Epiphany in Pater's Portraits

EPIPHANY IN PATER'S PORTRAITS By Jay B. Losey (University of Virginia, Charlottesville) Discussing Pater's fictional mode, Harold Bloom argues that as a form "imaginary portraits," the name Pater applied to his fiction, are "an almost indescribable gerne," and concludes that 'it may be best to call them what Yeats called his Paterian stories, 'Mythologies' or 'Romantic Mythologies.'"1 Certainly Browning's monologues, Landor's Imaginary Conversations, and Flaubert's Trois Contes lie behind the "imaginary portraits"; however, their closest literary precursor is the sketch, a form rarely used in contemporary prose fiction. In an analysis of Elizabeth Bishop's fiction, Helen Vendler has recently shown the literary relation between "imaginary portraits" and prose sketches: "A 'sketch,' as its name implies, sacrifices compositional unity (which may be achieved in, say, an oil following a watercolor) in favor of spontaneity, of free brushwork, of a 'rendering' rather than a reinventing."2 Pater's "imaginary portraits" reveal his attempt not only to provide psychological insights into his characters' actions but also to portray thenimpressions through pictorial language. Pater's word choices often disclose his use of poetic strategies, especially highly charged images, to convey the meaning of his characters' impressions. Like later writers of the sketch, Pater utilizes the formal qualities of the imaginary portrait to reveal the history of characters; he does so by concentrating on important moments from their Uves. Despite his meticulous care in constructing the "imaginary Eortraits," however, Pater creates an illusion of "spontaneity" by dramatizing is characters' epiphanic moments.3 In this article, I argue that the imaginary portrait is not "an almost indescribable gerne," but one dependent upon epipnany for its success. Rather surprisingly the epiphanic mode has not been analyzed in relation to Pater's eight imaginary portraits.4 Pater's reliance on epiphany not only to signify meaning but also to develop character makes it a vitally important concept in the study of his work. The Paterian epiphany generally involves an associative process in which the mind depends not on external reality for meaning, but on its own ability, refined through experience, to comprehend the momentary impressions forming a character's life. For Pater, an epiphany can occur in a number of different ways: One, when a character connects an event to another or when an event triggers the memory of a prior event, impression, or experience; I employ the term 'delayed epiphany" to denote this occunence. Two, when a character records a spontaneous response disproportionate to whatever causes it or when he receives a sudden illumination arising from some immediate event, impression, or experience; the term "direct epipnany" denotes this occunence. Three, when a character records some memorable phase of a dream and makes it part of his conscious thoughts or acts upon the dream; the term "dream epiphany" denotes this occunence. These different types of epiphany are significant because they enable Pater to breathe life into his idealized characters and to illuminate his cultural ideas. Pater further dramatizes the nonrational nature of epiphany by making his characters' epiphanic experiences occur in the reader's imagination as well. 297 Although Pater relies more on delayed epiphanies than on direct or dream epiphanies in his imaginary portraits, he continually stresses the predominance of his characters' "sensations," a favorite word, in contributing to their sense of experience. Pater employs delayed epiphanies to show the importance of memory in establishing personal identity. The memory of the past contributes to his characters' understanding of the present; but more importantly, memory provides Pater with an instrument capaole of recording the apparent discontinuity of time resulting from successive moments. While analyzing the modern conception of time, Henri Bergson has said that "duration" gives us a way to experience time as a continuous flow: There is no state of mind, be it ever so simple, that does not change every moment, since there is no consciousness without memory, and no continuation of a state without the addition of the memory of the past moments to the present feeling. Duration consists of that. The inner duration is the continued life of a memory, which prolongs the past into the present . . . Without this life of the past continuing into the present...