Nektaria KLAPAKI Modern Literary Epiphany in Cavafy, Sikelianos and Embiricos: Towards a Secularization and a Subversion of Div

Nektaria KLAPAKI Modern Literary Epiphany in Cavafy, Sikelianos and Embiricos: Towards a Secularization and a Subversion of Divine Epiphany

The present paper discusses some characteristic manifestations of the concept of modern literary epiphany in the work of three mainstream twentieth-century Greek poets, Cavafy, Sikelianos and Embiricos, and examines its relation with the concept of divine epiphany. Drawing on a broad understanding of the ancient Greek tradition of divine epiphany and on recent critical discussions of the concept of modern literary epiphany, this paper submits that the above three Modern Greek poets employ epiphany in accordance with the Joycean usage of the term, to convey, that is, short-lived moments of secular revelation, during which a perceiver suddenly feels that he gains a new insight into reality accompanied by the sensation of a momentary transcendence of time.

Exploring further the relation of those poets’ secular epiphanies with the ancient Greek tradition of divine epiphany, it is argued that, whilst all three poets trace the origins of the epiphanies they illustrate back to the meridian manifestations of divinities in antiquity, mainly by way of appropriating some of their key motifs and aspects, they claim nonetheless that man alone can give rise to revelatory moments by transforming, through the power of his mind and his imagination, the ordinary, even trivial elements of everyday experience into revelatory manifestations of personal significance. In so doing the Modern Greek epiphanists acknowledge that the literary epiphany is the secular outgrowth of an essentially religious tradition of revelatory moments, while at the same time they enter into a polemical dialogue with this tradition, in an attempt to subvert one of its most fundamental assumptions, the idea that revelation has heavenly origins.