Epiphany in literature refers generally to a visionary moment when a character has a sudden insight or realization that changes their understanding of themselves or their comprehension of the world. The term has a more specialized sense as a literary device distinct to modernist fiction.Morris, Beja. Epiphany in the Modern Novel (1916). London: Peter Owen, 1971. Author James Joyce first borrowed the Christian term "Epiphany" and adopted it into a profane literary context in Stephen Hero (1904–1906), an early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In that manuscript, Stephen Daedalus defines epiphany as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself." Stephen's epiphanies are moments of heightened poetic perception in the trivial aspects of everyday Dublin life. They become the basis of Stephen's theory of aesthetic perception as well as his writing. In similar terms, Joyce experimented with epiphany throughout his career, from the short stories he wrote between 1898 and 1904 which were central to his early work, to his late novel Finnegans Wake (1939). Scholars used Joyce's term to describe a common feature of the modernist novel, with authors as varied as Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Katherine Mansfield all featuring these sudden moments of vision as an aspect of the contemporary mind. Joycean or modernist epiphany has its roots in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially the Wordsworthian "spots of time,"See Beja. Also Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton, 1971; and Nichols, Ashton. The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Movement. Tuscaloosa: U. of Alabama P., 1987. as well as the sudden spiritual insights that formed the basis of traditional spiritual autobiography.Kim, Sharon. Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850–1950: Constellations of the Soul. NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Philosopher Charles Taylor explains the rise of epiphany in modernist art as a reaction against the rise of a "commercial-industrial-capitalist society" during the early twentieth century.Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989) 422.
Etymology The word "epiphany" descends from the ancient Greek ἐπῐφᾰ́νειᾰ (epipháneia), meaning a "manifestation or appearance." The word is built from the Greek words "pha" (to shine), "phanein" (to show, to cause to shine), and "epiphanein" (to manifest, to bring to light).Skeat, Rev. Walter W. An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. In ancient Greek usage, the term often describes the visible manifestation of a god or goddess to mortal eyes, a form of theophany.Platt, Verity. Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Early Christians adopted the term to describe the manifestation of the child, Jesus to the Magi, which was understood figuratively as the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles and commemorated in the Catholic Feast of Epiphany, celebrated January 6. In the Greek New Testament manuscripts, epiphaneia refers also to Christ's second coming.
Epiphanies in Dubliners
Dubliners by James Joyce is a collection of short stories published in June 1914. The short stories, set in Dublin, capture some of the most unhappy moments in life. Dublin, to Joyce, seemed to be the centre of paralysis, which he explains in a letter to Grant Richards, who was the publisher of Dubliners. Joyce explains his purpose and intention behind writing the collection:"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. I have tried to present it to the indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life. The stories are arranged in this order. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard."
Joyce introduced the concept of "epiphany" in Stephen Hero to preface a discussion of Aquinas's three criteria of beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance: when the object "seems to us radiant, [it] achieves its epiphany". The term isn't used when Stephen Dedalus covers the same ground in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In Stephen Hero the protagonist thinks of recording epiphanies in a book, and there's a reference to Stephen Dedalus's collection of epiphanies in Ulysses. Joyce himself recorded over seventy epiphanies, of which forty have survived.
An "epiphany" may be more colloquially defined as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind – the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it".Beja p.18. The concept has been adapted as a narrative device in five stories in Dubliners, in the form of a character's self-realization at the end of the narrative.
An Encounter
The story, narrated in the first person, is about a boy and his friend Mahony taking a day off from school to seek adventure in their dull lives. The boy has sought escape from his daily routine in stories of the Wild West and American detective stories and in make-believe warfare with his schoolmates. However, "The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad." His plan is to play truant, walk to the docks along the Liffey, Dublin's river, cross it by ferry, and walk toward the Pigeon House, Dublin's power station. The story describes the boys' excursion and the people they see. They get a glimpse of the world outside Dublin in the foreign sailors at the docks and are exposed to city's social diversity. They become too tired to go to the Pigeon House and stop to rest. An older man approaches them and begins talk of such mundane subjects as reading Sir Walter Scott and boys having young sweethearts. At one point, the man excuses himself and masturbates. His friend Mahony leaves the boy alone. The man returns and begins a drawn-out monologue on the need to whip boys who misbehave. Deeply unsettled, the boy gets up to leave and calls to Mahony. He's relieved when his friend comes to him, but also ashamed for having looked down on him.
Joyce's brother Stanislaus wrote that the story was based on their encounter with an "elderly pederast" while playing truant.
The boys' journey to the Pigeon House has been interpreted as a futile quest for Ireland's Church, like the visit to the bazaar "Araby", and the pervert they encounter has been taken as a counterpart to Father Flynn in "The Sisters".
Araby Through first-person narration, the reader is immersed at the start of the story in the drab life that people live on North Richmond Street, which seems to be illuminated only by the verve and imagination of the children who, despite the growing darkness that comes during the winter months, insist on playing "until [their] bodies glowed". Even though the conditions of this neighbourhood leave much to be desired, the children's play is infused with their almost magical way of perceiving the world, which the narrator dutifully conveys to the reader:
But though these boys "career" around the neighbourhood in a very childlike way, they are also aware of and interested in the adult world, as represented by their spying on the narrator's uncle as he comes home from work and, more importantly, on Mangan's sister, whose dress "swung as she moved" and whose "soft rope of hair tossed from side to side". These boys are on the brink of sexual awareness and, awed by the mystery of another sex, are hungry for knowledge.
On one rainy evening, the boy secludes himself in a soundless, dark drawing-room and gives his feelings for her full release: "I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love! O love! many times." This scene is the culmination of the narrator's increasingly romantic idealization of Mangan's sister. By the time he actually speaks to her, he has built up such an unrealistic idea of her that he can barely put sentences together: "When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me if I was going to Araby. I forget whether I answered yes or no." But the narrator recovers splendidly: when Mangan's sister dolefully states that she will not be able to go to Araby, he gallantly offers to bring something back for her.
The narrator now cannot wait to go to the Araby bazaar and procure for his beloved some grand gift that will endear him to her. And though his aunt frets, hoping that it is not "some Freemason affair", and though his uncle, perhaps intoxicated, perhaps stingy, arrives so late from work and equivocates so much that he almost keeps the narrator from being able to go, the intrepid yet frustrated narrator heads out of the house, tightly clenching a florin, in spite of the late hour, toward the bazaar.
But the Araby market turns out not to be the fantastic place he had hoped it would be. It is late; most of the stalls are closed. The only sound is "the fall of the coins" as men count their money. Worst of all, however, is the vision of sexuality—of his future—that he receives when he stops at one of the few remaining open stalls. The young woman minding the stall is engaged in a conversation with two young men. Though he is potentially a customer, she only grudgingly and briefly waits on him before returning to her frivolous conversation. His idealized vision of Araby is destroyed, along with his idealized vision of Mangan's sister—and of love: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."
"Araby" contains themes and characteristics common to Joyce in general and Dubliners in particular. Like "Eveline", "Araby" involves a character going on a journey that ends in futility. The boy lives with his aunt and uncle, like the boy in "The Sisters". The boy's uncle appears to be a prototype of Simon Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. One critic, noting the story's religious allusions, and finding in its ending the suggestion of an emptying church, sees the boy's journey to Araby as a futile quest for Ireland's Church. Another critic, expanding on the idea, has argued that Joyce drew upon the Church's iconography to depict Mangan's sister and its liturgy to render the bazaar's closing, and that the story should be read as a parody of the Eucharist akin to "The Sisters".
Eveline A young woman, Eveline, of about nineteen years of age sits by her window, waiting to leave home. She muses on the aspects of her life that are driving her away, while "in her nostrils was the odor of dusty cretonne". Her mother has died as has her older brother Ernest. Her remaining brother, Harry, is on the road "in the church decorating business". She fears that her father will beat her as he used to beat her brothers and she has little loyalty for her sales job. She has fallen for a sailor named Frank who promises to take her with him to Buenos Aires. Before leaving to meet Frank, she hears an organ grinder outside, which reminds her of a melody that played on an organ on the day her mother died and the promise she made to her mother to look after the home. At the dock where she and Frank are ready to embark on a ship together, Eveline becomes paralyzed.