Epiphany, a Starting Point în the Process of Creation

Triviality as a source in the process of creation is a challenge because only the artist feels and capitalizes such an impulse. For Joyce, this moment represents an epiphany, that is “the revelation of the essence of a thing” or the moment in which “the soul of the most usual object… is shown to us, radiant”. In Joyce’s opinion, epiphany places the artist beyond religion because, being the only one who can have such revelations generating the literary text, he does not have to wait for them, but to seek them in the most usual and sad moments of his existence.

The paradox of the epiphany with Joyce would be the fact that every thing and every event that exists near the artist can represent sources of epiphany and a motivation not to wait for them, not to let epiphany “happen” but “to look for it”. Joyce indicates the saddest moments as being appropriate for such a search, because in those moments the artist sees reality in a different way, he is placed between conscious and unconscious. “Seeking” would mean provoking such moments, when the Other is let to exist.

The concept of “epiphany”, as Joyce sees it, is not corresponding to the religious sense of the definitions already promoted in dictionaries: 1. Christian festival that takes place on the 6th of January and commemorates the moment when Jesus shows himself to the wise men; 2. an appearance, usually of a goddess; 3. a) a perception or a suddenly insight of reality or of the essential sense of a thing, usually initiated by a happening or a simple, usual or common experience; b) a literary work or a part of a literary work, which usually presents a moment of revelation and understanding. Richard M. Kain limits the definition of the third entering in order to confer more specification to Joyce’s epiphany. Thus, he distinguishes between insight and epiphany because in the first case the intuitive perception is caught in the narrative and contains the narrator’s commentaries, while epiphanies represent complete sketches without interpretation, each of them being introduced by words like “He was sitting…”. M. Kain reduces very much the series of epiphanies orientating the reader to two aspects: physical stillness but on one hand spiritual mobility, on the other hand the artist becomes receiver of the essence of an event/thing that is taking action on him: he receives an impulse image that he develops at the spiritual level.