Panepiphanal World: James Joyce's Epiphanies by Sangam MacDuff (review)

In recent years, a small number of new publications have returned to the margins of the Joyce canon. Both The Poetry of James Joyce Reconsidered and Joyce's Non-Fiction Writings: "Outside His Jurisfiction" offer unprecedented full-length critical appreciations of Joyce's early writings.¹ This new monograph by Sangam MacDuff follows suit by looking at another neglected area of Joyce's work: the epiphanies. A concerted reappraisal of Joyce prose poems, and the theory behind it, is certainly a welcome addition to Joyce scholarship. Unfortunately, MacDuff's work is not always of the same quality and rigor as the earlier two books.

MacDuff's central and important argument is that Joyce "never outgrew" the aesthetics of his early epiphanies (165). On the one hand, this is why he recycled them in his later writing. On the other, it explains his attachment and exploitation of epiphanic language. MacDuff promises "fresh readings" of the epiphanies (3), as well as a discussion of how, when, and where Joyce reused his epiphanies in his writing from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake. His appendix listing the locations where the epiphanies are reused is no doubt a helpful tool. These aims, however, are only partially fulfilled, because they are all too readily overtaken by MacDuff's larger purpose: analyzing Joyce's epiphanic language. MacDuff belongs to the school of thought that considers everything in Joyce epiphanic (predictably, even a single word in Finnegans Wake can be an epiphany), so one can understand his interest. The shift is regrettable, though, because there is innovative work to be done on re-evaluating the value and function of epiphanies in Joyce's work. Instead, MacDuff submits himself to a rather worn-out poststructuralist and frequently far-flung analysis of silence and repetition, which he considers key to epiphanic language in Joyce's writing.

One of the fundamental issues with Joyce's epiphanies, which was recognized early in Joyce studies, is that the theory—or poetics—of his epiphany is revealed through the mouth of a fictional character in work that only partially survives in manuscript. A sustained analysis of those poetics has never been successfully undertaken, but could be made possible by, first, a comparative reading of the changes that occur in Stephen's thinking about aesthetics between Stephen Hero and A Portrait. Second, such an analysis should also involve a sustained reassessment of Joyce's exogenetic process.

The good part is that MacDuff provides the beginnings for such an investigation. His exploration begins with the Paris-Pola Commonplace Book with Joyce's notes on Saint Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle.² He uses these notes to define, as Joyce set out to do, a new aesthetics of epiphany; however, as so often happens in this book, MacDuff moves away from this point rather quickly without fully connecting the dots. This is striking because the same notebook contains a series of notes (NLI 36,639/2/A, f. 17v) that further contextualize Joyce's (as opposed to Stephen's) conception of epiphany. To all intents and purpose, these notes are very epiphany-like, and they could either be onsets of new epiphanies or notes of an epiphanic structure intended for use in Stephen Hero. Either way, these notes allow us to rethink the relationship between epiphany as genre versus epiphany as extra-draft narrative vignettes. MacDuff touches on this issue briefly, apropos of David Hayman's "epiphanoids" (via an essay by Dirk Van Hulle), but once again does not fully explore the consequences, even when he proposes that Joyce's epiphanies can be regarded as a point of departure for his oeuvre (12).³ Nonetheless, from a creative point of view, the exogenetic function of the epiphanies offers, in my opinion, a better, or at least simpler, explanation of Joyce's re-use of the epiphanies in his later writing.⁴

To be clear, considering the possibility that the epiphanies were, perhaps in part, produced in preparation for...