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

Stephen's nightmarish vision of goat-beings, the nadir of his self-hatred in section 3 following the sermon, allows us to trace precisely one instance of how Joyce's original conception of the epiphanies themselves developed into the more general epiphanic mode seen in Portrait. As the epiphany marked #6, [2] Joyce's first rendering of nightmarish goat-beings is virtually identical to the sequence found in Portrait (137-38), with three significant alterations: the repeated ascription of sin to the beings in the epiphany is deleted in Portrait, and two phrases are added--the beings are for the first time given the properties of moving "hither and thither," and of issuing "soft language" as they enclose Stephen:

They moved in slow circles, circling closer and closer to enclose, to enclose, soft language issuing from their lips, their long swishing tails besmeared with stale shite, thrusting upwards their terrible faces...

Help! (138)

"Soft" language is like murmuring, in that softness describes both the volume of speech and the texture of its material presence. The association of language with feces makes explicit the general tendency in these climactic passages to describe language as a soft, substantial element emerging from a semiautonomous bodily orifice. Also, the aural quality of the repeated "hither and thither" suggests that the goat-beings' motion is a kind of indistinct speech in itself.

With these tactile acts of speech, along with the "thrusting upwards" of faces, it seems clear that Joyce has constructed this vision of "lecherous" debasement to parallel the prostitute sequence. While the goat-beings appear to be male, this rhetorical parallel must in some sense suggest a teleological progression from the prostitute to these demonic figures, a progression that would couple debased abjection with the practice of what I call the epiphanic mode of language. However, it is the combined effect of the climactic passages that best demonstrates the power of these shared representational strategies to undermine the thematic demonization of sexuality that these passages might seem to assert if read strictly through Stephen's understanding. Thus the bestial sensuality of the goat vision does not merely correspond to the sin and self-betrayal Stephen associates with the prostitute sequence but also carries forward from that earlier passage the valorization in language of the corporeal and of diffused identity. [3]

Joyce's work toward a pervasive use of such epiphanic language reveals itself at the local level in this chapter in his depiction of Stephen's soul. The removal of references to sin in the Portrait goat-vision corresponds to Joyce's general emphasis, in this novel's language, on a tactility that resonates in varied situations rather than on a specific act of "sin." With the explicit moral value of sin thus subordinated to the range of sensations that may or may not seem sinful to Stephen at a given moment, Stephen's soul can be both victim and agent of Stephen's various sins: in short succession (immediately preceding the goat-vision), his soul "pin[es] within him" (137) as he prays not to be sent to Hell, "sighs" as Stephen ascends to his room, and yet is deemed "a living mass of corruption" (137). As Stephen progresses toward confession, the soul acquires a split agency and embodiment that terrifies Stephen: