[In the essay below, Jacobs investigates the ways in which Joyce's shorter works, especially his manuscript fragments known as the Epiphanies, influence his later, more mature fiction.]

James Joyce's transformations of themes, language, and characters from one of his own works to another have long been among the signal preoccupations of Joyce's readers. The manuscript fragments known as epiphanies, written in the years 1900 to 1903, are the earliest sources of specific scenes and more general interests which we can see Joyce draw upon in all his longer works of fiction.¹ While Joyce's theorization and use of epiphany from Stephen Hero onward have been central to many readers' understandings of his work as a whole, the connection of this general aspect of Joyce's work to the specific records of scenes and interactions represented in the epiphany manuscripts has been of secondary interest. Perhaps remembering (with some embarrassment) along with Stephen in Ulysses his “epiphanies written on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if [he] died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria” (3.141-42), Joyce's readers have not often given serious attention to the ways in which his mature works use the material first developed in these fragments.

The most common critical approach to the epiphany fragments has been to examine their themes and Dublin locations and to suggest specific places in Joyce's later fiction in which these epiphanic elements are deployed. But this focus on the epiphanies as sources for the later works can obscure the particular workings of language in the epiphanies and in Joyce's earliest integrations of epiphanic material into his fiction. The linguistic contexts of these early uses of the epiphanies—from the passage in Stephen Hero in which Stephen first defines epiphanies, through scenes of Stephen's intense sexual or artistic feeling in Portrait—have a significance beyond their possible prefiguration of Joyce's later fiction. These moments where Stephen theorizes epiphanies or experiences overpowering feelings are not, for the most part, straightforward recyclings of Joyce's original epiphanies; however, in these passages Joyce's language echoes Stephen's initial encounter with an epiphanic scene in order to focus the tensions between Stephen's attempts at rigid self-definition and Joyce's more ambiguous constructions of selfhood.

What is chiefly at stake in these climactic passages is Stephen's alternating mastery and helplessness before his nascent sexuality and the extent to which he can define his intellectual and physical self as discrete from his context. Though Stephen tries to assert an intellectual source for his own language, the language Joyce uses to convey Stephen's assertions is insistently grounded in the corporeal and in several characteristic tropes such as murmuring, which stress the material nature of language itself. This dispersion of the source and nature of language beyond the confines of a discrete, fully cognizant agent undermines Stephen's attempts to assert such an agency for himself. By staging the materiality of language and the diffusion of the self within the context of Stephen's sexual crises, Joyce also links Stephen with the corporeality and diffusion of sexuality more firmly than can Stephen's hyperbolic denials or embracings of his sexuality.

I shall argue that, more than merely constituting a progression in theme between the epiphanies and climactic passages in Portrait, these moments and the defining passage in Stephen Hero are linked by their framing in language this tension between Joyce's and Stephen's constructions of self and sexuality. Because of this continuity of evocative language across distinct climactic moments, we can address this mode of language as a particular force and isolate its specificity and power. I use the term “epiphanic mode” in this essay to refer to this general practice of representing Stephen's nascent selfhood and sexuality, which Joyce develops first in the Stephen Hero passage—with its particular tension between the epiphanic text and Stephen's theorization of epiphanies—and then expands in his rendering of Stephen's emotional climaxes in Portrait, which have varying connections to the epiphany fragments.

The first explicitly noted example of an epiphany that appears in Joyce's fiction—the “Ballast Office clock” passage of Stephen Hero—is a revealing demonstration of Joyce's development from fairly straightforward use of material from the manuscript epiphanies toward the more general practice, or “epiphanic mode,” seen in Portrait. In the central moment of the relevant sequence in Stephen Hero, Stephen overhears a conversation, and is struck by a subsequent artistic imperative:

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 …

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 phrase 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. (211)

Stephen goes on to describe to his friend Cranly his theory of epiphanies, in an early version of his statements on aesthetics in Portrait (204-15). Given that in Portrait the event of the epiphany itself is removed from the theorization that had been linked to it in Stephen Hero, it is not so surprising that much of the critical dialogue has focused on the implications of Stephen's aesthetic critique and how it changes from the earlier work to the later. But the initial framing of this theory in uneasy juxtaposition with a scene of “triviality,” and Stephen's description of the “collecting” process as something separate from these scenes as such, suggests that we should avoid mimicking Stephen's attempts to distance the office of the “man of letters” from the events and language of these moments. A closer look at the exemplary epiphany shows that Stephen's self-assured argument for clarity is in fact a reaction against an unsettling multiplicity of language and sexuality.

The epiphany section of Stephen Hero begins with Stephen infuriated by his mother's religiosity, an anger that is quickly refocused on Emma Clery. Stephen is frustrated by his inability to fully criticize or ignore her: “In every stray image on the streets he saw her soul manifest itself and every such manifestation renewed the intensity of his disapproval” (210). The narration, explicit in criticizing Stephen in a way the Portrait narration is not, then somewhat mockingly relates Stephen's proposed “theory of dualism which would symbolize the twin eternities of spirit and nature in the twin eternities of male and female.” Thus Stephen's nascent desire to stabilize identity provides the background for the epiphanic encounter itself, which defines a correspondence between fragmented, stylized speech and the sexuality that pervades its utterance.

With these structuring factors in mind, Stephen's theoretical attention to the fixed relation of parts to the whole object (or claritas; see Stephen Hero 213) seems much more a practical attempt at control than an abstract paradigm. The free play and agency of “parts”—parts of the body and the soul within the body—will pervade the representation of Stephen's artistic and personal development in Portrait; here we can see this diffusion of discrete identity in the manifestation of Emma's soul in “every stray image of the streets.” Given its unbidden repetition, this consuming encounter has as much power to define Stephen as he has power to fix it within his categorizing scrutiny. The particular rephrasing of this line in the paragraph that follows the epiphanic scene—as a “sudden [and thus singular] spiritual manifestation”—suggests Stephen's attempt to make both himself and the ambiguous inspirations of epiphanic scenes stable in time and in language. Equally important is the epiphanic exchange itself, which despite being surrounded by qualifiers such as “triviality” and “vulgarity of speech” is clearly more central to Stephen's imaginative process than the Ballast Office clock (which becomes the official exemplum). The repeated “stage direction,” “(again inaudibly),” shows how Stephen's codifying impulse is frustrated by his incomplete observation; also, the separation of syllables by ellipses conveys a materiality of language that I feel corresponds to its sexualized context, particularly in contrast to the graphically unremarkable language that surrounds the epiphany text.

The tension in this passage between the epiphany and Stephen's grapplings with its implications establishes several key tropes of material language and dispersal of the unified self, which Joyce will use in Portrait to frame Stephen's drive toward greater rigidity. Joyce's central positioning here of female characters (and their characteristic use of language) as factors that weigh against Stephen's ideals of control and of discrete selfhood suggests how Joyce plans to oppose a female-gendered freedom to the stability Stephen desires. I do not believe that Joyce's use of female characters such as Emma Clery, as well as the prostitute and others in Portrait, implies that the feminine and the sexual are interchangeable and that both of these are equally stable and debased characteristics. Rather, Joyce consistently uses female figures to support the internalization of the ambiguities of selfhood in language and sexuality. Jones suggests that this aspect of what I have called the epiphanic mode demonstrates Joyce's general “disrupti[on] through his language of the received symbolic order,” which asserts “the limitation of the specular construct of the self as one, the coherence and mastery of ‘I,’ and [forces one] to acknowledge the scene on which that self is produced: the body of the woman” (182, 190). Joyce's emphasis on the corporeality of female characters, as the scene of the self that Stephen cannot acknowledge, makes them inextricably connected to the production of the epiphanic mode in the climactic scenes discussed here.

While Portrait, like Stephen Hero, contains materials from the manuscript epiphanies, the novel's salient characteristic for my purposes is not its direct reworkings of Joyce's earlier materials but rather Joyce's extension of the representational strategies of language first seen in the Stephen Hero epiphany sequence to climactic moments that are not necessarily prefigured by the manuscripts. Regardless of how closely such climaxes are tied to earlier material, they have in common with the Stephen Hero epiphany sequence an ambiguous, sexualized language, which frustrates Stephen's attempts to maintain binaries of intellect and sensuality in himself. The materiality, both in theme and in form, of this “epiphanic mode” of representation is quite pronounced in Stephen's encounter with a prostitute at the end of section 2; and in this passage Joyce establishes several principal figurations of language and the body that continue in these climactic moments throughout the novel.

In this passage Stephen acts to gratify his sexual desire for the first time, and for the first time names this desire as sinful: as he prowls Nighttown, his desire to sin is repeated hypnotically, and with a powerfully physicalized language:

He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being.

(Portrait 100)

Within the Nighttown milieu, Stephen feels himself overpowered by a “dark presence” rendered as both language and a material invasion. The central figuration of this blurring of speech and matter is the act and effect of murmuring. Among the representational successors to the tropes of the epiphanic exchange in Stephen Hero, murmuring in Portrait connotes a crucial speech just out of hearing, and is indeed an onomatopoeic rendering of such speech. Because of its materiality—seen here in its “flooding” of Stephen—murmuring continually challenges the idea that speech agency belongs to a discrete self, as murmuring seems to claim not only agency but also issuing substance.

This free play of physicalized language becomes all the more marked in the section's final paragraphs, as Joyce repeatedly cedes the act of speech and other acts to organs acting independently: “He tried to bid his tongue speak” (100), “Her round arms held him firmly to her,” “His lips would not bend to kiss her” (101). By distributing agency from a central self, Joyce effects a kind of “organic liberation” and allows a release of sexual power through what Derek Attridge has called a “traffic between vocal and sexual organs” (62). The final paragraph of this section is a paradigm of this trafficking:

With a sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the meaning of her movements in her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him. He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour.

(101)

Much has been made of Stephen's surrender to phallic penetration in this sequence, but I would argue that any “surrender” in the context of the epiphanic mode is not within a binary—in which one can either be male/dominant or female/submissive, or (in this case it seems) reverse these pairs—but is a relinquishing of unifying authority in favor of multiplicity. By his deployment of “swooning” in these final pages, Joyce leads Stephen to join in a hitherto-female act of falling from a unitary conception of the body into a potentially liberating field of autonomous organs and senses.

That this valorized falling had been designated as female is made clear by the immediate precedent for the “swoon of sin,” the swoon of the “frail swooning form” (100) (nominally that of Emma) that Stephen pursues in Nighttown. This earlier swoon appears as a hyperbolic rendering of idealized female frailty and impalpability, which by its very excess makes swooning a conscious act of playful, powerful escape from being “[held] fast” by a self-aggrandizing vision. Stephen swoons into a state of total palpability that corresponds to a speech that communicates in many registers. The simultaneous rendering of speech and of the speaking body in this final sequence is language at its most incarnate: this “vague speech” (101) (or murmuring) literally presses upon the cognitive centers of hearing and upon the organs of speech, and the lips and tongue that convey this speech become speech themselves. But the most significant coherence of this sexualized, incarnate communication is as a readable text of some sort, as Stephen retains the faculty of reading even in his swooning extremis. This extension of the epiphanic mode into written expression will become central to later climactic sequences as they build toward Stephen's self-definition as an artist.

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:

But does that part of the body understand or what? The serpent, the most subtle beast of the field … Who made it to be like that, a bestial part of the body able to understand bestially and desire bestially? Was that then he or an inhuman thing moved by a lower soul than his soul? His soul sickened at the thought of a torpid snaky life feeding itself out of the tender marrow of his life and fattening upon the slime of lust. O why was that so? O why?

(139-40)

This baffling division of the soul, and its clear identification with the penis Stephen does not want to acknowledge, is presented with an ironic appreciation both for Stephen's frantic hypostatization of his own urges and organs and for the humorous futility of such an effort. The narration becomes progressively less wry as Stephen approaches his confession and communion; during this progress, Stephen's attempt at self-purgation leads him to interpret his soul, whose above-mentioned ambiguities place it within the epiphanic mode of language, as debased. His actual confession of “sins of impurity” is portrayed as an utterly foul emission of physicalized language, from an equally base soul: “His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice” (144).

But Joyce makes it clear that such a vomiting-forth cannot rid one of sexuality, nor can the sin and redemption be reassuringly embodied outside oneself. In the final sequence between the confession and communion, Joyce portrays the withdrawal from language and sexuality as a morbidly effacing false purity, invoking the images of “pale flames of … candles” and of leached, overfragrant “masses of white flowers” (146). The most noticeable rhetorical development in this sequence is the profound infantilization of Stephen's represented speech and the repeated ascription of shyness, timidity, and silence to Stephen and his soul. With such gestures, Joyce frames this ostensible purification as a regression to Stephen's immediate preadolescence: in the sequence in section 1 in which Stephen first recognizes his soul and his desire, Stephen imagines a vaguely sexual union in which he is utterly impalpable, surrounded by darkness and silence (see 65). However, Stephen's taking of the communion wafer is not simply an imposition of a pure silence; it suggests the much more productive (and quite impure) oral exchanges rendered in similar terms in the prostitute and the final villanelle passages.

Stephen's vision of the bird-girl at the close of this section illustrates both the continuing power of the regressive force of silence and impalpability, and the power of the epiphanic mode to undermine this regression. The bird-girl's stylized “sufferance” of Stephen's adoring gaze is a hyperbolic rendering of femininity that, like the swoon of the ephemeral “E. C.” figure before the prostitute scene, exceeds Stephen's cognitive and assimilative control. Moreover, her “emerald trail of seaweed” (171) links her with the goat-beings, speckled with stale dung. Such a parallel reinvokes the demonizing portrayal of sexuality and language in the goat-being sequence, but retroactively brings the positive connotations of the present passage into that sequence. A more immediately evident reference to the goat-being sequence is in Joyce's use of “hither and thither” to indicate a murmurous, tactile speech-act:

[She gently stirred] the water with her foot hither and thither. The first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither and thither: and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.

—Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.

(171)

The bird-girl's breaking of silence is portrayed as a necessary reversal of tactile and sensory self-denial, and the reader must in turn reevaluate the nightmarish portrayal of such tactile speech in the goat-beings.

After this valorization of acknowledged speech and sensuality, the fact that the cry of “Heavenly God!” comes from Stephen's soul, and not himself, is somewhat surprising. A profound communication seems to have occurred across, or amidst, this cry, inscribing the bird-girl's murmurous sexuality on Stephen's body in the form of a mimetically inflamed cheek: his body glows, his limbs tremble. But the subsequent narration, at least at the level of staging, explicitly denies the exchange of tactile speech. Stephen is made to turn away from her and stride off, and the “low and faint and whispering” sound of their encounter is repeatedly denied: “Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy” (172). The dominant rhetorical practice of this sequence, however, undermines this attempt to retroactively separate sexuality and the feminine from spirituality, as Stephen is twice said to run “on and on and on and on” (172), to run recklessly, his blood in a riot.

Ultimately, Stephen appears to move even further from direct interaction with the bird-girl, while nonetheless entering a state of increased tactility and loss of discrete selfhood:

His soul was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings. A world, a glimmer, or a flower? Glimmering and trembling, trembling and enfolding, a breaking light, an opening flower, it spread in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and paling to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than the other.

(172)

Stephen's swoon has often been taken up by critics within what Carol Shloss refers to as the “second stage of women's critical responsiveness to Joyce”: that is, a criticism concerned with “naming the feminine” (628) and challenging the received critical view of women (in Joyce's works and elsewhere) as the archetypal other (628).⁴ The limitation of this period in Joyce criticism, as Shloss points out, is a focus on traditional, empirical ideas of character. This assumption of discrete character function allows critics within this second stage, such as Suzette Henke, to regard the swooning passage as Stephen's attempt to impose his “male aesthetic signature [upon] the female body/text” (102) and to view the language of this passage as a transparent vehicle for this exertion. But the materiality that we have seen extending across the language of these climactic moments in Portrait at the least complicates their thematic content; and indeed, the representational practice of these moments imposes its own valorization of ambiguity and sexuality upon Stephen far more forcefully than he can “sign” himself as removed from these qualities of self and language. Stephen's swoon in this passage does not retroactively efface his sexual encounter with the prostitute (the other significant swoon in the novel) but rather reinforces the sexual overtones in this passage by connecting with the earlier encounter. Stephen appears to swoon into female genitalia, and perhaps participate in an infinitely self-diffusive female orgasm. Certainly, he is left scarce objective distance from which to demonize this sexual materiality, which even after Stephen awakes remains in the murmurous “low whisper of her [the tide's] waves” (173).

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 represented 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).

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 [s] 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 synesthetic, 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 construct 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.

Notes

1. Beja provides the most extensive study of Joyce's particular uses of epiphanies in the later works.

2. Scholes and Kain give an authoritative account of the enumeration that Joyce devised for the epiphanies.

3. For a similar reading of A Portrait as building through a series of correspondences in language and theme, see Ellmann, especially 196.

4. Shloss focuses on Henke's role in editing Women in Joyce and on her own article on that collection as representative of this “second stage.”

5. See Day and Henke 99.

6. Gose provides an overview of the debate between those who believe this sequence depicts masturbation and those who favor a more abstract view.

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek. “Joyce's Lipspeech: Syntax and the Subject in ‘Sirens.’” James Joyce: The Centennial Symposium. Ed. Morris Beja et al. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986. 55-72.

Beja, Morris. Epiphany in the Modern Novel. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1971.

Day, Robert Adams. “The Villanelle Perplex: Reading Joyce.” JJQ 25 (1987): 69-85.

Ellmann, Maud. “Disremembering Dedalus: ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’” Untying the Text. Ed. Robert Young. Boston: Routledge, 1981. 192-206.

Gose, Elliot B., Jr. “Destruction and Creation in A Portrait.” JJQ 22 (1985): 259-70.

Henke, Suzette. “Stephen Dedalus and Women: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Misogynist.” Women in Joyce. Ed. Suzette Henke and Elaine Unkeless. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982. 82-107.

Jones, Ellen Carol. “The Letter Self-penned to One's Other: Joyce's Writing, Deconstruction, Feminism.” Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium. Ed. Morris Beja and Shari Benstock. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989. 178-95.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text, Criticism, and Notes. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking, 1968.

———. Stephen Hero. Ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon. New York: New Directions, 1963.

———. Ulysses. The Corrected Text. New York: Vintage, 1986.

Mahaffey, Vicki. Reauthorizing Joyce. New York: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Scholes, Robert, and Richard M. Kain. The Workshop of Daedalus: James Joyce and the Raw Materials for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1965.

Shloss, Carol. “In the Palace of the Magistrates: Joyce/Women/Writing: An Essay Review.” Modern Fiction Studies 35 (1989): 617-33.