“Welcomers”: James Joyce and Frederic W. H. Myers

Abstract

James Joyce’s brief essay, “The Portrait of the Artist” (1904) remains one of the writer’s most enigmatic texts. Drawing on the purported apparition of Joyce’s mother after her death in late 1903 and his reading of Frederic W.H. Myers’s compendium of occult and spiritist phenomena, Human Personality, and its Survival of Bodily Death (1903) in this same period, the author shows the many possible correspondences existing between Joyce’s essay and Myers’s study and how the 1904 “Portrait” represents the emergence of the spectral and occult as significant themes in Joyce, ultimately leading him to recast his sense and function of Epiphany.