Drama Criticism | Exiles, James Joyce - Francis Fergusson (essay date 1932)

Francis Fergusson (essay date 1932)

SOURCE: Fergusson, Francis. “Exiles and Ibsen's Work.” Hound and Horn 5, no. 3 (April–June 1932): 345–53.

[In the following essay, Fergusson discusses Ibsen's influence on Joyce.]

In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we read of Stephen that “as he went by Baird's stonecutting works in Talbot Place the spirit of Ibsen would blow through him like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty.” This spirit blows through Exiles with a super-Ibsen keenness over a colder-than-Ibsen structure of cut stone. Professor Rubek, in When We Dead Awaken, asks Irene with weariness and bewilderment, “Do you remember what you answered when I asked if you would go with me out into the wide world?”

IRENE:

I held up three fingers in the air and swore that I would go with you to the world's end and to the end of life. And that I would serve you in all things....

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