One of the best known landmarks of early Joycean aesthetics is the writer's theory of the epiphany as the essence of (involuntary) artistic manifestation, inseparable from the juvenile figure of the alter ego Stephen Dedalus. Less well documented, however, is how the successive stages in the theory's presentation and implementation, from Stephen Hero to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,(1) turn around a formal orchestration of correlated concepts, usually with an awareness of their etymology or even their Indo-European roots, involving gesture, rhythm but also emotion and energy. What follows is an attempt to chart the gradual development of this aesthetics of the epiphany in the light of these cognate "root words" and themes, and show how they paved the way for a more full-blown "choreography of writing", to be further refined in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (outside the scope of the present essay), whereby the figure of the artist as dancer emerges from a kinetic conception of art and of writing as a dance.
More broadly, this essay arises out of the following question: how does Joyce the poète manqué who, via several evolving artistic personae (Stephen Dedalus(es), Shem the Penman), never abandoned his interest in theories of language and the place these allocate to the poetic, feature among a range of practitioners who foregrounded the mechanics of writing, using as an analogical touchstone similes with rhythm, dance, gesture, e-motion, etc, in order (ultimately) to work out alternative genealogies for the practice of writing? I shall review some of these "figure of the dance(r)" or key moments in an ongoing choreography: writing the dance or writing-as-dance, the variously inflected, ceaselessly renegotiated and increasingly self-ironic "movements" and tempi of Joyce's oeuvre, by focusing on its incipient stages in Stephen Hero and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
1. THE RHYTHMIC E-MOTION OF EPIPHANY IN STEPHEN HERO: ART AS GESTURE
The "early Joyce"--both as writer and delimited literary corpus--is generally associated with the juvenile artistic figure of Stephen Dedalus and his theory of the epiphany as the essence of (involuntary) artistic embodiment. Within the broader context of remarks on (poetic) language, the word, gesture and rhythm, it is arguably the undramatic nature of the theory's early exposition towards the end of what was preserved of Stephen Hero--and prepared by notetaking on rhythm, dance (consonantia, harmony) in the 1903 Paris Notebook(2)--that will lead Joyce to want to recast the verbose "classical" end-of-19th-centuryish novel into the more economical modernist Portrait. A close-up on the moment of the theory's presentation in relation to earlier remarks on cognate terms is therefore necessary.
The theory is first glimpsed at through the first evocation of rhythm in supple terms that conjure up its Indo-European root, from *rei-: to flow, the "beauty of verse" being described as a pulsating movement of "concealment and revelation" (not unlike the ancient Greeks' conception of Truth as aletheia) after the short following passage (which occurs after two missing pages):
of verse are the first conditions which the words must submit to, the rhythm is the esthetic result of the senses, values and relations of the words thus conditioned.
(SH, ch. XV, p. 29)
I have deliberately underscored the tacit etymology since, as the text says--and that is also one of Joyce's best-known interests--Stephen's budding aesthetics of poetry-as-rhythm was informed from its inception by an acquaintance with the historical palette of words: "He read Skeat's Etymological Dictionary by the hour. [...] People seemed to him strangely ignorant of the value of the words they used so glibly" (SH, p. 29). Indeed the etym--or atom; both will be fused later in several portmanteau words of Finnegans Wake (e.g. p. 353)--provides the artist with a kernel of aesthetic energy, and modern poetic creation is interestingly conceived as a retrogressive dismantling of words back into their letter constituents (note "doubling backwards into the past" in the following excerpt, to which I will return):
He sought in his verses to fix the most elusive of his moods and he put his lines together not word by word but letter by letter. He read Blake and Rimbaud on the values of letters and even permuted and combined the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions. [...] Stephen did not attach himself to art in any spirit of youthful dilettantism but strove to pierce to the significant heart of everything. He doubled backwards into the past of humanity and caught glimpses of emergent art as one might have a vision of the plesiosaurus emerging from his ocean of slime. He seemed almost to hear the simple cries of fear and joy and wonder which are antecedent to all song, the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar, to see the rude scrawls and the portable gods of men whose legacy Leonardo and Michelangelo inherit.
(SH, ch. XVI, p. 34)
Further on, two distant textual fragments can be counterpointed as they both strengthen the connection between rhythm and emotion in Stephen's art:
For him [the critic] a song by Shakespeare which seems so free and living, as remote from any conscious purpose as rain that falls in a garden or as the lights of evening, discovers itself as the rhythmic speech of an emotion otherwise incommunicable, or at least not so fitly.
(SH, ch. XIX, p. 74)
--I know a few elementary things and I express them in words. I feel emotions and I express them in rhyming lines. Song is the simple rhythmic liberation of an emotion. Love can express itself in part through song.
(SH, ch. XXIII, p. 158)
These constitute the prelude to the full-blown articulation of a theory of an art to come ("should"), as rhythm gives way to the more quintessential gesture--cf. earlier: "the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar" --, as all the above is subsumed, integrated and transformed into Stephen's "theoretical" disquisition on that experience that crystallizes aesthetic energy: the epiphany:
[from a longer conversation with Cranly on rhythm and gesture]
--There should be an art of gesture, said Stephen one night to Cranly.
--Yes?
--Of course I don't mean art of gesture in the sense that the elocution professor understands the word. For him a gesture is an emphasis. I mean a rhythm. You know the song 'Come unto these yellow sands'?
--No.
--This is it, said the youth making a graceful anapaestic gesture with each arm. That's the rhythm, do you see?"
(SH, ch. XXIV, p. 165; emphasis mine)
Just after the thoughts "dancing the dance of unrest" in Stephen's brain before his composition of the "Villanelle of the Temptress", comes the famous definition--the passage is soon followed by a full exposition of the three qualities of beauty, the third of which, the Aquinean claritas (radiance), which Stephen equals with quidditas, constitutes the epiphanic moment proper:
This triviality [an overheard snippet of "the most commonplace conversation", whose hypnotic spell on his mind was recalled also on p. 29] made him think of collecting such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments.
(SH, ch. XXV, p. 188)
The epiphany can thus itself be a gesture recording kinetically--or, precisely, as etymology tells us, e-motively (from e[x]-movere: to move out, set in motion, stir up)--the intrusion of the vivid external reality of lived experience into the realm of artistic expression, the successful embodiment of something real and objective into something linguistic and subjective (to adapt Pound's terms for the "image", with which it has technical affinities(3)). Its choreo-graphic nature can be apprehended in ironic contrast to the seemingly more casual, implicitly more negative references to the pantomime but especially dance in its socially domesticated form, the more overtly classical ballet:
She [...] asked Stephen what he liked best in pantomime. Stephen said he liked a good clown but she said she preferred ballets. Then she wanted to know did he go out much to dance and pressed him to join an Irish dancing-class of which she was a member.
(SH, ch. XVII, p. 64)
What is striking about the above excerpts is how key concepts, components like "emotion", "rhythm", "gesture", "dance", "energy" also, and finally "epiphany", are made to interact two by two (or three by three) in such arresting moments of aesthetic observation or theorization, performing at intervals, as it were, a rhythmic two/three-step dance, a lexical choreography--Joyce's own logopoeia, which Pound again described as "the dance of the intellect among words"(4)--whose aesthetic function would be to gradually shape and forward the theory to its full-blown, rhythmic disclosure. It is this kinetic build-up to the epiphany of the theory of the epiphany, as much as its conception, which, together with a modicum of the yet insufficiently dramatized third-person narrative, at once redeems the juvenile novel from failure by the terms of Joyce's own aesthetic theory as it is filtered through his fictional alter ego, and yet removes the possibility for the epiphany to inform the presentation of the novel's action outside such crucial theoretical, metanarrative moments. Such an inchoate artistic treatment of the epiphany--both the theory's content as much as its practical manifestations or illustrations--had thus to be radically revised, and its raw material, too ostentatiously foregrounded in Stephen Hero, subjected to modernist economy for the rewriting as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this novelistic transformation, the more straightforwardly kinetic dimension of the epiphanic experience will modulate into the stasis of dramatic equipoise at the heart of the "rhythm of beauty."
2. EPIPHANIC PRESENTATION IN A PORTRAIT
The admixture of first- and third-person narrative agencies and the more prevalent, defter use of irony--which we can test in Lynch's boisterous remarks during Stephen's aesthetic peroration, instead of his predecessor's more patient listening--helped focus the overhaul of the earlier novel in order to bridge the gap between the "rhythmic-abstract" theorizing and the modernist aesthetics of dramatic distancing. Hence also the more deliberate alignment, in the crucial disquisitions in chapter five, of the threefold qualities of beauty with the three forms into which art divides itself: lyrical, epical, dramatic, so as to equip the reader with the critical vocabulary with which to judge how Stephen's subsequent sketch of a villanelle--the "rhythmic movement of a villanelle" (A Portrait, p. 197) which his mind conjures up after seeing his beloved--belies a lyrical immature artistic self, whose practice falls short of the grand theorizing (the theory's wording percolates into the description of the protagonist's sexually charged emotions during the literary elaboration). Let us compare the passage, cited earlier, about the laden value of language in Stephen's juvenile poetics with the artist's definition of the lyrical form and tacitly note the quickened recirculation of the cluster of key words seen before as well as of one significant image:
He sought in his verses to fix the most elusive of his moods [...]. He [...] even permuted and combined the five vowels to construct cries for primitive emotions. [...] He doubled backwards into the past of humanity and [...] seemed almost to hear the simple cries of fear and joy and wonder which are antecedent to all song, the savage rhythms of men pulling at the oar [...]
(SH, p. 34)
The lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal gesture of an instant of emotion, a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. [...] The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes itself, so to speak.
(A Portrait, ch. 5, p. 194; emphases mine)
In the light of Stephen's advocacy of an artistic maturation process, from the lyrical to the dramatic, Joyce's decision to turn the end of A Portrait into a series of shorthand (lyrical) entries from a first-person diary further underscored the accrued ironic distancing between writer and fictional alter ego in terms of artistic creed and execution, and can be interpreted as a retrograde "doubling backwards into the past" for strategic compositional purposes, an overall choreography of writing of which there will be many numerous examples in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (which inter alia will rehabilitate the pantomime as a salvational ironic mode for art). The writing becomes Janus-faced, both turned towards the artist's lyrical self in a language that betokens aesthetic immaturity, and informing the ironic portraiture and (self-)revelation through concise narrative presentation.
Such a shift is best registered towards the climax of the fourth chapter, when the artistic calling takes off from a drawn-out epiphanic scene which recasts the earlier tones of sacerdotal vocation. The radiance evoked earlier in religious contexts and absent as such in what has survived from Stephen Hero is redeployed into the highest form of beauty and epiphanic manifestation. Let us compare for instance the following passages, the first one from the most sacerdotal vein of Stephen's search for a vocation, the second from the turning point in chapter four (the revelation of the artist's calling, amid recurrent rhytmic "hither and thither"'s), but also a third one, from the framing of the composition of the Villanelle:
Every part of his day [...] circled about its own centre of spiritual energy. [...] every thought, word and deed, every instant of consciousness could be made to revibrate radiantly in heaven [...]
(A Portrait, ch. 4)
His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunwards. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear [...] and the body he knew was purified in a breath [...] and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.
(A Portrait, ch. 4, p. 154)
To him she would unveil her soul's shy nakedness, to one who was but schooled in the discharging of a formal rite rather than to him, a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.
The radiant image of the eucharist united again in an instant his bitter and despairing thoughts, their cries arising unbroken in a hymn of thanksgiving.
[six lines from the Villanelle, featuring the word "ardent"]
He spoke the verses aloud from the first lines till the music and rhythm suffused his mind [...]
(A Portrait, ch. 5, p. 200)
In order to reach a better understanding of what is at stake in this passage from religion to art, let us turn back to two excerpts from Stephen Hero--and tacitly note in the second quotation the Yeatsian-cum-Nietzschean echoes: Aherne and Robartes, related to the all-integrating figure of the dancer who realizes the artist's personality and his opposite (the all-powerful figure of the dancer in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with Nietzsche's advocacy of writing as dancing)(5):
[just before the fragment featuring Rimbaud's vowels, quoted before:]
He wrote a great deal of verse and, in default of any better contrivance, his verse allowed him to combine the offices of penitent and confessor.
(SH, p. 4)
He repeated often the story of The Tables of the Law and the story of the Adoration of the Magi. The atmosphere of these stories was heavy with incense and omens and the figures of the monk-errants, Ahern and Michael Robartes strode through it with great strides. Their speeches were like the enigmas of a disdainful Jesus; their morality was infrahuman or superhuman.
(SH, p. 160)
What Stephen had looked and hoped for in religion, and could only find in art, is the harmonious integration of opposites--of the kind praised by Nietzsche in equally mythical evocations: the artist's inhumanity as Übermensch, hence the famous passage in A Portrait about the artist being like the god of creation, everywhere but invisible (A Portrait, ch. 5, pp. 194-5). The quintessential, quasi-alchemical sifting of epiphanic ingredients and the conditions of epiphanic revelation, paradoxically through a dissolution of its centrality in A Portrait, had thus to retain and transform in the crucible of art this crucial difference between religion and aesthetics in order to recast more effectively the still predominantly rhythmical-gestural, quasi-mythical foundation of art. In that respect, the next stages of "evolution" in Joyce's choreographic aesthetics (Ulysses--especially the revisiting of rhythm, gesture and dance in the sexual phantasmagoria of "Circe"--and Finnegans Wake) will mark a fuller coming to terms with the necessity of compromising with polar opposites (for e.g. in the overall "redemption" of Stephen the effete artist by Bloom the homme moyen sensuel) and with what the younger fictional artist had despised about the President in Stephen Hero: the "hermaphroditic gesture" (SH, p. 90).
(c) Laurent Milesi, 2006