Epiphanies in Art

8/3/2019 Epiphanies in Art

1/13

Joyce and the Drama of Cognition: Escher as a Visual Analogue

Author(s): Barbara Stevens HeuselSource: Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 34, No. 4 (Winter, 1988), pp. 395-406Published by: Hofstra UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/441883 .

Accessed: 10/10/2011 05:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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 [email protected].

Hofstra University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Twentieth Century

Literature.

http://www.jstor.org
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hofstrahttp://www.jstor.org/stable/441883?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/441883?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=hofstra


2/13

J o y c e a n d t h e D r a m a o f Cogni t ion:E s c h e r a s a V i s u a l Analogue

BARBARA STEVENS HEUSEL

Familiarity with our world and our perceptual apparatus (our eyeand brain mechanisms) deadens our perception, and so we need artiststo shock us into seeing. James Joyce and M. C. Escher providemasterfully the necessary moments of surprise, trompe l'oeil, and tricksof the brain, to give us insight into cognition. They create a powerfulconjunction because of their complexity and their play with our learnedresponses. Juxtaposing Escher's visual play and Joyce's verbal playforces us to look at processes we usually overlook or take for granted:moments when perception becomes cognition and when cognition canbecome art.1 Then we can analyze our own responses, as readers and asviewers.Joyce's most basic step in recognizing how cognition becomes artwas his habit of scrupulously recording the moments of insight he called"epiphanies." Epiphany grows out of a long line of what M. H. Abramscategorizes as the "illuminated Moment."2 "By an epiphany" StephenDedalus in Stephen Hero means "a sudden spiritual manifestation,whether in the vulgarity of speech or gesture or in a memorable phaseof the mind itself."3Joyce's synthesis of two historical patterns-Aquinas' demonstra-tion that inner conflict is as real a subject of art as outer conflict, andPoe's realization that a work of art is a retracing of an emotion4-showed him that epiphany names the final stage of cognition. He wasable then-by retracing the labyrinth of actions, gestures, thoughts, andfeelings that lead to an illuminated moment-to record the universal

drama, the acting out of the stages of apprehension or cognition, theartistic process.395


3/13

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATUREUnfortunately for students of literature, neither poetry nor prosecan render unanalyzed, unsynthesized impressions, epiphanies, first-

hand with the ease that the visual arts can. Because we can absorbEscher's tricks almost instantaneously, his teasing of our visual cognitionhighlights what could, in Joyce's prose, otherwise remain abstract. Inaddition to exercising the connections between the eye and the brain,Escher-and Joyce-manipulate the eye-brain relationship, tricking usinto believing impossible figures that are impossible but, nevertheless,true.Using five of Escher's prints, I will demonstrate how Stephen'saesthetic theory helps us follow the pattern Douglas Hofstadter calls, in

discussing Escher, the "Strange Loop,"5 a closed or reverberating loop.Joyce's explanation, which does not differ from Stephen's significantly,helps us follow the labyrinth of pathways a mind takes when viewing,and reviewing, Escher's work; our slide-that-by-me-one-more-timereaction, or the remapping of the paths, re-creates the loop or cycleJoyce recognized as artistic process.It is interesting to notice how the following passage from StephenHsro applies to Escher's Day and Night (Fig. 1).6This is Stephen's prosaicexplanation of the first stage of his theory, simply the first stage of theperceptual process, the figure-ground stage:Consider the performance of your mind when confronted with

Fig. 1 Dayand Night (Photographby courtesyof the NationalGalleryof Art,Washington,D.C.)396


4/13

JOYCE AND THE DRAMA OF COGNITIONany object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehendthat object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object,and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you mustlift it away from everything else; and then you perceive that it isone integral thing, that is a thing. (SH, p. 212)While Stephen is using object-ground only in its simplest form, notas a paradoxical figure, we see that Escher is playing with two

paradoxical figures: object-ground reversible figures and figures thatspontaneously change their position in depth. Several circumstancescoalesce here to create the reader's illuminated moment. We notice atthe center of the print that the eye and brain can focus on either lightbirds or dark birds but not on both at the same time. We must-asStephen tells Cranly-lift one or the other away from everything else.The representational birds lose their three-dimensional bodies andbecome fields in the background and then divisions on a flat page. Inaddition, Escher fancifully flattens out the turning world onto atwo-dimensional surface.The second stage of Stephen's theory illustrates steps our own per-ceptual mechanisms go through when we encounter the tricksin an Escherprint. If the artist has, as Stephen says, "disentangle[d] the subtle soul ofthe image from its mesh of defining circumstances most exactly and ((re-embod[ied])) it in artistic circumstances chosen as the most exact for it inits new office" (SH, p. 78), we ought to experience an epiphany.In separating figure from ground in Waterfall(Fig. 2),7 we naivelyassociate the scene with conventional waterwheels and with water that isrunning downhill. At this very moment our minds are illustrating thesecond stage: "The mind considers the object in whole and in part, inrelation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts,contemplates the form of the object, travels every cranny of thestructure" (SH, p. 212). When we concentrate for any length of time, werecognize a shocking paradox: looking at any given corner confirmsthat the water is indeed running downhill, but tracing the path of thewater proves undeniably that it has been running uphill. The jolt wereceive from seeing this paradox-the involuntary smile it evokes-feelsvery like an epiphany. This is Stephen's explanation of epiphany:Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn't make outwhat Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word . . . but I havesolved it. Claritas is quidditas.After the analysis which discoversthe second quality the mind makes the only logically possiblesynthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the momentwhich I call epiphany. (SH, p. 213)

397


5/13

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE

"Mak[ing] the only logically possible synthesis" is part of theappeal-the delayed gratification-we associate with a print such asWaterfall (Fig. 2). Realizing we have been tricked by the movement ofthe water, we remap the visual field, retracing the labyrinth to see atwhat point our eyes and brains have been led astray. We discover that

c;C.)0T0s-O

Fig. 2 Waterfall

398


6/13

JOYCE AND THE DRAMA OF COGNITIONour learned responses have caused us to make some invalidassumptions. The intricacies of those figures atop the towers, of theterraces in the background, of the steps and even the cogs on thewaterwheels, not to mention the intricacy of those fantastic plants, allbeguile the viewer into trusting that what seems to be the most simpleelement of the picture-the path that water takes, flowing downhill-isindeed realistic. We have assumed that because the bricks outlining thetroughs proceed downward like steps and because each trough appearsto carry the water lower, water will be lower still at the end of the coursethan it was at the beginning.Such simple notions as "end" and "beginning" work in a world offorthright Euclidian geometry-but not in the world Escher creates bydistorting a three-dimensional figure on the flat plane of a piece ofpaper. If one imagines that he is holding the print in front of himselfand tilting the top of the sheet away, he can visualize the plane that cutsthrough all six corners, recognizing that Escher was elaborating on thefigure called the impossible triangle. It is helpful to imagine,superimposed over the waterfall, an early version of the impossibletriangle (Fig. 3),8 a two-dimensional representation of what appear to besquare beams resting upon each other at right angles. We see that hisstudy includes four triangles, whereas Waterfall includes three, theright-hand triangle being eliminated. Another epiphany occurs.Synthesizing our observations has allowed us a glimpse of ourselvesseeing.In Dubliners9we have a clear example of Joyce tricking us with astructural pattern in the same way Escher does visually. When we finish"Two Gallants," the epiphany is ours and not the protagonist's. Wemust retrace the labyrinth of behavior in the Dublin streets in order torealize shockingly that we have been voyeurs like Lenehan, anxiouslytrying to discover the way in which Corley is exploiting the youngwoman.This active viewing and reviewing is the prime characteristic of thework of both Joyce and Escher: it is not only the form but the content aswell. Escher shows us that moving back to the second stage jars us intoanother epiphany of recognition, demonstrating a reverberating loop.In Gddel, Escher,Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid Hofstadter explainsthis circular movement, calling it the "Strange Loop," or an endlessprocess represented in a finite way: the "phenomenon occurs whenever,by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of somehierarchical system [such as Waterfall (Fig. 2)], we unexpectedly findourselves right back where we started ...."10 In fact, Hofstadter uses

399


7/13

TWENTIETHCENTURYLITERA URE

Fig. 3 The ImpossibleTriangle

Waterfallto show that Escher creates "the most beautiful and powerfulvisual realization of this notion of Strange Loops" and uses ThreeSpheresII (Fig. 4) and Magic Mirror (Fig. 5) to show that this loop can illustratethe movement of the self-referential artist.This image of a loop helps in contrasting the most characteristicdirection in which Escher and Joyce each directed his energies. ForEscher this pattern was primarily a framework with which he couldanalyze the function of the artist at work. Joyce, by nature a navel-gazer,used the loop framework in a different way. Fascinated by GiambattistaVico's cyclic theory and its slowly ascending spiral or vortex, Joycefound the loop a convenient structure to step onto, in his movingDaedalean fashion outside himself and his work. Ultimately both Joyceand Escher stand outside their media, like gods paring their fingernails,seeing their material objectively while being seen participating in theprocess of creation.

The sequence of Joyce's works demonstrates his movement outsidehis fiction, from the retracing of naturalistic labyrinths that lead to an

400


8/13

JOYCE AND THE DRAMA OF COGNITION

rig. 4 I nree Spneres 11 (Photograph by courtesy of- the National Gallery ofArt, Washington, D.C.)

Fig. 5 Magic Mirror (Photograph by courtesy of the National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C.)

401


9/13

TWENTIETHCENTURYLITERATUREepiphany in each story in Dubliners, through the objectification of thediary in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man1' and the newspaperheadlines and catechism questions and answers in Ulysses,to the totaldistance of the multilingual puns in Finnegans Wake.While we talk about Joyce's willingness to reflect his own imagevery distinctly in his work, leaving it stamped there, Escher playfullycarries the idea a step further by making his literal reflection the focusof a number of graphics such as Three Spheres II (Fig. 4). Escher'splayfulness should remind us that Joyce's title A Portrait was itselforiginally a borrowing from another medium.In Three Spheres II notice the framed world, or fictive window,contains three worlds with varying surfaces that reflect in the writingtable. But the writing table is reflected only in the middle mirror-likesphere, which reflects the whole surrounding area. The left-handsphere, glass filled with water, reflects and magnifies the table top, thereflecting sphere, and the window. It reflects not only the window on itsleft side but also the window reflection from the middle sphere'sreflection. The reflection of the artist drawing every detail is distortedonly in the mirror-like sphere. All these surfaces, like the surface ofWordsworth's lake in The Prelude, are mirrors of the artist's mind or ofmemories in the artist's mind. Notice that the very center of the print isbetween the artist's eyes, at the still dead center of the artist's ego.

Joyce's early works reflect in part portraits of himself: the Stephenof StephenHero is more like Joyce than the Stephen of A Portrait andUlysses. R. P. Blackmur points out that the actions of Stephen andBloom in Ulysses"suggest a single picture . . . the picture of Joyce,working out the polarities of his own nature ... ,12 Moreover,throughout Joyce's work his reflections become less personal and moreabstract. His signatures are contained in his language, his style (ironyand juxtaposition), his form, even his typography. In Ulysses Joyceinserts a labyrinth of analysis between his reader and his characters.The newspaper headlines in "Aeolus" and the chapter-long sentence in"Penelope" tease us into focusing on the black marks covering the pageand on the elaborate pyrotechnics being set off in our heads.The form and typography of the novel are especially significantbecause they help us recognize the way characters not only reflect sidesof Joyce's personality, or reflect real people, but reflect ideas. The mostplayful of these signs placed between character and reader comes at theend of "Ithaca" in the 1922 edition. Gifford and Seidman explain thereason for the "large black dot or period at the end of Episode 17, 722

402


10/13

JOYCEAND THE DRAMAOF COGNITION(737). A dot or period is a conventional sign for Q.E.D. (Latin: quoderatdemonstrandum,which was to be proved')."'3

The most problematic signs are the majuscule letters S-M-P, which,in Bennett Cerf's 1934 American edition, introduce the three parts ofthe novel corresponding to the Homeric structure that Joyce discussedwith Stuart Gilbert. Cerf's use of typography merely makes morevivid-more graphic-the logical pattern ingrained in Joyce's mind bythe Jesuits. In 1959 William York Tindall linked the letters to the signsfor the three terms of a syllogism: "Innocent of meaning, decorative inpurpose, the enlargement of these initials in the American edition is alucky accident, calling attention to what might have been missed."'4Editor and critic illuminate another level of the labyrinth of tradition asthey participate in the text. These initial letters at the beginning of thethree-part structure resonate with the illuminated manuscripts withwhich Joyce would have been familiar. Letters have come to representthe protagonists and the content of their minds: Part I (TheTelemachiad) begins with S for Stephen, preoccupied with himself; PartII (The Wanderings of Ulysses) begins with M for Molly, who occupiesBloom's pattern of thought; Part III (The Homecoming) begins with Pfor Poldy or Leopold, who occupies Molly's reverie.'5

Carrying Tindall's commentary forward in Notesfor Joyce (1974),Gifford and Seidman emphasize Joyce's preoccupation with medievalpedagogy, whichregarded the sequence S-M-P [subject, middle, predicate] as thecognitive order of thought and therefore as the order in whichthe terms initially should be taught. . . . The analogue of thesyllogism (as the overall analogue to TheOdyssey)uggests a logicaland narrative structure, which the reader can grasp but of whichthe characters in the fiction are essentially unaware.16

Joyce's use of that orb at the end of "Ithaca" and his acceptance of thoselarger-than-life capital letters in the 1934 American edition, become anelaborate joke not only on the characters and the readers but on thecreation of stories, a joke that resurrects Aristotle and Aquinas.Escher's creatures in Magic Mirror(Fig. 5) help us visualize the wayJoyce manipulates characters inside the world of Ulyssesand readersoutside it. Escher uses his metamorphosing creatures to comment onthe relationship of image to object. When they loop back toward thefront of the mirror, they become spaces in a figure-and-ground grid ortiled floor. They appear to loop under the mirror, rather than throughit. The figures we see marching in the upper-right corner are reflectedtwice: once on the flat, presumably opaque surface of the mirror, and

403


11/13

TWENTIETHCENTURYLITERATUREagain-through the mirror-in the figures we see marching in theupper-left corner. That mirror is a fictive window, one that both reflectsand is seen through; we see the mirror and the surrounding figuresthrough a larger fictive window, which corresponds to the pupil ofEscher's eye-which has become our own.Joyce's creatures are in comparable states of materializing anddematerializing. Ulyssesis a study of a similar interaction between theflat and the spatial; flat, static black marks come to life, in the mediumof writing a story and reading it, instead of drawing objects andperceiving images. Here Joyce gives us numerous perspectivessimultaneously, as we have seen Escher doing in Day and Night anddoing more thoroughly in Magic Mirror. Joyce uses the mirror oflanguage to construct reverberating loops through which we can tracethe corporeality of the characters at various discrete stages, fromrealistic people using romantic language, in the early chapters, totwo-dimensional vehicles for ideas: psyches in "Circe," cliches in"Eumaeus," and Aquinas-like rhetorical patterns of questions andanswers in "Ithaca." By the last chapter Molly has metamorphosed frombeing an idea, or bits and chips of memory in people's minds, into beinga creature of flesh and blood-with emphasis on the flesh.

Joyce also uses mirrors as fictive windows to achieve metamorpho-sis, merging, and simultaneity, most notably in the sifting ofsubconscious material in "Circe." For example, when Bloom first entersNighttown, we see him, like the figures in Magic Mirror, creating a"composite portrait,"'7 reflected in concave and convex mirrors. Thescene, Bloom watching himself as an element in the surroundingstreets, is absorbed and reflected by "Gillen's hairdresser's windows"(XV:144). Flat, concave, and convex mirrors clustered tightly togethercreate a cacophony of images that reflect and overlap, even as theypenetrate the planes of glass. The reader sees external and internalrealities merge and sees beneath the ego into the libido. A concavemirror in the window reveals the psychic pain of Bloom's torturedego-"lovelorn longlost lugubru Blooloohoom"; then when his eyecatches a convex mirror, it draws out his animal joy-"fatchuckcheekchops ofjollypoldy the rixdix doldy" (XV: 145-49).Immediately after Bloom has watched himself be cuckolded byBoylan, Bloom's and Stephen's fantasies coincide in an epiphany for thefirst time when they simultaneously look into Bella's mirror and see noteach other but themselves revealed in Shakespeare. The three "men ofletters" are "crownedby the reflectionof the reindeerantleredhatrack in thehall" (XV:3823-24). The magic mirror takes in the reflections of the404


12/13

JOYCEAND THE DRAMAOF COGNITIONtwo men and feeds them back with the image of Shakespeare to boot,creating a cycle or loop.

This mirror, like many of Escher's, is permeable: we see Stephenand Bloom moving through it in "Circe" and recognize that they are onthe other side of it in "Ithaca,"just as Escher's creatures live magically intwo worlds-the world of reality reflected in the mirror and that otherworld beyond the back side of the mirror.I have used Escher's illuminated moments as visual analogues tohelp us see more clearly Joyce's concepts about artistic perception andprocess. Each artist analyzes portraits of the artist and his archetypalstruggles. For Joyce a work of art is, according to Marshall McLuhan,the "process of retrieval, of reconstruction after a moment of insight."'8Wordsworth and the Romantics, and the symbolists, prepared theground for Joyce and for the "vivisections" he describes in StephenHero,vivisections of the artist's mind in action-the drama of cognition.

Illustrations for this essay were provided through a grant from theResearchand PublicationFund of WakeForestUniversity.' MarshallMcLuhan uses this term, the drama of cognition, in "JamesJoyce:Trivialand Quadrivial,"n TheInteriorLandscape: heLiteraryCriticismfMarshallMcLuhan1943-1962, ed. Eugene McNamara(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), p. 32: "For it is in the drama of cognition, the stages ofapprehension,thatJoyce found the archetypeof poetic imitation. He seems tohave been the first to see that the dance of being, the nature imitatedby thearts,has its primaryanaloguein the activityof the exteriorand interiorsenses."2 M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: raditionand Revolution nRomanticLiteratureNew York: Norton, 1971), p. 543. Leaving the debate onwhy Joyce stopped using the term "epiphany"and on how broadly to define"epiphanies"and their predecessorsto a future discussion, I rely on Abrams'liberaldefinitions of the recurrent illuminationsWordsworthcalled "spotsoftime"andJoyce called"epiphanies."3JamesJoyce, StephenHero Norfolk,Conn.: New Directions,1963),p. 211.Subsequentreferences are found in the text, cited as SH.4 Joyce's understandingof poetic processbenefited, accordingto MarshallMcLuhan, from Aquinas, William Wordsworth, and the Symbolists: Poe,Baudelaire,Flaubert,Rimbaud,Mallarme. oyce'sstatement n StephenHero hatStephen's"Estheticwas in the main " was so literal hehad to scrapit (p. 77). In a postcardto his brotherStanislaus,Joyce makes hisconnectionwith Wordsworthclear:"I think Wordsworthof all Englishmenofletters best deserves your word 'genius.'" Letters,11 June 1905, ed. RichardEllmann(London:Faber,1966), p. 63.5 DouglasR. Hofstadter,Gidel,Escher,Bach:An EternalGoldenBraid(NewYork:Vintage, 1980), p. 10.6 F. H. Bool, et al., M. C. Escher:His Lifeand Complete raphicWork,rans.

405


13/13

TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURETony Langham and Plym Peters (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), cat. no.303. Figures 4-5, cat. no., respectively: 339, 338.7 The Worldof M. C. Escher, ed. J. L. Locher (New York: Abrams, 1971),prints 253 or 257.8 Ibid., print 250.James Joyce, Dubliners(New York: Viking, 1958).10Hofstadter, Godel,Escher,Bach, p. 10." James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a YoungMan (New York: Viking,1956). Subsequent references are shortened to A Portrait.12R. P. Blackmur, "The Jew in Search of a Son," Virginia QuarterlyReview,24 (1948), 115; rpt. in Eleven Essayson theEuropeanNovel (New York: Harcourt,1984), p. 46.13Don Gifford with Robert J. Seidman, Notes for Joyce: An Annotation ofJamesJoyce'sUlysses (New York: Dutton, 1974), p. 2.14William York Tindall, A Reader'sGuide toJames Joyce (New York: Farrar,1959), p. 126 f. Bennett Cerf's At Random says almost nothing about hispublication of Ulysses.H. K. Croessmann, however, in "Joyce, Gorman, and theSchema of Ulysses:An Exchange of Letters-Paul L. Leon, Herbert Gorman,Bennett Cerf," publishes letters that dramatize the jealously guarded schema(A James Joyce Miscellany, Second Series, ed. Marvin Magalaner [Carbondale:Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1959], p. 9.).15See Tindall, A Reader's Guide toJamesJoyce, p. 126.16Gifford and Seidman, Notesfor Joyce, p. 2.17James Joyce, Ulysses:A Critical and SynopticEdition, ed. Hans WalterGabler (New York: Garland, 1984), XV:144. Subsequent references are foundin the text.17Eugene McNamara, "Preface" to The InteriorLandscape,p. vii.

406

Documents

Epiphanies in Art