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Section 1  3 
The Epiphanies 
INTRODUCTORY NOTE 
 Joyce mentions his Epiphanies in his letters and in his plan for Stephen
Hero, but the only definition of the form we have is that of Stephen Daedalus:
"a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or
of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself" (SH 211). The forty
Epiphanies collected here represent all Joyce's works in this form which
have been found to date. To call the Epiphany a "form" is perhaps to dignify
it beyond Joyce's intention, since Stephen believed that "it was for the
man of letters to record these Epiphanies with extreme care," indicating
that this was not a matter of artistic creation but only of apprehension
and recording— to be done not by an artist, necessarily, but by "the
man of letters." Still there are signs that Joyce was not satisfied with
mere recording, with observations such as any writer might record in a journal;
rather, he seems to have attempted to give shape to the shapeless and substance
to the apparently insubstantial in his Epiphanies. Later he turned to more
ordinary devices, such as the alphabetical notebook (Part I, Section 6 below),
and to mere scraps of paper on which he wrote down bits of conversation or
phrases that came to his mind, which found their way into Ulysses or Finnegans
Wake. But he treated his early Epiphanies reverently, as befitted their "spiritual"
properties—with a reverence that he later mocked through the retrospective
interior monologue of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses: "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? Someone was to read them
there after a few thousand years. . . ." (U 41/40). 
 The Epiphanies which have been preserved fall readily into two classes,
which correspond, in many respects, to the two facets of Stephen Daedaius'
definition in SH. In one kind the mind of the writer is most important. These
Epiphanies, which may be called narrative (though a case might be made for
calling some of them lyric) present for the most part "memorable phases"
of Joyce's mind