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During their dispute over the problems in bringing out an edition of Dubliners, James Joyce wrote the publisher Grant Richards that "I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilisation in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass" ( L I, 64). The history of literary criticism devoted to the stories in Dubliners has in fact stressed their revelatory nature: the revelations they provide a reader, and the revelations they record, throughout, for characters. Inevitably, those illuminations have been seen in terms of Joyce's own concept of "epiphany"; probably no other motif has so pervaded critical discussions of both the volume as a whole and its individual stories. 1
Epiphany may be defined as "a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether from some object, scene, event, or memorable phase of the mind--the manifestation being out of proportion to the significance or strictly logical relevance of whatever produces it." 2 In Stephen Hero we are told that Stephen plans on "collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies" ( SH211); Joyce had had the same plan, although he never saw it through to completion. Of the many manuscript epiphanies which he composed, forty have survived and been published. 3 Twenty-five of them eventually found their way into Joyce's novels, none of the surviving ones into Dubliners; yet the connection between those manuscripts and the short stories seems especially intimate. Even the form of a story may remind one of the format of many of the manuscripts, most of which make frequent use of ellipses, and a number of which end with them. For example there is one manuscript epiphany recording a conversation about a priest:
[Dublin: in the Stag's Head,
Dame Lane]
O'Mahony--Haven't you that little priest that writes poetry over there-Fr Russell?
Joyce--O, yes . . . I hear he has written verses.
O'Mahony--(smiling adroitly) . . . Verses, yes . . . that's the proper name for them. . . . 4
The first story in Dubliners, "The Sisters," presents a very different conversation about a priest, but there too the fragmentary nature of the separate moment of manifestation for the boy who is listening is accentuated by the liberal use of ellipses, as the story even seems to end in the middle of a sentence:
She stopped suddenly as if to listen. I too listened; but there was no sound in the house: and I knew that the old priest was lying still in his coffin as we had seen him, solemn and truculent in death, an idle chalice on his breast.
Eliza resumed:
--Wide-awake and laughing-like to himself. . . . So then, of course, when they saw that, that made them think that there was something gone wrong with him. . . . ( D18)
The eponymous epiphany within Stephen Hero is the one provided to Stephen as he walks the streets of Dublin and overhears
. . . the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.
The Young Lady--(drawling discreetly) . . . O, yes . . . I was . . . at the . . . cha . . . pel . . .
The Young Gentleman--(inaudibly) . . . I . . . (again inaudibly) . . . I . . .
The Young Lady--(softly) . . . O . . . but you're . . . ve . . . ry . . . wick . . . ed. . . . ( SH211)
We may compare that to the following fragmentary colloquy--between a young lady and two young gentlemen--from "Araby," which somehow leads the boy who overhears it to come to see himself "as a creature driven and derided by vanity":
At the door of the stall a young lady was talking and laughing with two young gentlemen. I remarked their English accents and listened vaguely to their conversation.
--O, I never said such a thing!
--O, but you did!
--O, but I didn't!
--Didn't she say that?
--Yes. I heard her.
--O, there's a . . . fib! ( D35)
In the end, of course, it is not so much format as the sense of illumination that reminds us of the concept of epiphany: the appearance in so many of the stories of those separate moments of perception or self-awareness on the part of a character, or of those fragments in which the reader may feel suddenly illumined about an aspect of a character's personality, or situation--or entire life.
The connection can be exaggerated: Dubliners after all is not to be equated with the collection of epiphanies that never appeared, although such an identification has become a commonplace in criticism and scholarship. 5 Even the shortest of the stories cannot so defy the realities of spatial form that it can be regarded as "sudden" in its entirety--as "an" epiphany. Such loose terminology, and a tendency upon the part of some critics to find epiphanies everywhere (to such an extent that one wonders what in Joyce is not an epiphany), have led a few critics to doubt the whole validity of the literary term itself and its value in Joyce studies. 6 But its importance has persisted, and it has been related to the most prominent of the themes and patterns of imagery in the volume. Let me provide two examples: the theme of bondage coupled with that of the need to escape, and the imagery of eyes and sight.
The volume opens with the words, "There was no hope . . ."; it ends with "the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead." It is no wonder that so many of the characters we encounter seek refuge or escape from such a world. Moreover, the first story begins a pattern that will recur in a large number of the stories, as we realize that the frustrations and fears, as well as the hopes, associated with bondage and escape are often connected to a parental figure-in "The Sisters", the paternal figure of the dead priest. The narrator tells us that as a boy he was confused "at discovering in myself a sensation of freedom as if I had been freed from something" by the priest's death ( D12). And like other characters to come in the book, he dreams that he is "very far away, in some land where the customs were strange--in Persia, I thought" ( D13-14); but in fact it is the priest alone who has "gone to a better world" ( D15). Even in death, the priest has "taught me a great deal" ( D13).
The paternal figure in "An Encounter" is much more clearly a threat, of course; the irony is that he is encountered during an attempt to find release from the dull life the narrator has been leading, an attempt which is a result of his "hunger" for "wild sensations" and "escape": "but real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad" ( D21). Real adventures also entail dangers, and the pederastic stranger is more than the boy can deal with at his age--or comprehend, despite his realization that the stranger "seemed to plead with me that I should understand him" ( D27). Yet the experience is not without result: if the boy is not yet able fully to recognize or admit the significance of the stranger, he can respond as never before to his friend Mahony, who is after all coming as if to liberate him: "And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little" ( D 28). Throughout many of the stories, a central question entails how much the possibility of a given character's rescue may be enhanced by the awareness provided by an epiphany of one's self and one's situation.
Eveline, for one, does not achieve freedom as a result of her new insight; in bondage to an occasionally violent father--the first but not the last violent paternal figure in the volume--she recognizes what she must do "in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape!" ( D40). But she finds it impossible to do so, despite her awareness. Mr. Duffy's illumination, in "A Painful Case", comes too late for him to act upon it. Others, too, resist awareness or action or both: in "After the Race", Jimmy Doyle "knew that he would regret in the morning but at present he was glad of the rest, glad of the dark stupor that would cover up his folly" ( D48).
In "Counterparts," any sympathy we may feel for the entrapped Farrington because of his relationship with Mr. Alleyne is swept away as, returning to his home, he becomes himself the father-ogre; with Farrington experiencing no self-knowledge, the revelation from the fragmented slice of brutal life must be ours:
The little boy looked about him wildly but, seeing no way of escape, fell upon his knees. . . .
--O, pa! he cried. Don't beat me, pa! And I'll . . . I'll say a Hail Mary for you. . . . I'll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don't beat me. . . . I'll say a Hail Mary. . . . ( D98)
Bob Doran's "instinct," in The Boarding House, urges him "to remain free, not to marry. Once you are married you are done for, it said"--but he is oppressed by his knowledge that his bondage is inevitable in Dublin, which "is such a small city" ( D66), and by the overpowering Mrs. Mooney. Another ominous maternal figure is Mrs. Kearney of "A Mother," and perhaps still another is the protective Mrs. Chandler of "A Little Cloud," in which Little Chandler comes to the realization (accurate if only because he believes it to be so) that he is "a prisoner for life" ( D84).
In many important ways, "The Dead" stands apart from the rest of Dubliners, but it does share the sense of bondage and of the desirability of escape: Gabriel, like Gretta explicitly and others in the volume implicitly, hears the call of "distant music." In his afterdinner speech, Gabriel asserts that "we have all of us living duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours" ( D204). But he has already revealed in an outburst to Miss Ivors that "I'm sick of my own country, sick of it!" ( D189), just as he has enviously reflected on "how cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-table!" ( D192). But his fate comes at least for a time to seem more like that of the horse named Johnny--"the tragic part about Johnny" being his inability to do anything but go around in circles ( D207).
Gabriel, we are told, has "restless eyes" ( D178); again and again, the role of epiphany--and illumination, vision--and the theme of escape are connected within this volume through imagery of eyes and sight. It is striking how many of the stories are climaxed by an ending which refers significantly to eyes or the act of seeing. The narrator of "An Encounter" recognizes his new feelings for Mahony as the other boy sees him. In contrast, Frank cannot make contact with Eveline, whose "eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition" ( D41). The narrator of "Araby" tells us that "I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger" ( D35). At the end of "After the Race", the morning which Jimmy dreads comes as "the cabin door opened and he saw the Hungarian standing in a shaft of grey light" ( D48). "Two Gallants" closes as Corley opens his palm "slowly to the gaze of his disciple" ( D60). Waiting for word from her mother, Polly Mooney's "hopes and visions were so intricate that she no longer saw the white pillows on which her gaze was fixed or remembered that she was waiting for anything" ( D68). After recognizing his imprisonment, and then angrily shouting at his baby son, Little Chandler is confronted by his wife, and he "sustained for one moment the gaze of her eyes and his heart closed together as he met the hatred in them"--and then "tears of remorse started to his eyes" ( D 85). Farrington's son, treated even more brutally, "looked about him wildly but, seeing no way of escape, fell upon his knees" ( D98). At the end of "Clay", Joe's "eyes filled up so much with tears that he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was" ( D106). Finally, in "The Dead", Gabriel thinks of how his wife has "locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes," and then we are told that "generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes" ( D223).
At the end of "The Dead", Gabriel achieves epiphany; other characters in Dubliners stories come to similar revelations as well (the narrator of "An Encounter" and the narrator of "Araby", for example, or Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud", or notably Mr. Duffy in "A Painful Case"--or even Eveline, before she represses all awareness). At other times no less a sensation of epiphany is conveyed, but the revelation seems totally reserved for the reader (as in "Two Gallants", or "Counterparts", or "Clay", or "Ivy Day in the Committee Room", for example). We cannot know more than Gabriel does about Gretta's past life and about her feelings for Michael Furey, for we hear from her only what he does. But if we share his ignorance and uncertainty, a compensation may be that we can also share his insight: if Gabriel achieves epiphany, we may too. Yet it is no mere accident of fate, one is tempted to assume, that the earliest surviving piece of Joyce writing is an adolescent student essay entitled "Trust Not Appearances" ( CW15-16), and in Dubliners at least as much as in any other of his works a key question entails the reader's ultimate sense of the accuracy, validity, or completeness of a given character's illumination. Most readers will have at least some reservations: surely most of us will be less harsh on the boy at the end of "Araby" than he is on himself; while when Little Chandler at the end of "A Little Cloud" feels that he is "a prisoner for life," we may well agree--but we may not at all sense in his emotions and thoughts a genuine recognition of the major sources of that imprisonment. Even when we tend to accept a character's new awareness of his or her situation, we cannot be sure that we and the character are correct-or that the new awareness is any less fleeting than the sensation of epiphany itself. Constantly in Dubliners we see characters come to feel that their past understanding has been limited, or distorted, or downright wrong--so why should we doubt that they may eventually come to see their new sudden spiritual manifestations as false or even perverse? The narrator of "An Encounter" may go back to his contempt for Mahony, but even so, would we not trust--in this instance, anyway--his revelation of his shared humanity rather than any subsequent doubts about it?
In one sense, the question I am raising is irrelevant, or an imposition, if we believe that what matters is what a given character feels about an epiphany or the revelation it provides. An epiphany need not, after all, be "objectively" accurate; as I have argued elsewhere, 7 an epiphany is in its very conception and description a subjective phenomenon. So whether Mr. Duffy and the boy at the end of "Araby" are "correct" is much less relevant than how they feel about what they have learned. Yet while that is true, it is not the whole story either, and it is the rare reader who will exert such complete self-control as to refrain from all speculation in regard to such matters; and, I strongly believe, it is the misguided literary critic who will regard it as theoretically indefensible for a reader to be undisciplined. Most readers in the real world will almost inevitably want to know whether they can or not) how legitimate it is to share in the boys' views of themselves at the end of "An Encounter" and "Araby", or in Gabriel's self-contempt in the hotel in "The Dead". We cannot know, finally; but it is striking and worth noting how cogent the epiphanies seem to be at the close of several of the stories, even as they entail illuminations about the entire lives of certain characters; we may have doubts about many of Mr. Duffy's perceptions, yet we surely agree that he has "been outcast from life's feast" ( D117). Even poor Little Chandler's revelation of imprisonment and of remorse, restricted though it is by his severely limited abilities at genuine self-perception, probably brings him to a fuller and more accurate vision of his life than the sense of his existence he has had earlier that evening.
A series of unanswered questions appears throughout the volume. As the boy in "The Sisters" reflects on the priest's "intricate questions" about the "complex and mysterious . . . institutions of the Church," he finds that he can "make no answer" ( D13). When Mangan's sister speaks to the boy in "Araby" for the first time, he does "not know what to answer" ( D31), and in his distraction he answers "few questions in class" ( D32). When Miss Ivors asks Gabriel why he is sick of his own country, he does not reply--"Of course, you've no answer," Miss Ivors observes ( D190); and later, when he asks Gretta what she is thinking about, she does "not answer nor yield wholly to his arm" and she does "not answer at once" ( D218). When an answer finally does come to a question, the effect is terrifying;
--And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?
--I think he died for me, she answered.
A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer as if, at that hour when he had hoped to triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world. ( D220)
Thus begins a series of sudden, revelatory answers for Gabriel. All of our questions about the reliability of characters' epiphanies arise with special insistence in regard to Gabriel's in "The Dead". Some of the answers intruding themselves upon his consciousness are to questions Gabriel has never dared ask before, or thought to ask. Their cumulative effect seems to him cosmically significant; we may wonder whether they are as world-shaking as he makes them out to be, but for him they seem so--and, consequently, so they are, for him. Fittingly, they all occur on Twelfth Night, the Feast of Epiphany.
The choice of date is no doubt in part ironic, and as is frequently the case in Joyce's presentation of epiphanies, there is much irony in Gabriel's final revelations. Some of the irony appears, in retrospect, in the preparations for the epiphanies--as when we recall Gabriel's reference to Aunt Julia's singing as "a surprise and a revelation to us all to-night" ( D204) and realize that it has been Bartell D'Arcy's singing of "The Lass of Aughrim" that has in fact yielded "a surprise and a revelation." Moreover, between that song and the revelation will come additional ironic contexts, as Gabriel expects that he and Gretta will make passionate love. He longs "to be master of her strange mood," to "crush her body against his, to overmaster her" ( D217). One of the things he then discovers is the degree to which he is not truly her master--and, especially right now, not the "master of her strange mood," for she has, he comes to realize or believe, "locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live" ( D223). When Gabriel recognizes that while he has been fantasizing about their love-making, Gretta has not been thinking of him at all, we may ironically recall his urging of the other dinner guests to "forget my existence, ladies and gentlemen" ( D198).
With the recollection by Gretta Conroy of Michael Furey's existence, we see--as nowhere else in the story or the entire volume-the influence of the dead upon the living. Ostensibly, what Gabriel has learned is merely that his wife once had a sweetheart about whom he has not heard. Nevertheless, he somehow experiences a sudden illumination of the entire futility of his life and self--or a series of such sudden illuminations, as when a brief glance of himself in the mirror leads a few moments later to "a shameful consciousness of his own person": "He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror" ( D 219-20). In its harshness and our uncertainty about its justice, Gabriel's epiphany is distinctly reminiscent of the one experienced by the boy at the end of "Araby" when he sees himself as a "creature driven and derided by vanity" ( D35). Insofar as Gabriel comes to feel that he has not lived, his revelation is even more like the one provided to Mr. Duffy at the end of "A Painful Case", or to John Marcher at the climax of Henry James "The Beast in the Jungle." Gabriel realizes that ". . . she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life" ( D222). Like Marcher, although without any hint that in his case he will soon die, Gabriel comes to a sense of the inevitability of death, and he feels strangely close to the young man who died years before:
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. ( D223)
Earlier, Gabriel "ironically" asks, "What was he?" Here, too, Gretta's answer is devastating in its effect upon him as she matter-offactly replies, "He was in the gasworks." Gabriel feels "humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks" ( D219).
At the end of "An Encounter", the protagonist feels "penitent" about Mahony, "for in my heart I had always despised him a little" ( D28). Such a sensation reflects genuine moral progress. Similarly, although there has long been a controversy about the nature and full reliability of Gabriel's epiphanies at the end of "The Dead", we may take as a sign of growth, maturation, and a new perception about himself and others, his realization of his identity with the "boy in the gasworks."
Gabriel Conroy and several characters within the volume, then, have had in the end that "one good look at themselves." So have "the Irish people." And so, for that matter, have untold numbers, throughout the world, of Joyce's readers.
Notes
1.
Among those critics who have importantly or centrally associated the chief methods and approaches of Dubliners with epiphany are: Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, rev. ed. ( Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1960); Irene Hendry [Chayes], "Joyce's Epiphanies", in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens ( New York: Vanguard, 1963), pp. 27-46; Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce ( Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Pr., 1956); William T. Noon, S.J., Joyce and Aquinas, Yale Studies in English, No. 133 ( New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Pr., 1957); Julian Kaye, "The Wings of Daedalus: Two Stories in Dubliners", Modern Fiction Studies, 4 ( 1958), 31-41; William York Tindall, A Reader's Guide to James Joyce ( New York: Noonday Pr., 1959); S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce's Ulysses ( New York: Barnes and Noble, 1961); Florence L. Walzl, "The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce", PMLA, 80 ( 1965), 436-50; Warren Beck, Joyce's Dubliners: Substance, Vision, and Art ( Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Pr., 1969); Stanley L. Jedynak, "Epiphany as Structure in Dubliners", Greyfriar, 12 ( 1971), 29-56; Homer Obed Brown, James Joyce's Early Fiction: The Biography of a Form ( Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1972); Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell ( New
York: David Lewis, 1972); C. H. Peake, James Joyce: The Citizen and the Artist ( London: Edward Arnold, 1977); James H. Maddox Jr., Joyce's Ulysses and the Assault upon Character ( New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Pr., 1978).
2.
Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel ( Seattle: Univ. of Washington Pr., 1971), p. 18. The definition is an expansion upon the one in Joyce Stephen Hero, ed. Theodore Spencer, rev. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon ( Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1963), p. 211.
3.
See The Workshop of Daedalus; James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain ( Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1965), pp. 11-51.
4.
Workshop of Daedalus, p. 20.
5.
The habit began early, in the first two critical discussions of epiphany: in Harry Levin James Joyce: A Critical Introduction, which appeared in 1941, even before Stephen Hero ("Such a collection has come down to us by way of Dubliners," p. 29) and in Theodore Spencer's Introduction to Stephen Hero (" Dubliners, we may say, is a series of epiphanies," pp. 16-17).
6.
One of the most interesting of the debates about the term arose as the aftermath of an essay by Florence L. Walzl on Dubliners and its possible use of the liturgy of the epiphany season. Robert Scholes objected that the term "epiphany" should apply only to Joyce's manuscripts, to which Walzl replied that " Joyce himself set the pattern for the use of the term epiphany as a spiritual or intellectual apprehension which represented an enlightenment." See Florence L. Walzl, "The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season," and Robert Scholes and Florence L. Walzl, "The Epiphanies of Joyce", PMLA, 82 ( 1967), 152-54. Cf. Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel, pp. 84-85.
7.
Epiphany in the Modern Novel, e.g., pp. 77-79.
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