A young lady was standing on the steps of one of those brown brick houses which seem the very incarnation of Irish paralysis. A young gentleman was leaning on the rusty railings of the area. Stephen as he passed on his quest heard the following fragment of colloquy out of which he received an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness very severely.

 This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. [SH187-88; italics mine.]

— You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry, and radiance. Some day I will expend that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. You mind to apprehend the object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it, you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive it as one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. …
 — That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then. Analysis then. The mind considered the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of [189] the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity.
 — Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas. After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. The soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. [190; italics mine.]

How far did the concept and the “epiphany” serve James Joyce as a point of departure and and continuing rule in his innnovative literary art? Commentators such as Clive Hart have been quick to point out that his development as a writer from Stephen Hero (begun in 1904) to Finnegans Wake (published in 1939) involved a ‘rapid movement away from what he called epiphany’ towards the ‘more complex methods of his mature art’.

While this is true as regards the intensely various - and usually episode-specific - structures and techniques involved in successive chapters of Ulysses (1922) and likewise in Finnegans Wake, it may still be said that the fundamental concern with capturing what Joyce called in Stephen Hero ‘the truth of the being of the visible world’ is evident in all those variations. It is simply that the ‘truth’ began to seem immeasurably more complex as soon as the artist took into account the variety of personal and even historical perspectives on it.

The world finally described by Joyce is less like a definite entity with fixed, objective characteristics - as in a naively realist conception of art - than a living sphere in which where ‘all our perceptions mesh like gears’ (as Merleau-Ponty puts it). Such a version of reality is summoned multiple styles, each representing different viewpoints, as well as the often hilarious juxtapositioning of styles to represent their conflicting nature. The ‘odyssey of style’ that is Ulysses can very fitly be regarded from this standpoint.

Yet, in the end, the encyclopaedic world of multiple manifestations which was Joyce’s ultimate goal as an artist - a sort of comprehensive epiphany or ‘manifestation’ of the world arranged not only in terms of relative social, familial, historical and national positions - was better conveyed by the ‘panepiphanal world’ of Finnegans Wake than the more static ‘manifestations’ which Joyce tried to capture in the initial epiphanies of which he speaks in Stephen Hero [1944], or even in the more relativised world of Ulysses, which tended to suggest the necessity of rendering coherent the intrinsically chaotic elements of experience rather than the possibility of expressing universal coherence in a unitary literary image.

The case can be made, therefore, that in Finnegans Wake Joyce returned to his earliest aesthetic impulse and fulfilled, under the forms of an intensely innovative and experimental way of writing, his earliest ambition: to capture the “whatness” of experience without ignoring the inherent complexity of such a substance. In this sense his artistic development can best be viewed as a rapid movement away from a simple towards an increasingly more complex conception of the means and ends entailed in his original commitment to the ‘reality of experience’ that Stephen Dedalus promises to ‘forge in the smithy of [his] soul’ in the closing sentences of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916).

The following quotations, respectively from Stephen Hero, A Portrait, and Finnegans Wake, are intended to suggest a line drawn out between the different chapters of his aesthetic development and his ultimate fulfilment of that promise - albeit in the shape of a book which, for the common reader, lacks the normative coherence of conventional fiction. From “epiphany” to “panepiphanal” is perhaps, the shortest line that can be drawn through the endlessly changeful works of James Joyce.

Note: Italics applied to the term “epiphany” and its cognates [e.g., epiphany, epiphanise, panepiphanal] have been italicised are mine and not in the orginals of the ensuing quotations. BS