JAMES JOYCE

EPIPHANY:

•-    Codice religioso: festa durante la quale degli astrologi seguono la cometa per andare a trovare la culla di Gesù à ILLUMINAZIONE

Epiphany is twelfth night of January when Christ is visited by three wise men 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 tor record appearances of Gods and Goddesses. Traditionally the word has kept this specific religious association, but in our century it has been secularised to refer to other, non-divine forms of revelation.

James Joyce named this moments of prose, Epiphanies. In a famous passage in the fictional account of his youth, "Stephen Hero", which subsequently became the basis of his first published novel "A portrait of the artist as a young man (1916)". Joyce wrote of what the idea of an epiphany meant to the hero (Stephen Dedalus) of that work.

"By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters tor record epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments".

The result of such a use was a series of short prose fictions which achieve the unity of effect that Pope had identified as a characteristic of the new form which employ an impressionistic method and which moved not to some defining points in a plot, but to a moment when the implications of all that has gone before in the story begin to suggest the psychological condition of a central persona, or of the central personae.

Short story, impressionistic vignette and psychological sketch are combined in a detailed fictional texture which demands on a reader to interpret what an epiphanic method is seeking to convey.

Joyce's method in the Dubliners meant that he sought to work with impressionistic detail and with the comply contents of actual human speech to achieve his purposes rather than with the striking incidents and lengthy descriptions of characters which were the stock-in-trade of more conventional writers whose models were 19^th century realist novelists.

Accordingly, the Dubliners is a book that breaks fictional ground as a work which reveals the capacities of prose to impart understanding of human situations through indirect and implicit significance.

For the combination of Impressionism and epiphanic showing forth (the term epiphany derives from the Christian fest of the epiphany, which celebrates the adoration of the Magi, when the Incarnation was made publicly manifest) involves the writer in a closed attentiveness to the telling detail of setting and environment of an unusually precise kind.

Simultaneously he must consider how the values details in this text will supply in overall impression and achieve a unity of effect while maintaining a scrupulous regard for the way human speech is fragmentary and elliptical, meaningful only in actual situations and in specific tones of voice and accompanied by specific gestures and bodily signals.

Less consider Joyce's representation and use of dialogue in the Dubliners. Where in many 19^th century novels the characters speak in full sentences or even in paragraphs (in as conventional and discourse as any character in Elizabethan tragedy who speaks in iambic - pentameter) the characters in this story speak in a fractured, often ungrammatical way, people seemed to do in real life. The reader will often find himself in a situation where like the narrator in the "sisters", is seeking to interpret recording conversations.

Detail is crucially important in the short stories. Tales in which saw little appearance happens in which depend on overall affect and on the haphazard revelations comes to us from fragmentary conversations to create significance must necessarily be read with careful attention to what is said and what does occur. We understand therefore that such plots as the tale possess accarried by a subtle interplay often fragmentary speech and dialogue of detailed setting and apparently unimportant actions. Some stories like Grace are largely made up of richly allusive conversations in settings which give ironic significance to the talk we hear.

Setting in the tales is serving a symbolic purpose allowing readers to invest the tales with meanings which the conversations in and of themselves might not have been capable of communicating. Indeed the symbolic import of setting in these stories alert readers to the way in which throughout Dubliners Joyce uses details of settings and milieu to perform a symbolic function, adding a strata of employed meaning to tales which on first reading can seem so insubstantial.