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

While there are uses of the epiphany manuscripts later in the final chapter of Portrait, the sequence early in the chapter in which Stephen composes the villanelle is the culmination of the epiphanic mode of representation that I have discussed in this essay. Joyce here puts Stephen's nascent artistic agency--and artistic practice--at the focus of the continuing tension between Stephen's rigid self-definition in terms of language and sexuality, and Joyce's more interconnected depiction of these aspects of self. From the start of this passage we see Joyce using the same imagery of sensory diffusion of the self as that of the swooning end of chapter 4. Indeed, Stephen is here more intensely immersed, and literally inspired, by the figurative breath of various surrounding and permeating elements: "A spirit filled him, pure as the purest water, sweet as dew, moving as music" (217). That Stephen is said to "inbreathe" this "tremulous morning knowledge" becomes significant after we see the first cycle of represent ed inspiration, creative thought, poem text, and Stephen's reflections on the process. Stephen first perceives the "form" of inspiration as resolutely indeterminate, and the locus of inspiration is represented in ambiguous and equivocal language:

The instant of inspiration seemed now to be reflected from all sides at once from a multitude of cloudy circumstance of what had happened or of what might have happened...An afterglow deepened within his spirit, whence the white flame had passed, deepening to a rose and ardent light. (217)

However, in converting this inspiration into poetry Stephen moves immediately to establish concrete, precise associations and imagery: "That rose and ardent light was her strange wilful heart." Over the next few paragraphs, during Stephen's first period of inspired writing (three stanzas' worth), Stephen often uses this declarative tone as if to sum up his operative poetic conceit. But even in the sentences that contain these summary statements, the "roselike glow" and the language associated with it produce a rather nonsummary effect:

The roselike glow sent forth rays of rhyme; ways, days, blaze, praise, raise. Its rays burned up the world, consumed the hearts of men and angels: the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart. (217)

The dense pattern of interdependent imagery, sound, and attributed status in these sentences overspills the forms--of contemplative thought and of poetic verse--into which Stephen imagines he distills it. For example, the rhythmic listing, or chanting, of potential line endings infects Stephen's second repetition of his equation rose-equals-heart: "the rays from the rose that was her wilful heart." Stephen asks "And then?" after these first stanzas are produced, as if he had processed successive units of inspiration.

This apparent disparity between the represented nature of inspiration, which falls within the epiphanic mode I've described, and the representation Stephen seeks to create from such inspiration is at the root of Stephen's conceptual process. Immediately after Stephen comes up with the first stanza, we read that the "verses passed from his mind to his lips and, murmuring them over, he felt the rhythmic movement of a villanelle pass through them" (217-18). Previous critics of the villanelle sequence have variously regarded this moment as evidence of the unconscious triumph of Stephen's personality over the artistic product or as a sign of Stephen's misogynistic dialectic. [5] What is too easily assumed, in such readings that ascribe textual domination to Stephen, is that the passage through the lips is necessarily outward. In the rhetorical and imagistic context of this sequence--particularly in these nebulous, undulant first paragraphs-- Stephen's sensation of something between his lips must refer both to the prostitute scene and to the literally "in-spiring" nature of his current creative moment. The teleology of creation laid out in this sequence clearly points to Stephen's murmuring as the creative inception, and certainly what Stephen formulates (and then writes down) begins here. But the rhetorical and imagistic rendering of this creative process, as seen in such incantatory passages earlier in the sequence, situates Stephen within the continuity of the epiphanic mode--which, having been "inbreathed" (217), exceeds the rigor and unity of his creative formulations. Indeed, being in the act of literary creation emphasizes the workings of language as performed by decentralized, autonomous organs of the body, as Stephen's lips are frequently said to murmur the verses, or, as his inspiration flags, to "stumble through half verses, stammering and baffled" (218).