Abstract
This chapter attempts to achieve a more effective balance between Joyce’s fictional and non-fictional work by offering a reading of a single aspect of the epiphanies, the presence of animals within them, in the light of the theme of this volume and within a Deleuzian theoretical framework of becoming. It argues that it is the unfinished, evolving, and liminal status of the epiphanies, rather than their more stable position in an archive of Joyce’s writings, that gives them most power. The overall approach will show that Joyce dramatises his creative achievements and impasses through the representation of animals far beyond the familiar “Icarus/bird-man” and “bird-girl” tropes of Portrait.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
David Hayman. “The Purpose and Permanence of the Joycean Epiphany”, James Joyce Quarterly 35/36 (1998), 638.
- 2.
Hans Walter Gabler, “Preface”, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Facsimile of Epiphanies, Notes, Manuscripts & Typescripts (New York & London: Garland, 1978), xxiv–xxv.
- 3.
Oliver Gogarty, As I was Going Down Sackville Street: A Phantasy in Fact (London: Rich and Cowan, 1937), 285.
- 4.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper: James Joyce’s Early Years (New York: Viking, 1958), 125.
- 5.
John Eglinton, “The Beginnings of Joyce”, Irish Literary Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1935), 137.
- 6.
Eglinton , “The Beginnings of Joyce”, 144.
- 7.
Gogarty , As I was Going Down Sackville Street: A Phantasy in Fact, 285.
- 8.
Gabler , “Preface”, xxvii.
- 9.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Chapter 8: 1874: Three Novellas, or ‘What Happened?’” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 234.
- 10.
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The Complete Text, trans. Richard Howard, (London and New York, Continuum, 2008), 100–101.
- 11.
Vicki Mahaffey, “Joyce’s Shorter Works,” The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce, Second Edition, ed. Derek Attridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 172.
- 12.
Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 145.
- 13.
Hayman , “The Purpose and Permanence,” 638.
- 14.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome,” A Thousand Plateaus, 4.
- 15.
Deleuze , Proust and Signs (2008), 100–101.
- 16.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 10: 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible,” A Thousand Plateaus, 340.
- 17.
Hayman , “The Purpose and Permanence,” 647–650.
- 18.
Mahaffey, “Joyce’s Shorter Works,” 172.
- 19.
Ruben Borg, “Deleuze on Genre: Modernity Between the Tragic and the Novel,” Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 99–118.
- 20.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 7: Year Zero: Faciality,” A Thousand Plateaus, 221.
- 21.
Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way, 158.
- 22.
Steve Baker, “What does Becoming-Animal Look Like?”, Representing Animals, ed. Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 67.
- 23.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 10,” A Thousand Plateaus, 279.
- 24.
Derek Ryan, “Entangled in Nature: Deleuze’s Modernism, Woolf’s Philosophy, and Spinoza’s Ethology,” Understanding Deleuze, Understanding Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 159.
- 25.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 10,” A Thousand Plateaus, 280.
- 26.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 36.
- 27.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 126.
- 28.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 10,” A Thousand Plateaus, 281.
- 29.
Ibid. 280.
- 30.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, 35.
- 31.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 126.
- 32.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 10,” A Thousand Plateaus, 289.
- 33.
Hayman reminds us that the imagery of “Epiphany 32” transforms into and “cross-pollinates” at least the depiction of the playground in Chapter 1 of Portrait; the farmyard in Chapter 2; and the racetrack in the “ Nestor” episode of Ulysses (634). He also suggests that in Chapter 3 Stephen’s vision of hell, based primarily on “Epiphany 6,” and the bird-girl epiphany, which we do not have an original source for, likewise appropriate the language of “Epiphany 32” (634); I would argue this reflects the way that the interlinked becoming-animal of the epiphanies remains entangled when Joyce rewrites and “fictionalises” them.
- 34.
Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, 34–36.
- 35.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 10,” A Thousand Plateaus, 279; 294.
- 36.
Bogue, Deleuze’s Way, 130.
- 37.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 125–126.
- 38.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 125.
- 39.
Stanislaus Joyce, My Brother’s Keeper, 127.
- 40.
Deleuze and Guattari, “Chapter 10,” A Thousand Plateaus, 302–303.
- 41.
A comparably dense list of animal references and images for “ Proteus” to that which I have included early in this chapter on the epiphanies could certainly be produced: including seahorses, herring, whales, pigeons, barnacle geese, mammoths, zebras, panthers, pointers, hares, gulls, wolves, bears, and porpoises. The meaning of that chapter, “primal matter,” and its Homeric parallel, likewise links to Stephen’s artistic becoming and his becoming-animal by Joyce in the Linati schema.
- 42.
Margot Norris, “The Animals of Finnegans Wake,” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 60.3 (2014): 527–543.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ebury, K. (2018). Becoming-Animal in the Epiphanies: Joyce Between Fiction and Non-Fiction. In: Ebury, K., Fraser, J. (eds) Joyce’s Non-Fiction Writings. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72242-9_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-72241-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-72242-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)