Joyce's Misbelief

3. “Epicleti”: The Artistic Possibilities of Schism

28 / Joyce’s Misbelief 3 “Epicleti” The Artistic Possibilities of Schism 1 In the beginning of Joyce’s creation there is a word, the substance of which is heretical, and that word is “epicleti.” It is a word that initiates a body of works, the stories of the Dubliners, and it is a word that signals a disposition toward the possibilities of schism from the very outset. The word is something of a crux: a nonce word taken first as a religious term and more recently, in revision, suggested as a literary one; but in neither case has its meaning and consequences been considered. In a book about schism, the word “epicleti” requires some exegesis, because it marks a major rupture in religious history and provides Joyce with literary possibilities congenial to his interest in art and in misbelief. The passage in which this strange word appears has become so familiar that it seems to have fallen beneath notice as if by a habitual critical paralysis. In a letter to his college classmate Constantine Curran in 1904, Joyce asserts his intent “to write a series of epicleti—ten—for a paper. I have written one. I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city” (Letters 1:55). This clear statement of intent (perhaps too clear and confident) has always been glossed with regard to its thematic focus as a plan for a series of stories depicting physical inaction. And this intent has received, of course, excessive attention; the theme of paralysis has always made the easiest approach to the Dubliners. The additional purpose of exposing a city has its origins in Zola’s naturalism and Ibsen’s clinical diagnostic scrutiny.1 Critics frequently note the planned aspect of the stories as a “series,” marshaled out in parts to make a whole. (We will revisit this idea, as it speaks to Joyce’s firm sense of a narrative sequence.) Another key theme in Dubliners is betrayal. A central issue for Joyce, this word which immediately evokes the politics of Parnell never loses its religious sense as one of the actions preceding Christ’s Passion. Thus, Joyce’s claim “to betray the soul” has in its literary focus a re- “Epicleti”: The Artistic Possibilities of Schism / 29 sidual spiritual error such as “simony,” a heretical choice. In short, the “epicleti” passage from his 1904 letter has been used to explain that Joyce has an aim in writing consonant with various formal and thematic purposes. Critical habit notwithstanding, the term “epicleti”—of which this series is said by Joyce to be comprised—may signal an important approach to Dubliners and much else in Joyce. As to what “epicleti” might mean, the literary and religious interpretations insist on their respective claims without considering what purpose Joyce had in using the term and what consequence he might have intended by it. If previously the word was taken from Stuart Gilbert, Ellmann, and Scholes in unquestioned (and unexamined) literary orthodoxy as something religious (and we will return to this claim later), since Gabler’s 1993 edition of the Dubliners, the thematic aspect of the word has informed the current, unchallenged interpretation . In that edition, Gabler claimed that “epicleti” had been misread—understandably given Joyce’s difficult, even hieroglyphic, handwriting. Now that the original lettering could be read definitively, Gabler, crediting Wolfhard Steppe, asserted that the word should be “epiclets,” a diminutive of epic.2 This reading, however, raises its own questions: “epiclets” seems to be a contradiction , a short version of what is formally a long narrative (and the epic derives from εποϚ—word, utterance, poem—unrelated to epiclesis and never found as a diminutive). “Epiclets,” too, is a solecism, compounding error upon error: if “epicleti” is bad Greek—and it surely is—“epiclets” is worse English. In 1904, Joyce had hardly any acquaintance with Greek, but he already possessed a firm sense of English.3 While it is a pat coincidence that the Dubliners, as brief epics, was supposed to include the story that was later transformed into the large epic novel Ulysses, the argument proceeds backwards from effects to causes and it does so by ignoring two issues. The first involves that other Greek word in Joyce’s letter to Curran: “hemiplegia,” a synonym for paralysis. Its presence reinforces the propriety of reading “epicleti” as a (nearly) Greek word. Greek is a nod to otherness (and to superiority, as Professor MacHugh claims in “Aeolus”); the...