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In their studies of epiphany, literary critics often arrive at a distinction between two different types: epiphany as an experience and epiphany as a textual record of that experience. As Herbert Tucker has quipped, epiphany is the “account of an experience” and “the account of an experience” (1208; original italics); it is “something lived through, yet also something written down” (1208). Critics keep returning to this insight because the terms of analysis must shift if the object of study is a lived event or if it is a text. Are we talking about Stephen Daedalus’s epiphany while walking down Eccles Street, or are we talking about the poem Stephen wrote to capture it? Or are we talking about James Joyce’s novel about Stephen Daedalus walking down Eccles Street, having an epiphany, and writing a poem about it? Yet when it comes to epiphany and who has one, or who writes about it, there remains a third axis in addition to the author or the character: namely, the reader, who may suddenly “see” something in or through a text while reading. Such experiences are moments of critical or interpretive fire. What role does epiphany play in the process of critical reading?

Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850) tells the story of a young girl, bereft of her parents, who is sent to live with a mean aunt on a farm. Despite her talent for cooking delicious country meals, the aunt does not know how to relate to her ten-year-old niece, Ellen Montgomery, or how to comfort her for the loss of her mother. She soon subjects Ellen to a life of arbitrary frustration. In her struggles, Ellen finds friends like Alice Humphreys, a young woman who shares Ellen’s love of nature, learning, and religion. Alice and her brother John welcome Ellen as an adoptive sister and teach her how to face her problems, helping her mature into a devout Christian.

In the trivial, ugly, sordid, and vulgar, a young James Joyce noted sudden perceptions that he called epiphany. The chatter in a pub, fake condolences, a bit of seaweed on a girl’s thigh—such negligible things unexpectedly lit up in the mind and sparked the writing of texts. Joyce wrote his epiphanies into a notebook then later spun them into poems and novels. Although he experimented with them for decades, casting them into a startling verbal pyrotechnics by Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce never defined epiphany except through the manuscript Stephen Hero (1904–1906).

William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942) presents the epiphany of a nonpassive being: the bear. The bear is purely phenomenal, like Lily’s brushstroke, but unlike the brushstroke, it is alive. It moves, watches, and hunts, eluding the men who hunt it and make it an object of their games and tall tales. When Isaac McCaslin sees the bear, the bear looks back. It is a wild animal and thus an authentic Other: sentient but not human, conscious but without a human pattern of thought, unassimilable to human terms except through destruction. The look of this Other plays a decisive role in forming Isaac. More than the boy seeing the bear, Isaac’s being seen by the bear makes him the Ike who becomes uncle to half the county while father to no one.

Born in 1819, Susan Warner and George Eliot both grew intensely religious in the late 1830s, started publishing fiction in the 1850s, and died in the 1880s. Like Warner, Eliot adapted Pilgrim’s Progress and the paradigms of spiritual autobiography into her work, seen most clearly in The Mill on the Floss (1860).1 Yet while Warner brought this spirituality into novels of contemporary life, Eliot set most of her novels in the past—the historical past that is prior to her present day but just after the age of religious faith, somewhere in its “afterglow.” Her first novel Adam Bede (1859) takes place “half a century ago, while there was yet a lingering after-glow from the time when Wesley and his fellow-labourer … [carried] a divine message to the poor” (47). In Middlemarch (1872–1874), one of her last novels, the age of Saint Theresa is long gone, leaving only “dim lights and tangled circumstance” (xiii).

Joyce “invented” epiphany when he was 19 and still in college. Young, cocky, and poor, he wrote down his theory in pieces from 1901–1906, as he set about forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. Joyce would later portray epiphany as a youthful fad or infatuation. In the early twentieth century, however, an august, even “ponderous” (Safranski 410), thinker independently developed a parallel theory of epiphany: Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) (1927) is one of the most significant philosophical works of the last century. Both the edgy novelist and the university professor offered epiphany as an aesthetic counterpoint to the modern technological eye. Both drew upon ancient Greek epiphaneia as a resistance to Roman Catholicism. Moreover, both referred to Thomas Aquinas to explain their theories of epiphany.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) whirls with a myriad revelations, like “when all at once he realised that it was this: it was this:—she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen” (16). Sparked at random, these modern epiphanies constantly erupt into the text: Lily’s intuition that Mrs. Ramsay wants her to marry, the sudden attraction of the word “flounder” (49), the exquisite scimitar shape of rooks. The breeziness of Woolf’s style drives an endless firing of synapses in the brain, an energy Woolf craved since she found the Victorian epiphany both hackneyed and stale.