Epiphany in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce is celebrated as one of the great literary pioneers of the twentieth century. He was one of the first writers to make extensive and convincing use of stream of consciousness. It is a stylistic form where the writer presents the characters inner thoughts and perceptions instead of depicting them from an objective, external perspective. Epiphany is one of the major techniques used by Joyce to represent the characters’ thoughts and perceptions. The word ‘Epiphany’ means ‘manifestation, showing forth’. It is a religious terms that refers to the three men of wisdom who saw more than a baby. This baby was actually the Son of God, Jesus Christ. 

Joyce was raised a Catholic and he used many religious ideas in his novels but they had no connection with religion. In the context of this novel,   epiphany can be defined as a moment in which a character makes a sudden, profound realization. This can happened due to external event or a sudden rush of thoughts in one’s mind. The new idea arise thus change the character’s perception about the world.

In the first chapter we see the baffling impressions of young Stephen Dedalus. There is a conflict between his implicit faith in the authority of his elders and his feeling of insecurity. During Christmas, he listens to a heated argument between his father, John Casey and Dante, their governess on Catholic church and Charles Parnell. When the poet talks about Clongowes Wood College, we see this conflict again. The ‘smuggling’ incident, the stealing wine from the school’s sacristy and the Prefect “Pandying” him for no reason. There is a difference between what the young Stephen expects and what happens in real life.

In the second chapter, there are some more interesting examples of epiphanies. Stephen was very happy when he complained to Father Conmee. He thought that justice triumphed when Father Conmee told him that he would look into the matter. To his shock, he found out that Father Conmee never took the matter seriously. He and Simon were laughing over this matter. In Belvedere College, Stephen again faced this conflict. For expressing his ideas, Mr Tate, the English master, found “Heresy” in his essay. His friends- Heron, Boland and Nash thrashed him with cane and cabbage stamp for defending Byron, the “Heretic.” Stephen’s desire for beauty and purity and the reality of the world resulted in his escape to brothel. He knew he was sinned when he had sex with a whore but he enjoys it.

The best example of Epiphany in this novel is seen in the last part of Chapter 4 when Stephen comes to the beach after decides not to become a priest. Before leaving for university, he goes to the beach. There he sees a young girl wading at the beach, which strikes him with the sudden realization that an appreciation for beauty can be truly good.

This technique of Joyce makes the novel a bit difficult to reading but also gives its unique nature. If the reader becomes patient and read the entire novel then he or she would find that the seemingly jumbled perceptions of stream of consciousness can crystallize into a coherent and sophisticated portrayal of a character's experience.

Change of Stephen Dedalus as shown in five chapters

James Joyce is one of the most important figures of modernist literature. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is one of his important works. This novel actually shows the growth of Stephen Dedalus as an artist.

When the novel opens, we are in the mind of a child; fragmented lines from a nursery story are intertwined with sensations and associations of feeling, touching, hearing, and smelling. 

The author then switches to Clongowes Wood College where Stephen studied. Stephen was small and weak, and suffered from poor vision and painful homesickness. Stephen did not like the school. He never complaint to his teachers about his classmates and he had a very strong sense of right and wrong. When Father Dolan, the Prefect of Clongowes, punished him for no reason, he complained to Father Conmee. For the first time, Stephen was introduced to the idea of conflict between nationalism and Catholicism. During Christmas, Stephen was allowed to sit with adults in the dinner table where he heard an argument between Mr. John Casey and Simon Dedalus, Stephen’s father, and Dante, their governess over the Church condemning Charles Parnell, an Irish Nationalist, for his marital infidelity.

The second chapter deals with the Dedalus’ changing fortune and how Stephen adopted himself and formation of his own ideas. The chapter opens up describing Stephen spending summer in Blackrock, Dublin with his family. His father did not send him to Clongowes for his financial difficulty. However, Stephen did not feel sad. He rather enjoyed his summer. In this chapter, we see Stephen’s imagination and restlessness. He enjoys reading The Count Of Monte Cristo and thinks of adventure. The family then moves to Dublin where Stephen discovers a new world. He sees things in his own way. We also see a Stephen growing up and forming his thoughts about the world, about literature about everything. His rebel nature becomes visible in this chapter when he defends Byron and gets beaten for it.

Chapter three and four mainly shows Stephen’s inner conflicts and accepting himself with all his sins and failures. He finds religion meaningless and considers church going people hypocrites. He likes food, sex and wandering around. He starts visiting prostitutes. Although he is known as a good student and performs religious rituals in his school but he does not believe in them. He thinks about sex most of the time. If he is not thinking about sex, he works in complex religious matter. Life takes an unexpected turn when he hears the fiery sermons of Father Arnall. He becomes very afraid and starts to perform various religious rituals seriously. Seeing his dedication, the college director approaches him if he is interested to become a Jesuit. This brings back the memories of Clongowes. He understands that the life of a Jesuit would not suit him. He accepts his life the way it is and finds immense joy in it.

The final chapter we see Stephen going to University and talking with people from different social background. University has provided crucial intellectual material for Stephen's growth. His aesthetic theory, very sophisticated for a college student, is deeply indebted to Aristotle and Aquinas. Stephen gradually understands that the Irish establishment is the main impediment on his path to creativity. So, he finally decides to leave Ireland.

Art and artist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce is an Irish novelist. He is considered to be one of the most influential writers of the early 20^th century. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is the first novel of Irish writer James Joyce. In this novel, the writer shares his concepts about arts and artists. Through Stephen Dedalus, he presents his own opinion. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man details events which closely correspond with those of Joyce's first twenty years. 

This novel is the story of the growth of Stephen from creature to a creator. It shows the development of the child into a young man ready to take up his mission as an artist. He wants to pursue the talent of an artist. It is his believe that he can do it only if he is free of all commitments. He is tied by family, religion, and country but he arranges to get himself freed from all these ties. He wants to be loyal to his art. He throws off the shackles of his mind. He struggles to free himself from all bonds. Even he leaves his family, his country, and goes into exile.

According to Stephen, art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. It seems Stephen believes that true art stands alone. It is separate from morality. Stephen’s approach to art is formalistic. He believes in the theory of art for art’s sake. There is no difference between beauty and truth. Stephen thinks that the job of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. He is influenced by Aquinas. According to Aquinas, we can call that beautiful which pleases the sight. Stephen has pointed out that Aquinas has given three conditions for the apprehension of beauty- wholeness, harmony, and radiance. He imagines that the loveliness that has not yet come into the worlds’ is to be found in his own soul. The earth is gross, and what it brings forth is cow dung. Sound and shape and color are the prison gates of our soul; and beauty is something mysteriously gestated within.

Stephen compares the artist with God. He says that an artist is just like God in his creation. However, such analogies should be considered only analogies, not identifications. Stephen is just elaborating his aesthetic principles. We should not think that he is trying to elevate the human artist to the place of God in his comparison of the autonomy of art and artist to the autonomy of God.  

Though Stephen wants to be a priest, he feels that he would not be able to fulfill his mission in life which was to become an artist. His destiny is not to get entangled with religions and social orders. He must be free of all loyalties and attachments if he wants to be a true artist.

Stephen's thoughts, associations, feelings, and language serve as the primary vehicles by which the reader shares with Stephen the pain and pleasures of adolescence, as well as the exhilarating experiences of intellectual, sexual, and spiritual discoveries. He has worked hard and dedicated his life because he wants to be an artist who owes loyalty to nothing but his art.

Aesthetic theory given in “A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man”

A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man is one of the most notable works of James Joyce. The novel deals with the growth of an artist, Stephen Dedalus, who is also the central character of this novel. In the last chapter, the reader comes across his idea of “Aeshtetics.”

The word “Aesthetic” means ideas concerned with beauty or the appreciation of beauty. Stephen develops his own ideas on Aesthetics based on Aristotle and Aquinas. The final chapter of the novel opens up showing Stephen going out of the house annoyed and frustrated. Wandering through rainy Dublin roads, he quotes poems and thinks about the aesthetic theories of Aristotle and Aquinas. We see two Latin quotations of Aquinas. The first one means, “Those things are beautiful the perception of which pleases”. The second one means, “The good is that toward which the appetite tends.”

We all know that Aristotle is a famous Greek philosopher and St. Thomas Aquinas is a renowned philosopher of the Middle Ages. They had significant contributions to aesthetic theory. 

Stephen asserts three propositions on aesthete:

I. Art is a stasis brought about by the formal rhythm of beauty.

II. Art or beauty, divorced from good and evil, is akin to truth; therefore, if truth can best be approached through intellection, beauty or art is best approached through the three stages of apprehension.

III. The three qualities of beauty which correspond to the three stages of apprehension are, in the terms of Aquinas, integritas (wholeness), consonantia (harmony), and claritas (radiance).

Stephen questions the religious and sexual desires of human soul, and defines these as “kinetic”. By the end of chapter 2, in the arms of the prostitute, the “movement” reaches its climax; and the second part reaches its climax at the end of chapter 4, with the static joy at the sight of the girl on the beach. The conflict between these two becomes a practical example of Stephen’s theory of kinetic and static effects. Ultimately, Stephen sees both sexual and religious desires as kinetic, towards which appetite ends to seek fulfillment outside itself. In contrary, the satisfaction of the aesthetic appetite is static; it is something that satisfies or pleases in itself; it does not move the individual to the acquisition or something or someone outside the self.

Art should not be didactic. Art is the realm of creation so it is related only to the good and perfection of the work produced. Thus, it remains outside the scope of human conduct and its limits, rules and values which are attributed to “men”. Art always strives towards perfection, therefore it is always good. On the other hand, the artist’s decisions are ethically vulnerable.  Art is always right, and if it ever seems to fail, it is because the artist has failed his art. The artist must be moral in creating his art because art is specific to human beings rather than being a mechanical production.

Stephen’s theory is bound up with the three cardinal aesthetic principles; integritas, consonantia and claritas of Aquinas. Integritas is the perception of the aesthetic image as one thing. Consonantia is the symmetry and rhythm of structure and claritas is given the approximate meaning of radiance.