EPIPHANY-  JAMES JOYCE

Everyone has sudden flashes of perception and insight writers have a name for them –Ephiphanies.

Epiphany is twelfth-night-the 6^th of January when Christ was visited by the three Wiseman, and his divinity was revealed to the world.

It derives from a Greek word, Epiphainein, meaning “to manifest”, and in pre-Christian times it was used to record appearances of Gods and Goddess. Traditionally the word has kept this specific religious association, but in our century it has been secularize to refer to other non-divine forms of revelation

JOYCE’S SECULAR EPIPHANY

The principle writer to extend the meaning of the word as a secular term was James Joyce, who was interested in sudden, dramatic and startling moment which seemed to have heightened significance and to be surrounding with a kind of magical aura. The well known reference is Ulysses when Stephen Dedalus is thinking to himself:

“Remember you Epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world including Alexandria? Someone was to read them thereafter a few thousand years.“

The notion of the Joycean Epiphany was first outlined in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when a casual incident in Eccles street,, Dublin strikes Stephen)

A young lady was standing on the steps of the one of those brown brick houses which seem be the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty rails of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest, hear the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

This triviality made him thing of collecting many such moment together in a book of epiphanies. 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 ITSLEF.

He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these Epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.

Joyce than, at this stage of his career, as he explained to his brother Stanislaus, noted “little errors and gesture- mere straws in the wind- by which people betrayed the very thing they were most careful to conceal “

Epiphany in these instances is revelation. In some cases Epiphany could be ironical but they could also be lyrical and radiant. Stephen explains in Stephen Hero that the apprehension of beauty involves:

a.       The recognition of integrity

b.      Wholeness

c.       Symmetry

d.      Radiance

Joyce demonstrate the way in which the contemplated object is revealed: its soul, its whatness leaps to us form the vestment of its appearance.

The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. Joyce is here extending the definitions of beauty to cover areas that most people would not recognize as such.

The American writer Amerson employed the term Epiphany in a lecture of 19^th December 1838: “effect is an Epiphany of God and on every facts of his life man should rear a temple of wander and joy.”