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

As Stephen develops his conception of the poem, his thoughts tend toward a hyperbolic unity and creativity: "The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries arising unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving" (221). Then follows the fourth stanza, and shortly after, the narration returns him to the confusion of the world: "He knew that all around him life was about to return in common noises, hoarse voices, sleepy prayers". Stephen "shrink Es] from that life," and from the specific implications it contains of his own sexuality in Nighttown: "He listened eagerly for any sound," "He heard bursts of hoarse rioting" (99, 100). But his retreat from such conjunctions of sexuality, speech, and physicality is undermined by his own synesthesic, physicalized reaction to (and writing down of) the stanza itself:

He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind, turning it to quiet indulgence; then copied them painfully to feel them the better by seeing them; then lay back on his bolster. (221)

As in the initial, murmuring conception of the poem structure, here Stephen feels the verses acting (tonguelike) directly on his brain and experiences their effect as an overlapping act of writing, feeling, reading, and seeing. With each of Stephen's successive attempts to impose a poetic rigor on himself and his inspiration, Joyce renders his imaginative process in a manner that suggests Stephen is approaching a conscious awareness of the epiphanic mode in his literary work.

This dynamic between Stephen's inspiration and his creative process comes to a climax in the sequence's final passage, which ends with the poem reproduced in its entirety. Stephen's probable masturbation is depicted as a simultaneous penetration and yielding that corresponds to the prostitute scene, as he makes E. C. yield to him as he himself is flooded by "the liquid letters of speech, symbols of the element of mystery" (223). [6] Vicki Mahaffey argues that Stephen's solitary onanism makes his artistic production equally fruitless, in the context of his continued denial of the union of opposites (102). While Stephen's solitary, erotic imagining of E. C. is not directly communicative and unifying, in Mahaffey's sense, the language of this passage does directly identify the epiphanic dynamic of body, speech, and sexuality with the foundation of Stephen's literary process. This language, I believe, is a more subtle and powerful indication of Stephen's direction as an artist than his limited attempts to constr uct binary, rational forms from his inspiration.

In this final juxtaposition of creative process and artistic product, the evolution of Stephen within the epiphanic mode since Stephen Hero is clear. The full text of the poem, as it is positioned directly after Stephen's literary-sexual epiphany, is Stephen's attempt to represent the "liquid letters of speech, [the] symbols of the element of mystery" (223). However, as the "rays of rhyme" passage demonstrates, the poem itself is representative of Stephen's very failure to completely rationalize the murmurous aspects of multiplicity in his life and world. In its isolation, then, the full text of the poem demonstrates a sort of inversion that has taken place in Joyce's representation of sexuality and language since Stephen Hero. In that work's conception of the epiphany, as discussed above, the epiphanic exchange itself was isolated graphically within Stephen's evasive theorization of the epiphany in general; in Portrait, the isolated poem's text is itself the evasive attempt to summarize, and is now surround ed and outweighed by the epiphanic properties of language that pervade the novel as a whole. I believe this new predominance of nondemonized sexuality in language is a more reliable portent of Joyce's future transformations than are Stephen's final, Icarian pronouncements.