Transfigured Vision and Everyday Apocalypse

I've just finished reading Faith, Hope and Poetry by Malcolm Guite which is about transfigured vision and am just beginning to read David Dark's book about Everyday Apocalypse. Each are different sides of the same coin; the coin in question being epiphany understood as a moment of revelation.

Guite writes that:

"sometimes ... the mirror of poetry does more than reflect what we have already seen. Sometimes that mirror becomes a window, a window into the mystery which is both in and beyond nature, a 'casement opening on perilous seas'. From that window sometimes shines a more than earthly that suddenly transforms, transfigures all the earthly things it falls upon. Through that window, when it is opened for us by the poet's art, we catch a glimpse of that 'Beauty always ancient always new', who made and kindled our imagination in the beginning and whose love draws us beyond the world."

It is those moments of transfiguration, he writes, "those moments when the mirror a poem holds up becomes a window into the Divine," which are the subject of his book.

Dark, by contrast, writes that:

"We apparently have the word "apocalypse" all wrong. In its root meaning, it's not about destruction or fortune-telling; it's about revealing. It's what James Joyce calls an epiphany - the moment you realize that all your so-called love for the young lady, all your professions, all your dreams, and all your efforts to get her to notice you were the exercise of an unkind and obsessive vanity. It wasn't about her at all. It was all about you. The real world, within which you've lived and moved and had your being, has unveiled itself. It's starting to come to you. You aren't who you made yourself out to be. An apocalypse has just occurred, or a revelation, if you prefer."

Two contrasting revelations but both meeting the requirements for an epiphany. James Joyce set out the requirements or conditions for an epiphany in Stephen Hero (the early version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) where he writes:

"By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual transformation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phrase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they are the most delicate and evanescent of moments ...

... First, we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing, which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."

This description of epiphany seems more aligned with Guite's sense of transfigured vision than it does of Dark's everyday apocalypse, although it is Dark who claims Joycean understanding. On the one hand this is because Joyce draws heavily on theology for his understanding of epiphany. He wrote, for instance, of the work that would become Dubliners as being "a series of epicleti." This term Terence Brown notes, "derives from the Greek Orthodox liturgy and refers to the moment in the sacrifice of the Mass when the bread and the wine are transformed by the Holy Ghost into the body and blood of Christ." It is at this moment of consecration that "the everyday realities of bread and wine are charged with spiritual significance." Similarly, the literal meaning of epiphany is manifestation but, in the Church calendar the Feast of Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Christ's divinity to the Magi. Bernard Richards notes that with this definition Joyce "comes close to the aesthetics of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his philosophy of haeccitas ('thisness')."  Richards also notes that, "For centuries writers and mystics have experienced sudden insights that seem detached from the flow of everyday perception. He cites William Wordsworth's The Prelude and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Sudden Light as examples, before stating that often these epiphanies "have been on a borderline between the secular and the religious: what has been revealed in the mystical moment has been a sense of God, of the whole shape of the universe, of the unity of all created things."

On the other hand, Dark is right in stating that Joyce's use of epiphanies in his work was more to do with everyday apocalypse than with transfigured vision. Francesca Valente writes that:
"Joyce himself confirmed this in a letter of July 1904 to Curran, where he said that he intended Dubliners "to betray the soul of that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city" (Joyce, Letters 55). Joyce therefore conceived this work as a sequence of "fifteen epiphanies"-as he stated in a letter dated February 8, 1903 to Stanislaus (Ellmann, James Joyce 125)-which were written to let Irish people take "one good look at themselves in his nicely polished looking-glass" (Joyce, Letters 63-64). What emerges from these words is that both the fictional characters of the tales and the readers are meant to undergo an epiphanic confrontation."

The two sides of the coin are, to some extent, combined in the stories of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy (Dark says that O'Connor "is perhaps the best example of how the Yes and the No can coincide"). Percy writes about there being two stages in non-Christian audiences becoming aware of grace. First, there is an experience of awakening in which a character in a novel (and through that character, the audience) sees the inadequacy of the life that he or she has been leading. This is a moment of epiphany or revelation about themselves; an everyday apocalypse in which they either realise their depravity or their potential for grace. Thinking along similar lines O’Connor wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” Such an experience may then lead on to the second stage of hearing and responding to the grace of God in Christ (an epiphany of transfigured vision).

In the American South, there is a tradition of Appalachian country death songs; gothic backwoods ballads of mortality and disaster. The Violent Femmes took that tradition and used it in Country Death Song to confront their audience with an epiphany of the reality, ugliness and consequences of sin. They told a story in which the central character acts in a way that all of us recognise as sinful and then spoke about the reality of hell as a consequence of what he that did. This song is, therefore, an example of what Flannery O’Conner was talking about when she wrote that “the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural.” In that situation she said, you have to make your vision apparent by shock and that is what the Violent Femmes did.

In her novels Flannery O’Connor also wrote about the way in which the holy interpenetrates this world and affects it. St Paul, in Philippians, tells to go through life with an attitude of looking out for things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely and honourable. He expects us to find these things in our ordinary lives, if we look for them. Over The Rhine say in the song Jesus in New Orleans that you never know just what on earth you'll find in the face of a stranger or in the dark and weary corners of a mind because, here and there, when you least expect it, you can see the Saviour's face. In their story of meeting a stranger in a bar in New Orleans in whose face and words they see something of Christ the holy is interpenetrating their world, and ours, and affecting it. In this way Over The Rhine created an epiphany that reveals Christ for us in the ordinary experiences of life.

American Literature and American Music frequently oscillate between epiphanies of grace and epiphanies of terror. Compare and contrast Emily Dickinson and Flannery O'Connor, for example, Victoria Williams and Jim White, The Innocence Mission and Sixteen Horsepower. Fear and threat on the one hand, mystery and enamour on the other - the twin poles of American music (see my post here). Legends, bibles, plagues, vegetables and death, roses growing out of people's brains, lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're all in the mix. Epiphanies are songs of sin and salvation as sung by the wild, unshod, soot-covered orphans of God.     

Dark recalls an interview given by Malcolm Muggeridge in which he says:

"Let's think of the steeple and the gargoyle. The steeple is this beautiful thing reaching up into the sky admitting as it were, its own inadequacy - attempting something utterly impossible - to climb to heaven through a steeple. The gargoyle is this little man grinning and laughing at the absurd behaviour of men on earth, and those two things both built into this building to the glory of God ... [The gargoyle is] laughing at the inadequacy of man, the pretensions of man, the absolute preposterous gap - disparity - between his aspirations and his performance, which is the eternal comedy of human life. It will be so until the end of time you see ... Mystical ecstasy and laughter are the two great delights of living, and saints and clowns their purveyors, the only two categories of human being who can be relied on to tell the truth; hence, steeples and gargoyles side by side on the great cathedrals."   

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Over The Rhine - Jesus In New Orleans.