Abstract

The epiphany remains important to Joyce's aesthetic in A Portrait of the Artist a Young Man and Ulysses. Further, it is contrary to Stephen's description of it in Stephen Hero and his descriptions of the experience of aesthetic apprehension in Portrait. Stephen understands epiphany and aesthetic apprehension as revealing a thing to be a particular and distinct substantial form. Joyce, however, departs from an Aristotelian idea of distinct substances in favor of Giordano Bruno's idea that there is only one universal substance, namely Being, and that in that substance all things coincide and are contained. ;Stephen's world in A Portrait is one of antagonistic opposing forces, such as Protestant and Catholic, Parnellite and anti-Parnellite, spirituality and sensuality, and it is governed by a rigid and repressive authoritarianism. Stephen's organizing of his experience into opposites, especially mind versus body and self versus society, is his way of responding to and hence unintentionally perpetuating antagonistic and threatening forces in his environment. His rationalistic aesthetic theory projects arbitrary boundaries onto things and is in opposition to his moments of poetic inspiration, which the novel associates with Hermetic ideas adopted by Bruno. ;In Bruno's ontology, universal intellect and substance comprise one universal Being, of which the entities Aristotle describes as substances are but accidents. Accordingly, things we think of as disparate or even opposite are one in essence. Ulysses is more conformant to this vision than to Aristotle's or Aquinas'. Interpretations of Ulysses according to the latter two thinkers fail to adequately account for the myriad interchanges, correspondences, and transformations among characters, events, and objects depicted in the novel. Stephen, likewise, wrestles in Ulysses with an Aristotelian world-view whose teleology and ontology of discrete entities do not seem to fare too kindly towards the latter. The alternative the novel posits as its god is Proteus, or universal flux. In the "Proteus" chapter of Ulysses, Stephen evinces skepticism about knowledge of essences as acquired through empirical observation of appearances, contemplates the sorry fate of seemingly isolated beings, and finally works his way, aided by allusions to Bruno's thought, to an epiphany in which he glimpses the unity of all being and the immanence of divinity in nature. ;Ulysses depicts the coincidence of a variety of contraries and brings their depictions to fruition in a series of epiphanies. The "Hades" and "Cyclops" chapters of Ulysses respectively depict the coincidence of the contraries of life and death, and love and hatred. Stephen's aesthetic theory in "Scylla and Charybdis" is biographical realism, and is depicted as only one half of the unity of realism and symbolism which is Joyce's true aesthetic. Largely through a myriad of references to Bruno and Hermeticism, "Circe" identifies the contraries of intellectual and material substance and the sacred and profane. "Nausicaa" continues this thematic by identifying sacred and profane loves through its montage of Bloom's shared fantasy with Gerty MacDowell with the nearby church ceremony. "Ithaca" explores the coincidence of microcosm and macrocosm, mundane and universal. Molly's monologue at the end of Ulysses is one long epiphany identifying imagination and matter, cause and principle, and particular and universal, through Molly's unified vision of life