present demonstration.

3.2 Memory and Imagination

We will first have a close look at the way memory was regarded from the Greek philosophers to the modern ones and after having done that, we will offer a few examples of Joyces way of employing different types of memory and mnemonic techniques in order to build the identity of his protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The relation between memory and imagination will be presented according to different theories, from Plato to Edward S. Casey, followed by an analysis of Stephens memories of his father, (the way Joyce presents them) which will determine the nature of his relationship with him, and also the way Stephen recalls the most significant stages in the process of acquiring an artistic identity. The first subchapter opens with Stephens personal memories of his father managing to follow the descending evolution of their relationship. In order to illustrate that, we shall analyse Stephens dream with the marshal. Stephens first reminiscence of his father nestled in his mind when he was baby Tuckoo and his father was the fairy God that told him the story. After being left at Clongowes, Stephen, a shy, sensitive infant, begins to
101 102

Ibid., p. 192. John S. Rickard. Joyces Book of Memory - The Mnemotechnique of Ulysses. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p. 20.

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lose faith in him. Joyces way of showing is reminiscent of the activist view of memory, associated with Bergson. Bergson, in the activist theory on memory, 103 sustained that the personal past is not just a repository of images that we store and carry with us during and that we can reach anytime we need; he conceived of the past as an active, overflowing collection of experiences that motivates and exerts itself in the present. Thus, instants are central to Bergsons philosophy as they are to Stephen; yet, for the former they are not like pearls strung one after another on the thread of identity. They are seen as opportunities for the intuitive perception of duration,104 unlike Joyces epiphanies which manifest themselves also beyond the temporal confinement. According to Bergson, past, present and future are interrelated; our past guides us into our future. We can transpose the temporal intricacy that Bergson proposes in Stephens time labyrinth. By means of involuntary memory Stephens discourse passes from the marshals death wound, the dark and the light, to the black dog. The same technique is employed further to show some significant snapshots of instants in Stephens process of acquiring an artistic identity. The scene with the wading girl stands as an eloquent example of the activist view of memory, the beginning of the workings of his artistic imagination/ freedom of creation. As this episode renders highly delicate feelings and emotions, experienced by Stephen, the whole scene can be viewed as belonging to personal memories. (Indeed, Joyce at a certain moment met a girl, whose description in A Portrait resembles with the real appearance of the girl in real life.) Still, there are some allusions in the description that allow the transfer from personal to collective memory. Among them we mention the allusion to Blessed Virgin Mary (referring to the girls purity), the allusion to Venus (who was born out of sea foam, apparently just like the wading girl), the allusion to the Holy Ghost (as the girl is likened to a dove, also a symbol of peace hinting at the serenity that her whole presence inspires.) In order to better reflect the way in which collective memory works is employed by Joyce, we chose the episode with the eagle and the Christmas dinner scene. Through these instants we wanted to demonstrate that we are not alone and that, although we may not
103 104

Henri Bergson. Matter and Memory. New York: Cosimo Inc., 2007, p.101. Henri Bergson. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. New York: Kensington Publishing Group, 1946, p. 129.

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want it, the experiences of our ancestors influence us in the process of defining our identity. In these scenes social and religious intolerance are emphasized leading to what we may call racial memory. These are traumatic memories for Stephen and determine his refusal to serve either the Church or his countrys politics. In the end, we have reunited all significant moments in Stephens life, in order to show how personal and collective memories, employed either voluntary or involuntary, manage to shape the young artists self. From Plato and Aristotle to Locke and Casey - theories on memory and imagination. Since Joyce received an education in the Jesuit spirit he became acquainted with the memory theories of Plato, Augustine, Aquinas and even the Roman Catholic Mass. Joyces personal interpretation of religion led him to writers such as Giordano Bruno, whose central attention was focused upon memory and the occult. A certain connection between naturalism and memory reached Joyce by means of Butlers work, which Joyce knew, was stemming from the evolutionary views of the French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, esposed to various degrees by Henri Bergson, William James, the members of the Theosophical Society, Sigmund Freud, and other writers that Joyce read.105 The problem of the interdependence between memory and imagination is as old as Western philosophy. From the philosophical Socratic disputes on this question remain as poignant two rival and complementary theories, one belonging to Plato, the other one to Aristotle. The former, centred round the issue of eikn,106 speaks about the present representation of an absent thing, thus implicitly pleading for including the question of memory in that of imagination, albeit the latter focuses on the representation of a previously perceived thing, a thing which can be acquired or learned, and pleads for including the issue of image in that of memory. What immediately results from the philosophers debate on the subject matter is the fact that both memory and imagination are interdependent.
105

John S. Rickard. Joyces Book of Memory - The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p. 8. 106 Noburu Notomi. The Unity of Plato's Sophist: Between the Sophist and the Philosopher. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 147.

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The notion of eikn is to be found, either alone or together with the one of phantasia (an appropriate equivalent would be appearance), in Platos dialogues about the sophist. 107 Thus, due to the philosophical context of the research, the concepts of imagination as well as memory are viewed from their very origins (The Sophist and Theaetetus). To complicate things even further, the issue of eikn is also associated right from the beginning with the one of the imprint, of typos, under the sign of the wax tablets metaphor. Platos theory states that we all have, in our souls, a tablet of wax given as a gift from Mnemosyne, and everything that we want to remember from what we know or hear, or we produce in our mind after we have submitted it to our sensations and mental perceptions, is imprinted in it as if we imprinted the signet of a ring. And what is imprinted will be remembered and known as long as the image persists in the typos.108 On the other hand, what is erased or is not able to get imprinted will be forgotten and will no longer be known. Therefore error is seen as being assimilated either with an obliteration of the traces (smeia) or with a mistake similar to the one made by someone who would follow a false track. And here we have the issue of forgetting which is considered from the very beginning; it is considered from two angles, first as obliteration of traces and then as a difference between the present image and the trace left in ones memory. It is remarkable the fact that starting with these both fundamental texts, memory and imagination share the same fate. Therefore, memory, seen as a potential forgetting, appears as directly connected to time. According to Paul Ricoeur, the same issue that of memory and imagination is represented by the allegory of the cage.109 According to this new model, a crucial distinction is imposed, the distinction between possessing knowledge and using it actively, the same as we must admit that there is a whole difference between holding a bird in ones hand and having it locked in a cage. So, from Platos metaphor of the trace left by a ring, we have passed to Ricoeurs cage metaphor where the emphasis falls on defining knowledge in terms of mental power and capacity.

107

James A. Coulter. The Literary Microcosm: Theories of Interpretation of the Later Neoplatonists. Netherlands: Columbia University, 1976, p. 7. 109 Paul Ricoeur. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004, p. 10.

108

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Aristotles De Memoria et Reminescentia (Aristotle on Memory and Recollection) can be placed in connection with the eristic and dialectic plan inherited from Plato. 110 The double title serves to make a clear distinction, but not between the persistence of memory and the act of recollection itself, but between memorys simple presence in spirit and the act of recollection seen as a search. (It is what Proust would differentiate many years later as involuntary and voluntary memory). In this special sense, memory is characterized from the very start as feeling ( pathos ) as opposed to the simple act of recollection. As we have said at the beginning of the chapter, emotions and their intensity are the ones which filter which memories are imprinted and which not. The connection between memory and imagination is assured by their belonging to the same part of the soul, which is the sensitive soul, according to a division already operated by Plato. By bringing together the two issues the difficult question of the presence of the absent has already emerged. Aristotle states that the emotion produced due to the sensation in soul and in that part of the body which shelters it must be thought of as a sort of picture which is called memory.111 And again, we are confronted with the notion of eikn (under a new name) and along with it, with the one of typos, further connected with the one of the signet and of the ring. Yet, unlike Plato in Theatetus, Aristotle associates the body with the soul and, on this connection, he elaborates a typology of the various effects of the imprint. In Remembering: A Phenomenological Study,112 Edward S. Casey offers a new perspective on the difference between the two models of memory: passivist and activist. Casey sustains that since memory secularized from the philosophical point of view; Mnemosyne has begun to lose her status in the West. 113

Plato often contrasted this type of argument with the dialectical method and other more reasonable and logical methods (e.g., at Republic454a). In the dialogue Euthydemus, Plato satirizes eristic. (Eristic, from the ancient Greek word Eris meaning wrangle or strife, often refers to a type of argument where the participants fight and quarrel without any reasonable goal. The aim usually is to win the argument and/or to engage into a conflict for the sole purpose of wasting time through arguments, not to potentially discover a true or probable answer to any specific question or topic. Eristic is arguing for the sake of conflict as opposed to the seeking of conflict resolution.) Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eristic. 111 David Bloch. Aristotle on Memory and Recollection. Hotei Publishing, USA, 2007, p. 186. 112 Edward S. Casey. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2000, p. 14. 113 Where once Mnemosyne was a venerated Godess, we have turned over responsibility for remembering to the cult of computers, which serve as our modern mnemonic idols. Edward S. Casey. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana, University Press, 1987, p. 2.
110

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As far as Casey is concerned those for whom remembering is reduced to a passive process of registering and storing incoming impressions114 are seen as passivists. Having as central characteristic the tendency to reduce all mnemonic functions to a simple search, the passivist memory also tends to ignore what he calls the transcendent aspects of memory. 115 One of the earliest examples of the passivist view on memory (seen as nothing more than imprinting) is Platos metaphor of memory as a wax tablet in Theatetus. At the opposite pole of passivist model of memory is activism, which views memory as a more unreliable and more powerful function of the mind. Casey localises the activist tradition after Plato through the hermetic art of memory practiced by the Renaissance philosophers.116 Perhaps the best understanding for the activist view is found in the metaphor of the search, but understood as a creative or active search. The main tools with which the subject, owner of memory, is provided in his quest are language and experience guided by imagination, dependent on the contexts of the present as on the past. Activist memory is always challenging, for many activist writers doubt that they could pinpoint a definite, available and final truth at the end of their search. This implies a permanent shiftiness and untrustworthiness that the memory challenges its owner with.
117

Many of Freuds later writings can be inscribed in the activist tradition, for he came to feel that the weak spot in the security of our mental life is the untrustworthiness of our memory.118 In A Portrait memory operates in a zone constructed by modern philosophical and psychological discourses, and thus, as we might expect, it contains elements of both the
114 115

Idem. Edward S. Casey. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana, University Press, 1987, p. 14. 116 Among them we can name: Giordano Bruno, Tomasso Campanella, and Raymond Lull up to modern writers such as William James, Edward Husserl, Bergson, Pierre Janet, and Jean Piaget. 117 On reflection, Freud found that in his case studies of neurotic patients such as the Wolf Man, what he had once seen as primal scenes reconstructed from the actual earliest memories of his patients were actually constructions rather than literal reconstructions. Freud came to see that what mattered was whether this construction of the past this story of neurosis proved to be an effective version of the past for the purposes of psychoanalysis. Thus, the activist tradition sees memory as an intersection between actual experience and interpretation, imagination and repression. John S. Kikard. Joyces Book of Memory - The Mnemotechnic of Ulysses. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1999, p. 13. 118 Sigmund Freud. A Phylogenetic Fantasy: Overview of the Transference Neuroses. ed. Ilse Grubrich-Simitis, Trans Axel Hoffer and Peter T. Hoffer, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknao Press of Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 24.

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passivist and the activist visions of memory. In reading the novel as the site of a dialectic between various modes and models, differing stories of the self and of the workings of memory, we come upon a central question of the nature of past experience and our relationship to it. Does memory only store the past in an unchanging and unchangeable form that can be dug up years later, or is memory in a continuous change and thus all the more interpretable? Does the subject always rewrite the past to some extent where he/ she remembers? Is our access to the past limited to our personal experience, as the passivist tradition would sustain, or are we capable of remembering much more, drawing memories from the minds of others, as some activist writers would argue? According to the empiricist (empathizing with the passivist view) model of memory, the self was just as a collection of events and sensations, a processing of present instants; each individual personality is defined by the aggregation of his or her experiences, and each new experience therefore moulds that personality. The importance of instants is emphasized throughout A Portrait and, except for the case of the epiphanic moments, instants seem to constitute a threatening notion. Father Arnall, for example, tells the boys on retreat that one single instant was enough for the trial of a mans soul, (A Portrait, p. 113) and a few pages later Stephen thinks of Lucifers sin of pride, the sinful thought conceived in an instant that ironically comes later to symbolize his own rejection of the church: non serviam: I will not serve. (A Portrait, p. 117). The relationship father-son; the epiphany with the marshal. The quest for a sense of identity is present from the very first pages of A Portrait, when baby Stephen, hearing his father read a story about Baby Tuckoo, thinks: He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived. She sold lemon platt. O, the wild rose blossoms On the little green place ... He sang that song. That was his song. 73

O, the green wothe botheth (A Portrait, p.7) The little boy begins at once to map the world around him in terms of sensations (at his early age each perception serves for a better mapping) with the help of which he locates his experiences. As Kenner states in The Portrait in Perspective, by changing the red rose to a green one and dislocating the spelling, he makes the song his own. 119 As the wild rose blossom becomes in the infants language the green wothe botheth there becomes apparent the accidental rather than intentional character of the boys replacing of the adjective wild with the adjective green. The playfulness of the child enables the emergence of such an eikon as green rose, which will later be consciously articulated (both at linguistic and mental levels; the artists spiritual games emerge as he, guided by the arbitrariness of memory and playfulness inherent at his age, emotion and imagination, converts and recreates all the given constituents of his biographical self) by the teenager Stephen. The protagonists first and personal recorded memory proves pivotal for his later becoming as they set the premise for the individuation process. Another eikon present in the little boys song is the image of the moocow, which will later become an emblem for Stephens self quest (he is called Bous by his colleagues but he rejects this appropriation). Towards the end of the novel, Stephen becomes aware of his vocation, inscribing thus the image of bous into that of the Greek myth and indirectly identifying himself with Icarus. The entire memory may be interpreted as both a retrospective (since it is a recollection of Stephens early boyhood) and a prospective epiphany (as it contains three elements that will later prove emblematic for Stephens identity quest: green rose, cow, song, implying thus the tendency towards the playful spirit, inherent for the creative freedom.) Imagination makes its first appearance in the little boys mind. What is exactly the connection between epiphany and memory? The concept of epiphany the way Joyce sees it, doesnt correspond to the religious meaning of the definitions already given by the dictionaries: 1. Christian festival that takes place on January, 6th and commemorates the moment in which Jesus Christ showed himself to the wise men; 2. the
119

Hugh Kenner. The Portrait in Perspective. Published in Thomas Edmund Connolly (ed.). Joyce's Portrait: Criticisms & Critiques. New York: Meredith Publishing Company, 1962, p. 25-60.

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appearance of a deity; 3a. a sudden, intuitive insight or perception of reality or of the essential meaning of an object, usually triggered by a simple, common experience; 3b. a literary work or part of it which presents, usually symbolically, such a moment of revelation and understanding. Let us review the definition of epiphany as it is rendered in Stephen Hero: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. (Stephen Hero, p. 211) There it is: a memorable phase of the mind resulting into an episode/ slice of life that should be intense or shocking enough to make its memorising worthwhile. The intensity (a quality specific for epiphany, of which Ashton Nichols spoke of in his Poetics of Epiphany) of such a phase of the mind appears through the workings of an acute emotion or feeling, which can be either an absolutely positive (joy, love) or an absolutely negative one (fear, terror, pain).120 One of these delicate and evanescent moments is connected to a dream of Stephens while he was still at Clongowes. In his dream, a marshal appears; a marshal who dies and who represents a hypostasis of the father the young, shy and fearful Stephen was looking for. This dream marks the beginning of the period of confusion in the relationship father-son, announcing the sons discontent with his father, Simon Dedaluss deeds. The prefects shoes went away. Where? Down the staircase and along the corridors or to his room at the end? He saw the dark. Was it true about the black dog that
120

This reminds the reader of Aristotles clear delineation between the two emotions that arrest the mind (joy and terror) of which Stephen picks joy as to translate the state of mind during aesthetic apprehension. But here, through the prism of memory, epiphanies are no longer governed by aesthetically charged elements, but they surface the artists conscience through the filter / realm of emotion. The memorability of the phase of the mind is also reminiscent of quoting from Shelleys mind as a fading coal. As Shelley said, emotions are poetic images recollected in tranquility, only Joyces poetic images appear under the form of epiphanies. Here creative memory comes into play, combining in an apparently arbitrary way eikon, phantasia, passive and active memory, personal and collective memory.

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walked there at night with eyes as big as carriage-lamps? They said it was the ghost of a murderer. A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. He saw the dark entrance hall of the castle. Old servants in old dress were in the ironing-room above the staircase. It was long ago. The old servants were quiet. There was a fire there, but the hall was still dark. A figure came up the staircase from the hall. He wore the white cloak of a marshal; his face was pale and strange; he held his hand pressed to his side. He looked out of strange eyes at the old servants. They looked at him and saw their masters face and cloak and knew that he had received his death-wound. But only the dark was where they looked: only dark silent air. Their master had received his death-wound on the battlefield of Prague far away over the sea. He was standing on the field; his hand was pressed to his side; his face was pale and strange and he wore the white cloak of a marshal. (A Portrait, p. 22) By integrating the eikon of the marshal represented through the black dog into a collective memory (Was it true about the black dog that walked there at night with eyes as big as carriage-lamps?), Stephens recollection immediately emerges as an intertwining of both personal and collective memory (what Casey calls reminiscence) He remembers of things past: It was long ago, but he dissolves the past temporality of epiphany by using the past continuous (He was standing on the field.). The persistence of the marshals image in Stephens memory comes as a result of intense emotion generated by the involuntary apprehension of the black dog: A long shiver of fear flowed over his body. From a different perspective, the image of the marshal is imprinted due to information that the collective memory offers to Stephens personal memory. The protagonist does not use a documentary technique in his recounting; instead he makes use of the activist memory, by reworking through his sensitivised / touched imagination the entire figure of the marshal. The chromatic contrast white - dark is indicative of the fact that Stephens recollection of this image is apprehended as a luminous spot in time on the background of other insignificant (and thus wrapped in darkness) moments. The insistence on the epithet white sustains also the idea

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of an epiphanic appearance from the darkness of the mysterious, occult past (enhanced through the repetition of the word strange: strange eyes, his face was pale and strange.) Joyces art is remarkable in projecting Stephens inner thoughts and torments during this episode. He was so young and sensitive and he just couldnt adjust himself to the conditions at Clongowes: he needed his father. He needed his father to be there for him, to offer him love and stability and to protect him from the black dog, symbolizing doubt and uncertainty. Although in Stephens dream Simon Dedalus is represented through the figure of the marshal, another example of the heros highly considering his father, he is, in fact, the murderer hosted by the black dog. He is the one who kills Stephens hopes. The death wound of the marshal is nothing else but the heros loss of faith in his father, also brilliantly pictured by means of the antagonism fire dark, symbolizing Stephens young hope, his wings, as opposed to his fathers attitude of indifference and self-pity. From another perspective, the whole episode of recollection is quite intertextual since the ghost of the marshal is reminiscent of the spirit of Hamlets father in Shakespeares play. More examples of eikon and intertwining of personal and collective memory are identifiable also in some of Dubliners epiphanies: The Lass of Aughrim becomes for Gretta an eikon of Michael Fury, the chalice becomes an eikon of the dead priest in The Sisters, Little Chandlers melancholy can be translated as an aspiration towards enlacing the personal and the collective memory. His melancholy occurs due to the fact that he cannot sound the Celtic note in his poems; in this sense his recitation of Byrons verses121 becomes a phantasia of his own melancholy: A volume of Byrons poems lay before him on the table. He opened it cautiously with his left hand lest he should waken the child and began to read the first poem in the book: Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom, Not een a Zephyr wanders through the grove, Whilst I return to view my Margarets tomb And scatter flowers on the dust I love.
121

(Dubliners, p. 92.)

Since Stephen will later advocate the value of Byrons verses in one of the talks with his (Stephens) colleagues, we can also speak of intertextual memory between the envisaged works.

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3.3 Personal Memory and Collective Memory

As the title announces the investigation regards personal and collective memory, whose results will be further illustrated by some significant examples from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man concluding with a detailed account of the various stages Stephen goes through, in the novel, in order to discover his true self. Individual conscience and collective conscience traditional versus modernist views. Individual memory and collective memory are seen as opposites in the very context in which an old tradition of reflexiveness is opposed to the more recent tradition of objectivity. Yet, they do not compete in the same level, but in certain spheres of discourse which have become distanced from each other. The issue of the relation between the individual and the collective memory hasnt been solved yet, but throughout the passing of time there have been some orientations which attempted to analyze each of them thoroughly and create (or not) a bridge between them. The tradition of the insight, through Augustine, 122 promoted the primary and essential character of individual memory. There are three features emphasized in order to support the private character of memory, according to Augustine. First, memory seems to be unique, singular: ones memories are not anothers memories. A persons own recollections cannot be transferred to someone elses memory. As it is ones own, memory represents a model of what belongs to oneself, according to all the experiences lived by the subject. Furthermore, the initial connection between conscience and the past lies in memory. As Aristotle stated and Augustine emphasized: Memory is of the past,
123

and this past is that of ones impressions;

thus, the respective past is ones own past. It is this particular characteristic that enables
122

Brian Stock. Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation. U.S.A.: First Harvard University Press, 1998,.p.209. 123 Idem.

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memory to assure the temporal continuity of a person, and by means of it, the persons identity. Continuity allows one to go back in time, without disturbing the stream of the present, to the most remote events of ones childhood. Although memories may be divided and organised according to their level of significance, their source, there still remains the ability to travel in time, regress, digress and transgress without any hindrance and also without disturbing the continuous evolution of identity. Sometimes recollections of older memories (of childhood for instance) may be apprehended in a different way according to the various moods of the biographical self (as the passing of time reworks ones view of ones own memories). This alterity supports the distinction operated by history (chronological recording of events) in the periods of time. What makes the distinction between recollections (moments of remembered past) does not dissolve any of the characteristics of the relation between the remembered past and the present time. The temporal continuity and the private nature of the recollection is also taken into consideration. Thirdly, memory is connected to the sense of orientation in the passing of time; orientation, in its double direction, from the past to the future, but also from the future to the past, to the recollection, according to the principle of anticipation, passing through the living present. These characteristics, reunited in the common experience and the current language constitute the foundation of the tradition of the insight, which we may say it was initiated by Augustine. But, although he knows the insight man, Augustine is not acquainted to the relation of interdependence between identity, self and memory. This equation will be brought by John Locke at the end of the 18th 124century and continued by Husserl, who will attempt to connect the question of the recollection with the one of the person who does it, trying to maintain a unitary proportion between insight and reflexiveness.125 With Husserl, the insight tradition comes to mind, but at the same time, the whole insight tradition represents an obstacle on the way to collective memory.

124 125

R. Leary, June Price Tangney. Handbook of Self and Identity. New York: Guilford Press, 2003, p. 71. Lanei M. Rodemeyer. Intersubjective Temporality: It's About Time. Netherlands: Springer, 2006, p. 102.

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In the perspective of the Fifth Cartesian Meditation,126 the concept of common conscience, which is strongly related to the one of collective memory, can result only from a second process of objectification of the intersubjective exchanges. Starting from this premise, which leaves the whole responsibility of founding the collective entities to the intersubjectivity, what is worth noticing is that only by analogy and related to the individual conscience and memory can we consider collective memory a recollection of the traces left by the events which affected history, some of them being now common recollections on the occasion of festivals, rituals, public ceremonies. Opposing the insight tradition, Maurice Halbwachss outside orientation is stated in his book, On Collective Memory.127 In his book he introduces the idea of assigning memory directly to a collective entity which he calls a group or a society. The second chapter of the above mentioned book, called Individual and Collective Memory, is written in the first person singular from the beginning to the end, in an almost autobiographical style. Mainly, the text states the following: in order to remember, we need the others. But it also adds: not only that personal memory cannot be derived from collective memory, but also vice-versa. Nonetheless, we must point out that individual memory becomes self-conscious starting from a subtle analysis of the individual experience of belonging to a group and on the basis of the knowledge received from the others. We meet the others memory especially by remembering and recognizing, two major mnemonic phenomena of the recollection. In this context the trajectory from collective memory to personal memory is preferred not because of the fact that individual memory is grasped from someone else, but because the self receives information about the past. So, the data that collective memory offers to the personal memory presides over the actual source of information. Thus, the first memories that we meet on this way are the shared memories (the ones placed by Casey under the title reminiscing). They allow us to state that although unique, in fact, we are never alone, the hypothesis of solipsism, thus being eliminated right from the beginning. Thus, we get to some events re-constructed for us by others (other nations/ cultures). Consequently, the contexts (cultural, religious, historical and so on) in which the self evolves cannot be separated from ones becoming.
126

A. D. Smith. Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, New York: Routledge, 2003, p.212. 127 Maurice Halbwachs. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 87.

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Religious versus nationalist intolerance the epiphany with the eagle An example of collective memory is present in the second page of A Portrait, when infant Stephen has his first epiphany the epiphany with the eagle triggered by his aunt, Dantes threatening statement: O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes. The starting point of this first epiphany is represented by Stephens friendship with his neighboursdaughter. Eileen, the fair-haired, with pale figure, who represents a substitute for Stephens mother, is the offspring of the Vances, a mixed family made up from an Englishman and an Irish woman, a most unfortunate union, both from the socio-political point of view, as well as from the religious one (they were Protestants), as it is known how the society of the time profoundly disapproved of this type of marriages and tended to isolate them. So, after daring to assume the role of the father by planning his future marriage to Eileen, When they were grown up he was going to marry Eileen.(A Portrait, p. 20), Stephen hides under the table, feeling guilty towards his father. This defensive reaction reveals his vulnerable side and aunt Dantes threat (in psychoanalytic criticism this punishment was associated to that of castration) doubled by his mothers agreement to it O, Stephen will apologise (A Portrait, p. 2), makes him react in a totally unexpected way, by creating a nursery rhyme, similar to a pun, where the two possibilities alternate: Pull out his eyes, Apologise, Apologise, Pull out his eyes. Apologise Pull out his eyes, Pull out his eyes, Apologise. (A Portrait, p. 2)

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The structure of the rhyme, its rhythm and the resonance of the sounds involved make it sound like an execution ritual: the first stanza starts directly with the merciless sentence (Pull out his eyes), continues with the alternative solution (Apologise), alluding to the Catholic practice of repentance, which gains power of expression by means of its repetition, only to come back to the inevitable end in case of disobedience. In the second stanza the emphasis falls on the harshness of the punishment mirrored by the rhythmically obsessive Pull out his eyes, while the repentance alternative solution, somehow, misses strength, seeming rather uncertain and remote. Here the text is interrupted and the reader is taken to another time and space, without being offered any information on Stephens behaviour, if he apologized or not. This was not the final aim of the author, but Stephens tiny poem which came into being so unexpectedly, in an almost involuntary manner, imposed by the resonance of certain sounds and by the protagonists capacity to associate them in an instance of weakness, of vulnerability, feminine characteristics, following the courageous attempt of his identification with his own father. This poem represents Stephens debut as a young artist, his first encounter with the Muse. The breakdown in the text directs the readers attention towards this particular aspect, leaving aside the flowing of events. Here, according to Halbwachss theory on collective memory, 128 the event is reconstructed through aunt Dantes fanatic religious and socio-political vision; instead of laughing at Stephens early poem (which probably half the boys of his age would have done) and protecting both him and Eileen, we are confronted with the adults xenophobe attitude whose violence makes young Stephen wish to escape from the prison of the Irish inheritance. Aunt Dantes place in society is clearly defined: she is preoccupied with politics and manifests strong aggressiveness; even her name has a masculine resonance, if we think of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whom Joyce admired so much. Christmas dinner scene; the epiphany with the death of Parnell The same extremist attitude is encountered in the famous scene of the Christmas dinner. What could have been a nice, quiet, family dinner in the spirit of Christmas turns into
128

Maurice Halbwachs. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, p. 87.

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a violent argument between Aunt Dante, on the one side, and Simon Dedalus and Mr. Casey on the other, that young Stephen is stricken with terror. The joy that such a celebration should enable is easily replaced by the tension triggered by the contradictory talk. Aunt Dante, a fervent supporter of the Catholic Church, as well as of the Church role in the leading of the country, holds the view that the fate of Charles Stewart Parnell should rightfully be placed in the hands of the merciless judgment of the religious representatives of the time. Mr. Casey, a declared supporter of Parnells nationalist cause, defends him against the unjust accusations that were inputted to him by the Irish people and the religious figures, thus mentioning also his well known love affair with Kitty OShea. At this stage of the dialogue Dante Riordan feels compelled to express her view in favour of the Church interdiction of Parnells relationship with Kitty while Casey replies that it was precisely the fault of the Church for having interfered in this matter that led to the end of his political career and together with it to the abolition of the promised Home Rule for their nation. The tension of their discussion rises up to the point of exchanging insults and vociferous sayings, thus transforming young Stephen into an unwilling witness to the quarrelling of the adults. The Christmas dinner scene, now a mere pretext for their gettogether, becomes the battle field of the opposing principles and convictions. Simon Dedalus shares Caseys view, both insisting that it was the priests pawns that compromised Parnells reputation by making public his affair. On the other hand, Dante Riordan, who becomes the advocate of the Church, sustains that it was the priests duty to vindicate the morality of religion and God through their actions or correcting measures. Stephen takes refuge in the remembrance of joyous days when the adults views were united under British imperialism: both his father and Dante were sustaining Ireland and Parnell.129 Once Parnells image was tainted, the divergence of opinions started to spread and dismember the promised union of the Irish nation. This scene serves as a snapshot of the social tension of the time reflected also at the family level, while extending to the context of an ideological tension. The novel makes clear that the politics is subdued by the power of the Catholic dogma, as Parnell will remain for ever in Stephens memory as a victim of the
129

Stephen even remembers how Dante, one evening at a concert, had hit a gentleman with her umbrella because he had taken off his hat when the band played God Save the Queen at the end. (A Portrait, p. 37)

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Church. His fathers carving of the popes nose is Simons idea of being simultaneously humorous and critical. Stephens conscience is sensitive to the scene of violent political and religious views and the whole image fills him with terror as he asks himself, Who was right then?, but has no means of knowing. What awes and strikes his sensibility is the destructive power that the passionate convictions of the grownups world bring upon the harmony of the family circle and the joyous days which he had anxiously waited for. The sad experience is imprinted directly unto his imagination and memory without passing through the filter of understanding. Later, by reviving this painful memory, Stephen will develop an epiphany on the death of Parnell. When travelling with his father to Cork, Stephen tries to appeal to his childhood memories, but all he could remember was names, Dante, Parnell, Clane, Clongowes, and chronological data apparently of no significance, just like an enumeration. But when reaching the period of his being ill and staying in the infirmary, the epiphany takes place under the form of a dream in which Stephen witnesses his own burial ceremonial. Yet, it is not he who dies, but Parnell. But he had not died then. Parnell had died. There had been no mass for the dead in the chapel and no procession. He had not died but he had faded out like a film in the sun. He had been lost or had wandered out of existence for he no longer existed. How strange to think of him passing out of existence in such a way, not by death but by fading out in the sun or by being lost and forgotten somewhere in the universe! It was strange to see his small body appear again for a moment: a little boy in a grey belted suit. His hands were in his side-pockets and his trousers were tucked in at the knees by elastic bands. (A Portrait, p. 111)

In the dream, and thus through the prolific implication of imagination, Stephen constructs his own memory of the death and the burial ceremony of Parnell, whom he admired a lot. As a proof of Joyces admiration towards Parnell stands his poem, Et Tu 84

Healy, composed when he was only four years old and when the betrayal of Parnell stamped his soul. The intensity of the emotions that the small James had lived back then rooted Parnells image into his soul forever. Hence his determination to allocate considerable space for this event in his first published novel. Moreover, the ambiguity of the text points to the protagonists wish to identify himself with the hero. During Stephens self-quest he is also trying to identify himself with the paternal figure and now Parnell best fits in the role of the spiritual father. By transfiguring a biographical personal memory, which happens to be also a collective memory for the Irish society of the time, together with the constructedness of imagination, this epiphany erases the protagonists personal self and sets him beyond the newly discovered spiritual father. The leap of the personal self towards the depersonalised ego is made possible through a loop in the universe (even if mediated at imaginary level), by suffusing up to annihilation both identities (of the protagonist and his spiritual father now seen as Parnell) and spatio-temporal coordinates. By means of this plurilevel fusion Stephen projects himself in the neverdying hope that Parnell will remain an immortal hero through his accomplishments in the conscience of his fellow Irishmen. Paradoxically, death becomes here the gate to the eternal life.

4. LOVE FROM DUBLINERS TO A PORTRAIT

An even more acute level of investigation into the internal laboratory of the Joycean epiphany is achieved in the fourth chapter through the analysis of the role of the feminine as most critics admitted that the feminine figure was prevalent in Joyces life. The primary directions of focus regard womens role in Joycean textual voices through the major critical threads of gender and phenomenological theories as well as a religious interpretation we proceed to the mapping of the Joycean womans identity in Dubliners and A Portrait: mother, temptress (womans paradox of aggressive passiveness turning her into a symbol of sovereignty), Blessed Virgin Mary, ideal feminine. Moreover, from the Kristevian feminist point of view we grasp the Joycean woman also as victim of a male-governed society without overlooking the female image and symbol as it appears in Celtic times.

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However, the trajectory of the Joycean womans evolution stretches far beyond mere mapping of feminine roles through gender, power and religious criticism. The woman and the feminine do not represent just another ingredient in the Joycean epiphanic melting pot but an important agent that propels the hero forward on his path towards artistic maturity, the complexity of the feminine nature becoming a form of imago (to use Jungs term) for the Joycean epiphany. At the next level of our demonstration the Joycean woman sways from feminine agency and feminine muse to feminine sublime contributing thus to the sense of totality which the artist so feverishly looks for. Automatically the dimension of the sublime (the mystery that resides from the feminine abstractedness that the Joycean conscience imprints onto the feminine image) presupposes a harmonious symbiosis of contraries, a simultaneously and absolutely captivating and frightening dimension, which we interpreted as the feminine sublime. The artist reaches this dimension only after having adopted the most matter-bound dimension, mater genitrix, but only to convert it at an abstract level into his own epiphany laboratory which Joyce calls virgin womb of imagination.(A Portrait, p. 215) Therefore the feminine is not only grasped in its multilayered complexity but is also transcended by the heros words made flesh (A Portrait, p. 276) while simultaneously contributing considerably to the formation of the sensitive artistic conscience.

4.1 Queer Feminine Resonance in Dubliners

The Irish writer, starting from basic opposing qualities such as weak vs. strong indirectly associated with male vs. female, deepens the line of thought and dissolves those contraries into a queer stage of being. Note that these oppositions are perceived as such only by our rational minds which tend to subordinate to the comfortable logic of categorization. It is much easier to think in terms of contrasts or opposites than to get caught up in blurry shades drawn between truth and lie, between power and weakness, between male and female. The reality of genders present in Dubliners proves to be more colourful than our black and white mode of thinking.

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Father Times and Mother Species, as Joyce puts it.130 The question of identity immediately arises at first sight stretching the division between male and female, linear and eternal time, time and space. This representation of woman as body prefigures a denigrating image of males counterpart. Identity is seen as neither masculine nor feminine but more like a neutral all encompassing totality. It is precisely Kristevas theory of womans time that we are going to apply first to Joyces Dubliners and then to A Portrait; the major points in our argument will be the hysteric condition of the female, which is overshadowed by the male order, versus the New Woman that emerges as disruptive of the paternal law. Attention will be given to the Joycean language which proves to be the best tool for portraying the inbetween-ness of the semiotic and symbolic representatives (the masculine and the feminine according to Kristevas theory131). Following the course of history in the direction of the evolution of the feminine Kristeva begins at the origins and acknowledges that woman in ancient times was very much ignored if not oppressed by the patriarchal society. Although there are numerous women that people Joyces work they resisted the threat of becoming dependent on patriarchal authority. And yet there are also some feminine characters that seem less independent and were seen as suffering from physical weakness which sometimes was compensated by the display of impulsive behaviour; for instance the raging splitting headaches of Gerty MacDowells abused mother are so severe that they render her unable to fulfil the housekeeping duties; the emotional disequilibrum and possible suicide of Emily Sinico after her rejection by James Duffy; the absent-mindedness of Julia Morkan after her dismissal from the choir of at Adam and Eves; the frights of Eveline Hill, caused by the danger of her fathers violence; and of course the nonsensical final craziness of Evelines mother.132 All of these women seem to be more or less disrupted by the patriarchal order which threatens to engulf their identities; they are captive in the society of the patriarchal order and their fits represent nothing but the manifestation of their hysteria. Unfortunately their eagerness to communicate and make themselves heard only by means of the body and bodily drives seem not the most appropriate ones. Their hysteric exteriorization becomes the
130

Julia Kristeva. The Kristeva Reader. Essay: Womens Time. Ed. Toril Moi, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, p. 188, 190. 131 Idem., p. 197. 132 Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and the Victorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 204.

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physical manifestation of their cry of help. It seems to them that this is the only means of breaking the social constraint that denies their identity. Eveline Hills mother is such an example. Even her daughter captures such an image of her indulging in madness and surrendering to verbal delirium or undifferentiated language, to use Jristevas terms: As she mused the pitiful vision of her mothers life laid its spell on the very quick of her being- that life of commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. (Dubliners, p.41) Evelines mother appears as victim of an entrapping household. The fact that she dies in her own house after enduring craziness, renders her as a total victim of her husbands oppressiveness. After having internalised the evil, she collapses under the burden of self-sacrifice. Her implacable condition enhances the image of Evelines father as an obvious symbolic executioner (though an indirect one): her father used to hunt them. (Dubliners, p.37) The helplessness and craziness of his wife is traceable in her last words which seem undeciphrable: Derevaun Seraun. (Dubliners, p. 40) However, the weird language proves meaningful to Eveline who interprets the message as an encouragement for escape. Feminine characters like Mrs. Eveline Hill remain a concerning presence among Joyces Dubliners as their bodies strive to transmit their cry for help beyond the rigurosity that the paternal speech imposes. Another similar character would be Mrs. Martin Cunningham who is also portrayed as manifesting a nonverbal complaint against patriarchal authority.

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Mrs. Martin Cunninghams unpleasant habit of drinking unveils her weakness as a sign of her moral degradation, which cannot be said of other, masculine, characters in the story, which suffer from the same vice. Thus the discrimination is clear between the semiotic and the symbolic: these feminine characters are a confirmation of the mode in which society viewed them. The story begins with Tom Kernan, who is drunk, and has fallen on the steps to the pub bathroom: His clothes were smeared with the filth and ooze of the floor on which he had lain. (Dubliners, p. 40) On the other hand, the only picture of Mrs. Martin Cunningham as alcoholic appears as she is leaning against the furniture, singing The Jewel of Asia. The unpleasant aspect of Mrs. Cunninghams portrait derives from her alcohol abuse and shows her as an irrecuperable victim of mens society of the time. She is another sample of feminine internalization of evil. A certain ambiguity installs as the narrative never expresses itself wholly as a promoter of male or female, it refuses a definite choice of one category over the other; it rather melts them both into an in-beetween-ness, a totality of the unconscious which is free from gender and body limitations. Joyces attitude towards gender differences was never an all too clear one. He never pleaded for the masculine order over the feminine one or the other way round. Having done his aesthetic duty (and much more than just that) as a writer he presented the complexity of the relationships rooted / suspended or plainly present between these two representatives of human race. Moreover, the writer strongly encouraged paradoxes at as many levels as possible: social, emotional, political and domestical. Starting with Dubliners the wide palette of Joycean women may be seen as unfolding in a myriad of roles, some stronger and some weaker. For instance the lover exhibits two different stages of the woman: seducer (as in Mangans sister in Araby) and seduced (as in A Painful Case or Eveline) while the role of mother (in The Boarding House) perfectly subscribes to the stronger category and the role of daughter (Eveline) is mostly considered a more feminine and thus vulnerable one. We picked out these particular stories as they provide a profound, multicoloured portrait of the Joycean womans evolution. Concerning the roles acquired throughout Dubliners it would be hazardous to claim that women fulfil merely the roles of mother, daughter and lover. The complexity of the Joycean woman goes far

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beyond this consideration; it stretches like such an enormous canvas that the reader cannot even hope to grasp in its totality. Still some poignant nuances stand out and catch the eye. In Araby the first and not only the first description of Mangans sister is a physical one: Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side. (Dubliners, p. 30) Without presenting a clear description of her face she appears self contained in a misty aura while the term rope is indicative of her enchanting physical beauty. The girl whose name remained unknown as if it were a sacred chant sheltered by the boy-narrator from the profane world slowly emerges as the seducer even though unconsciously. She is an iconic figure whose names absence makes her the more mysterious in his affective memory; the boy in his love elevated at sacred level places his beloved in times beyond our linear and chronological perception of events. She is a creature similar to an idolized romantic heroine133 belonging to a cyclical time according to Kristevas theory regarding womens time. In adolescence most of the girls acquire the condition of the seducer, temptress and not the seduced, simultaneously desiring and desired subjects. This does not necessarily imply that boys remained mere objects: they too have a wish of their own to subdue the female subject or as is the case of Araby to accomplish the girls wish for them. Thus the boys initial desire (of projecting his identity onto the girl) is replaced by his counterparts wish: I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But mybody was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. (Dubliners, p. 31) This time it is the boy-narrator who exhibits an acute sensibility. By means of a musical simile the boy-narrator admits his subordination to her will and confesses his own bodily wish to be touched by the delicate hands of his beloved. The boys recurring adoration can endow him with the ability of living in a circular time. He most acutely experiences the time of love which comes and goes like the eternal waves. He is entrapped in his circular mode of perceiving and therefore expressing love; leaving behind for a while his goal he also
133

Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1990, p. 187.

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abandons the masculine desire which leaves room for the feminine features. According to Julia Kristeva, cyclical time is attributable to women while telos encoded time corresponds to men.134 This is Joyces way of not allowing his readers to come up with a definite/ decisive way of categorizing Dubliners characters. Linear time seems to have stopped for the boy narrator the moment he enters the bazaar; by mentioning that actual time he presumably wants to freeze that instant as a sacred one in his memory: the moment he enters the bazaar a prolongement/ elonguement of the girls identity as it was her wish to get there in the first place. The boy is not the only one who has androgenic qualities; the girls feminine traits are also debatable. Surely, most of her features point to her femininity as Mangans sister primarily appears as a physical presence. Her language also appears not to be trustworthy as the narrator does not feel confident to let her words be heard directly in the story; she perhaps shares that undifferentiated language which Kristeva attributes to female subjects135, thus amplifying the mystery of the feminine characters presence. However, Mangans sister shows signs of masculine power for she is the seducer instead of becoming the seduced. Her feminine qualities and her bodily drives endow her with the phallocentric power of the seducer. She, more or less unconsciously, charms the boy, who in his turn acquires an androgenic condition. Both of them reach and maintain this condition as long as they relate with one another. Reaching and preserving this condition strongly relies on the interdependence of the exchange of their primary most distinct features feminine acquiring the masculine and vice versa. A paradoxical condition is also achived by Evelines mother, who is a victim of men societys oppression, but she may also appear as enscribed to the category of the stronger woman. Her final undeciphrable message leads Eveline to consider an ambivalent interpretation. First she sees her mothers reply as a request to free herself and then as an urge to keep the household. Being caught between the two possible meanings of her mothers last request Eveline emerges as a symbol of sacrifice as she remains a surrogate mother for her
134

Julia Kristeva. Womens Time. Online source: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/ events/2011/ spring/documents/kristeva_womenstime.pdf. 135 Julia Kristeva. Womens Time. Online source: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/ events/2011/ spring/documents/kristeva_womenstime.pdf.

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siblings. She carries her black leather purse (Dubliners, p. 39) as a stigma of her burden self imposed or imposed by her mothers reaching beyond the grave. Her refusal to elope with Frank stresses her inability to break the mother-child bond; this simultaneously renders her as a confused helpless animal (Dubliners, p. 43) opaque at mans desire, thus preserving her saint-like status. Considering the domestic environment in which she was raised having a drunken father, it is perhaps explainable why she refuses to start a new life next to another representative of male authority: Frank. The elopement wears the mask of freedom for in the end her marriage may prove to be a confinement resulting in a household comparable to a mental institution. But in her new home, in a distant unknown country, it would not be like that. Then she would be married she, Eveline. People would treat her with respect then. She would not be treated as her mother had been. Even now, though she was over nineteen, she sometimes felt herself in danger of her fathers violence. She knew it was that that had given her palpitations. (Dubliners, p. 38, 39) The symbolism contained in her name Eve + line, the descendant of Eve implies that Evelines condition, and implicitly that of every woman, goes back to mythical and biblical times when Eve, the primordial woman, was more or less subordinated to Adams authority. It appears to be a tragic truth not to be able to reverse the fate pre-established from mythical times or at least find a border line and a middle way between masculine oppressiveness and feminine obedience. All of her bodily manifestations are cries of help to escape a no way out situation. In the end the only seemingly possible solution of escaping the well established system in parameters of male authority is the loss of knowledge or cognition resulting in madness. Thus she reiterates womens fate (sacrificial condition) from centuries and that of her mothers, too by internalising the evil. While doing so she escapes external evil but tragically alienates from her self as well: she breaks free into insanity. Her overwhelming fear of becoming confined renders her incapable of experiencing epiphanies as she does not share Franks desire for travel. She merely indulges in a reverie of a better future and experiences what appears to be a pseudo epiphany when she remembers her mothers 92

wish. She is not yet able to grasp the qudditas of her mothers reply since the message, impossible to decode, contributes to Evelines symbolical petrification. Another complex portrait of mans counterpart appears in The Boarding House where the woman accomplishes two roles: mother and daughter. Here the man is the one that emerges as vulnerable borrowing traits of femininity as he is embodied by Bob Doran. His masculine power is shattered by the net which Mrs. Mooney weaves with the help of her daughters charm. The role of man, normally considered in control and authoritative, is now reversed with that of the woman, generally perceived as weak and vulnerable. Step by step he falls in the trap whose knots are tightened by his seducer with each carefully staged gesture. Beyond tacitly guiding her daughter towards entrapping Mr. Doran, Mrs. Mooney exhibits also her feminine side in her attention to details. She is the one that stages everything so carefully, implacably. Being described as a person who dealt with moral problems as a cleaver dealt with meat (Dubliners, p. 68) it is no wonder her portraits appear tainted; and she is as incapable of experiencing an epiphany as conceivable. Her materialistically-oriented mind saves no space for aesthetic visions or emotional outbursts. Mrs Mooney becomes the representative of the stronger woman, yet an immoral mother who coldly ignores and erases the masculine identity for the sake of her daughters good. At a more distant point but not quite opposite stands Polly, whose femininity and vulnerability is exhibited in her fantasy of travel; nevertheless on a more realistic and ground rooted level she remains fixed by the reverie next to the bed pillows. Lacking any possibility for experiencing the Joycean epiphany, Pollys consciousness cannot move to the narrators awareness. She is merely the feminine representative of lower class who becomes the seducer or the little perverse madonna. (Dubliners, p. 60) Being a tacit collaborator, she is a more successful version of Emma Clery in simoniacal bargaining.136 For both Polly and Mrs. Mooney, Bob Doran represents the symbolic dough which they will feed on as the two women are of a lower one than his. Polly uses the bodily drivenot as means of expressing hysteria but as tools of seducing the masculine other. Indeed, the victim of her trap is Bob Doran, who, although being a man, renders the quality of masculine self in its weakness (the desire for the feminine body). Fallen from the presumed rational coldness (unlike Duffy)
136

Jolanta W. Wawrzycka and Marlena G. Corcoran (eds.). Gender in Joyce. Florida: The University Press of Florida, 1997, p. 98.

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normally associated with men, he is a victim of carnal beauty. He degraded himself by letting his masculine identity slip away in favour of his emotional delirium. Deprived of male authority, Bob Doran, like Eveline, manifests a desire for escape. His identity is denied but not replaced or erased by another. Polly does not manifest the power of her own will. She, just like Doran, has been the marionette of Mrs Mooneys evil mind. At this stage epiphany is blocked since such degraded states of consciousness cannot experience epiphany. Ironically, Doran, though he is a man, is pushed into an unwanted marriage by the social conventions of honour and respectability which impose that he weds the woman he might have left pregnant. By reversing roles, the man becoming more feminine, vulnerable and the woman becoming more masculine, thus powerful, both representatives reach an androgynous status, a queer in-between-ness status which makes them all the more complete. What needs to be retained is the fact that in order to obtain this result both man and woman depend on one another in this symbiotic process of self-other-completing (an intersubjective transcendence). From a rear and more distant perspective one could say the same thing about A Painful Case only in this story the itinerary follows a much more complicated route. In the beginning and for the most part of the narrative James Duffy emerges as the vertical male representative solely interested only in identifying himself and performing in this sense a colonizing act: entombing the other within the self.137 His feminine friend, seen through his eyes, represents to him an element for winning recognition for himself; a canvas on which man could draw his self-portrait or a prolonged mirror for himself. Being too occupied to create an angel-like image in her eyes, Duffy allocates less or no space or time for listening to his feminine companion. He is so dependent on his own desire to project his identity onto the woman that Emily Sinicos ego is erased by his rational delirium. Mr. Duffy abhorred anything which betokened physical or mental disorder. A mediaeval doctor would have called him saturnine () He had an autobiographical habit which led him to compose in his mind from time to time a short sentence about

137

Gerald Doherty. A Painful Case: The Contract That Never Was. Published in Dubliners Dozen, the Game Narrators Play. Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2010, p. 106.

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himself containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense. (Dubliners, p. 120) He emerges as the embodiement of rational coldness. In Kristevian terms he is the male representative obsessed up to self-absorbtion with identifying himself, imposing his identity no matter what. Initially they appeared as potential counterparts but what was formerly complimentary now is in opposition. She was like a warm soil about an exotic.(Dubliners, 123)To his rational delirium Emilys body listened.(Dubliners, 123) The feminine bodily drive intervenes as womans only left means of communication. Emilys gesture her hand touching Duffys cheek is an example of such drive but it is also an unconscious attempt to subvert male authority and weaken the phallocentric power by seducing its owner. Negating and annihilating Emilys desire and indirectly her affirmation of the ego, James Duffy plunges his confessor in a spiral of suicidal melancholy, according to Jeri Johnson.138 Given the context of their discussion in which Duffy was preaching about irrevocable solitude, Emilys gesture intervened as a potential means of consolating the masculine other, only it was not interpreted as such by Duffy. Considering James Duffy as the self-imposed subject and Emily Sinico as the other, an object in the subjects view, the subjects wish for identification seems to prevail over the objects desire. This brutal exertion of power kills first spiritually and then later, indirectly, physically its object as Emily Sinico is found dead on the railway lines. Having been outcast from her husbands gallery of pleasures Emily now experienced being rejected by the only person whom she considered to be her friend. This situation renders her as a double victim since due to her excessive sensibility she collapses under the burden of such painful experience. Self-sacrifice and thus escape from a world where she is unwanted seemed to her like the only possible solution. Her gesture is the bodily outburst or expression of a a long repressed hysteria, to speak in Kristevian terminology. From now on her gesture will haunt him until he would become empathetic and realize the complexity of Emilys emotional life, her torment and loneliness. James Duffy, as the representative of egocentric man, reconsiders
138

Jeri Johnson quoted from the preface to James Joyce. Dubliners. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. XV.

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his entire mode of thinking and experiencing. Bearing and perhaps slightly regretting the weight of his logocentric authority his mind becomes an empty vessel which opens to an awareness directed towards the possibility that Emily might have also been a desiring subject and not just a desired or desiring object. It is now that he becomes most aware of his own loneliness which apparently is not so different from his initial status (that is before Emily became his confessor) only now it becomes unbearable; thus he becomes more feminine and vulnerable and consequently enables Emily to fully emerge (even though post mortem) as a subject in her own right; the woman reaching beyond the grave proves to be more powerful than the masculine representative of power: man himself. The feminine character, like an agent that propels the masculine other on the path towards self-realisation, helps James Duffy to experience the quidditas of his own self. Now that she was gone he understood how lonely her life must have been (). His life would be lonely too until he, died, ceased to exist, became a memory if anyone remembered him. (Dubliners, p. 130) The silent loneliness that he feels reveals itself as a punishment for his former pride or just as an indication of the fact that womans position continues to remain queer throughout Dubliners. (Queer not in the sense of not understandable but in the sense of undecided stance, complex and ungraspable identity resulting that both male and female subjects complete each other in an androgynous stasis.) Freed from his obsession with self identification, the male character internalizes what he formerly perceived as feminine vulnerability/ weakness as he is filled with remorse. Regretting his initial oppressive coldness he cries over the sins committed by his pride in a lyrical and funeral rhythm. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seemed to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen. Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? He felt his moral nature falling to pieces. (Dubliners, p.130)

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At this the point in the story James Duffy acknowledges himself as the executioner of his feminine friend. Ironically, Emilys gesture initially perceived as a threat to mans identity and individuality, is now re-felt by James and amplified as he fancies a spiritual communion at the shelter of darkness. The darkness becomes a symbol of union, both identities being suffused in a primordial eternity. The roles of the two protagonists are reversed through Duffys phantasy of reconciliation: this time he is the one who listens to her voice. But all that he can hear is the echo of the train engine reiterating the syllables of her name (). He halted under a tree and allowed the rhythm to die away (). He felt that he was alone. (Dubliners, p. 131) The atmosphere of eternal solitude with which the story ends points to the melancholy of the self that longs for the others recognition. The spiritual amputation that the character undergoes is rendered as an epiphany of ones loneliness. A Mother renders a totally different light on a mothers portrait than we are accustomed to seeing when dealing with mothers. This woman aligns to the stronger category of women asserting feminine agency over mans former power. Mrs. Kearney drops her lady-like demeanour, withdraws her acknowledgement of both the men and the impalpable manifestation of their authority The Committee. She also begins to desire the approbation of the other to affirm her subject position.139 But she tries to beat man at his own game: power game, and, involuntarily, as long as she wants to win she is obliged to observe the rules of mens society. In this game everything becomes circular for what is needed is not a replication of the patriarchal order in which woman may now function as a subject, but a modification of that order in which the terms subjectand object would no longer exist.140 When Mrs. Kearney fights for the rights of her daughter (stipulated in the contract) she in fact argues for her own interests, just like an agent exploiting the performers talent for her own better placement in society performer who happens to be her daughter. The title A Mother further extends this dark image of the Dubliners mother as Mrs. Kearney appears as such an example. She can also be seen as a possible procuress for her daughter141 if we are to look at the language used during and after Kathleens performance (when she concludes
139

Jeri Johnson quoted from the preface of James Joyces Dubliners. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. xvi. 140 Jeri Johnson quoted from the preface of James Joyces Dubliners. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. xvi. 141 As Paige Linda Rohrer calls her in the online article: James Joyces Coloured Portraits in Dubliners, 2012.

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that men were satisfied (Dubliners, p. 164)). Moreoever, occupying the position of the powerful New Woman Mrs. Kearney is one of the few examples of feminine voices which are allowed to speak directly. In conclusion, the Joycean woman masters and sometimes not the art of losing; she is a present absence as her freedom of thought and expression, freedom of living is denied to her. The road to the totality that the two counterparts can accomplish can only be possible by bridging the differences imposed by their genders; while keeping these differences to their own for fear of not losing their identity each subject remains separated from the other, each on a separate way of self-quest. As an example stands Evelines case when she seriously considers her future with Frank: He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. (Dubliners, p.41) Shes also the mutilated man and like him she has been removed from the androgynous ideal; she also appears as a toy object in mans moulding thought and power but she also uses the game as a way to undermine mans authority. She refuses the borrowed time that Frank offers her and expresses her longing to be an independent identity. As a representative of the weaker category of women, Eveline bears the stigma of vulnerability and lacks the power that such a quest on ones own demands. There is a mirror labyrinth of identities, shadows, nuances, more lightly or darkly coloured portraits to which Joyce exposes his readers in a poetically polished looking glass.142 A representative of the New Woman143 arises in The Dead. The dependence of the masculine subject on the control it presupposes over the feminine other, as well as the nullification of masculine identity that results when vociferous women refuse to cooperate in the phallic charade.144 There are a few feminine characters who contribute to the subversion of male authority. Among these characters we identify Molly Ivors, Gretta Conroy and Lily.
142

James Joyce quoted in Letters, vol. 2, p. 134: My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis. [] It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass. 143 The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century and had a profound influence on feminism well into the twentieth. The term "New Woman" was popularized by American writer Henry James, to describe the growth in the number of feminist, educated, independent career women in Europe and the United States.[1] The New Woman pushed the limits set by male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (18281906). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Woman. 144 Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and the Victorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 174.

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All of them contribute to the usurpation of Gabriel Conroys authority. First of all, Gretta, Gabriels wife betrays Gabriels desire as she resists her husbands lustful gaze. She succeeds in directing Gabriels look from one that tries to master and control her behaviour to one that interrogates his own. Her gaze seems powerful enough to obliterate the self rendering it to nothingness.145 As Gabriel senses the impact of Lily, Molly and Grettas gaze directed against him, his illusion of a unified authoritative self silently dissolves. Once again man becomes feminine and vulnerable due to the masculinized woman. The androgynous and at the same time the queer status is reached and Joyce artistically subverts any preestablished gender, law or order. At a totally different pole are situated other Joycean women who bitterly render the image of an outcast, tormented and weak feminine character. Their physical fragileness is sometimes compensated by impulsive outbursts of behaviour. Among these we will discuss about the intemperate behaviour and possible suicide of Emily Sinico, the torment of Eveline Hill, caused by the danger of her fathers violence, (Dubliners, p. 39) Mrs. Kearneys violent talk against those who did not observe the contract signed with her daughter. All of these women seem more or less disrupted by the patriarchal canon which threatens to erase their identities; they are captive in the society of the time and their fits represent nothing but the materialization of their hysteric behaviour, their eagerness to communicate, and affirm the self. Their hysteric cry-out becomes a physical manifestation of the social symbolic constraint. Just as Evelines father had controlled her mothers access to the outside world by shutting her away in a close dark room, (Dubliners, p. 38) after his wifes death he attempts to proceed in a similar way with his daughters existence: he obliges her to give all her wages to him under the pretext that she would not not know how to administrate it; he threatens her physically and denies her the right of meeting her lover by telling her in a patronizing tone: I know these sailor chaps. (Dubliners, p. 40) However, Eveline tries to resist her fathers control and tries to set her own voice beyond this first representative of male order who threatens to impose his oppressiveness on her. Up to now she emerges as a victim of her childhood household. Beyond the fact that she
145

Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and the Victorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 178.

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had to cope with a violent (and sometimes drunk) father she also has to fulfil the role of mother for her younger siblings, now that her mother is dead. The weight of the household duties and worries imposed on her at an abnormally early age overwhelm her and the reverie of escape seems consolating to her. Frank, her secret lover, presents himself as a hero promising the girl to save her from her fathers authority. In fact there is a reiteration of her fathers dominance as Frank washes her brain by means of romantic entrapment. Frank would save her. He would give her life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her. (Dubliners, p. 41) The desire for happiness is inherent to any human being only with Evelines particular case it is much more connected to the idea of freedom, regained independence by breaking the chains of male authority. The verb fold catches the eye and makes the reader sense that Franks promised salvation is not all that freedom giving, instead it tends to swallow and devour Evelines identity into his own. Franks promise of fairy tale-like life will only shift her fear of male dominance from her fathers authority to her husbands. After all, Frank is a man, too and thus just another representative of male order. Either way, she will remain bound, due to this impossibility of finding a way out she will only be able to speak through her body its cry of anguish.(Dubliners, p. 42) Unable to find a solution to the internal crisis she remains torn between the sordid reality of her household and the promise of a potentially better future. In Kristevian terms, Evelines crisis resides in her inability to mend the evil by becoming masculinized or by trying to make man adopt a feminine guise. The only condition that can be adopted is the internalization of evil, not that this would constitute a solution but a mere logical and direct consequence. Her communication becomes more and more founded on the body and bodily drives remaining a victim caught in the web of linear authority. In front of Franks pleas she remains passive, like a helpless animal.(Dubliners, p. 43) Similarly, A Painful Case deals with the intelligent and passionate woman, Emily Sinico, who is too confined in an uncaring household. Here we witness the collision between 100

the sensible, genuine, unconscious language and logocentric, rational language. The feminine protagonist decides to break this tension by exteriorizing evil inside the micro social nucleous called family. Although Emily Sinico is the one to encourage the first verbal exchange by speaking to James Duffy at a concert, it is the latter that guides the continuity of the affair. Along with this affair Mr. Duffy appears as the embodiment of mans desire to be acknowledged and recognised by the feminine other, rather than demand knowledge, culture on the womans behalf. If in Kristevian146 terminology the feminine protagonist stands for the hysteric type, the masculine character conversely represents the obssessional type tending to impose the paternal law or order no matter what. Therefore, Mr. Duffy like an obssessional type, strives to control his companion, trying to mold her into a woman who will reflect both the power of his own intellect and his good nature: he lends Mrs. Sinico his books, provides her with ideas, shares his intellectual life with her and turns her into his confessor, believing that in her eyes he would ascend to an angelical statute.147 He acts in accordance with the male society of the time tending even to exaggerate a bit the opposition body-intellect trying to determine his companion to embrace the cold intellection solely, leaving emotion and bodily drive at a rear level. But the monumental, cyclic, (to use Kristevian terms) unconscious must speak through the body, and Mrs. Sinico manifests this urge one evening: as they sat together she caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek. (Dubliners, p. 111) Her longing for fusion is explainable by means of her desire towards unity, totality: conscious and unconscious, rationale and emotional, semiotic and symbolic. Not only does Mr. Duffy resist what seems to him romantic entrapment but he is also startled at this apparently immoral message. When faced with a female Other who no longer reflects his own inflated self-image or responds to his control, a disillusioned Mr. Duffy severs their tie. Mrs Sinico either has misunderstood him or has acted on an impulse independent of him; either way she is no longer capable of mirroring James because she has dared to project Emily.148 The masculine character senses such
146

Julia Kristeva. Womens Time. Online source: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/ events/2011/ spring/documents/kristeva_womenstime.pdf. 147 Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and the Victorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 158. 148 Idem. p. 157.

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bodily manifestation as a barrier in front of the evolution of his identity. Being absorbed by self-affirmation he is not willing to share his gained authority with his companion, much less renounce to it in a potential process of self-transcendence. Emily is identifiable with the body and her language appears very much undifferentiated compared to James logocentric power and knowledge; she represents the matter and mother as she motherly listens to whatever it is that James has to tell her. However, this is not enough for her: she feels the need for recognition, too and her attempt to guide their relationship towards a more intimate level bodily fusion is in fact her mode of trying to appropriate James more to her own nature. It is both a step forward on her behalf which would indirectly and implicitly presume a somewhat regress on the part of her companion. According to the Kristevian theory,149 both female and male characters reach a point where each of them stands as a barrier in the evolution of the other. James, as the representative of paternal law, should symbolically annihilate or destroy his female counterpart in order to preserve his authority, whereas the female companion ought to annihilate her male counterpart if she wants to win and evolve unhindered. Although perhaps at the beginning they seemed perfect counterparts of a whole as Jamess mind spoke and Emilys body listened, this relationship concealed a tremendous tension on the part of the woman. Liberation from this interiorised evil, tension cannot take place but through Mrs. Sinicos violent violently unexpected and too full of bodily concreteness gesture of trying to impose her own bodily nature on him. The reader should however anticipate Jamess reaction as it portrays the clash between the rational order of mind and the unconscious bodily drive. Mrs. Sinicos attempt of establishing a more convenient hierarchy, by means of an apparently violent gesture does nothing but replace her in her initial state as she reiterates the evil. Mrs Sinicos gesture does nothing but break the bond that was created between them and render them as opposed rather than complementary. As Duffy shows her that she has misinterpreted his speech they are thrown into two irreconciliable realms: mind and body. The impossibility of solving the conflict, (bridging the chasm that opened before them) amplifying the tension, makes Emily even more violent (this time we are talking about a
149

Julia Kristeva. Womens Time. Online source: http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/ events/2011/ spring/documents/kristeva_womenstime.pdf.

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more visible bodily violence due to Joyces use of the word) when at their last meeting she began to tremble so violently that, fearing another collapse on her part, he bade her good-bye quickly and left her. (Dubliners, p. 124) This blunt solution to Emilys inner conflict, the spiritual separation without the possibility of fusion, will direct her violence towards herself; it is the beginning of an endless process of self-destruction: she had been in the habit of going out at night to buy spirits. (Dubliners, p. 114) which actually referred to the fact that she had made a habit out of crossing the lines late at night from platform to platform (Dubliners, p.115). As she does not possess the coldness of rational thought, Emily internalises the evil and will be crushed by her own destiny; she finds the so much longed for death four years later when she is knocked down by a slow-moving train. Even the language used in the short story to recount her death, by means of a newspaper article, is pervaded by male authoritative voices and sustaining and even echoing (even after the womans death) Mr. Duffys desire to annihilate her wish. Being told in the documentary tone, the impersonal description of her death tends to erase the idea that she was a human being after all. Mr. Duffys initial reaction is that of sharing with the masculine voice the tendency of shattering the cause of her death, and he even feels revolted when he learns about the circumstances of Emilys death. The whole narrative of her death revolted him and it revolted himto think that he had ever spoken to her of what he held sacred () Not merely had she degraded herself; she had degraded him. He saw the squalid tract of her vice, miserable and malodorous. His souls companion! (Dubliners, p. 128) The word vice comprises both James disgust with her but it also sends to the immoral dimension of suicide as it was an act forbidden by the Church and the law that is the law of the paternal society of the time. Beyond this, though the male character perceives Mrs. Sinicos emotional distress and frustration, he still demands of her to reflect his better image. His rational coldness, the self absorption into his own image cannot be disrupted so rapidly not even by the tragic news of her death; he first has to go beyond his intellectual mode of thinking in order to be able to acknowledge Emily Sinico as a subject in her own 103

right. Only at this point can he understand and become aware of the importance she played in his life. Thus he dismisses the authoritative voice in the newspaper article as well as his own authority, formerly imposed on her. As the light failed and his memory began to wander he thought her hand touched his. The shock which had first attacked his stomach was now attacking his nerves. () He walked through the bleak alleys where they had walked four years before. She seemed to be near him in the darkness. At moments he seems to feel her voice touch his ear, her hand touch his. He stood still to listen.( Dubliners, p. 129) Now, being dead, Emily Sinico no longer constitutes a threat to Duffys evolution and the male representative feels more at ease to let his identity be permeated by what he imagines that Emily is telling him beyond the grave. By bringing together the two words voice and touch Joyce brilliantly defines the male-female homogeneity so longed for by the feminine character and now, unfortunately too late, acknowledged by the masculine counterpart. The noun ear becomes a symbolic image of this union; the bodily translation of thought could not be brought forward if it were not for all the other ears to hear it. This revolution of his ability, that is to listen to something besides his own voice (admitting the hypothesis that there are other subjects besides himself) results in the understanding of his companion and barely now he grasps the turmoil of his friends loneliness and emotional depths. Mr. Duffys own body begins to react in a sympathetic way - he perceives Emily as both object, reflecting his intellectual uprightness, and as a subject that continuously attempts to protect itself. When Mr. Duffy senses his moral nature falling to pieces, it is because he has realised that it is his self-absorption, his refusal to listen, and his insistence on rectitude in the face of anothers suffering that was in fact immoral; he recognizes that the ponderous weight of these indecencies overbears the slight of committing adultery with a woman whose husband cares nothing about her.150 He explicitly acknowledges his complicity in Emilys fate: Why had he withheld life from her? Why had he sentenced her to death? (Dubliners,
150

Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and the Victorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 159.

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p. 130) Thus, in the end the masculine authority proves emotional and sensitive to the suffering of the other, the feminine representative; it is a revolution of the entire way of experience, for by becoming emotional Mr. Duffy emprunts/adopts female characteristics and becomes homogenous, whole, and complete. Having suffered this transformation does not leave him without secondary consequences (side effects). It is only now due to the inclusion of the female bodily drive that he is capable of experiencing his own the isolation and frustration once felt by his feminine companion. Having been left alone now he knows how to listen but ironically, there is no one who speaks to him: He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone. (Dubliners, p. 131) Although the intense isolation felt by James throws him in a state similar to that of Emily, a kind of post-mortem punishment on behalf of the oppressed woman, one should still consider the teleology of Mr. Duffys evolution; through this catharsis-like transgression he manages to reach the nostalgic state of middle-ness, a kind of mental and corporeal equidistance from the symbolic or male as well as the semiotic or female refusing each to take over and including both. Accordingly, one may rightfully point that the female character from A Painful Case reaches a final state that is brutally (brutally-due to her violent death) leaves room for the emergence of the New Woman in Joyces Dubliners. James Joyce was fascinated by the gender relationships that marked city life as he grasped in Dubliners the corrosive male authority over women on one hand, and he also sensed a destabilized masculine law threatened by the outspoken women, on the other. This issue is tackled in Ivy Day in the Committee Room, Grace, and A Mother to name just a few of the stories where we encounter the above mentioned case. All coordinates of the Irish nation Church, politics, and culture seem to be dominantly male and in each story they are threatened by female defiance. Ivy Day features women who are mentioned in conversation not as flattering mirrors, reflecting the power of the male or symbolic (as 105

Kristeva says), but powerful feminine selves that disrupt masculine subjects. The mother of Old Jacks impudent son cocks him up with this and that while Jack himself, too old to hold the stick (certainly an image of phallic infirmity) is no longer able to discipline the boy. The women of Grace are as menacingly unmanageable as those of Ivy Day, Mrs. Kernan openly criticizes her husbands drinking and had very few illusions left about either him or her marriage.151 In A Mother Joyce points to the issue of maternal subversion more openly. Mrs. Kearney sneaks into the masculine order by masking her femininity. Garry Martin Leonard has stated that the protagonist possesses a nearly unlimited respect for what she imagines men represent,152 but the organizers of the concerts in which her daughter is to perform are unnamed, in Mrs. Kearneys view. Thus, she begins to acknowledge their authority less and less, up to the point of ignoring it, as she ironically refers to both men as The Committee. Moreover, Mrs. Kearney begins to assert her self as a feminine subject when she waves her contract in front of the men and demands that the two male representatives recognize her justice: Her face was inundated with an angry colour and she looked as if she would attack some one with her hands. Im asking you for my rights, she said. (Dubliners, p. 167) Probably the ability to enter into a contract would have seemed exciting for her as it would have affirmed her own masculine side. Though this is not Mrs. Kearneys contract, as it was in fact her daughter, Kathleen, who had signed it, Mrs. Kearney imagines that within it there is a power that legitimizes them both; in order to protect her own rights, she is concerned to see that her daughter got her right. (Dubliners, p. 168) Unlike other feminine representatives her language is quite distinct and even demanding. For her, the contract not only validates her her power, but it assures her an autonomous status, the symbolic authority that she never had, except indirectly, through her husband.
151

Tracey Teets Schwarze, Joyce and the Victorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 171. 152 Garry Martin Leonard. Reading Dubliners Again: A Lacanian Perspective. New York: Syracuse University Press, p. 257.

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In spite of insinuating herself into the masculine realm, she is still perceived by these representatives in conventional feminine terms. Because of this fact, Mr. Holohan continues to see Mrs. Kearney as a protective mother rather than as an ambitious person; he restricts her image to that of a woman a lady, in fact who wanted to rule through mens weaknesses. As Tracy Teets Schwartz observes in order to do so Mrs. Kearney is friendly and advising153 as she helps Mr. Holohan to arrange the program; she is able to hide her masculine zeal. She demands that the initial form of the contract be fulfilled even when the participants in the contract discover that the four concerts are reduced to three; this inevitably entails that her daughter may receive less than the initial full payment. Still, Mrs. Kearney refrains from quarrelling with Mr. Fitzpatrick (and thus avoids a direct challenge of his authority) because it would not be ladylike (Dubliners, p. 158) - when he tells her that the Committee would discuss the issue of remuneration. But Mrs. Kearney continues to maintain her mask of femininity and she tries to treat both Mr. Holohan and Mr. Fitzpatrick on equal terms, verbally imposing her contract, the symbol of her own authority, into the faces of the men who try to silence her: - But, of course, that doesnt alter the contract, she said. The contract was for four concerts. (. . .) Her daughter had signed for four concerts and that, of course, according to the terms of the contract, she should receive the sum originally stipulated for. (Dubliners, p.158) Her daughter had signed a contract for eight guineas and she would have to be paid. Mr. Holohan said that it wasnt his business. - Why isnt it your business? asked Mrs. Kearney. Didnt you yourself bring her the contract? Anyway, if its not your business its my business and I mean to see to it. (Dubliners, p. 162) Out of (mens) control, Mrs. Kearney manages to disrupt both the atmosphere of the concert and this public space where men are supposed to rule. She talks so loudly that her husband asks her, evidently without result, to lower her voice (Dubliners, p. 164) and she
153

Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and theVictorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 175.

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begins to attack the Committee, the locus of masculine authority, questioning its very existence and asserting her own signifier in its place.154 Significantly, as Mrs. Kearney declares her own feminine power, she also begins to desire the recognition of the Other. She praises the artists for their support, but the terms she uses They wouldnt have dared to have treated her like that if she had been a man. (Dubliners, p. 148) suggest that she begins to realise her mistake in showing her masculine like power by conforming herself to it. Mrs. Kearneys conduct was condemned on all hands: everyone approved of what the Committee had done. (Dubliners, p. 168) that ultimately enable the patriarchal order to outcast Mrs. Kearney from its midst, rather than any of her misunderstandings regarding the contracts literal terms of payment. Mr. Holohan and the Committee realize they have been tricked by Mrs. Kearneys feminine mimesis and find themselves threatened by the authority she pretends to play with. As Tracey Teets Schwarze observe they quickly react against her. Moreover, Mr. Holohan shifts their debate back to issues of gender and place, even as Mrs. Kearney continues to demand both her rights and a civil answer: I thought you were a lady, said Mr. Holohan, walking away from her abruptly. (Dubliners, p. 168) As the patriarchal order reconsolidates itself here, Mrs. Kearney is marginalised her conduct was condemned on all hands and immobilized by this gaze as the concert continues without her:155 haggard with rage () she stood still for an instant like an angry stone image. (Dubliners, p. 168) In Dubliners final story, The Dead, Joyce reveals the extraordinary dependence of the masculine subject on the control it presupposes over the feminine Other, as well as the nullification of masculine identity that results when women refuse to cooperate in the perimeter of their authority. Gabriel Conroy arrives at his aunts home sure of his privileged ability to control the discourse of femininity, as his first remark reveals: he replies to the reproach of his own arriving late to the party by saying that his wife, Gretta, takes three mortal hours to dress herself. (Dubliners, p. 201) It is one of the few moments in the story when Gabriels replies are not responded at. Gabriels will to power is also criticised. His authority presumably imposed by his speech is disrupted and his attention is directed from a
154

Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and theVictorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 176. 155 Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and theVictorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 174.

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position that attempts to redress or correct their (womens) behaviour to one that interrogates and censures his own. Lily, the Morkans housemaid, is the first so-called object that captures the attention of Gabriels look; he gazes at her in an obvious way: She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still paler. Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll. (Dubliners, p. 201) According to Gabriels supposition, Lily would have attended school and would probably have wanted to get married, but the young woman treats with contempt Gabriels suggestion that she ought to marry soon and his offering of a Christmas coin. According to Tracey Teets Schwarze, she responds to his gesture not with gratefulness but with an accusatory tone156 the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you. (Dubliners, p. 202) Lilys gesture makes him direct his eyes from her appearance to his shoes, which he begins to polish with an embarrassed, energetic fervour. Molly Ivors, Gabriels colleague, defeats Gabriels gaze as she exposes his intellectual and political pretenses and leaves the party before he can gets the chance to reply. Gretta, his wife, completes the defeat: she ignores his attempt of authority by refusing to adopt an attitude of feminine passivity on which he could inscribe his desire. Molly Ivors stands as the storys most clear figure of the New Woman as she is able to disrupt the masculine authority and expose the masculine charade. Gabriel exerts his gaze on Molly and he notes Mollys freckled face prominent brown eyes, (Dubliners, p. 201) and her large Gaelic brooch. As Tracey Teets Schwarze observes, just as Lily challenges Gabriels assumptions about her attitudes (she would like to marry) and her position (she would be grateful for his charity), so also Molly Ivors breaks his gaze and its intended authority - with a voice and look of her own.157 She unmasks Gabriels pen name (G. C.)
156

Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and theVictorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 177. 157 Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and theVictorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 178.

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and determines him to confess his antinationalist view (Im sick of my own country, sick of it! he states annoyed in Dubliners, p. 216). As she leaves the party earlier she derives him of a possibility to reply against her: He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. (Dubliners, p. 214) Molly Ivorss ability to disrupt the male order of discourse is obvious in these pages; Gabriel cannot decide even how to refer to her and begins to ponder what he cannot say as well as to reconsider what he has already said: Of course the girl or woman, or whatever she was, was an enthusiast but there was a time for all things. Perhaps he ought not to have answered her like that. (Dubliners, p. 217) Gabriels physical reactions to Mollys assault as well as to Lilys unexpected attitude (he blushes repeatedly, becomes inattentive, and averts his look: he avoided her eyes for he had seen a sour expression on her face, (Dubliners, p. 216) show that both encounters have an important impact on him. As Gabriel reflects on their parallel careers he becomes quite conscious of the fact that he and Molly occupy a contiguous space; her remarks have already reduced his authority: he cannot risk a pretentious response or he might lose even more ground to her. Significantly, Gabriel fears he has been publicly humiliated: But she had no right to call him a West Briton before people, even in joke. She had tried to make him ridiculous before people, heckling him and staring at him with her rabbits eyes. ( Dubliners, p. 217) According to Tracey Teets Schwarze, it is the public nature of Molly Ivorss verbal challenge that bothers Gabriel most profoundly. He senses that she has shattered his political and professional space but also robbed him of the chance to direct their discourse. Molly leaves the party before Gabriel can even reply. She refuses his offer to walk her home, insisting, Im quite well able to take care of myself. (Dubliners, p. 223) After this final 110

exchange of replies, Gabriel emerges as the vanquishment man enable to affirm his identity. Thus his former frustration is compensated by the enthusiasm with which he is ready to carve the goose at dinner. In fact, he now feels ready to carve a flock of geese, if necessary (Dubliners, p. 224) and boldly takes his seat at the head of the table as he picks up the carving knife and fork; it is the only moment of the evening when he finds himself entirely at ease, for it is the only occasion during which his masculine authority is secured from feminine intrusion. Ironically, he overlooks the fact that these elements are bestowed upon him at female request: the aunts Morkan, two ignorant old women in Gabriels view (Dubliners, p. 219), but the true heads of the household, have temporarily given him the illusion of privilege. Gretta Conroy joins the women who subvert her husbands presumed authority; she not only resists Gabriels overt attempts to reorder her behaviour - refusing to wear the galoshes he insists on and criticizing him in front of other people: 158 Theres a nice husband for you, Mrs. Malins (Dubliners, p. 218) she says ironically when Gabriel refuses to consider the possibility of travelling to Galway she also counters his more subtle attempts of patriarchal domination. After their departure from the Morkan house, Gabriel and Gretta return to their hotel, her silence leaving space for Gabriels attempt to rewrite the narrative of their past lives; it is quite a romantic and sentimental episode in the story. Gabriel recalls three incidents: Grettas first letter to him (he could not eat for happiness), a moment together on a crowded platform (perhaps during their wedding trip), and a man making bottles before a roaring furnace while he and Gretta stood watching in the cold air. That there is no response to the question Is the fire hot, sir? (Dubliners, p. 244) suggests the fact that passion was not one of the ingredients of their relationship. As a proof stands Gabriels attempted seduction of his wife later that evening; he has no idea even how to begin and reproaches himself for his diffidence (Dubliners, p. 216). In spite of this truth, Gabriel insists on his power to modify the passionless reality that has been their lives; specifically, he insists on his ability to change Grettas conception of this reality by manipulating her narrative: He longed to recall to her those moments, to make her forget the years of their dull existence together and remember only their moments of ecstasy. For the years, he felt,
158

Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and theVictorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 179

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had not quenched his soul or hers. (Dubliners, p. 213) Once the narrative of the past is altered so that Gabriel appears as Grettas romantic hero, he turns his attention to fancying her immediate future: He longed to be alone with her. When the others had gone away, when he and she were in the room in the hotel, then they would be alone together. He would call her softly: - Gretta! Perhaps she would not hear at once: she would be undressing. Then something in his voice would strike her. She would turn and look at him. (Dubliners, p. 245) But Gretta here reveals a narrative of her own that actually supresses Gabriels attempt to control. She resists her husbands lustful eye and betrays it; she exerts her own elsewhere, past him, outside their marriage. She is remembering her passion for Michael Furey, the man who died for love of her years before: I was great with him at that time, she tells Gabriel (Dubliners, p. 251). In fact, Grettas narrative exposes the pathetic dimension of Gabriels vision, and according to Tracey Teets Schwarze the falsity of his domestic fiction,159 and the falsity of their marriage. Gretta succeeds in redirecting Gabriels look or pretended gaze from one that attempts to reorder her behaviour to one that strongly interrogates his own: While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure . . . the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. (Dubliners, p. 251) As Gabriel endured the subversive attitude of Lily, Molly, and Gretta he feels now deprived of authority and owner of a dissolved masculine self, whose unification remains
159

Tracey Teets Schwarze. Joyce and theVictorians. United States of America: University Press of Florida, 2002, p. 179

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mere illusion: His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself () was dissolving and dwindling. (Dubliners, p. 255)He experiences the epiphany of his own identity dissolving and disintegrating. Therefore mens world is tumbling down in order to make room for the manifestation of the feminine. Let us see now whether we can say the same thing about A Portrait or not.

4.2 Feminist Readings of Womens Role in Joycean Narrative

One of the most controversial and talked about literary trends but also with essential implications in literary criticism has been feminism. The first phase of feminism was recorded in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed by its other two waves. The first issue dealt with was womens property rights and later their role in political power. The second phase is now almost lost in the third wave as no clear delimitation is apparent. In this last phase women seemed very much preoccupied with the notion of femininity but merely at the level of emphasizing the experiences of upper-middle class white women.160 The main demands of that time have irreversibly changed womens status in society all over the world in the sense of the proliferation of female liberty, of freedom of opinion and thought and also the right to participate in social active life. Since then and up to now we could say that an entire rhetoric evolved around the phenomenon of feminism just as a multitude of feminists has emerged. French feminism distinguishes itself by an approach that is more concerned with the literary and the philosophical, caring less for political life, but being more focused on the theories of the body. To enumerate just a few of such feminists, who are not necessarily French, but have worked in the French tradition we should not forget to mention Julia Kristeva, Bracha Ettinger, Simone de Beauvoir, Hlne Cixous, and Luce Irigaray. None of these French feminists subscribe to the feminist movement as it appeared throughout the world. Moreover, Julia Kristeva has substantially influenced feminist theory in general and feminist literary criticism in particular and was and is regarded as a key figure of French
160

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism.

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feminism influencing also literary studies in the U.S. and U.K. She made a famous disambiguisation of three types of feminism in the essay Womens Time in her 1993 book, entitled New Maladies of the Soul. The question of womens time in Kristevian terms deals specifically with the apprehension of time as a dual temporality: one that is linear, flowing as opposed to Nietzsches notion of monumental time a massive temporality. Julia Kristeva interestingly begins her essay by recalling the loss of national homogeneity of the nineteenth century nation which now has to accept interdependence with other states, a tendency towards the symbolic denominator the cultural and religious memory forged by the interweaving of history and geography () Father Times and Mother Species, as Joyce puts it.161 The question of identity immediately arises at first sight stretching the division between male and female, linear and eternal time, time and space. Kristeva calls into question Platos affirmation of the woman as nurturing space (the mother) and thus existence before God. The womans association with space entails in fact her identification with the body which conversely is accommodated by space. This representation of the woman as body prefigures a denigrating image of males counterpart. The bodily drive, as Kristeva explains in her esssay, also represents the semiotic element of signification, and is associated with rhythms, tones, maternal body and nonreferential meaning whereas the symbolic element stands for the structure of signification making reference possible. Signification is construed by both semiotic and symbolic as inseparable just as woman cannot be merely body but body and mind interconnected like nature and culture, space and time. Feminine subjectivity is strongly related to time as the female existence involves both repetitions as cosmic time, gestation, cycles on the one hand and eternity as massive temporality on the other. The cursive, linear time, teleological history162 remains as the only apprehension of time which seems to hinder the feminine subjectivity but by existing between the monumental and the cursive in this way, they will echo in a most specific way the universal traits of their structural place in reproduction and its representations.163 Kristeva suggests that the development of feminine subjectivity is prior to Freuds theory
161

Julia Kristeva, Womens Time in New Maladies of the Soul, Columbia: Columbia University Press, New, 1995, p. 210. 162 Julia Kristeva, Womens Time in New Maladies of the Soul, Columbia: Columbia University Press, New, 1995, p. 211. 163 Ibid., p. 214.

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regarding the Oedipus complex and it embraces culture and nature, unlike the second phase of feminism which rejected the already present culture considering it to be masculine. The French feminist critic states the absence of an adequate discourse of maternity (as only two aspects of maternity emerge: in religion mother is seen as sacred and in science it is reduced to reproductive function). During motherhood the woman identifies with the not yet born infant (pre-oedipal stage) and can no longer be considered as a sexed person thus Kristeva states that almost anyone can fulfil the maternal function. The maternal body bearing the infant (the other within) becomes a totality, a self forgetfulness.164 Abjection, understood as a rejection of anything that threatens ones self or ones own, in Kristevas view is related also to maternal body and function; the main threat would be that of the dependence on maternal body thus the attempt of totally eliminating this threat implies the abjection (rejection) of motherhood translated as matricide. But women, unable to abject the maternal body with which they identify, will develop a depressive sexuality.165 There are two choices: a woman can either revolt against the other or she may internalize this evil becoming simultaneously victim-executioner observing the sacrificial law within the social and symbolic contract. This phase of feminism seeks to reconceive identity, difference and their relationship refusing to choose one over the other, thus exploring multiple identities of the self. From this feminist perspective we will look upon James Joyces writing which sometimes seems embraceable of feminism and other times it does not. Looking at Joyces statement I hate intellectual women166 and the language used in his letters to Nora tending to denigrate her, reducing her to a sexual object 167 we are tempted to think that his oeuvre is not too eager to be interpreted from a feminist perspective. Still the doors of Joycean writing are not completely shut in front of this interpretation; there are also many other elements that encourage the reader to analyse his writing from this point of view. For instance the woman who is here, there, nowhere and everywhere in Joyces novel, acquiring a multiplicity of identities, the poetic language which in Kristevas view is revolutionary and incestuous,
164

Ibid., p. 216.

165
166

George Ritzer (ed.). Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Volumes 1-2, California: Sage Publications, p. 424. Mary Colum. Our Friend James Joyce. Garden City: Doubleday, 1958, p. 132. 167 Derek Attridge. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. 2nd edition, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 107.

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with Joyces modernism exemplifying a mode of writing that is neither the lawful position of the father, nor the Oedipal chaos associated with the mother. 168 A certain ambiguity installs as the narrative never expresses itself wholly as a promoter of male or female, it refuses a definite choice between the two categories; it rather melts them both into an in-between-ness/ totality, the totality of the unconscious which is free from gender and body limitations. It took a long time before this theory was pointed at (by Kristeva more exactly although she never devoted an entire work only to Joyce or feminism); among the feminists who more or less envisaged Joyces writing we might mention Kate Millet who condemned the Irish writer for viewing woman as nature, then, later Joyce himself highlighted the feminist connection in Finnegans Wake (that New Free Woman with Novel inside169); Harriet Shaw Weaver, Sylvia Beach, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap; in 1920s and 1930s there was the poet Mina Loy, then later Helene Cixous who devoted several works to Joyce making it clear that through the remaking of language (into what is his poetic language) could be seen as the rethinking of gender roles, then in the 1970s more negative criticism of the womens stereotypes in Joyces work came from Marilyn French and Mary Ellman. Starting with Julia Kristeva (1960) and Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless (1980) we witness a tendency towards regarding Joyces discourse as feminine. Moreover, Julia Kristeva in her 1960 essay, Word, Dialogue and Novel, presents the Irish writer as one of the creators of the modern polyphonic novel and characterizes his mode of writing as dialogical170 existing only as a game of relationships, analogies and non-exclusive oppositions () parodying its own productive processes and by exploring and transgressing the forbidden frontiers of sexuality and death () operating through a collocation of conflicting discourses which challenges both logical and representational language and the authorities which that language sustains.171 Strongly related to this
168

Lee Spinks. James Joyce: A Critical Guide, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p. 193.

169 170

James Joyce quoted in James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism. By Jean-Michel Rabat, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 44.

To use Bakhins concepts of polyphonic novel and dialogic form as they appear in Introducing Bakhtin. by Sue Vice. UK: Manchester University Press, 1997. 171 Jennifer Birkett. Joyce-Tracing the Mother. Published in French Feminists and Anglo-Irish Modernists: Cixous, Kristeva, Beckett and Joyce, The Brazen Head on-line magazine, University of Edinburgh, 16 June 1995.

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conception and perhaps more explicit is her view of women in Julia Kristevas essay, Womens Time. Considering the paternal law as symbolic, differentiated, coherent language, dealing with culture whereas the maternal order is seen as semiotic, bodily, undifferentiated language, the pre-oedipal position that involuntarily threats the paternal law, Kristeva establishes that for the male order time is cursive, linear, historic and most importantly teleological leading thus to a certain goal, finitude, to a logical and expectable destination, while for the female order time is repetitive, monumental (concepts that Kristeva borrows from Nietzsche), an eternity due to cycles and gestation. Paralleling these ruptures and recalling the phases of feminism, Kristeva disagrees with the first two stages explaining that: 1) socialism as seen as a tendency towards the equality of men and women was still seen as faulty because in its emphasis on production overlooked womans function of reproduction; 2) Freudian theory of the complex of castration abuses the term castration by establishing through it an aprioristic (yet imaginary) condition of woman as inferior to man Kristeva explains that castration merely points to the appearance of the separation language which is felt by both man and woman. At the level of language the appearance of sign and syntax is identified with this operation of separation.172 The solution that imposes itself is the search for a symbolic denominator perceived as historical homogeneity and linguistic unity. This implies womens entry in the historical/ symbolic or cursive/ linear time and in order to reach this position women can either exteriorize the tension (evil) accumulated between semiotic and symbolic or they may internalize re-living the sacrifice.173 In the first case the monumental would be disruptive of the linear while in the second case woman would inevitably become victim-executioner determining a reiteration of gestation, thus again the unshakeable monumental time leaving woman right where she started from: the undifferentiated position bearing the sacrificial stamp. It is an irreconcilable position established a long time before, at the beginning of history but not before the primeval sovereign femininity highlighted in one of Kristevas interviews.174 One might interpret this time (womens time) as a borrowed one or a temporal pause due to the fact that the symbolic bedrocks on which history was founded overlooked
172

Julia Kristeva. Womens Time in New Maladies of the Soul. Columbia: Columbia University Press, New, 1995. 173 Julia Kristeva. Womens Time in New Maladies of the Soul. Columbia: Columbia University Press, New, 1995, p. 218.

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her presence. But if we give a second thought to this genuine in-between-ness of women we come to see their multiplicity of identifications and identities; striving so much to belong to a pre-established canon (outside maternal order) but without ever reaching a final solution that would satisfy both symbolic and semiotic simultaneously, womans position remains all the more complex: she accepts neither and embraces both (keeping to the pre-established position would mean the deepening of sacrifice while the entire alignment to the symbolic order would lose womans specificity resulting again in the sacrifice of her identity).

Kristevas Feminism and A Portrait

The Joycean Mother
Although A Portrait seems to focus mainly on men and the masculine experience, the analysis that follows will deal with the ways in which Joyces novel advances the cause of women and men by revealing engendered attitudes enhancing the very creativity by which the young artist would live. Certain French feminists hold the view that language offers women a limited range of choices. Nonetheless, women can develop their own language called feminine language or lcriture feminine: womens writing.175 Recently, Julia Kristeva has said that feminine language is semiotic, not symbolic. Rather than rigidly opposing the elements of reality, rather than symbolizing one thing but not another in terms of a third, feminine language is rhythmic and unifying. If from the male perspective it seems fluid to the point of being chaotic, that is a fault of the male perspective.176 According to Kristeva, feminine language is derived from the pre-oedipal period of fusion between mother and child. Associated with the maternal, feminine language is not only threatening to

174

Kathleen OGrady. An Interview with Julia Kristeva. Published in Parallax: Julia Kristeva 1966-96.

Aesthetics, Politics, Ethics. Issue 8 July-September 1998, p. 5-16. Guest Editor: Griselda Pollock.
175 176

Hlene Cixous quoted in Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed. By Mary Klages. London, New York: Continuum Publishing Group, p. 102. Rose C. Murfin in What is Feminist Criticism published in Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Johanna M. Smith (ed.). London: MacMillan Press LTD, 2000, p. 297.

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culture, which is seen as patriarchal, but also a medium through which women may be creative in new ways.177 In Kristevas view, the truly feminist innovation in all fields requires an understanding of the relation between maternity and feminine creation.178 Her central and liberating claim also contains the suggestion that if it is placed entirely in a feminine, semiotic discourse, it risks being marginalized by men. The feminist encounter with A Portrait points out that Stephens conception of women exists within a framework of dichotomies (flesh and spirit, politics and religion). Throughout Joyces writing, women are associated in Stephens mind with the realm of the physical, toward which he is deeply ambivalent. Having suggested that Stephens consciousness generally connects women with physicality, Henke goes on to show that, within that general association, more destructive dichotomies exist.179 The realm of the physical, after all, includes the warmth of a protective mothers as well as the very different warmth of the feeling of being embraced by mothers nature. In trend with his time, Stephens all too typical tendency to see women as one or the other absolute positive or absolute negative is as limited and limiting as his tendency to see them in terms of the physical. Henke relates Stephens conception of women not only to an earlier, psychological complex but also to the voices and images of his education; the novels he reads, as well as popular entertainments of his culture, project the same images of women, with few variations. We are going to analyse the multitude of nuances that that Joycean mother acquires in strong relation to the Kristevian theory. Since the French feminists main line of thought expressed in her essay, Womens Time, envisages woman as being acknowledged in the society of the time as wearing a stigma of physicality, we identified the role of the mother as circumscribable to this theory in A Portrait. Feminine characters, sensuous figures haunt the developing consciousness of Stephen Dedalus and provide a background or complement against which he defines himself as both man and artist. Like everything else in A Portrait, women are seen almost exclusively from
177
178

Alistair M. Duckworth. Emma by Jane Austen, Palgrave, New York, 2002, p. 560. Julia Kristeva, Womens Time in New Maladies of the Soul, Columbia University Press, New, 1995, p. 210. 179 R. B. Kershner. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism -James Joyce: A Portrait, New York: Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, 1993, p. 308.

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Stephens point of view. Seen through his eyes and coloured by his fantasies, they often appear as projections of a narcissistic imagination. Some of the nuances that the Joycean mother acquires in the novel enclose the figures positive and beneficial dimension, as opposed to what was generally accepted by the masculine authoritative society. In this sense the occurrence of Stephens mother in the novel highlights the protective warmth of the childs home. Mother was sitting at the fire with Dante waiting for Brigid to bring in the tea. She had her feet on the fender and her jewellery slippers were so hot and they had such a lovely warm smell. (A Portrait, p. 11) We are offered the portrait of an idealised image of the mother who seems to be descending in the boys imagination from an atmosphere that echoes mythical times. All the elements of homey warmth are rendered through the childs sensorial perceptions: fire, tea, hot, and warm. At this level of Stephens emerging awareness the sensorial perceptions are for him the best utensils with which he can map the exterior world. The beneficial setting in the centre of which is his mother and which remained stamped in Stephens infantile memory renders the protagonist in the pre-Oedipal stage, according to Kristevas theory. The mother dependency that the boy experiences and indirectly confesses reveals at figurative level that the umbilical chord was not yet broken. The fact that the female parent is the one who holds a special place in the childs universe is made obvious through an innocent comparison that the child makes between the two parents: His mother had a nicer smell than his father. She played on the piano the sailors hornpipe for him to dance. He danced: Tralala lala Tralala laladdy Tralala lala Tralala lala. (A Portrait, p.8)

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The comparison that the protagonist succeeds at this age is also inscribed in a set of sensorial perceptions: mother had a nicer smell. The same adjective, nice, is used later in the novel still capturing the good nature of his mother: His mother had told him not to speak with the rough boys in the college. Nice mother!(A Portrait, p. 8) Stephens evaluation of his female parent is not a permanent one. For the moment he identifies with the undifferentiated language prefigured in the tralala lala, and which in Kristevas view pertains to women since primeval times. Stephens perception of the female parent will undergo a sinuous passage, but will remain a central figure against and with which he will try to represent and reveal himself. At the meeting point between pre-oedipal attachment and oedipal separation, Stephen first sees his mother as a powerful and beneficient source of physical pleasure. (A Portrait, p. 319) She tends to her sons corporal needs, changes the oil sheet, and encourages his artistic development by playing the piano. The first of the many episodes that erode his ego, apologize is associated in his mind and vivid imagination with matriarchal threats. Dante and Mrs. Dedalus, once the protectors of childish narcissism, they both become the inhibitions of an unfriendly reality. As Dorothy Dinnerstein explains in The Mermaid and the Minotaur, it is usually a woman who serves as even an infants first love, first witness and first boss () The initial experience of dependence on a largely uncontrollable outside source of good is focused on a woman, and so is the earliest experience of vulnerability to disappointment and pain.180 The uncleanness of birth is reflected upon the mother and if the little boy remains in early childhood sensually attached to the maternal flesh, when he grows older and becomes socialized, and takes note of his individual existence, this same flesh frightens him . . . calls him back to those realms of inborn from which he would fly.181 After the child is born and thus separated from the mothers body, the latter becomes semiotic while the little boy symbolic. This so happens as the process of individuation presupposes a distancing from the mother, a break, not only at the level of physicality, of the umbilical chord. Reproduction is the beginning of death (A Portrait, p. 199), argued Hegel182, and so argues Stephens fellow
180 181

Dorothy Dinnerstein. The Mermaid and the Minotaur. Harper and Raw, New York, 1999, p. 80. Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 53. Charles Taylor. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 151.

182

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student, Temple. The Manichean dichotomy between flesh and spirit, body and mind, has long been present in the writings of male philosophers and it was often associated with an acute polarity between the genders thought to be manifeste d at linguistic level, too, by means of certain constructions that certify the gender difference.183 Nevertheless, it takes Stephen quite a while until he reaches the age when he is able of such awareness. The first occurrence of tension played upon the mother-child bond is generated by the boys perceiving certain strangeness in the act of kissing his mother: Then he went away from the door and Wells came over to Stephen and said: - Tell us, Dedalus, do you kiss your mother before you go to bed? Stephen answered: - I do. And then later, because his colleagues made fun of him Stephen blushed under their eyes and said: - I do not. A little later he still tried to think what was the right answer. Was it right to kiss his mother or wrong to kiss his mother? What did it mean to kiss? (A Portrait, p.16) Although he tries to come up for himself with a definition of kiss he cannot decide which category, good or bad, it belongs to. Due the physicality that the gesture implies Stephen will not be able to figure out not even as he grows older if it is appropriate or not. His mother kissed him. Was that right? (A Portrait, p. 23) In Kristevian terms, both female and male subjects reach a point where each of them stands as a barrier in the evolution184 of the other just like, at a certain moment, the mother may cause the childs regression by means of her correcting ways. This intermingling of shades also prolongs in A Portrait as the reader is presented Stephens mother ambiguous gesture (the kiss). The ambiguity rises not from the gesture itself, but from the way the hero perceives it; the word kiss renders both maternal affection and sexual connotation. Moreover, due to this gesture which remains one of motherly affection the protagonist is beginning to catch a glimpse of the gender difference.

183 184

Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 53. Julia Kristeva. Womens Time in New Maladies of the Soul. Columbia University Press, New, 1995, p. 220.

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The figurative umbilical chord is shattered as soon as he brings down the image of the mother from nicer than father to not so nice when she cried. (A Portrait, p. 10) The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said goodbye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried. (A Portrait, p. 10) This episode will later explain Stephens attitude of revolt towards his mother as a way of showing her he is not going to let her engulf his individuality. Notice that at this level of the novel the epiphany coincides with the childs apprehension of his mother, both of them being united through a cosmic-like umbilical cord. She cannot be described but through the eyes and conscience of the child. However, Mrs. Dedalus subscribes to the good mothers as she is the one that offers him comfort, warmth, harmony. Her company means music, dance, intimacy which makes the hero want to relive these serene moments, to bask in a total self forgetfulness. In such a sense the mother becomes synonymous to the eternal return,185 to use Eliades terms, similar to a regress in the consoling warmth of the home. Regressing home means escaping from the external world and reality into the tranquil atmosphere created by his mother. Taking the bits that contribute to the creation of this atmosphere one may have the impression that in the house time has stopped; thus every gesture coming from Mrs Dedalus is interpreted as a sign of frozen eternity: neither involution, nor evolution. The music, the dance, the warmth of the fire, the warmth of the tea all are elements that help the child preserve in his memory, the beneficial and pleasant atmosphere of his home. From this perspective Mrs. Dedalus becomes a protector of Stephen from the meanness of exterior people, embodying some kind of form of dependency which, at the beginning, the child does not feel as a constraint; on the contrary he acts as an empty vessel for his mothers never ending affection. That is perhaps why the return home, even if it is only in the heros mind,
185

Mircea Eliade. The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History. U.S.A.: Princeton University Press, 2005.

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appears like a sweet self forgetfulness and as a need of fully identifying himself with his mother. From a different perspective, due to Joyces ambivalent attitude to women, the gender antagonism that pervades Irish society impresses Stephen at an early age. At the dawn of infantile consciousness, Stephen interprets the external world in terms of complementary couplets: male and female, father and mother, politics and religion, Davitt and Parnell. Baby Stephens cosmos is organized in binary structures that set the stage for the dialectic of personal development.186 He loathes his mothers feminine vulnerability and thinks that she is not nice when she bursts into tears. According to Simone de Beauvoir, mans symbolic association of woman with the flesh reflects an embedded infantile disdain for corporality and bodily drives. The male identifies himself as spirit by virtue of his own subjective consciousness; he then perceives the female as the Other, who limits and hinders/ obstructs him.187 We are now entitled to talk about what Kristeva named Oedipal separation. Stephens breaking with motherly authority and matriarchal order becomes apparent in his perceiving his mothers gesture of sending him to university as disloyalty. (A Portrait, p. 196) Thus, he experiences the feeling of being cast off from the homes protective atmosphere into the external worlds vicissitudes, betrayed by the very being that he thought loved him unconditionally, neglecting the fact that precisely due to motherly affection does Mrs Dedalus send him to get a good education and develop spiritually. When he begins to deal a harsh life at Clongowes he is determined to adopt an ethic of manly stoicism:188 his father had told him . . . whatever he did, never to peach on a fellow (A Portrait, p. 9) In a world where only the cruel and remorseless survive, Stephen perceives himself as an outcast. Small, frail, and feeling very much like an outsider in this group of aggressive schoolboys, he mentally takes refuge in recollections of the family fireplace protected by beneficial female spirits. As he relives the horror of being shouldered into a rat-infested urinal ditch by the bully Wells, Stephen takes comfort in reverie of his mother sitting by the fire in hot jewellery slippers. (A Portrait, p. 10) Alienated from a brutal male environment, Stephen longs to return to this female figure of security and comfort, to be at home and lay his head
186 187

Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 50. Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 53. 188 Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 54.

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on his mothers lap. (A Portrait, p. 9) As the growing boy moves in the direction of manhood, he feels increasingly compelled to cast off the chains of female influence. The formerly rejected motherliness is longed for and then again abandoned; now trading the semiotic of the feminine order on the symbolic of the masculine one. His childhood educator Dante, a clever woman and a well read woman (A Portrait, p. 11) who teaches him geography and lunar myths, is replaced by male instructors: Father Arnall knew more than Dante because he was a priest. (A Portrait, p. 11) The Jesuit teachers from Clongowes indirectly encourage Stephen to tackle the mysteries of religion and death. They introduce him to a system of male authority and discipline that will ensure the presupposed correct training and proper socialization. Thus they transform education into a manipulative play in which the students convictions are washed away as they are turned into depersonalized subjects. In Slaters view, a single-gender education and the separation of young boys from maternal care enhances misogyny, narcissism, and a lingering terror of the female.189 Once the child is deprived of his mothers affection, he seeks compensation through self-aggrandizement renouncing love for admiration () He becomes vain, hypersensitive, invidious, ambitious, () boastful, and exhibitionistic.190 Stephens impulsive appeal to Father Conmee at the end of the episode is motivated not only by faith in a male-controlled world but by personal vanity and a tendency towards exhibitionism.191 The prefect of studies was a priest but that was cruel and unfair, (A Portrait, p. 57) he insists. With an absurdly optimistic view of the world, he feels certain that Conmee will understand and forgive him. Having rebelled against Father Dolans totalitarian power, Stephen is apprehended as a revolutionary hero by all his peers. But the apparently triumphant child later discovers an ironic follow-up to his visible victory: Dolan and Conmee, in a friendly verbal exchange, treat the incident as a joke, rendering Stephen as an involuntary fool in front of his Jesuit masters.192 After having taken such distance from the maternal authority, it is explainable why he is rather reticent to Cranlys praise of motherly love while trying to convince him to fulfil his mothers wish and participate at the Easter Mass.
189 190

Idem,. p.58. Idem., p.58. 191 Ibidem. 192 Idem. p. 58, 59.

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Your mother brings you into the world, carries you first in her body. What do we know about what she feels? But whatever she feels, it, at least, must be real.(A Portrait, p. 288) Stephen seems to have activated the refrigerating aparatus 193 of depersonalisation since not only that he is not moved by Cranlys speech but instead gives him a rather misogynistic reply: Pascal, if I remember rightly, would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex () Jesus, too, seems to have treated his mother with scant courtesy in public. (A Portrait, p. 299) Stephen, no longer a child, almost demonizes the mothers image through his attitude of abjection: women emerge as powerful emblems of the flesh and frightening reminders of physicality and bodily decay. The childs confusion contained in the gesture of kissing ones mother is now simply resolved by reducing it to a mere physical abjection. To sustain his flight from the mother the protagonist chooses as examples two illustrious names from philosophy and religion. After his childhood experience with the kiss, Stephen refuses any dialogue referring to his mother and takes shelter in the objective requirement of defining ones terms. When asked by Cranly if he loves his mother, Stephen replies: I dont know what your words mean (A Portrait, p. 287) In Cranlys view the love for a mother is something you cannot argue about and at the same time overpasses mens ability of understanding. Moreover, Cranly involuntarily points to the primordial function of mother which is strongly related to her matter or earth-bound nature. For Stephen on the other hand a mothers love can easily acquire sexual nuances: Pascal () would not suffer his mother to kiss him as he feared the contact of her sex. (A Portrait, p. 299) Not only does he refuse to talk about his mother-son relationship, but he also manifests a certain detachment and
193

Stephen Sicari. Joyce's Modernist Allegory: Ulysses and the History of the Novel. Columbia: University of South California, 2001, p.35.

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distancing, authorised in his view by the experience of male illustrous figures (Pascal, Christ). His detachment is not caused, but self-imposed as a means of educating himself in the process of creation. There is nothing in Mrs. Dedalus that made him take distance, but his conscience is the one that feels constrained; this lack of freedom is even more strongly felt in the presence of Dante, the symbol of the punitive mother. Stephens misogynistic attitude is present also in Stephen Hero, when he states a theory of dualism which would symbolize the twin eternities of spirit and nature in the twin eternities of male and female. (Stephen Hero, p. 210) Translating the expression eternity of nature as mere eternal reproductive function would reduce women to matter-bound beings and motherhood. But if we take into account Joyces translation of Aristotles statement (that art is an imitation nature which Joyce translates as art being a natural process194) we discover that the whole perspective of women is changed. Eternity of nature becomes eternity of art, the image of woman becoming an inexhaustible source of art, that the man (an eternity of spirit), ideally the artist, would render. Here identity becomes synonymous with eternity as Stephen is using the same term for both feminine and masculine figures. Moreover, the complementariness (twin) of the two poles of gender ensures the androgynous state of both man and woman. As Suzette Henke shows Steohens father, being perceived as the childs primordial storyteller, is the one who initiates Stephen on the path of linguistic expression thus guiding the boy towards the symbolic order of patriarchal authority.195 The critic continues to say that Simon Dedalus as a representative of the law and the word, indirectly supplies little Stephen with the two means of authority that may enable for him the mastering of a hostile external environment.196 The male parent appeals to Stephens imagination, and awakens him to a sense of individual identity the moment when language establishes the distinction/ separation between subjective desire and self-representation:197 He was baby tuckoo . . . He sang that song. That was his song (A Portrait, p. 19). As soon as Stephen

194

Thomas Edmund Connolly. Joyce's Portrait: Criticisms & Critiques. New York: Meredith Publishing Company, 1962, p. 254. 195 Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 51. 196 Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 51. 197 Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 51.

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receives a forename, he is able to assert himself as a subject of discourse and thus he may be represented in narrative. According to Suzette Henke, when Stephen is old enough to join his parents table at Christmas, his mother can no longer protect him from the aggressiveness of the masculine world or the turbulence of Irish politics and at the holiday meal, the impressionable child assimilates the knowledge that frantic women like Dante Riordan support ecclesiastical authority in the name of moral correctness; due to her religious fervour, Dante is willing to sacrifice Parnell as a political scapegoat in order to save the face of the priests of Irish Catholicism.198 In front of Mr. Caseys and Simons judgment, she names the Catholic clergy the apple of Gods eye: Touch them not, says Christ, for they art the apple of My eye. (A Portrait, p. 40) Dante defends the masculine representatives of the Catholic Church against what a sinful adulterous Nationalist leader. The weight of the puritanic views of society crush this leader, as this attitude is traceable and voiced through Dantes impassioned replies, born out of puritanical self-righteousness, suggesting a formidable association between the Catholic Church and the ideals of bourgeois morality. 199 The political duel, intertwined with the religios one, is here doubled by the gender battle. God and morality and religion come first, (A Portrait, p.43) shouts Dante, and Mr. Casey counters with his own retort. In this particular episode religion constitutes the background of gender separation expressed by means of speech differences, specific for the two opposing genders. Due to the aggressivity of her linguistic expression, Dante appears to signify the hysterical condition of the woman. Comparable even with Mrs Kearney, who becomes out of control when she learns that her daughters contract will not be fully observed, Dante outbursts into enraged replies in order to defend the so much pretensed Church authority, imposed by Puritanism. In this sense, though her language is far from being undifferentiated, she becomes an emblem of feminine bigotry. Dante is also the severe mother who is very strict concerning religious faith. She becomes a symbol of punishment and violence possibly emerging as a step mother. To a certain extent both his mother and his aunt tend to acquire a somewhat devouring role, ultimately annihilating the childs will of individuality. This is precisely what makes the child experience the primary form of dependence on an external source of good as it appears
198 199

Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 56. Ibidem.

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embodied by the first woman whom he comes in contact with: the mother. It is also the earliest experience of vulnerability that he is subjected to even though involuntarily and unconsciously. Thus the subject is born with a feminine stamp as far as vulnerability is concerned. The child has not got a choice as his primary steps in life could not be guided but by the mother, the woman who knows him best. This applies to all young human beings including future artists, too, like Stephen. This state of pre-consciousness, during early childhood, is inevitably accompanied by a feminine vulnerability. Beyond the spiritual and necessary mother-child bond there is another aspect, much more concrete, concerning the blood connection that ties the babys flesh to that of the mothers. If during infancy and early childhood this bond is as necessary as unbreakable, towards its growing mature, the child starts to sense this flesh-made umbilical chord as a hindrance and even as a menace in the process of gaining ones freedom. Stephen moreover feels the maternal bond as complotting with his mother countrys nationalism into manufacturing a net which will soon prevent/ pervert his will to fly on higher artistic realms. As Stephen slowly distanced himself from the mother not because she was a bad mother but because he wished to break the umbilical chord and construct his individual personality, the image of Joycean mother remained as neither ideal, like Virgin Mary, nor bad or severe, like Dante; she represents a more human version of a mother, a mother that pendulates between two extremes. Although she too bears the stigma of matter or body suggested by the kiss and by her crying, she is also attentive at his education (thus the spiritual side) providing Stephen a harmonious universe at least inside the home. However, the paradoxical nature of the protagonists perception of the mothers image leaves room for a certain reconcilable dimension. The last occurrence of the maternal figure, on the last page of the novel, portrays her in a sphere that is beyond mere physicality or eugenic function. As a reiteration of Virgin Marys prayers for her Son, Stephens mother prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it.(A Portrait, p. 302) The protagonist thus reaches a solution to the entrapped nature of motherhood, which cannot assert itself in the world of mens authority nor can it consider only feminist views: instead he offers the liberating perspective of sacred maternal figure. 129

4.3 Mapping Joycean Epiphany through the Feminine Sublime

The key element that binds and holds together all of the narrators experiences evolve around women and feminine instances. It is the sensible and beautiful that touches the artists vibrant soul enabling the occurrence of epiphanies. Most of the experienced epiphanies are possible due to to the more or less near presence of the feminine causing the narrator to emprunt such a feminine side lest he resists it with his authoritative reason. The tension of his resistance will be later crystallized into the realisation of his artistic consciences mission. When speaking of James Joyces writings one reveals an entire universe of themes, illuminating even more identities as they radiate from his use of trivial things, religion, mythology, history, public life, political aspects, gender and love, all intertwined and undestructibly kneated to forge the uncreated conscience(as Stephen himself declares in A Portrait) of his people. His epiphanic mode proves an indispensable tool in rendering the conscience of the Irish culture as a universal one. The speaker-narrator strives to conceptualize his spiritual elevations, to inventory and map them, just like a trustworthy librarian does with his books, but it is not only a process of rigurous organization for he learns something new from each and every epiphany following closely the spiral of his evolution thus reaching in the end the awareness of his purpose in artistic existence. The role of epiphany becomes quite crucial for, in the first place it determins the narrators evolution towards artistic existence, secondly it becomes involved in structuring the novels text and thirdly it also enables the reader to experience his own epiphanies. As mentioned above, most of the spiritual elevations are centered on women, leaving but a couple of epiphanies dealing with objects. Let us refer again to Joyces definition of epiphany: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. (Stephen Hero, p. 210 - 211)200
200

Quoted from Harold Bloom. James Joyce. U.S.A.: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003, p. 110.

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As it stems from the above-quoted definition, epiphany reunites five major coordinates: first of all its spontaneous and sensible nature, its triviality under the form of gesture or speech, and intellectual memorability. We may characterize the epiphany as having its source in the ordinarily trivial or intellectually memorable while being instantaneous and sensible in nature, and spiritual when experienced rendering a feeling of completness that embraces the artists conscience. Joyces emphasis is generally on the perceiving consciousness, the subject who actively adjusts his spiritual vision to focus on the object, which in turn is epiphanized. His stress on the perceiver is in line with the general development in epistemology from an emphasis on the object that reveals itself, fundamentally through Gods grace, to an emphasis on the role of mans mind and imagination: from revelation by the object to insight on the part of the subject.201 Therefore epiphany appears as a subjective means of appropriating the other unveiling, also a Romantic dimension of the process: a kind of rationally limited empathy on behalf of the viewer. It can be argued that current Romanticism implies a positive valorization of the sublime. Enthusiasm, ecstasy, imagination, pathos-values and qualities inseparably tied with the sublime - are also irresistibly associated with Romanticism. A similar affinity exists between the gothic and Burke's aesthetics.202 What we understand by feminine sublime refers to certain paradoxes of the feminine nature, more exactly the ambivalent conditions and features that the Joycean woman reunites. This permanent symbiosis of contraries, perceived by the narrator, proves fruitful as the womans sublime quality renders her either as muse, ideal or agent in the narrators epiphany creating process. In this sense we shall also envisage some of the sources of the Joycean womans sublime as they are represented by the coexistence of several of her paradoxical identity coordinates: corporality and sacredness, innocence, abstracted physical beauty, all of
201

Morris Beja. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. London: Peter Owen, 1971, p. 75.

202

Kenneth Holmqvist, Pluciennik, Jaroslaw, Style. A Short Guide to the Theory of the Sublime. Volume: 36. Issue: 4, .Northern Illinois University. Provided by ProQuest LLC, 2002.

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them bestowing more mystery upon her nature. Another aspect of the demonstration is concerned with answering the questions to what extent are the roles of muse, ideal and agent interconnected with the sources of feminine sublime and in which measure do they trigger epiphany. One of the many epiphanic occurrences stemmed from feminine presence is traceable in Stephens description of the flower girl: The blue flowers which she lifted towards him and her young blue eyes seemed to him at that instant images of guilelessness; and he halted till the image had vanished and he saw only her ragged dress and damp coarse hair and hoydenish face. (A Portrait, p. 218) The description of the flower girl starts in a Romantic tone, a tone dictated by the presence of the chromatic epiphet blue referring both to the flowers and to the girls eyes. By means of sensorial perception Stephen portrays a melancholic scene of what otherwise would constitute a banal, ordinary episode from his life. It is well known that in Romantic poetry the blue flower is associated with melancholy and nostalgia.203 Her eyes, having the same colour, induce the idea of sadness and also an allusion at her innocene (young blue eyes). These primary perceptions make Stephen think of the encounter as instant images of guilelessness. The word instant immediately points to the suddenness of this lifes episode, consubstantial with the instantaneous aspect of epiphany. It is an epiphany of authentic (hence the guilelessness) triviality since what strikes the narrators conscience is restricted at sensorial perception. Thus the object of his epiphanic experience, in this case the woman florist, is merely reduced to corporality and materiality. As the epiphanic instant fades away, the narrator notices also her ragged dress and damp coarse hair and hoydenish face. Later on as the novel progresses, and Stephen reaches a point when he mentally takes revenge on Emma for he thought that she flirted with the priest, the flower girl image appears as a fragmented dimension of Emmas image:

203

See Eminescus poem entitled Floare Albastr. (Blue Flower)

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On all sides distorted reflections of her image started from his memory: the flower girl in the ragged dress with damp course hair and a hoydens face who had called herself his own girl and begged his handsel. (A Portrait, p. 263) As the reader can notice all the melancholic hues and allusions at innocence have been abandoned in favour of the negative aspects of her garments and overall appearance. Thus the image of the flower girl turns into an emblem of feminine physicality; her image has been brought down from a potential state of the sublime, prefigured in the paradoxy of her innocence and her overall harsh appearance, to a demonized condition of corporeal ugliness and rejected physicality. She has been but a temporary muse. This is not the case with other feminine presences in the novel. For instance, the image of Emma is firstly contoured in Stephens conscience as an object of desire. Her physical concrete beauty draws the young narrators physical desire. Here the vulnerability associated with the feminine figure in general becomes an all empowering device. Thus the roles are reversed as woman, though unintentionally and unconsciously, projects her own vulnerability associated with her corporeality onto Stephens libidinal desire. It is precisely through her most demonised feature that the feminine figure masters the masculine representative. At this stage Stephen has to choose between two options that are crucial for his spiritual evolution: he can either plunge into a strategy of winning her heart in the real sense, and become just like every other boy of his age, or he can resist this temptation in favour of other loftier purposes. The image of Emma appeared before him and under her eyes the flood of shame rushed forth anew from his heart. If she knew to what his mind had subjected her or how his brute-like lust had torn and trampled upon her innocence! Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? The sordid details of his orgies stank under his very nostrils.(A Portrait, p. 131) In this episode the degradating features of male physicality are mapped by terms and expressions like flood of shame, brut-like lust, orgies, becoming in the protagonists 133

imagination vivid olfactory sensations. The sordid reality contained within his gender makes him a victim of his own bodily desire. Experiencing a state of confusion Stephen is trying to clarify for himself what exactly is the eruption of feelings that he is confronting with. In his endeavour he appeals to the flesh - spirit dichotomy, and the spiritual self detaches from the bodily self by mapping its whims. Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry? At the dawn of an emergent adolescent love he is not able to pinpoint his emotions. However, his taste for contemplation is visible in the pondering over the nature of his love. The protagonist experiences the epiphany of the trivial nature of this love which stank under his very nostrils. If woman acts as involuntary agent in this case she is not yet helping the narrator find his artistic ego. She emerges as sublime though through the ambivalence of her womanhood qualities: vulnerable while also powerful. The male protagonist will later admit to his submissiveness towards the feminine figure. His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.(A Portrait, p. 76) Emma appears as a pseudo Kathleen Ni Houlihan, a Celtic figure inviting Stephen to romantic initiation in the stillness of a moonlit evening. Depersonalised and seen through the haze of mythical allusion she emerges as a shadowy emblem out of the unconscious Eve in nuns robe.204 The mystery (some dim past, tale) in which her whole image seems to be wrapped amplifies her quality of the sublime. Stephen not only grasps this dimension of her but internalizes it as his own (her revery becomes their tale). The portrait that Stephen succeeds comes as a result of the conversion of bodily desire into poetry. Through the synesthesia of sensorial perceptions (dance, movement, eye, heard) he achieves a fluid image of what was earlier the object of his desire. Feminine physical beauty is converted into the abstract beauty of lyrical expression by means of a tension that breaks from the protagonists proud, almost ascetic refusal to indulge in physical pleasure. At this point, having her beauty abstracted by the artist to be, Emma emerges as an incipient muse.
204

Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 61.

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Although in front of Emmas charming face the protagonist maintains his self-control, repressing the feverish agitation of his blood, (A Portrait, p. 75) he later transposes his own erotic vulnerability onto the girl whom he believes to be flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart. (A Portrait, p. 76) He saw her urge her vanities, her fine dress and sash and long black stockings, and knew that he had yielded to them a thousand times. Yet a voice within him spoke above the noise of his dancing heart, asking him would he take her gift to which he had only to stretch out his hand. (A Portrait, p. 76) By reworking through his imagination the trivial details of one of his life episodes, the male protagonist operates another reversing of the specifically masculine and feminine qualities. After having transposed feminine vulnerability into the masculine proneness to bodily desire, Stephen projects his own temptation onto the figure of Emma. In an attempt to gain symbolical mastery over the feminine character he imagines that he can, at will, catch hold of her floating figure. Again, the trivial source of epiphany emerges by means of sensorial perceptions; the focus on her garments such as stockings and dress turn her image into that of a temptress. On the verge of losing emotional balance, Stephen refuses to yield to this pretended temptation. Blurring the figures of himself and his beloved in the womb of his artistic imagination, Stephen is able to give cathartic expression to the pain of loss associated with unacted desire. Byronic verses written to construct the memory of romantic intimacy, 205 as Stephen imagines that the kiss, which had been withheld by one, was given by both. (A Portrait, p. 71) The artists mind is cold, chaste, and detached, as his verses render the experience of romantic epiphany. Now the scene has been deprived of naturalistic detail and the protagonists are almost as ethereal as the ideal characters of a romantic tale. The imagined reciprocity of emotions seems to have been sealed into art: Stephen feels now fulfilled, but Emma is left to dream in her nunlike cowl.

205

Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 62.

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Her power of transfiguration is most obvious when Stephen defuses her image into a literary inspired character. Taking the Count of Monte Cristo as his model, Stephen projects the image of Emma onto that of Mercedes. Appealing to empathy and creative memory he envisages the scene of the encounter between the Romantic heroine and the Count of Monte Cristo. She remains throughout the novel a feminine figure that will be present in the narrators imagination. The image of Mercedes traversed the background of his memory. He saw again the small white house and the garden of rosebushes on the road that led to the mountains and he remembered the sadly proud gesture of refusal which he was to make there, standing with her in the moonlit garden after years of estrangement and adventure. (A Portrait, p. 112) The sublime quality of the feminine figure is traceable here in her mysterious nature -the unrest which had sent him wandering () in search of Mercedes. (A Portrait, p. 73) as well as in her power to transfigure. Mercedes, a descendent of Emma, indeed transfigures the Counts life as she inspires him with sufficient grace to conquer his erotic desire. When Stephen dreams of himself as Edmond Dantes, he identifies with a man betrayed by his friends and his mistress, unjustly exiled and imprisoned, but eventually able to wreak vengeance on those who failed him.206 Monte Cristos sadly proud gesture of refusal: Madam, I never eat muscatel grapes, (A Portrait, p. 65) stands as a literary reflection of Stephens ressistence to Emmas presupposed temptation. As a nascent artist, Stephen admires the self-sufficiency of Dantes, an isolated hero who eventually conquers the woman he loves through a complex process of amorous sublimation. According to Freud, sublimation is the process of transforming libido into socially useful achievements, including artistic, cultural and intellectual pursuits. Freud considered this psychical operation to be fairly salutary compared to the others that he identified, such as repression,

206

Idem., p.60.

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displacement, denial, reaction formation, intellectualisation and projection. Freud's daughter, Anna, () classes sublimation as one of the major defence mechanisms of the psyche. 207 From this viewpoint Kristevas and Freuds thoughts meet in Stephens choice of abandoning libidinal drive while having two purposes: to avoid both becoming dependent of the feminine other and to be able to forge his own artistic ego. At this stage in the novel the reader can state that Emma emerges as a true muse, since her sublime quality triggered not only the sublimity of Stephens erotic desire, but his own identification with a Romantic hero. The protagonist thus shows that he is able not only of experiencing epiphany but also of rendering it, at the shelter of his dissipated muse. By taking models from the romantic literary genre, the Count of Monte Cristo and Lord Byron, he seals in fact the path towards his own artistic conscience. Such an example of constructed epiphany emerges in the scene where the narrator, with the help of his imagination, recreates a different ending for his encounter with Emma. Later in the novel, he is day-dreaming that Virgin Mary, having transformed into the morning star, offices his communion to Emma: - Take hands, Emma and Stephen. It is a beautiful evening now in heaven. You have erred, but you are always my children. It is one heart that loves another heart. Take hands together, my dear children, and you will be happy together and your hearts will love each other. (A Portrait, p. 132, 133) The fact that Stephen appeals to religion in order to sanctify his bond with Emma shows his preference for the ideal means of sealing his imagined relationship instead of leaving it at a level of mundane, sentimental or romantic dimension. Through this epiphany of religious union Stephen does away once and for all with the riot of his blood because of which he felt earlier in the novel that he has violated both Emmas honor and his own code of chivalry, not to mention the rigorous ethic of purity enforced by Irish Catholicism. 208 He experiences what Kant calls the sublime feeling, () which is also the feeling of the sublime, a powerful and equivocal emotion: it brings both pleasure and pain. Or rather, in it
207
208

Freudian sublimation quoted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sublimation_(psychology). Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. London: Routledge, 1990, p. 69.

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pleasure proceeds from pain.209 The masculine narrator compensates the pain of lost and denied love (at least in the real world) with the pleasure of contemplation. It is a moment of utmost sublimation: the participants past is sublimated as they are seen as having returned to innocence (that state of pre-consciousness); the physical aspect is also sublimated since their love is all heart rendering thus the participants as chastisized by this very union in heavens. Therefore, the feminine figure reflected in Emma Clery, is submitted in Stephens conscience to a complex evolutionary process, from being a mere shadowy presence, at the beginning of the novel when the narrator retains only her initials, to an evil temptress conscious and proud, to an etherealized condition, an essence before man. Following a trajectory of ascetic and chastisizing isolation, Stephen chants Marys praises in an act of humbleness. The raw morning air whetted his resolute piety; and often as he knelt among the few worshippers at the side altar, following with his interleaved prayer book the murmur of the priest, he glanced up for an instant towards the vested figure standing in the gloom between the two candles, which were the old and the new testaments, and imagined that he was kneeling at mass in the catacombs. (A Portrait, p. 170) The voluntary mortification to which Stephen submits himself, indicated by the presence of imaginary catacombs, reflects also the solemnity with which he endows this moment of prayer. His transfiguration is here enabled by the mystery of the vested figure (thus aloof, unattainable and ideal) as the theological sublime impregnates his whole being. Her eyes seemed to regard him with mild pity; her holiness, a strange light glowing faintly upon her frail flesh. (A Portrait, p.125) The image of the Blessed Virgin Mary acquires in the nascent artists mind a luring, translucent glow. The quidditas which the narrator believes that She is offering him (his eyes seemed to regard him) transcends the concreteness of her image. She represents both sacredness and motherhood, a totality of
209

Kant quoted in Jean Franois-Lyotard. Answering the Question: What is Postmodern? In The Postmodern explained to Children, Sydney: Power Publications, 1992, p.6; source: http://www.marginalutility.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/04/machete_reading_may1_c.pdf.

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feminine figures that render her mysterious nature as unrepresentable to young Stephen. She will later become the ideal muse as protagonist dissipates her figure up to the point of physical sublimation: a presence that is bright and musical, telling of heaven and infusing peace, (A Portrait, p. 125) The unreal dimension of Virgin Mary, due to her being associated with celestial bliss, showers its radiance on the perceiver. Moreover, Stephen, wanting to overmystify and glorify her ideal status projects her image as the morning star. Thus, She, the representative of all of the feminine figures that Stephen has encountered and tried to elude so far in the novel, reaches in the artists mind the condition of the abstracted ideal. Her image has been sublimated at the level of physicality, sacredness and theological sublime, motherhood, feminine beauty. She emerges now as an empowered muse or a pseudo agent that propels the hero forward towards the artistic path. The appropriation of the figure of the Virgin Mary with that of the morning star shows once again Joyces affiliation with the romantic poetry (the poetic images of the morning star are well known in the romantic literature from Eminescu to Shelley). However, there is much more to Stephens naming of Virgin Mary than meets the eye. First of all, Stephen empowers himself with God-like authority in order to baptize Virgin Mary. But the morning star refers in mythology also to Lucifer englobing thus the serene light not of the Divine Grace but of the mighty of knowledge. The artist converts Virgin Marys radiant light into lux occulta. His dissatisfaction with his own constructed image of Her has nothing to do with the religious heroine; it is the artists thirst for the essence of the ideal that makes him transcend this feminine figure also. If this was an epiphany constructed by the artists imagination and dwelled more at phantasy level, he decided: He wanted to meet in the real world the unsubstantial image which his soul so constantly beheld. (A Portrait, p. 71) Stephen, now that he discovered his artistic vocation, resolutes to abandon the former fabrication of epiphany by resorting to literary (Mercedes) or religious muses (Virgin Mary) in favour of real, live epiphany. In this sense he gives an artistic translation of the wish of most young gentlemen210 as he permamently tries to deflower the Blessed Virgin Mary of Irish
210

- Tell me, for example, would you deflower a virgin? - Excuse me - Stephen said politely - is that not the ambition of most young gentlemen? (A Portrait, p. 291)

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Catholicism. Indeed the dimensions of the Joycean women are again dissipated and overlapped. The all encompassing image of woman is prefigured in the bird girl epiphany. The bird imagery first enabled as a threat in the apologize epiphany during Stephens childhood, prepares the protagonist for his vision of the wading girl where the imagery offers a promise of freedom. First of all the wading girl is seen as alone and still, gazing out to sea.(A Portrait, p. 204) By applying Sthephens aesthetic theory, he singles out the object of his contemplation from its orbiting background. In this moment of being211 which Stephen is experiencing, her stillness appropriates her to an axis of the observers world (still). Her ethereality, reflected in the word magic, endows her with a goddess-like aura, turns her into a feminine ideal, born from a forgotten realm (or even the Promise Land). By comparing her with a strange and beautiful seabird, (A Portrait, p. 204) she appears as a repository of both mystery and the ascension aspiration. The mysterious nature resides in her sea kinship: seaweed, emerald trail, blue, gazing out to sea, stirring the water, whereas the appropriateness with the bird imagery, and thus the promise of flight, is reflected by the presence of: crane, featherings, dovetailed, her bosom was a birds soft and slight, darkplumaged dove. Her mystery reflects also the mystery of the nascent epiphany while the bird appropriation unveils the narrators desire to fly on the wings of art. Though perceived as an irreal appearance, the birdgirl is depicted in terms of external sensorial details. These serve also as an echo of the feminine vulnerability: emerald trail of seaweed, soft and slight, girlish, and mortal. The frailness of the womans physicality is counterbalanced by the use of certain elements that reflect her and innocence (indirectly calling into question the problem of authenticity in the artists mind): pure, white, soft white. Moreover, certain allusions to the image of the Holy Ghost, the symbol from the Catholic Church, are brought to our attention by the repetition of the word dove. However, towards the end of the description by bringing together the words dove and dark (darkplumaged), the image of the birdgirl sends to the symbol of lux occulta; she emerges as Lucifer as later she is named wild angel. Her image attains sublime dimensions since it is rooted in both physicality and beauty, in saintliness and paganism, in
211

Beth Carole Rosenberg, Jeanne Dubino .Virginia Woolf. And the Essay. New York: Library of Congress Cataloging - in - Publication Data, p. 178.

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purity and vulnerability, both in concreteness and spiritual elevation, both in mortality and ethereality. She is more than just a muse for she is the one who triggers Stephens becoming aware of his evolution as an artist. Dwelling at the threshold of reverie (bells of sleep) and reality (profane joy), the girls observer is experiencing an epiphany of ideal beauty. He resists the temporary mundane desire of erotic fulfilment and chooses to freeze in time this illuminating encounter. The tension of his resistance results in libidinal sublimation. He knows that by keeping forever the girls image in his mind and without breaking the holy silence of his ecstasy, (A Portrait, p. 205) he internalizes a supreme moment of life which will later supply him with the necessary raw material for creating art. The wading girl also has her contribution as her gazing out to sea urge her viewer to plunge in the mysterious, figurative sea of art. She is both an inspiring muse and an artistic agent. Since Joyce pictures the muse through a synthesis of chromatic, visual, audible and kinetic elements, and Stephens aesthetic theory also comes into play, appealing also to Christian and mythical allusion this episode emerges in A Portrait as a compex epiphany. Throughout the novel, Stephen seeks the balance of affect and manliness in language and by empathizing with and internelizing the female with her multilayered identities and modes of speech, he refuses to plead for a final irrevocable condition of woman. The hero narrator resolutes he has to identify himself in rapport to the feminine other and chooses to resist the paternal tendency of merely objectifying this other. He remains true to the eternal quest for woman and determines to convert the feminine presence into the radiant body of ever living life. (A Portrait, p. 167) The epiphany is firstly lived and then, by means of verbal strategy he is able to create life out of life. The Joycean woman becomes terra incognita,212 offering just as many springs of epiphany as the mystery of the eternal feminine can. Stephen exacts the play of intersubjectivity and fruitifies it into the in-betweenness state or totality. He refuses to align to the paternal law by refusing to deny womans emergence as subject, instead he has the artistic wisdom to reunite what was formerly
212

Derek Attridge. The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 209.

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regarded as opposing subjects. Thus refusing to equate the identification of woman with the eugnie of motherhood, which implied emphasizing her physicality, he turns this mode of identification inside out. The feminine other (at a certain moment seen as aggressive and threatening) not only that it is no longer viewed as an other that must be oppressed, but it emerges as consubstantial with the artistic self. The epiphany intervenes here and enables the total fusion only after grasping the feminine essence. The Joycean feminine essence is seen as conjoining at least two of the crucial coordinates of the feminine subject: motherhood and sacredness. Joyce, without upsetting motherhood nor sacredness, describes his internal laboratory of creation of epiphany as the virgin womb of imagination. (A Portrait, p.195) The affiliation of this syntagm to his art reveals once again Joyces fondness for the trinitary aspect, and reunites both Virgin Mary (virgin) and motherhood (womb) into the paternal coordinate (imagination, seen as dealing with intellection, thus symbolic language pertaining to man, and not semiotic, specific for women). In a naturally artistic common sense Joyce through Stephen performs the wisest operation possible by reuniting the two antagonizing subjects: masculine and feminine/ animus and anima/ yin and yang/ earth and sky. We are assisting at a quid pro quo: by suffusing the dimension of motherhood with that of sacredness Joyce eradicates the ugliness associated with bodily drive offering new potential interpretations. By relocating the feminine materiality into the abstract level of artistic creation, reinforced by the mythical and sacred dimension of Virgin Marys motherhood, the artist actually recognises woman as a subject, erasing thus her former stigma of colonisable object. Her existence is no longer denied or ignored as in the patriarchal order. The other aspect of the threefold conjoining comports the artists becoming feminine by adopting these features specific to feminine bodily drives. The je ne sais quoi of the woman surfaces and imbolds the emergence of artistic consciousness. (This so happens due to Joyces knowledge of womens psychology also.) It is precisely now that Stephen retrieves the childhood femininity, only his femininity is no longer translatable as vulnerability, but as

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feminine sensibility (or in Kristevas terme depressive sexuality,213 translatable as melancholy, from which may stem the power of creation.) The fusion takes place due to the revealing of essence, first as quidditas (the artist grasps womans essence) and then as a shared claritas (by both masculine and feminine representatives). The fusion is of course taking place at all profound levels resulting in that imponderability, specific for the epiphany. At linguistic level the Kristevian symbolic, associated with the masculine speech, and the semiotic, pertaining to maternal expression, are united in Stephen becomes aware of the word was made flesh.(A Portrait, p.195) In addition, the linear, cursive and teleologic time (specifically paternal) is melted with the monumental, cyclic time of the feminine into the atemporality of epiphany. Even time stands still, amazed by such total fusion. Unquestionably, the Greek eros (erotic love) is melted together with Christian agape (pietal love) into one single love: the love of creating art. In conlusion, if woman was initially seen as Gods mirror (as was the case with Emily Sinico and Charles Duffy, here Charles Duffy viewed as the almighty creative mind), later this optique yielded to the hypothesis that God- seen as the artistic consciousness, might be womans mirror since he, the artist, is the one that renders in scriptural space her emotions and life events. What Joyce reaches is the interplay of both mirrors (Gods woman and womans God) up to the point of being liquefied in one single mirror which is all the more complex since it reflects two fusioned identities.

5. RESTRUCTURING TEXTUAL EPIPHANIES

At this stage of our demonstration a reconfirmation of the epiphanys totality and atemporality is justified by means of encoding it in myth where the Celtic symbols are brought to light by us showing more clearly through the textual fibre Joyces ambivalent attitude towards the Irish Revival, announced in the first chapter. More specifically in this
213

George Ritzer. Encyclopedia of Social Theory. Volumes 1-2, U.S.A.: Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data, 2005, p. 424.

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subchapter we analysed the texts that offer examples of Celtic elements (celtic woman, bous which is also reminiscent of the Greek Minotaur legend, the bird symbolism conjoining both Catholic and Celtic myths) On the verge of literary hidrolatry, the Joycean text exhalts its reader with the all engulfing water instances and later in the text with the water epiphanies. The demonstration is apparent under the form of a close-text analysis in both envisaged works with a fine delicate thread of Bachelardian phenomenology and a more dominant one of Lyotardian phenomenology concerning the sublime which through the readers imagination reworks the Joycean water imagery. This intricately weaved analysis reveals the many water epiphanies as they underwent a sinuous passage from incipient symbolic phases or symbols per se in Dubliners to a highly complex epiphanogenic presence in A Portrait. The Joycean water presence in the novel is grasped through the readers imagination under the sign of an intricate evolution from trivial (pertaing also to the bodily drive) social, natural, to spiritual and finally the celestial and sacred dimension. Since all the Joycean water motifs, symbols and images are viewed inasmuch as they contribute to the construction of epiphany and since water resembles the feminine regarding their undecidability, shiftiness and mater genitrix in terms of epiphanogenic function it is explainable why we demonstrated the water imagery as reaching the epiphanic sublime. However, the sublime is not enclosed upon itself but represents a mere starting point for a re-plunge into the phenomenological reality, even though keeping the artists thirst for the transcendental essence. At first glance one may falsely consider that this whole epiphanic voyage is nothing but an enclosed circle, although there is much more to it as the second coming of the ordinary opens up the trajectory of philosophical and literary consciousness to the next evolutional curlicue of the spiral: the sublime. 5.1 The Celtic Muse in Joycean Textual Voices Digging deeper into the origin of what came to be such a complex work of art as A Portrait one cannot obliterate the trace of Celtic elements, their transgression into catholic myth, culminating with the distillation into a perfect artistic creation. Remembering that the 144

symbol of trinity first appeared since mythical times when most of the Celtic goddesses manifested in triple aspects could constitute a primary example of a celtic borrowing. The dark Gods gave away to Christ, himself one part of an all-powerful and indivisible trinity. Triplism the merging of three elements to create one whole, the number three having an especial sacred and magical symbolism manifested in Celtic art, too, not only in the manifestations of the gods.214 An abstracted form of triplism is noticeable in Joycean text beyond spatio-temporal boundaries under the form of Aquinas quidditas containing thus the three indivisible qualities of the aesthetic object: consonantia, integritas and claritas. One involuntarily witnesses Joyces use of religiously related terms in the scope of his narrative reaching a deep level of artistic theory. The coexistence of the Celtic and Catholic origin in the economy of an orderliness based on triplism contributes to the indestructibility of Stephens theory. The hero appeals to the most immediate myth available for his counrtrys religion, but he selects it in such a way that it reverberates throughout the primitive form of his nation. Religious terms used in the service of aesthetic discourse serve him quite well in the economy of his spiritual heritage. He talks of beauty in the same spirit that a catholic would talk about the holy trinity only the concepts already mentioned are not employed in the same sense aswhen they would describe the the holy trinity. There is a correspondence between the three phases of the trinity and three objective aspects of the beauty that Toma dAquinas establishes and Stephen applies. This analogy is slowly built up only to further sustain the correspondence between beauty and the instance of the divine entity. Although Joyce does not merely adopt Aquinas terms, according to WilliamYork Tindall in Umberto Ecos book, he denaturizes the Thomistic aesthetic when interpreting the concept of claritas215; in Joycean aesthetic theory claritas is not a reiteration of integritas as is the case with the trinitary model; on the contrary, it exists as a spontaneous effect as it is self revealed through epiphany. Stephens exemplification with the basket during his talk with Lynch is eloquent in this sense:
214 215

Idem. Umberto Eco, Poeticile lui Joyce, Traducere i prefa de Cornel Mihai Ionescu, Piteti: Paralela 45, 2007, p.13: Dar ceea ce W.Y. Tindall numea denaturarea esteticii tomiste de ctre Joyce se vdete n interpretarea conceptului de claritas.

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- In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be 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 (...) You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas. (...) -Bulls eye again! Said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is clariats and you win the cigar. -The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses the term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universe alone, make it outshine its proper conditions.(A Portrait, p.253, 254) It is in front of the art object that Stephen bows and whose sermon he holds while the sacred instance of conscience is made possible through epiphany revealing also the aesthetic object in its myriad of rays. In order to reach the most crystallized form of his aesthetic theory by showing an example of object epiphanization in action, he submits one of the most popular Christian aspects to a pluri-reflective mirror maze journey by taking the aspect of triplism to the highest levels of abstractization. Since the beginning Stephens decision to borrow this famous Christian dimension triplism reflects its Celtic origin; then he singles out the terms used by Aquinas but refuses and abandons even the clear-cut correspondences to the latters terms of claritas, radiance, consonantia in favour of their own reversed form/reflection which Stephen will employ for defining his aesthetic theory. This is the result of his mastery in the use of self-reflective paradoxes up to the point of the most abstracted form of aesthetic demonstration. Strongly related to the concept of beauty stands the Joycean vision of woman as muse who would represent in fact the ultimate stasis that woman acquires in the artistic conscience of the hero. We are talking more precisely about the image of the wading girl that appears 146

also as self-reflective paradox; she alone contains elements of both pagan and Christian symbols; shes both mortal and serene. A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a cranes and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sigh upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and softhued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were lik featherings of soft white down. Her slateblue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom was a birds soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some darkplumaged dove. But her long fair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. (A Portrait, p.205) Her ivory thighs recall Eileens ivory hands and the figure of the Catholic virgin. Her bosom like the breast of some darkplumaged dove alludes to the Holy Ghost, traditionally represented as a dove in Christian art. Conversely, comparing her bosom with that of a dove is indicative of her youthful but mortal beauty. At another level, having the sea as her source, the wading girl recalls the image of the goddess of love born of ocean foam, recalling also Maat, the Celtic water goddess. However, beyond reaching this final phase of muse for aesthetic production on behalf of the artist, woman is almost permanently submitted to an ambivalent yet paradoxical view: she embodies the ambivalence virgin-temptress (virgin because Catholicism demands so and thus turns the eyes of the artist towards the Blessed Virgin Mary, and temptress as a mark of womans ability to give birth, her stigmata of materiality that connects her also to impermanence and thus also death) Almost all the women in the novel share a paradoxical ambivalence: Eileen, Emma, the bird-girl, even his mother. As a child he feared the sexual implications of his mothers kiss. He proudly spurns the romantic Merceds and finds temporary salvation in the arms of a prostitute who exacts the kiss withheld from Emma. All the women in Stephens life are both nurturant and demanding.216
216

Suzette Henke. Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Misogynist. published in Modern Critical Interpretations. Harold Bloom (ed), New York: Chelsea House Publishers, Philadelphia, 1988,

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Reducing the entire palette of womens role to basically three aspects: ideal (aesthetic muse) Virgin and temptress this view is again reminiscent of the trinitary aspect of most of the Celtic goddesses as well as of the holy trinity within Christian framework. Following a more focused line of the correspondence we discover that goddess Morrigan hints exactly at the bird-girl as the former used to transform into a crow whenever she sensed that someone was approaching death. This analogy further sustains the mortal condition of beauty as revealed in the emerald trail of seaweed seen on the bird-girls leg. The paradoxical nature of her existence is deepened by the divine like quality of her beauty, thus promising immortality, and on the other hand the traces of a presumable future death relate her more to Goddess Morrigan. Both aspects are contained within her emblem which is imposed by the artists mode of perceiving her: as a bird (-girl). As nothing in Joyces work stands arbitrarily or independently, the evolution of the narrative around the symbolism of the bird is not random. Having already mentioned its presence in both catholic and Celtic myth and only partially in Joycean text one feels that this is far from covering the whole symbolistic of the bird. The first instance of the bird under the form of a threat in the beginning of A Portrait marks the heros existence as emerging under the emblem eventually after having transgressed many dichotomies, paradoxes, ideal trajectories etc, which will become the supreme order of artistic conscience as the artist himself will identify the creative process with the icaric flight. The birds oscillation between the aerial and terrestrial plane parallels Stephens evolution from fright to identification and artistic elevation. The fear of the unknown and the unconscious is materialized into the flight even if it is viewed from the perspective of icaric myth. This view nevertheless sustains the artistic becoming just as all the bird image projections are projections of the artists conscience. Of course many other images of the bird coexist in the novel: the orb is seen as a heavy bird, Stephens colleague, Heron, bears a birds name and some features of this bird, whereas Stephen discovers that his name (a predestined one) was the key to flight, as Florentina Anghel observes poetic study that it linked him to the fabulous artificer. The artist is eventually capable of spreading the wings of

p. 64.

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imagination, as suggested by the precise use of the term wing thus becoming a symbol of ascendance towards the sun, translated into the maturity of artistic conscience. Stephens choice of abstracting the female representative of his race has to do also with a certain rejection of the romantic hue present in Stephen Hero. In his reading before the University Literary and Historical Society, Stephen elaborates his idea that the classical temper for which Ibsen provides an example, rather than the romantic as exemplified by Aeschylus, is the proper one for an artist 217; the critical view applies to the Revivalists attitude of idealizing the Romantic image of peasantry as well. However, in A Portrait he displays an initial tendency of creating a personal myth out of the Revivalists image of the peasant. Joyces attitude towards the figure of the Irish peasant is reflected in the description of Davin. The Romantic atmosphere in which he is wrapped up seems alluring at first but vanishes as soon as Stephen comes to associate Davins seductress, a country woman, with a batlike soul, a category in which he will inscribe later his former beloved Emma. The line of evolution of the peasant image in Joyces text reaches a peaceful conclusion towards the end of the novel when Stephen understands that he has nothing to split with this living repository of Celtic folklore: Old man sat, listened, smoked, spat. Then said: -Ah, there must be terrible queer creatures at the latter end of the world. I fear him. I fear his red rimmed horny eyes. It is with him I must struggle all through this night till day come, till he or I lie dead, gripping him by the sinewy throat till Till what? Till he yield to me? No, I mean him no harm.(A Portrait, p. 301) His wise, yet paradoxical perspective confirms the protagonists ambivalence towards Celticism - he is neither a rejector nor a lover of it or validating a simultaneous coexistence of both.

217

William ONeill. Myth and Iidentity in Joyces Fiction: Disentangling the Image - James Joyce. p. 2, online publication in http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n3_v40/ai_16736315/.

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To a more telluric dimension veiling though its conversion into myth, belongs the image of the cow, bull or bous in Greek. The primary occurrence of this image is felt from the first page of the novel when the father tells his boy the story with the moocow. Bearing the assets of infantile language one is made aware of the auspices under which a conscience is about to evolve reechoing in a certain way the auspices under which Christ was born also. In the third sermon Father Arnall notes that He was born in a poor cow house in Judea (A Portrait, p. 118); by linking the story of the moocow in the beginning of the novel with this image of cow as sacred due to the fact that it witnessed Christs birth one can easily detect Joyces choice to create his own myth out of the Christian one. But the roots of the cow image seen as sacred go back to Celtic times when the cow was the sacred animal that accompanied goddess Brigit. Another aspect of the cow, and with it Stephens rejection of it, is revealed when the protagonist emerges from the sermon and enters the classroom his fellow students sound like softly browsing cattles. (A Portrait, p.210-11) Perceiving them as cattle points to his sense of superiority over his colleagues foregrounding also the personal myth - he appears as a new Christ as he has his own sacrifice to endure for the sake of art. This habit of savouring ones position as victim of injustice is a species of mental sin discussed by Aquinas under the name of morose delectation. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and testing its mortifying flavour in secret(.)This helps to explain why Stephen is not interested in joining societies for the improvement of things in general.218 Stephens detachment will determine his decision to exclude not only the Celtic but also the Catholic Revival, if we might say so, as an alternative for his personal myth. Therefore, as the novel advances, by perceiving the bovine as an element pertaining to the catholic religion the hero will slowly try to exclude himself from any affiliation whatsoever; not to mention that he later confesses his disgust at the materiality of the animal: The cattle which had seemed so beautiful in the country on sunny days revolted him and could not even look at the milk they yielded.(A Portrait, p 63)

218

William ONeill. Myth and Iidentity in Joyces Fiction: Disentangling the Image - James Joyce. p. 6, online publication in http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n3_v40/ai_16736315/.

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Paradoxically, Stephen himself will be appropriated to the bovine family when his swimming classmates call him Bous Stephanoumenous. (A Portrait, p. 168) As St. Stephen, he is the Christian protomartyr and as the sacrificial ox he is decorated for the sacrifice.219 Having come out of the obscurity which existed among his colleagues, the hero is now approaching the downfall of his own self-created myth. The fall is imposed by the colleagues formerly seen as kettle and who wish to level Stephens conscience to that of theirs. However, the complexity of his mind will not become indulgent in an externally imposed label; he will discover that in the power of divination of this new name lies also his artistic identity; the Greek term, bous, reminds us that on Kings Minos island of Crete, Dedalus, the artificer, built the labyrinth to entrap the Minotaur. The ambivalence contained in the juxtaposition of the two names resulting in Bous Dedalus certifies the heros double belonging to the image of the labyrinth creator and the minotaur contained within it. The paradox will later be solved as Stephen will reject the bous appropriateness in favour of the artificer who can take him above and beyond the labyrinth, but who also committed the original sin and lured him down in search of mythic moocows and impossible green roses and the unknown arts.220 As we have seen so far there is an entire plethora of paradoxical and self-reflective symbols, some transformed into epiphanies or even forged into myths, this metamorphose being made possible due to the existence of other, much older myths, which transcend Joyces religious and cultural upbringing. He very much understood that, and resisting the temptation of a forceful rejection of the past with its entire legacy of artistic father figures, tradition and so on, he decided to take it all and remold it into the smithy of his soul, redefining thus the Celtic Revival. Trying to decode the maze of self-reflective myths and symbols that are created in front of the eyes of our conscience one feels amazed at the relativity of ones positioning in the universe generating also a certain feeling that there is an orderly spatio-temporal
219

Thomas S. Staley and Bernard Benstock (eds). In Ireland after A Portrait. Published in Approaches to Joyces Portrait. London: University Pittsburg Press, 1976, p. 214. 220 Thomas S. Staley and Bernard Benstock (eds). A Light from Some Other World: Symbolic Structure in A Portrait of the Artist. Published in Approaches to Joyces Portrait. London: University of Pittsburg Press, 1976, p. 211.

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localization, a sense of identification with the past memory of the universe thus transforming the one aware of this into a universal conscience.

5.2 Water: Another Mater Genitrix of Epiphany

Beyond all theoretical, explanatory definitions or multitude of sources of the epiphany, what is of dramatic importance for our incursion in this meanings maze is the strict classification of all the types of epiphany which serve to better portray their plurivalent aspects. Therefore, according to Morris Beja, one could register an entire palette of distinct epiphanies as they are traced throughout Joyces work: retrospective epiphanies, dream epiphanies present in both Dubliners (Pollys reverie) and A Portrait (after Stephen was ditched and was sleeping in the infirmary), instantaneous, subjective as opposed to objective, climactic epiphanies as they are integrated in a certain context, and of course there are the readers epiphanies in opposition with the narrators epiphany. To this seemingly complete classification one might add the aesthetic arrest epiphany, which John Blades happily coins as estuary epiphany.221 Here we see how, on the one hand, Stephen in a flash of insight recognizes the call of the artistic vocation transfigured into the form of the wading girl, become for him the embodiment of beauty and art while, on the other, the second aspect of epiphany (an enchantment of the heart) is portrayed clearly in the wild transport of delight experienced by Stephen at this sight of the girl, and to some extent shared by the reader through the ecstatic language.222 This kind of epiphany appears to be encompassing precisely the three principles that Stephen postulates in his aesthetic theory. However, Joyces applied Aquinas to literary art proves unquestionably superior to the other arts capacity of arresting the mind as ecstatic language is put in the service of expressing an ecstatic moment resulting in a highly memorable episode for what may be called a somewhat reflection of the trinitary model embodied in the narrator-observed observer, the wading girl-observed observer and the observer reader. The allusion to the Christian and Celtic myth as well as the play of other myth allusions pervade the narrative,
221 222

John Blades. James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: Penguin Books, 1991, p. 77. Idem.

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so it should not come as a surprise the fact that all revealing epiphanies, to which add up quite more significant elements, share an apparent transubstantiation with the mythological dimension even though interpreted in psychological terms. Before embarking upon this steep but rewarding analysis that proposes to examine how deeply the epiphanies are mythologically imbued, one would necessarily map the entire plethora of epiphanies and significant elements present and sharing some common features in both Dubliners and A Portrait. It is of the whole epiphanic kinship between the two literary works that we are taking a clear and concise snapshot, even though not all the roots of the epiphanies in A Portrait may be easily traced back into Dubliners. To start with, there are numerous Celtic (fire, sun, water, air) elements present in both regarded works followed by a multitude of incipient/ young epiphanies (in Dubliners) which aid the writer in creating the full-fathom or mature ones in A Portrait. However, one should keep in mind that Joyce, unlike the Revivalists, did not appeal to an ethnographic redemption through Celtic mythology. One primary example of shared epiphany in both works would be the tram epiphany from A Painful Case (the sound of the tram echoing in James Duffys ears the realization of his loneliness and a premonition of death) which is strongly linked to the three-fold tram epiphany in the novel revealing at first Stephens emotions, transmuting him to a supernatural realm in the presence of Emma next to him, secondly appearing as an objective description providing progressive illuminations towards the process of creation and thirdly as a factor enabling the creation of the villanelle. The death or disgust epiphany from The Dead alludes to the epiphany bearing the same name in the novel only this time is referring to the disgust that Stephen feels when he is shouldered into ditch water by Wells. The epiphany of feminine beauty experienced by Gabriel Conroy solicits the ascendance towards artistic maturity as it is reached by Stephen through the epiphany of the wading girl. In An Encounter we catch a glimpse of the nature of the relationship that the narrator has with his friend, Mahony, exhibiting also some of his feelings, whereas in A Portrait. We are provided with an epiphany disclosing the nature of the relationship that Stephen has with his friend, Heron (and we discover that they are as complimentary as two aspects of the same bird-one physical, the other spiritual). Then there is the narrators epiphany of the triviality of the 153

conversation between the young lady and the two youngsters at the bazaar showing also the illusory nature of love in Araby echoes in a way Stephens epiphany concerning his being different from his colleagues and not only, yielding to a sense of his superiority. A very curious epiphany is the one related to Little Chandlers realization of the coldness of the eyes in the photograph of his wife alluding to a premonition of death or to a deadly loneliness of ones uniqueness. To this epiphanic fragment corresponds a wide range of eye epiphanies in A Portrait following Stephens shift of perception regarding various characters he encounters and their changing nature or Stephens changing mode of perceiving them is rendered through the description of their eyes. There is also to be taken into consideration the dream epiphany which appears in Dubliners as a reverie or pseudo-epiphany as it is lived by Polly, who being a woman, does not appear to possess all the necessary qualities in order to fully enhance a real epiphany, whereas Stephen, though during his boyhood, experiences such an epiphany after having been ditched by Wells and then fell asleep at the infirmary. Another pseudo-epiphany would be the one regarding Evelines attempt to escape, alluding feebly at Stephens more powerful and self sufficient and self-imposed exile. Much more poignant than those epiphanies already mentioned, stands the water epiphany present also in Dubliners but acquiring a complex status reflected in each of the instances that prefigure it in A Portrait, resulting in a fluid picture of symbols, a liquid labyrinth that does not dissolve itself but grows even more with each wave nuance . However, the water epiphanies are not the only ones around which the novel evolves; one could not speak of Joycean epiphanies and omit the crowning epiphany of the bird which insinuates itself from the very first pages of the novel. This primary aspect would be the apologize epiphany immediately linked to the bird-like orb flying in the air, then, as Stephen grows, he experiences the bird-girl epiphany, all of these apprehensions and spiritually elevations converging implacably to Sts realization of his artistic call as he regards himself as both Daedalus and Icar. Both water and bird imagery are so interactively leading to the heros reaching maturity that it becomes even harder to establish which of the two prevails in the artists conscience (even though there are numerous critics who agree on the bird imagery as being the most poignant).What emerges clearly from the marriage between bird and water 154

imagery is the figure of an artist ready to spread the wings of imagination above the luring sea. The maturity of the artistic conscience is punctuated by the rigorous and logically powerful expos of Stephens esthetic theory. Admitting that were dealing with applied Aquinas, the pillars of this theory would inevitably be the key concepts integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony) and claritas (radiance). After establishing a clear-cut distinction between proper, improper and didactic arts, Stephen uses these key concepts to further explain the phenomenon of aesthetic arrest which is due to occur when the subject is dealing with an object of proper art. His brilliant logic does not stop here as he continues to vivisect even the notion of aesthetic arrest down to its essence: proper emotions that could not be but tragic (terror and pity) or comic (joy) which are believed the only ones that could really arrest the mind in an ecstatic admiration or contemplation desire and intellectual categorization are suspended/ eclipsed. Paradoxically, the hero is demonstrating by using all the might of logic appealing also to Christian philosophy and Aristotelian concepts that real art would ideally be able to suspend its viewers rationale, eclipsing ones drive towards intellectual or logical interpretation. Surprisingly, there is a notion of claritas and quidditas even in Dubliners, though not directly referred to: claritas through an apparently trivial incident.... and there is also a sense of emblematic quidditas in Dubliners still.223 As a proof of the strong and close relationship existing between the imageries in Dubliners and A Portrait stands the pillar-like epiphany, reminiscent of the myth of the eternal return (Eliade) which is embodied in the city of Dublin, which, in its utmost abstracted form, appears as the only locus with everlasting sinew for the artist to draw his raw matter for the creative process. Following ancient myths, Dublin emerges as the sacred center, not in the sense that it is a sacred city but it rather represents the genuine spring from which Joyce absorbs the fresh flow of life so ingeniously accommodated in his literary creation. All of Joyces works, including Ulysses, Stephen Hero and Finnegans Wake, are set in dear dirty Dublin, which being an Axis Mundi for Ireland, so does Stephen become the prototype of the Irish creator.

223

Thomas E. Connoly. Joyces Portrait. Criticism and Critiques. U.S.A.: Meredith Publishing Company, 1962, p. 207, 219.

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Around this apotheosis that the artist has created for himself evolves also our paper inscribing the above mentioned epiphanies in a corollary of Catholic, Celtic, Greek, Buddhist, Hindu as well as other mythological interpretations analyzing also to what extent they could be archetypal in nature. When discussing Joycean epiphanies one cannot omit the wide range of connections existent between epiphany and its multiple interpretations as they are offered by the critics. Beyond all these interpretations stands Joyces own definition of epiphany: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.224 Joyces definition of epiphany as it appears in Stephen Hero offers the most comprehensible explanation of this literary device showing that the various aspects implied are just as many proofs of its complexity. However, we are not going to view but some of them which are essential to our thesis as they become recurrent in both envisaged works. An a priori aspect of the epiphany, beyond its denomination borrowed from religion, would inevitably concern its source which is strongly linked to hazard, the instantaneous or spontaneous nature of the trivial things in life that will empirically enable the heros artistic elevation. Still, this does not necessarily mean that the epiphany can be equated to intuitive apprehension - the former being rather objective, while the latter somewhat subjective. Therefore the objects, elements, places, people, images undergo the subjects objective epiphanization. In a boomerang-like effect the apprehension of the artist is directed towards the object (to be epiphanized) which could be identified with the pre-epihanic moment, then the object is indeed epiphanized in an epiphanic instant and finally it returns in front of the heros conscience but bearing a different guise (this is the post-epiphanic stasis) as if its manifestation were its own (the counsciousness that is) and not created or crystallized by the subject/ observer. In this process of identification with the object observed a curious
224

Source: http://theliterarylink.com/joyce.html.

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metamorphose takes place as the epiphanized element becomes pure by the very process of epiphanization, while its observer reaches a pure stasis due to the purity of the object observed. There is a three dimensional transfiguration which imposes itself on the artistic conscience: identification, reaching a pure stasis and radiance/aesthetic arrest when dealing with object of proper art. The route of the epiphany can be captured in a cinematographical focalization, the observed object being submitted to transience from general apparently unimportant background to its decoupage and singling out as a particular object in its utmost essence which in the end shows itself radiant, independent of the initial subject. This complex process could not occur without the implication of a somewhat reversed empathy, referring to the fact that unlike the usual empathy which mainly relates the objects manifestation or aspect to the presupposed feelings of the subject, the reversed empathy assumes the observed has feelings and a life of its own that are absorbed by the subjects conscience. According to the spiritual outcomes that these epiphanized objects induce in the subject and according also to the way in which they occur and following Morris Bejas theory, one might classify them in: retrospective epiphanies, dream epiphanies225 present in both Dubliners (Pollys reverie) and A Portrait (after Stephen was ditched and was sleeping in the infirmary), instantaneous, subjective as opposed to objective, climactic epiphanies226 as they are integrated in a certain context, and of course there are the readers epiphanies in opposition with the narrators epiphany.227 One might add that there is one more kind of epiphany, which pervades the whole novel and without which the literary work would probably not achieve the same grandiose effect. It is the pillar-like epiphany that manifests itself into two concrete aspects which evolve as tightly interweaved imageries throughout the novel: the stages of birdepiphany reaching its ultimate phase when Stephen grasps the wading girls essence and his own artistic identification with Icar and Daedalus. The second pillar-like epiphany that determines not only the evolution of the novel but marks the entire literary universe of creation throughout Joyces other works, too, is the Dublin epiphany revealing the Irish capital as modern myth, inscribing also Stephen as his
225

Morris Beja quoted in http://harvey.cc.binghamton.edu/~mbidney/assets/books/patterns _of_epiphany_bidney.pdf. 226 Idem. 227 For more examples Morris Bejas Epiphany in the Modern Novel is quite helpful.

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own mythical hero of artistic creation. The way in which all the symbologies evolve and so neatly converge towards an unbreakable symbiosis makes Joyces work emerge as a literary diamond providing the reader the chance to contemplate this indestructible beauty, losing and recreating oneself in the many illuminations so finely interconnected. Following the chronological order in which Joyce wrote the two works our thesis envisages, the line of evolution of the epiphanies is also traceable. More concretely, Dubliners particular epiphanic instants are in most part pseudo-epiphanies as they are experienced by women, thus told in the third person, not integrated in the observers conscience, leading to the idea of their somewhat doubtful nature. To mention but three examples of such pseudo-epiphanies one should regard Evelines epiphany of escape, Pollys pillow reverie and Marias epiphany leaving out part of the song. The other epiphanies, bearing some similarities in both works undergo an ascendant trajectory from being experienced by a narrator to a more complex and distilled form as they are lived by an emergent artistic conscience. This unbreakable kinship between the epiphanies existent in two distinct literary works serves one well in the process of a clear mapping of the architectural route of Joycean epiphany. In the development of this self-bred authority we believe that a certain primordial element imposes as within Joyces frame of work it unveils a particular perspective regarding the route of the epiphany. The presence of these primordial elements of matter resolve to highlight the Joycean center and one could say that we are assisting at the birth of a personal mythology with the help of these four fundamental elements: water, fire, air and earth. The first category being that of the earth, matter of percussions, place for gestures like crushing, cutting, modelling, the second one being that of the fire that provokes gestures of heating, bake, melt, dry, deform, and the third one is given to us by the water with her techniques of diluting, melting, washing, etc. And, finally, the fourth element that of the air which dries, purifies and revives / revigorates.228 Water and its secular symbolism inspired Joyce with creative lan. Most of the Joycean protagonists experience and treasure this elements dimensions as they are presented by Durand: its universality: the democratic equality and constant, its vastness, its
228

Gilbert Durand. The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary. London: Boombana Publications, 1999, p. 46.

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profoundness, the unsettledness of the waves and particles, the independence of its units, its variability, its hydrostatic tranquillity, its hydrokinetic unsettledness, its subsidence, its sterility in the ice blocks, its climatic and commercial meaning, its preponderance and hegemony, its stability and its capacity of diluting and preserving in the solution all soluble substances, the erosion, the fluxional deposits, the density and the volume, its stillness, the gradation of its nuances, its reverberations and ramifications, the violence and its mysterious quality, the simplicity of the composure, its healing qualities; its boiling, its perseverant capacity of penetration, its properties of cleaning and clearing, its infallibility, its metamorphoses, its strength and variety of forms, its solidity and docility, its utility, its potentiality its ubiquity.229 As we can see the dimensions embraced by the water form multiple rays of meaning, and by making frequent appeal to it (the water), Joyce succeeds in accommodating his plurivalent totality. Fire is of similar importance to Joyce for it proves to unfold also in a myriad of rays; there is another aspect to be taken into consideration: the ways in which these two primordial elements (fire and water) interact. In contrast with the fire of hell, Joyce also considers fire as divine, acquiring a promethean meaning. Just like the water, the fire encloses and displays a variety of primordial dimensions, be they self-explainable or traceable through the protagonists experiences. Air facilitates ones access to unknown realms. Not surprisingly, the first beings which explore the sky are presented through the ornitologic symbolism. The air proves to have sacred qualities, it mobilizes and it modulates. Therefore the birds seem to remain the closest to the primordial essence of the air and that of freedom (artistic liberty also). Earth embodies the dimensions of Mother Geea. The Joycean protagonist feels Pax super totum sanguinarium globum. (A Portrait, p. 236) Thus, earth is not only a generating source of individuals, but it also represents the sacred ground of those who are born on / from it. Without neglecting the importance of the other natural elements in the constituence of epiphany, paying thus much tribute to the Romantics who exahlted nature, by the end of the novel Joyces unveils his fondness for the water element. Returning to the primordial element
229

Ibidem. p. 310.

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that was mentioned first and by interpreting it within a Celtic mythological framework, one discovers that since ancient times the Irish were very much preoccupied with the supreme significance of water. This particular concern is clearly reflected in the wide range of Gods and Goddesses associated with the various forms of water during those times. Therefore, there were recorded approximately thirteen water Celtic Goddesses: Abnoba - goddess of rivers and forest, Adsullata - goddess of river Savus, Ancamna - water goddess, Arnemetia water goddess, Aveta - mother goddess associated with fresh water spring at Trier (now present Germany), Belisana - goddess of lakes and rivers, fire, of light and crafts, Coventina goddess of wells and springs, Dea Matrona - divine mother goddess and goddess of the river Marne in Gaul, Dea Sequana - goddess of the river Seine, Iconellauna - water goddess, Tamesis - goddess of the river Thames, Verbeia - goddess of the river Wharfe, 230 and merely four male deities that were believed to hold the patronage of water: Abandinus - river gos, Arausio - water god, Barinthus (Manannan mac Lir) - god of sea and water, Borvo - god of mineral and hot springs. Could it be just a fortunate coincidence between Joyces care towards the sea of meanings comprised by the water and the wide palette of Celtic water deities? Taking into consideration the authors upbringing and his thirst for culture and myth one feels that his preoccupation with the meaning of the fluid, if it is not rooted in the ancient water worship it shares at least a mythical concern with the way in which man prefigures his identity in the changing nature of the sea. To the different forms of water correspond just as many instances of human shifting identity, although one could reintegrate all of them in six main categories based on three oppositions: life-dead water, static-kinetic water, and terrestrial-cellestial water. In other mythologies the life and dead water are merely viewed as complimentary, for the dead water, besides its unpleasant aspect of dirty muddy and opaque water leading the dead bodies in hell, it also has magic healing properties. For instance, in the Romanian mythology it is believed that the heros dismembered body could be remade with the help of this water. The life water - clear, flowing or kinetic and transparent - gives back the life of the soil, plants, and people. Due to its representation in non-divine form it confirms its connection with the land but being also able to move in space by magical means, thus explaining the idea of
230

www. Wikipedia celtic dictionary.

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spiritual elevation or flight, as it appears in Romanian mythology, according to Kernbachs Dicionar de mitologie general. 231 Beyond all positive interpretations, water is mainly perceived as related more to death than to life, and its evolution is always seen as a transgression from light into dark in an irreversible process. Never does the opaque, muddy water turn into clear crystal water. The process is always the other way around leaving the impression of a personified water undergoing the process of birth after which descending/ flowing slowly into death. According to Bachelard one may experience reverie in the vicinity of clear water, with innumerable reflections, but it will still end up as a sad dark one that transmits strange, somber whispers; the dawning reverie in front of the water that in the end gathers its dead bodies will die itself also like a dark universe.232 Surprisingly, when dealing with Joycean water the itinerary is somewhat reversed: the water is no longer a slow yet sure entering into death but a reawakening from it, water becomes a mirror for the artists spiritual becoming and a continuous presence of his death. According to Durand, no matter under what form the water may appear, it is still seen as a death epiphany, even when it is clear and flowing, for even this flowing233 suggests a finitude, an end. In the first envisaged literary work, Dubliners, the water imagery shares some similarity traits with the dimensions embraced in A Portrait the shared aspects of water would be: that of sacred, pure water, transgressing into the dirty and muddy water, the everchanging water reflecting also mans impermance of materiality as well as fixed identity, and ending with the authors return in both literary works to the purest form of water. Therefore, it is not a mere evolution from the darker to a lighter aspect of water, but a return to the initial condition prefiguring such numerous other cyclical transfigurations, as many as are required from the artist in order to render the perfectly distilled work of art.

231

Victor Kernbach, Dicionar de mitologie general, Bucureti: Editura tiinific i Enciclopedic, 1989, p. 217. 232 Gaston Bachelard, Apa i visele, trad. Irina Mavrodin, Bucureti: Editura Univers, 1942, p.60. 233 Gilbert Durand. The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary. London: Boombana Publications, 1999, p. 210.

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5.3 The journey of the water imagery in Dubliners

The Chalice as Container of Sacred Water The first reference to water in Dubliners is present from the very first pages but indirectly indicated through its container: It was the chalice he broke That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still They say it was the boys fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him!(Dubliners, p. 17) The chalice as sacred container of the divine substance involves through its breaking disequilibrium of the cosmic order rendering Father Flynns existence as crossed. The priests doubtful religious competence resides in his breaking the sacred container, prefiguring his fall. The boy narrators destiny is given birth under this sign of ill omen as he appears indirectly responsible for the priests gesture, his clumsiness reflecting also his innocence. The circumscription of the water imagery into the religious symbols is reminiscent of Joyces own religious upbringing and his later rejection of Catholicism. The narrators breaking of the chalice reflects in fact the authors liberation from the imposed religious nets; the absence of the substance from the chalice is also indicative of an acute awareness of the emptiness of Catholicism. By devoiding oneself of external, matter-bound rituals, the artist will able to fill the empty vessel with all the mighty of his creation. We do not notice a direct indication of this fact in Dubliners, but even its mere allusion serves as a strong connector of the boy narrators gesture from The Sisters (the glass of wine received by the boy at the table (altar) brings this sequence to its climax. 234) to Stephens later repudiation of the Catholic rite when he tells his mother Non Serviam.235 In the short story
234

William York Tindall. A Readers Guide to James Joyce, First Syracuse University Press Edition, U.S.A. 1995, p. 17. 235 The phrase Non serviam: I will not serve is used to characterize Lucifers sin, an allusion to Lucifers assertion of non serviam to God in Milton Paradise Lost, where the fallen angel Mammon states that it is Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven. The protagonist Stephen Dedalus later echoes Lucifer in his decision to follow the life of the artist, telling Cranly, I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether

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collection we are dealing with an involuntary expression and manifestation of an innocent clumsiness whereas in A Portrait we witness the overt and deliberate choice of art as definitely superiour even to religion. The indication of the holy water through the presence of its vessel will emerge as a fully radiant presence in the final short story, rendering a cyclical structure of the water imagery, reflecting also the wave-like metamorphosis undergone by Stephen. In the story entitled The Dead the snow image acquires a benevolent ambivalence, intertwining the attribute of static water, its immovability without being impregnated by a stagnating decay, together with the purity of celestial water, Joyce renders what is so often called the snow epiphany, still viewed by some critics as death or paralysis epiphany.236 An incipient phase of transformation contrary to the idea of paralysis is encapsulated in the boy narrators run to the sea. The Sea in An Encounter To the material, fixed, tiny but sacred container of holy water he prefers the vastness of the sea. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships, and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantly dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane (Dubliners, p 22). The unlimitedness of such medium, far from being frightening proves convenient for accommodating the protagonists want of escape, offering the perfect chance for breaking the barriers imposed by school, social or family life. The magnet of the sea mysteries draw the protagonist of An Encounter into another level of being, blurring the apparent stability offered by the family shelter. It is in the nature of children to feel estranged from their families, or even adopted thus offering an adequate explanation for the protagonists attitude
it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church. Eamonn Hughes maintains that Joyce takes a dialectic approach, both assenting and denying, saying that Stevens much noted non serviam is qualified I will not serve that which I no longer believe, and that the non serviam will always be balanced by Stephens I am a servant and Mollys yes. Stephen repeats the phrase non serviam in Ulysses during his confrontation with his dead mother. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_serviam.
236

For instance Jascha Walter in her 2009 study, An Investigation of Parallels between The Sisters and The Dead, p. 11.

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while simultaneously rendering him as a deliberate outcast. Just like an outcast felt also Stephen when he was forced to live outside his family, among mean colleagues and unjust school teachers. The hero knew how to rework all these sensitively harsh aspects into a translation of the authentic Irish spirit as seen through his nicely polished looking glass. 237 Although the protagonist of An Encounter does not perceive himself as a nascent artist, he is aware of the radiant image of the sea before him, and will develop the necessary tools for articulating the sea epiphany in A Portrait with which we will deal when the time comes. The protagonist of An Encounter is at least during this moment similar to an empty vessel absorbing in his consciousness the ray like images of the mysteries contained within the sea. Admitting his condition of an outcast, the only authority he recognizes is that of nature, transforming the sea into a real heaven and also a means for enabling an epiphanic experience: the revelation of what has been merely dosed to him in school. The critical attitude towards school constraints and its flaws is obviously marked by the presence of the word dosed foreshadowing Stephens similar attitude. The interconnections are established not only as a punctuated itinerary from Dubliners to A Portrait but also between the stories themselves. The short storys protagonist that wishes to escape out on the sea eventually does so, unlike Eveline, from the story bearing the same name, who merely indulges in a reverie of escape. Dark/ Impure Water in Araby Following the cyclical metamorphose leading towards an apparently ultimate phase of evolution, the next water image catching ones attention touches upon the darker aspect of water as it is reflected in the muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed a horse or shook music from the buckled harness.(Dubliners, p.30) The entire image is weaved around the material dimension of the stagnate water emphasizing a sombre symbol of decay reminding us of the inexorable transience of time. All the necessary attributes are
237

Quoted from Suzette Henke. James Joyce and the Politics of Desire. New York: Routledge, 1990, p.12.

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present in order to better portray the lowest and most impure form of water present in Dubliners, alluding to the water that carries the dead bodies on the river Styx. The image is further amplified with hell decorum elements ashpits and dark odours foreshadowing the same elements that Stephen will apprehend during the hell sermon. Fluidity generally associated with change and thus rebirth does not represent an attribute of the muddy water. On the contrary, the viscosity of the substance implies a general stagnation, an entire abandon to sorrowful sin, the dark odours reflecting Stephens walking among horse piss and rotted straw(A Portrait, p. 82) odour in order to calm his mind, to appease his qualms over the sins committed. The mindlessness generated by the olfactive stimuli is not to be mistaken for the tragic emotion of which Stephen speaks in his esthetic theory. In the short story there is not even one precise indication of the effects that the harsh odours might have on the narrator, but they serve well the structural cohesion of the stories. The odours from Araby are strongly linked to the places where one of the gallants was walking. So we went for a walk round by the canal, and she told me she was a slavey in a house in Baggot Street.(Dubliners, 53) The same image of luring sin is envisaged. Perceived as a retrospective epiphany due to the use of past simple and the poetic language suffused with a weaving of overall senses stimuli it allows both the reader and the narrator to glide back to mythical times echoed in the rough tribes. It is the primary occurrence of mythological allusion recorded so far in the short story collection, but it serves the author well into creating an illo tempore238 image. The choice of creating such an image in the middle of the most impure representation of water proves once again Joyces capacity to subvert definite categorization, enhancing thus both sacred and profane. The Chalice, Flood and being liquefied in Araby The counterbalancing of the profane dimension of water is apparent even in the same short story through the presence of the chalice which is bored safely:

238

Termen utilizat de Mircea Eliade pentru a denumi timpul mitic n care a fost creat lumea.

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These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bored my chalice through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires. One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palm of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times. (Dubliners, p.31) The chalice, though broken in the first short story, is now held with sacred care, compensating for a previous loss. The use of religious terminology for describing ones feelings demonstrates the highly spiritual transfiguration which that person is experiencing. It is not an Eros-like love, and neither an agape239 like love, but a blending of the two resulting in a purity of sentiments which reveals a tendency towards iconizing the beloved. Mangans sister accumulates in the narrators conscience at least, all the attributes of the ideal woman that will furnace Stephen with the later, more mature epiphanies (for instance the bird-girl epiphany). Not at all surprisingly, there will always emerge a trace of the Blessed Virgin Mary in almost every Joycean woman throughout the authors work. The consubstantiality that the Joycean woman shares with the Blessed Virgin Mary is comparable to Lucian

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agape - Greek noun meaning love, comparable to the graceful love of God shown in Christ; thus seen as altruist human love as Joseph Campbell presents it in his study Mythic Worlds. Modern Words. California: New World Library, 2003, p.20.

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Blagas apprehension of the primordial mystery contained within the feminine representative,240 both authors relying on Christian myth. Unlike Blaga, who perceives the womans primordial mystery as bursting from satanic origin, Joyce endows the feminine presence with a divine aura inherited from the Mother of Jesus herself sharing thus a celestial, apparently not a Luciferic, dimension. However, if we consider Stephens comparing Virgin Mary with the morning star, which is also a namegiven to the Fallen Angel, the cellestial nature of the wading girl no longer remains restricted to divine, buth shows sparkles of Hell, too. From another perspective, the annihilation of the senses permit a dissolving of the Eros-like love into a full submergence into the unknown caves of the unconscious, conducting to the most abstracted form of love, just like Stephen abstracts the image of the bird girl up to the point of converting her into a form of distilled poetry. The narrator does not give in to an ascetic kind of love, which is devoid of the senses drives, as he appeals to a restabilization of the sensorial plane but in a totally different form: he uses the bodily drives to perform a chaste prayer in the name of love. The object of his initial desire - Mangans sister - has vanished into the abstractedness of his way of building up a genuine love image. The gestures and words that accompany his spiritual instance make one seriously consider that the boy narrator is uttering a mantra, and is transformed through his uttering/ chanting into a shaman; in this trance like state the narrator undergoes a slow process of purification, though not to be perceived as a religious connotation. In the beginning of the epiphany we are told that it was her name which enabled his enacting of the prayer, now it has been replaced by the word love which in its turn liquefies the entire being of the person experiencing it: a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom.(Dubliners, p. 31) According to Veronica Strang, the flood represents rebirth or renewal as Egyptian female water Gods were responsible for the generation and regeneration of the human life.241 This dimension of rebirth ironically foreshadows Stephens baptismal in the water of the canal in
240

Eva-Lucian Blaga: Cnd arpele intinse Evei marul, i vorbi/c-un glas ce rasuna de printre frunze ca un clopot de argint./Dar s-a ntmplat ca-i mai sopti apoi/si ceva la ureche/ncet, nespus de ncet, ceva ce nu se spune n scripturi./Nici Dumnezeu n-a auzit ce i-a soptit anume/cu toate ca asculta si el./Si Eva n-a voit sa-i spuna nici lui Adam./De-atunci femeia ascunde sub pleoape o taina/si-si misca geana parca-ar zice/ca ea stie ceva, /ce noi nu stim, /ce nimenea nu stie, /nici Dumnezeu chiar. 241 Veronica Strang. The Meaning of Water. New York: Berg, 2004, p. 84.

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which Wells ditched him, whereas the pouring of the heart implies the dissolving of oneself into the liquid letters of speech. Similarly, the confused adoration in which the boy indulges, is comparable to the aesthetic arrest mentioned in Stephens aesthetic theory.

Tears in Araby Another manifestation of the narrators being liquefied is found at a material level in the tears. Although tears are often seen as the material expression of suffering (for example when Stephens mother cries and the tears appear to leave unpleasant marks on her face), here they are present as a means of purification. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) () Having been considered as sent from God, thus of divine origin, the tears emerge as mans device towards consubstantiality; they also embrace the imperfectness of the human nature, as in the midst of crying, the eyes turn watery, impeding the subject from beholding a clear image of the reality before him. As a metaphor of transience and evidence of human weakness they also serve as a terrestrially bound link to the divine/ celestial. Not knowing or not being able to identify their exact cause or origin obstructs a clear positioning in a certain classification. At this point we do not know whether they are tears of remorse, of happiness or sadness. In the narrators case the mystery of their origin advances the apprehension of tears as material manifestations of the two emotions capable of arresting the mind, as Stephen sustains when presenting the definitions of terror and joy. The famous ambivalence is properly installed by now in the short story collection and it will further accompany
other radiant water images, and not only, as we follow its stream through the stories.

Rain in Araby For example, the rain compared to the needles of water playing in the sodden beds (Dubliners, p. 31) offers a memorable image of macrocosm pouring itself into microcosm 168

alluding also to the image of Stephens bedwetting. The transmuting of the divine fluidity into a telluric plane - water in the sodden beds- is enabled by the innocent nature of both instances. It goes without saying that the celestial water or divine substance is pure and innocent in its nature, whereas the boys bedwetting is involuntary and childishly innocent. Innocence as the shared feature of two opposing stasis of the same element enables the permanent pendulation between the vertical dimension of water, involving atemporality or eternity, and the horizontal line of evolution, bound to earth, and leading to a certain finitude, which betray Joyces irresolution towards sacred or profane, not recognizing the authority of either but using both for higher artistic purposes. If in the short stories and the beginning of the novel this pendulation between opposing poles persists, the narrator not yielding to either extremes, later in the novel, Stephen goes directly to the essence of things, the core of reality by experiencing successively both profane, then arising from it through the experience of the sacred, and then again giving in to sin and so on; all of Stephens digressions, regressions and progressions represent just as many necessary instants generating emotions, visions, epiphanies articulated by the author through his brilliant use of the liquid letters of speech. (A Portrait, p.242) Tears in The Boarding House Another occurrence of water manifestation is present in Pollys tears, in the scene announcing her presumed marriage proposal. Being a crucial and decisive moment in her life one would read her tears as a natural outburst of emotion but also as a materialization of her fear of the unknown, of the mysteries of the future. Polly sat a little on the side of the bed, crying. Then she dried her eyes and went over to the looking glass. She dipped the end of the towel in the water-jug and refreshed her eyes with cool water. She looked at herself in profile and readjusted a hairpin above her ear. (Dubliners, p. 74)

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The emphasis is not on the unpleasant effects of tears, like in the case of Stephens mother, but rather on the swiftness with which the female representative is able to rectify her emotional balance. Significantly though, after he leaves, she does away with herself very nicely by moving unconsciously from the role of the imperiled maiden to that of the offstage actress preparing herself for a new role in front of the masculine gaze of the mirror () A bobby pin set awry is a convincing detail for a girl contemplating suicide but not for one contemplating an offer of marriage () She is not, for a brief period, masquerading as feminine for any man ()242 Thus the act of crying is not at all perceived as a sign of feminine vulnerability, or weakness as it appears when Stephens mother cries tears of sadness caused by the parting from her son, but as mere means of relief: Pollys tears do not appear to be united with any particular cause, they emerge only as a direct consequence of the long and sustained effort during her performance. In this stasis when she can be herself, Polly is free to let her emotional outburst come out in the open, though in moderate manner. Tears in A Little Cloud In our attempt to develop a sub-classification of water into its multiple variations, the tear imagery proves a poignant and persistent presence throughout the short stories, accompanying the reader in the story entitled A Little Cloud, too. The narrators outburst of tears is preceded by several instances of his childs crying. The child awoke and began to cry. He turned from the page and tried to hush him: but it would not be hushed. He began to rock it to and fro in his arms, but its wailing cry grew keener. He rocked it faster while his eyes began to read the second stanza () He couldnt do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear.(Dubliners, p.92). Generally regarded as a sign of weakness, when dealing with childrens crying, the perspective shifts towards the involuntary expression of a feeling of discomfort; as is the case
242

Garry Martin Leonard. Reading Dubliners Again: a Lacanian perspective. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993, p. 141.

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with babies, crying becomes a form of communication by uttering ones requests or complaints. Thus the tear is rendered as a built up bridge between two different realms: that of adults and that of small children. However, it is up to the adults, who seem to hold the authoritative stance, in which way and to what extent the two realms manage to connect. Little Chandlers fatherly reaction of wanting to simply stop the babys crying is not the best example of such parent - child connection. As a direct consequence, he too, will have the eyes filled with tears,243 although they are not the eyes that burned with anguish and anger of one driven and derided by vanity (Araby, last page of the story). Still, Little Chandler shares the narrator of Arabys vanity in his quest for Eastern enchantment. Surely, they are not Gabriels generous tears, but tears of remorse. These are not tears likely to connect him with any other being in empathetic identification, but tears of remorse, surely among the most wasteful to be shed, because they are the least likely to lead to any transforming perception.244 They are the tears of Chandlers fellow clerk, Bob Doran and also Joe Donnellys for days gone by. () Ordinary as it may be, the troping of the infant as a little lamb of the world implicates Annie in the power of metaphoricity that Chandler seems radically disabled from ever achieving. We are all in our own ways little lambs of the world, and Chandlers refusal to recognize that vulnerability is what seems to disable him.245 Chandlers ante posed diminutive sustains his image owing to vulnerability, a weakness which is translated into tears expressing regret not for having been imprisoned by marriage, or for remaining stuck in dear dirty Dublin, but for becoming aware of his lack of power- the power that the metaphor requires: he is not able to sound the Celtic note and can merely indulge in melancholy and victimization. In this story precisely the first direct reference to the Celtic empowers the inevitable network of mythical allusions and plays of such allusions persistent throughout Joyces work. Tears in Counterparts

243

Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened while the paroxysm of the childs sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes. (A Little Cloud, p. 94). 244 Earl G. Ingersoll. Engendered Trope in Joyces Dubliners. U.S.A.:Southern Illinois University, 1996, p.124. 245 Idem.

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Under the same sign of victimization is concentrated Toms squeal of pain: The boy uttered a squeal of pain as the stick cut his thigh. He clasped his hands together in the air and his voice shook with fright. O, pa! he cried. Dont beat me, pa! And Ill Ill say a Hail Mary for youIll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you dont beat meIll say a Hail Mary (Dubliners, p. 109) The brutish gesture of the boys father reflects his desire to compensate for the frustration of his lack of money, which would open for him the gate to mundane pleasures.246 Identifying Mr. Farrington with the representative of Irish masculine authority, his son emerges as the victim of Irish oppressive nationalism, echoing Stephens fright of getting entrapped in its nets. Interesting is the fact that the boy appeals to religious ovations in order to appease his father being transfigured by fury; the liturgical language should be the only one capable of softening and taming Irelands thirst of victims, voiced through his fathers tat dsprit. The direct reference to the Blessed Virgin Mary further amplifies the redemptive role of religion but more specifically the role of supreme/ absolute woman that the Mother of Jesus acquires in A Portrait. Water Imagery in The Dead
You can never step into the same river, for new waters are always flowing on to you. - Heraclitus

A far more complex web of symbols acquires the water imagery, under its many aspects, in the final short story of the collection: river, rain, dew, tears etc. However, we are about to focus our investigation mainly upon the most emergent water form: snow and tears, be they of Grettas or Gabriels, which will be triggered later marking his nascent sensitivity, as this symbol serves to better portray the spiritual transformation that the protagonist undergoes showing also certain reflection from Joyces own life as well as Stephens
246

() she brushed against his chair and said O, pardon! in a London accent. He watched her leave the room in the hope that she would look back at him, but he was disappointed. He cursed his want of money () His heart swelled with fury and, when he thought of the woman in the big hat who had brushed against him and said Pardon! His fury nearly choked him. (Dubliners, p.106, 107)

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evolution. The basic opposition on which the imagery is built envisages its two complementary sub-images of water and fire embodied by or prefigured in Gretta and Michael Furey on the one hand, and Gabriel Conroy on the other. Starting off from a Celtic algorithm of interpretation, strongly blended with, and without which it would not otherwise stand, Christian myth reverberation, one discovers, as is the case with Joyces work where nothing is arbitrary, that Gabriels name is of religious origin. Several polarities between Michael and Gabriel as angels namesakes appear. The first involves a difference in the rank between the angels Gabriel and Michael. In the angelic hierarchies Michael as an archangel has precedence over Gabriel as an angel, a relationship which is probably exemplified in the ascendancy of Michael over Gabriel in the memories of Gretta.247 The second polarity involves the elements in nature which these two angels represent. In both Jewish and Christian religion the four chief angels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Uriel, are correspondent with the four elements, seasons and directions. Michael represents symbolically the element water, is called the Prince of Snow and Gabriel represents fire, he is called the Prince of Fire.248 The protagonists indirect placement into the fire realm249 prompts his aloofness under the form of a self-wrapping unquenched fire, seemingly capable of burning the ardent love itself. He is so immersed in his own fictional self, to borrow Garry Leonards term, which was made of his educational and social background, that he is rendered incapable of such human feeling as love. Observing Joyces paradigm of self revealing contrasts, one will shortly notice that love is immediately and perfectly accommodated by the symbol of water. While his university acquired culture seals Gabriel up into a tight waterproof package (once again as an anticipation of Stephen Dedalus), uneducated Gretta threatens to unwrap him with her story
247

Thorsten Klein. An Analysis of the Short Story The Dead by James Joyce. Language and Arts disciplines, Grin Verlag, 2007, p.12. 248 Thorsten Klein. An Analysis of the Short Story The Dead by James Joyce. Language and Arts disciplines, Grin Verlag, 2007, p.12. 249 We refer to this fire realm as different from Hell, as merely the nature domain to which Gabriel Conroy is set due to his name.

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of passion.250 Gabriel has to first melt this intellectual fire burning within the logic and education that were imposed on him as well as the dull fires of his lust (Dubliners, p. 250) in order to let room for more human feelings to dwell. Certain intellectual development or status is commonly associated with a considerate amount of pride that accompanies its owner, idea strongly enhanced by Gabriels name origin belonging to the realm of fire. Consequently, Gabriel reiterates Lucifers sin of pride foreshadowing also Stephens utterance of the famous Non serviam reply. Pride or that complacent concentration upon the self which seems a cause of his incapacity for loving yields to a kind of generous impersonality, accompanied by pity, and sympathy, not for himself this time but for the others.251 This opening up of the shell of self does not come out ex nihilo. For great enlightenment even greater causes and circumstances are needed. Among several such factors which are due to arise throughout the story, the main one is embodied by Gabriels wife, Gretta, whose pertaining to the water realm becomes apparent from her predisposition to love and her sensitivity aroused by the ballad. The outburst of tears that the song Lass of Aughrim unchains in her establishes her as both a water related being and a symbol of love. In the same sense, her tears become the emblem of her love. In The Dead there is present the earliest phase of the theme of necessary dive, which will accompany the Joycean protagonists in the following later works. According to some critics, Joyce owes much of his method of immersion to his lover who seems to have inspired him in this way. In love letters to Nora, Joyce refers to her as his dark-blue rain-drenched flower252 and to her eyes as strange beautiful blue wild flowers growing in some tangled, rain-drenched hedge.253 Moreover, the ballad that Michael Furey sings in The Dead, and which causes the transfiguring tears of Gretta and Gabriel is about a woman and her baby abandoned by the
250

Garry Leonard. Reading Dubliners again - A Lacanian Perspective. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993, p.295. 251 William York Tindall. A Readers Guide to James Joyce. U.S.A.: First Syracuse University Press Edition, 1995, p.43. 252 Richard Ellmann. James Joyce. New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 267. 253 Richard Ellmann. James Joyce. New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 267.

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father to whom they call from out in the rain: The rain falls on my yellow locks/And the dew it wets my skin; /My babe lies cold within my arms, /Lord Gregory, let me in. 254 The ballad which marks both Gretta and Gabriel is in fact a mise en abme of their own present situation for in it lies concentrated Grettas attempt of liberating Gabriel from his self-enclosed dry security. The cry voiced in the ballad is materialized under the form of piercing tears, not induced by the subject of the ballad in itself but by the personal intimate memory that The Lass of Aughrim reveals in Gretta. As she herself admits, the ballad reminds her of a seventeen year old boy, Michael Furey, a former boyfriend, who used to sing this, and caught his death because he stood in the cold rain to bid her good-bye. It appears that the power of love reaches from the seemingly forgotten past and his memory becomes similar to fingers running upon the wires (Araby) of Grettas harp like soul. In a domino effect Grettas tears will later trigger Gabriels. However, it is not only his wife that will act as agent in Gabriels necessary immersion. A closer look upon the reason for including the ballad in the story as well as the revealing of the origin of Michael Fureys character will multiply the revelatory meaning of the whole water imagery present in The Dead. According to Richard Ellman, for creating the character of Michael Furey, Joyce blended two lads who had courted Nora Barnacle: 255 Michael Feeny, dead at sixteen and Michael Soony Bodkin who actually came to sing outside Noras window on a rainy night. Joyce was so fascinated and obsessed by Noras feelings for the young men she had met before him, whom he tried to empathetically render them in a poem he wrote about Nora and the dead lover, called She Weeps over Rahoon.256 The including of the character of Michael Furey in the story serves a double target: Joyces

254

Don Gifford. Joyce annotated: notes for Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. London: University of California Press, 1982, p.124: The words of the song (incomplete) which Nora Joyce could recall and she sang to Joyce (quoted by Richard Ellmann in James Joyce [New York: Oxford University Press, 1959] p.295): If youll be the lass of Aughrim/As Im taking you mean to be/Tell me the first token/That passed between you and me/O dont you remember/That night on yon lean hill/When we both met together/Which Im sorry now to tell./The rain falls on my yellow locks/And the dew it wets my skin;/My babe lies cold within my arms:/Lord Gregory let me in. 255 Richard Ellmann. James Joyce. New York, London, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 386. 256 The poem reads as follows: Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling,/Where my dark lover lies./Sad is his voice that calls me, sadly calling,/At grey moonrise./Love, hear thou/How soft, how sad his voice is ever calling,/Ever unanswered, and the dark rain falling,/Then as now./Dark too our hearts, O love, shall lie and cold/As his sad heart has lain/Under the moongrey nettles, the black mould/And muttering rain.

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attempt to portray Noras feelings, on the one hand, and is also employed as an integrating part of the water-fire antithesis, on the other. Michael Furey belongs to and represents the water realm as in Christian religion he is the Prince of Snow, as we have already mentioned. Michael, Hebrew for Who is like God? is the warrior angel, the Church Militant. He is also the heavenly recorder of mens deeds. () He is the warior angel of the Last Judgement. One of his missions is to bring the souls of men to judgement. This is exactly the role Michael Furey plays in The Dead, he brings Gabriel to a judgement of himself.257 We will return to our personal conclusion on whether or not the character from the past succeeds in redeeming Gabriels soul or renders him as just another living dead among his Irish fellows. The first clue pointing at his initiatory plunge occurs under concrete form in the moment when Gabriels soul breaks free from previously imposed nets, and yields to liberated yet vulnerable existence- a moment marked by insatiable burst into tears: Generous tears filled Gabriels eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. (Dubliners, p.255) The tears become thus an empowered initiatory device, after having successfully traversed an itinerary of conquering ones ego recalling also the celestial origin of tears. Although the healing process appears to have completed it is only the beginning of it. The complexity of the tear imagery is amplified through that of the snow, another transfiguring Joycean element. As the imagistic of fire melts into the imagery of snow and cold there is a deepening effect on Gabriels conscience as well as in the readers. There is a simultaneous
257

Thorsten Klein. An Analysis of the short story The Dead by James Joyce. Language and Arts disciplines, Grin Verlag, Norderstedt, 2007, p.12.

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minimization and vanishing of the former ego, letting room for the expansion of the new self. Gabriels initial fear of snow reflected in his obsessive use of the galoshes, which Gretta naturally disliked, is slowly replaced by his association of snow with freshness - a metaphor of his rebirth. The symbol of snow unfolds in a trinity of meanings: coldness, frozen water, and ultimately the metaphor of redemption. The snow imagery incorporates more symbols than some critics have previously been accustomed to point, playing insistent note on the metaphor of paralysis. Primarily associated with coldness, the snow imagery offers a definite explanation for Michaels (Prince of Snow) pertaining to the snow realm, deepening and extending his ghost like appearance, and therefore ethereal in nature, into what comes to be a metamorphic agency for both Gretta and Gabriel. However, due to Grettas pertaining to the watery realm, as she conjoins both water and love in her emotional outburst materialized in tears, her transfiguration seems rather predictable, whereas in Gabriels case the metamorphose requires much more than merely Michaels indirect agency. There is needed an entire set of factors the ballad with its triggering of Grettas memory of Michael, Grettas tears, Michaels tears, his reflection in the mirror at Grettas window by the light of the lamp in the street which converge and culminate to what appears to be the climactic agency image: the snow. Despite the realm in which Gabriel is circumscribed, due to his predestined name if we consider its religious origin Prince of Fire he will eventually succeed in conquering all the fires within his self (fires of education, pride and lust) only at a certain moment. This moment occurs only when he is ready to open his self up to the coldness of Phoenix Park and accept and even embrace the refreshing coldness within the snow image. In this entire process, the name of the park is not at all arbitrary, implying the presence of the firebird capable of rising from its own ashes, echoing also Gabriels awakening to the death (by turning to ashes) of his former ego, immediately replaced by his fresh improved self. The phoenix becomes Gabriels emblem in this sense (foreshadowing Stephens evolution under the sign of the bird imagery strongly intertwined with the water imagery). The idea of rebirth goes hand in hand with the second interpretation of the snow image which is strongly connected to its very source or chemical composition: water that had been frozen. Water, being a symbol of life, explains more clearly why the protagonist is capable of 177

spiritual rebirth. At the opposite pole lies the significance of water as death, reflected in the inexorable passage of time. One cannot live without dying, and one cannot be reborn unless they first die. According to Florentina Anghel when referring to Bachelards view of water rapported to Joyces work the water reflecting spiritual becoming will always defy the laws of nature by undergoing a reversed evolution: not from life water to death water as Bachelard demonstrates, but from death water to rebirth water.258 However, the snow does not concentrate such fluid image of ever flowing life and death but a frozen instance of the ambivalence. The suspension of both poles resides in Gabriels consciousness rising beyond life or death.259 From a much broader perspective Gabriels decision to go westward, suggesting an internal death, reflects in fact Joyces determination for the death of the authors subjectivity in favour of the nascent impersonality, an artistic resolution which will pervade all the Joycean works to come: A Portrait, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The ultimate phase of snow is reached in the metaphor for the potential redemption, springing from a westward journey, on the one hand, and the concrete evidence of this existent in the short story: the snow cloaks the statue of Dan OConnell who is the Liberator,260 which is furthermore sustained by the detachment stasis inferred in the final lines: His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.(Dubliners, last page) The impersonality triggered by the closing lines highlights also an all embracing ambivalence: descent upon all the living and the dead marks dissolution of being up to the point of trans-consubstantiation, where one knows no longer whether the snow is personified or the character becomes an element of nature. The color of snow glides over ones grid of identifying meaning towards the first word opening the final short story: Lily, which also unfolds in a trinitary of meanings: the name of a servant girl, the flower used at funeral ceremonies, but also at the ceremony of
258

Maestru n descrierea apei ostile, a apei negre n devenirea ei material ireversibil, Bachelard nu s-a gndit poate c apa, reflectnd devenirea spiritual, poate sfida legile firii. La Joyce apa, dei isi pastreaza legatura indestructibila cu moartea, isi asuma o devenire inversa celei prezentate mai sus, fiind o oglinda a devenirii spirituale a artistului si o continua prezenta a mortii lui inexorabile(...) p. 195 from James JoycePortret al Artistului n Tineree - o lectur poietic by Florentina Anghel, Craiova: Scrisul Romnesc, 2006. 259 William York Tindall. A Readers Guide to James Joyce. New York: First Syracuse University Press Edition, 1995, p.47: Accepting snow is accepting life and death. 260 William York Tindall. A Readers Guide to James Joyce. New York: First Syracuse University Press Edition, 1995, p.47.

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resurrection at Easter, and ultimately Gabriels emblem261 and the key term for the entire story, enclosing both life and death. All the three emblematic elements triggering spiritual elevation- lily, snow, tears- share a common framework of purity enhancing the idea that the main storyline follows in fact a sort of ceremonial service for Gabriels baptismal at the altar/ pyre (as he is the Prince of Fire) of his redemption. Much of Gabriels evolution resembles Stephens in many aspects (water and bird imagery, woman as agency, baptism), with which we will deal later in a separate chapter. Consequently, it is the tears that validate Gabriel Conroys passage into another more sensitive realm, as successful, underlying the plunge that Stephen, too, will undergo in A Portrait. In Joyces fiction it would appear that learning occurs in opening oneself up to another figure, an author, a character, an individual, and allowing the other to pierce ones emotional, spiritual, and intellectual defenses. Reading Joyce requires a plunge.262 Rereading the whole story in the light of the newly discovered meaning shed by the presence of the lily, snow, tears, to mention but a few images, there is a certain polyphony of symbols which the reader has to embrace in order to grasp the complexity of the work. James Joyce turns and returns to water following also the concentricity of meaning prefigured both horizontally and vertically, for Gabriels tears as drops of life water in the ocean reestablish ones condition as both significant, sharing kinship with the perennial aspect of ocean, and insignificant, rapporting oneself quantitatively to the immensity of ocean in which the indifference of the universe is reflected. Water imagery in Eveline The theme of escape and frustration link Eveline closer to the protagonist of A Little Cloud than to the boy-narrator in Araby or Gabriel Conroy from The Dead.
261 262

Ibid,48. Harold Bloom. James Joyce. New York: Library of Congress Cataloging -in-Publication Data, 2009, p. 177.

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Eveline, just like Little Chandler fails to take the chance of promised escape, and puts against it the fixity and stability of a more bound to earth life: the known discomforts of family life seem incomparably smaller than the unknown shortcomings that a new life might bring. Although Little Chandler seals his frustration through crying, Eveline is rendered by the end of the story as no longer capable of any reaction making it somewhat difficult to establish a clear emblem for her character. Following the female protagonists line of evolution one discovers it is but an ebb wave: it advances with an apparent opening up towards what may seem a better prospect, it is washed away by several meaningful ill omen elements, and ends up in a regressive position back from where she started of suspended immobility on the female characters behalf. The first phase of this evolutional loop can be traced in the opening of the story: Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes. Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave her home.(Dubliners, p. 37) For a considerable part of the narrative Eveline seems excited at the thought of leaving all the housework worries behind, doubled now by the death of her mother, and becoming a respected lady in the prosperous city of Buenos Aires. However, she is as undecided as enthusiastic as she may seem, weighing and turning and returning in her mind the potential consequences of her decision to leave. Brooding upon the idea of escape by the sea is somewhat explainable as the water, according to Veronica Strang, promises renewal and regeneration.263 Up to this point she is elevated on the wave of rebirth at mental level only, even though she does not seem too convinced about this elevation.She had consented to go away, to leave her home. Was that wise? She tried to weigh each side of the question.(Dubliners, p.38) Dreaming about leaving the homeland by the sea and having as suitor a sailor definitely place Eveline in the family of water related Joycean characters. The theme of emigration immediately arises in direct connection to this promised better prospect and permits one to further relate it to Joyces actual life.

263

Veronica Strang. The Meaning of Water. New York: Berg, 2004, p.84: Female water gods were responsible for the generation (or regeneration) of human life. Gor example, the Roman Egeria protected unborn children and the Greek Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility, rose from the waves as the Roman Venus.

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When Joyce himself was writing this story in the late summer 1904, emigration with Nora was in his mind () Its Joyce;s inventing a story in which he can play with a putative identity and mix together truth and fiction, what might or might not transpire. Its in that sense a what if story (...) Here in Eveline there is a mixture of concerns, including how he as Frank might appear to Nora as Eveline.264 Similar identifications can be applied in the case of other Dubliners characters forming a couple: Gabriel and Gretta, for instance, the wannabe couple Mangans sister and the boy narrator, Emily Sinico and James Duffy from A Painful Case, Little Chandler and his wife, Annie, in A Little Cloud. Most of these fictional couples serve also to catch a glimpse of several episodes from Joyces real life with his life companion, Nora. Returning to the story in question, Eveline could be further inscribed in the water imagery through her refraining of future potential tears:She would not cry many tears at leaving the Stores.(Dubliners, p.38) The imagined withheld tears indicate the incipient phase of a sentiment of insecurity; by voicing the denial of her fear, that she would in fact end unhappy on foreign land, unveils Evelines frail attempt of self-encouragement. Unlike the generous tears cried by Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of The Dead, Evelines withheld tears do not present a transfiguring function; not even being materialized, they show Evelines self-enclosure without a glimpse of distant, later or potential opening up of the shell of self. The above quoted phrase portrays in fact the female protagonists embarking upon a different wavelike loop of evolution; far from opening unknown gates towards her own sensibility or realization, as is the case with Gabriel, the uncried tears of Eveline set her to the path of resistance to rebirth: the withheld tears become an emblem for her withheld evolution. From another angle, and more concretely, the tears also serve to link the female protagonist to the water realm although she does not fully account for this. The tears remain unshed, even in the final part of the story: Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish. (Dubliners, p.42) the tears are replaced by a cry and not crying (our emphasis added). The backward trajectory of the wave is paralleled and fully reflected by a number of ill omen elements which accompany Eveline on the road towards back-from-where-she264

David Pierce, Saying Goodbye in Eveline,published in Reading Joyce, Pearson Education Limited, United Kingdom, 2008, p.98

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started. Among such several elements we are about to analyze: the boat and its blackness, the mournful whistle, Frank as sea-monster/ lover but also as a figure of the shore. The first ill omen element appears when: Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in beside the quay wall, with illuminated portholes. (Dubliners, p.42) The striking appearance of the boat concentrates in it a double ambivalence confessed by its blackness and its quality of carrying one to a different realm, on the one hand, and the simultaneous apprehension of the boat as both an instrument of death and rebirth, on the other hand. Firstly, the idea of blackness comprises the mystery of the unknown or even of the unconscious, recalling Gustav Jungs mater tenebrosum, providing Eveline with a glimpse of the abyss of the sea reflected also in the water vehicle (boat) with which Frank proposeas they should elope. Moreover, the colour black brings with it certain opacity prefigured in Evelines self-enclosure, opacity which is counterpoised with the transparent surface of the sea. From a broader perspective, the boats opaqueness is more a matter of the subjects perception, in this case Evelines, and this mode of perception betrays in fact the bluntness of the Irish nations nets transferred to its subjects. Eveline is therefore so impregnated with her countrys opaque views of social conventionality that she cannot shake off this inherited mode of perception and be able to see things as they really are; from the potentiality of the boat as an instrument of escape she only sees its dark side. As she cannot ascend to transience leading towards transparency she emerges more like an earth related creature than a water related one. Although she turns the waves of a dream of freedom round and round in her mind, their real translation into act is freezed by the blackness of social constraints. All the Irish nets that Joyce feared of being entrapped are prefigured symbolically in this non colour (colour of a dead end) showing Eveline as a victim of such an oppressive Irish mentality. The second ambivalence carried within the boat touches upon the quality of passage on the water. The boat in itself is immobile like the ground in its fixity - it is impregnated with the opaque colour of a dead end: black but it is carried by the translucid waves of the sea to a different realm, and with it may carry other passengers: the static, stable or fixed (bound to earth) becomes mobile through a passivity of letting itself infused with the kinetic energy of the waves. The antagonism transparent-opaque is doubled by the paradoxical 182

coexistence static-kinetic. An ancient idea related to the boats transportation quality leads one back to the myth of Caron, who is said to carry by boat the souls of the dead in exchange for a nickel.265 This myth of transience by water strongly echoes Eveline in her fear of death by drawning. All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her.(Dubliners, p.42) In addition, the close association of the two words black and mass in the depiction of the water vehicle create an expressive image launched by the double meaning of the word mass. Although the primary meaning refers to a large amount or quantity of something, a big surface, another meaning refers to a Church ceremony, more precisely, in Roman Catholic Church, it celebrates the last meal that Jesus ate.266 Therefore, as we were saying, by bringing together the two words in the expression black mass and keeping in mind that the colour black is also the colour of funeral clothing and Mass is a Catholic religious ceremony there is contoured a definite image of Evelines perception of embarking on the boat as equal to her burial ceremony. Instead of using the water vehicle as an instrument of escape, Eveline is freezed with panic induced by her own apprehension of the boat. Up to a certain, rather spiritual point, her premonition is indeed real, for one must first bury the former ego in order to let the new fresh self be born. Evelines premonition of death is further sustained by another element of ill omen prefigured in the boats mournful whistle. The boat blew a long, mournful whistle into the mist.(Dubliners, p.42) For her, embarking upon that boat would actually mean to consent to the burial of her former identity, just as she had consented in the beginning of the story, to go away, to leave her home. (Dubliners, p.38) The personification of the boat portrays the depth of its image acquired in the female protagonists consciousness. Step by step she is turned into a victim of her own panic driven thoughts, which is not entirely her fault, but rather the result of her Irish education. If in the beginning of the story she was undecided whether to choose the promised better future over the stability of her home, she is now mentally and physically immobile due to the overwhelming death imagery reflected (in her
265

George Lzrescu, Dicionar de mitologie, editura Ion Creang, Bucureti, 1979, p 118: Caron- fiu lui Ereb i al Nopii, barcagiu al infernului, care primea sufletele morilor de la Hermes i cu barca lui le trecea pe cellalt mal al Stixului, primind din partea lor o moneda (obol). Caron putea s-i ndeplineasc aceasta sarcina numai daca cel mort era incinerat sau nhumat, dup toate regulile tradiiei, altfel umbra lui rtcea venic pe trmul Stixului. Cteodat, Caron i permitea s treac n lumea venic i cte un personaj viu, care, pentru a fi primit de el, trebuia sa aib totui cu sine o ramur de aur destinata zeiei Persefona. 266 *** Dictionary of Contemporary English, Pearson Education Limited, England, 2005, p. 1011.

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mind) in the whole strategy of escape: the blackness of the boat, its mournful cry, the waves opening the abyss of death and, finally, the image of Frank. The boats signal of departure is counterbalanced by Evelines immobility voiced in a cry of anguish. The third ill omen element emerges in the figure of Frank. Being a sailor, he is immediately and directly connected to the water realm and more precisely grasped as a demonic figure by the shore. Evelines daydreaming about her escape by sea and her anxiety at the dock may be interpreted easily as a reverie or fantasy by the sea, with Frank, like the pervert of An Encounter tugging at her - to draw her into the sea: A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart.(Dubliners, p. 41) Frank appears to her mythically seen, like the demon - lover from the sea. 267 The ambivalence of the nature of Franks character becomes obvious in the mystery of his real intentions; in the story the reader does not get a chance to probe the honesty of his love for Eveline but could not uphold a contrary view either. All of his stories of distant countries and his song about the lass that loves a sailor, which is in fact a mise en abme of the entire story up to a certain point, stand as proofs of his courting talent, but do not display insights into the sincerity of his heart. What comes out for sure is the way in which Eveline perceives him in the end: all wrapped up in the death imagery built up so far by her earlier fearful thoughts that evolved around the image of the sea. The origin of the whole sea fear is well rooted in Joyces much earlier works. The first apparition of the sea in the authors earlier works is captured in one of his schoolboy essays, entitled Trust not Appearances. Even though a fourteen year old teenager, Joyce grasped since then the double nature of the sea and stressed the idea of the inseparability of material surfaces and moral interiours. In his essay he observes:

267

Sidney Feshbach. Literal/ Litoral/ Littorananima - the figure on the shore in the works of James Joyce. published in Anna Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.). Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition. (Analecta Husserliana v.19) Holland: Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, 1985, p. 329.

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There is nothing so deceptive and for all that so alluring as a good surface. The sea, when beheld in the warm sunlight of a summers day; the sky, blue in the faint and amber glimmer of an autumn sun, are pleasing to the eye; but how different the scene, when the wild anger of the elements has awaked again the discord of confusion, how different the ocean, choking with froth and foam, to the calm, placid sea, that glanced and rippled merrily in the sun.268 As Sidney Feshbach upholds, most of Joyces works could and should be interpreted in terms of presenting appearances for a better understanding of the cores as his searching for those double points where the surface and the interiour are inseparable, and as his developing literary techniques for the best presentation possible.269 The second occurrence of the sea is traceable in Joyces volume of poems, Chamber Music, and its image is also submitted to a descending trajectory from visually pleasant to an audible fear and pain.270 This theme does not seem important to Chamber Music, except by implication, for if the waters (and love) at first appear visually pleasant, and later they turn into audible fear and pain, perhaps one should conclude with stoical apatheia, in silence, isolation, and sleep, which appears at the end of several of Joyces works.271 Reading the analyzed short story in the light of these new meanings shed by Joycean earlier works it results that in Eveline the fear reaches its climax and her mothers words!!!Derevaum Seraun! which pinned her to the homeland constitutes her minds arrest. By contrast, the non serviam reply in A Portrait is the expression of a determined volition as the artist manages not only to free oneself from this fear but to use the sea as an instrument of inspiration. As contrasting figures Eveline embodies an ancient Irish world that believes in premonitions whereas Stephen is the representative of the freedom of creation.
268

Kevin Barry, James Joyce-Occasional, Critical and Political Writing, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 15. 269 Sidney Feshbach, Literal/Litoral/Littorananima- the figure on the shore in the works of James Joyce, published in Anna Teresa Tymieniecka(ed.), Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition, (Analecta Husserliana v.19) Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, Holland, 1985, p. 326. 270 Ibidem, p. 328. 271 Ibidem, 328.

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River, Rain and Dew in Dubliners First of all, the river regarded as terrestrially related flowing water appears under different aspects in quite several of the stories in the collection. The dynamic aspect contained within the river imagery bestows the idea of impermanence or discontinuity which can be probed by the multitude of shifting significations that the river acquires throughout the short story collection. A primary and direct reference to the river occurs in Araby where the kinetic flow is amplified by the train in motion. After an intolerable delay the train moved out of the station slowly. It crept onward among ruinous houses and over the twinkling river.(Dubliners, p.35) In this brief episode the river is personified by the use of the epithet twinkling which actually betrays the boy narrators momentarily emotion as we learn about his eagerness to go to the bazaar after being indirectly urged by Mangans sister. Before submitting the sea of epiphanies to an acute analysis let us first consider their preliminary elements, which should not be translated as merely epiphany constituents but rather as Celtic-Catholic elements (directly mentioned or alluded to in both Dubliners and A Portrait), thus inscribed in myth and projecting also the epiphany in the archetypal dimension; therefore they are of primary concern due to their important role in the deciphering of the later emerging epiphanies. Joyces strategy follows the objectivity, in Dubliners at least, of the participantobserver, having a bi-level function: the narrator participates imaginatively in the lives of Dubliners whose experiences are told from a detached point of view, these experiences themselves being ones of detached self-observation - the author endures imaginative selfsubmergence in the object.

5.4 The Epiphanic Sublime: Water Imagery in A Portrait

On the verge of hidrolatry, the Joycean text indirectly pays considerable tribute to the sublime dwelling within water epiphanic imagery. Considered more of an umbrella concept, the sublime, as it appears in Lyotards philosophical system, contentedly grasps the Joycean epiphanys sense of totality. The consubstantiality shared by both epiphany and the sublime 186

relies on a threefold kinship: the aesthetic which is specific for both epiphany and the sublime, the perennial referring more strictly to water occurrences, which are also viewed as sublime objects, reaching what seems to be the ultimate stage of totality: the sacred dimension. Re-envisaging the Joycean definition of epiphany as it is rendered in Stephen Hero: By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments (Stephen Hero, p.211)272 the reader immediately senses the contradictory sign, or queerness as Joyce himself would call it, under which the Joycean epiphany is born. The first apparent feature is that of spiritual manifestation which implies an out of this world quality, intangibility or ungraspability that the epiphany contains and also delivers. Then the spiritual manifestation is further explained and deconstructed into its constituents: speech, gesture, and mind. The antagonistic nature of these elements is further stressed with the help of the opposition triviality-memorablility. Triviality here is not to be equated with what stands for trivial for mere mortals but what shocks the aesthetic conscience in such a way that it determines the mind to retain it. An artists conscience such as Stephens may find as vulgar many other things that usual people do not even retain or memorize. In other words his sensitivity would be bothered to such a degree that the experience itself may trigger a tragic like state. As Stephen himself explains in his aesthetic theory one of the states in which the mind is arrested is the tragic. So often equated by the critics with a state similar to paralysis, this mind arrest state, be it enabled by the tragic, the comic or the aesthetic delight, it surely reveals the effect of epiphany. By drawing its sinew from the blending of contraries, memorability and triviality, the epiphany strikes the viewer (if we are to understand the reader as someone who actually sees and grasps the epiphany) by its very paradoxical nature. Each feature should be entitled to trigger a corresponding feeling in the viewer: the memorability can trigger veneration or utmost admiration whereas the triviality might as well generate disgust in the viewer. The blending of these two opposing feelings dissolve into the mind arrest, that state of amazement that addresses and engulfs the spirit in its entirety, beyond the body-mind categorization or de272

Thomas Burkdall. Joycean Frames: Film and the Fiction of James Joyce. New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2001, p. 28.

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lineation. Who, when confronted with a pure mountain lake or with a spring gushing forth from the rock, has never felt at least something of the awe and veneration that are inseparable from anything sacred?273 When the mind arrest is manifested the contraries, be they at the level of epiphanic features or that of human feeling, are actually (dis)solved. This unifying and elevating state shares certain consubstantiality with the sublime. The sublime has its origin from classical philosophy. During the 18th century, with the rise of aesthetics, the sublime became a subject of debate and controversy. For Lyotard, the most important account of sublimity is found in the work of Immanuel Kant. According to Lyotard, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant distinguishes two forms of aesthetic experience: the beautiful and the sublime. Beauty is a feeling of harmony between oneself and that object: it appears perfectly shaped for ones perception and generates a sense of well being.274 This refers more strictly to the Joycean aesthetic epiphanies. With the sublime the response is more complex. One is simultaneously attracted and repelled by the object, enthralled by it and also horrified. This applies more broadly to all the other types of Joycean epiphany. For Kant the feeling of the sublime appears when one confronts with something too powerful or overwhelming to be able to represent adequately to oneself. The imagination being stretched to the limit trying to represent what is perceived, one feels a simultaneous joy for having grasped such wonder and disappointment for not being able to render it. Thus what causes the sublime feeling is the unrepresentable, but within that feeling it is possible to conceive that there is something. Hence Lyotards formulation of the sublime: presenting the existence of something unrepresentable.275 If other philosophers, like Sartre, stressed the idea of nausea generated by the absence of meaning in life, Lyotard holds the idea of existence as made up of a multitude of events. Amazement, awe, shock, that is the sublime, replace nausea and disgust and convert the lack of justification of life into a reward or a gift. Similarly, Joyce converts the daily bread of existence into an epiphanic sublime. Unlike the Kantian sublime, which is imbued with arrog273

Barry McDonald. Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred. Canada: World Wisdom Inc., 2003, p. 210. 274 Simon Malpas. Jean Franois Lyotard. Canada: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2003, p. 46. 275 Andrew Benjamin (ed.). Judging J. F. Lyotard. New York: Routledge, 2006, p. 50, 51.

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ance, Lyotards sublime is tinged with Christian humility.276 The religious consciousness is also deeply felt in Joyces writing. The religious rhythm that pervades A Portrait is further amplified through the instances of divine or celestial water: sanctifying water, (A Portrait, p.123) Gods water, coldness in his hands, (A Portrait, p.163) purest water, sweet as dew. (A Portrait, p 259) Having reached this final stance, that of the divine, the epiphany claims the reins of totality, beyond the presumed superiority and arrogance of reason (as it is the case with the Kantian sublime, placing thus emphasis on a foreclosed nature of the sublime; a sublime confined in the totality of space and quantity perfectly subdued to the functions of human logic), Lyotard proposes a different kind of totality: a totality that is more permeable and thus more all enhancing. He sees totality as a matter of form as time, not of form as space, as it is the case with the Kantian sublime. Lyotards quod is temporal, but not in the usual sense of temporality as time-consciousness. The postmodern sublime work of art breaks the support of time-consciousness and lets time be, which, for Lyotard, is equivalent to letting being be insofar as he understands being as the concentration of time. Distancing himself from Kants anthropomorphism, Lyotard claims that his aesthetics revives the essential of metaphysics which is a thinking pertaining to impersonal forces much more than to the subject.277 In the same sense the totality of Joycean water in A Portrait is achieved through a variety of epiphanic occurences that by undergoing a sinuous trajectory from the trivial, social, natural water manifestation to the spiritual and ultimately celestial dimension of water. Water lies at the bedrock of all myths and legends, or if not it is at least hinted at, it is all pervasive throughout human existence, be it spiritual or merely physical, it flows in rays and streams upon ones conscience as if wanting to engulf the spirit in its immensity. Therein lay just as many meanings and shifting identities as in the sea depth. No one can possibly grasp the essence or the true noumenon of water in a single writing process: the paradoxes
276 277

Temeneuga Trifonova. Image in French Philosophy. Netherlans: Rodopi, 2007, p. 129. Ibidem., p. 138.

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and contraries it contains blend and delve so naturally, yet so mysteriously in a sublime undecidability that trying to take a snapshot of it (and therefore present it from a unilateral angle) and then proudly proclaim that you have grasped its essence would be similar to falsely asserting that one tried to catch the phantom of life itself and was successful. But James Joyce seems to be very much aware of that as he never stops tackling the issue from the very beginning of his writing career to his final work of art; through the mediation of his characters Joyce manages to conquer his fear of water existent in real life and masterly transforms this overwhelming power of fluidity into his own tool of creation and carefully projects it into epiphany only to ingeniously bring it later to the level of myth. It slowly becomes the divine Joycean substance making the authors genius and inspiration appear quite consubstantial with it. The abundance of water details punctuate the text not only betraying Joyces fondness with this element, be it interpreted as a social, natural, primordial or even acquiring spiritual and celestial dimensions. Water is the unifying element that ties Joyce or delivers him to the plurality it contains, just like an all-engulfing entity, having mythological resonance and up to the most abstract dimension acquired through art. The gradual and apparently unobservable transience that the water imagery undergoes can be briefly associated with a process of emerging from plain everyday meaning (for example the act of bedwetting in the first pages of the novel) to a more complex one (for instance the metaphor of tear), and then inscribed in a much higher abstracted symbol or image (water as celestial substance), which in its turn is exceeded by the aesthetic arrest which takes place in the presence of the sea, and the imagery of course does not stop here in A Portrait and it does not close in this novel either. Let us us proceed with the analysis of the primary dimension of water as it occurs in the novel and which exposes the element in its most trivial aspect. Even though not directly and totally related to the epiphany, these occurrences trigger and impose certain memorability on the protagonist since he insists on presenting them. The first water image appears in the beginning of the novel and shows the child Stephen in an innocent moment of his life: When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it gets cold. His mother put on the oil sheet. That had a queer smell.(A Portrait, p.7) The simplicity of the description unveils the sensory 190

understanding that the child is capable of. It is the primary form of apprehension of water in the novel and it very much belongs to the trivial aspect of this element; hence one could say that we are dealing with only one component of the sublime, more exactlly the negative one. The next occurrence of water imagery manifests in the weakness that the protagonist feels as concentrated in his watery eyes.278 Besides the weakness, there is also inferred the idea of the protagonists situating his sensibility under the sign of spiritual becoming. Here the ambivalence of water is suggested; the watery eyes cannot see clearly nor their owner, and much the less can they reflect the external surrounding world. The confusion rises from undecidability just as it happens with the sublime which is a reunion of two extremes: a positive and a negative one. Surely, at this stage the protagonists watery eyes are not looking for nor grasping the sublime but his conscience is starting to sense that painful uniqueness he is endowed with. Another water image evolves under the form of tear which undergoes a sinuous trajectory from his mothers tears to Stephens own tears. The first day in the hall of the castle when she had said good-bye she had put up her veil double to her nose to kiss him: and her nose and eyes were red. But he had pretended not to see that she was going to cry. She was a nice mother but she was not so nice when she cried.(A Portrait, p.10) The primary function of tear is that of manifested suffering, showing the physicality and triviality of such feeling; the pain being liquified into tear, which becomes a metaphor of transience. His mothers tears are in fact the expression of mourning over change: she will from now on be separated from his son who goes to study far away from home. This suffering is shared by Stephen, her son who longed to be at home and lay his head on his mother lap.(A Portrait, p. 14) Thus suffering and its liquified expression, the tear, strengthen the mother-son bond. In the view of the feminist Julia Kristeva, mother is directly related to the bodily drive that is the materiality of expression. Stephen, though becoming aware of the side effect of crying (it made his mother look not so nice any more) emerges fully into the
278

He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of players and his eyes were weak and watery.(A Portrait, p. 9)

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materiality of the sentiment of missing his mother. The umbilical chord is reset through the triviality of tear - such simple and humble bodily manifestation for triggering the spiritual bond. Although emerging around the sphere of the spiritual, since tears cannot appear outside a sentiment be it of pain, suffering, joy, anger, anguish etc, a somewhat different connotation catch the tears cried by Mr Casey, Simon Dedaluss friend, and the tears cried by Stephens father (Simon Dedalus): Mr Casey, freeing his arms from his shoulders, suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. -Poor Parnell! He cried loudly. My dead king! He sobbed loudly and bitterly. Stephen, raising his terrorstriken face, saw that his fathers eyes were full of tears.(A Portrait, p. 46) Mr. Casey is overwhelmed by suffering at the thought of the dead Parnell, therefore his pain is situated outside the family, in a political hue, empathizing with his favourite political figure. Nevertheless, his tears are also a proof of weakness and vulnerability, taking into consideration that they are cried by a man, the societys male representative who is supposed to maintain an image of unmovable protectiveness and authority. The unusual masculine weakness is further amplified with nostalgic nuance when Simon Dedalus recounts his son, Stephen, of the time when his father had first caught him smoking. Stephen heard his fathers voice break into a laugh which was almost a sob (...) He heard the sob passing loudly down his fathers throat and opened his eyes with a nervous impulse.(A Portrait, p.109-110) The triviality of his fathers tears is enhanced by the presence of the loud sound that the sob presupposes. The tears are cried out in the memory of Stephens grandfather that echoes over time, uniting three generations of male authority: the father of Stephens father, Stephens father and Stephen himself. Thus tear, be it delivered by masculine or feminine subjects, becomes a sublime element (sublime because it reunites the materiality of the bodily drive with its abstract power) that enables the spiritual bond over generations.

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What causes Stephen to actually cry manifests later in the novel when his eyes were dimmed with tears and, looking humbly up to heaven, he wept for the innocence he had lost.(A Portrait, p.166) This time the tears being cried by the protagonist contain a blend of remorse, humility and undecidability. Stephen feels repentant for having lost his innocence, he is also humble as he knows he is in sin but he is not yet determined to confess. The ache of his consciousness tortures him bitterly wrapping his pain in hell like dimensions. In Stephens crying the triviality reaches high peaks since the cause itself that determines his crying is strongly bodily, establishing a non reversible change in him. As an adolescent he reaches what could be termed as bodily maturity, and although he confesses his first sin, he will no longer be the same. The bitter sob is later replaced by the murmuring blood: His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom.(A Portrait, p.169) Another trivial dimension of water, besides the bodily related one (commented above) is strongly related to the social framing of water which indirectly connects with what Bachelard would call evil water.279 The dark connotation that water embraces becomes apparent as soon as Stephen is acquainted with the muddy water and then he gets shouldered into the square ditch by Wells, and he remarks: How cold and slimy the water had been!(A Portrait, p. 11) This episode can be equated with Stephens baptism, his entering into the world that is opposed to the homey atmosphere of his family. Re-memorizing this episode of his life, and fancying his death, Stephen is in fact inviting an obsessive anthology of evil water as the following pages promise. The players are also muddy, the ball has a greasy lace, once his father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin. (A Portrait, p.12) The entire coldness of water becomes an emblem for the worlds indifference. Stephen the child is amazed at the outer worlds coldness reflected in the water and searches for a compensation. The need for compensation is visible when he notices that the white look of the lavatory made him feel cold and then hot. There were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot. (...)That was a queer thing.(A Portrait, p. 12) Waters ambivalence is sensed even at the level of its social framing, the faucet, but it still confuses the child rather than offering any consolation. Almost
279

Apa grea quoted from Gaston Bachelard, Apa si visele, Bucuresti: editura Univers, 1995, p. 54.

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every water image outside his home bears a dark, almost frightening stigmata: at school, the prefects and rats eyes are both slimy, damp and cold, (A Portrait, p. 25) he felt cold before the pandybat, (A Portrait, p. 53) all culminating with his more philosophical exclamation: O life! Dark stream of swirling bogwater on which apple trees have cast down their delicate flowers. (A Portrait, p.299) Through the oxymoronic phrase Stephen reaches a sublime expression of his meditative thought over life, by blending the negative aspect of water with the touch of overwhelming beauty. So the water becomes in its entirety (with positive and negative aspect) sublime. It is not the fact that the positive feature sublimates the negative one, but by their nuances and potentialities combined they intensify one another and the image achieves its sublime. The indestructibility of their juxtaposition and union pleads for the undecidability of whether life is like water or water resembles life. The final image of the water as sublime is reached throughout a strenuous contribution on Stephens behalf to compensate for all the negative features of water that have marked his sensitive consciousness. As it would probably be expected the comfort is found within the homey universe. The hot but weak tea (A Portrait, p.14) becomes watery tea. (A Portrait, p.207) The tea as a form of water becomes at a symbolical level the liquid essence of his home or family. The protectiveness of its warmth reconnects him with his family and reinscribes him to a sphere of belonging. Moreover, it further differentiates and distances Stephen from the other fellow colleagues of his age Nasty Roche and Saurin drank cocoa that their people sent them in tips. They said they could not drink the tea; that it was hogwash.(A Portrait, p.14) The natural forms of water also sustain the artists internal equilibrium:It was the noise of the waves. Or the waves were talking among themselves as they rose and fell. He saw the sea of waves, long dark waves rising and falling, dark under the moonless night. (A Portrait, p.31) The sea water is perceived not just as an ungraspable immensity but as a dynamic undecidability. It is not the water but the waves that draw and frighten the sensitive conscience inducing also at spiritual level an arresting effect. The entire image is estheticized through his poetic and sensitive conscience that what is frightening in the mystery and obscureness of the sea (or its deathlike tone sent together with the mourning of Parnell) 280 has
280

He saw him [Brother Michael] lift his hand towards the people and heard him say in a loud voice of sorrow over the waters: -He was dead. We saw him lying upon the catafalque.

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also a beauty sustained by the sonorous kinetic energy of the waves. The solemnity of the episode enables the contraries to be sublimated and the portrait of the sea reaches its sublime. The rain is also prefigured as a sublime image that evolves from a dark and negative apprehension. Rain was falling on the chapel, on the garden, on the college. It would rain forever, noiselessly. The water would rise inch by inch, covering the grass and shrubs, covering the trees and houses, covering the monuments and the mountain tops. All life would be chocked off, noiselessly. (A Portrait, p. 75) Joyces and Stephens water obsession is now deeply felt since he pictures rain as an epiphany of death. Though a natural manifestation of water, the rain acquires in this portrait the valences of Jungs mater tenebrosum281 the water before the initial creation. The biblical echoes of the flood are also apparent later in the same description of the rain. Birds, men, elephants, pigs, children: noiselessly floating corpses amid the litter of the wreckage of the world. Forty days and forty nights the rain would fall till the waters covered the face of the earth.(A Portrait, p.139) A certain comparison arises between this sombre image of water and the image of snow in The Dead which, in some critics view refers more strictly to the paralysis theme, or a form of death. Stephens evolution in rapport with his own apprehension of water is noticeable in this fragment. He is able to elevate the beneficial qualities of water but he can also fancy its darkest dimension, its huge power. He stretches the imagination beyond limits in order to render a portrait of the unimaginable. His sombre vision of the return to the initial chaos through the banal but obsessive rain betrays also the heros permanent quest for self which must endure many deaths and rebirths in order to reach its maturity.

A wail of sorrow went up from the people. -Parnell! Parnell! He is dead! They fell upon their knees, moaning in sorrow.(A Portrait, p. 31) 281 Carl Gustav Jung, Personalitate si transfer, trad. Gabriel Kohn, Teora, col. Archetypos 3, 1996, p.160.

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Just like the waves he will fall and rise, endlessly and noiselessly. And indeed the sinister quality of rain will be later counterbalanced in his conscience by apprehensions told in totally different nuances. The rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vaporous from point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft cocoon of yellowish haze.(A Portrait, p. 165) A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned into the dukes lawn, to reach the national library before the shower came.(A Portrait, p. 257) The quick light shower had drawn off, tarrying in clusters of diamonds among the shrubs of the quadrangle where an exhalation was breathed forth by the blackened earth.(A Portrait, p. 258) In the first quote the rain is abstracted up to the level of being evaporated in order to confer a unique natural aura to Stephens beloved, Emma. Then the reader understands that the aural endowing rain is of celestial origin, since the sky itself is veiled. The most abstracted form of rain is reached in the final episode when it is distilled under the form of diamonds that deliver the earth from its heavy burden. The contraries are again intertwined to create a sublime image of water, under the form of rain this time. The diamonds, distilled rain drops, prefigure the absolute positive qualities that coexist within the sublime: the celestial and the divine. The Joycean water becomes in this way mysterious and inexhaustible to use the adjectives that Marcel Proust often uses when discussing being, hope, faith, and other similar ideas - adjectives that echo Levinass description of the Infinite. Like the desire for the infinite, mysterious or inexhaustible phenomena are incapable of satisfaction by their very nature. We approach inexhaustible phenomena as mysteries, for their mysterious nature is the source of their inexhaustibility. However, while mysterious realities cannot be known, they are not meaningless. Moreover, they allow us to approach the universal.282 Stephen is now able to accede to the all en-globing aspects of water by acknowledging its potential divine nature in the fountains of sanctifying grace even though shortly after his sin he is suspicious that these fountains will soon refresh his soul.(A Portrait, p. 118) The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and mirrored the highdrifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him.(A Portrait, p.204)
282

Brian Treanor. Aspects of Alterity, Levinas, Marcel and the Contemporary Debate. U.S.A.: Fordham University Press, 2006, p.104.

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The reflection of the sky into the river can stand as a confirmation for waters celestial source. As a reflective surface it transcends both earth, that is matter, and sky, that is the divine. Through the exigency of his aestheticizing faculty he manages to elevate himself as well as the apprehension of water to the sphere of the universal. Stephen transcends his own preconceived ideas related to water and plunges freely into the unknown of potentialities. Transcendence is a journey or a task that will never be completed, a journey that, in some sense, cannot be completed. Thus, we seem to be drawn toward something that does not satisfy and can in no way be satisfying, an assurance that cannot be commuted into evidence. Being - qua Absolute Thou or qua the presence of another being - cannot be grasped and known, only affirmed and invoked.283 The fact that transcendence is never complete does not indicate that it is not experienced. While transcendence is an unending journey there must be the possibility of an experience of transcendence if the term itself is to be meaningful in any way.284 Although the hero in the envisaged novel does not seek God everywhere, he nonetheless envisages this coordinate in a reality that he perceives almost as divine. According to Reza Shah Kazemi failure to see all beautiful things in God violates the aspect of transcendence: for it is blind to the fact that all beautiful things are prefigured in the Divine Principle which infinitely transcends the world; and failure to see the Divine Beauty in all beautiful things violates the aspect of immanence, by being blind to the fact that objects are beautiful only by virtue of the Divine Beauty that is rendered present through and by them. 285 From the three fundamental degrees of Being: the terrestrial, the celestial and the Divine, the celestial felicity is derived from its archetype the Beatitude, proper to the Absolute. 286 Thus, by transcending all duality emerges the conscious realization of the supreme identity, which also entails a state of bliss. In Stephens case this supreme identity is not to be sought outside his
283

Brian Treanor. Aspects of Alterity, Levinas, Marcel and the Contemporary Debate. U.S.A.: Fordham University Press, 2006, p. 106. 284 Idem. 285 Reza Shah Kazemi, Divine Beatitude: Supreme Archetype of Aesthetic Experience, online source: http://www.allamaiqbal.com/publications/journals/review/oct99/4.htm.
286

Barry McDonald. Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred. Canada: World Wisdom Inc., 2003, p. 218.

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consciousness into the almighty entity, but is actually discovered within his self, his creative consciousness. He preaches the religious feeling in front of the divine of reality without offending the Christian God. Throughout Stephen Hero and A Portrait Stephen is confronting the enigma of human nature, which he sees as torn between the Augustinian sense of sin and grace and the Aristotelian necessity of self-realization. When Stephen says that he seeks a bonum arduum (Stephen Hero, 180), his implicit reference to Aquinas (S.T. I-II, q.40, art.8) means that he desires hope; in other words, he fears to be a prey to despair, the sin against the Holy Ghost in Catholic theology, the only sin that cannot be forgiven and entails eternal damnation.287 The themes of grace and of love are merely another aspect of this division of the human subject. As Stephen says in A Portrait, the mystery of the Holy Trinity was easier of acceptance by his mind by reason of their august incomprehensibility than the simple fact that God had loved his soul from all eternity. (A Portrait, p.149) How could he explain himself such an existential issue if not by a certain sublimation? Thus, he chose to express in almost mystical terms his sense of spiritual obligations. That is why he interpreted the both falling into an abyss and redemption through the use of metaphorical Christian terms. Having placed the transcendental quality of God on the duty of the artists becoming, Stephen proves more and more self conscious. Towards the dawn he awoke. O, what sweet music! His soul was all dewy wet. Over his limbs in sleep pale cool waves of light had passed. He lay still, as if his soul lay amid cool waters, conscious of faint sweet music. (...) A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music.(A Portrait, p. 258, 259) Merging his soul with the purest form of water suggests his consubstantiality with the divine. Water symbolizes the soul. From another point of view, but analogously, water symbolizes the materia prima of the whole universe. For, just as water contains within itself, as pure possibilities, all the forms which, in flowing and sparkling, it may assume, so materia prima contains all the forms of the world in a state of indistinction.288

287

Dolf Srensen. James Joyces Aesthetic Theory. Its Development and Application. Rodopi, Netherlands, 1977, p.115, 117.

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In the Biblical story of creation it is said that, in the beginning, before the creation of the earth, the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters; and the holy books of the Hindus tell us that all the inhabitants of the earth emerged from the primordial sea.289 In these myths, water is not meant in the ordinary sense of the word; and yet the picture they create in our imagination is in its own way correct, and as apt as possibly can be, for nothing conveys better the undifferentiated and passive unity of materia prima.() The opened lotus flower, the seat of Indian divinities, is also a throne of God floating upon the water of materia prima, or upon the water of principial possibilities.290 This symbol, which was transmitted from Hindu to Buddhist mythology and art, takes the image of water as the primordial substance of the world to that of water as the image of the soul. The lotus flower of the Buddha or Boddhisattva rises from the rivers of the soul, just as the spirit, enlightened by knowledge, frees itself from passive existence. Here water represents something which has to be overcome, but in which nevertheless there is something good, because in it there is rooted the flower whose calyx contains the precious jewel of Bodhi, the Divine Spirit.291 In a similar way for Stephen the dewy water in which his soul awakens signifies precisely his spirits evolution, his successful transcendence of the formerly evil water image which tended to become obsessive in his mind. Although having reached a certain spiritual maturity, the hero confesses: His soul was waking slowly, fearing to awake wholly.(A Portrait, p.195) Thus he still leaves room for other transcendental experiences to come and does not have the pretense of having grasped a well delineated totality. In a somewhat narcissistic tone, Stephen is portrayed as a sublime figure, the vastness of his being recalling the formlessness linked to the mystery of the sublime water. By borrowing traits from the purest water form, his whole being is liquified into sublime feeling; he lends himself to the water imagery but does not let himself entirely absorbed by it. The act of transcendence is characterized by the fact that it is oriented; it entails intentionality and the transcendent is no doubt definable in terms of the negation of all autocentrism.
Barry McDonald. Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred. Canada: World Wisdom Inc., 2003, p. 209, 210. 289 Idem. 290 Barry McDonald. Seeing God Everywhere: Essays on Nature and the Sacred. World Wisdom Inc., Canada, 2003, p. 209, 210. 291 Idem.
288

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Transcendence, then, is a movement toward the other, toward otherness. Correlatively it is a movement away from the self, or away from self-centeredness. Although the rejection of autocentrism need not entail a demand for pure heterocentrism; there is also the possibility of polycentrism.292 The journey of transcendence is never complete. The other is encountered but not grasped, known but not understood. There are in a decidedly non-dualist sense two aspects of the other person: an aspect with which participation and communion are possible and another aspect which remains absolutely other and unknowable to me. There remains even in the most open, permeable, and intimate inter-subjective relationship an element of the other person that is forever foreign to the self.293 The connection between Joycean water and the sublime is sustained by the duality contained by both. This simultaneous attraction and repulsion or fright is engendered in the concreteness that both water and the sublime imply. Water conjoins ambivalent dimensions which makes it sublime while also being epiphanic since with Joyce water is at the basis of a multitude of epiphanic experiences. Both epiphany and the sublime deal with an aesthetic hue. If epiphany uses aesthetics both as means or source it also becomes a telos taking into consideration that epiphany has its origin not only in art, but transfigures the surrounding reality into art, due to the artists sensible conscience. At this level where reality becomes art one could say that the sublime dimension intervenes. The aesthetics of the ordinary is translated as the Joycean sublime: on the one hand there is the repulsion towards realitys concreteness and on the other hand there is a certain captivating effect that Joyce succeeds through his conversion of the daily bread of experience(A Portrait, p.199) into art. The artistry of epiphany may be compared with the sublime beauty of a lotus that draws its sinew from the dark mud in order to render resplendent the beautiful colours of its petals on the surface of the water.

292

Brian Treanor. Aspects of Alterity, Levinas, Marcel and the Contemporary Debate. U.S.A.: Fordham University Press, 2006, p. 107. 293 Idem.

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The perreniality of water on various levels (mythological, social, celestial and spiritual) resides in the sufficiency of its undecidability. Moreover, where there is ambiguity, there is also a sense of totality contained in the mysteriousness of meanings. The multifarious water reflects the totality of epiphany, which acquires its totality precisely through the multitude unexpectedness of its sources. In the same direction one could suppose that Joyce was attired by mysteriosophy. The third aspect concerning the sacred dimension that is implied by both water and sublime deals with the highest degree that these element and coordinate could reach. Taking into consideration Joyces stepping away from Catholicism, his individual and audacious heretics (in the sense that he has the sufficient power to think and interpret the dogma otherwise, by forging his own credo thus placing art above religion) one might state that the profusion that the Joycean water reaches is not to be understood in the sense that it could be equated with the Christian holy water. The Joycean water surpasses the cannons of Christian sacredness by promoting the sacredness of epiphany beyond any religion (or mythology) or faith. The sublime also reaches its sacred dimension in as much as the experience of the subject reaches a climax, wherein the whole being is sublimated, leaving free room for the mind arrest, as Joyce calls the precious declic.

Conclusion
Knock on the sky and listen to the sound. ~ Zen Saying

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As the Zen saying urges, we as readers cannot avoid the challenge of trying to grasp such an enormous figure like Joyce. When dealing with a Joycean work of art, be it short story or novel, the possibilities of interpretation that the text offers are innumerable; as a proof stands the Joyce industry that has been accumulated up to now, without showing any signs of exhausting his works whatsoever. What is surprising though is the fact that no critic has committed himself to write a full study of the Joycean epiphany present in Dubliners and A Portrait. Leaving aside the fact that a study on Joyces work in the rigorous and rigid sense of the term seen as patterning would hardly be applicable it appeared as our duty to relocate the Joycean epiphany where it should rightfully be placed: in the midst of any Joycean creative act. Therefore we built our study of epiphany not as a structure of patterns based on repeated and recurring images or symbols but as a radiant totality respecting the polyvalence of the viewed texts. In this sense we studied the context of Joyces life since the emergence of epiphany owes itself also to Joyces insistence on authenticity despite and, what is more, outside the canons of the acceptation of the terms nationality and religion of the time. The first chapter emphasizes the role of Joycean resistance to his countrys nets as well as his resistance to mimetic violence thus setting the auspices of a different artistic vocation. Unlike former writers who forged a new current or technique in literature by negating the earlier ones (denying tradition), Joyce did not attempt to exercise violence against his artistic father figures (Ibsen, Byron, Shelley); on the contrary, he kept for himself and adopted what he considered as beneficial. A similar attitude he manifested towards religion too, as he distanced himself from the blindfolding faith that the Catholic Church proposed, but kept its liturgical tone (according to Umberto Eco) and the mystery of the Mass in his own epiphany. Within this chapter, the text offers a complex autobiografiction of the author as we apply the New Historicist reading grid and locate some of the most important influences played upon Joyces art craft. More specifically, related to the birth and evolution of the Joycean epiphany stand out Ibsen with the fondness for the realism of the ordinary, Romanticism with the taste for nature aesthetics and its sense of rebellion, the Irish Revival with its stress on the simple and humble life but also with the appraisal of the triumphant hero. The voyage is implemented between two ap202

parently opposing levels: fiction and reality, mundane and narrative going along the experiences that the two selves (authorial and narrative) more or less share. To better understand the whole Joycean context special emphasis is awarded to James Joyces positioning within the Irish Revival (according to Vincent Cheng, Gregory Castle and Declan Kieberd, Emer Nolan to mention but a few names of the critics preoccupied with the question of integrating or locating Joyce in the Irish Revival frame) incidentally analysing the question of Irish Nationalism and Joycean Catholicism, reaching back to its roots since Celtic times as this connection will shed further light on the nature of epiphany. Joyces A Portrait is quite autobiographical, though its autobiography is shaped upon the imaginary self-portrait of Stephen Dedalus. Joyces life thus becomes the aesthetic presentation of autobiography which might be described as fictionalization (an assimilation of autobiographical material into a novelistic shape) and then to the emergence of the artist whose vocation the epiphanies constitute. As the religious term implies, they are moments of intense visual realization which might be redescribed as impressions, though they are also strong contenders for examples of the spiritual experiences Stephen Reynolds argued were the core of autobiografiction. Out of context they look like fin-de-sicle prosepoems.294 Without yielding to a disguised form of Girardian mimetic violence (therefore not rejecting his artistic father figures) Joyce peacefully distances himself from the Revivalists borrowed aestheticism (to use Fanons expression) who strongly believed in the resurrection of the national identity through an acute delve into the priomitive world of Celtic legends. Joyce abandons the ancient myth as he was about to create his own modern myths later. While challenging this primary form of imposed authority (that of the primitive Irish realm) the Irish writer confesses and struggles for the only authority that seems valide to him as an artist: the authority of authenticity. Hence, his ambivalent, complex and paradoxical attitude towards the Celtic legacy, which some of his fellow contemporaries, Synge and Yeats, were proclaiming, represent in fact his incipient tool of double validation: the (re) validation of his nations identity reaching what could be termed as isomorphism, and the validation of his own authority as creative artist. But the revelation of inauthenticity which
294

Max Saunders. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p. 298.

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characterizes many of Joyces epiphanies becomes an empowering anthropological fiction in its own right, capable, for good or ill, of inventing Irish souls.295 Resisting the temptation of erasing history, the author chooses to create his own myths drawing from the Irish culture, picking from its mythology only the hues that become poignant for the authority of his conscience. Allusion and its play seem to be the most powerful tools for setting the pillars of modern myths benefiting also from Joyces poetic images, be they enclosed or not in epiphanies. A more radiant image of the personal authority is delivered in A Portrait as the narrator coincides with the protagonist granting him the authenticity of the here and now of an instantaneous experience as it is instantaneously absorbed by his conscience. However, Stephen will be able to undergo a process of crystallization towards the sacramental authority of the priest of eternal imagination only with the help of certain sovereignty figures, and relying on, but without imitating, former ancient myths. Having abandoned his faith, the Irish writer did not let go of certain ritualistic forms and habits as he transposed the religiousness into his mode of moral introspection or more concretely in his narrative punctuated by a liturgical rhythm as well as his entire taste for the sacred oratory; not to mention that even the term epiphany was borrowed from the religious discourse. After having transcended the potential Catholic priestly vocation, the hero reestablishes the correspondence between beauty and the instance of the divine entity by acknowledging his own vocation. It is in the second chapter of our study, structured in three subchapters: Former Attempts of Literary Epiphany, Joycean Epiphany within Its Critique, and Claritas beyond Phenomenological Perception, that the epiphany study per se begins. Here we review the crucial analysis of the former attempts of epiphany as they have been recorded and discussed by Martin Bidney, Ashton Nichols, and Robert Langbaum. Due to Martin Bidneys study entitled Patterns of Epiphany we discover that James Joyce might not have been quite the only epiphany creator. From the Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge and to the Victorian Arnold, Bidney exposes the radiant geometry in Wordsworthian epiphany and the elemental epiphanies of the other two poets and then
295

Gregory Castle. Modernism and the Celtic Revival; chapter A Renegade from the Ranks: Joyces critique of Revivalism in the Early Fiction. Cambridge Univeristy Press, Cambridge, 2001, p. 180, 182, 183.

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proceeds with the analysis of epiphany in Tennyson, and Pater, disclosing the fact that both writers share a recurrent pattern of epiphanies (flower and fire). His study ends with the historical dimension of epiphany as he registers and analyses it in authors like Carlyle, Tolstoy and Barrett Browning. Though illustrious and resonating names seem to precede the Joycean epiphany, the authors Bidney chooses to screen in view of epiphanies have not coined the term themselves. It was only in the twentieth century with the arrival of Joyce on the literary scene that the concept of epiphany was born under this denomination in literature. Thus one can say that James Joyce is the godfather of epiphany since it was he who coined this term, even though there was also his contemporary woman writer Virginia Woolf who manifested a certain intuition towards this literary device but called it by referring merely to its temporal dimension: moment. The specificity of Joycean epiphany is analysed throughtout this whole study. In our view what the Joycean epiphany brings in order to refresh literature is the feeling of totality and imponderability reflected in Stephens confessed evanescence of moments. Grasping all that the artists conscience proves sensible to, the epiphany becomes in itself ungraspable, an immensity of emotional, aesthetical, retrospective, elemental, mythical experiences. Thus trying to decode this epiphany in terms of pre-established patterns would prove a never ending strife. With Joyce each epiphany is fully plunged in and also absorbed that even though there are traceable some repetitive symbols and/or images (e.g. ivory, water, and woman) they are obsessively abandoned and partially transcended in order to embrace new and fresh ones. Blending the refined hue of Romantic epiphany with the concreteness of Realism and going even beyond these dimensions Joyce assures his epiphanys totality reaching also a sense of the sublime in this permanent intertwining of contraries. After establishing a clear history of the epiphany throughout literary works of art, the focus of the chapter will naturally fall upon the classifications and definitions of Joycean epiphany in itself, as they appear either in Joyces works or in those of the critics (Margot Norris, Morris Beja, Robert Langbaum, Henry Chayenne). Besides the influences played upon Joyces becoming from incipient, babel-like self to authorial ego, commented upon in the first chapter, there are still some more specific ones that define the Joycean epiphany: the free 205

interpretation of the Thomist aesthetics developed in the economy of the religious trinitary ideal. From the three dimensions, integritas, consonantia and claritas, we have singled out claritas as being specific to Joycean epiphany. A third specific dimension of Joycean epiphany dwells in the sense of the sacred borrowed from religion. Therefore the reader assists at a constant dispersion of Joyces biographical self into just as many constituents of the egos vocation, more exactly just as many epiphanic experiences. By applying John Armstrongs theory of empathy together with Marleaus Pontys system of phenomenological perception the reader, after having analysed the first two stages of Joycean aesthetic apprehension integritas and consonantia witnesses how the transcendental Ego of the artist becomes God-like while grasping and later, in tranquility, rendering claritas, in the process of creation much like Joyce, the artist, who sits behind beyond or above his artwork paring his fingernails. His mind, as incandescent as a fading coal, can be luminously apprehensive and apprehendive, consequently reaching the enlightened state. Only in that moment can the artist embrace and shed light on the noumenon of the aesthetic object. What imposes more specifically this explosion of light if not a dispersion of limits at all levels and in all possible directions? The pluri-transcendence operates not only at the level of temporal or spatial dimensions that uselessly strive to limit/concretize/ephemerize the subject and object but it involves both a self and other transcendence of the object and subject themselves (a self-and-other-tarnscendence). The subject first transcends itself and then the object, identifying with it, and transgresses or goes beyond it, reuniting thus a new-self-andother. Claritas may be the climactic phase of aesthetic apprehension but it coincides also with the Joycean epiphany since both stages comport a certain level of transcendence beyond phenomenological perception as Ponty would probably state. Furthermore, the author himself admits to the fact that this instant refers to epiphany, for which he poetically quotes the Italian physiologist, Galvani: that enchantment of the heart. Thus the epiphanic attempts in Dubliners are matured and distilled in A Portrait. Aesthetic apprehension and epiphany cannot leap the three stages that Stephen mentions and thus they cannot subside without a form of transcendence. Although in Dubliners the poetic language is not mastered quite like in A Portrait; the visible inclination towards spiritual games brood upon the contemplated object is obvious as they are sustained by the artists early edu206

cation, sensitive memory, the imaginative ability in aesthetic scope. The spiritual games of transcendence offer themselves as key elements on the path of the selfs quest for vocation. The third chapter entitled, Epiphanic Mnemotechnique in the Philosophical Labyrinth explores the mechanism of individuation from a different perpective. In order to render the epiphany-making process more transparent we revealed the mnemotechnique of epiphany. The epiphanogenic function that the memory games within Joyces work considerably situates the author in a sphere of influence such as Prousts mmoire involuntaire, while also showing an indirect tributary contribution of Bergsons flux of experience.For demonstrating our perspective we have adopted a philosophical and religious approach built upon the theories of Vico, Plato, Aristotle, Locke and Casey. Moreover, Lakoffs principle of gestaltic experience together with Ricoeurs entertwined memory-image connecting also the case of the Greek eikon with the phantasia serve as sharp insights into the making process of Joycean epiphany. Starting with Platos theory which presents in the dialogues entitled The Sophist and Thaeitosus the problematique of eikn (the representation of an absent thing) the question of memory and imagination immediaeltely comes into play. But then there is Eduard S.Casey who introduces the distinction between active memory (according to Bergsons theory) and passive memory as it is represented by the English empirism of John Locke while also providing an ampler perspective of the two coordinates. After clearly establishing the relation between memory and imagination, appealing also to Plato and Aristotles as well as Locke and Caseys theories of imagination (although the text invites an analysis from Bersons activist theory on personal memory as instants) we analyzed Stephens memories of his father, (the way Joyce presents them) which determine the nature of the heros relationship with him, playing also a crucial role in Stephens mnemonic journey towards acquiring an artistic identity. The analysis of personal and collective memory (according to these notions as they are defined by Augustin, la Husserl si Maurice Halbwachs) is imposed and sustained by significant textual examples (the famous childhood apologize scene which when recounted becomes the eagle epiphany, the epiphany with the marshall) resulting thus in a detailed account of the various stages the protagonist goes through, in order to discover his true self. 207

Therefore the labyrinth of memory is transposed and also doubled by the philosophical labyrinth both of which converging towards the epiphany of vocation, which apparently is an epiphany of the hero but more abstractly (and far-off) an epiphany of the author himself. A deeper level of analysis into the internal laboratory of the Joycean epiphany is achieved in the chaper entitled Love from Dubliners to A Portrait through the investigation of the role of the feminine as most critics admitted that the feminine figure was prevalent in, if not governing, Joyces life. The primary directions of focus regard womens role in Joycean textual voices through the major critical threads of gender and phenomenological theories as well as a religious interpretation: mother, temptress (womans paradox of passive aggression turning her into a symbol of sovereignity), Blessed Virgin Mary, ideal feminine within a feminist (more exactly Kristevian) point of view as well as a circumscription of the female image and symbol as it appears in Celtic times. However, the trajectory of the Joycean womans evolution stretches far beyond mere mapping of feminine roles through gender, power and religious criticism. The woman and the feminine do not represent just another ingredient in the Joycean epiphanic melting pot but an important agent that propluses the hero forward on his path of artistic maturity, the complexity of the feminine nature becoming a form of imago for the Joycean epiphany. As we deepen the demonstration the Joycean woman sways from feminine agency, feminine muse to feminine sublime contributing thus to the sense of totality which the artist so feverishly looks for. Automatically the dimension of the sublime (the mystery that resides from the feminine abstractedness that the Joycean conscience imprints onto the feminine image) presupposes a harmonious symbiosis of contarires, a simultaneous absolutely captivating and frightening dimension. From the feminine sublime (consisting also of the eternal feminine mysteryand the trivial side of feminine bodily drive) the artist adopts precisely its most matter-bound function: that of mater genitrix, but only to convert it at an abstract level into his own epiphany laboratory which he calls virgin womb of imagination. Therefore the feminine is not only grasped in its multilayered complexity but is also transcended by the heros biosemantics while simultaneously contributing considerably to the formation of the sensitive artistic conscience.

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Further arguments can be brought by contrasting other works of Joyce as they appear in Cixous and Irigarays readings. The interpretation of the epiphany does not close here its curlicue of evolution. A reconfirmation of the epiphanys immortality or atemporality is justified by means of encoding it in myth where the Celtic symbols are brought to light by us showing more clearly through the textual fibre Joyces ambivalent attitude towards the Irish Revival, announced in the first chapter. On the verge of literary hidrolatry, the Joycean text exhalts its reader with the all engulfing water instances and later in the text with the water epiphanies. The demonstration is apparent under the form of a close-text analysis in both envisaged works with a fine delicate thread of Bachelardian phenomenology and a more dominant one of Lyotardian phenomenology concerning the sublime which through the readers imagination reworks the Joycean water imagery. This intricately weaved analysis reveals the many water epiphanies as they underwent a sinuous passage from incipient symbolic phases or symbols per se in Dubliners to a highly complex epiphanogenic presence in A Portrait. The Joycean water presence in the novel is grasped through the readers imagination under the sign of an intricate evolution from trivial (pertaing also to the bodily drive) social, natural, to spiritual and finally the celestial and sacred dimension. Since all the Joycean water motifs, symbols and images are viewed inasmuch as they contribute to the construction of epiphany and since water resembles the feminine regarding their undecidability and shiftiness it is explainable why we demonstrated the water imagery as reaching the epiphanic sublime. Following the spiral-like itinerary of the artist the journey of the epiphany proves also to be spiral-like since it transcends so many levels that carry the epiphany creator through just as many initiatic journeys from the national identity crisis, to the religious, and then more intimately within the artists consciousness who strives to resolve both collective and personal memory but only to encounter another initiatic journey enabled by the feminine phase. With each grasped and surpassed dimension the protagonist is elevated to another curlicue thus forging not only his becoming as an artist but his affiliation to the figure of hero, even though he is to be viewed as a rather abstracted one than a traditional hero. He becomes a modern Chuchulain or Protomartyr who has as only weapon silence, exile and cunning and as his only tool: the epiphany. 209

Taking into consideration all the above pillars of our thesis being very much aware of the three types of critique distributed throughout the chapters: intentio auctoris, intentio lectoris, intentio operis, to use Umberto Ecos terms we have successfully enlaced both phenomenological and metaphysical into the sublime of epiphany. Without doubting the quality of the sublime there is a strong implication that the poetic language stands as the only means of expression for Joycean epiphany. However, the sublime is not enclosed upon itself but represents a mere starting point to a re-plunge into the mundane, material, phenomenological, even though keeping the artists thirst for the transcendental. At first glance one may falsely consider that this whole epiphanic voyage is nothing but an enclosed circle. However, there is much more to it as the second coming of materiality/ordinary opens up the trajectory of philosophical and literary consciousness to the next evolutional curlicue of the spiral: the sublime. The sublime, somewhat ironically, given its overtly metaphysical ambitions, turns out to be a form of materialism after all. Perhaps the sublime is irony at its purest and most effective: a promise of transcendence leading to the edge of an abyss. Still, there may be a sense in which even such falls come to depend on ways of thinking that have no relation to any underlying material cause. And here is a further twist of irony: could it be that the sublime does indeed affirm the unlimited nature of being? Could the concept of the sublime, as Kant believed, lead ultimately to the triumph of mind over matter, or possibly towards an affirmation of the divine? So many questions straining towards the limits. We are never certain of the sublime.296

Sinele Vocaional. Un studiu al epifaniei lui James Joyce de la Oameni din Dublin la Portret
Rezumat Cuvinte i concepte cheie: autobiografiction (autobiograficiune), rezisten joycean, fictionalization (ficionalizare), figure suverane, pluri-transcenden, jocuri spirituale, memorie epifanogenic, epifania vocaiei, imageria apei joyceene epifanogenice, sublimul epifanic.
296

Philip Shaw. The Sublime-The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, London, 2006, p. 10.

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Cnd abordm o oper joycean, fie c este vorba de o povestire sau de un roman, posibilitile de interpretare a textului sunt numeroase. Drept mrturie st o real industrie a studiilor critice consacrate lui Joyce, ce pare nc departe de a fi epuizat operele sale n vreun fel. Ceea ce este surprinztor, totui, este faptul c pn acum niciun studiu nu a fost dedicat epifaniei joyceene, aa cum apare ea n Oameni din Dublin i Portret. Dac printr-un astfel de demers nelegem o analiz bazat pe canonizare, aceasta ar fi cu greu aplicabil operelor vizate i tocmai din acest motiv ne-am construit studiul nu pe o structur de tipare bazate la rndul lor pe imagini sau simboluri repetitive, ci, mai degrab, ca o totalitate radiant, respectnd polivalena textelor vizate i relocaliznd epifania joycean acolo unde aceasta ntr-adevr se afl: n mijlocul oricrui act joycean de creaie . Pentru a nelege ct mai bine cum a luat natere epifania joycean nu aveam cum s nu studiem contextul vieii scriitorului, constatnd astfel insistena acestuia asupra autenticitii dincolo de conceptele de naionalitate i religie ale vremii. Primul capitol, James Joyce i Spirala Identitii, evideniaz rolul rezistenei joyceene la oprelitile impuse de ar, precum i rezistena la violena mimetic, punnd astfel bazele stadiului incipient al unei vocaii artistice diferite. Fr a ceda n faa unei forme deghizate a violenei mimetice girardiene (astfel nu i respinge pe mentorii si artistici Ibsen, Byron, Shelley), Joyce se distaneaz de esteticismul mprumutat al Revivalitilor. Acetia din urm credeau cu fervoare n renvierea identitii naionale prin renvierea simbolurilor i a eroilor din legendele celtice. Joyce opteaz pentru abandonarea mitului antic deoarece el este capabil s creeze propriile sale mituri moderne mai trziu. Punnd sub semnul ntrebrii autoritatea impus a trmului primitiv irlandez, scriitorul anun i se lupt pentru singura autoritate perceput ca fiind valid pentru artist: autoritatea autenticitii. Aceasta explic de ce Portret este destul de autobiografic, dei autobiograficitatea sa este modelat dup autoportretul imaginar al lui Stephen Dedalus. Viaa lui Joyce devine, astfel, prezentarea estetic a autobiografiei, ce poate fi descris ca ficionalizare. n acest capitol textul ofer o autobiograficiune complex a autorului, permindu-ne s localizm prin prisma grilei de lectur a Noului Istorism cteva din cele mai importante influene asupra artei joyceene. Mai specific, n ceea ce privete naterea i evoluia epifaniei joyceene, se 211

remarc influena lui Ibsen (aprecierea realismului, a obinuitului, cotidianului), Romantismul cu gustul su pentru estetica naturii i spiritul su de rebeliune, Renaterea Irlandez cu accentul pe viaa simpl i umil, dar i cu elogierea eroului triumftor. Itinerariul se desfoar ntre dou planuri aparent antagoniste: ficiune i realitate, lumesc i narativ, mergnd de-a lungul experienelor pe care cele dou contiine (auctorial i narativ) le mprtesc mai mult sau mai puin . n ncercarea noastr de a-l situa pe Joyce n contextul Renaterii Irlandeze n msura n care acest lucru servete unei mai bune aprehensiuni a epifaniei, am pornit de la studiile lui Vincent Cheng, Gregory Castle, Declan Kieberd, civa dintre criticii preocupai n mod direct de localizarea scriitorului n spaiul naiunii irlandeze. Nu am omis nici naionalismul irlandez i, cu att mai puin, catolicismul joycean, mergnd pn la rdcinile sale din timpuri celtice, toate acestea constituindu-se n adevrate coordonate pentru identificarea naturii epifaniei joyceene. Ambivalena manifestat fa de Renaterea Irlandez se reflect i n aspectul unitar i reconciliant al epifaniei. O atitudine similar s-a nregistrat i fa de religie, Joyce distanndu-se de credina oarb pe care Biserica Catolic o propune, dar pstrnd, totui, tonul liturgic(Umberto Eco) i misterul ceremoniei religioase n epifania sa. Integrnd astfel anumite forme i obiceiuri ritualice, scriitorul a transpus religiozitatea n propriul su mod de introspecie moral sau, mai concret, n firul narativ punctat de ritmul discursului sacru. De asemenea, chiar mprumutarea termenului epifanie din aceeai sfer certific originea religioas a epifaniei joyceene. Etapele cristalizrii epifaniei sale dincolo de religioziate, dar totui n mijlocul ei, se vor desfura odat cu dou realizri ale protagonistului din roman. n prim faz, Stephen transcende poteniala sa vocaie de preot catolic, dar o pstreaz pe cea de preot. Apoi, eroul restabilete corespondena ntre frumusee i instana entitii divine prin contientizarea propriei vocaii. Al doilea capitol, intitulat James Joyce i epifania, este structurat n trei subcapitole, dup cum urmeaz: ncercri anterioare de epifanie literar, Epifania joycean i critica sa, i Claritas dincolo de percepia fenomenologic. Studiul epifaniei per se ncepe, n acest capitol, cu o analiz a ncercrilor anterioare de creare a epifaniei, aa cum au fost nregistrate de Martin Bidney, Ashton Nichols, i Irene Hendry Chayes. Datorit studiului lui Martin 212

Bidney, intitulat Patterns of Epiphany, suntem tentai s pornim de la premisa c James Joyce e posibil s nu fi fost unicul creator de epifanie. De la Romanticii Wordsworth i Coleridge pn la Victorianul Arnold, Bidney expune geometria radiant din epifania Wordsworthian i epifaniile elementale ale celorlali doi poei, apoi continu cu o analiz a epifaniei lui Tennyson i Pater, demonstrnd faptul c ambii scriitori mprtesc un tipar repetitiv de epifanii (floare i foc). Studiul su se ncheie cu dimensiunea istoric a epifaniei aa cum el o nregistreaz i analizeaz n autori precum Carlyle, Tolstoy i Barrett Browning. Dei scriitori renumii par a fi fost preocupai de epifanie, preceadnd astfel epifania joycean, autorii pe care Bidney alege s-i scaneze n vederea epifaniilor nu au inventat sau gsit termenul ei nii; criticul este cel care a stabilit anumite corespondene ntre nuanele epifanice. Abia n secolul douazeci, odat cu sosirea lui Joyce pe scena literar, conceptul de epifanie se nate sub aceast denumire n literatur. Astfel putem spune c James Joyce este naul epifaniei, de vreme ce el a ales termenul i a dezvoltat aceast tehnic literar. Cu toate acestea, Virginia Woolf, scriitoare contemporan cu Joyce, a manifestat o anumit intuiie vis--vis de aceast tehnic literar, dar a numit-o moment of being, accentund temporalitatea epifaniei. Cu toate acestea, Joyce este cel care a dezvoltat ceea ce poate fi numit religia epifaniei, cci el a cutat-o n viaa cotidian, a redat-o sau rememorat-o sau chiar a recreat-o n propriile sale scrieri, aceasta devenind pilonul central n jurul cruia graviteaz ntrega sa oper. n viziunea noastr, ceea ce epifania joycean aduce pentru a remprospta literatura este sentimentul totalitii i al imponderabilitii reflectat n evanescena momentelor, mrturisit de Stephen. Surprinznd tot ceea ce sensibilizeaz contiina artistului, epifania n sine devine de nesurprins o imensitate de triri emoionale, estetice, retrospective, elementale, mitice. Astfel, ncercarea de a decoda epifania n termeni de tipare pre-stabilite sar dovedi o reiterare a mitului lui Sisif. La Joyce fiecare epifanie este pe deplin ancorat n totalitate, atfel nct, chiar dac sunt detectabile unele simboluri sau imagini repetitive (de exemplu filde, ap, femeie), acestea sunt n mod obsesiv i parial depite pentru a mbria altele noi, proaspete. mbinnd nuana rafinat a epifaniei Romantice i concreteea Realismului, dar mergnd dincolo de acestea, Joyce asigur totalitatea epifaniei sale, izbutind s prezinte o dimensiune a sublimului n permanenta mpletire a contrariilor. 213

Dup stabilirea unei istorii clare a epifaniei n operele literare, capitolul se concentreaz n mod natural asupra clasificrilor i definiiilor atribuite epifaniei joyceene, aa cum apar ele fie n operele lui Joyce, fie n ale criticilor Margot Norris, Morris Beja, Robert Langbaum i Henry Chayenne. La influenele asupra devenirii scriitorului, de la sinele biografic comparabil cu Turnul lui Babel la ego-ul auctorial, inseparabile de auspiciile epifaniei, se adaug interpretarea liber a esteticii tomiste dezvoltat n parametrii idealului de Trinitate religioas. Din cele trei dimensiuni, integritas, consonantia i claritas, am singularizat claritas ca fiind specific epifaniei joyceene. Cititorul asist, aadar, la o dispersie constant a sinelui biografic al lui Joyce n tot att de muli constitueni ai vocaiei ego-ului cte experiene epifanice exist. Aplicnd teoria empatiei care i aparine lui John Armstrong, mpreun cu sistemul percepiei fenomenologice al lui Merleau Ponty, cititorul, dup ce a analizat primele dou faze ale contemplrii estetice joyceene integritas i consonantia devine martor la transformarea Ego-ului transcendental al artistului ntru dumnezeire. Acesta din urm surprinde i, mai trziu, n linite, red claritas n procesul de creaie precum autorul care st n spatele, dincolo sau deasupra operei sale curndu-i unghiile. Mintea sa, incandescent precum un tciune aprins, poate fi receptiv n mod luminos, atingnd astfel starea iluminat. Numai n acel moment poate artistul s mbrieze i s rspndeasc lumin asupra esenei obiectului estetic. Ce impune mai exact aceast explozie de lumin, dac nu o dispersie a limitelor pe toate planurile i n toate direciile posibile? Ceea ce noi am numit pluri-transcendena nu numai ca opereaz la nivelul dimensiunilor temporale sau spaiale care ncearc inutil s limiteze, concretize sau s efemerizeze subiectul i obiectul, ci i implic att o trancendere a sinelui, ct i a alteritii subiectului i obiectului nii (o trancenden sine-cellalt). Subiectul mai nti se transcende pe sine i apoi obiectul, identificndu-se cu el, transgreseaz sau merge dincolo de acesta, dnd astfel natere unui nou sine-cellalt. Dimensiunea claritas poate fi privit ca o faz climactic a contemplrii estetice, dar este n strns legtur i cu epifania joycean, de vreme ce ambele stadii comport un anumit nivel de transcenden, dincolo de percepia fenomenologic, aa cum ar afirma probabil Merleau Ponty. Mai mult, autorul nsui recunoate faptul ca acest instant sau moment se refer la epifanie, iar prin

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intermediul lui Stephen, citndu-l pe italianul Galvani, identific epifania n mod poetic cu acea ncntare a inimii. ncercrile epifanice din Dubliners sunt distilate n A Portrait. Contemplarea estetic i epifania nu pot face abstracie de cele trei etape pe care Stephen le explic i astfel, ele nu pot exista fr o form de trancenden. Dei n Oameni din Dublin limbajul poetic nu este la fel de bine stapnit ca n Portret, nclinarea vizibil spre jocuri spirituale esute n jurul obiectelor contemplate este evident i susinut de educaia timpurie a artistului, memoria sensibil i capacitatea sa imaginativ n scop estetic. Jocurile spirituale ale transcendenei se ofer ca elemente cheie pe calea cutrii vocaiei sinelui. Al treilea capitol, ntitulat Mnemotehnica Epifanic n Labrintul Filosofic, exploreaz mecanismul individuaiei dintr-o perspectiv diferit. Pentru a face mai transparent procesul de creare a epifaniei am dezvluit mnemotehnica acesteia. Funcia epifanogenic pe care memoria o joac n opera lui Joyce situeaz autorul n sfera de influen a memoriei involuntare a lui Proust, aducnd totodat un tribut conceptului de flux al experienei al lui Bergson. Pentru a demonstra perspectiva noastr am adoptat o interpretare filosofic i religioas, construit pe teoriile lui Vico, Platon, Aristotel, Locke and Casey. Mai mult, aplicnd principiul experienei gestaltice al lui Lakoff mpreun cu memoria-imagine a lui Ricoeur, conectate cu grecescul eikon i phantasia, ajungem la o fin nelegere a procesului de creare a epifaniei joyceene. Debutnd cu teoria lui Platon, care prezint n dialogurile intitulate The Sophist and Thaeitosus chestiunea eikn-ului (reprezentarea unui lucru absent), problematica memoriei i a imaginaiei intervin imediat. De asemenea, teoria lui Eduard S. Casey care indic diferena dintre memoria activ (conform teoriei lui Bergson) i cea pasiv (aa cum este reprezentat n empirismul englez al lui John Locke) joac un rol foarte important, deoarece ofer o perspectiv mai ampl asupra ambelor valene. Dup stabilirea clar a relaiei dintre memorie i imaginaie, apelnd, de asemenea, la teoriiile imaginaiei dezvoltate de Platon i Aristotel, precum i Locke, i Casey (dei textul invit la o analiz i din perspectiva teoriei lui Bergson conform cruia memoria personal ar fi format din momente) am analizat amintirile lui Stephen legate de tatl su, acestea jucnd un rol crucial n cltoria mnemonic a lui Stephen ctre devenirea artistic. Analiza 215

memoriei personale i colective este impus i susinut de exemple din text semnificative: faimoasa scen a scuzelor care, odata povestit, devine epifania cu vulturul, apoi epifania cu moartea lui Parnell etc., ntregul demers constituindu-se astfel ntr-un document detaliat al diferitelor etape pe care protagonistul le parcurge pentru a-i descoperi adevratul sine. Labirintul memoriei este transpus, dar i dublat de labirintul filosofic, ambele convergnd ctre epifania vocaiei care, aparent, este o epifanie a eroului, ns la nivel abstract ea se traduce printr-o epifanie a autoritii creatoare a artistului nsui. O analiz mai acut n laboratorul intern al epifaniei este prezentat n al patrulea capitol, ntitulat Iubirea de la Oameni din Dublin la Portret, prin investigarea rolului femininului, innd cont de faptul c muli critici au recunoscut c figura feminin era prevalent, dac nu cumva chiar guverna viaa lui Joyce. Primele noastre direcii de analiz vizeaz rolul femeii n vocile textuale joyceene, avnd ca principale curente critice teoriile genului i cele fenomenologice, precum i o interpretare religioas. Astfel putem identifica principalele roluri pe care femeia joycean le ndeplinete: mam, seductoare, Binecuvntata Fecioara Maria, femininul ideal dintr-un punct de vedere feminist (mai exact kristevian), precum i o nscriere a imaginii i simbolului femeii aa cum apare n timpurile celtice. Trecnd dincolo de dimensiunile sociale, religioase, ideale, dar i mitologice pe care femeia joycean le poate ndeplini, spirala evoluiei identitii acesteia se continu ntr-un alt plan cu ajutorul a trei coordonate principale: agent feminin, muz i sublimul feminin. Aceast dimensiune din urm reiese att din misterul, ct i din amprenta abstractului pe care Joyce le imprim imaginii feminine, confirmnd i contribuind n acelai timp la sentimentul totalitii pe care artistul l caut cu atta fervoare. Aceasta presupune n mod automat o simbioz armonioas a contrariilor, o dimensiune captivant i nspimnttoare totodat, pe care noi am interpretat-o ca fiind sublimul feminin. Din aceast coordonat, artistul adopt valena cea mai ancorat n materie: mater genitrix, dar numai pentru a o converti la un nivel abstract n propriul su laborator epifanic, pe care l numete pntec virgin al imaginaiei. Aadar, femininul nu este surprins doar n complexitatea sa pluristratificat, dar este i transcendat de cuvintele care se ncarneaz, contribuind simultan la formarea contiinei artistice sensibile.

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n utimul

capitol,

Restructurarea Epifaniilor

Textuale, o reconfirmare a

atemporalitii i totalitii epifaniei este justificat prin codificarea acesteia n mit. De accea simbolurile celtice sunt aduse la lumin de ctre noi prin fibra textelor analizate i atitudinea ambivalent a scriitorului cu privire la Renaterea Celtic, atitudine anunat de noi nc din primul capitol. La limita hidrolatriei literare textul joycean i ncnt cititorul cu multiplele instane ale apei copleitoare i, mai apoi, cu epifaniile ei. Demonstraia este evideniat sub forma unei analize pe text n ambele opere vizate, cu o abordare delicat a fenomenologiei bachelardiene i una dominant a fenomenologiei lyotardiene n ceea ce privete sublimul care, prin imaginaia cititorului, reconstituie i reinterpreteaz imageria apei joycene. Aceast analiz complex esut relev numeroase epifanii ale apei, aa cum ele au parcurs un itinerariu sinuos de la faze incipient simbolice sau simboluri per se n colecia de povestiri, la o prezen epifanogenic n roman. Astfel, surprindem cltoria apei joyceene n roman sub semnul evoluiei subtile, de la dimensiunea trivial, social, natural, la dimensiunea spiritual i, n cele din urm, celest i sacr. De vreme ce toate motivele, simbolurile i imaginile apei joycene sunt vizate n msura n care contribuie la construcia epifaniei i avnd n vedere c apa este similar femininului sub aspectul indecibilitii, al indefinitului, dar i ca mater genitrix n realizarea funciei epifanogenice, este explicabil de ce am demonstrat imageria apei ca atingnd sublimul epifanic. Cu toate acestea sublimul nu este nchis n sine, ci reprezint doar un punct de plecare pentru o re-plonjare n realitatea fenomenologic, pstrnd totui setea artistului pentru esena transcendental. La prima vedere se poate considera n mod fals c toat aceast cltorie epifanic nu este altceva dect un cerc nchis, dei este vorba de mai mult dect att, de un fel de a doua pogorre a ordinarului sau cotidianului, deschiznd traiectoria contiinei literare i filosofice spre urmtoarea paraf evoluional a spiralei: sublimul. Acesta i gsete repaosul n cotidian, din acesta din urm lund natere transcendentalul i aa mai departe. Prezentul studiu i-a propus s demonstreze c epifania joycean analizat n Oameni din Dublin i Portret presupune un proces complex care nu prezint doar devenirea artistic, ci i modelarea epifaniei dup o totalitate de nesurprins. Specificitatea epifaniei joyceene 217

const mai exact n omniprezena ei n spaiul scriptural: de la nivelul textului la cel ideatic i imagistic, religios i mitologic, regresnd i transgresnd tot attea niveluri ale evoluiei eului auctorial. Cochetnd cu multiple valene, dar necednd nici uneia pe deplin, epifania l determin pe cititor s cread c se afl n faa unei esturi uimitoare, a crei identitate nu poate fi cuprins odat pentru totdeauna. Auto-reflexivitatea epifaniei joycene l ademenete pe cititor ntr-un labirint care pare c duce iniial la lecturi lineare, iar mai trziu, la lecturi ciclice care atest i mai mult simbioza contrariilor, pe care autorul nu o poate obine dect dup ce va fi parcurs procesul sinuos al transcendenei de la sinele biografic n favoarea eului auctorial.

Summary
Key words and key concepts: autobiografiction, Joycean ressistance, fictionalization, sovereign figures, pluri-transcendence, spiritual games, epiphanogenic memory, epiphany of vocation, epiphanogenic Joycean water imagery, epiphanic sublime. When dealing with a Joycean work of art, be it short story or novel, the possibilities of interpretation that the text offers are innumerable; as a proof stands the Joyce industry that 218

has been accumulated up to now, without showing any signs of exhausting his works whatsoever. What is surprising though is the fact that no critic has committed himself to writriting a full study of the Joycean epiphany present in Dubliners and A Portrait. Leaving aside the fact that a study on Joyces work in the rigorous and rigid sense of the term seen as patterning would hardly be applicable it appeared as our duty to relocate the Joycean epiphany where it should rightfully be placed: in the midst of any Joycean creative act. Therefore we built our study of epiphany not as a structure of patterns based on repeated and recurring images or symbols but as a radiant totality respecting the polyvalence of the viewed texts. In this sense I studied the context of Joyces life since the emergence of epiphany pays tribute also to Joyces insistence on authenticity despite and outside the canons of the acceptation of the terms nationality and religion of the time. The first chapter, James Joyce and the Spiral of Identity, emphasizes the role of Joycean resistance to his countrys nets as well as his resistance to mimetic violence, thus explaining his tendency towards a different artistic vocation. Without yielding to a disguised form of Girardian mimetic violence (therefore not rejecting his artistic father figures: Ibsen, Byron, Shelley) Joyce peacefully distances himself from the Revivalists borrowed aestheticism (to use Fanons expression) who strongly believed in the resurrection of the national identity through an acute exploration of the primitive world of Celtic legends. Joyce abandons the ancient myth as he was able to create his own modern myths later. While challenging this primary form of imposed authority (that of the primitive Irish realm) the Irish writer confesses and struggles for the only authority that seems valid to him as an artist: the authority of authenticity. That explains why Joyces A Portrait is quite autobiographical, though its autobiography is shaped upon the imaginary self-portrait of Stephen Dedalus. Joyces life thus becomes the aesthetic presentation of autobiography which might be described as fictionalization.297 Within this chapter, the text offers a complex autobiografiction of the author as we apply the New Historicist reading grid and locate some of the most important influences played upon Joyces art craft. More specifically, related to the birth and evolution of the Joycean epiphany stand out Ibsen
297 e

Fictionalization-an assimilation of autobiographical material into a novelistic shape () and then to the emergence of the artist whose vocation the epiphanies constitute. ; Max Saunders, Self Impression: LifeWriting, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010, p.XIV

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with the fondness for the realism of the ordinary, Romanticism with the taste for nature aesthetics and its sense of rebellion, the Irish Revival with its stress on the simple and humble life but also with the appraisal of the triumphant hero. The voyage is implemented between two apparently opposing levels: fiction and reality, mundane and narrative going along the experiences that the two selves (authorial and narrative) more or less share. Thus observing Joyces positioning within the Irish Revival context (according to Vincent Cheng, Gregory Castle and Declan Kieberd, Emer Nolan to mention but a few names of the critics preoccupied with the question of integrating or locating Joyce in the Irish Revival frame) and incidentally analysing the question of Irish Nationalism and Joycean Catholicism, reaching back to its roots since Celtic times proves fruitful for the discovery of the nature of Joycean epiphany. The ambivalence manifested towards the Irish Revival is reflected also in the unitary and reconciling aspect of epiphany. A similar attitude was manifested towards religion too, as Joyce distanced himself from the blindfolding faith that the Catholic Church proposed, but kept its liturgical tone (according to Umberto Eco) and the mystery of the Mass in his own epiphany. Having abandoned his faith in the Catholic Church, the Irish writer did not let go of certain ritualistic forms and habits as he transposed the religiousness into his mode of moral introspection or more concretely in his narrative punctuated by a liturgical rhythm as well as his entire taste for the sacred speech; not to mention that even the term epiphany was borrowed from the religious discourse. After having transcended the potential Catholic priestly vocation the hero re-establishes the correspondence between beauty and the instance of the divine entity by acknowledging his own vocation. The second chapter, entitled James Joyce and Epiphany is structured in three subchapters as follows: Former Attempts of Literary Epiphany, Joycean Epiphany within Its Critique, and Claritas beyond Phenomenological Perception. The epiphany study per se begins within this chapter with a crucial analysis of the former attempts of epiphany as they have been recorded and discussed by Martin Bidney, Ashton Nichols, and Robert Langbaum. Due to Martin Bidneys study entitled Patterns of Epiphany we discover that James Joyce might not have been quite the only epiphany creator. From the Romantics Wordsworth and Coleridge and to the Victorian Arnold, Bidney exposes the radiant geometry in 220

Wordsworthian epiphany and the elemental epiphanies of the other two poets and then proceeds with the analysis of epiphany in Tennyson, and Pater, disclosing the fact that both writers share a recurrent pattern of epiphanies (flower and fire). His study ends with the historical dimension of epiphany as he registers and analyses it in authors like Carlyle, Tolstoy and Barrett Browning. Though illustrious and resonating names seem to precede the Joycean epiphany, the authors Bidney chooses to screen in view of epiphanies have not coined the term themselves; the critic is the one who established certain epiphanic hues. It was only in the twentieth century with the arrival of Joyce on the literary scene that the concept of epiphany was born under this denomination in literature. Thus one can say that James Joyce is the godfather of epiphany since it was he who coined this term, even though there was also his contemporary woman writer, Virginia Woolf, who manifested a certain intuition towards this literary device but called it by referring merely to its temporal dimension: moment. Once more, it was Joyce who developed what can be named the religion of epiphany as he sought it in his everyday life, rendered/remembered or even created it in his own writings. In our view what the Joycean epiphany brings in order to refresh the literature is the feeling of totality and imponderability reflected in Stephens confessed evanescence of moments. Grasping all that the artists conscience proves sensible to, the epiphany becomes in itself ungraspable, an immensity of emotional, aesthetical, retrospective, elemental, mythical experiences. Thus trying to decode this epiphany in terms of pre-established patterns would prove a never ending strife. With Joyce each epiphany is fully plunged in and also absorbed that even though there are traceable some repetitive symbols and /or images (e.g. ivory, water, and woman) they are obsessively abandoned and partially transcended in order to embrace new and fresh ones. Blending the refined hue of Romantic epiphany with the concreteness of Realism and going even beyond these dimensions Joyce assures his epiphanys totality reaching also a sense of the sublime in this permanent intertwining of contraries. After establishing a clear history of the epiphany throughout literary works of art, the focus of the chapter will naturally fall upon the classifications and definitions of Joycean epiphany in itself, as they appear either in Joyces works or in those of the critics (Margot Nor221

ris, Morris Beja, Robert Langbaum, Henry Chayenne). To the influences played upon Joyces becoming from incipient, Babel-like self to authorial ego, inseparable from the auspices of epiphany, adds the free interpretation of the Thomist aesthetics developed in the economy of the religious Trinitarian ideal. From the three dimensions, integritas, consonantia and claritas, we have singled out claritas as being specific to Joycean epiphany. A third specific dimension of Joycean epiphany dwells in the sense of the sacred borrowed from religion. Therefore the reader assists at a constant dispersion of Joyces biographical self into just as many constituents of the egos vocation, more exactly just as many epiphanic experiences. By applying John Armstrongs theory of empathy together with Marleaus Pontys system of phenomenological perception the reader, after having analysed the first two stages of Joycean aesthetic apprehension -integritas and consonantia- witnesses how the transcendental Ego of the artist becomes God-like while grasping and later, in tranquillity, rendering claritas, in the process of creation much like Joyce, the artist, who sits behind beyond or above his artwork paring his fingernails. His mind as incandescent as a fading coal can be luminously apprehensive, consequently reaching the enlightened state. Only in that moment can the artist embrace and shed light on the noumenon of the aesthetic object. What imposes more specifically this explosion of light if not a dispersion of limits at all levels and in all possible directions? The pluri-transcendence operates not only at the level of temporal or spatial dimensions that uselessly strive to limit/concretize/ ephemerize the subject and object but it involves both a self and other transcendence of the object and subject themselves (a self-and-other-transcendence). The subject first transcends itself and then the object, identifying with it, and transgresses or goes beyond it, reuniting thus a new-self-and-other. Claritas may be the climactic phase of aesthetic apprehension but it is also consubstantial with the Joycean epiphany since both stages comport a certain level of transcendence beyond phenomenological perception as Ponty would probably state. Furthermore, the author himself admits to the fact that this instant refers to epiphany, for which he poetically quotes the Italian physiologist, Galvani: that enchantment of the heart. Thus the epiphanic attempts in Dubliners are matured and distilled in A Portrait. Aesthetic apprehension and epiphany cannot leap the three stages that Stephen mentions and thus they cannot subside without a form of transcendence. Although in Dubliners the poetic lan222

guage is not mastered quite like in A Portrait; the visible inclination towards spiritual games brood upon the contemplated object is obvious as they are sustained by the artists early education, sensitive memory, the imaginative ability in aesthetic scope. The spiritual games of transcendence offer themselves as key elements on the path of the selfs quest for vocation. The third chapter entitled, Epiphanic Mnemotechnique in the Philosophical Labyrinth explores the mechanism of individuation from a different perspective. In order to make the epiphany-making process more transparent we revealed the mnemotechnique of epiphany. The epiphanogenic function that memory plays within Joyces work considerably situates the author in a sphere of influence such as Prousts mmoire involuntaire, while also showing an indirect tributary contribution to Bergsons flux of experience. In order to demonstrate our perspective we have adopted a philosophical and religious approach built upon the theories of Vico, Plato, Aristotle, Locke and Casey. Moreover, Lakoffs principle of gestaltic experience together with Ricoeurs intertwined memory-image connecting also the case of the Greek eikon with the phantasia serve as sharp insights into the making process of Joycean epiphany. Starting with Platos theory which presents in the dialogues entitled The Sophist and Thaeitosus the question of eikn (the representation of an absent thing), the question of memory and imagination immediately comes into play. But then there is Eduard S. Casey who introduces the distinction between active memory (according to Bergsons theory) and passive memory as it is represented by the English empiricism of John Locke while also providing an ampler perspective of the two coordinates. After clearly establishing the relation between memory and imagination, appealing also to Plato and Aristotles as well as Locke and Caseys theories of imagination (although the text invites an analysis from Bergsons activist theory on personal memory as instants) I analyzed Stephens memories of his father, playing a crucial role in Stephens mnemonic journey towards acquiring an artistic identity. The analysis of personal and collective memory (according to these notions as they are defined by Augustin, at Husserl and Maurice Halbwachs) is imposed and sustained by significant textual examples (the famous childhood apologize scene which when recounted becomes the eagle epiphany, the epiphany with the

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marshall) resulting thus in a detailed account of the various stages the protagonist goes through, in order to discover his true self. Therefore the labyrinth of memory is transposed and also doubled by the philosophical labyrinth both of which converging towards the epiphany of vocation, which apparently is an epiphany of the hero but more abstractly an epiphany of the writers own creative authority /of the author himself. A deeper level of analysis into the internal laboratory of the Joycean epiphany is achieved in the fourth chapter entitled Love from Dubliners to A Portrait through the investigation of the role of the feminine as most critics admitted that the feminine figure was prevalent in, if not governing, Joyces life. The primary directions of focus regard womens role in Joycean textual voices through the major critical threads of gender and phenomenological theories as well as a religious interpretation: mother, temptress (womans paradox of passive aggression turning her into a symbol of sovereignty), Blessed Virgin Mary, ideal feminine within a feminist (more exactly Kristevian) point of view as well as a circumscription of the female image and symbol as it appears in Celtic times. However, the trajectory of the Joycean womans evolution stretches far beyond mere mapping of feminine roles through gender, power and religious criticism. The woman and the feminine do not represent just another ingredient in the Joycean epiphanic melting pot but an important agent that propels the hero forward on his path towards artistic maturity, the complexity of the feminine nature becoming a form of imago for the Joycean epiphany. As we deepen the demonstration the Joycean woman sways from feminine agency, feminine muse to feminine sublime contributing thus to the sense of totality which the artist so feverishly looks for. Automatically the dimension of the sublime (the mystery that resides from the feminine abstractedness that the Joycean conscience imprints onto the feminine image) presupposes a harmonious symbiosis of contraries, a simultaneous absolutely captivating and frightening dimension, which we viewed as the feminine sublime. From this the artist adopts the most matter-bound dimension, mater genitrix, but only to convert it at an abstract level into his own epiphany laboratory which he calls virgin womb of imagination. Therefore the feminine is not only grasped in its multilayered complexity but is also transcended by

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the heros words made flesh while simultaneously contributing considerably to the formation of the sensitive artistic conscience. In the fifth chapter which is also the last one, Restructuring Textual Epiphanies, a reconfirmation of the epiphanys totality and atemporality is justified by means of encoding it in myth where the Celtic symbols are brought to light by us showing more clearly through the textual fibre Joyces ambivalent attitude towards the Irish Revival, announced in the first chapter. On the verge of literary hidrolatry, the Joycean text exhalts its reader with the all engulfing water instances and later in the text with the water epiphanies. The demonstration is apparent under the form of a close-text analysis in both envisaged works with a fine delicate thread of Bachelardian phenomenology and a more dominant one of Lyotardian phenomenology concerning the sublime which through the readers imagination reworks the Joycean water imagery. This intricately weaved analysis reveals the many water epiphanies as they underwent a sinuous passage from incipient symbolic phases or symbols per se in Dubliners to a highly complex epiphanogenic presence in A Portrait. The Joycean water presence in the novel is grasped through the readers imagination under the sign of an intricate evolution from trivial (pertaing also to the bodily drive) social, natural, to spiritual and finally the celestial and sacred dimension. Since all the Joycean water motifs, symbols and images are viewed inasmuch as they contribute to the construction of epiphany and since water resembles the feminine regarding their undecidability, shiftiness and mater genitrix in terms of epiphanogenic function it is explainable why we demonstrated the water imagery as reaching the epiphanic sublime. However, the sublime is not enclosed upon itself but represents a mere starting point for a re-plunge into the phenomenological reality, even though keeping the artists thirst for the transcendental essence. At first glance one may falsely consider that this whole epiphanic voyage is nothing but an enclosed circle, although there is much more to it as the second coming of the ordinary opens up the trajectory of philosophical and literary consciousness to the next evolutional curlicue of the spiral: the sublime. The present study attempted to demonstrate that the Joycean epiphany analysed in Dubliners and A Portrait presupposes a complex process which does not present only the 225

artistic becoming and the discovering of the authorial egos vocation through epiphany, but the epiphanys own moulding into an ungraspable totality. The specificity of the Joycean epiphany consists precisely in its omnipresence within the Joycean scriptural space: from text level to ideatic and imagery level, religious and even mythological level regressing, digressing and transgressing just as many levels of the authorial egos evolution. As the epiphany lends itself to so many dimensions but yields itself wholly to none, the reader finds himself/herself in front of an amazingly intricate tapestry, whose definite identity cannot be pinpointed once and for all. The omnipresence of the Joycean epiphany draws the reader into a labyrinth which leads towards, initially apparent, linear and later cyclic readings that further testify the sublime of contraries, which is not reached by the author until he undergoes a sinuous process of transcendence from the biographical self in favour of the authorial ego.

Le Soi Vocational. Une Etude de lEpiphanie a Partir de Gens A Dublin jusqua Un Portrait
Rsum Mots et termes cls: autobiografiction,298 ressistance du Joyce, fictionnalisation, figures souveraines, la pluri - transcendance, les jeux spirituels, la mmoire piphanogenique, l'piphanie de la vocation, l'imagerie de leau joycienne piphanogenique, le sublime piphanique. Lorsquon traite d'une uvre Joycienne, soit-elle histoire ou roman, les options d'interprtations que le texte offre sont innombrables; comme tmoignage on a l'industrie de
298

Des choses qui cachent ou qui sont cachs au-dessus de la toile gris et diaphane.

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Joyce the Joyce industry - qui s'est accumul jusque maintenant, sans offrir des signes quil avait puis ses uvres, dans une telle ou telle manire. Cependant, ce qui est surprenant est le fait qu'aucun critique n'a pas entirement consacr son tre un tude de lpiphanie joycienne tel qu'elle apparat dans Les Gens de Dublin et Un Portrait. Laissant de ct le fait que l'tude de l'uvre de Joyce, dans le sens strict du terme, serait regard comme une canonisation difficilement applicable, on a considr que cest notre devoir de transfrer lpiphanie joycienne l o elle appartient il appartient vraiment : dans le milieu de tout acte joycien de cration. Cest ainsi quon a construit notre tude : pas sur une structure de canons base sur des images ou des symboles rptitifs, mais comme une totalit radiante qui respecte pleinement la polyvalence des textes concerns. Pour ceci, nous avons tudi le contexte de la vie de Joyce du moment que la naissance de l'piphanie est due l'insistance de Joyce sur l'authenticit malgr et en dehors de l'acceptation des canons et des notions de nationalit et religion de l'poque. Le premier chapitre, James Joyce et la spirale de l'identit, met en vidence le rle de la rsistance joycienne aux interdictions imposes par le pays aussi que la rsistance la violence mimtique, mettant ainsi les bases du stade prcoce d'une vocation artistique diffrente. Sans cder des formes dguises de la violence mimtique Girardienne (de cette manire il ne rejette pas ses mentors artistiques: Ibsen, Byron, Shelley), Joyce sloigne de l'esthtisme emprunt borrowed aestheticism (Fanon) de revivalistes qui croyaient fortement dans la renaissance de l'identit nationale par une libration brusque dans le monde primitif des lgendes celtiques. Joyce abandonne le mythe antique, car, plus tard, il est capable de crer ses propres mythes modernes. Mettant en question l'autorit impose (celle de la sphre primitive irlandaise) l'crivain avoue et lutte pour la seule autorit qui semble tre valable pour lui comme artiste: l'autorit de l'authenticit. Ceci explique pourquoi Le portrait est assez autobiographique, mme si son autobiografiction est model aprs un portrait imaginaire de Stephen Dedalus. La vie de Joyce devient ainsi la prsentation esthtique de l'autobiographie qui peut tre dcrite comme fictionnalisation. Dans ce chapitre le texte fournit une autobiografiction complexe de l'auteur et, en appliquant la grille de lecture du Nouveau Historisme on localise quelques unes des influences les plus importantes pour l'art joycienne. Plus prcisment, en ce qui concerne la naissance et l'volution de 227

l'piphanie joycienne, on remarque l'influence d'Ibsen (l'apprciation du ralisme, de lphmre, du quotidien), le Romantisme avec son got pour la lesthtique de la nature et son esprit de rbellion, de la Renaissance Irlandaise en mettant l'accent sur la vie simple et humble, mais aussi en louant l'hros triomphant. L'itinraire est parcours entre deux plans apparemment antagonistes: la fiction et la ralit, le monde terrestre et le rcit, allant tout au long des expriences que les deux consciences (l'auteur et le rcit) partagent plus ou moins. Notant ainsi lemplacement de Joyce dans le contexte de la Renaissance Irlandaise (selon Vincent Cheng, Grgoire Chteau et Declan Kieberd, Emer Nolan pour n'en nommer que quelques-uns des critiques proccups par la question de l'intgration ou de l'emplacement de Joyce dans le contexte de la Renaissance Irlandaise) et analysant la question du nationalisme Irlandais et du catholicisme joycien, allant jusqu ses racines celtiques, tout cela est une approche fructueux pour la dcouverte de la nature de l'piphanie joycienne . L'ambivalence montre la Renaissance Irlandaise se reflte galement dans l'aspect uniforme et rconciliant de l'piphanie. On note une approche similaire envers la religion, de mme que Joyce sest loign de la croyance aveugle que l'Eglise Catholique proposait, mais il a gard son ton liturgique liturgical tone (selon Umberto Eco) et le mystre de la crmonie religieuse dans son piphanie. Gardant certaines formes et les coutumes rituelles lcrivain a traduit la religiosit dans son propre faon de conscience morale, ou plus concrtement dans le fil narratif ponctue par le rythme liturgique imprgn par le discours sacr, pour ne pas mentionner le fait que le terme piphanie a t emprunt du discours religieux. Aprs la trancendance dune potentielle vocation de prtre catholique l'hros restaure la correspondance entre la beaut et linstance de l'entit, travers la prise de conscience de sa propre vocation. Le deuxime chapitre, intitul James Joyce et l'piphanie, est structur en trois souschapitres, comme suit: Tentatives prcdentes de l'Epiphanie littraire, L'piphanie joycienne dans sa critique, et Claritas au-del de la perception phnomnologique. L'tude de l'piphanie en soi commence dans ce chapitre par une analyse critique des essais prcdents d'piphanie tels comme ils ont t enregistrs par Martin Bidney, Ashton Nichols, et Robert Langbaum. Grce a l'tude de Martin Bidney intitul Modles dpiphanie, Patterns of Epiphany on constate que James Joyce na pas t, peut tre, le crateur 228

exclusif de l'piphanie. A partir des romantiques Wordsworth et Coleridge jusqu lcrivain victorien Arnold, Bidney expose la gomtrie rayonnante de l'piphanie de Wordsworth radiant geometry in Wordsworthian epiphany et des piphanies lmentaires des deux autres potes, et, puis, il continue avec une analyse de l'piphanie de Tennyson et Pater, rvlant le fait que les deux crivains partagent un motif rptitif d'piphanies (la fleur et le feu). Son tude finisse par la dimension historique de l'piphanie, telle comme il lenregistre et lanalyse aux auteurs comme Carlyle, Tolsto, et Barrett Browning. Bien que les noms illustres semblent prcder l'piphanie joycienne, les crivains que Bidney a choisi pour analyser le concept dpiphanie ne lont pas invent ou trouv eux mme ; le critique est celui qui a mis en place certaines nuances piphaniques. Cest justement dans le XXe sicle, avec l'arrive de Joyce sur la scne littraire, que le concept de lpiphanie est prend cette dnomination dans la littrature. Ainsi on peut dire que James Joyce est le parrain de lpiphanie, comme il a choisi le terme, mme sil y tait aussi l'crivaine contemporaine, Virginia Woolf, qui a montr une certaine intuition vis--vis de cette technique littraire, mais la appel en se rapportant seulement sa dimension temporelle le moment . Mais Joyce est celui qui a dvelopp ce qu'on peut appeler la religion de lpiphanie, parce qu'il l'a cherch dans la vie quotidienne, il la utilis, sen est rappeler ou la mme recre dans ses propres critures qui sont devenus le pilier central autour duquel tourne toute son oeuvre. notre avis ce que l'piphanie joycienne apporte de nouveau la littrature est le sentiment de la totalit et de limpondrabilit reflt dans lvanescence des moments tmoigns par Stephen (Stephens confessed evanescence of moments). En surprenant tout les choses qui touchent la conscience de l'artiste, lpiphanie devient elle-mme dpourvue de surprises, une multitude dexpriences motionnelles, esthtiques, rtrospectives, lmentaires, mythiques. Ainsi, lessai de dcoder l'piphanie en termes de schmas prtablis serait une ritration du mythe de Sisyphe. Chez Joyce chaque piphanie est pleinement ancr dans la totalit, dune telle manire que mme si on peut dtecter quelques symboles ou quelques images rptitives (par exemple "livoire", "leau", "la femme"), ils sont partiellement et obsessionnellement surmont pour embrasser de nouvelles images. Combinant le ton raffin de l'piphanie romantique et le concret du ralisme et allant au-del

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de ceux-ci, Joyce a fournit la totalit de son piphanie et a russi tablir la dimension du sublime dans la fusion permanente des contraires. Aprs avoir tabli un historique clair de l'piphanie dans des oeuvres littraire diverses le chapitre portera naturellement sur les classifications et les dfinitions attribues l'piphanie joycienne, telles comme elles apparaissent soit dans les uvres de Joyce soit dans celles des critiques (Margot Norris, Morris Beja, Robert Langbaum, Henry Chayenne). Les influences sur le dveloppement de l'crivain partir du soi biographique comparable la Tour de Babel vers l'ego d'auteur, influences indissociables des auspices de l'piphanie ; on y ajoute la libre interprtation de l'esthtique thomiste dveloppe dans l'conomie de l'idal religieux de la Trinit. Des trois dimensions, integritas, consonantia et claritas, on a singularis claritas comme spcifique l'piphanie joycienne. Le lecteur est donc tmoin une dispersion constante du soi biographique de Joyce dans de nombreux constituants de la vocation d'ego, c'est--dire dans nombreuses expriences piphaniques. Appliquant la thorie de l'empathie de John Armstrong combine avec le systme de Marleau Ponty sur la perception phnomnologie, aprs avoir examin les deux premires phases de l'apprhension esthtique joycienne - integritas et consonantia - le lecteur est tmoin la transformation de l'ego transcedental de l'artiste en divinit. L'crivain capture et, plus tard, il relve tranquillement le claritas comme un auteur en pleine processus cratif qui se situe derrire, au-del ou au-dessus de son uvre en nettoyant ses ongles (sits behind beyond or above his artwork paring his fingernails). Sa conscience, incandescente comme une chancre brise ("fading coal"), peut tre apprhensive dans une manire lumineuse, atteignant ainsi un tat dclairage. C'est seulement alors que l'artiste peut embrasser et rpandre la lumire sur l'essence de l'objet esthtique. Qu'est-ce que cet clat de lumire impose plus exactement si non une dispersion des limites sur tous les niveaux et dans toutes les directions possibles? La pluri-transcendance opre non seulement au niveau des dimensions spatiales ou temporales qui essayent, en vain, de limiter / concrtiser/ phmriser le sujet et objet, mais implique la fois une transcendance et une altrit du sujet et de l'objet mme (une transcendance soi - autrui). Le sujet se transcende d'abord luimme et ensuite l'objet en s'identifiant avec lui ; il transgresse ou va au-del de celui-ci, en runissant ainsi un nouveau soi - autrui. Claritas peut tre une phase climatique de 230

l'apprhension esthtique, mais concide aussi l'piphanie joycienne du moment que les deux tapes comportent un certain niveau de transcendance au-del de la perception phnomnologique, beyond phenomenological perception, comme dirait probablement Ponty. De plus, l'auteur admet lui-mme que cet instant ou moment se rfre l'piphanie, instant pour lequel il cite le pote italien Galvani enchantment of the heart. Ainsi, les tentatives piphaniques de Les gens de Dublin sont distilles dans Un Portrait. L'apprhension esthtique et l'piphanie ne peuvent pas ignorer les trois tapes que Stephen a expliqu et donc ils ne peuvent pas exister sans une certaine forme de transcendance. Bien que le langage potique dans Dubliners n'est pas aussi bien matris que dans Un Portrait, le penchement visible vers les jeux spirituels tisss autour des objets contempls est vident et soutenu par l'ducation prcoce de l'artiste, par sa mmoire sensible, et sa capacit imaginative mise en service des fins esthtiques. Les jeux spirituels de la transcendance sont offerts comme des cls dans la qute pour la vocation du soi. Le troisime chapitre intitul, Mnmotechnique de l'piphanie dans le labyrinthe Philosophique explore le mcanisme de l'individuation sous un angle diffrent. Pour rendre plus transparent le processus de cration de lpiphanie, on a rvl la mnmotechnique de l'piphanie. La fonction piphanogenique que la mmoire joue dans l'uvre de Joyce situe l'auteur dans la sphre d'influence de la mmoire involontaire de Proust, tout en montrant un hommage la notion de flux de lexpriencede Bergson. Pour dmontrer notre point de vue, on a adopt une approche fonde sur les thories philosophiques et religieuses de Vico, Platon, Aristote, Locke et Casey. En outre, le principe de l'exprience gestaltique299 de Lakoff avec la mmoire image de Ricoeur connect au concept grecque d'eikon et phantasia servent comme intuitions de l'essence de la cration de l'piphanie joycienne. Commenant avec la thorie de Platon qui prsente dans les dialogues Le sophiste et le thanatos la question de l'eikon (la reprsentation de quelque chose d'absent), la question de la mmoire et celle de limagination interviennent tout de suite. Mais ensuite intervient la thorie d'Edward S. Casey qui montre la distinction entre la mmoire active (selon la thorie (ce ravissement du cur) that

299

Adj. formant une gestalt, un ensemble structur ; propre la gestalt-thorie ;

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de Bergson) et de la mmoire passive telle comme elle est reprsente par l'empirisme anglais de John Locke et qui donne une perspective plus large des deux coordonnes. Aprs avoir tabli une relation claire entre la mmoire et l'imagination, en faisant galement appel aux thories de limagination dveloppes par Platon et Aristote, mais aussi par Locke et Casey (bien que le texte fait appel aussi une analyse du point de vue de la thorie de la mmoire activiste de Bergson, visant la mmoire personnelle comme tant compose de moments ou dinstants), on a examin les souvenirs de Stephen propos de son pre, qui jouent un rle crucial dans le voyage mnmonique de Stephen vers la perfection artistique. Lanalyse de la mmoire personnelle et collective est ncessaire et soutenue par des exemples significatifs du texte (la fameuse scne des excuses qui, au moment o on la raconte, se transforme dans l'piphanie de l'aigle, puis on a lpiphanie avec le marchal, etc.), en se constituant ainsi dans un document dtaill des diffrentes phases que le protagoniste traverse afin de dcouvrir son vrai soi. Le labyrinthe de mmoire est transpos mais aussi doubl par le labyrinthe philosophique, les deux convergent vers l'piphanie de la vocation, qui est apparemment une piphanie de lhros, mais plus abstraitement elle se traduit comme une piphanie de l'autorit crative de l'artiste lui-mme. Une analyse plus aigu dans le laboratoire interne de l'piphanie est gre dans le quatrime chapitre intitul Lamour partir de Les gens de Dublin vers Le portrait, travers de lenqute sur le rle du fminin, du moment que plusieurs critiques ont reconnu que la figure fminine tait rpandue si non quelle mme gouvernait la vie de Joyce. Notre analyse initiale concerne le rle des femmes dans les voix textuelles joycienne, ayant comme principales courants critiques les thories phnomnologiques du genre aussi quune interprtation religieuse. Ainsi, on peut identifier les rles essentiels que la femme joycienne remplit: la mre, la sduisante (le paradoxe de la femme dune passion agressive quelle transforme dans un symbole de la souverainet), la Bienheureuse Vierge Marie, l'idal fminin analys partir d'un point de vue fministe (plus exactement, Kristevian) aussi qu'une inclusion de l'image et du symbole de la femme telle comme elle apparat dans l'poque celtique.

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Au cours de notre investigation la femme joycienne passe de lagent fminin la muse fminine, au sublime fminin contribuant ainsi au sentiment de la totalit que l'artiste cherche avec une forte ferveur. Automatiquement la dimension du sublime (le mystre fminin qui dcoule de labstract fminin que Joyce imprime limage fminine) exige une symbiose harmonieuse des contraires, une dimension absolument captivante et la fois terrifiante, quon considre comme tant le sublime fminin. A partir de cela l'artiste adopte la dimension la plus ancre dans la matire, la mre gnitrice (mer geriatrix), mais seulement pour la convertir, un niveau abstrait, dans son propre laboratoire piphanique qu'il appelle le sein virginal de l'imagination ("virgin womb of 'imagination "). Donc, le fminin nest pas seulement surpris dans sa complexit pluristratifie, mais il est aussi transcend par les mots qui sont incarns (words made flesh), en contribuant la cration de la conscience artistique sensible. Dans le dernier chapitre, La restructuration des piphanies textuelles, une nouvelle confirmation de l'atemporalit et de la totalit de l'piphanie est justifie par la tension de l'piphanie dans le mythe, l o on a mis en vidence les symboles celtiques travers de la fibre des textes analys et l'attitude ambivalente de l'crivain envers la Renaissance Celtique, attitude quon a annonc dans le premier chapitre. A la limite de l'hidrolatrie300 littraire le texte joycien exalte ses lecteurs avec les nombreuses instances de l'eau crasante, puis avec les piphanies de l'eau. La dmonstration se manifeste sous la forme d'une analyse sur le texte des deux uvres concernes, par le courant phnomnologique dlicat de Bachelard et celui encore plus dominant de la phnomnologie de Lyotard, courant concernant le sublime, l'aide desquels le lecteur rinterprte et reconstitue l'imagerie de l'eau joycienne. Cette analyse tisse dune manire complexe, rvle des nombreuses piphanies de l'eau de la mme manire dont elles ont parcouru le chemin tortueux des stades symboliques initiales ou des symboles mme, dans Les gens de Dublin, la prsence piphanognique dans Un Portrait. Le voyage de l'eau joycienne dans le roman, est surpris par l'imagination du lecteur sous le signe de lvolution subtile de la dimension triviale, sociale, naturelle, la dimension spirituelle et enfin cleste et sacre. Du moment que toutes les motifs, les symboles et les images de l'eau joycienne sont
300

adulation de leau

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vue dune telle manire quelles contribuent la cration de l'piphanie et tant donn que l'eau est similaire au fminin en ce qui concerne laspect de lindcision, de lindfini, mais aussi au terme de mater genitrix comme fonction piphanognique, on peut comprendre pourquoi on a prsent limagerie de l'eau comme la russite incontestable de lpiphanie sublime. Cependant le sublime n'est pas cod en soi, mais seulement reprsente un point de dpart pour re-plonger la ralit phnomnologique, conservant toutefois la soif de l'artiste pour l'essence transcendantale. une premire vue, on peut faussement considrer que tout ce voyage piphanique n'est rien qu'un cercle, mais il sagt de beaucoup plus que cela dans le seconde venue ("the second coming") de l'ordinaire ou du quotidien qui ouvre la voie de la conscience littraire et philosophique vers le timbre suivant de la spirale de l'volution : le sublime, qui son tour va rclamer le banal et ainsi de suite. Cette tude vise dmontrer que l'piphanie joycienne analyse dans Les gens de Dublin et Un portrait suppose un processus complexe qui nimplique seulement le dveloppement artistiques, mais aussi le moulage de lpiphanie daprs une totalit pas trop facile prvoir. La spcificit de l'piphanie joycienne consiste plus exactement dans son omniprsence dans l'espace scripturale: partir du niveau textuel au niveau des ides et des images, celui religieux et mythologique, en rgressant et transgressant dautants niveaux du dveloppement du soi de lauteur. Flirtant avec des dimensions multiples, mais ne cdant pas devant aucune, l'piphanie attire le lecteur dans un labyrinthe tonnant des paradoxes dont la rconciliation ne peut pas tre remplie quaprs la conscience sensible de l'crivain aura suivi le processus tortueux de la transcendance, atteignant ainsi le sublime.

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Bibliography a. The work A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Prietenii Crii, Bucureti, 1993 Dubliners, Wordsworth Classics, Hertfordshire, 1995 Epiphany [Up: |Q|] [Robot Wisdom home page], Jorn Barger September 2000 (updated Feb2001) Essais critiques, traducere lisabeth Janvier, Gallimard, Paris, 1966. Letters of James Joyce, vol I, Stuart Gilbert (ed.), N.Y., The Viking Press, 1966 Letters of James Joyce, vol. II, Richard Ellmann (ed.), N.Y., The Viking Press, 1966 Les Exils, traducere J.S. Bradley, Gallimard, Paris, 1950 Stephen Hero,Theodore Spencer (ed), New Directions Press, New York, 1944 Ulysses, Vintage Books, Random House, New York, 1961

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b. Critical references 1. ANDERSON, Chester G., James Joyce, Thames and Hudson, London, 1998 2. AUBERT Jacques, The Aesthetics of James Joyce, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore & London,1992 3. BENSTOCK, Bernard, A Light from Some Other World: Symbolic Structure in A Portrait of the Artist, in Approaches to James Joyces Portrait, Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (editori), University of Pittsburg Press, 1976 4. BLOOM, Harold (ed.), James Joyces A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Chelsea House Publishers, N.Y. Philadelphia, 1988 5. BOLT, Sydney, Preface to James Joyce, Longman, London, 1992 6. BRIVIC, Sheldon, The Disjunctive Structure of Joyces Portrait, in Approaches to Joyces Portrait, Thomas F. Staley i Bernard Benstock (ed.), University of Pittsburg Press, 1976, pp. 251-268 7. BROWN, Richard, James Joyce, Macmillan Education LTD, 1999 8. BUDGEN, Frank, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and London, 1960, fourth printing 1967 9. CHENG, Vincent., Catching the Conscience of a Race: Joyce and Celticism in Morris Beja and David Norris (eds.), Joyce in the Hibernian Metropolis, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1996 10. CIXOUS, Hlne, The Exile of James Joyce, David Lewis, New York, 1972 11. CIXOUS, Hlne, Readings. The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva, trad. Verena Andermatt Conley, Harvester Wheatsheaf, London New York, 1992 12. COYLE, John (ed.), James Joyce, Icon Books, Cambridge, 1997 13. DAHL, Liisa, Lingustic Features of the Stream of Consciousness Techniques of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Eugene O-Neill, Kirjapaino Polytypos Turku, 1970 14. DECLAN, Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, James Joyce and Mythic Realism Vintage, London, 1996 15. ECO, Umberto, The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, The University of Tulsa, 1982 16. ELLMANN, Maud, Disremembering Dedalus: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, Robert Young (ed.), London, Routledge Kegan Paul, 1981 17. ELLMANN, Richard, James Joyce, Oxford University Press, London, 1966 18. FULLER, David, James Joyces Ulysses, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992 19. GIFFORD, Don, Joyce Annotated, University of California Press, 1982 20. GOLDMAN, Arnold, Stanilaus, James and the Politics of Family, pp. 60-75 in Atti del Third International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, 14-18 giugno 1971, Trieste Universit degli Studi, Facolta di Magistero 21. GRIGORESCU, Dan, Realitate, mit, simbol. Un portret al lui James Joyce, Univers, Bucureti, 1984 22. HALPER, Nathan, James Joyce and his Fingernails, pp. 292-298 in Atti del Third International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, 14-18 giugno 1971, Trieste Universit degli Studi, Facolta di Magistero 236

23. HARARI, Roberto, How James Joyce Made his Name- A Reading of the Final Lacan, New York: Other Press, 1995 24. HARKNESS, Marguerite, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Voices of the Text, Twayne Publishers G.K.Hall Co., Boston, 1990 25. HENKE, Suzette, James Joyce and the Politics of Desire, Routledge, N.Y. & London, 1990 26. HENKE, Suzette, Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Feminist Reading of Portrait, in James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, R.B.Kershner (ed.), Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, Boston. New York, 1993, pp. 307-326 27. HERR, Cherryl, Deconstructing Dedalus in James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, R.B.Kershner (ed.), Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, Boston. New York, 1993, pp. 338-361 28. HOLLAND, Norman N., Portrait as Rebellion in James Joyce. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, R.B.Kershner (ed.), Bedford Books of St. Martins Press, Boston. New York, 1993, pp. 279-295 29. IONESCU, C.M., Cercul lui Hermes, Univers Enciclopedic, Bucureti, 1998 30. JOHNSEN, William A., Violence and Modernism: Ibsen, Joyce and Woolf, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003 31. KAIN, Richard M., Epiphanies of Dublin in Approaches to Joyces Portrait, Thomas F. Staley i Bernard Benstock (ed.), University of Pittsburg Press, 1976 32. KEARNEY Richard, Traversals and Epiphanies in Joyce and Proust in Peter Gratton, John Panteleimon Manoussakis (eds.) R. Kearney Traversing the Imaginary, Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois, 2007 33. KENNER, Hugh, The Cubist Portrait, in Approaches to Joyces Portrait, Thomas F. Staley i Bernard Benstock (ed), University of Pittsburg Press, 1976 34. LEWIS, Whyndham, Analysis of the Mind of James Joyce in Time and Western Man, Chatto and Windus, London, 1927, pp. 100-106 35. LOSS, Archie K., The Artist Type in the Earlier Work of Joyce and Related Types in Symbolist Art: An Approach by Way of the Visual Arts, pp. 270-278 in Atti del Third International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, 14-18 giugno 1971, Trieste Universit degli Studi, Facolta di Magistero 36. MAHAFFEY, Vicki, Reauthorizing Joyce, University of Pennsylvania, Cambridge University Press, 1988 37. MAHON, Peter, James Joyce A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, 2009 38. McCourt, John, James Joyce in Context, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009 39. MIROIU, Mihai, Epiphany in James Joyces Early Fiction in Studies in English Language and Literature for Refresher Courses, coord. Mihai Miroiu, Universitatea din Bucureti, Facultatea de Limbi i Literaturi Strine, 1983 40. MOSS, Roger, Difficult language: The Justification of Joyces Syntax in Ulysses, in The Modern English Novel: The Reader, the Writer and the Work, Gabriel Jasipovici (ed.), Open Books, London, 1976 41. NAREMORE, James, Consciousness and Society A Portrait of the Artist in Approaches to Joyces Portrait, London, University of Pittsburg Press, 1976 237

42. NOLAN, Emer, James Joyce and Nationalism, Routledge, London and New York, 1999 43. NORRIS, Margot, A Companion to James Joyces Ulysses, Bedford Books, Boston. New York, 1998 44. PARRINDER, Patrick, James Joyce, Cambridge University Press, 1984 45. RABAT, JeanMichel, James Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, Cambridge, 2001 46. ROCCO-BERGERA, N., A Contribution to the Study of Jealousy in Italo Svevo and James Joyce, p. 25 in Atti del Third International James Joyce Symposium, Trieste, 14-18 giugno 1971, Trieste Universit degli Studi, Facolta di Magistero 47. SCOTT, Bonnie Kime, James Joyce. Feminist Readings, The Harvester Press, Great Britain,1987 48. SHERRY, Vincent, James Joyce Ulysses, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Reprinted 1997 49. SHORT, M.H., Stylistics and The Teaching of Literature: with an Example from James Joyces A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, in Language and Literature, Ronald Carter(ed.), George Allen & Unwin, London, 1982 50. THORNTON, Weldon, The Antimodernism of Joyces Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Syracuse University Press, 1994 51. VERSCHUYL, Chris, Religionless and Asexual: Searching for the Smithy of Stephens Soul. A Close reading of the Villanelle in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1996 52. WALES, Katie, The Language of James Joyce, Macmillan Education LTD, 1992 53. WILLIAMS, Trevor L., Reading Joyce Politically, University Press of Florida, 1997 54. *** Joyce & Paris 19021920-19401975, Actes du Cinquime Symposium International James Joyce, Paris 16-20 Juin 1975, Editions du C.N.R.S., Publications de LUniversit de Lille 3, 1979 55. *** Portraits of the Artist in Exile. Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans, Potts Willard (ed.), Wolfhound Press, University of Washington Press, 1979 56. *** Approaches to James Joyces Portrait, Staley, Thomas F. and Benstock Bernard (ed.), University of Pittsburg Press, 1976

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