Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning (review)

In Patterns of Epiphany, Martin Bidney, the author of Blake and Goethe (1988), sets out to describe “literary epiphanies,” “puzzled but privileged moments, sudden gifts of vision, when one’s feeling of aliveness intensifies and the senses quicken” (1). Such epiphanies, “felt as aesthetically privileged” by readers, are also felt to be “expansive, mysterious and intense” (3). Following Gaston Bachelard, whose phenomenology is Bidney’s inspiration and whom he calls “my mentor” (8), Bidney focuses on eight writers he dubs “elemental epiphanists” (13). “Earth, water, air, and fire” are for Bachelard “the chief activators of our reverie-world” (12); therefore, Bidney posits that the “reveries” most vividly translatable into epiphanies will stem from encounters with those elements. A section entitled “Elemental Diversity and Conflict” describes epiphanic moments in William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold; “Elemental Deaths and Illuminations” covers Alfred Tennyson and Walter Pater; and “Elements, Heroism, and History” Thomas Carlyle, Leo Tolstoy, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Bidney argues that there exists a basic epiphany pattern in each of the writers he describes: the dawn-rose and the wheel in Tennyson, for example, the red-yellow fire flower and the dying white bird in Pater, and “fitful motions and fragile forms” (198) in Coleridge.

Phenomenological literary analysis generally sets out to find textual traces of structures of perception. Thus Georges Poulet’s fascinating Metamorphoses of the Circle (1967) describes the methodology of Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881): to depict the creation of a single consciousness (Isabel Archer) as illumined by the various gazes of minor characters crafted for the purpose of contemplating that center. Poulet’s reading succeeds by accurately unearthing James’s method of making up a world—his willingness to draw what Poulet refers to as an arbitrary circle around the novel’s world so as to focus all light centerwards. Poulet offers a psychological theory, then, but one that essays to reflect the theory immanent in the novel. Bidney claims to have found a way of doing phenomenology that will “resolutely avoid Pouletian hazards” (9). According to Bidney, Poulet is guilty of hypostatizing mental processes from linguistic structures. Bidney himself will not “speculate about hypothesized interior processes” but will instead zero in on “the concrete literary, verbal product” (8, italics in original).

But that strong claim for a phenomenology without recourse to the psyche is undermined almost immediately. In describing the “felt” aesthetic privilege of the epiphanic moment, and in claiming that “the epiphanic pattern constitutes the imaginative preoccupation from which the larger encompassing work arose” (16), Bidney quickly reverts to investigating what he calls “phenomenological depth” (15). In Bidney’s phenomenology, the text at a certain point must serve as a passport into the mental state either of the writer (Bidney talks of the “conflicted personality of the writer” [199]) or of the reader (one telltale phrase is “as most readers understand” [3]).

There are two serious problems with such claims. The first is that criticism moving from surface epiphanies to the phenomenological depth of the writer allows various unwarranted assertions about the author’s own mental makeup: for example, “as elemental fire-flower seers, Pater and Tennyson share a preoccupation with aesthetic ecstasy and death” (19). The second one, however, troubles me more: the assimilation of the critic’s reading experience to a universal one. When Bidney claims that “It takes a deep, penetrative, absorbed, empathetic contemplation to perceive these half-hidden structures. The phenomenological critic is at once structural analyst and empathetic redescriber” (16), the methodological inference is that an account of one’s own feelings in front of a text count as three things at once: description of the text, of the writer’s phenomenological depth, and of a generalizable reader response. It is one thing to put forward an observation rooted in one’s own reading practice, or to provide an historical argument for the plausibility of a certain interpretation...