Walsh University

Narrative Aporia:

Deconstructing the Epiphanic Moment in Early Modernist Literature

A Thesis by

Nicholas Beaver

English Department

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a

Bachelor of Arts Degree with

University Honors

April 2019

Accepted by the Honors Program

Date

Date

Ty Hawkins, Ph. D., Honors Director Date

Table of Contents

Section Page

Introduction...... 1

Methodology...... 2

Literature Review...... 7

Deconstruction...... 8

The Literary Epiphany...... 12

“The Dead”...... 19

Lord Jim...... 23

The War of the Worlds...... 25

Review Conclusion...... 28

The Men of Now’s Palaver: The Literary Epiphany of “The Dead”...... 30

The Moment of Ideas: The Literary Epiphany of Lord Jim...... 42

“A Man of Exceptional Moods” The Literary Epiphany of The War of the Worlds...... 53

Conclusion, Significance, and Further Research...... 62

Works Cited...... 65

1

Introduction

At its core, literature is the attempt to fathom and articulate the human condition, and put to words insights, knowledge, and revelations gained through experience. To this end, no literary device has been so frequently invoked than the epiphany, the sudden manifestation of meaning or insight that provides illumination. Inextricable from the development of the literary canon, the epiphany as a vehicle for revelation and insight has seen sustained usage for centuries, with writers bringing unique interpretations and conventions to a growing compendium that continues to see development today. Ashton Nichols in The Poetics of Epiphany argues that the development of the epiphany first evolved as a “way of establishing poetic meaning,” (1) in the

Romantic Era poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge. These writers paved the way for

Victorian and Modernist writers like Conrad and Joyce to further develop the epiphany through their conceptions of the “visionary moment” and “epiphanic moment” respectively. The culmination of this continued development has made the epiphany one of the most common and enduring literary devices that remains in use.

Despite the ubiquitous nature of the epiphany and its prevalence in the literary canon, conceptions of the device remain vague and undefined. Existing scholarship has chiefly honed its focus on identifying instances of the epiphanic within literature, striving to point out occurrences and, at best, providing limited interpretations within the varying fields of literary criticism. Other critics such as Geoffrey Hartman, Northrop Fyre, and Nichols have traced the origins of the Joycean epiphany to the 19th century Romantic Period, in which the initially divine qualities of the epiphany (as traditionally understood as a religious experience) are shifted to the human imagination. Fyre in particular points to Joyce’s adoption of Wordsworth’s “spots of time” to “associate all manifestations of divinity with the creative spirit of man...[for Joyce],

2

the basis of the epiphany, in its literary context, is an actual event, brought into contact with the creative imagination” (qtd. In Nichols, 2). Here, the epiphany begins to become increasingly secularized, but maintains an ethereal link to its original divine origins that Joyce and other

Modernist writers would later use to treat the aesthetic implications of revealed knowledge.

The conclusions drawn from this body of criticism provide a list of epiphanic occurrences

within literature and a rough diagram of its evolution, as well as some indication of the literary

stakes inherent in the device, but still have little knowledge as to the structure and mechanics of

the device itself. Literary critics and authors like Professor Paul Maltby argue that there is no

sustained analysis of the epiphanic or visionary moments through a poststructuralist lens

(Maltby, 3), with the net result being that the shape of understanding regarding the epiphany is

amorphous and as ethereal as the epiphanic experience itself, leading to confusion as to the exact

purpose, interpretation, and conventions surrounding the device. This project addresses these

concerns by offering a postmodern perspective that strives to provide a structure to the epiphanic

moment through the lens of Deconstructionist literary theory.

Methodology:

I base my analysis upon this currently available Deconstructionist scholarship, notably John

Paul Riquelme, Ross Murfin, and founding Deconstructionist author Jacques Derrida, as well as

Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous. Riquelme’s Deconstructive reading of the Joycean epiphany

in “For Whom the Snow Taps: Style and Repetition in ‘The Dead,’” for example, provides the

framework and methodology I follow most closely. His analysis, which follows a close-reading of the text that reveals “echos” of binary tensions that lead to an ultimate destruction of the protagonist’s character and an “interpretative multiplicity” for the ending follows the chief

3 guideposts of Deconstructive readings in literary criticism. These authors provide a base for my research, but are limited by several considerations that fall beyond their own analyses. Notably, none of them addresses the epiphanic moment as a literary device directly, and instead focus on the binaries and tensions that lead to epiphany, or the aftermath of the moment. Kristeva’s application of Deconstructive conceptions such as the “abject” borders closely on an analysis of the epiphany that I intend to offer, but her critique explores the epiphany only tangentially.

Outside of her treatment, virtually no usage of Deconstructive conceptions are leveraged in discussion of the epiphany, legitimizing Maltby’s claim that “the convention of the visionary moment has been neglected by scholars trained in postmodern epistemology” (Maltby, 2).

Lastly, existing critiques such as those of Zack Bowen and David Hayman fail to treat the epiphanic moment as a literary device outside of a monolithic application within a single work.

These critiques typically strive to supervene with a ready-made interpretation to justify the usage of the epiphany, and thus, fail to problematize or treat the structure of the epiphany as its own phenomenon.

I build from the research presented by authors like Derrida, Riquelme and Kristeva, but also address the limits presented by their approaches. I use the techniques presented by these authors, but expand the arsenal of Deconstructive analysis to introduce concepts such as aporia and

Parousia into the conception of the epiphanic moment. This simultaneously allows for a deeper and more thorough critical application of Deconstructive techniques, and also increases the tools available to formulate a structure of the epiphany in a postmodern vein. I apply these tools in a focused and sustained analysis of the epiphany, the leading textual elements that triggered it, and its implications upon the narrative and text as a whole. Lastly, I expand the critical focus from a singular, isolated application of the device to a broader range, in order to treat the epiphany not

4

only within a work, but as a phenomenon throughout works by pointing to larger trends in its application and comparing them in light of other writers within my project’s scope.

A Deconstruction-informed exercise addresses binary tensions in texts and their tendency to

be hierarchized (eg. “Up” is privileged over “Down”). Deconstruction aims to locate these

binaries and disrupt them, often revealing a state of undecidability in texts that has been termed

“aporia” or intellectual vertigo. Such revelations can point to how the epiphanic moment often

emerges out of a gridlock of undecidability between two or more conflicting elements, and how

the epiphany itself serves as either an extension of aporia or its dismantlement and resolution.

On a schematic level, envisioning the literary epiphany as the manifestation of a narratorial

deadlock, or narratorial aporia, can better underscore the epiphany’s significance within

literature as the point of destruction for characters as the conflicting nature of their world and

identity reach a breakdown, or as the catalyst for a fundamental change or awakening

engendered by this division. The destroyed identities of characters can often be “recalled” in a

secondary epiphany through Parousia or prosopopeia, theories advanced by Deconstructionist

Paul de Man as methods of “positing voice or face by means of language,” (81). Moving from

an explication of the application of the epiphany, I draw from a middle-ground of

Deconstructionist theorists like Derrida and current Deconstructionist applications like Julia

Kristeva’s work to analyze the implications and literary “stakes” that the epiphanic moment

provides for the story itself, and understandings of literature in a broader sense. Of particular

interest are considerations regarding the transformative and destructive power of the epiphanic

moment, the religious and secular implications of its usage, and its merits as a metaphysical and

interpersonal medium that connects the observer to another through the impartation of greater

meaning or understanding.

5

My study hones its focus to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century British writers that

are widely accepted to be the origin of the epiphanic tradition in its current form that is analyzed

today. Starting with Joyce, the traditionally-accepted founder of modern conceptions of the

literary epiphany, I establish a working model of the device, and then move backwards in time to

address other instances of the epiphanic moment that also exhibit elements of the epiphanic that

are traditionally left undeveloped by criticism interested in exploring the modalities of the

device. Moving from Joyce to Conrad, and later, Wells, I address three salient attributes of the

epiphany as a narrative turning point, a transformation of character, and a medium that creates an

author-reader relationship.

These three elements engage the text in increasing depth, with each reaching a deeper level of significance within the narrative, and ultimately, a deeper resonation with the reader. The turning point typically concerns the epiphany’s engagement with the plot or narrative of the story, featuring the mechanical concerns that a narrative channels to resolve the tension of the story. The epiphany, often acting as a narratorial synthesis of two or more conflicting tensions within a text, acts as a bridging element or resolution that helps advance the plot. Moving deeper, the second element of epiphany engages with the character, acting as a means of transformation or metamorphosis through the unlocking or realization of some revolutionary truth. Lastly, the epiphany acts as a bridging between the author, text, and reader, presenting information and illumination that often invokes a secondary, metaphysical epiphany in response

to the literature on behalf of the reader. Each element of this tripartite structure lends itself to a

Deconstructionist focus, with the concepts of aporia, Parousia, and the metaphysics of presence,

binary tensions and hierarchies, and lastly, Derrida’s theory on the totality of equivocation

efficiently addressing each layer of the structure respectively.

6

Ultimately, this project intends to use this new methodology to shed new light onto seminal classics of British literature, experimenting with a postmodern literary criticism that has received little treatment outside of Kristevian-inspired Feminist analysis, with the goal of providing new modes of reading these works and fresh perspectives. In doing so, I hope to use Deconstruction to create a deeper understanding of the epiphanic moment. Such an application may provide the basis for further analytics across the spectrum of the literary canon, including new voices and cultural representations in a compendium. Until then, this project presents a targeted criticism of the canon from 1895 to 1914, to prove the effectiveness of such a method, and elucidate the modalities of the epiphanic moment as a literary device.

7

Deconstruction, the Epiphanic Moment,“The Dead,” Lord Jim, and The War of the Worlds,

A Review of the Literature

Before analyzing and interpreting the usage of the epiphanic moment within the selected literary works, it is necessary to establish an understanding of Deconstruction and the foremost voices that have contributed to its development and perception. Murfin has labeled

Deconstruction as “the most complex and forbidding of literary approaches,” and has deemed it

“the hardest style to imitate” (206). As such, I will first establish my understanding of

Deconstruction as a literary approach, as well as a Deconstructionist definition of the epiphanic moment so that its techniques can better inform my methodology and analysis. Special consideration will be given to the concepts of aporia and abjection, as it relates closely with the analysis intended for my own application of Deconstructionist readings.

This review of the literature will also treat the critical and interpretive works and conversations surrounding the three literary works in this project’s purview: The War of the

Worlds, Lord Jim, and “The Dead.” Before a close reading of the texts themselves can commence, it is necessary to establish a working understanding of the foremost critical conversations concerning these texts, so that my analysis fits into the broader scope of scholarship concerning them. An established understanding of these conversations and interpretive claims will also prove useful as supplemental material to my own interpretive claims that will be generated by the close reading. Lastly, I have included conversations that relate to the use of the epiphanic moment wherever possible, as these criticisms will provide the core of my analysis and understanding as to the epiphany’s function within the selected works.

8

Deconstruction:

In the evolving world of literary theory and criticism, Deconstruction has emerged as a viable

alternative to formalist methods of text analysis and has redefined what it means to offer a text-

based approach to literary works; pushing the boundaries of philosophy, metaphysics, and

cultural studies. Deconstruction has likewise evolved its purpose beyond text analysis into

cultural applications such as feminist, LGBTQ, and architectural adaptations, these changes

having adopted elements of Deconstructive readings to suit their own ends.

Deconstruction focuses its treatment on the tensions that occur within a self-contained text.

The methodology at large is “a historicizing movement that opens texts to the conditions of their

production,” by analyzing the textual tensions that naturally occur in the body of text. The

practice of Deconstruction is concerned with what philosopher Richard Rorty calls “the way in

which the 'accidental' features of a text can be seen as betraying, subverting, its purportedly

'essential' message,” (Rorty, 171), and through analyzing these tensions, aim to problematize the relationship between text and meaning. Deconstruction pursues this aim with the analysis of language; building from French linguistic theory in the 1960s, and earlier, in analyzing language as a system of signs with deferred meaning. It contends that since meaning is deferred, it cannot be found within a reading, and concepts can only be clarified through their relationship to an opposite. These terms are typically exposed, deconstructed, and replaced with new terminology to mark differences and to aid in analysis.

Philosopher Martin Heidegger's interest in separating meaning from historical transformation

through Destruktion was to become the major influence for the father of Deconstruction: Jacques

Derrida. Derrida, like Heidegger, channeled a“line of thought characterized by an ever more

radical repudiation of philosophical distinctions which the West inherited from Plato,” for

9 deconstructing the binaries that he argued inhibited this philosophical tradition. Unlike

Heidegger, however, Derrida sought to expand and enhance the methodology from Heidegger’s more limited focus to apply to a greater range of cultural and academic sources by “turn[ing] from Heidegger's preoccupation with the philosophical canon to the development of a technique which could be applied to almost any text, past or contemporary, literary, or philosophical,”

(Rorty 171).

Derrida shifted his focus from the Heideggerian search for Being to more “political questions” of text and meaning, while also freeing his methodology from “Heideggerian nostalgia, pastoralism, and nationalism” and allowing his methodology to operate on a more holistic scale (Rorty 171). Derrida’s Deconstruction would focus more devotedly on the metaphysics raised by tensions within texts, the deconstruction of these binaries, and, borrowing from Heidegger's application of new terminology to aid in analysis: the creation of new terminology to support his methods such as trace, différance, and a derivative of Heidegger's own Destruktion in the informal name of his exercise.

While Derrida structured Deconstruction around philosophical guidelines and to solve questions of a more philosophical nature, literature departments in English speaking countries, rather than philosophical ones, were eager to adopt Derrida’s theories in literary criticism.

Author Nancy Holland elaborates two reasons as to why this shift to a more critical application occured, positing that Deconstruction firstly “opened [critically needed] channels of communication between philosophy and literary studies” by establishing a framework for discourse that had not yet appeared in force within the English speaking academia. Secondly,

Deconstruction was able to be more easily applied to literary texts than those of their philosophical counterparts due to its use of interplay and ambiguity that played into literary

10

analysis comfortably (“Deconstruction”). Derrida was initially shocked by the English speaking

academia’s repurposing of his theory, arguing in “Letter to a Japanese Friend” that “it is true that

in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technological and

methodological ‘metaphor’ that seems necessarily attached to the very word ‘deconstruction’ has

been able to seduce or lead astray,” (quoted in Derrida and Différance 3). Subsequent modifiers

on behalf of literary critics at least partially convinced Derrida of the direction of the movement,

which saw him participate in literary criticism and partially embrace the English speaking

mentality towards Deconstruction.

One such modifier of Derrida’s thesis was Belgian literary critic Paul de Man, working on

behalf of the Yale School of Deconstructionist writers. His work focused on clarifying the

“language of deconstruction” that Derrida had introduced, while arming Derrida’s philosophy

with the tools of criticism needed to transition Deconstruction from a strictly philosophical

discourse into the pantheon of literary criticism. He argued that Derrida didn’t “address

questions of what language is and isn’t,” instead choosing to focus his energy on “linguistic

paradigms and with the binary opposition as carrier of metaphysical values into the discourse of

other accounts of language” (Currie, 161). De Man believed that a greater discussion of

language was necessary to effectively wield Deconstruction in a critical manner and mature it as

a school of criticism. Under his guidance Deconstructionists gained a “a theory of language of

their own,” by introducing discourses that encouraged the analysis of rhetoric and figurality

(Currie, 161).

De Man’s contributions to the genre allowed Deconstruction to depart from Derrida’s readings and create a multiplicity of uses for the exercise, including the applications embodied in

other “second-generation” Deconstructionists like Barbara Johnson, whose critique The Critical

11

Difference on Deconstruction established a compendium of uses outside of the traditional

Derridean model while also focusing on the mechanics behind the Yale School’s application of

Deconstruction. This inclusion of Deconstruction into the canon of literary criticism was championed chiefly by French Feminist authors like Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, who utilized Deconstructive techniques to “underscore the series of hierarchical oppositions

(good/bad, life/death, day/night, culture/nature, male/female) that provide most, if not all, of the key terms that open a text to a deconstructive reading” (Holland, “Deconstruction”). French

Feminists utilized the deconstruction of these hierarchies, not to reverse them in typical

Deconstructive interplay, because that “would only create another system of power,” (Holland).

Instead, their work aimed to deconstruct the conceptions of power and privileged sex altogether, leaving a “bisexuality” that “refuse[d] to focus on a single sexual organ in favor of undifferentiated pleasures of the flesh,” this strategy “to rethink sexuality” would continue to grow within literary circles, with influential writers such as Kristeva and Derrida himself adopting it in later works (Holland).

The example of French Feminism’s inclusion of Deconstructive techniques into the methodology of Feminist and gender literary criticism, and the subsequent modification and subversion of these techniques acts as a theoretical model for my own project. Kristeva’s

“Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection” provides a particularly poignant template for

Deconstructive-informed analysis. Here, Kristeva describes abjection, the experience of suffering a breakdown in distinguishing the self from a foreign other as “two seemingly contradictory causes that bring about the narcissistic crisis that provides, along with its truth, a view of the abject... [it] shatters the wall of repression and its judgments, it is an alchemy that transforms death drive into a start of life, of new significance ” (15). The description of

12

abjection as the merging of two contradictory impulses, a thesis and antithesis, to create a “new

significance” or a synthesis, follows Riquelme’s discourse on the creation of a new

consciousness, particularly his assertion that it utterly destroys the character in which it occurs.

By the 1980s, Deconstruction had fully developed into its own form of literary criticism using

the foundations as provided by Derrida, the literary tools and language of de Man, and the

applications of various analytics like Feminist theory. As an emergent method of criticism, its

practice combined many of the formalist traditions of text-based analysis with the emerging

Deconstructionist framework to create a new paradigm of language and analysis.

The Literary Epiphany:

The literary epiphany owes a great deal of its modern usage and critical interpretation to

James Joyce’s application of the term in the early twentieth century. His epiphanies,

retroactively termed the “Joycean epiphany” have come to form the critical apparatus through

which epiphanies and visionary moments are analyzed and contextualized. Joyce engaged with

the epiphany across the breadth of his literary career, first with his collection of personal

epiphanies, written as snapshots of dialogue and depictions of scenes and images he experienced,

then with the prototype novel Stephen Hero, which finally evolved into A Portrait of the Artist

As a Young Man and Ulysses. These last two novels feature Joyce’s literary alter-ego Stephen

Dedalus, with Dedalus’ engagement of the epiphanic moment serving as the groundwork for linguistic, aesthetic, and critical understanding of the device. These novels, along with Derrida’s

reading of them in Two Words for Joyce and Ulysses Gramophone, in conjunction with

secondary criticisms from Maltby and others, will serve as the basis for defining the epiphanic

moment and its stakes within the scope of this project.

13

Maltby provides a working definition of the epiphanic moment, arguing that Joyce created

“the standard, aphoristic definition of the literary epiphany as a sudden spiritual manifestation,

which moreover, is generally triggered by mundane, insignificant stimulus” (12). These triggers

vary, and are nebulously composed of “various elements, motions, and/or shapes” that resound

with some significance for the observer (Maltby, 2). For Dedalus, the epiphanic moment is

triggered by elements such as an office clock, a select phrase of poetry, and the beachside scene

of a woman bathing in the ocean. Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man explains

his understanding of the epiphanic moment, what he terms his “aesthetic theory” as a process of

apprehending an object through an analysis of its properties and qualities, where “the clear

radiance of that esthetic image is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested

by its wholeness and fascinated with its harmony” (AP, 213). The object need not be physical,

as Stephen argues that a poetic phrase elevates him to a similar state of epiphany where “an inner

world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in [the] lucid supple periodic prose” (AP 166).

The mundane nature of these epiphanic triggers often creates a disconnect between the character experiencing the epiphany and the reader. Kim in Literary Epiphany in the Novel argues that the epiphanic moment “fades fast into the nondescript because it literally looks like, and is identical to, the unepiphanized thing. Epiphany evaporates into tautology” (5). Since the action of the epiphany occurs outside the range of the readers’ emotions, the scale and impact of the moment is always more influential for the character than the reader. This disconnect has led to a series of debates regarding the precise articulation of the epiphanic moment within Joyce’s novels, and whether the language of the epiphany is dictated to the readers from Joyce or presented through the language of the character/narrator (Maltby, Wazl, Bowen). Bowen, in

14 particular, argues that Dedalus’ self-mockery of his epiphanies in Ulysses is Joyce’s attempt to downgrade the importance placed on epiphanies within his literature:

Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years...When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once... (Ulysses, 40)

With the language of the epiphany being articulated through the character that experiences it, the significance of the epiphany often remains with the character instead of being explicated and laid bare for the reader. The meaning of the epiphany often remains vague and undefended, encouraging the reader to develop interpretative strategies that in turn generate a secondary, metaphysical epiphany in response to the literature.

Lastly, the epiphanic moment is generally secular, but can intone spiritual themes. Maltby locates the epiphany as a “literary substitute for the revelations of religion” (12) and maintains that echoes of Christian symbolism exist within its usage by Joyce and subsequent authors.

Themes of rejuvenation, spiritual rebirth, and reincarnation are woven into Joyce’s usage of the epiphany, such as Dedalus’ spiritual awakening on the beach of Sandymount Strand: “His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, sourining her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore” (Ulysses, 170). Christian themes pervade throughout instances of the epiphany that this study explores, with “The Dead” featuring the savior/saved dichotomy embodied in Michael

Furey and Gabriel (Wazl), The War of the Worlds’ narrator making the sacrificial march up

Primrose Hill in parallel to the Passion on Calvary, and Marlow’s auditory signifier of the epiphany with “By Jove,” in Lord Jim through his recollection of Jim through the features of

Parousia.

15

The epiphany’s ubiquity in literature and the contentious nature of its meaning are partially

due to its wide-reaching significance both for the novel that features it and a broader contextual relationship between texts and their readers. The epiphany can function as a plot device that serves to indicate a turning point or the growth of a character like the epiphany Daedalus experiences at the beach that convinces him to commence the path of the artist. It may also function as the medium through which the internal is unlocked: “Or was it that...he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prison of language many colored and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly” (A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, 166). Here, the epiphany functions as a deeper form of communication for Dedalus, one that reaches beyond the constraint of words to reveal a fundamental truth about his own character. Because this truth is expressed in a medium beyond the constraints of language, Dedalus experiences difficulty transcribing the experience to the reader, who remains unable to draw from the same source of internal awakening or to understand the implications for his character.

This seemingly cogent linking between the epiphany as a medium and the internal may suggest that the epiphanic moment may serve as a means through which one can discover something fundamental about oneself; however, I argue that while the epiphanic moment can impart knowledge, this knowledge is so fundamental and influential for the character that he/she is fundamentally altered and changed, so that the pre-epiphanized character is not the same as the epiphanized one. Dedalus argues that his realization elevates his soul “from the grave of boyhood,” indicating a coming of age encounter that is so fundamental that the difference is paralleled by a corpse resurrecting from the grave. In other words, the pre-epiphanized Dedalus and the epiphanized Dedalus occupy a dichotomy as strong and as polarized as life and death.

16

Thus, the epiphany can unlock inner meaning only to the extent to which that character perceives the meaning as genuine and valid, in which time the revolutionizing consequences utterly change the character, his or her perceptions, and even the fundamental understanding of the experience.

The epiphany functions as a deconstruction and creation of identity so that the character left behind and the character created are fundamentally irreconcilable. The epiphanic moment is a means of transformation, not of introspection.

Themes of transformation remain strong in detailing the explication, specifically in regards to

Joyce’s usage, of the epiphany. Strong spiritual ties of rebirth and rejuvenation suggest that the epiphany is a manifestation of the spiritual, for Joyce, the Christian God. Joyce underscores that

God can be found through the mundane triggers that prime the epiphany: “That is God, a shout in the street” (Ulysses, 37) while Daedalus’ conception of the “aesthetic art” in A Portrait asserts that through greater contemplation of mundane objects, one can reach beyond their ordinary characteristics and contemplate creation. Dedalus’ mocking imagination in Ulysses concedes that “when one reads these strange pages [Dedalus’ collected epiphanies] of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once...” indicating a transformative experience that merges three distinct identities, or three ”ones” into a single, unified “one” in direct parallel to Christian conceptions of the Trinity. For Joyce, at least, the epiphany functions as means of getting closer to God, or becoming a deity through direct contemplation of the mundane and Creation.

In a secular vein, Joyce indicates that the epiphanic moment contains a universality that is able to remove the present/past dichotomy. Dedalus’ beachside epiphany at Sandymount Strand is a harmonizing experience that makes him realize that “all ages were as one to him” in a moment of timelessness where “the ancient kingdoms of the Danes had looked forth through their vesture of the hazewrapped city” (AP, 168). Joyce’s later recreation of the beachside

17 epiphany features an even stronger allusion to the fracturing of time, where Dedalus imagines a dead baby’s umbilical cord stretching “all the way to Edenville” (Ulysses, 38) where he calls upon the first man and woman in a direct act of agency by using the cord as a phone line. Both instances indicate the epiphanic moment’s power of breaking the present/past dichotomy, and even more critically, the ability to for the character experiencing to glean information from others, with the Ulysses episode actually using the medium of a dead child to gain direct control over the past, brining the present dead, the past dead, and the living together in yet another instance of the tripartite unification of the epiphany. The epiphany can unlock the past and bring the Danes onto the beach with Dedalus, symbolically opening the floodgates for his understanding and allowing him to empathize more strongly. He argues that he is “another now and yet the same. A servant too, a server of a servant” (Ulysses, 11) asserting that the transformative properties of the epiphany can likewise impart an almost schizophrenic duality of understanding and empathy that can be extended to others.

Derrida’s treatment of Joyce in Two Words For Joyce arguably lays the groundwork for discussing these implications in his discussion of the totality of the equivocal. Mitchell and Slote argue that Derrida's readings of Joyce “stage the deconstructive play of totality and equivocation” (2) by offering an analysis of “the staggering failure of any totality, even the most encyclopedic and multilingual, to ever truly complete itself” (On Totality and Equivocation, 2).

Derrida finds himself claimed by the same ambiguities that threaten the totality of Joyce’s texts, to the extent to which he is “not only overcome by [Joyce], whether you know it or not, but obliged by him, and constrained to measure yourself against this overcoming...you have only one way out: being in memory of him” (TW, 147). Joyce’s mastery is in totalizing human experience, particularly the equivocations of the human condition, into a distilled narrative that

18

Derrida refers to as Joyce’s ‘theme.” Joyce’s theme, specifically the metaphysical goals of

encompassing the equivocations of humanity through “a single instant or a single vocable,

gather(s) up of cultures, languages, mythologies, religions, philosophies...” (TW, 147) can only

be accomplished through the harmonizing usage of the epiphany. The epiphany, as a device that

can deconstruct the present/past dichotomy, offer the inner knowledge and self-truth capable of transforming and fundamentally changing a character, and bring one closer to God or a secular

Ideal, is necessarily the tool that Joyce utilizes to reach the totality of equivocation that troubles and consumes Derrida, as well as every other reader of Joyce or reader of the epiphany in a broader context.

Thus, Joyce enters into the largest and perhaps most crucial significance of the epiphanic moment: its ability to summarize and emit the sum total of humanity's experiences, and link that knowledge to the reader: “[Joyce] tries to make outcrop the greatest power of the meanings buried in each syllabic fragment, subjecting each atom of writing to fission in order to overload the unconscious with the whole memory of man,” (TW, 149). Joyce, and by extension, the epiphany’s, greatest reaching influence is in its ability to transcend the text and and reach the reader and impart a second-hand metaphysical epiphany. To be in memory of him, in a

“totalizing drive of Joyce’s absorption and disaggregation of culture and history” (Mitchell,

Slote, 8) is to be accounted for within the textual epiphany, to be reached through the text at the very limits of the text’s meaning and be accounted for alongside all other human thoughts and endeavours.

In analyzing the epiphany, this study is ultimately investigating a three-tiered system of interlocking themes that have been the driving force of literary studies and philosophy for centuries. On a textual level, the epiphany addresses elements of plot as an indication of a

19

turning point, coming of age, or climax in some element of tension. Moving deeper, the

epiphany broaches the topic of inner knowledge, personal growth, and spiritual or ideological

adherence by creating a stage through which characters are fundamentally altered through a

transformative experience. And thirdly, the epiphany indicates a unique relationship between a

reader, a text, and its meaning through a totalizing universality of equivocations of the human

condition that the epiphany harmonizes and distills into a poignant and provocative application

of literary knowledge that stands at the very limit of text and meaning.

“The Dead”

At the end of my project’s scope and the first I analyze is the short story “The Dead” by

James Joyce. “The Dead” is the final chapter in Joyce’s Dubliners, a collection of short stories

that investigates the paralysis, cultural and religious tensions, and the role of art in relation to

politics within Irish society in the Edwardian Era leading into the First World War. It features

the revelation of a party-goer named Gabriel Conroy as he is met with disruptions to his perceived evening, ultimately culminating in his wife’s admission that her heart belongs to a dead man named Michael Furey. This particular story is important to analyze in light of Joyce’s heavy use of the epiphany in each of the stories that comprise the Dubliners, and the position of

“The Dead” as the summarizing and concluding remark for that collection. Critical analysis and interpretation surrounding what has been termed the “Joycean Epiphany” is generally more robust than the scholarship surrounding the other literature in my purview, and “The Dead” in particular has been analyzed by Deconstructive authors in a similar manner to the methodology I plan on employing as the scope of this project.

20

Criticism for Joyce and the epiphany typically revolves around the artistic process that

invokes the epiphany and the historiographical implications of the epiphany that feature

predominantly throughout Joyce’s novels. David Hayman postulates that the epiphanies that

feature within Joyce’s Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, and

especially, Stephen Hero act as a kind of artistic channeling of Joyce’s own epiphanies in what

he calls “traces of the construction process behind the dialectical result...the painful birth of the

novelist out of the dissolution of the poet and theorist” (Hayman, 639). Hayman brings to light

the fixation of horses within the epiphanic framework, remarking that “the graphic

reconstruction of what may have been Joyce’s first and only racecourse experience [is

channeled], not just once, but at least four times,” including once during “The Dead” with the allusion to Johnny the Horse and the cyclical march around an English King (634).

Criticism has emerged from discussions of biographical source material that contributes to the

Joycean epiphany that questions the epiphany as a product of the artist and his conflict with

society. Hayman calls the epiphany a device that “illustrates the degree to which the young

proto-creator is torn between his idealizing Platonic drives and his practical or Aristotelian

mindset,” (636) and sets these two conflicting ideologies as the tension that ultimately produces

the epiphany. It is notable that Gabriel, as a literature enthusiast and writer, describes his

epiphany in what Zack Bowen labels as “a poetic masterpiece [that] is attributable to Gabriel’s

artistry...the images are his artistic creation,” (Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New

Approach, 109).

Hayman’s technique of close-reading the passages for echoes of Joyce’s biographical

experiences is predicated on the same principle that dictates Riquelme's methodology of close

reading. Riquelme, in “For Whom the Snow Taps: Style and Repetition in ‘The Dead’ focuses

21 on the echoes of binary tensions that contribute to what critics generally agree to as the buildup of tensions that causes Gabriel, and “The Dead”’s, most profound epiphany. The emphasis on the tension of artistic vision and practical sensibility also provides the framework for an aporia of irreconcilable ideologies that give birth to the epiphany. Hayman’s process differs in his search to analyze the implications of Joyce’s external experiences that contribute to his fascination with the epiphanic moment, whereas Riquelme employs this strategy in a more restrictive close reading that my project will emulate.

The conversation among critical authors diverges in the interpretation of the epiphany as either a device to indicate the character’s realizations, or that of the author. Florence L. Walzl, a leading Joyce scholar, argues that the language of the epiphany is articulated by the one that experiences it, as evidenced in Dubliners by the course and terse articulations of epiphanies by lower or middle class characters, or opposingly, by the ultimate embodiment of the artistic style by Gabriel (“The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce”). This conversation is important in that it locates the focal point of the epiphany strictly within the text in line with the methodology of New Criticism, and does not require the reader response of New

Historicist analysis of Joyce to draw out meaning. Lastly, although the epiphany is indicated as coming from the characters and articulated in their words, an element of distancing exists, what

Hayman describes as “the refurbished and greatly abbreviated epiphany [intruding]upon and set[ing] against Stephen’s muzzy perception,” (634). This indicates that while the epiphany comes from the character, it is an element not entirely in their control, perhaps from the subconscious. It is ethereal and spiritual, and difficult to articulate. This embodies one of the three styles of epiphany that I will tackle within my project’s scope.

22

The implications behind the construction of the epiphany and the indication that it is the characters’ experience that is articulated within the description of the epiphanic moment is crucial to my project. Similar to Hayman, my project can entertain the echoes that build to the creation of the epiphany, and his analysis on Joyce himself can be combined with Walzl’s analysis of the self-contained aesthetic of the story to provide a Deconstructive-informed analysis of the implications and interpretation of the epiphanic moment in a way that neither author seriously entertains or considers within the boundaries of their scholarship.

Moving from interpretations of the work and its relation to Joyce, authors have also entertained close-readings of “The Dead” in light of the “interpretative multiplicity” that

Riquelme posits as the meaning and mechanics of the story. Walzl’s work analyzes the narrative along its religious implications, arguing that “The Dead” is an example of a broader

Joycean phenomenon that merges the literary epiphany with the religious revelations that occur during the season of Epiphany (“The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of

Joyce,” 436). In another publication, Walzl asserts that “the judgement that Michael brings is a salvation, and Gabriel’s swoon is a symbolic death from which he will rise revivified. Gabriel is rightly named: his is the figure of annunciation and new life,” (Gabriel and Michael: The

Conclusion of "The Dead," 30), in a furthering of his theme of religiosity and the binary tension between Michael as the figure of salvation and Gabriel as the figure in need of salvation.

Other writers, notably Bowen, Riquelme, and Ghadiri, build from the conclusions of Walzl and others to present a targeted analysis of symbolism, repetition, and structure of the story.

Bowen asserts that “Gabriel, in effect, suffers three disparaging epiphanies of his own ineffectuality, promoted in turn by Lilly, Miss Ivors, and Gretta. The epiphanies increase in intensity and in their depressing effect on Gabriel,” (108). This introduces the concept of the

23

three-part epiphany that channels the binary tensions of Irish society, politics, and art, as well as

Gabriel’s failure as a man and husband. Riquelme, building from Deconstructive theory and

Joycean scholarship, capitalizes on the image of snow as a manifestation of Gabriel’s (and the

artistic) subconscious, and that the binaries presented throughout the night cannot be resolved,

causing Gabriel's character to be “utterly destroyed” in light of the contradictory aporia that halts

the progression of the narrative.

Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim is the second literary work analyzed in the scope of my project.

Published at the turn of the century in 1900, this novel stands at the cusp of the era of Modernism

and the end of the Victorian Era, where issues like Imperialism, Industrialization, and matter of

the conscious and subconscious began to preoccupy literature. Lord Jim chronicles the life of a

young seaman named Jim, who abandons a sinking passenger liner in an act of disgrace, and

flees to the island of Patusan in self-imposed exile where he attempts to come to terms with

himself and his moral failings. The narrative is told chiefly through the point of view of Charles

Marlow, whose complicated relationship with Jim propels the story. Critical analysis of Lord

Jim is divergent and multidisciplinary, but a substantial core of criticism exists to characterize

the nature of the epiphany as used by Conrad, typically referenced as the “visionary moment.”

Significant scholarship exists to locate the use of the epiphanic moment within Conrad’s

works as an expression of Early Modernist writing, with the attention being divided between

Youth, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim. These three novels are notable in that they all feature

Conrad’s alter-ego, Charles Marlow, a character that embodies what Josiane Paccaud-Huguet theorizes as Conrad’s “way of responding” to the passion of revelation and enlightenment that

24 comes as a result of the epiphanic moment (Paccaud-Huguet, 73). Marlow acts as a narratorial middle-ground between the actions of Jim and the overarching narrative that Conrad himself writes, and it is in this distancing from the narrative via a storyteller that the epiphany registers: his [Marlow’s] epiphanies may occur either in the act of remembering or in direct contact with reality” (73). Conrad’s desire to distance the immediacy of the epiphany through a narrator reflects within Marlow’s belief that “the epiphany is undesirable and dangerous, hence the necessity to keep it at bay. Jim and Kurtz affect Marlow because they have performed...the act of violent transgression towards the real,” (75). Here, the extraordinary circumstances of Jim shatter Marlow’s emotional distance, causing a revelation into the insight of the human condition that overrides his desire to remain at arm’s length.

It is at this point that scholarship divides, or rather, returns to the origins of the epiphany as the Modernist “Visionary Moment.” Professor Paul Maltby in The Visionary Moment: A

Postmodern Critique argues: “epiphany then, is the term must often used to designate what, in this study, I am calling a visionary moment. However “epiphany cannot adequately signify forms of sudden and momentary illuminated that diverge from Joyce’s restrictive definition of the term,” (12). Maltby, in his explanation of the epiphany and its older variant the visionary moment, provides the first link between Joyce and Conrad and the epiphanic modes they operate in. He argues that Conrad is distinct from Joyce in that Marlow’s epiphanies are an expression of the self, ultimately secular, and entirely an emotional response to the revelation of information

(13), whereas for Joyce, an epiphany often comes as an intrusive spiritual force that is imposed from outside circumstances, or at the very least, an uncontrollable subconscious.

Whereas both instances of the epiphany impart deeply personal information and experiences,

Conrad’s work can be said to be even deeper in its personal connection to the narrator. Gail

25

Fincham argues that because the Marlow’s narration is a “speech-act performance” often to an

unspecified other, the scope of his narrative takes on the form of monologue that suggests that

the “discourse of imperialism is inward-looking and self-referential,” (“The Dialogism of ‘Lord

Jim,’" 62). Paccaud-Huguet expands on this theme, arguing that “The Conradian Moment is less concerned with metaphysics that with what occurs in the human cavern enlightened by the sunlight of reason,” ...its function is not to introduce mystical states: it conveys the throb of the passion for the real into sensory and secular instantaneous illumination,” (73). Again, in a departure from Joyce, Conrad’s epiphany is a sharp jolt, literally a flash of illumination that is contained entirely within a narration that Fincham describes as having no point of origin. A metaphysical break cannot be located like it can in Joyce, the emphasis is strictly on the effect on the narrator, and the wider commentary that Conrad displays towards Imperialism as the characters and narrator look inwards.

The War of the Worlds

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was written during the twilight of the Victorian Era, and represents the beginning of this project’s scope. Despite this, I will visit this novel last, as its advantage is not in its embodiment of the epiphany, so much as its use of the epiphany within a broader narrative framework. As such, the detached, analytic, and distanced narrative of The

War of the Worlds may provide a tertiary perspective for examining and contrasting the visionary moment in Lord Jim and the Joycean epiphany in “The Dead.” The novel depicts the observations of an unknown narrator on the Martian invasion of Earth in 1899. He comments on

their technological superiority, the British people’s shattered dominance over the world by the

coming of the Martians, and ultimately, the Martians defeat by the workings of small bacteria

26

and microbes, causing the narrator to reflect extensively about the role of humanity in the

cosmos and the foresight of God in creating the myriad lifeforms of Earth. The War of the

Worlds remains relatively untouched by critical scholarship, which will provide an opportunity

for a comparatively fresh analysis of themes, as well as the novel’s treatment of the epiphanic

moment.

Wells’ novel was constructed from the tensions of the world around him and the burgeoning

promise and threat presented by science, militarism, and a rapidly expanding academic

knowledge. His response in The War of the Worlds has come to typify the hallmarks of the

science-fiction genre, but as Ingo Cornils notes, “science fiction hadn’t yet separated from

mainstream literature,” indicating that Wells’ work, while fantastic, was taken to be a mirror of a

reality and a allegoricalization of threats to England and humanity at large (“The Martians Are

Coming,” 38). Cantor agrees, arguing further that Wells, in “imagining a journey to the future,”

ultimately based his narrative on “a journey to the imperial frontier,” (“The Empire of the Future,

(36) by structuring close parallels between the military domination of the Martian invaders to

that of colonial powers and their domination over pre-industrialized societies.

Wells’ goal to create an allegorical account of the domination of imperial others drew from a burgeoning genre of “invasion myths” during the late 1800s, with authors such as Chesney leveraging anxieties about German militarization to create politized tales that encouraged rearmament. An alien invasion, Cornils concedes, “required a leap of faith from his readers,

[Wells therefore] used Chesney’s semi-documentary style...However, Wells and his narrator appear much more distanced from the events than do Chesney and his narrator, viewing them almost with scientific detachment,” (27). By presenting his allegory as a documentary with distanced narration, Wells could slowly and methodically reveal to his readers the horrors of

27

imperialism and subjugation, while simultaneously playing off of existing fears of German

invasion. In this way, I argue that Wells’ work embodies the third aspect of the epiphany, the

metaphysical experiential moment, where over the course of a deliberately strategized narrative,

Wells is able to deliver his readers a message that comes not to the characters, who have no

concrete presence within the story, but to the readers in a way that follows upon notions of

Reader Response Theory.

Cornils remarks on the cyclical nature of the narrative, and how Wells’ narrator returns to his

location at the start of the story where his academic work remains unfinished, Cornils indicating

that “At the end of the novel we know what to expect, that we may be wiped out be a ruthless

enemy, just like the ‘primitive’ races that were wiped out by colonial powers,” (35). The

deliberate drive to impart a message through the narrative is not unique to Wells, but I argue that

the narrative voice, style of narration, and the distancing of his account represent a significant

departure from traditional modes of literature and warrant a closer examination. The epiphany

the readers experience is impersonal and extrapolated for all of humanity, as opposed to the

deeply personal (in different way) epiphanic moments in Joyce or Conrad (Cantor, 37), making

the third of my triumvirate of epiphanic modalities.

While unconventional, the work still lends itself to a deconstructive reading, especially in

light of the abstract concepts of light/darkness, foreign/familiar/sexual/asexual, and other binary

tensions that exist throughout. Wells poses the question of reconciliation between scientific

discovery and ethical and moral conservatism, and finds that the two cannot be easily brought

into conversation, with the extremes creating a amoral imperial society and a descent into

primitivism respectively (Cornils, 25). Other issues, such as the matter of sexuality and humanity are explored in light of the increasing pressures of industrialization and the scientific

28

revolution, with the Martian aliens providing a soulless interpretation of a society that has

surrendered these basic fundamentals in its quest for further domination. Many of these issues

remain untouched by scholarship, especially in regards to the Deconstructive-informed analysis

that I intend to employ, which promises for a fresh perspective on a seminal work within the

science-fiction genre.

Conclusion:

A review of the literature indicates that each literary work within this project’s scope explores the relationship between the epiphany and the binary tensions invoked throughout the course of

the narratives. Each embodies a different aspect of the epiphanic moment, sometimes referred to

as the visionary moment. “The Dead” encapsulates the Joycean Epiphany in its truest and most

completed form, having been added later to Dubliners and having the advantages of being read

as the final remark in a collection of literary epiphanies, or on the strengths of its own merit as a

piece of standalone fiction. It is partially metaphysical, and characterized by the characters’ lack

of control over its intrusion, the confrontation possibly destroying Gabriel as a character in

perhaps the most distilled form of narrative aporia. The visionary moment is embodied by

Conrad’s Lord Jim, where Marlow acts as a middle-ground and projection of Conrad’s own

experiences, where he responds to the turns of the story in fits and starts, indicating the flash of

illumination that comes as a result of a deeply personal and internalized revelation of truth.

Lastly, The War of the Worlds broaches issues of binary tension within a broader social and

political commentary, addressing these concerns through an allegory that unites science-fiction

with the contemporary concerns of foreign invasion and imperialism. The allegory is delivered

in a detached narrative, allowing the scope of the narrative aporia to effect not the characters,

who remain nameless, but the reader in a form of metaphysical epiphany.

29

Each embodies the three modalities of the epiphany that I have identified as the narratorial turning point, the transformation of character, and the author-reader dynamic medium. The proximity to each other in terms of nationality of origin, religious overtones, and masculine authors allows for a deeper comparative analysis of the epiphany and its modes of operation, rather than a survey diluted by establishing the scope and setting of the works. Furthermore, each addresses similar issues of racial tensions, imperialism, modernism, and the rise of science and industry, allowing for a comparison of their respective treatments of these topics and the effects their treatment has on the narrative as a whole. In each case, a Deconstruction-informed exercise will be able to draw out these tensions and ambiguities presented, analyzing them in terms of hierarchies, privileging of one half of binary pairs, and the ambiguity of the narration in regards to these treatments. The epiphanies that are engendered by these considerations can be analyzed in light of the concept of aporia, which in all three cases indicates an inability for the characters or narrative to reconcile the tensions presented by the binaries that unite the texts.

Ultimately, this project intends to use this new methodology to shed new light onto seminal classics of British literature, experimenting with a postmodern literary criticism that has received little treatment outside of Kristevian-inspired Feminist analysis, with the goal of providing new modes of reading these works and fresh perspectives. In doing so, I hope to use Deconstruction to create a deeper understanding of the epiphany. If such an analysis is successful, it may provide the basis for further analytics across the spectrum of the literary canon, including new voices and cultural representations in a compendium. Until then, I propose a targeted criticism of the canon from 1895 to 1914, to prove the effectiveness of such a method, and elucidate the modalities of the epiphanic moment as a literary device.

30

The Men of Now’s Palaver- The Literary Epiphany of “The Dead”

James Joyce’s “The Dead” was published in 1914 as the concluding remark to his collection of short stories, Dubliners. The collection, a series of “slice of life” snapshots treating the political, social, and religious climate of Dublin, is structured closely on Joyce’s own observations regarding life in in the city. Each story channels earlier versions of Joyce’s collection of “Epiphany’s” into poignant applications of the literary epiphany that stand as some of Joyce’s best and most sustained applications of the device. “The Dead,” acting as the culminating point in Joyce’s examination of Dubliner life, has remained the most salient and analyzed within the collection in regards to the epiphanic moment and its interpretative impact upon the narrative and collection as a whole.

The epiphany of Gabriel Conroy in“The Dead” is noteworthy in that it appears at the very end of the narrative, effectively creating a suspense that leaves readers unsure of Gabriel’s ultimate fate. There is no pronounced denouement to Gabriel’s character arc that allows readers to glean the meaning of the epiphany or its transformative effects upon him from the events that follow its inception. Instead, readers must look to the development of the narrative as a series of social and subliminal cues that culminate with Gabriel’s confrontation with himself at the hotel bedroom window. Bowen has posited that there are three such cues that he deems “failures” as Gabriel progresses through the Morkan’s party and the evening with his wife, Gretta. Identified as his failure as a gentleman, his failure as a patriot, and his failure as a husband and lover, each embodies tensions that Joyce observed in Irish society, culture, and politics that may have contributed to his own epiphanies and his troubled relationship with his home country.

Gabriel’s failures can best be understood as structural fault lines along the binary axis of

control and chaos that exists throughout “The Dead.” Each builds in intensity and poingnacy for

31

Gabriel and act as the catalyst for the epiphanic moment. Other binaries are explored throughout the narrative and brought to light by Gabriel's failures, such as the tensions between conceptions of womanhood, art and politics, and the past and present as Ireland reluctantly moves into a new century. Ultimately, these breakdowns culminate in a moment of aporia where Gabriel’s conception of his own identity cannot continue within the constrictive framework of the narrative. The epiphanic moment emerges as a response to this pressure, indicating a transformative process that acts as a self-deconstruction of Gabriel’s identity. Before analyzing this epiphany, it is necessary to diagram these fault lines so that the culminating transformative process may be better analyzed and interpreted in light of the preceding context.

The main setting of the narrative takes place within the Morkan’s party, an elaborate New

Years’ dance that “was always a great affair..never once had it fallen flat” (199). The festivities embody the core elements of control and social circumstance, with every element meticulously planned out, even to the point that women were directed upon entry to a converted bathroom acting as a ladies’ dressing-room to avoid unseemly lines at the entrance as the caretaker's’ daughter, Lily, strives to address every guest’s coat and winter wear. The first great tension of the night manifests in the introduction of the archetypes of control and chaos: Gabriel Conroy and Freddy Malins respectively. Gabriel embodies the conservative lens, wearing neat and ordered clothes and being sought after by the Morkan’s as a reinforcing element to keep the party on track.

Gabriel uses his status as an exemplar of control to construct his identity, and it appears evident that without these identifiers and trappings of superiority he is alien, even to himself: “As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length...the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror” (249). Gabriel’s construction of his

32 own identity is entirely dependent upon the social and educational circumstances that elevate his position above those of the other guests and his wife. Malins stands as the polar opposite. There is a fear among the organizers that he might “turn up screwed” and in a drunken state that would make him “very hard to manage” (200) and thus, be a threat to the formality of the party. His entrance is symbolically illustrated by his bursting forth from outside the membrane of the controlled party from the snow-filled chaotic streets beyond.

Gabriel’s own arrival is headed by Lily, whose greeting causes “Gabriel to smile at the three syllables she had given his surname” (202) betraying Lily’s course lilt and Gabriel’s appreciation of his educational superiority over the girl. He dismissively “glaces down at her” noting the girl as childlike and as “a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion...the gas in the pantry made her look still paler” (201). In learning that Lily is not in school, Gabriel assumes that they’ll “be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man” in an apparent show of gentlemanly conduct. Lily instead responds by bitterly retorting: “the men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” causing Gabriel to blush and stammer “as if he had made a mistake” (202). Here, Gabriel’s attempt at gentlemanly civility in accordance with established customs backfires and evolves into a threateningly public social “mistake,” with

Lily’s accusation standing not only to override the gentlemanly principles that Gabriel exemplifies by indicating that men are ultimately mercenary in their relations with women, but by embarrassingly incriminating Gabriel, the practitioner of such gentlemanly principles, as equally guilty of the practice by proxy.

Palaver, however, has two meanings that stand at odds with one another. In the sense traditionally understood and read with this scene, palaver stands to indicate a drawn out and idle discussion. In the sense of Lily’s charge, she uses it to indicate men’s ultimately disinterested

33

gambit for sexual and emotional satisfaction. However, palaver also indicates a hasty conference

or intersection between two opposing sides, indicating the presence of conflict and the direct

attempt to mitigate or converge this tension to reach a desirable result. In that sense, Lily’s “man

of now” is a fundamentally divided character that stands at odds with his environment or himself.

In this sense, the emerging failures of Gabriel to reconcile his gentlemanly virtues, his artistic

and patriotic selves, and ultimately, his role of husband and lover are a doomed palaver that give

rise to his eventual epiphanic moment in the hotel. The concept of palaver as convergence

remains strong throughout the course of “The Dead,” with the Morkans’ party representing

another instance of intersection between the controlled society and the out-of-bounds antics of guests like Malins, as well as social gaffs and mistakes that continue to break Gabriel and the

Morkan’s control over the course of the evening.

Gabriel’s failure as a gentleman reaches its apex during his attempt to dismiss Lily with a holiday tip. He strives to reassert control by tipping her and “waving his hand to her in deprecation” (203) but her refusal of the tip and continued rejection of Gabriel as enduring master over the situation causes him to retreat up the stairs and away from a girl he deems his inferior, causing an unmitigated fracture in his conception of his role as gentleman and his construction of femininity, which continues to be undermined throughout the narrative. This first fracture plants the seeds of doubt in Gabriel's mind and threatens his fragile construction of identity as an exemplar of good form and of the essential foundations of who he is. Gabriel, who continually looks to his relationship as a superior over others as an affirmation of his own identity, suffers his first check to that identity through Lily’s refusal of his token.

The party’s restricted formality begins to fracture as the guests move into the ballroom. Mr.

Browne begins drinking heavily and makes inappropriate comments towards the women in

34 attendance, all the while betraying a “very low Dublin accent so that the young ladies received his speech in silence” while Malins appears with “bronchitic laughter” and “disarray in his dress”

(211). These are the only two characters that the text references as entering and leaving the party explicitly from the outside, indicating that each, as exemplars of the chaotic forces beyond the control of the Morkans, have entered from some liminal space beyond Gabriel’s grasp and understanding. Gabriel’s control over his wife begins to be undermined with the tale of the galoshes, articles of footwear that Gabriel asserts “everyone wears on the continent” but Gretta asserting that although he wanted her to put them on, she wouldn’t. (205). Gretta resists this attempt at control, and through her relation of the story to the party guests, makes clear Gabriel’s lack of power over her, as well as his furtive attempts to master the elements through the use of galoshes.

Gabriel’s interest in continental fashion is brought to a dramatic contrast by his dance

(fittingly a confrontational dance known as “lances”) with Miss Ivors, who wears an “Irish device” on her dress (213). Miss Ivors makes light of his contributions to The Daily Express, where he reviews literature in a supposedly pro-British paper, calling him a traitorous “West

Briton” (214). This prompts Gabriel’s second failure of the night: his inability to reconcile the demands of Irish nationality with his love of literature and art. Gabriel argues that his contributions are not political, that “the books he received were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque” (214) and attempts to express that art is beyond politics. However, Ivors presses him, arguing that he should go Westward to the Aran Isles in Ireland to stay in touch with his national language and identity instead of a much-anticipated biking trip in Europe, promoting

Gabriel into another breach in social etiquette by admitting “ I am sick of my own country” in a violent outburst (215). Hayman argues that the conflict between art and politics “illustrates the

35 degree to which the young proto-creator is torn between his idealizing Platonic drives and his practical or Aristotelian mindset,” (636) and is one of the chief primers for the epiphany, including in other Joyce works such as Ulysses or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Gabriel has no control over this balance, as it is imposed from an external societal construction of Irish nationality, and thus he must come to terms with the fact that his great love of literature and his enjoyment of his job come at the cost of social ostracization and political oppression.

His inability to square these two conflicting energies retroactively amalgamates with his fragmenting conception of women: “Gabriel tried to vanquish from his mind all the memory of the unpleasant incident with Miss Ivors. Of course, the girl, or woman, or whatever she was was an enthusiast,” (217). Here, Ivors appears as an unidentifiable antagonist that pits Gabriel’s love of literature against his culture, a manifestation of the chaotic Other that further disrupts his assurance of control and indicates his lack of confidence with women that do not fit the traditional “wife or young girl” archetypes. Miss Ivors remains outside of these bounds even in name, with the “Miss” indicating a deliberate distancing from a husband figure, but Gabriel’s intellectual defeat at her hands could likewise not come from a child. The liminal state that Miss

Ivors inhabits not only comes off as perplexing for Gabriel, but eminently threatening: her position invalidates the gentlemanly virtues that necessitate his character. Ivors fittingly leaves the controlled membrane of the party directly after her antagonism.

Shortly before his scheduled speech, Gabriel briefly considers an escape outside where “the snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the

Wellington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the super table”

(219). This indicates the beginning of Gabriel's unrest and lack of assurance regarding his own position at the party and, more importantly, a desire to escape the tensions of the binary that have

36 besieged him all night. He later describes the outside where “the air was pure” and the snow

“flashed Westward over the white field...” indicating a desire to escape into not only the chaos of the outside, but beyond into what Hederman and Riquelme have termed the mythical West of

Ireland that may stand beyond the constraints of the control/chaos binary and the constructions of identity that cause Gabriel’s unrest.

Later that evening, Gabriel attempts to assert control over his rapidly deteriorating sense of identity by sharing the benign story of Johnny the horse, which exists within an apolitical and masculine vacuum free from the contradictory elements that have compromised the night.

Patrick Morkan, a family patriarch and characterised as an “old gentleman” strikes “out from the mansion of his forefathers” with the mill-horse Johnny to attend a military parade with all the pomp and circumstance that is characteristic of the controlled, upper-society (237). However, in the middle of the parade, the horse breaks formation and ignores the old gentleman’s attempt to restrain it from walking ceaselessly around a statue as if it were back in the mill. The anecdote highlights the fruitlessness of the Morkans’, and Ireland’s, emphasis on control, because they are effectively walking in circles and accomplishing nothing in an extended palaver, just like Johnny the Horse. Furthermore, the parade as an exemplar of independent Irish military pride is disrupted by the horse’s cyclical walk around a statue of an English King, further highlighting

Gabriel’s tension regarding Irish culture and the appeals of the other European powers, and on a larger scale, the inability for Ireland to evolve into an future not dominated by the English control of the past. The story, which has gained considerable social traction, is fittingly interrupted (with another breach in social etiquette) by Malins at the door.

As the evening draws to a close, Gabriel begins to fall back on his role of husband and mastery over his wife as a source of security and control. He draws from her his sense of

37

masculinity: “she seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then

to be alone with her” (246) while he struggles to “be master of her strange mood” (248) in a way

that asserts not only Gabriel’s situational dominance over Gretta but also his desire for emotional

dominance. These factors act as a source of escapism from the failures of the night, with Gabriel

imagining at the hotel door that “they had escaped from home and friends and run away together

with wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure” (246). It is notable that this sense of escapism

occurs outside at the threshold of the door, in the same snow-lined wilderness that produced

Malins and continues to be the scene of unrestrained, and yet, not fully obtainable, freedom for

Gabriel.

Once inside, the tension of the binary returns. Gabriel’s attempts to force Gretta to yield and

“fall to him” are rebuked when she suddenly breaks into tears (249). She reveals that a song

Gabriel only distantly heard at the party was the “Lass of Aughrim,” a song sung by a dead lover in Gretta’s youth named Michael Furey. Gretta admits that Furey “died for me” causing Gabriel to be “seized by this answer as if, at the hour when he had hoped to triumph, some implacable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering forces against him in its vague world”

(252). The boy, it is revealed, died tragically young at the age of seventeen, signing the “Lass of

Aughrim” a week before his death to a departing Gretta. Gabriel is brough to humiliation “by the evocation of this figure from the past” (251) a figure that has broken the past/present dichotomy that paralyzes Dubliner society and Gabriel. Furey not only breaks the opposition between present and past, but seemingly transcends the control/chaos binary to become the gentlemanly lover that embodies the patriotic spirit of Irish nationality through his rendition of the “Lass of Aughrim.” His death removes him from the consequences of the destructive palaver between the forces of control and chaos that drew Gabriel inexorably towards failure,

38 forever youthful and innocent of the contradictory impulses that are a reality for Gabriel. Gabriel worries that “perhaps she had not told him all the story” indicating that Gabriel further believes that Furey had sexual relations with Gretta, and through her continued remembrance and love of him, makes of Gabriel a cuckold from beyond the grave in another sabotage of the past/present binary.

This third and final failure as husband and lover indicates a critical point within the narrative for Gabriel’s character. The three failures, with the final one in particular, sabotage Gabriel’s core conception of his character and manhood, causing a moment of narratorial aporia. Gabriel acknowledges that “he never felt like [Furey had] to any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (255) and the realization that not only his underlying assumptions regarding society, art, femininity, but even love have been unable to be reconciled with the tensions of the evening strips his identity bare and leaves him vulnerable. Gabriel’s “eyes rested long upon her face and on her hair; and, as he thought of what she must have been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer beautiful but he knew it was no longer the face for which

Michael Furey braved death” in a form of visionary signification (254). The realization of his wife’s mortality, that her youthful beauty belonged to Furey just as her heart does now, is the catalyst that generates the epiphanic moment.

The difference between the past and present blurs further, where Gabriel imagines “he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead.” The assertion of the ghosts into reality coincides with the deconstruction of Gabriel’s own identity as the failures of the night become internalized: “His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid

39 world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived was dissolved and dwindling.”

(255). Gabriel’s “vague terror” of Michael Furey’s powers over the present become realized with abundant clarity: not only has Furey emerged as tangible as Gabriel and Gretta in the present, but Gabriel’s own failures have eroded his identity, at the conception of who he is, until he himself begins to take Furey’s position in the mythical realm of the dead. An excruciating consciousness regarding morality emerges, and Gabriel sees a funeral for one of the Morkans play out, where he is unable to offer any consolation and appears powerless before the concept of death. The departed Morkan joins the failed symbols of control as “a shade with the shade of

Patrick Morkan and his horse” in a furthering of Gabriel's own conscious surrendering of control.

Here, the epiphanic moment emerges as a crisis point for Gabriel's identity. No longer can he remain living under the assumptions that he carried with him into the Morkans’ party earlier in the night. Furthermore, the realizations of the evening permeate into his conception of identity to such as degree that the Gabriel that entered the party cannot continue to live under the revelations of the night. Instead, Gabriel self-consciously disrupts his construction of identity, leaving him in a liminal state where he is neither living nor dead. The epiphanic moment is the destruction of this identity in a radical transformation of character that begins to fundamentally alter Gabriel's construction of the self.

A secondary, aural signifier of the epiphany in the from of a few light taps upon the windowpane shakes him from this line of thinking, indicating a conclusion to the deconstruction of Gabriel’s identity and the emergence of a new consciousness. He notes that “it had begun to snow again” (255) in an apparent recognition and acceptance of the forces of chaos present outside his window. Michael Furey returns to the new, proto-Gabriel, this time not as an enemy, but in what Wazl argues is the role of redeemer, in a channeling of the Joycean relationship

40

between the epiphany and the religious implications of salvation. Gabriel acknowledges that the

snow he sees is likewsie “general all over Ireland, falling too upon the lonely churchyard where

Michael Furey lay buried” (256), indicating a universality between Gabriel and the Furey, with

the chaotic element of snow acting as a universal binding, the medium through which a new

palaver is initiated. At this recognition, Gabriel's “soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow

faintly falling through the universe” in a deliberate indication of the savior/saved dichotomy that

Furey and Gabriel embody, with the Furey’s mortal sacrifice for Gretta and the display of love

offering hope to a fallen and deconstructed Gabriel. The ending asserts this universality and the

creation of a new consciousness free of the control/chaos binary, with Gabriel contemplating a

plan to “set out Westward” and acknowledging that the snow fell upon “all the and the dead”

(255).

With this last invocation, Joyce moves beyond Gabriel (his story, and full redemption, are left

unfinished) and touches the reader. The equivocation “all the living and the dead” reaches

beyond the confines of the narrative into a metaphysical plane. Here, the epiphany begins to lose

sight of Gabriel, who has faded into a proto-consciousness, and begins to form directly between

the Joyce and the reader. The taps at the windowpane seem to come directly from Joyce himself,

and this self-insertion is not so much for Gabriel’s benefit (for his process is entirely within) but

for the reader, whose attention is drawn to the universality of the snow, and ultimately, the

universality of Gabriel’s process. Gabriel acknowledges during his deconstruction that “other

forms were near,” while admitting that “one by one they were all becoming shades” (254) with

lines that seem to gesture at the fleetingness of mortality and the totality of Gabriel’s experience, and Joyce’s vision.

41

Perhaps only with Joyce does the architect of the text react directly with the reader within the narrative space. The wide-ranging effects of the epiphany become universal, and through

Gabriel’s process, and Joyce’s own attempts to draw the reader's attention towards the universality of the chaotic, the link between the living and dead, and ultimately, the reader’s own inclusion into this dichotomy as one of the other forms that accompanies Gabriel, the reader’s own sense of the epiphanic is heightened. To what end will vary from person to person, but

Joyce’s insistence of the universality his message becomes clear. Perhaps for Joyce, Lily’s “Men of now” remains as relevant and integral as it did for Gabriel at the turn of the century.

The epiphanic moment of Gabriel Conroy indicates a radical deconstruction of identity as a result of a transformative process for the character. The moment of inception is generated by deeper contemplation of an ultimately mundane artifact, as Gabriel looks into the lost youth of his wife’s face. It comes at the heels of three major binary tensions that are confronted and disrupted throughout the story, with Gabriel’s own sense of identity dissolving further at each.

The final act sees Gabriel acknowledge these failures in a self-deconstruction of his identity, where Michael Furey plays the role of savior through his sacrifice out of love. The end moves beyond the specificity of Gabriel’s experience into a broader sense, as Joyce, and to a lesser extent, the reader, are invoked and brought into the story in a secondary metaphysical epiphany that solidifies Joyce’s message and resounds with poignancy for the reader.

42

The Moment of Ideas: The Literary Epiphany of Lord Jim

Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim first saw publication in 1900 at the head of the Modernist Era of

British Literature and at the tail-end of the Victorian Era, channeling a patchwork of interconnected themes such as the importance of class, moral character, and status, imperialism, and the exploration of the Romantic character. The sometimes conflictory nature of these themes is brought alive in the struggle of the principle character, a seaman named Jim, as he attempts to overcome his ignominious abandonment of a passenger liner called the Patna and eventually enters into self-imposed exile to grapple with the fracturing of his image as a hero.

Charles Marlow, another seaman, provides the main portion of the narrative through his articulation of Jim’s story, and more importantly: his troubled relationship with the tragic hero.

Jim ultimately confronts his fate on the island of Patusan and dies in an accountable sacrifice.

Marlow’s narration of Jim’s fate is famously complicated, with the majority of his monologue occurring as a dictation to unspecified others during a party, and later evolving into a handwritten letter that addresses one of the attendants at the party. At times, the scene is addressed objectively from outside Marlow’s control by another character that appears as an over-narrator, while Marlow himself relates other characters’ takes on Jim’s story in detail, providing three levels of narration in a complicated narrative nesting. Marlow clarifies his relationship as narrator by arguing “I only knew [Jim] was one of us. And what business had he to be romantic? He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you”

(172). As the only interested character in Jim’s plight, Marlow first affirms Jim’s universality, that Jim was “one of us,” then asserts that it is his job to make Jim manifest to the listeners at the party.

43

The deliberate act of recollecting a dead man and making him manifest stands upon the principles on Parousia that are fundamental to Deconstructionist notions of the metaphysics of presence. The concept hinges heavily on the process of making something “appear” from an inaccessible or intangible state; to recall and make tangible, which derives from de Man’s prosopopeia, the “fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity,” (de Man,

75). The over-narrator argues that Marlow “showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly” (27) indicating his frequent engagement with the notion of Parousia. In a Biblical sense, Parousia was used to indicate the Second Coming or the arrival of an important or royal person, and shares the same Greek origins as epiphaneia: the epiphany. As the narrative progresses, Marlow’s frequent attempts to make sense of Jim and his struggle to recall him to his audience represent the act of Parousia and a narratorial aporia that forces Marlow into a explanatory deadlock. Fincham has argued that this deadlock is internally directed, as Marlow’s speech is ultimately a monologue that suggests an inward searching for truth. It is only out of this deadlock that Jim’s experience manifests itself into a sudden clarity of understanding in the epiphanic moment.

The structure of the epiphanic moment in Lord Jim represents a significant diversion from the epiphany of Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead.” Unlike the highly choreographed and building nature of the Joycean epiphany, Conrad’s epiphany comes from a sudden illumination that has come to be referred to as the visionary moment. Maltby clarifies further, asserting that the visionary moment is distinct from the Joycean epiphany by its emphasis on a rapid self- referential emotional response to the revelation of information, as opposed to the building, ethereal power of the epiphanic moment that manifests for Gabriel. Both rely on a typically mundane catalyst like the turn of a phrase or a common object; whereas the Joycean epiphany

44

arrives at an almost metaphysical conclusion from the contemplation of these objects, Maltby

asserts that the visionary moment is a generally secular and entirely self-contained revelation.

Perhaps the most important distinction between the two modes of epiphany is in their accessibility or inaccessibility to the reader, with the Joycean construction often being left undefined and separated by a narratorial wall, and the visionary moment generally being rendered in excruciating detail so that the reader is on equal terms with the narrator as to the nature and understanding brought about by the epiphanic “appearance” and revelation. This project represents three such manifestations in the narration of Charles Marlow, as well as a supplementary fourth epiphany that functions as a hybrid between the visionary moment and the

Joycean epiphany. Diagramming each of these occurrences will be sufficient to construct a shape of the visionary moment and its structure, while providing a foundation for further exploration as to its significance and defining differences for the outcome of the text, the reader-

character relationship, and ultimately: the author-reader dynamic.

Marlow’s troubled relationship with Jim provides the impetus for the majority of the

epiphanic moments throughout the novel. Marlow admits that Jim’s dereliction of duty was a an

affront to any sailor and that Marlow’s disdain was shared among all sailors as the event of Jim’s

trial “contained a naked fact, about as naked and ugly as a fact can well be. The whole waterside

talked of nothing else” (28). And while Marlow disproves of Jim’s cowardly abandonment of

the vessel, he admires the strength he exhibits in enduring the trial and the stripping of his

identity of a seaman; a strength that “prevented [Jim] from becoming a criminal in the legal

sense” (35). Just as Jim is universally despised for his role in the drama concerning the

passenger liner, Marlow believes that Jim’s trial was in part a trial of every sailor and that he had

a personal stake in the proceedings: “was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow

45

of an excuse for that young fellow whom I had never seen before, but whose appearance alone

added a touch of personal concern to the thoughts suggested by the knowledge of his weakness--

made it a thing of mystery and terror-- like a hint of a destructive fate ready for us all whose

youth had resembled his youth” (41). Jim’s willingness to admit a weakness shared and resisted

by every sailor colors his relationship with Marlow, and also contributes to Marlow’s struggle to

fully understand Jim, and ultimately his own, character. This struggle, Marlow admits “was one

of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure” (89).

The allusion to breaking through a fog, as well as his admission that the “mists were closing

again” (99) characterise the epiphanic moment born out of an intense narratorial aporia over

Jim’s character and its implications for Marlow and his listeners.

Jim's transgressions and subsequent confrontation with his moral weakness proves to have a

wide-ranging impact that expands beyond Marlow into a ubiquitous and accessible narrative

throughout the Pacific. He acknowledges that Jim’s affair “had an extraordinary power of

defying the shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with a sort of uncanny vitality in the minds of men, on the tips of their tongues. I’ve had the questionable pleasure of meeting it often...coming to the surface of the most distant allusions” (106). This observation indicates that Marlow is not alone in his ability to recall the spectre of Jim in a act of

Parousia. The presider over Jim’s trail, Captain Brierly, is likewise affected by the universal implications of Jim’s cowardness, and channels Marlow’s struggle to make sense of the character’s morality and Brierly’s own hidden guilt. The captain first attempts to pay to have

Jim escape the trial, and Marlow later assumes that the captain was “silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret of his evidence with him in that leap into the sea” (47). Marlow’s assumption as to the cause of the captain’s

46

suicide is that the affair of Jim was “no doubt of the gravest import, one of those trifles that

awaken ideas...start into life some thought with which a man unused to such companionship

finds it impossible to live” (47). Paccaud-Huguet has suggested that the Conradian epiphany is

“undesirable and dangerous, hence the desire to keep it away” (Paccaud-Huguet, 75) and that

Briely’s discussion of Jim and ultimate suicide indicates an attempt to distance oneself from the

encounter with reality that the epiphanic moment engendered. Fyre underscores the fear of

tainted knowledge or possession in his analysis of “demonic epiphanies,” an undesirable

illumination “where the central manifestation is of the reality of evil,” (qtd in Nichols, 23). The

“trifle” at Jim’s trial certainly seems to have illuminated something for Briely, and while it

borders on the epiphanic, Marlow’s own abandonment of Briely’s character in an act of avoiding

the second-hand effects of the epiphanic moment make it unclear. Nevertheless, Briely’s engagement with Jim’s trial, his desire to avoid it, and his ultimate suicide indicate the universality of Jim’s affair and the wide-reaching effects of its development.

The most notable of the visionary moments that Conrad describes through Marlow occurs

during his conversation with a French Lieutenant in Sydney. The topic turns to Jim’s disgrace,

and it turns out that the Lieutenant was on the boat that picked up the passenger liner that Jim

fled from thinking it would sink. Their conversation turns to Jim’s motivations, in which

Marlow has a special interest in, and the Frenchman responds: “mon dieu!’ how the time passes”

leading Marlow into a flash of illumination:

Nothing could have been more commonplace than this remark; but its utterance coincided for now with a moment of vision. Its extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts...nevertheless there can be but a few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much--everything--in a flash-- before we fall back again into our agreeable somnambulance. I raised my eyes when he spoke, and I saw him as though I had never seen him before...time had passed indeed: it had overtaken him and gone ahead, (110)

47

The Frenchman’s casual utterance of the phrase “how the time passes” strikes Marlow and

elevates him to the epiphanic, (one of these rare moments of awakening). Unlike Joyce, where

even the catalyst of the epiphanic moment builds in significance for the character and reader,

Marlow’s epiphany is made known in an explosive manner at the forefront. An emphasis on

clarity is channeled, with Marlow highlighting the ability to see and hear everything in a flash,

which he characterized as a moment of awakening or vision. The moment, as quick as it comes,

passes fleetingly, and Marlow acknowledges that he returns to a level of “agreeable

somnambulance” in a sleeplike state that deprives him of the clarity of seeing and hearing.

While the emphasis is on Marlow’s own experience as it relates to understanding himself, the

second half of the epiphany turns from a contemplation of Marlow’s own character to that of the

Frenchman across from him. Marlow’s momentary illumination allows him to see the

Frenchman as he had “never seen him before,” allowing Marlow to take into account the scars

the man had that he had not seen before, and the fleeting nature of the man’s youth. Like the

epiphanies analyzed in the Joycean works, Marlow’s moment of vision works here as an intense

gateway into the conditions (and mysteries) of another’s soul. Marlow looks upon the

Frenchman in an entire new light, and feels, as a consequence of the momentary illumination, a

deeper understanding of the man. Considering Marlow’s own admission of his lost youth (41)

earlier in the narrative, it is probable that this contemplation of the Frenchman also rings true for

Marlow’s own state, providing an even deeper connection between the two aging sailors.

The next epiphany is notable in that it takes place outside the control of Marlow’s narration,

and represents the first instance of narrative nesting that the novel uses to convey the plot.

Marlow’s interpretation of Jim’s trial is usurped by the over-narrator, who begins to describe the scene of the party and Marlow’s narrative act in an objective and detached manner. This

48 narrator, who remains unspecified, remarks that “now and then a small red glow would move abruptly and expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in profound response, or flash a crimson gleam into a par of pensive eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead...” (28) and seems to indicate a description of an epiphanic response to

Marlow’s revelations on behalf of the guests. The emphasis on color, shape, and fast movement likewise indicate Maltby’s catalogue of the visionary moment’s signifiers. This scene stands out as an oddity in that it is more reminiscent of Joyce’s inaccessible epiphanies where the epiphanic can be identified, but the meaning is not entirely clear or understood within the context of the narrative. Yet, the visionary “flashes” and abrupt lights seem to solidify the scene as that of the visionary moment.

The over-narration scales its focus from the surrounding environment and centers on Marlow, effectively twisting the story to reflect upon its originator and his narrative performance.

Marlow is described as “extended at rest in his seat...with the very first word uttered [becoming] very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past” (28). Once again, a narratorial detachment characterises this description, but the narrator is likewise able to see Marlow’s response to his own revelations, and more importantly, the aftershock of dealing with the moral quandary of Jim, replay upon his face as he struggles to recall the figure from memory. This recollection, brought on by every

“utterance” brings Marlow into a nearly ethereal state that mirrors the metaphysical transformations of Gabriel in “The Dead.” The epiphanic moment that plays upon Marlow is distanced by the narrator’s unfamiliarity and by the fact that the narrator himself is not experiencing it, but he is able to note that Marlow seems to be channeling a different time and different experience through his story. Through the over-narrator, it appears that Marlow’s

49 epiphanic response to the recollection of Jim allows for a breakdown in the time barrier that is likewise present in Joyce’s works, with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses in particular. Here, the recollection isn’t sterile and static, but appears to not only affect Marlow by striking him still, but also invokes the ghost of Jim and Marlow’s past into the present in a blending of reality that remains a hallmark of the epiphanic moment.

Jim’s shame from the Patna trial draws him into a self imposed exile on an island backwater known as Patusan. There, he eventually gains the trust of the locality, only to have it dashed by the emergence of a pirate that uses Jim’s promise of safe conduct to kill one of the chief’s sons.

Jim surrenders himself to the grieving chief in a symbolic turn around from his unaccountable fleeing from the Patna and his past that drove him to Patusan and the chief kills him on the spot.

Marlow learns of these events afterwards, and relates them in a letter to an attendant of the party that sets the first half of the narrative, in which Marlow offers the account of the pirate as well as

Jim and Marlow’s mutual friend, Stein, further complicating the narrative direction of the story.

In his closing remarks he delivers the last epiphany brought about by the recollection of Jim as he asserts the imperative of the story: “We ought to know. He is one of us, and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer to his eternal constancy...there are moments too when he passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades” (318). These closing remarks as to the nature of Jim’s character further highlight the power of the epiphanic as an equalizer between the past and present. Like Gabriel and Michael Furey, Marlow’s efforts to recall and deliver Jim’s ghost to the audience have invigorated Jim’s spirit while Marlow himself fades into the background. Marlow remains “extended at rest” and “very still” (28) and in the last act of the novel disappears as a physical presence entirely to be replaced by his written word.

50

Marlow becomes the “evoked ghost” to clarify and characterise Jim, much like Odysseus’

solicitation of the ghosts in the underworld for information, which Marlow’s allusion almost

certainly points to. As a result, Jim becomes as real as Marlow, if not more so, in an act of

Parousia so strong that it mirrors the word's initial intent as a signification for a Second Coming

or resurrection.

Marlow’s closing words that “Stein has aged greatly of late...and says often that he is

‘preparing to leave all this; preparing to leave...’ (318) engage the theme of excruciating morality

that Gabriel also develops during his epiphany in “The Dead.” A heightened sense of the

fleetingness of life and Marlow’s glance towards the future complete the tripartite blending of

past, present, and future through the lens of the epiphanic. Marlow mentions in closing the

butterflies, a potent symbol of balance and perfection as Stein asserts: “look at the accuracy, the

harmony...so exact! This is Nature: the balance of colossal forces” (158). The conflict that Jim

embodies that forces Marlow to struggle on his own personal level is embodied by the butterfly,

which is fittingly the last visionary glimpse of the epiphanic moment within Lord Jim. Jim was

unable to find the balance which he pursued all the way to Patusan, and answering for the chaotic

forces of nature in a balancing reconciliation destroyed his character. Marlow’s own answers

remain likewise elusive, indicating that the narratorial aporia that he struggles with throughout

the novel remains unreconciled, with Jim as the subject being destroyed rather than reaching the

desired balance.

While the focus of the novel is Marlow’s relationship between Jim and what he represents for

Marlow himself, the complicated narratorial style of the story also allows for an engagement between Conrad and the reader directly. Paccaud-Huguet and Fincham postulate that Marlow is a direct mouthpiece for Conrad, acting as an emotional and narratorial medium for Conrad’s

51 monologues regarding the issues broached by the narrative. Marlow is Conrad’s way of distancing the epiphanies that emerge in grappling with Jim’s tribulations, and this distancing takes the form of an elaborate speech-act performance. Marlow is certainly a fitting alter-ego for

Conrad, as both fulfill the roles of sailor-storyteller in and out of the narrative.

However, this speech-act performance does not solely engage the author. For the majority of the novel only stock-characters and vague outlines of other guests are present to witness

Marlow’s recollection of Jim, which provides a blank canvass that allows the reader to project into the narrative. The epigraph for Lord Jim, appearing before even Marlow or the over- narrator gains control over the course of the story, reads: “It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe it.” This line can be said to be the only line in the entire novel expressed directly from Conrad himself, adding another and top layer to the narratorial scheme of the story. Conrad’s message insists upon the dual nature of the speech-act performance as one of listening and speaking, with Conrad, through Marlow, delivering a narrative that the reader receives. The tripartite relationship between Conrad as author, Marlow as medium, and reader as listener is transcended through the epiphanic moment.

During the first epiphany, Marlow’s unspecified dictation to an unknown “you” (28) seems to be directed not at the languid and disinterested forms that populate the party, but at the only person that has an invested stake in the story: the reader. Marlow asserts that “It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun,”

(138) suggesting that Marlow is able to reach the reader through the narratorial aporia that he struggles with in recalling Jim. The “you” of the party address is only addressed through the heighten awareness caused by this struggle, which manifests in a fourth-dimensional narrative

52

speech-act performance that channels from Conrad, to Marlow, and finally to the reader. In the second half of the narrative, Marlow’s letter concedes that you alone have showed interest in him that survived the telling of his story” (258) while it is referenced that the party broke up in the previous chapter without any questions or other signals of interest. It is the reader (who, after all, has read to this point and is invested in Jim’s fate) that becomes the “privileged reader” that the speech-act is directed towards, and it is the reader that receives the images of the recollected

Parousia of Jim in the final chapter of the story through Marlow, and Conrad’s last epiphany.

What Lord Jim offers through an analysis of the visionary moment is a closer and more

defined view of the mechanics of the epiphany and how its relationship manifests with the author

and reader. In Joyce’s “The Dead,” the epiphany remains not entirely definable, as it is

experienced entirely by Gabriel behind the barrier of narration. The visionary moment

experienced through Marlow’s narratorial struggle manifests itself in a flash of illumination that

stands potentially as bright for the reader as it does for the one who experiences it. The story,

which all comes from Marlow and Conrad jointly, necessitates an explication of the flash as

Marlow ruminates in his monologue about its meaning and significance. The visionary moment

is just as effective at providing the insight and intense connection between two characters within

the story, and also has equal powers in connecting the past and futures as the epiphany in Joyce.

Marlow’s speech-act performance serves to clarify the third and final level of the epiphanic

structure by providing a causal link from author to reader, that through the epiphanic moment is

strengthened and directly connected. The Marlow-Conrad revelations are presented in their entirety for the benefit of the reader, and the epiphany serves to heighten the speaker-listener

dynamic which can perhaps be seen as the fundamental basis of the reader's experience of the

novel.

53

“A Man of Exceptional Moods” The Literary Epiphany of The War of the Worlds

H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds was first published in serial form throughout 1897 and is often credited alongside other literature from Wells for creating the science-fiction genre. The

novel depicts an alien invasion of Earth during 1899 at the end of the Victorian Era and the dawn

of a new century. Wells’ conceptualized invasion is structured closely along contemporary fears

of a German invasion of the English mainland, which he plays off of to address concerns

regarding the dynamics of imperialism, intersection of class, and ultimately: the redemptibility of

Man. To accomplish this, Wells produces a detached narrator that offers the narrative in a

journalistic style in an emulation of the serial newspapers that were a predominant part of the

contemporary English culture and the main way news of a feared German invasion would be

disseminated. As such, the nature of the epiphanic moment departs significantly from the

ethereal subconscious of Joyce or the visceral visionary moment of Conrad. The epiphanies of

The War of the Worlds stand as prefabricated expository devices, set in place by Wells to tell a

contemporary audience a specific, targeted message that maintains facets of relevance today.

Wells begins his narrative by introducing a sense of retrospective analysis to the succeeding

events of the novel, signalling to readers that the events of the invasion have already occurred

and that the chief focus of the story will be the recollection and interpretation of these events.

Lines such as “early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment” (8) and “the storm

came upon us six years ago now” (11) serve to provide a sense of narratorial distancing from the

events that will be related, even as these events, for contemporary readers, are chonologized in

the future. The story’s narrator, who remains unnamed and nondescript, likewise plays into this

recollective distancing through the narrative’s progression. He relates the events, even those that

occur to him, in an expository and journalistic nature, and at times he appears to distance his own

54 emotions and internal processing of the story. When the Martians first arrive and begin to vaporize those assembled around their landing site, the narrator remarks that “suddenly, like a thing falling upon me from without, came— fear” (41) and in doing so, separates his account from his emotions, and goes further to suggest that such emotions came from an outside source separate and distinct from himself even at the moment of their inception.

This element of narratorial distancing allows Wells to create a prefabricated narrative experience that strikes at pre-existing fears and anxieties for late-Victorian England. As Cantor has suggested, locating the story in the “near future” provided readers a sense of impending doom, while others, notably Conils, suggest that by mirroring his story on a possible German invasion of the English home territories, Wells could use the fear, anxiety, and the intrigue of the narrative’s proximity to the reader to impart his arguments and social commentary. The story is not the narrator’s to tell (who remains undefined and with no clear objective or direction), it is for the reader to listen and glean Wells’ themes, much like an serial in a newspaper. The narrator, who admits that he seems to “suffer from the strongest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all,” (48) makes him the perfect instrument through which Wells’ scheme can be delivered. The two chief epiphanic moments of the narrative are similarly designed to provide those themes, and due to the narrator’s insignificance, the epiphany takes the form of an expository device that flows directly from Wells to the reader, through a narratorial medium in a similar vein to that of

Marlow in Lord Jim.

Through the narrator’s recollection of the invasion, two interconnected binary fault lines emerge and remain central to the construction of the novel. The first, a construct between the

55 dominant and the dominated, is introduced by the novel’s epigraph: “But who shall dwell in these worlds if the be inhabited? Are we or are they Lords of the World...and how are all things made for man?” Two points of tension diverge from this first binary, firstly: the matter of supremacy, whether that be in a galactic or imperial form, and secondly: mankind’s claim to the rank of dominant species on the Earth. These tensions are pressed by the arrival of the Martians, who early in the narrative are imagined to consider humans “at least as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us” (10). This tension is manifest, the narrator asserts, in an “incessant struggle for existence” that defines all of life’s relationships. The Martians, whose planet is dying, seek “to carry warfare westward” as “their only escape” (10) making the inter-species struggle for dominance manifest in bitter warfare. Like “The Dead” or Lord Jim, the emphasis on a removal to the West as a means to escape the binary pairing (in this case, to destroy humanity) remains a common theme in the literature of the epiphany.

The second fault line is the dynamic between civilization and chaos and destruction. The epigraph voices concerns over mankind’s right to the ascendancy of the Earth, and Wells argues that humanity, especially England as the center of the world in the Victorian Era, divines this right through the trappings of civilization. The novel’s obsession with trains, newspapers,

Ironclad warships, cities and locations, and the overall manifestation of the English people’s power serves to indicate the tenuous membrane that holds questions of dominance at bay pre- invasion. But, as the Martian invasion progresses, humanity’s institutions of order “lose shape and efficiency, guttering, softening, running at last in that swift liquefaction of the social body,”

(142) causing a “a stampede...without order and without goal...the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind.” (162). This disruption threatens the integrity of the first binary of dominance, which is emphasized by Well’s secondary characters in the curate and

56

artilleryman, who begin to take two different and equally cowardly and subservient roles in

relationship to the Martians. The artilleryman begins to enjoy the fall of humanity, drinking and

gambling the time away in hiding, while the curate “practically already sunk to the level of an

animal” (210) in response to humanity’s usurpation as dominant species. These characters come

to embody the failings of two support systems that legitimatie English power: the military and

the Church for the artillerymen and the curate respectively. Both are disrupted by the Martians’

rise to power, calling threatening their ability to legitimize human dominance.

The culminating blows to humanity’s supportive membrane strip the narrator of his own

identity. A self-professed “recognized writer on philosophical themes” (246), the narrator comes to embody the pinnacle of academic authority that the dominating power of civilization allows for. But the Martian invasion forces him to recognize “an emotion beyond the common range of men, yet one that the poor brutes we dominate know only too well. I felt the first inkling of a thing that presently gre quite clear in my mind...a sense of dethronement, a persuasion that I was

no longer a master, but an animal among the animals...the empire of man had passed away (226).

Like the curate or the monkeys and lemurs deemed inferior at the beginning of the narrative, the

narrator feels like a hunted animal in a symbolic stripping of his humanity. In fact, the only time

the reader perceives the narrator as an actual human instead of the disembodied voice of the

narrative is when the narrator loses elements of this humanity and the trappings that elevate it.

The narrator’s experience with the curate and artillerymen force him to question the vulnerable

state of humanity further, as the removal of dominance strips the veneer of moral righteousness

that civilization offers, and leads him to question the ultimate redemptibility of Man.

The first epiphany occurs during the narrator’s second encounter with the artilleryman in

London. The narrator has convinced himself that humanity has been defeated, and entertains

57 delusions of being the last man alive, but the meeting shifts his focus to the grand plans of the artilleryman. The artilleryman first declares that he is “satisfied it is up with humanity” and that the conflict was “no more a war than there’s a war between man and ants,” (239) forcing the narrator to acknowledge the imminent collapse of civilization. Coming from the artilleryman, the embodiment of the powerful armed forces, the binary fault line is highlighted in gross detail by the admission of defeat by a member of that army. He goes on to acknowledge a degree of happiness that humanity has been subjugated, asserting that the class differences that kept him as a common soldier no longer exist. His plan for resurgence and regaining dominance on Earth captivates the narrator for a time, before he asks why the artilleryman was wondering the fields instead of preparing his great plan, to which the artilleryman says “oh, one cannot always work”

(251). The narrator acknowledges that at this admission of laziness “in a flash I saw the man plain” (251). In a scene that borrows from conceptions of the visionary moment, with an auditory admission of laziness sparking a flash of insight into another person, the narrator recognises the artilleryman's wavering commitment to humanity and resolves to leave the

“strange undisciplined dreamer of great things to his drink and gluttony”( 255). As a result, the narrator gleans something essential about the artilleryman, and through his own narratorial struggle, something about himself: he aligns himself with humanity against the destruction that has supplanted them.

The epiphany manifests as a visionary moment along the lines of the Conrad construction in

Lord Jim, however, the difference lies with the narrator’s emotional removal from the narrative.

With Conrad or even Joyce, the characters that experienced the epiphany in some level grapples with the meaning and struggles to articulate its import in a form of narratorial aporia, whereas with Wells, the epiphany comes from a predetermined and analyzed event that is delivered to the

58

reader already unpacked. The tension presents itself through the contemporary allusions that

Wells offers in his journalistic style: the threat to England, the tenuous relationship between

civilization and imperialism, and, as is the case with the artilleryman, the undisciplined members

of society that idly dream of glory and progress, but are ultimately claimed by the same binary

tensions that propel Wells’ story. The epiphany isn’t directed at the narrator, whose only agency

is in its delivery, but at the reader, who is left to form independent conclusions from the

presentation in much the same way one would derive meaning from a newspaper headline.

The encounter with the artilleryman and the overthrow of mankind forces the narrator to

consider humanity as a morally flawed and ultimately animalistic race. His wandering of the

destroyed city of London, symbolically the center of the world during the Victorian Era and now

devoid of people, convinces him that humanity’s ascendancy has been lost both as a competing

species and as morally exempt from the animal designator. A Martian’s cry of “Ulla Ulla Ulla”

is the only voice of the city, and drives the narrator to contemplate suicide. He resolves to

charge the Martian’s stronghold at the top of Primrose Hill to “die and end it. I would save even

the trouble of killing myself. I marched on recklessly towards this Titan...the thought that had

flashed in my mind grew real, grew credible. I felt no fear, only a wild, trembling exultation”

(263). Upon reaching the top, he is struck by the realization that the Martians are all dead or

dying from bacteria native to Earth’s surface that humans have become naturally immune to.

This revelation, coupled with the thought that “flashed” in his mind, elevates him once again to

the epiphanic.

In line with Maltby’s diagram of the epiphanic catalyst, the sight of the dead Martians and the sound of the last one’s solitary wailing proves to be the tipping point for his character. He recalls:

59

“As I looked at this wide expanse of houses and factories and churches, I thought of the

multitudinous hope’s and efforts, the innumerable hosts of lives that had gone to build

this human reef, and the swift and ruthless destruction that had hung over it all; when I

realized that the shadow had been rolled back, and that men might still live in the streets,

I felt a wave of emotion that was near akin to tears” (268).

The revelatory moment is not without its epiphanic imagery, as it mirrors Marlows own

observations regarding Jim’s story and its power to “remove the mist.” In this case, the narrator

is struck in two senses by the destruction of the Martians: he recognizes that the threat is over

and he acknowledges the flash of insight as the removal of a shadow. This insight has deeper

implications that once again are conveyed through the narrator to the reader. He explains his

flash of illumination as a recognition that the Martians were “slain by the putrefactive and

disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being

slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest thing that God, in his wisdom,

had put upon this earth” (265). This contemplation reveals an insight into the construction of

humanity's understanding regarding life and fulfills Wells’ scheme of imparting this advice

through the epiphany of a stock narrator.

The aporia and tension regarding humanity’s fate reaches its resolution with the epiphany on

Primrose Hill. However, like Joyce and Conrad, the transformative power of the epiphany

fundamentally alters —and arguably destroys—the narrator. He is left “a demented man...wandering, weeping, and raving through the streets” (271) while he acknowledges that he forgot: “of the next three days, I know nothing” (270). Whereas Jim had to die for the revelatory insight that Marlow received, and Joyce ends the novel before Gabriel reconstructs his relationship to his surroundings, Wells provides the “successful” outcome of the epiphanic

60

transformation. The narrator wanders in a form of narratorial recalibration as his mind processes

the insight of the epiphanic moment. Those days represent the transitional period between the

pre-epiphanic narrator to the post-epiphanic narrator. The fact that the story is told all from the retrospective of the post-transformational narrator makes it hard to ascertain the exact effects on the character of the narrator, but the narrator’s status as conveyer of epiphany places the focus not on how he personally adapts to the epiphany, but that the scale of the knowledge learned was so great that he had to adapt to its revelation.

In keeping with the epiphany’s often religious allusions, the narrator mirrors the Passion at

Calvary, the Biblical episode of Christ’s torture and death on the cross, through his sacrificial summit of Primrose Hill and his subsequent epiphany. The narrator’s struggle to rationalize a redemption for the fallen humanity is symbolized by his sacrificial summit, and the destruction of his character and reconstitution over a three-day period. His mirror-sacrifice is intended to indicate that humans are worthy of saving and that “by the toll of a billion deaths man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is against all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in vain” (266). The salvational power of this episode provides the resolution necessary to deconstruct the binary of dominance, and by extension, that of civilization and chaos, to create the resolution of the final chapters.

The narrator considers himself “a man of exceptional moods” (48) that is to say: no moods.

His tribulations and narration are purposely distanced throughout the narrative, providing room

(through the allusions to contemporary issues like class, the dynamics of imperialism, and the

German threat) for Wells to make clear his message about faulty reliance on civilization as a means of deriving superiority, and the fragile systems of dominance that construct humanity’s relationship with the other species on Earth. The narrator’s epiphanic sacrifice and resurrection

61 at Primrose Hill is meant to act as a salvational resolution for humanity, proving that humanity’s ascendancy is brought on through merit, and that we are worthy of saving.

62

Conclusion, Significance, and Further Research

The three instances of the epiphanic moment I analyze within this project’s purview effectively create a foundation for diagramming the structure and shape of the epiphany in literature. These findings isolate three manifestations of the epiphany as it functions within a literary capacity. Firstly, the most basic functional level of the epiphany acts as a narratorial turning point as the epiphany serves to provide some source of inspiration or information that propels the plot forward. Elements of Marlow’s written epiphany at the end of Lord Jim or the journalistic presentation of the Narrator’s epiphany in The War of the Worlds serve to provide new plot elements or indicate a turning point through the medium of the epiphanic moment. The second represents a deepening level of introspection from the first, where characters use this new information or revelations to arrive at essential truths regarding themselves or others in what I have termed the “transformation of character.” These elements of the epiphany feature either a radical destruction or alteration of the epiphanized character, or a profound insight into the mind and soul of another that reaches the essential “self” of that person. Such episodes likely feature the self-deconstruction of the epiphanized character’s identity, like Gabriel Conroy’s destruction at the end of “The Dead.”

Lastly, the epiphany may function as a transcendental medium that directly links the author to the reader. The power of the epiphanic moment manifests in its ability to subvert barriers of time or presence, and such activity extends to the author-reader dynamic. Often, as is the case with

Conrad-as-Marlow or Wells’ dictated epiphany, the epiphanic appears as a direct insight into the author’s own moment of vision, and is intended to appear unaltered through a narratorial medium (the character that experiences the epiphany) to the reader. As is the case with Wells,

63 the epiphany itself acts as a signifier of larger themes at work like the fate of mankind or the dynamics of imperialism.

Each modality maintains its distinct uses, but a single epiphany may serve more than one element within this tripartite structure, as is the case with Marlow’s narratorial episodes, which at times fulfill all three modalities. The occurrence of the epiphanic moment may be determined by these effects retroactively, but certain commonalities exist that unite all the epiphanies studied within this project and act as “themes” for the literary presentation of the epiphany. The ability for the epiphanic to transcend time, presence, and space remains heavily prevalent throughout all three novels, as well as the literature by Joyce which has been analyzed as a supplementary source of the epiphanic structure. Drawing from Joyce’s merging of the secular epiphany with elements of the Christian holiday, each manifestation of the epiphanic maintains strong religious allusions, especially the recollection of Jim on behalf of Marlow which serves as a reenactment of the biblical Parousia. The epiphanic is also notably consistent in its usage of a mundane

“catalyst” that acts as the spark of illumination.

In each case, I applied a loose application of Deconstructive literary theory to provide a shape to the epiphanic beyond the ambiguities of current scholarship. This approach focused on using

Deconstruction to trace binary tensions in texts to locate the structural “fault lines” that occured in the progression of the text. Specifically, this approach looked to the expression of the narration through the novels’ chief narrators: Gabriel Conroy, Charles Marlow, and the Narrator, to indicate sources of binary tension that resulted in cases of narratorial aporia. These moments created a narrative gridlock that forced the narration into a distillation and confrontation of the conflictory elements of the text, out of which the epiphanic moment was generated. Further

64

Deconstructive elements such as the concept of the recollective Parousia and the abject were

drawn upon to further draw out the implications of the epiphany and its role in the texts.

In each case, the Deconstructive exercise proved useful in providing a basic structure of the

epiphanic moment, out of which patterns began to emerge that allowed for deeper exploration

and interpretation. The greatest implications of this research appeared in an explication of the

epiphany’s second and third modalities, in which the character, reader, and author are

fundamentally linked through the revelation of some essential truth. The “transformation of

character” and the metaphysical author-reader relationship that is induced by the epiphany holds important implications for how we read and respond to texts, and may serve to indicate why the epiphany has remained such a dominant mode of literary expression for centuries.

These findings are by no means all-encompassing, and this study has taken pains to recognize a wide source of epiphanic material that lies beyond the scope of the project’s purview. The intention of this project was to provide the structure of the epiphanic moment using a post- modern methodology to provide a new perspective on a seldom-analyzed topic. Such a structure could then be applied to other elements and facets of the literary canon as a working and adaptive methodology. It is my hope that such research may be continued across the breadth of the literary canon in the exploration of new avenues of epiphanic expression, and bringing us closer to one of the more curious, and persistent, modes of literary expression.

65

Works Cited

Bowen, Zack. “Joyce and the Epiphany Concept: A New Approach.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 9, no. 1, 1 Jan. 1981, pp. 103–114.

Cantor, Paul A, and Peter Hufnagel. “The Empire of the Future: Imperialism and Modernism in H.G. Wells.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 38, no. 1, 2006, pp. 36–56. JSTOR.

Conrad, Joseph, et al. Lord Jim: a Tale. Penguin, 2007.

Cornils, Ingo. “The Martians Are Coming! War, Peace, Love, and Scientific Progress in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds and Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf Zwei Planeten.” Comparative Literature, vol. 55, no. 1, Jan. 2003, pp. 24–41. JSTOR, doi:10.1215/-55-1-24.

Currie, Mark. The Invention of Deconstruction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Derrida, Jacques. “Two Words for Joyce.” Monoskop, 2014, monoskop.org.

Dick, Kirby and Amy Ziering Kofman, directors. Derrida. Youtube, Zeitgeist Films , 2002,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgwOjjoYtco&t=18s.

Doyle, Laura, and Laura A. Winkiel. Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Indiana University Press, 2005.

Fincham, Gail. “The Dialogism of ‘Lord Jim’ .” The Conradian, vol. 22, no. 1/2, 1997, pp. 58–74. JSTOR.

Ghadiri, Hamid R. "Deconstructing Digression." Peculiar Language Literature As Difference From The Renaissance To James Joyce (n.d.): 210-38. Elin Holmsten, 2007. Web. 4 May. 2018.

66

Hayman, David. “The Purpose and Permanence of the Joycean Epiphany.” James Joyce Quarterly, 35/36, no. Vol. 35, no. 4 - Vol. 36, no. 1, 1 July 1998, pp. 633–655.

Hederman, Mark P. "'The Dead' Revisited." The Crane Bag 2 (1978): 29-38.JSTOR. Web. 4 May. 2018.

Holland, Nancy. “Deconstruction .” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, www.iep.utm.edu/deconst/#SH2a.

James, Simon J. Maps of Utopia H.G. Wells, Modernity, and the End of Culture. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Hopkins Univ. Press, 1992.

Joyce, James, and Daniel R. Schwarz. The Dead: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical and Historical Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Five Contemporary Critical Perspectives. Boston: Bedford of St. Martin's, 1994. Print.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man . Viking Press, 1965.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. Edwards Brothers, 2005.

Kim, S. Literary Epiphany in the Novel 1850-1950: Constellations of the Soul. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection. Columbia Univ. Press, 2010.

Maltby, Paul. The Visionary Moment: a Postmodern Critique. State University of New York Press, 2002.

Man, Paul De. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. Columbia University Press, 2008.

67

Mitchell, Andrew J., et al. Derrida and Joyce: Texts and Contexts. State University of New York Press, 2013.

Neuhold, Birgit. Measuring the Sadness: Conrad, Joyce, Woolf and European Epiphany. P. Lang, 2009.

Nichols, Ashton. The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of Modern Literary Moment. University of Alabama Press, 1987.

Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane. “One of Those Trifles That Awaken Ideas’: The Conradian Moment.” The Conradian, vol. 31, no. 1, 2006, pp. 72–85. JSTOR.

Parrinder, Patrick. Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia. Duke University Press, 2001.

Rorty, Richard. “Deconstruction.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 8: From Formalism to Poststructuralism, edited by Raman Selden, vol. 8, Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 166–197.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty., and Jacques Derrida. Of Grammatology. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Walzl, Florence L. “Gabriel and Michael: The Conclusion of ‘The Dead.’” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 4, no. 1, 1 Oct. 1966, pp. 17–31.

Walzl, Florence L. “The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce.” PMLA, vol. 80, no. 4, 1 Sept. 1965, pp. 436–450.

Wells, H. G., and Orson Scott. Card. The War of the Worlds. Scholastic, 2005.