An Unnoted Textual Gap in Bird-Woman Epiphany in 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'
An unnoted yet convincing textual break happens near the end of the bird-woman scene in part iv A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the outcome of his thrilling vision of the bird-like young woman wading on the estuary a mile from Sandymount strand, Stephen Dedalus encounters another universe of sight and feeling that flickers and unfurls like Dante's heavenly rose in the last cantos of the para disco. Accordingly, after an unidentified pause signaled by a paragraph division, he awakes, ' recalling the rapture of his sleep'. This account break does not point out itself, not at all like other pause-producing gadgets Joyce utilizes particularly at climactic minutes in his stories, for example, the ellipses that happen in 'The Sisters', revealing the conspiracy of quiet nearby the dead priest's psychological and physical state, or the perplexing dark spot that shows up at the end of 'Ithaca' chapter in Ulysses, which has evoked serious interpretations ranging from inactive sleep to cosmic quiet; or the wrecked sentence with which Finnegans Wake ends. Still, Joyce's creative consciousness to the expressive force of the textual gap is recommended by the delicate and indicative use he makes of it in the bird-woman section. The bird-woman epiphany is apparently the ultimate moment of the novel. Joyce depicts in this immeasurably significant period of Stephen's creative arising the young man's wordless conversation with a joyful young woman wading in the seawater south of Howth Hill. Preceding this experience, he had restlessly embarked for the ocean while his father discussed his future with his mentor. So now, while walking along the sea shore, his shoes hung over his shoulder, Stephen turns over in his mind, the line, ' A day of dappled seaborne clouds,' and observes'
The phrase and the day and the scene synchronized in a chord. He then asks himself, 'Was it their colors? '. The phrase happens again but in a different form slightly later in the told prologue: ' Disheartened, he raised his eyes towards the slowly drifting clouds, dappled and seaborne.'. Here, Joyce in this way weaves Stephen's poetic awareness into the external account. Birdwoman's experience by its own is not subjected to the shape of the poem but is reformed by Joyce in a very poetic style that is free of the metrical limitations of were. Joyce conveys the all-encompassing silence of sea and sky into the foreground before Stephen observes the 'wild angle'; The clouds were drifting above him silently, and silently the sea tangle was drifting below him, and the grey warm air was still'. Inside this silence and tranquility, Stephen walks on, unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life, when abruptly he understands that somebody is there: A girl stood alone before him in the middle of the stream, gazing out to the sea. She appeared like one whose magic had altered into the likeness of a weird and lovely sea bird. Her long slim bare legs were subtle like of crane and clean save where an emerald trail of seaweed had shaped itself like a symbol over the flesh. Her thigh, was completer and softened as ivory. Her slate-blue skirts were kilted boldly about her waist and fit together behind her. Her bosom was as a bird's soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish l: and girlish and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face. The aloneness of Stephen has extended into an instant and wonderful sense of coordination with the help of the non-affected and uninterrupted girl who exposes to his poetic fancy to be a mythical bird goddess coming to see the earth but not destined to it. Her natural beauty stirs Stephen's finest feelings, not his grosser passions: 'Heavenly God! Cried Stephen's soul..' He turns away and sets of across the strand: On and on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him. This informative experience, which is enclosed by clear references to silence, later Joyce comments that ‘ her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy’.
It appears that silence is a stage for the outburst of joy has risen. At a critical point in the interpretation, as Stephen perceives the woman with her slate blue skirt kilted around her waist, gazing at the sea, the speaker narrates that the woman feels his existence and turns to him, in quiet tolerance. She then, ‘quietly withdraw her eyes from him and bent them towards the stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither’.
The silence is basically highlighted by the contrasting ‘faint noise, of gently moving water, little and faint and whispering, faint as bells of sleep; hither a thither.’ Stephen finally observes that ‘faint flame trembled on her cheek’ and then, after a paragraph break, his screams 'Heavenly God! Happens. In conventional paragraph break, the blissful reply has risen, leading to an overwhelming sense of new freedom. But the most dramatic and expectant textual gap happens amid Stephen's falling asleep on the beach, defined as a 'swooning into some new world, imaginary, blurred, undefined as undersea,' and his return to normal waking awareness. As he mirrors on this 'under sea' like experience, Stephen wonders whether it is indeed:
‘A world, a glimmer, pr a flower? glimmering and trembling, trembling and unfolding, a brake light, an opening flower, it spreads in endless succession to itself, breaking in full crimson and unfolding and fading to palest rose, leaf by leaf and wave of light by a wave of light, flooding all the heavens with its soft flushes, every flush deeper than others.’
That ‘it spreads in endless succession’ to its own undoubtedly shows that it is totally self-referral phenomenon. It encloses inside itself pure, radiance sight and delicate, trembling sense, remaining a lively fullness. Stephen has apparently revealed the way of originality in his own self. In the next paragraph:
‘Evening had fallen when he woke and the sand and arid grasses of his bed glowed no longer. He rose slowly and, recalling the rapture of his sleep, sighed at its joy.’
In between these two sections of paragraph, a textual gap has happened, for Stephen awoke after an undefine time lap. His considerations suggest that some different option from profound, latent rest has passed, for we are told, rather confusingly, that Stephen recalls, ‘the rapture of his sleep’. It might mean from one perspective that the rose of light was only the result of an excellent dream. Still, on the off chance that it has been a fantasy vision, it appears to have occurred before Stephen really tumbled to rest, since the content simply expresses that he 'shut his eyes in the sluggishness of rest,' and that 'his spirit was fainting into some new world,' not, indeed, that he has really submitted to sleep. On the other hand, the text visibly shows that in the interim, ‘Evening had fallen?’. Maybe, Joyce is hinting that Stephen ‘envisioned’ the paradisical rose since he had been dozing off, but that he directly had an inspiring though the contradictory sounding experience of being awake in the sleep state.
In sum, the textual gap that follows Stephen's vision of the bird-woman as he rests on the sea shore, to the extent that it successfully expresses a silent ‘witnessing’ experience, fills in as a significant transition from a limited perspective on oneself and its connection to the world, to a radiant new sense of the power of the creative self. It is much the same as the condition of aesthetic capture that Joyce goes to considerable lengths to outline in the last piece of a portrait and turns into the motivation for Stephen's last break with established religion.
