Joyce's Epiphanic Mode: Material Language and the Representation of Sexuality in Stephen Hero and Portrait - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2000 by Joshua Jacobs

Within the Nighttown milieu, Stephen feels himself overpowered by a "dark presence" rendered as both language and a material invasion. The central figuration of this blurring of speech and matter is the act and effect of murmuring. Among the representational successors to the tropes of the epiphanic exchange in Stephen Hero, murmuring in Portrait connotes a crucial speech just out of hearing, and is indeed an onomatopoeic rendering of such speech. Because of its materiality--seen here in its "flooding" of Stephen--murmuring continually challenges the idea that speech agency belongs to a discrete self, as murmuring seems to claim not only agency but also issuing substance.

This free play of physicalized language becomes all the more marked in the section's final paragraphs, as Joyce repeatedly cedes the act of speech and other acts to organs acting independently: "He tried to bid his tongue speak" (100), "Her round arms held him firmly to her," "His lips would not bend to kiss her" (101). By distributing agency from a central self, Joyce effects a kind of "organic liberation" and allows a release of sexual power through what Derek Attridge has called a "traffic between vocal and sexual organs" (62). The final paragraph of this section is a paradigm of this trafficking:

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour. (101)

Much has been made of Stephen's surrender to phallic penetration in this sequence, but I would argue that any "surrender" in the context of the epiphanic mode is not within a binary--in which one can either be male/dominant or female/submissive, or (in this case it seems) reverse these pairs--but is a relinquishing of unifying authority in favor of multiplicity. By his deployment of "swooning" in these final pages, Joyce leads Stephen to join in a hitherto-female act of falling from a unitary conception of the body into a potentially liberating field of autonomous organs and senses.

That this valorized falling had been designated as female is made clear by the immediate precedent for the "swoon of sin," the swoon of the "frail swooning form" (100) (nominally that of Emma) that Stephen pursues in Nighttown. This earlier swoon appears as a hyperbolic rendering of idealized female frailty and impalpability, which by its very excess makes swooning a conscious act of playful, powerful escape from being "[held] fast" by a self-aggrandizing vision. Stephen swoons into a state of total palpability that corresponds to a speech that communicates in many registers. The simultaneous rendering of speech and of the speaking body in this final sequence is language at its most incarnate: this "vague speech" (101) (or murmuring) literally presses upon the cognitive centers of hearing and upon the organs of speech, and the lips and tongue that convey this speech become speech themselves. But the most significant coherence of this sexualized, incarnate communication is as a readable text of some sort, as Stephen retains the faculty of reading even in his swooning extremis. This extension of the epiphanic mode into written expression will become central to later climactic sequences as they build toward Stephen's self-definition as an art1st.