THE EPISODIC AND EPIPHANIC IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION
By Jack Harrell
When I think about the fundamental nature of story, I think of cave dwellers gathered around a fire at night. They’ve hunted and gathered and their bellies are full. The children are safely asleep. The adults talk and the stories come out. Some stories are new, others recurring, embellished by retelling. I’m sure the genres were big in those days. I imagine adventure stories—encounters with wild animals, natural disasters, fights with neighboring tribes. Romance stories about lovers whose coupling evoked approval or censure. Speculative stories conjuring the supernatural. Horror stories asserting a corrective influence on those drawn to the forbidden. I picture a rhetorical hook cast—“I saw something strange today.” In response, the magic question: “What happened?” And the story begins. Afterwards, another question, individuals asking themselves, “What does it mean?”
On those nights around the fire, I suppose people felt vulnerable and small in the darkness, but nearly omnipotent in their capacity to grasp so much through imagination. Of course, the question “What happened?” induces the relating of an episode. Perhaps the question, “What does it mean?” is the first step toward epiphany.
In his introduction to Best American Short Stories 2000, E.L. Doctorow noted a shift “more disposed to the episodic than the epiphanic” (xv) (a movement of the modern story toward the earlier form of the tale. In the years since reading that statement, I’ve wondered if Doctorow’s observation was only an observation … or a notice of a larger movement in fiction. Of course, any talk of the epiphany, any contrast of the epiphanic and the episodic, evokes passionate beliefs about what writing is and what it does. The subject prompts a host of questions.… About didacticism and bad art. About meaning, empathy, and the human condition. About the reading experience. About Joyce’s coinage of the term epiphany and its usage over the past ninety-some years. About Western culture itself. Has the narrative epiphany become passé? Is it essential? Is it vilified but ever-present? I’m not sure how to answer these questions, but I hope I can bring them into focus.
I’ll start with a few definitions, beginning with E.M. Forster’s distinction of story and plot. Writing in 1927, Forster called story “a narrative of events in their time-sequence,” while “plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality” (86). Story, says Forster, is “and then … and then” (41); it is “primitive,” and “reaches back to the origins of literature” (40). Plot is “an organism of a higher type” (30). “Unlike the weaver of plots,” Forster says, “the story-teller profits by ragged ends” that don’t lead to development (33). Is this already begging the question then, making a distinction between “ragged ends” and “development,” privileging one over the other?
An episode is “An incident presented as one continuous action” (Harmon and Holman 192). According to the Harmon and Holman Handbook to Literature, an “episodic structure” consists of “a series of incidents … with no particularly logical arrangement or complication” (192), such as travel writing, for example. In fiction, perhaps the most common episodic structure is the picaresque novel, in which some witty rascal moves from one random misadventure to the next. This sounds like Forster’s “ragged ends.” Surely epiphanic fiction incorporates episodes—incidents in one continuous action. So it’s really episodic structure under consideration here. The question remains, does “development,” “complication,” or even “logical arrangement” require the epiphanic?
In Greek mythology and literature, an epiphany is, literally, a “showing forth,” the moment when a god or goddess casts off its disguise and reveals its divinity. In Christian mythos, the word signified a manifestation of God’s presence in the created world. James Joyce used the word in an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published posthumously as Stephen Hero) to describe “a sudden spiritual manifestation” (211) when the “whatness” of an object “leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance,” when “The soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant” (213). Over the years, the word has broadened to describe a comprehension of reality by a sudden intuitive realization, though it’s still often applied to profound insight into the essence of a commonplace something.
Joyce’s notions of the epiphany significantly influenced subsequent thought on fiction. But before Joyce we had the ancient dramatic structure, with its rising action, climax, and unwinding, a structure Freytag put into his pyramid in 1863. Perhaps the significance of Joyce’s thought is his modernist focus on the inner self. With the epiphany, what Forster would later call development is a climax that occurs within the individual, not without. Such inward transformation has roots in the romantic idea of transcendence. Perhaps the romantic connection explains why it’s so easy to read analogs of the epiphany in nature. A seed becomes a shoot; a caterpillar becomes a butterfly; a rain cloud bursts, bringing rain; a child becomes an adult. Transformation seems fundamental to existence. In nature and in societies, contending forces clash, fall away, and clash again, until one or all are irrevocably transformed. Old order moves through conflict and into new order. Of course, transformation may not be the same as transcendence. For example, a human sexual encounter may have all the marks of dramatic structure—exposition, rising action, climax, unwinding, and conclusion—but the experience may not be transcendent. Still, it’s intriguing to consider dramatic structure as a mirror of sex, and by extension, to see the epiphanic story as an analog for those times when sexual consummation is deepened and made substantive by mutual commitment and love.
Whatever the origins of the epiphanic, the drive toward the epiphany seems connected to a universal human desire for meaning. When people tell or write stories, facts and feelings are sorted and sifted. Certain things are discarded and others are emphasized—all that the chance events of life might add up to something meaningful. Despite the obvious randomness of reality, the human desire that episodes should accumulate meaning persists.
Of course, this argument can be easily deconstructed. This isn’t nature at all, we might say, but simply a reading of nature, rooted in insistent and naïve logocentrism. By an appeal to Western thought since Plato, I might assert a claim on Logos—meaning, truth, reason, logic, word, and the Word. This business of epiphanies might be just another version of the metaphysics of presence, the belief that essence exists beyond our linguistic structures. As Jonathan Culler says, “The notions of ‘making clear,’ ‘grasping,’ ‘demonstrating,’ ‘revealing,’ and ‘showing what is the case’ all invoke presence” (94). The problem with presence, Culler says, is that “when arguments cite particular instances of presence … the instances invariably prove to be already complex constructions. What is proposed as a given … proves to be a product” (94). Language need not be viewed as a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified—epiphanic scene and meaning. Language is a play of identity and difference, an endless chain of signifiers leading to other signifiers. Presence is not discovered, but an absence of presence, a trace. Just as there’s no transcendental signified, one might say, so there’s no epiphany.
A few years ago my daughter gave me a book she bought in a used bookstore in Champaign, Illinois. The book was published in 1971, and titled Anti-Story. It’s a book of experimental fiction by writers such as Donald Barthelme and John Barth, stories that challenge plot, character, verisimilitude, and everything else. The editor of the book, Philip Stevick, called the epiphany “the single feature of the modern classic story most repeated and consistently characteristic” (xiv). Stevick said of the epiphany that “there is no feature of the classic twentieth-century story so carefully avoided by writers who wish to do something new with short fiction” (xiv). Introducing his anthology, Stevick said:
Characters in the works that follow do not learn. There are no insights. Relationships are not grasped in an instant. Structurally, the stories are flat, or circular, or cyclic, or mosaic constructions, of finally indeterminate or incomprehensible in their shape—they are not climactic. What we start with is pretty much what we have at the end. No epiphanies. (xiv)
This was written more than forty years ago, which makes us smile when we read, “writers who wish to do something new.”
What should we conclude, then? Is the epiphany a natural phenomenon, evidenced in nature and our commonplace experience, part of our human desire for reason and meaning? Or is it just a manifestation of Western culture, its very name betraying roots in the religious logocentrism that excluded so many things we now embrace? Answer for yourself … and I’ll answer for myself.
The epiphany resonates with a romantic concept of the individual, and a modernist focus on the inner-self. As a reader and writer of fiction, I’m interested in the inner-selves of others, as well as my own inner-self. For me, the epiphany is important only when, and if, it lends itself to the larger business of meaning in life and in literature. Meaning is contingent upon values. Values lead characters to struggle—within themselves and with other characters and circumstances. Unlike Stevik, I want characters who learn—or, at least, who have the chance to learn and fail. This isn’t a call for didacticism or propaganda or truisms. It’s a call for stories that help me understand the world I live in and the worlds other people live in. Such stories need not be epiphanic, but they might be. I want the freedom that they might be.
Not long ago I listened to a story read on a Public Radio International podcast called Selected Shorts. The story by Amy Bloom, called “Silver Water,” presented a family—a father, mother, and two sisters—whose financial and emotional resources were deeply challenged by the older sister’s mental illness. At the end of the story the older sister overdoses on her medication and dies. Is the story epiphanic? Subtly so, I think. But I’m not sure. I’d have to pick it apart to know—which I may do sometime. Perhaps that’s one strength of the story, that it’s so meaningful and real and human that I don’t know, nor care at this point, whether or not it’s epiphanic. But I suspect it is, and I suspect the epiphanic movement is just one of the tools Bloom used to craft such a story that, in the end, struck me as more life than art—though I know it’s both.
In the Age of Information, the Internet and digital technology are making human culture more homogeneous, more culturally ecumenical. The world is “flat,” they say. Will our stories go “flat” as well, the epiphanic giving way to the episodic? I don’t think so. As long as people value meaning and growth and new experience, literary characters will do the same.
And sometimes they’ll find it.
Works Cited
Bloom, Amy. “Silver Water.” “The Power of Love.” Selected Shorts. WNYC, 27 May 2012. Web. 15 Jul. 2011.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithica: Cornell UP, 1982. Print.
Doctorow, E.L. “Introduction.” Best American Short Stories 2000. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. xiii-xvi. Print.
Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. San Diego: Harvest, 1927. Print.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, eds. A Handbook to Literature. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 2000. Print.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero: Edited from the Manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer. New ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, eds. New York: New Directions, 1959. Print.
Stevick, Philip, ed. Anti-Story: An Anthology of Experimental Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Print.
By Jack Harrell
When I think about the fundamental nature of story, I think of cave dwellers gathered around a fire at night. They’ve hunted and gathered and their bellies are full. The children are safely asleep. The adults talk and the stories come out. Some stories are new, others recurring, embellished by retelling. I’m sure the genres were big in those days. I imagine adventure stories—encounters with wild animals, natural disasters, fights with neighboring tribes. Romance stories about lovers whose coupling evoked approval or censure. Speculative stories conjuring the supernatural. Horror stories asserting a corrective influence on those drawn to the forbidden. I picture a rhetorical hook cast—“I saw something strange today.” In response, the magic question: “What happened?” And the story begins. Afterwards, another question, individuals asking themselves, “What does it mean?”
On those nights around the fire, I suppose people felt vulnerable and small in the darkness, but nearly omnipotent in their capacity to grasp so much through imagination. Of course, the question “What happened?” induces the relating of an episode. Perhaps the question, “What does it mean?” is the first step toward epiphany.
In his introduction to Best American Short Stories 2000, E.L. Doctorow noted a shift “more disposed to the episodic than the epiphanic” (xv) (a movement of the modern story toward the earlier form of the tale. In the years since reading that statement, I’ve wondered if Doctorow’s observation was only an observation … or a notice of a larger movement in fiction. Of course, any talk of the epiphany, any contrast of the epiphanic and the episodic, evokes passionate beliefs about what writing is and what it does. The subject prompts a host of questions.… About didacticism and bad art. About meaning, empathy, and the human condition. About the reading experience. About Joyce’s coinage of the term epiphany and its usage over the past ninety-some years. About Western culture itself. Has the narrative epiphany become passé? Is it essential? Is it vilified but ever-present? I’m not sure how to answer these questions, but I hope I can bring them into focus.
I’ll start with a few definitions, beginning with E.M. Forster’s distinction of story and plot. Writing in 1927, Forster called story “a narrative of events in their time-sequence,” while “plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality” (86). Story, says Forster, is “and then … and then” (41); it is “primitive,” and “reaches back to the origins of literature” (40). Plot is “an organism of a higher type” (30). “Unlike the weaver of plots,” Forster says, “the story-teller profits by ragged ends” that don’t lead to development (33). Is this already begging the question then, making a distinction between “ragged ends” and “development,” privileging one over the other?
An episode is “An incident presented as one continuous action” (Harmon and Holman 192). According to the Harmon and Holman Handbook to Literature, an “episodic structure” consists of “a series of incidents … with no particularly logical arrangement or complication” (192), such as travel writing, for example. In fiction, perhaps the most common episodic structure is the picaresque novel, in which some witty rascal moves from one random misadventure to the next. This sounds like Forster’s “ragged ends.” Surely epiphanic fiction incorporates episodes—incidents in one continuous action. So it’s really episodic structure under consideration here. The question remains, does “development,” “complication,” or even “logical arrangement” require the epiphanic?
In Greek mythology and literature, an epiphany is, literally, a “showing forth,” the moment when a god or goddess casts off its disguise and reveals its divinity. In Christian mythos, the word signified a manifestation of God’s presence in the created world. James Joyce used the word in an early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (published posthumously as Stephen Hero) to describe “a sudden spiritual manifestation” (211) when the “whatness” of an object “leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance,” when “The soul of the commonest object … seems to us radiant” (213). Over the years, the word has broadened to describe a comprehension of reality by a sudden intuitive realization, though it’s still often applied to profound insight into the essence of a commonplace something.
Joyce’s notions of the epiphany significantly influenced subsequent thought on fiction. But before Joyce we had the ancient dramatic structure, with its rising action, climax, and unwinding, a structure Freytag put into his pyramid in 1863. Perhaps the significance of Joyce’s thought is his modernist focus on the inner self. With the epiphany, what Forster would later call development is a climax that occurs within the individual, not without. Such inward transformation has roots in the romantic idea of transcendence. Perhaps the romantic connection explains why it’s so easy to read analogs of the epiphany in nature. A seed becomes a shoot; a caterpillar becomes a butterfly; a rain cloud bursts, bringing rain; a child becomes an adult. Transformation seems fundamental to existence. In nature and in societies, contending forces clash, fall away, and clash again, until one or all are irrevocably transformed. Old order moves through conflict and into new order. Of course, transformation may not be the same as transcendence. For example, a human sexual encounter may have all the marks of dramatic structure—exposition, rising action, climax, unwinding, and conclusion—but the experience may not be transcendent. Still, it’s intriguing to consider dramatic structure as a mirror of sex, and by extension, to see the epiphanic story as an analog for those times when sexual consummation is deepened and made substantive by mutual commitment and love.
Whatever the origins of the epiphanic, the drive toward the epiphany seems connected to a universal human desire for meaning. When people tell or write stories, facts and feelings are sorted and sifted. Certain things are discarded and others are emphasized—all that the chance events of life might add up to something meaningful. Despite the obvious randomness of reality, the human desire that episodes should accumulate meaning persists.
Of course, this argument can be easily deconstructed. This isn’t nature at all, we might say, but simply a reading of nature, rooted in insistent and naïve logocentrism. By an appeal to Western thought since Plato, I might assert a claim on Logos—meaning, truth, reason, logic, word, and the Word. This business of epiphanies might be just another version of the metaphysics of presence, the belief that essence exists beyond our linguistic structures. As Jonathan Culler says, “The notions of ‘making clear,’ ‘grasping,’ ‘demonstrating,’ ‘revealing,’ and ‘showing what is the case’ all invoke presence” (94). The problem with presence, Culler says, is that “when arguments cite particular instances of presence … the instances invariably prove to be already complex constructions. What is proposed as a given … proves to be a product” (94). Language need not be viewed as a one-to-one correspondence between signifier and signified—epiphanic scene and meaning. Language is a play of identity and difference, an endless chain of signifiers leading to other signifiers. Presence is not discovered, but an absence of presence, a trace. Just as there’s no transcendental signified, one might say, so there’s no epiphany.
A few years ago my daughter gave me a book she bought in a used bookstore in Champaign, Illinois. The book was published in 1971, and titled Anti-Story. It’s a book of experimental fiction by writers such as Donald Barthelme and John Barth, stories that challenge plot, character, verisimilitude, and everything else. The editor of the book, Philip Stevick, called the epiphany “the single feature of the modern classic story most repeated and consistently characteristic” (xiv). Stevick said of the epiphany that “there is no feature of the classic twentieth-century story so carefully avoided by writers who wish to do something new with short fiction” (xiv). Introducing his anthology, Stevick said:
Characters in the works that follow do not learn. There are no insights. Relationships are not grasped in an instant. Structurally, the stories are flat, or circular, or cyclic, or mosaic constructions, of finally indeterminate or incomprehensible in their shape—they are not climactic. What we start with is pretty much what we have at the end. No epiphanies. (xiv)
This was written more than forty years ago, which makes us smile when we read, “writers who wish to do something new.”
What should we conclude, then? Is the epiphany a natural phenomenon, evidenced in nature and our commonplace experience, part of our human desire for reason and meaning? Or is it just a manifestation of Western culture, its very name betraying roots in the religious logocentrism that excluded so many things we now embrace? Answer for yourself … and I’ll answer for myself.
The epiphany resonates with a romantic concept of the individual, and a modernist focus on the inner-self. As a reader and writer of fiction, I’m interested in the inner-selves of others, as well as my own inner-self. For me, the epiphany is important only when, and if, it lends itself to the larger business of meaning in life and in literature. Meaning is contingent upon values. Values lead characters to struggle—within themselves and with other characters and circumstances. Unlike Stevik, I want characters who learn—or, at least, who have the chance to learn and fail. This isn’t a call for didacticism or propaganda or truisms. It’s a call for stories that help me understand the world I live in and the worlds other people live in. Such stories need not be epiphanic, but they might be. I want the freedom that they might be.
Not long ago I listened to a story read on a Public Radio International podcast called Selected Shorts. The story by Amy Bloom, called “Silver Water,” presented a family—a father, mother, and two sisters—whose financial and emotional resources were deeply challenged by the older sister’s mental illness. At the end of the story the older sister overdoses on her medication and dies. Is the story epiphanic? Subtly so, I think. But I’m not sure. I’d have to pick it apart to know—which I may do sometime. Perhaps that’s one strength of the story, that it’s so meaningful and real and human that I don’t know, nor care at this point, whether or not it’s epiphanic. But I suspect it is, and I suspect the epiphanic movement is just one of the tools Bloom used to craft such a story that, in the end, struck me as more life than art—though I know it’s both.
In the Age of Information, the Internet and digital technology are making human culture more homogeneous, more culturally ecumenical. The world is “flat,” they say. Will our stories go “flat” as well, the epiphanic giving way to the episodic? I don’t think so. As long as people value meaning and growth and new experience, literary characters will do the same.
And sometimes they’ll find it.
Works Cited
Bloom, Amy. “Silver Water.” “The Power of Love.” Selected Shorts. WNYC, 27 May 2012. Web. 15 Jul. 2011.
Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. Ithica: Cornell UP, 1982. Print.
Doctorow, E.L. “Introduction.” Best American Short Stories 2000. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. xiii-xvi. Print.
Forster, E.M. Aspects of the Novel. San Diego: Harvest, 1927. Print.
Harmon, William, and C. Hugh Holman, eds. A Handbook to Literature. 8th ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice-Hall, 2000. Print.
Joyce, James. Stephen Hero: Edited from the Manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer. New ed. John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon, eds. New York: New Directions, 1959. Print.
Stevick, Philip, ed. Anti-Story: An Anthology of Experimental Fiction. New York: Macmillan, 1971. Print.
