The Catholic Connection (Coda)
In the end, Guido and Stephen choose not to partake in their parents' hypocrisy. As artists, they struggle instead to express the truth behind their experiences. In Book Five of Portrait, Stephen equates truth with beauty. This association is apt in describing the states of epiphany that he and Guido experience on the beach.
At the close of Book Two, Stephen beholds a young girl "alone and still, gazing out to sea." She inspires him to have a revelation of sexual and artistic import (Joyce, 58).
"She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and wonderful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delicate as a crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashioned itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as ivory, were bared almost to the hips where the white fringes of her drawers were like featherings of soft white down."
By likening the girl to a bird, Stephen downplays her human characteristics. According to Bloom, this is done out of a subconscious need to suppress his lust for her. Stephen feels obliged to submerge his sense of arousal in the interest of advancing his art. From an object of sexual desire, the "bird girl" is imaginatively transformed by Stephen into creative fodder. She serves, in fact, as the inspiration for his first serious piece of writing. Bloom accedes that "Stephen believes..he has purified his sensuous encounter by making it into an object of art." It follows that the experience on the beach, and the ensuing epiphany are looked upon by Stephen in reverent terms. For him, the bird girl becomes affiliated with the Holy Spirit. Her bosom, like "the breast of some darkplumaged dove," suggests the Holy Ghost, traditionally represented as a dove in Christian art. Stephen, as purveyor of the Word, imaginatively begets a surrogate Holy Spirit in his ecstatic vision of the bird-girl.
Just as the Spirit's descent upon the disciples resulted in their rebirth as Christians, the bird girl's foray into Stephen's psyche now spurs his new life as an artist.
In one sense, Guido's romp with Saraghinia is an epiphany because it transforms his perception of women. At the time of the event, he is still a young boy. Judith Crist holds him to be eight and a half, the same age as Fellini when he reportedly had his first sexual encounter. Guido, then, is completely ingenuous about sex. For him, the carnal posturing of Saraghinia is a new and titillating source of awe. The
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