Exiles, James Joyce - Bernard Bandler (essay date 1933)

Bernard Bandler (essay date 1933)

SOURCE: Bandler, Bernard. “Joyce's Exiles.” Hound and Horn 6, no. 2 (January–March 1933): 266–85.

[In the following essay, Bandler discusses the conflict between artistic ideals and man's human nature in Exiles.]

The note of exile recurs frequently in our age. It is the one constant among the voices which have most engaged contemporary attention in literature, dissimilar as those voices otherwise are as in Proust, Eliot, and Joyce. Yet the note is not new: it has been sounded in the occident from the time of the Orphic mysteries and the Pythagorean order and magnificently by the youthful Plato. Similar circumstances everywhere prompt it. When the conditions of life are difficult, treacherous, and unstable, the soul of man repudiates its natural relation to the body and seeks its true home elsewhere. In some way or other it seeks to detach itself from the foreign and inimical substance in...

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