From Pater To Wilde To Joyce Modernist Epiphany and The Soulful Self

From Pater to Wilde to Joyce: Modernist Epiphany and the Soulful Self
Author(s): John McGowan

Source: Texas Studies in Literature and Language , FALL 1990, Vol. 32, No. 3, Artistic
Tensions: Tradition, Society, Memory, and Gender (FALL 1990), pp. 417-445
Published by: University of Texas Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754942
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754942?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Texas Studies in Literature and Language
This content downloaded from

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
From Pater to Wilde to Joyce: Modernist
Epiphany and the Soulful Self
John McGozvan
To be Greek one should have no clothes: to be mediaeval one should

have no body: to be modern one should have no soul.
-Oscar Wilde
When in 1918 T. S. Eliot praised Henry James by claiming that "he had
a mind so fine that no idea could violate it/' the paradox, like many of
Oscar Wilde's pronouncements, rests on a revolution in sensibility
Only the cognoscenti who have abandoned the dearly held truths o
the past will appreciate that "a mastery and an escape" from ideas "are
perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence."1 Less than seventy-five
years before Eliot's comments, John Ruskin had declared "that the art
is greatest which conveys to the mind of the spectator . . . the greatest
number of the greatest ideas,"2 while a mere thirty years before, Walter
Pater still feels constrained, at the end of the essay "Style," to remind
the reader that "the distinction between great art and good art depend[s]
immediately . . . not on its form, but on the matter."3 The belief that
art's claim for value and for our serious attention rests not on its ideas
message, or content, but on aesthetic considerations divorced from
subject matter stands at the center of the revolution that we call mod-
ernism. Such a shift must necessarily downplay the significance of those
revelatory moments or epiphanies that are characteristic of romanticism.
Moments of insight are crucial for the nineteenth-century writer be
cause the presentation of knowledge unavailable elsewhere assures
art's importance; the artist as seer/prophet presents truths that more
mundane perspectives miss and the radiance of the epiphanic moment
captures the mysterious, often intuitive, process by which such truths
are reached. Yet, even when backing away from claims to possess an
special knowledge, the modernists retain a dependence on revelatory
moments. In part, this retention marks how habitual the formal use of
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 32, No. 3, Fall 1990
®1990 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
418 John McGowan
epiphany had become in literature; the mod

nificant moments as the climaxes around which to structure their narra-
tives and lyric meditations. But the central importance of epiphany in
writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust also indicates
that these modernists have not given up all desire to use art to gain access
to truths hidden to ordinary perception. This desire, I shall argue, conflicts
with an equally strong wish to divorce art from such knowledge claims.
The modernists, it seems to me, quite easily abandon the notion that
art can tell us anything about the nature of the real. Unlike Wordsworth
or George Eliot, the modernist does not believe that art can or should
reveal metaphysical or moral truths about the relation of the self to
nature or to other people. However, modernist epiphanies often do
reveal previously hidden truths about the self itself, bringing to light
what had been unconscious or, at least, only dimly perceived before.
This use of epiphany to gain self-knowledge stands in contrast to efforts
in modernist literature to, in today's terminology, "deconstruct the
self." Modernist epiphany gains its significance within a larger struggle
for the very meaning of the self in which an allegiance to rather tradi-
tional notions of the "soul" conflicts with a vision of a dispersed,
transient emotional life that has no unifying center. The soulful self
continues to serve as a content which art represents and about which
it offers knowledge long after other subject matters have been dismissed.
What I want to pursue in this essay is a tension in early modernist
work between two understandings of the self. On the one hand, the
modernists associated the declaration of art's autonomy from moral,
social, and epistemological responsibilities with a willful heroic self that
is created ex nihilo as the exemplary work of art should be. Some con-
fusion over whether this heroic self's identity is discovered or created
persists in both Wilde and Joyce, but the extraordinary strength, per-
sistence, and genius of that self is asserted. Epiphanie moments afford
full insight into the glory of this artistic soul. On the other hand, Wilde
and Joyce manifest the suspicion articulated by Pater that selfhood itself
is a trap, a hobbling tie to obligations of consistency and of accurate
representation of one's "true" identity. A fully radical autonomy, which
proclaims the pure difference of each moment in isolation, imagines a
self that is entirely new in each instant. None of the writers I discuss
manages to adopt a consistent abandonment of all notions of identity
and of soul as the best path to independence. Doubtless, they are hin-
dered, as are current discussions of the same issue, by the puzzle of who
could be said to aim for and to enjoy the freedom afforded by autonomy
if the self has been dissolved. Still, the urge for pure moments and for
pure difference marks modernist texts, and this urge not only influences
the recasting of the art work's relation to knowledge (and hence to

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
From Pater to Wilde to Joyce 419
epiphany) but also disrupts the modernist attempt to construct

artistic self that stands as both the work's referent and its purpose. Th
writers I discuss here manifest, as I believe our contemporaries still d
the incompatible desires of autonomous self-creation and of sloughing
off the burden of self altogether.
My discussion of this modernist tension suggests a recasting of curre
debates about a postmodernist "break" from modernist practices. W
tend to associate heroic self-creation (Nietzsche's "overman" is the mos
extreme model) with the larger-than-life artists of modernism: Joyce
Picasso, Stravinsky, and Proust (to name just a few). A belated postmo
ernism, by way of contrast, has more academic than artistic hero
(Derrida and Foucault for starters), and their work stresses the "death
of the subject," the self's variety, its lack of unity, over time. Thus, th
modernist (often existentialist) reading of Nietzsche focuses on th
"will" of the strong individual who scorns "the herd" and "sla
morality" in its search for self-determination; postmodernist interpret
tions of Nietzsche highlight his claim that "self," like other generalizin
terms, is a fiction that covers multitudinous diversity.5 My argument
would be that both modernist and postmodernist texts contain simul-
taneously a will to strong selfhood and an anarchistic urge to dissolve
the self; hence, both the modernist and the postmodernist reading of
Nietzsche accurately reflect portions of his work. The distinction b
tween modernism and postmodernism becomes whichever side of t
tension is emphasized: the formation of a self or the suspicion th
identity masks an ever-present and perhaps even blissful diversity.
Postmodernism' s insistence on the "death of the author" or, more
globally, "the death of the subject" leaves the purely aesthetic realm
when the subject is seen as having succumbed, like a Kafka character,
to the overwhelming bombardment of its resources by the demands (of
time, of effort, and on the senses) placed upon selves by the modern
city and by bureaucratic late capitalism. Fredric Jameson claims that the
postmodern condition is characterized by a "schizophrenic" self which
results from contemporary society's complexity having transcended
"the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize
its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its
position in a mappable external world."6 The suggestion that selves
cannot maintain any independence from the vertiginous transforma-
tions by urban capitalism of the traditional values and social formations
in which identity is grounded has been a mainstay of classical sociology
since at least Durkheim and Tönnies, if not from Burke and Tocqueville,
so that Jameson's ascription of the self's decline to our specifically post-
modern moment appears short-sighted. I am sympathetic, however,
with Jameson's concern that poststructuralism all too often identifies

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
420 John McGowan
the malady of a dispersed self as the cur

brief discussion of Ulysses at the end of th
that the modernist self- with its fierce
impulses toward self-destruction- grows ou
modern conditions that defeat any hope of
sentable knowledge offered by the narrator
march.1 But it remains unlikely that we ar
a clear date for the transition from the ca
George Eliot to the blustery posturings of
indicates that what we now consider a typ
the chaos of modern life was already availa
two hundred years ago. And mentioning B
last flaw in Jameson's position, a flaw that
dissolution of the self is not always experi
as a pleasure devoutly to be wished. Thus,
sought, not just simply suffered by an ove
bivalence about the possibility of dissolutio
Pater's work offers a convenient place to
the modernists' rewriting of epiphany as t
self not only because his work strongly in
Wilde and Joyce- I have space to discuss
Conclusion to The Renaissance is the most radical text of all those I shall
consider.8 The Conclusion's extremism, in part, stems from its complete
repudiation of any purpose for art or life beyond the provisions of ex-
quisite moments. Pater's greed for vital impressions- expressed most
crudely in the urge for "getting as many pulsations as possible into the
given time" (220)- rests on a melancholic hyperconsciousness that "we
are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve"
(220). Each moment is precious, not for any knowledge it might yield
or for any use it might have, but simply for itself. And art is justified
because it "comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the
highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those
moments' sake" (220). Thus Pater retains the romantic focus on intense
moments, but drains those moments of any connection to truth or
knowledge. The experiences that art provides are not useful for any-
thing; we do not take anything away from the aesthetic experience; we
simply value it because it has made one particular moment, a moment
that we can never recapture, intense.
In adopting the aestheticist creed of valuing things "for their own
sake," Pater implicitly attacks one fundamental tenet of bourgeois life:
the notion of an accumulative self. Bourgeois economics and ethics both
rest on investment in the future, the acceptance of delayed gratification
in the name of a greater future profit. Such thinking carries over to the

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
self wherever the concept of bildung appears, with its conviction that t
self develops over time toward a desired end by way of a set of formati
experiences. The self must be created just as capital is accumulated, by
being buñt up through a long, purposeful process. If this process is pain
ful, so much the better; underlying this bourgeois ethics is an age-old
Christian belief that suffering is redemptive. Pater rejects any such calc
lated approach to experience. "Not the fruit of experience, but experien
itself, is the end" (219). His hedonism places the focus on the moment
itself, not on any knowledge or strength gained from the moment.
Pater can only defend the moment's integrity, its being accountable
to nothing beyond itself, by adopting the most stringent atomism. Th
radical consequences of this move are seldom noted by Pater's commen
tators, while Pater himself only appears fitfully willing to accept every
thing to which his position commits him. The moment can be sav
from the fate of becoming a pawn in some developmental sequence by
the insistence that each moment is entirely discrete, existing in a sep
rateness that allows no ties to other moments. Mirroring this isolation
of each moment from every other in Pater's text is the isolation of eac
individual from all others. His theory of knowledge proposes a solipsis
that finds the "individual mind" stimulated by "impressions, unstable,
flickering, inconsistent, which burn and are extinguished with our co
sciousness of them" (218). Pater's atomism is so extreme here that
comes close to denying the faculty of memory, since it would provide
union of impressions across time within the mind. In the Conclusio
Pater is willing only to endorse the reality of the absolute present, ev
while acknowledging that the present moment is so fleeting as to
almost imperceptible, almost unreal. Yet it is all we have, and it is lost
completely, with no remainder, once it is gone.
Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual

in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its ow
dream of the world. Analysis goes a step further still, and assures
us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for eac
one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; th
each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible,
each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it bein
a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it ma
ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is. To such a
tremulous wisp constantly re-forming itself on the stream, to a sing
sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, o
such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines down. (218-19
The very stuff of experience here disappears under Pater's "analysi

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
422 John McGowan
Paradoxically, his insistence on the absolut

by the logic of " infinite divisibility," to h
truly present. Pater's rhetoric- the wor
"isolation," and "fines itself down"- sugges
real does not entirely coincide with the wa
Nonetheless, he sticks by his atomism (at l
of his texts), insisting that all general, org
the structures of time itself are invalid. Th
object with a developmental history or a tel
severed from any determinant relations to
in a contextual field; it is completely au
here a particularly compelling statement o
the purity and autonomy of the art work,
at the beginning of the modernist era,
enunciates the extreme atomism and decontextualization on which
assertions of autonomy must rest and because the text's melancholy
already suggests the high price to be paid for art's willful separation of
itself from exterior concerns. Pater's willingness to adopt such an ex-
treme position must, I believe, be read in terms of his need to escap
the limitations of art's accountability in Victorian culture. Only where
art feels completely oppressed by the demand that it provide variou
kinds of information and moral uplift could it experience a retreat int
atomistic isolation as liberating.9
My formulation of Pater's position thus far avoids a rather sticky
question: Who has these momentary impressions? Surely if analysis can
fine moments down to tremulous wisps that constantly reform them-
selves, it could do the same to the receiving mind? If Pater justifies his
emphasis on experience because it generates a certain kind of self or
because it wins freedom for that self, then he has succumbed to the
bourgeois ethos of usefulness in spite of himself. Experience for its own
sake should benefit no one and no thing. Furthermore, a truly consistent
atomism would find the "self" as invalid a general term as all other
such terms; why should the self enjoy a persistence over time that
nothing else has?
The Conclusion to The Renaissance is a justly famous text because in it
Pater demonstrates a courage of his extremism that he rarely displays
in his other work and which finds expression elsewhere in the nine-
teenth century only in non-English writers: Kierkegaard, Flaubert,
Dostoyevski, Nietzsche.10 (Of course, Pater's courage in this instance
failed him when he omitted the Conclusion from the second edition
[1877] of The Renaissance and made several changes before restoring it
to the 1888 edition.)11 In this one text, Pater comes closest to throwing
the self to the winds, recognizing that an aestheticism that really hopes

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
to escape all utilitarian calculations of the benefits that art renders m

discard the beneficiary in order to assure being absolutely disinterested
Atomism finds its most consistent expression when fleeting impressio
meet a receiving mind that is different in every moment, catching
present shape from the momentary experience. "Some mood of passi
or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractiv
us- for that moment only" (219). The self has an identity in the mom
but then the moment passes and the self takes on another identi
characterized by a different thought, or mood, or passion. Submi
to "the passage and dissolution of impressions," we reach the limi
expression and of the coherent self, "that continual vanishing aw
that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves" (2
Pater is even more explicit about the self's tenuous identity in a para
graph of the original (1868) Conclusion which he deletes from the m
familiar (since it is the one usually reprinted) 1888 version.
Such thoughts seem desolate at first; at times all the bitterness o

life seems concentrated in them. They bring the image of one wash
out beyond the bar in a sea at ebb, losing even his personality,
the elements of which he is composed pass into new combinations
Struggling, as he must, to save himself, it is himself that he lose
at every moment.13
We see here not only Pater's willingness to submit the self to his atomi
metaphysic but also the wistful melancholy about the conclusions
which he comes.
Of course, Pater talks of "us," "he," "himself," and "ourselves"
in these very passages that claim the self is something different in each
new moment. Paradoxically, he can dissolve the self only by describing
an experience and a knowledge that is ascribed to some self. In this
view, the whole point of the Conclusion is that once we have lost as-
sured access to the meaning and reality of the outer world and other
people, our only sure knowledge of our own existence is through sen-
sation. I feel, therefore I am. When the world has dwindled down this
far, our epiphanic moments no longer tell us anything about reality out
there, but they do still let me know that I exist. They let me know only
that I exist right now in this very moment, carrying no assurance for
the next moment, which is why Pater approaches each moment with
the same quest and the same need. Interpreted this way, Pater's aesthet-
icism still aims for knowledge, although a knowledge about the self
instead of about the world and a knowledge that must be continually
renewed. And he still relies on epiphanic moments to gain that knowl-
edge. At the same time, however, his text also seeks to push beyond the

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
424 John McGowan
very issue of knowledge and does so by

of the very self that could be said to kn
atomistic universe of utterly discrete mon
only to and for themselves.
Part of the Conclusion's extremism can be
the question of experience from the spectat
that viewpoint as normative. "The service o
culture, towards the human spirit is to rou
constant and eager observation" (219). 14
Conclusion offers no resistance to its obser
prior identity to bear on its sensations, but
from the "impression" that is made upon
this receptive self to a creative self that ac
that others will observe, the self he descri
In "Style" we find Pater proposing an expr
art, that is, like all art which is in any way
fact ... is the representation of such fact
specific personality, in its preferences,
Logically, Pater's views of the self would
"impressionist" (the passive rendering o
rather than to a more actively "expression
when the issue of creativity arises, Pater r
"soul" of the artist, a notion of strong self
for the extraordinary accomplishments of
Pater's Appreciations, Wilde reports that P
the perfection of a man's style, must lie t
Once the traditional self reappears in the
artist, the rest of Pater's radical program
"Style" presents an astoundingly incohere
an allegiance to the atomism and pure aesth
with attempts to temper it. I have already
presentation (style) undermines its very su
final paragraph, that "matter," not "fo
"good art" from "great art" (413). Pater also
to judgments of artistic value; without "Tr
no craft at all" (396). Submission to the crit
ably absent in the Conclusion- renders the
able to something outside of itself, espe
traditional understanding of truth as accur
be good literary art ... in proportion as its
that soul-fact, is true" (396). Pater's connec
truth to beauty and style does not help ma
long run only fineness of truth, or what w

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
accommodation of speech to that vision within" (396). Style becom

in this formulation and throughout the essay, the Flaubertian sea
for the mot juste, understood as a recognizably realist project. The o
twist is that the writer is not seeking to portray truthfully the exter
world, but the internal one, "something that comes not of the w
without but of a vision within" (395). The importance of finding
right word is also traditionally expressed: it allows the "vision withi
to become "recognisable ... by others" (412). "All language involv
translation from inward to outward" (410), and in pursuit of success
communication, Pater offers stylistic advice reminiscent of almost ev
Victorian stricture on the issue: "Say what you have to say, what
have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact man
possible, with no surplusage" (411). 16
By making language responsible for communicating the truth of ex
perience and by making art accountable to the inner vision that it ai
to represent, Pater makes nonsense of the aestheticism grounded
atomism that we find in the Conclusion to The Renaissance. Art no lon
exists to provide intense experiences, but to translate experience
a vocabulary that makes it accessible. Here Pater finds a formula
escaping the prison of solitary dreams that the Conclusion presen
but at a price of submitting the self to a generalizing language that m
it commensurate with others. The Conclusion had warned that all
failures to recognize absolute difference lessened the intensity of exp
ence. "It is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two perso
things, situations, seem alike. . . . Not to discriminate every mom
... is to sleep before evening" (219). In "Style" Pater not only acc
the use of language to overcome differences, but argues that such a
is to be desired. The opening paragraph of the essay offers a rounda
acknowledgment that Pater has found it necessary to curb his earlie
more extreme, views, with even a slight hint that his retreat is to
regretted. "Since all progress of mind consists for the most par
differentiation ... it is surely the stupidest of losses to confuse thin
which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of achieved
tinction" (393). But, Pater confesses, he intends to risk exactly t
stupidity in his essay. Pater returns from the isolation that pure diffe
tiation imposes- affirming now those very processes of generalizatio
that he previously abhorred.
My sense is that Pater's inability to extend his extreme impression
to account for the act of creation undermines his radical atomism and
returns him to a more traditional, romantic use of epiphany. If art works
merely rendered fleeting impressions rather than "soul-facts," concerns
with knowledge and truth could be completely put aside. But the heroic
model of a self standing behind the text as its origin and maker has too

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
426 John McGozvan
strong a hold on Pater to be completely jett

continues to probe texts to catch some glim
A similar inability to abandon an allegianc
vitiates Wilde's efforts to embody the atom
his life and work, which is why he appears
modernism than does Joyce. However, J
Dedalus indicates the persistence of the li
nouncements of art's autonomy and the soul
though the logic of selfhood can work to
tonomy.
No one stands as a more emblematic figure of the attempt to wriggle
out from under Victorian earnestness than Oscar Wilde- or of the ter-
rible power of traditional morality to revenge itself on those who tried
to snub and ridicule it. What remains fascinating about Wilde is how
completely he embodied internally the very conflicts that were to destroy
his life in one of the most public morality plays (part tragedy and part
farce) of the fin de siècle. Wilde, in my view, was torn from the start
between a belief that the self is a fiction that can be reinvented in each
successive moment and more traditional notions of destiny and identity
that were grounded on a belief in an essential character or soul possessed
by each individual. Wilde makes it clear that the self is a moral category,
with its persistence over time linked to imperatives of consistency,
sincerity, and responsibility. If he is to escape this morality, then this
traditional self must also be put aside. Not surprisingly, Wilde's denial
of the self involves a Paterian hedonistic celebration of each moment's
vitality and distinctness, while his search for the essential self is often
resolved in moments of epiphanic revelation. (In most of his plays, the
dramatic climax involves the revelation of characters' identities. Endings
in Wilde occur when the play of possibility- Bunburying- is over, and
identity is fixed. Thus definitive knowledge of the sort supplied by a
traditional epiphany brings the delightful lies or fictions of art to a close.)
"The Decay of Lying" is the Wildean text that is truest to Pater's
extremism in the Conclusion to The Renaissance and offers one of the
fullest expressions of the modernist goal of complete autonomy for art.
The main thrust of the essay is to attack realism (any notion that art is
responsible to a prior existing object that it undertakes to represent) by
taking the offensive and proving that "Life imitates art far more than
Art imitates life" (LC, 182). But Wilde is also careful to deny completely
that "art expresses the temper of its age, the spirit of its time, the moral
and social conditions that surround it, and under whose influence it is
produced." To this suggestion from Cyril, Vivian replies: "Certainly
not! Art never expresses anything but itself" (LC, 189). Art is freed here
from any connection to its social context as well as from any relation to

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
realities (natural or social) that provide its subject matter or govern it

strategies of presentation. It follows that art should have nothing to d
with expressing the realities of the self. To capture real selves in a
would be pure tedium; only the fictional masks that people create
distinguish themselves from one another are "interesting, . . . not the
reality that lies behind the mask" (LC, 172).
Wilde favors lying over the truth in the artistic presentation of the se
because uniqueness can only be preserved by the proliferation of mask
"It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of us made out of the sam
stuff. . . . Where we differ from each other is purely in accidentals: i
dress, manner, tone of voice, religious opinions, personal appearanc
tricks of habit and the like. The more one analyses people, the more a
reasons for analysis disappear. Sooner or later one comes to that dread
ful thing called human nature. Indeed, as anyone who has ever worked
among the poor knows only too well, the brotherhood of man is no me
poet's dream, it is a most depressing and humiliating reality" (LC, 172
Analysis in Wilde leads to the opposite results that it achieves in Pater
the discovery of identity rather than difference. The delight of lying i
its multiplication of differences, but this underlying belief in a "depre
ing and humiliating reality" that motivates our lies shadows even
Wilde's most exuberant texts. Atomism in Wilde is a fiction, not the on
reality as it is in Pater. The result, in "The Decay of Lying," is a d
tinctly different expressivist aesthetic. Art, even while "expressin
nothing but itself," provides us with continually new forms of expres
sion, thus multiplying the possible stances we may adopt in the world
"Scientifically speaking, the basis of life- the energy of life, as Aristot
would call it- is simply the desire for expression, and Art is alway
presenting various forms through which the expression can be attaine
Life seizes on them and uses them" (LC, 186).
Wilde offers a more usual version of the expressionist aesthetic-
expressing the creator's self- in many texts as we shall see, but "T
Decay of Lying" provides his most extended attempt to get out fro
under the burden of the self by celebrating the multiple possibilit
offered by the prospect that we adopt a new mask in each successi
moment, unhampered by our pasts and motivated by pure whim. Here
is the playful Wüde who appears more often in the famous epigram
than in his more extended texts. Richard Ellmann quotes Wilde as say-
ing, "The first duty of life is to assume a pose, what the second duty
no one has yet found out," and the biographer goes on to commen
that Wilde "thought of the self as having multiple possibilities, and of
his life as manifesting each of these in turn."17 To accept that the pos
sibility entertained yesterday should influence the stance taken today
the beginning of the end. "One should never take sides in anything

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
428 John McGowan
Wilde declared. "Taking sides is the beginn

ness follows shortly after, and the human
421). The search for novelty in Wilde becom
Pater's attempt to cram as many sensations
since Wilde is haunted by the suspicion tha
boring sameness. "I myself would sacrifi
perience, and I know there is no such thin
(OW, 269-70). The attempt to escape the sel
sive submission to "mood," allowing the
tion to another as the passion of the mome
remains infinitely fascinating to me, the m
of these moods is exquisite, to be master
still" (OW, 270). The integrity of the mom
a creature of moods, adopting each new sta
the "mysterious" fact that one feels like it
In his review of Appreciations, Wilde exte
explain art's abhorrence of fixity and ge
art, at any rate, thought is inevitably co
fluid rather than fixed, and, recognising
and upon the passion of fine moments, wil
scientific formula or a theological dogm
ever comes to articulating a law of mood
W. H.," in which he muses on "the curious reaction" that makes the
narrator of the tale completely indifferent to his conclusions about
Shakespeare's sonnets once he has finished writing up his theory.
Perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion, I had exhausted

the passion itself. Emotional forces, like the forces of physical life,
have their positive limitations. . . . Perhaps I was simply tired of the
whole thing, and my enthusiasm having burnt out, my reason was
left to its own unimpassioned judgment.18
We might add that perhaps the cause is a horror of being caught within
a rigid, definable, consistent self, a horror also expressed in the curious
disclaimer at the end of "The Truth of Masks": "Not that I agree with
everything that I have said in this essay. There is much with which I
entirely disagree"(LC, 157).
Not surprisingly, Wilde associates joy with those absolutely free
moments in which the self unconstrainedly acts out its impulses. In
the prose poem "The Artist," Wilde contrasts "The Sorrow that en-
dureth for Ever" with "The Pleasure that abideth for a Moment."19
The Picture of Dorian Gray, of course, provides Wilde's most extended
meditation on this connection between pleasure, the absolute integrity

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
of the moment, and the freedom of the self to adopt a new identity ea
day. The novel makes it clear that only the annulment of time cou
actually achieve the triumphant ascendancy of the moment that Wild
often wants to attain. To possess eternal youth would be to exist alwa
in the present, with no actions ever being influenced by anything
the past or ever generating any future consequences. Dorian has be
liberated from bildung and lives out "a new Hedonism that was
recreate life, and to save it from that harsh, uncomely puritanism th
is having, in our own day, its curious revival." Wilde describes Dorian
goal in words taken from Pater's Conclusion: "Its aim, indeed, was
be experience itself, and not the fruits of experience."20 And the nov
makes it clear that such a life can be lived only within a completely ne
understanding of time. The new hedonism
was to teach a man to concentrate himself upon the moments of lif

that is itself but a moment. . . . Our eyelids might open some morn
ing upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkne
for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes
and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in
which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate
in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance of
even joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their
pain.21
Eternal youth means that time's passing has no effect upon body and
soul, and Wilde imagines a world that corresponds to Dorian's state.
The abolition of time's consequences does not produce a stasis imper-
vious to change (as in Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium," for example),
but rather infinite change, since the removal of any determination of
today by yesterday makes everything and anything possible.
Poised against the fantasy life that Dorian gets to lead throughout
most of the novel is the quite different revelation stored up in the por-
trait, the soul that Dorian has created over time as he acted out each of
his whims. As in "The Decay of Lying," the fictions of art try to hold
off a more "depressing" reality. Interestingly enough, in defending
his novel against charges of frivolity and immorality, Wilde took to
explaining literature's preeminent position among the arts in terms of
its superior ability to render the effects of time's passage, a position
reiterated in "The Critic as Artist."
The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element

of growth or change. . . . The secrets of life and death belong to
those, and those only, whom the sequence of time affects, and who

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
430 John McGowan
possess not merely the present but the f

from a past of glory or of shame. Movement
ble arts, can be truly realised by Litera
that shows us the body in its swiftness a
(LC, 219-20)
Thus, the novel's presentation of the temporal reality that Dorian tries
to evade becomes the mark of its value and superiority. Given Wilde's
subsequent fate, it is impossible (and I see no reason to resist the temp-
tation) not to read the novel as expressing a duality within the author:
a desire to act out his dreams of living each moment for itself and the
ever-present sense that someday a terrible price will be paid for ignoring
the reality of a self that develops over time and will be held responsible
for what it has done and been.22 (In De Profundis Wilde writes of "the
note of doom that like a purple thread runs through the texture of Dorian
Gray/')23 Against the pure moment, which means nothing other than
itself, stands the epiphanic moment in which the repressed identity of
the self, its soul, as it has been created over time will be revealed.
Wilde's individualism, his belief in the self's possession of a unifying
and unique identity, is not always as guilt-laden as in Dorian Gray,
where the indulgence of the fantasy of escape from such a rigid self
generates the violence of the revelation of identity. Much more usually,
his individualism arises in the context of celebrating the artistic genius
and is presented as a kind of Utopian liberation of late nineteenth-cen-
tury men and women from the stultifying conformities of late Victorian
culture. "The Soul of Man under Socialism" offers Wilde's most ex-
tended defense of individualism as central both to artistic production
and to the achievement of true freedom and happiness for human beings.
In this essay, in contrast to his comments about "human nature" in
"The Decay of Lying," Wilde lays all responsibility for dull uniformity
at "authority's" door; when all authority is dismantled, the result will
be the infinite variety of true individualism, where each person thinks
and acts for himself or herself, discovering in the process his or her
uniqueness. With the advent of socialism, "the State is to make what is
useful. The Individual is to make what is beautiful" (DP, 32). As a result
all will become artists under conditions that are conducive to the most
perfect artistic expression, since "a work of art is the unique result of a
unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is
what he is" (DP, 34). The individual's true soul will blossom under
these conditions as Wilde adopts traditional organic metaphors: "It will
be a marvellous thing- the true personality of man- when we see it. It
will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, as a tree grows" (DP, 26-27).
The extreme individualism of "The Soul of Man under Socialism"

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
has obvious ties to Pater's aestheticism and to the modernist quest for
autonomy. The Wildean self is not answerable to any authority outsid
itself, and the essay indulges in a long discussion of the necessity
artistic freedom. Only when free from all outside pressures can the arti
create works marked by their purity and disinterestedness. In the
ways individualism might be said to have the same results as atomism,
especially if we accept Wilde's clever use of socialism to bifurcate t
world into the realm of necessities, which becomes the state's respons
bility, and the realm of freedom, which becomes the self's playground
As Wilde envisions it, a self freed from responsibility to anything be
yond itself can be achieved in a world of material plenty, and he w
endorse socialism insofar as it provides that plenty. (The prospects of
prideful discipline within a tight social group or even the notion
communitarian cooperation are socialist images that hold no appeal for
Wilde.) The essay uses socialism to create the conditions that woul
make a Paterian life possible; after socialism's triumph, "one will live.
To Live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all"
{DP, 26).
It is not the essay's version of socialism that undermines its Paterian
vision but its version of individualism. "'Know thyself!' was written
over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world
'Be thyself shall be written" {DP, 27). Wilde reproduces the Paterian
move of repudiating knowledge here in favor of being, but his injunc-
tion to "be thyself" introduces a fixity to the self that is foreign to the
Pater of the Conclusion. (And one would have to ask how it is possible
to "be thyself" without knowing who that self is.) The model of the
true individual as the artist leads Wilde here, as it does Pater in "Style,"
to reify the self as the preexisting unique entity that underlies the art
work. In fact, Wilde had promulgated a cult of the artist from the very
beginning of his career, and his individualism is everywhere tied to a
belief that only a strong and unified self can produce great works of art.
In "The Critic as Artist," Wilde rejects the suggestion that "the great
poems of the early world, the primitive, anonymous collective poems,
were the result of the imagination of races, rather than the imagination
of individuals" {LC, 212). For Wilde "all fine imaginative work is self-
conscious and deliberate. . . . For there is no art where there is no style,
and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual"
{LC, 212). A Homer or a Shakespeare is required to shape the traditional
stories into song. "The longer one studies life and literature, the more
strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the
individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the
man who creates the age" {LC, 213).
Wilde's individualistic promotion of the prerogatives and creative

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
432 John McGowan
achievements of the unified self is no less

fantasies of a continuously changing existe
Wilde linking his theories of individualism
in his copy of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethic
end for himself out of himself: no end is im
tions, he must realize his true nature, mus
must discover what his nature is" (OW, 6
of the active ("man makes his end") and the
nature orders") indicates how Wilde, determ
tion is moral (is, in fact, the true morality), m
to something outside of itself, to its "natur
of fatalism in Wilde's theories of individua
character is not shaped by the individual bu
individual and is merely discovered by him
a lifetime. And that epiphanic moment o
unalloyed joy, since now one has come upon
Wilde's need to make his individualism r
obvious in his ambitious (and outrageous) at
under Socialism" to rewrite Christianity as
Immediately following the command to
above, Wilde continues, "And the message o
'Be thyself.' That is the secret of Christ. Wh
he simply means personalities, just as when
simply means people who have not develo
27). The conclusion of the essay's first exte
that "he who would lead a Christlike life is
solutely himself" (DP, 30). But when the ess
Christ in its last four paragraphs, we now
is not sufficient. The problem with Christ
fection .through pain" (DP, 52). "A Nihili
because he knows authority to be evil, an
through that he realizes his personality,
What socialism offers, Wilde insists, is the
vidualism through joy, not pain. "What i
expressing itself through joy. This Individu
lovelier than any Individualism has ever be
mode of perfection. . . . Pleasure is Nature'
(DP, 53). Consequently, the Christian mod
rejected. "The new Individualism is th
Wilde declares, in keeping with his claim in
"whatever, in fact, is modern in our life w
ever is an anachronism is due to mediaev
Why even consider the model of Christ if

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
as inadequate? I think that in the juxtaposition of pain and joy we ca

find an answer. We have seen already how Wilde associates sorr
with things that endure over time and joy with an intense moment th
is just as quickly lost. When adopting the notion of a persistent iden
for the self, the association of pain with what lingers calls up the fig
of Christ as one example of individualism. Wilde is trying to work h
way toward another model of individualism, a model based on joy, bu
all the specifics in "The Soul of Man under Socialism" concern the dis
covery of the self through pain not the Utopian prospect of self-discov
in joy. The return to Christ as model in De Profundis not only devel
the interpretation of Christ offered in the earlier essay but also manif
Wilde's renunciation of all Utopian hopes in the belated acknowle
ment that "there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are ti
when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth" (DP, 161).
De Profundis, of course, is a text produced under very different con
tions and with a very different audience in mind than Wilde's variou
literary productions. But- and how could we expect otherwise?-
continuity of theme with Wilde's more public works is striking.
letter presents Wilde's full acceptance of the grim truth that he hol
at bay in Dorian Gray until the novel's final pages. (Let me hasten to a
that I mean that Wilde views the notion that one must finally pay f
the self that one has become as a "grim truth" of destiny or fate or reality
not that I believe that some such accounting is inevitable or that som
how Wilde got what was coming to him. It is Wilde who writes of hi
"entire ethical degradation" [DP, 103] and of how "I forgot that every
little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and th
therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day
cry aloud on the house-tops" [DP, 152].)
In his prison letter, Wilde ponders "the profound and terrible myste
of a human soul" (DP, 123), returning continually to the insistence th
"the supreme vice is shallowness" (DP, 130). "The real fool, such
the gods mock or mar, is he who does not know himself. I was one t
long" (DP, 98). Wilde must plumb his depths to discover his true s
a knowledge he had avoided out of frivolity and shallowness and
terrible mistake of his "unintellectual friendship" (DP, 99) with Doug
The way to such self-knowledge can only be through suffering. "Clerg
men and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk
suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation" (DP, 160). The epiph
that resides in suffering is contrasted to the fictional appearances pr
sented by joy. "Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament
coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorro
Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask" (DP, 161). In prison Wilde want
the truth, not masks, and no longer toys with the paradox of the "tru

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC34:56 UTC
434 John McGowan
of masks." "There is about sorrow an inten

. . . For the secret of life is suffering. It is
thing" (DP, 161). In turning from the life
the truth of sorrow, Wilde recalls his cl
moment while sorrow abides forever and c
been otherwise. At every single moment o
going to be no less than what one is" (DP
life of the moment in favor of an abiding t
more complete. The destiny of one's iden
uncovered.
This emphasis on pain and suffering as the keys to the self's truth
necessarily leads Wilde back to the figure of Christ. He reaffirms his
association of Christ with individualism in "The Soul of Man under
Socialism"- "Christ was not merely the supreme individualist, but
he was the first individualist in history" (DP, 169)- and insists that "it
is man's soul that Christ is always looking for" (DP, 168-69). 24 Wilde
describes his prison conversion as occurring at the moment of most
complete loss, when his children are "taken away from [him] by the
law."
I saw then that the only thing for me was to accept everything. Since
then- curious as it will no doubt sound- I have been happier. It
was of course my soul in its ultimate essence that I had reached.
In many ways I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me
as a friend. When one comes in contact with the soul it makes one
simple as a child, as Christ said one should be. (DP, 169)
De Profundis offers no vision of a joyful, Hellenistic individualism.

The discovery of the "soul in its ultimate essence" can come only through
pain, and the reality revealed by Christian individualism turns out to
be the "distressing" fact of human sameness that Wilde was at pains to
evade in "The Decay of Lying": Christ "pointed out that there was no
difference at all between the lives of others and one's own life" (DP,
170), from which Wilde derives an aesthetic of imaginative symathy.
"Christ's place is with the poets. . . . He took the entire world of the
inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of
himself its eternal mouthpiece" (DP, 166, 171). This acceptance of pain,
and of the artist's responsibility to give it voice, is connected in Wilde,
as always, with the acceptance of a fixed identity and of a minimal dif-
ference between one's own soul and the souls of others. Even in adopt-
ing the Christian viewpoint that he earlier had rejected, Wilde cannot
convert its connection with suffering and pain to an affirmative joy. But
he does receive the consolation traditionally associated with epiphanic

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
revelations of the truth; he now knows that nothing is without meanin

or purpose in this world. "But while there were times when I rejoiced
in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them
to be without meaning. Now I find hidden away in my nature som
thing that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, an
suffering least of all" (DP, 152).
But even in De Profanáis, Wilde cannot simply accept, in a spirit
humble repentance, the painful fact that we are all essentially the sam
The discussion of Christ in the prison letter veers, in its later stages,
toward a version of individualism that stresses the unique over th
similar and presents morality as a sympathetic recognition that gener
laws of conduct fail to understand that every case is different. "For him
there were no laws; there were exceptions merely, as if anybody,
anything, for that matter, was like aught else in the world!" (DP, 176).
This Christ holds a recognizably Paterian view of life: "He felt that lif
was changeful, fluid, active, and that to allow it to be stereotyped int
any form was death" (DP, 176), and "he preached the enormous im
portance of living completely for the moment" (DP, 178).
Given the ambivalence we have found throughout Wilde's caree
about the possibility of escaping from the destiny of an "ultimate es-
sence," such contradictions in the presentation of Christ in De Profan
should not surprise us. Only our own desire for a neat, fixed ending t
the story (our own persistent longing for resolution through epiphan
asks for a conversion in De Profunáis that is consistent and lasting. Bu
Wilde's whole life has proved the difficulty of constancy for him- an
perhaps for all selves. More mundanely, his lack of fixity in emotion
purpose leads him back to Douglas after his release from prison, a re-
union that anyone reading De Profanáis would have deemed utterl
impossible and a backsliding that must make even the most sympathet
readers of Wilde's life story wince. It is not the morality of his rejoini
Douglas that troubles us, but the self-degradation, the lack of prid
that it evidences. We could simply claim that it proves that Wilde emerg
from prison a broken man, but that would ignore Wilde's own com
ments, both humorous and serious, on his weakness of will throughou
his life. The famous remark that "I can resist anything but temptation,
and the bemused "my weakness is that I do what I will and get what I
want" can be paired with more earnest laments in letters to friend
"I need not say, though, that I shift with every breath of thought an
am weaker and more self-deceiving than ever" (OW, 65, 68). What
must recognize is how Wilde, in certain ways, had built a philosop
out of that very weakness, finding in the waywardness of the impulsiv
whimsical self a way toward denying the responsibilities of fixed iden
tity. We might even end- fittingly enough in a discussion of Wilde- o

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
436 John McGowan
the paradoxical note that his true weak

that exemplary modern that he described
had too much soul and thus remained sus
nation of him.
James Joyce, with his fierce pride and even fiercer determination to
live life on his own terms, would seem at first glance the polar opposite
of the feckless Wilde, a figure who more closely resembles Simon Dedalus
and the other Dublin lounge-abouts who populate Joyce's stories and
novels. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is often read as a manifesto
of the artist's and art's autonomy. Stephen's dramatic "I will not serve"26
announces his break from the fetters of family, religion, and homeland,
a break undertaken in the name of the "soul," which "has a slow and
dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul
of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back
from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try
to fly by those nets" (PA, 203). A Portrait itself can be read as narrating
that "slow, dark birth" of Stephen's soul and the famous epiphanies
are tied to Stephen's coming to self-knowledge and the knowledge that
he must heroically assert his total independence. In other words, the
novel can be read, as in Breon Mitchell's essay, as firmly within the
bildungsroman tradition.27 The passages in which Stephen rejects the
"call" to the priesthood stress how he discovers his "destiny" in this
moment of rejection: "His soul was not there to hear and greet it and
he knew now that the exhortation he had listened to had already fallen
into an idle formal tale. . . . He was destined to learn his own wisdom
apart from others" (PA, 162). He wonders "at the remoteness of his
soul" (PA, 161), but affirms its distance as the foundation stone of his
pride. The subsequent epiphanic vision on the beach confirms his rejec-
tion. On hearing his name called, Stephen rethinks his connection to
"the fabulous artificer" and recognizes in it "a symbol of the artist forg-
ing anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new
soaring impalpable imperishable being" (PA, 169). His true destiny as
an artist has finally been revealed to him: "This was the call of life to
his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not
the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar"
{PA, 169).
This epiphanic moment, with its revelation of Stephen's true soul,
does not end there, however.28 Stephen next sees the girl standing in
the water and the sight moves him to an ecstatic, almost mystical, union
with the earth: "He felt above him the vast indifferent dome and the
calm processes of the heavenly bodies; and the earth beneath him, the
earth that had borne him, had taken him to her breast. . . . His soul
was swooning into some new world, fantastic, dim, uncertain as under

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
sea, traversed by cloudy shapes and beings" (PA, 172). At this poin
Joyce appears to have returned fully to the romantic epiphany, findi
in its revelations a way to unite self with nature. But I want to sugge
that such a conclusion would be overhasty; the Joycean epiphany
more closely linked to separation than to unity. To make this argume
will require a detour through Stephen Hero and the rewriting of Aristo
telean aesthetics by Stephen in both Stephen Hero and A Portrait.
The key difference, for my purposes, between the two texts' differe
versions of Stephen's Aristotelean musings is that the first text explicit
links epiphany with claritas, but in A Portrait the word ' 'epiphany" do
not appear, either in the discussion of Aristotle or anywhere else.
both versions Stephen uses claritas to emphasize the object's autonomy
its separate being and integrity. "You see that it is that thing which it
and no other thing" (PA, 213). This meaning of claritas must be pr
tected against an interpretation that would emphasize the individ
thing's relation to larger structures of significance that give it its impo
tance. "I thought that he [Aristotle] might mean that claritas is the artis
discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything o
force of generalisation which would make the esthetic image a univer
one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk.
understand it so" (PA, 213). Stephen here takes a recognizably Paterian
position. The beautiful thing is itself alone and its difference, its distin
ness, is the very source of its beauty. And this understanding of beau
must be defended against more traditional notions that ascribe the thin
beauty to its connection with a higher order of existence. Stephen mu
deny that Aristotle "had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme
quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of whi
the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbo
(PA, 213). Stephen rejects here all sacramental theories of art- be they
religious or Coleridgean- in favor of a profane celebration of the thin
itself. What Stephen Hero adds to the account offered in A Portrait is t
identification of epiphany as the moment in which the claritas of the
thing stands revealed. "This is the moment which I call epiphany. .
We recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, lea
to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commones
object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. T
object achieves its epiphany. "2g
I can only speculate as to why Joyce decided to drop all reference to
epiphanies in A Portrait and, more particularly, why he severed the con
nection between epiphany and claritas. M) I would like to think that a
good clue is found in the passage in A Portrait that comes closest to d
cussing epiphany, even though the word is not used.

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
438 John McGowan
His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self

by the lightnings of intuition, but light
that in those moments the world perished
been fireconsumed: and thereafter his
met the eyes of others with unanswering
spirit of beauty had folded round him like
at least he had been acquainted with nobi
pride of silence upheld him no longer, h
still in the midst of common lives, pa
squalor and noise and sloth of the city
heart. (PA, 177)
We find here the characteristic connection of epiphany with separate-

ness: the world around him is consumed. And, once again, Stephen's
pride in his difference is mentioned. But the description also stresses
the momentary nature of the transcendence afforded by these flashes
of intuition. Escape into another realm cannot be sustained. The dialectic
between Stephen's exalted ambitions and the "squalid" world he in-
habits figures strongly in A Portrait; the surprising note here is the relief
that Stephen feels to be returned from communion with "nobility"
(associated with separation) to the more "common" world. His relief
reminds us of his semi-ironical awareness after he rejects the priesthood
that the unwordly purity of the rectory could only prove sterile for a soul
such as his. "He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule
and confusion of his father's house and the stagnation of vegetable life,
which was to win the day in his soul" (PA, 162). A Portrait plays down
the centrality of epiphanies, I suggest, because they are recognized as
only momentary and because they emphasize too strongly the transcen-
dence of the ordinary into some other, more noble and more beautiful,
realm. Already, in A Portrait, Joyce is beginning to value the everyday
over the exalted in ways that will lead in Ulysses to the emphasis on
Leopold Bloom instead of on Stephen.
The deemphasis of epiphany in A Portrait has the curiously contra-
dictory consequence of both enhancing Stephen's heroism and of
undermining it. On the one hand, Stephen's choice of exile appears an
even stronger act of will because the ordinary world has a stronger
presence in the novel and because he is not guided by extraordinary,
received moments of insight. He must act on his own. The final section
of the novel has none of the dramatic revelations vouchsafed Stephen
in section 4, while the long dialogues of that last section embed Stephen
in the mundane social relations from which he must extricate himself.
However, the turn away from dramatic revelatory moments also allows
a doubt about identity itself to creep into the book. When epiphanies are

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
no longer used (as they are in section 4) to reveal "that which a thing is
then a thing's identity (especially a person's identity) comes to seem a
matter of will, not of being (as section 5 often suggests). Taken this wa
Stephen's story would not be about his discovery of his true identity as
artist, but about his determination neither to discover nor to inherit a self;
if he is to have a self, it must be entirely self-created. But that willful asser
tion of identity can be easily seen as fostered by the need to exclude for
fully from the self precisely those characteristics that most frighten it, tha
most strongly pull it in directions contrary to its conscious, willful inte
tions. All of which amounts to another way of raising the long-moote
issue of A Portrait's irony.11 The novel grants us a variety of viewpoin
from which Stephen's construction of his identity can be criticized.32 A
obvious example is Cranly's comment that Stephen's "mind is supe
saturated with the religion" that he claims to be escaping (PA, 240). Th
novel invites us at various moments to recognize that Stephen's artisti
ambitions are not so radically different from his earlier religious ambitions
as Stephen would like to think. Less explicitly, the novel also documen
Stephen's sexual confusions and asks us to interpret many of his aesthe
theories in relation to his frustrated romantic longings. (In the noteboo
for A Portrait, we find this wonderful, unused, thought: "One effect o
the resurgence of the Irish nation would be the entry into the field o
Europe of the Irish artist and thinker, a being without sexual education.")31
The epiphany on the beach at the end of section 4 loses much of its exalt
transcendence when we interpret it in terms of Stephen's troubled re
tion to women; his separation from the girl, with whom he exchanges
"no word" {PA, 172) makes his substitution of the warm embrace
mother earth take on a comic note. In this view it is Stephen's position
an alienated, separated observer (almost a voyeur)- a position reinforce
by the epiphany- that generates the compensatory romantic vision (all
his head) of mother earth's taking "him to her breast" (PA, 172). Simi-
larly, Stephen's insistence that "art must not excite desire" (PA, 205) an
his definition of "unesthetic emotions" as those that "are not more than
physical" {PA, 206) is ironically undermined by the source of his villa-
nelle being his desire for Emma.
The connection of epiphany with separation means that epiphanies
as well as Stephen's pretensions to autonomy will be ironized by all
those features of the novel that indicate how completely Stephen is
immersed in and influenced by the world he longs to escape. Stephen
finds in the willful assertion of identity the best strategy for asserting
his distance and difference from the world he perceives as a threat. But
the novel ironically suggests at times that identity is a willful fiction
imposed on the self that is, in fact, different in different moments.
Stephen not only contains elements of all those forces- family, religion,

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
440 John McGowan
Irishness- that he likes to think that he has

not only is unable to transcend his sexual na
of art; but he is also unable to ascribe to him
of intention or desire. At several points
over the transience of his emotions. "All th
and hatred which he had met in books had seemed to him therefore
unreal" (PA, 82) because he knows how quickly his own feelings change.
"Even that night as he stumbled homewards ... he had felt that some
power was divesting him of that suddenwoven anger as easily as a fruit
is divested of its soft ripe peel" (PA, 82). The same image is repeated
later on: "A brief anger had often invested him but he had never been
able to make it an abiding passion and had always felt himself passing
out of it as if his very body were being divested with ease of some outer
skin or peel" (PA, 149). And this transience extends to love as well: "He
had felt a subtle, dark and murmurous presence penetrate his being and
fire him with a brief iniquitous lust: it too had slipped beyond his grasp
leaving his mind lucid and indifferent" (PA, 149). This lack of control
over his thoughts and emotions returns to trouble him when he is think-
ing of Emma in section 5. "The images he had summoned gave him no
pleasure. . . . This was not the way to think of her. It was not even the
way in which he thought of her. Could his mind then not trust itself?"
(PA, 233). These passages point to the dissolution, or at least lack of
constancy, of the very self whose destiny and soul the protagonist strug-
gles to affirm in order to separate it out from all the other forces in the
world that threaten its autonomy. To focus on moments, as Pater had
already discovered, leads to the recognition that the self changes from
moment to moment. The reader's faith in Stephen's creation of a strong
self is undermined by this privileged view of his various waverings over
time. The silence over epiphanies in A Portrait deflates their significance;
they are among the moments experienced by the self, but are no longer
explicitly tied to a revelation of the perceived thing's or the self's "what-
ness."
The self, then, is heterogeneous. Its immersion in the atomistic stream
of moments that is experience calls forth responses that the conscious
mind- and the identity that consciousness wills- can neither predict nor
control. This unwilled and marvelous diversity supplies the subject
matter of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. (We should keep in mind, how-
ever, the paradoxical effect of supermastery adhering to the writer
Joyce, who manages to bring this unwilled material within the confines
of his consciously crafted art.) Joyce's later novels still place the self at
the center of concern, but now it is a self that cannot be clearly distin-
guished from the world. This self's various contents certainly carry no
intellectual weight; they are merely the sensations and emotions of the

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
moment, not "ideas'' of the sort that we would expect philosophy

ethics to provide and of which Eliot is so scornful in the aesthetic realm
Bloom's "ideas" are generated by the mundane in just the way epiph
nies are described as occurring in Stephen Hero, but the ideas in Ulyss
cannot be carried away and used in some realm apart from the novel i
which they are recorded. Joyce's fascination with the quotidian no
stands unjustified by some knowledge it might provide.
This interest in the self's immersion in the world means that epiphan
as the marker of a separation that allows the assertion of a unified iden
tity is not mentioned, even though present, in A Portrait, and it disa
pears entirely from the last two novels. By the time Joyce comes to narrate
the events of Bloomsday, the ironic dismantling of Stephen's hero
posturings has become more obvious, less ambivalent. Not that Joy
in Ulysses offers a completely serial conception of the self. Some a
tenuated notion of identity still lingers, found now in the mythologi
schema that asserts an identity between Bloom and Odysseus. It would
require another essay to trace through the tension between some relian
on a persistent self in Ulysses and the utter permeability of the boun
daries between self and world, conscious and unconscious, past an
present, that the novel dramatizes. l4
Suffice it to say that the protagonists' claims to a strong self, to an
essential soul that some epiphany might reveal, are so fully broug
into question in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that A Portrait's ironies pa
in comparison- a fact that has allowed readers who want to affirm art
autonomy to take Stephen Dedalus as their model and Joyce himse
as their hero. But we can, in fact, read Joyce's work in a very differen
way, as an ironic process by which Joyce tries to empty out the "soul
of his protagonists, thus moving toward that fully soulless modernism
that Wilde describes. And we could even argue, with Wilde's life i
mind, that only such soullessness affords true liberation, a comple
escape from the limits and punishments (both external and internal) o
traditional morality. Certainly Joyce lived the life of the bohemian an
the exception in ways that Wilde could only envy, and Joyce's life dis
plays a notable lack of the highmindedness characteristic of Stephe
But to phrase the issue this way is, perhaps, to slight the extremism
Joyce's position, for this phrasing still assumes some coherent self th
enjoys the freedom that modern soullessness imparts. Joyce's last two
novels more fully suggest the kind of amorphous low-level anxiet
characteristic of individuals who never know what will happen or who
they will be in the next moment as the world pours in on them in all i
multitudinous fury. In place of Pater's exquisite moments, Joyce give
us the overwhelming perceptual assault of the modern city, an assault
in the midst of which it proves futile to isolate any knowledge provide

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
442 John McGowan
by a special epiphanic moment as a stay

flow of experience. Joyce does not mourn t
said to celebrate its passing. He indicates in
in becoming the very condition of chaotic
an existence quite different from that wh
University of Rochester
Rochester, New York
NOTES
My thanks to my colleague James Adams for his helpful comments on an earli

version of this essay and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for th
fellowship that gave me the time to write it.
1. T. S. Eliot, "On Henry James," in The Question of Henry James, ed. F. W

Dupee (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), 110.
2. John Ruskin, Modern Painters 1, in Ine Compiete Works of John Kuskin, e
E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903), 3:23.
3. Walter Pater, Three Major Texts: "The Renaissance," "Appreciations," and
"Imaginary Portraits," ed. William E. Buckler (New York: New York Universit
Press, 1986), 413; all subsequent passages from Pater are taken from this text
with page numbers given parenthetically.
4. ror a succinct account ot romantic epiphany and its appearances in sub-
sequent poetry, see Robert Langbaum, ' 'Wordsworth and the Epiphanic Mode
in Modern Poetry/' New Literary History 14 (1983): 335-58. Ashton Nichols (The
Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment
ITuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 19871) provides a close look at all the
major romantic texts on epiphanies, but assumes a continuity between the
modernists (including Joyce) and the romantics that I find hard to credit.
5. I discuss the distinction between modernist and postmodernist readings
of Nietzsche, while offering examples of each, in my forthcoming Postmodernism
and Its Critics.
6. Fredric Jameson, ' 'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capi-
talism/' New Left Review 146 (July-August 1984): 83. Roland Barthes's famous
essay "The Death of the Author" can be found in Image, Music, Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 142-48.
7. For some excellent discussions of the connection of modernism to a fast-
changing urban culture that uproots traditional values and social formations,
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmoderni
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), chap. 1; Marshall Berman,
That is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982); and Perr
Anderson, "Modernity and Revolution," in Marxism and the Interpretation o

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illino
Press, 1988), 317-38.
8. Harold Bloom (Introduction, in Walter Pater: Modern Critical Views [New
York: Chelsea House, 1985]) discusses Pater's influence on subsequent writ
in an essay that has, in its turn, influenced much recent work on Pater. Bloo
also comments that " Pater remains the most honest reader of epiphanies, by
asking so little of them" (6).
9. Irving Howe (Introduction, in The Idea of the Modern [New York: Horizo
Press, 1967]) declares that "a central direction in Modernist literature is towa
the self-sufficiency of the work" (27). Huyssen (After the Great Divide, esp. ch
3) offers a more recent discussion of modernism's attempt to secure the au-
tonomy of the art work from outside influences. In my essay ' 'Postmodern
Dilemmas," Southwest Review 72 (1987): 357-76, I consider the contemporary
réévaluation of autonomy's desirability, possibility, and consequences.
10. J. Hillis Miller ("Walter Pater: A Partial Portrait," in Walter Pater: Moder
Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom [New York: Chelsea House, 1985], 75-95) writ
that Pater "is the nearest thing to Nietzsche England has" (75), and his essay
emphasizes the extremism of Pater's position; Robert Keefe ("Walter Pater: T
Critic and the Irrational," Victorian Newsletter 69 [Spring 1986]: 12-16) also pr
vides an interesting discussion of what he calls Pater's "radically new view of
the self" (12).
11. Ross Borden ("Pater's Temporizing: The Conclusion to The Renaissance,"
Victorian Newsletter 68 [Fall 1985]: 29-31) presents and discusses the changes
Pater made to the Conclusion to The Renaissance in the 1888 version.
12. Pater s attempt to show that the self gains nothing from its experience of
art works provides his own extreme version of the "disinterestedness" that
Matthew Arnold tries to annex to criticism in "The Function of Criticism." John
Kucich (Repression in Victorian Fiction [Berkeley: University of California Press,
19871) has brilliantly outlined a whole panoply of strategies by which Victorian
novelists attempt to protect the disinterestedness of their heroes and heroines
while, at the same time, providing them in the end with the spouses they desire
and a comfortable financial situation.
13. Borden, "Pater's Temporizing," 30.
14. This sentence's 1888 version (quoted in my essay) is more tame than the
1868 version, which reads: "The service of philosophy, and of religion and
culture as well, to the human spirit, is to startle it into a sharp and eager obser-
vation" (qtd from Borden, "Pater's Temporizing," 29).
15. Oscar Wilde, The Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 63; hereafter referred to as LC. I
have made it clear in each case which particular essay by Wilde is being cited.
lb. 1 have discussed the Victorians suspicion or figurative language and their
almost universal call for a plain style in my book, Representation and Revelation:
Victorian Realism from Carlyle to Yeats (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
1986).
17. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 311; hereafter
referred to as OW.

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
444 John McGoivan
18. Oscar Wilde, Complete Shorter Fiction, ed.

University Press, 1979), 165.
19. Ibid., 253.
20. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray an
Ellmann (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 114. Fo
in Dorian Gray, see Nathan Cervo, "Wilde's Close
Victorian Newsletter 67 (Spring 1985): 17-19; and
Homage: The Presence of Pater in Dorian Gray,"
1983): 15-18. Cervo's essay is particularly interes
within the novel (Lord Harry's influence over D
fluence poses to the self's integrity.
21. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other
22. For a very moralistic interpretation of Dor
"Wilde's intention is to show the failure of the a
(6), see Donald R. Dickson, "'In a Mirror That
Mirrors in Dorian Gray," English Literature in T
purposes, the interesting point about such a read
strong, determinate self. "The real failure of Dor
about his own life, is the failure of the will to asse
character" (12).
23. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writi
1973), 164; hereafter cited as DP. I have used thi
Soul of Man under Socialism" as well as for De P
24. Bruce Bashford ("Oscar Wilde as Theoris
English Literature in Transition 28 [1985]: 395-406
individualism found in De Profundis and its relat
earlier critical essays.
25. The conditions under which De Profundis w
consistency in the letter as a whole. As Vyvyan H
"was composed of eighty close- written pages, o
prison paper. . . . Wilde was allowed one sheet of
was filled it was removed and replaced by anoth
revised the finished document" (DP, 91).
26. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a You
ed., ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Vikin
cited as PA.
27. See Breon Mitchell, "A Portrait and the Bildungsroman Tradition," in Ap-
proaches to Joyce's Portrait, ed. Thomas F. Staley and Bernard Benstock (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), 61-76.
28. My view of Joyce's epiphanies is hardly the orthodox view held by most
Joyceans. I do take heart in the more ironic readings of the epiphany at the end
of section 4 found in Deborah Pope, "The Misprision of Vision: A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man," in James Joyce: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom
(New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 113-19; and F. L. Radford, "Dedalus and the
Bird Girl: Text and Celtic Subtext in A Portrait," James Joyce Quarterly 24 (1987):
253-74. For the fullest and best orthodox account of Joyce's notion of epiphany

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC
and of the grand epiphany at the end of section 4 of A Portrait, see Morris
Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 19
13-111.
29. James Joyce, Stephen Hero (New York: New Directions, 1963), 213.
30. We do know that Joyce had plenty of time to change his views on epiphanies;
he wrote his prose epiphanies (some of which are incorporated into the final
version of A Portrait) between 1902 and 1904. Stephen Hero was written between
1904 and 1906, while the first version of A Portrait was written from 1907 to 1911.
That version was revised substantially in 1913-14. See Hans Gabler, Preface, in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Facsimile of Ephiphanies, Notes, Manu-
scripts, and Typescripts (New York: Garland, 1978); and Hans Gabler, 'The Seven
Lost Years of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," in Approaches to A Portrait,
ed. Staley and Benstock, 25-60. In Ulysses (New York: Vintage Books, 1961),
Stephen thinks mockingly of his epiphanies and his early ambitions as a writer:
"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?' ' (40).
31. The Viking Critical Library edition of A Portrait collects the classic essays
on the problem of irony in the novel; for a good quick summary of the way critics
have approached the issue, see Thomas F. Staley, "Strings in the Labyrinth:
Sixty Years with Joyce's Portrait," in Approaches to Joyce's Portrait, 3-24. More
recently, Marguerite Harkness (The Aesthetics of Dedalus and Bloom (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1984], chap. 5) takes up the issue of irony explicitly in
reference to Stephen's aesthetic theories. (In chapter 4, she considers those
theories' relation to Pater's and Wilde's aestheticism.)
32. Maud Ellmann ("Polytropic Man: Paternity, Identity, and Naming in The
Odyssey and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," in James Joyce: New Perspec-
tives, ed. Colin McCabe [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 19821, 73-104)
offers the fullest attempt to read those elements in A Portrait that undermine the
unified integrity of Stephen's self.
33. Quoted from Robert Scholes and Richard M. Kain, The Workshop of Dedalus
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 100
34. For two discussions of the nature of the self in Ulysses, see Franco Moretti,
Signs Taken for Wonders, trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller
(London: Verso Editions, 1983); and Jay Cantor, The Space Between (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). The former believes that the novel un-
reservedly brings personal identity into question, whereas Cantor writes, "The
dissolution of Bloom's character makes him appear as almost only a function of
different languages, different signifying systems." But the "almost" here proves
important, as Cantor concludes that "there is, we are to feel, an irreducible core
to Bloom" (41).

124.168.3.141 on Mon, 30 May 2022 10:13:21 UTC

From Pater To Wilde To Joyce Modernist Epiphany and The Soulful Self

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

From Pater To Wilde To Joyce Modernist Epiphany and The Soulful Self

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

From Pater to Wilde to Joyce: Modernist Epiphany and the Soulful Self

Author(s): John McGowan

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754942

This content downloaded from

To be Greek one should have no clothes: to be mediaeval one should

This content downloaded from

epiphany had become in literature; the mod

This content downloaded from

epiphany) but also disrupts the modernist attempt to construct

This content downloaded from

the malady of a dispersed self as the cur

This content downloaded from

Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual

The very stuff of experience here disappears under Pater's "analysi

This content downloaded from

Paradoxically, his insistence on the absolut

This content downloaded from

to escape all utilitarian calculations of the benefits that art renders m

Such thoughts seem desolate at first; at times all the bitterness o

This content downloaded from

very issue of knowledge and does so by

This content downloaded from

accommodation of speech to that vision within" (396). Style becom

This content downloaded from

strong a hold on Pater to be completely jett

This content downloaded from

realities (natural or social) that provide its subject matter or govern it

This content downloaded from

Wilde declared. "Taking sides is the beginn

Perhaps, by finding perfect expression for a passion, I had exhausted

This content downloaded from

was to teach a man to concentrate himself upon the moments of lif

The image stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element

This content downloaded from

possess not merely the present but the f

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

achievements of the unified self is no less

This content downloaded from

as inadequate? I think that in the juxtaposition of pain and joy we ca

This content downloaded from

of masks." "There is about sorrow an inten

De Profundis offers no vision of a joyful, Hellenistic individualism.

This content downloaded from

revelations of the truth; he now knows that nothing is without meanin

This content downloaded from

the paradoxical note that his true weak

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

His thinking was a dusk of doubt and self

We find here the characteristic connection of epiphany with separate-

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Irishness- that he likes to think that he has

This content downloaded from

moment, not "ideas'' of the sort that we would expect philosophy

This content downloaded from

by a special epiphanic moment as a stay

My thanks to my colleague James Adams for his helpful comments on an earli

1. T. S. Eliot, "On Henry James," in The Question of Henry James, ed. F. W

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

18. Oscar Wilde, Complete Shorter Fiction, ed.