James Joyce Quarterly

Abstract:

William Wordsworth describes “spots of time” as all encounters with death. In each case, death is elided, with this absence becoming the nodal point for a complex emotional and perceptual experience that transforms the narrator; these intense moments also provide the key scenes for the two-part Prelude, revealing the epiphanic structure of the later versions. Joyce awarded the “highest palms” to Wordsworth, and as in the “spots of time,” death is a central theme in Joyce’s epiphanies: numbers 19, 20, 22, and 23 deal with the death of his brother Georgie, while 21, 34, and 37 are linked to May Joyce’s death. Just as Wordsworth’s “spots” structure The Prelude, I argue that the textual strategies Joyce employs in the epiphanies provide the earliest manifestation of the epiphanic methods that animate his mature work. For instance, a close analysis of epiphanies 19 and 34 demonstrates two key principles: the art of silence and cunning concealment, where the world and the word are founded on resonant lacunae, and the endlessly proliferating profusion of polysemous and polyphonic signifiers that animate Finnegans Wake. These techniques are both epiphanic, but in quite different ways: the first affirms certainty in the revelation of absence; the second manifests a continuously changing presence in the act of being created. They come to light in Joyce’s epiphanies of death because death is the natural limit of experience, a conclusion that reveals the truth of our own mortality, opens onto the void beyond experience, and puts pressure on the finite present.