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The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Florence L. Walzl
Florence L. Walzl*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
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Extract

It has long been recognized that Joyce's writing is a texture of epiphanies and that the basic pattern in most of his major works is a chronological cycle tracing man's life from childhood and youth to maturity and sometimes age. The combination of these devices largely explains the structure of Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and both are used in conjunction with other techniques in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Although Joyce's use of them has been much discussed, the influences that led him to combine them have been less fully explored. The purpose of this paper is to assess the effect of the liturgy of the Epiphany season on Joyce's concept of epiphany and his use of the cycle pattern at the period he was writing Dubliners. Related liturgical influences on Dubliners will be discussed.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 4-Part1 , September 1965 , pp. 436 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 William F. Arndt and F. Wilbur Gingrich, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (Chicago, 1957).

2 James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York, 1944), pp. 26–27.

3 Ibid., p. 211. For the biographical background of the epiphany see Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959), pp. 87–89 and 169; Oliver St. John Gogarty, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street (New York, 1937), p. 295; Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years (New York, 1958), pp. 124–127; and Joseph Prescott, “James Joyce's Epiphanies,” MLN, lxiv (May 1949), 346.

4 Stephen Hero, pp. 210–213. For the epiphany as a part of Joyce's aesthetics see Maurice Beebe, “Joyce and Aquinas: The Theory of Aesthetics,” PQ, xxxvi (January 1957), 32–34; Haskell M. Block, “The Critical Theory of James Joyce,” JAAC, viii (March 1950), 182–183; Rudd Fleming, “Quidditas in the Tragi-Comedy of Joyce,” UKCR, xv (Summer 1949), 289–290; Irene Hendry, “Joyce's Epiphanies,” in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York, 1948), pp. 27–46; Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce (Bloomington, Ind., 1956), pp. 144–154; and William T. Noon, Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, 1957), pp. 60–85.

5 See James Joyce, Epiphanies, ed. O. A. Silverman (Buffalo, 1956).

6 For additional definitions and discussions see William Powell Jones, James Joyce and the Common Reader (Norman, Okla., 1955), pp. 11–13; Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (Norfolk, Conn., 1941), pp. 27–32 and 73; and William York Tindall, James Joyce: His Way of Interpreting the Modern World (New York, 1950), pp. 120–121; and A Reader's Guide to James Joyce (New York, 1959), pp. 10–12.

7 James Joyce, Letters, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New York, 1957), p. 55.

8 Ibid., and Ellmann, p. 169.

9 Adrian Fortescue, “Epiklesis,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1909, v, 502–503.

10 Stephen Hero, pp. 32, 77, and 202–203.

11 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Compass Edition (New York, 1956), p. 221.

12 My Brother's Keeper, pp. 103–104. See Ellmann, p. 169.

13 Pius Parsch, The Church's Year of Grace, trans. William G. Heidt (Collegeville, Minn., 1957), i, 10 and 370–378.

14 Ibid., pp. 8–10.

15 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

16 The Catholic Missal, ed., Charles J. Callan and John A. McHugh (New York, 1934), p. 123. Quotations from liturgy, unless otherwise indicated, will be from this work, pp. 130–147 and 733–740.

17 Cyril Martindale, “Epiphany,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1909, v, 504–506; and Parsch, i, 264. Christmas, the popular festival of the West, is a later development.

18 Parsch, i, 16.

19 Ibid., pp. 265 and 17.

20 Because of the movable calendar of the Church year, not all these feasts are celebrated every year during Epiphany.

21 Parsch, i, 295–297. The Feast of the Holy Family, now celebrated on the Sunday within the octave of the Epiphany, is not considered here because it is of recent institution.

22 This octave has recently been suppressed by the Holy See. The day has now received a new name, The Commemoration of the Baptism of Our Lord (Pope John XXIII, motu proprio, Rubricarum instructum, 25 July 1960).

23 Parsch, i, 322 and 347.

24 See James R. Baker, “Ibsen, Joyce, and the Living-Dead: A Study of Dubliners,” in A James Joyce Miscellany, Third Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner (Carbondale, Ill., 1962), pp. 19–32; David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World (Chicago, 1939), pp. 83–100; Brewster Ghiselin, “The Unity of Joyce's ‘Dubliners’,” Accent, xvi (Spring 1956), 75–88, and (Summer 1956), 196–213; Jones, pp. 9–23; Kenner, pp. 53–68; Richard Levin and Charles Shattuck, “First Flight to Ithaca: A New Reading of Joyce's ‘Dubliners’,” in Two Decades of Criticism, pp. 47–94; J. Mitchell Morse, The Sympathetic Alien: James Joyce and Catholicism (New York, 1959), 97–110; Tindall, Guide, pp. 3–8 and 11–49; and Florence L. Walzl, “Pattern of Paralysis in Joyce's Dubliners,” College English, xx (January 1961), 221–228.

25 Quoted in Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York, 1939), p. 156.

26 From a letter to Grant Richards in Gorman, p. 150.

27 The Portrait offers a variation of this plot device in that it consists of a series of chronological epiphanies, each focusing on a significant aspect of Stephen Dedalus' development as an artist, the novel as a whole justifying flight of the artist into exile.

28 From a letter to Grant Richards in Gorman, p. 150, and a letter to Constantine P. Curran, in Letters, p. 55.

29 Parsch, i, 297.

30 From the third nocturn lessons on the Seventh Day after Epiphany, quoted in Parsch, i, 285.

31 Stephen Hero, pp. 210–211.

32 Ibid., p. 211.

33 See The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York, 1911), xi, 403: “In the ancient Church the term theophaneia, the same as epiphaneia, was almost exclusively restricted to the manifestation of God and the divine glory in Christ.” Webster's New International Dictionary of the English Language (1959) defines theophany as “a physical manifestation of the presence of God or a God to man, esp. by incarnation in a human body or appearance in human form,” and epiphany as “a manifestation; sometimes an apparition, as of God; usually a manifestation of Christ as divine.” See also A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture (London, 1953), pp. 618 and 727, and Parsch, i, 264–265.

34 See Noon, pp. 49–54 and 60–83, for the influence of St. Thomas Aquinas on Joyce's concept of the epiphany.

35 Stephen Hero, p. 77.

36 Ibid., p. 213. See also Portrait, pp. 212–213.

37 Stephen Hero, p. 211.

38 Portrait, p. 213.

39 Stephen Hero, pp. 77–78.

40 See James Joyce, Ulysses, Modern Library Edition (New York, 1946), p. 41. For discussion of Joyce's developing fictional techniques in Dubliners, see Marvin Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship: The Fiction of Young James Joyce (New York, 1959), pp. 73–87.

41 Stories illustrating the pattern of a single episode leading directly to an epiphany are “The Sisters,” “An Encounter,” “Araby,” “Eveline,” “After the Race,” “Two Gallants,” and “A Painful Case.” Stories varying this technique by use of parallel episodes or two or more epiphanies are “A Little Cloud,” “Counterparts,” “Clay,” “Ivy Day in the Committee Room,” and “Grace.” “The Dead,” written at a later date, has a more conventional short story structure, though it too ends with an epiphany.

42 See A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, pp. 130–131: “… the OT led up to Christ by prophecies, or predictions in word, and by types or figures, or predictions in act and fact. … The significance of these has become apparent in their fulfilment in the antitype.” See also pp. 56–57 and 536–537. A New English Dictionary (Oxford, 1901) defines type as “… spec. in Theol. a person, object or event of Old Testament history, prefiguring some person or thing revealed in the new dispensation; correi. to antitype”; and antitype as “that which is shadowed forth or represented by the ‘type’ or symbol.”

43 “Eveline” and “After the Race” contrast the sexes in youth; “Clay” and “A Painful Case” in later middle age. In the eleven tales comprising the life cycle each protagonist is definitely older than in the previous tale.

44 See Stephen Hero, pp. 176–178, and My Brother's Keeper, p. 180.

45 Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship, p. 78.

46 See Ghiselin, pp. 81 and 196–199, and Walzl, pp. 227–228.

47 See Stanislaus Joyce, Recollections of James Joyce [1941], trans. Ellsworth Mason (New York, 1950), p. 21. For explications citing religious motifs in this story, see Ghiselin, pp. 196–198; Julian B. Kaye, “Simony, the Three Simons, and Joycean Myth,” in A James Joyce Miscellany, ed. Marvin Magalaner (New York, 1957), pp. 21–23; Kenner, pp. 50–53; Magalaner, Time of Apprenticeship, pp. 73–78; Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain, Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (New York, 1956), pp. 71–75; Fritz Senn, “ ‘He Was Too Scrupulous Always’: Joyce's ‘The Sisters’,” James Joyce Quarterly, ii (Winter 1965), 66–72; Tindall, Guide, pp. 13–17; and Florence L. Walzl, “A Date in Joyce's ‘The Sisters’,” Texas Studies in Lit. and Lang., iv (Summer 1962), 183–187.

48 For explications citing religious motifs, see Julian B. Kaye, “The Wings of Daedalus: Two Stories in ‘Dubliners’,” MFS, iv (Spring 1958), 31–37; Sidney Feshbach, “Death in ‘An Encounter’,” James Joyce Quarterly, ii (Winter 1965), 82–89; and Tindall, Guide, pp. 17–19.

49 James Joyce, Dubliners, Compass Edition (New York, 1958), p. 27.

50 For explications citing religious motifs, see Ghiselin, p. 199; Magalaner and Kain, pp. 77–79; William Bysshe Stein, “Joyce's ‘Araby’: Paradise Lost,” Perspective, xii (Spring 1962), 215–222; and Tindall, Guide, pp. 19–21. Stein notes Advent-Christmas symbolism in certain details.

51 For explications citing religious motifs, see Ghiselin, pp. 199–200; William Bysshe Stein, “The Effects of Eden in Joyce's ‘Eveline’,” Renascence, xv (Spring 1963), 124–127; and Tindall, Guide, pp. 21–22.

52 Eye imagery is employed in the conclusions of “Araby,” “Eveline,” “After the Race,” “Two Gallants,” “The Boarding House,” “A Little Cloud,” “Clay,” and “The Dead.” For a discussion of eye imagery in relationship to radiance, see Robert S. Ryf, A New Approach to Joyce: The Portrait of the Artist as a Guidebook (Berkeley, Calif., 1962), pp. 149–152.

53 Dubliners, p. 41.

54 Parsch, i, 308–317.

55 Ibid., p. 309. See St. Augustine, Homily viii on John ii.1–4 and Homily ix on John ii. 1–11.

56 For explications citing religious motifs, see Robert Boyle, “ ‘Two Gallants’ and ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’,” James Joyce Quarterly, i (Fall 1963), 3–9; Ghiselin, pp. 200–201; Noon, pp. 83–84; Tindall, Guide, pp. 23–25; and Florence L. Walzl, “Symbolism in Joyce's ‘Two Gallants’,” James Joyce Quarterly, ii (Winter 1965), 73–81.

57 Dubliners, p. 60.

58 Tindall, Guide, p. 26.

59 Dubliners, pp. 62–65 and 67.

60 For explications citing religious motifs, see Harold Brodbar, “A Religious Allegory: Joyce's ‘A Little Cloud’,” Midwest Quarterly, ii (Spring 1961), 221–227; and William Bysshe Stein, “ ‘Counterparts’: A Swine Song,” James Joyce Quarterly, i (Winter 1964), 30–32.

61 For explications citing religious motifs, see Baker, pp. 27–28; Richard Carpenter and Daniel Leary, “The Witch Maria,” James Joyce Review, iii, i–ii (1959), 3–7; Magalaner and Kain, pp. 84–91; William T. Noon, “Joyce's ‘Clay’: An Interpretation,” College English, xvii (November 1955), 93–95; Tindall, Guide, pp. 29–31; and Florence L. Walzl, “Joyce's ‘Clay’,” Explicator, xx (February 1962), Item 46.

62 For explications citing religious motifs, see Joseph L. Blotner, “ ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’: Death without Resurrection,” Perspective, ix (Summer 1957), 210–217, and Magalaner and Kain, pp. 79–84. Blotner details the Jesusdisciple analogies fully.

63 Dubliners, p. 132.

64 For an interpretation of Mrs. Kearney as a Mother-Church figure, see Tindall, Guide, pp. 36–38.

65 For explications citing religious motifs, see Ghiselin, pp. 206–207; Kaye, “Simony, the Three Simons and Joycean Myth,” pp. 23–24; and Tindall, Guide, pp. 38–41.

66 Dubliners, p. 163.

67 Parsch, i, 372 and 378.

68 Dubliners, p. 171.

69 For an explication of “The Dead” as an Epiphany story, see Kaye, “The Wings of Daedalus: Two Stories in ‘Dubliners’,” pp. 37–41. For other religious motifs, see Gerhard Friedrich, “Bret Harte as a Source for James Joyce's ‘The Dead’,” PQ, xxxiii (October 1954), 442–444; and William York Tindall, The Literary Symbol (New York, 1955), pp. 224–228.

70 Dubliners, pp. 223–224.