[In the following essay, Tysdahl discusses the influence of Ibsen on Exiles.]

In appearance Exiles is like one of Ibsen's realistic dramas from beginning to end. Joyce's stage-directions begin, as if copied from A Doll's House or An Enemy of the People, with a minute description of the drawing-room; then follows, in a new paragraph, a sketch of the persons we see on the stage. Throughout the play stage-directions are frequent, often in the form of an adverb to indicate the tone of a speech. Words like ‘heartily’ or ‘shyly’ are used as often in Exiles as in The Masterbuilder. Behind these outer resemblances lies the fact that, like Ibsen, Joyce deliberately chose the present time and the ordinary parlour as the setting for his drama. In his articles on Ibsen's plays Joyce had praised the Norwegian dramatist for his courage to put life—real life—on the stage, without the conventions or embellishments that had often served to veil reality. And this is Joyce's aim, just as in a grim, reformist way it was John Galsworthy's in the plays which he wrote at the time. No purple passages, no farce, no extravagant characters were admitted. Exiles was to be a realistic play.

But the notes¹ which Joyce made while he was working on Exiles show us that realism was not his only aim. In the notes Bertha is more of a symbol than a real person. She is compared to the moon—her age is twenty-eight, the number of days in a lunar (and menstrual) cycle—and to the earth: ‘She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts’ (p. 167). As in Dubliners and A Portrait Joyce wants to transcend the rigid realism for which he praised the old playwright in 1900. This attempt may in itself testify to an influence—not from Ibsen the realist, but Ibsen the symbolist. In 1914 Joyce is consciously aware of these other qualities in the Norwegian: in the notes he mentions ‘the Scandinavian women (Hedda Gabler, Rebecca Rosmer [sic], Asta Allmers) whom the poetic genius of Ibsen created’ (p. 173).

There is more symbolism in the notes than in the play itself, where Bertha's associations with the moon are restricted to Robert's not very original compliment:

ROBERT:
(Moves his hands slowly past his eyes.) You passed. The avenue was dim with dusky light. I could see the dark green masses of the trees. And you passed beyond them. You were like the moon.
BERTHA:
(Laughs.) Why like the moon?
ROBERT:
In that dress, with your slim body, walking with little even steps. I saw the moon passing in the dusk till you passed and left my sight.

(p. 39)

More is made of her likeness to the earth. In the second act, when Robert puts his arm round Bertha's shoulder, he tells her to listen to the summer rain and says:

The rain falling. Summer rain on the earth. Night rain. The darkness and warmth and flood of passion. Tonight the earth is loved—loved and possessed. Her lover's arms around her; and she is silent. Speak, dearest!

(p. 125)

She reminds Robert of the rich, fertile earth; and as the only wife and mother in the cast she might have been shaped into a modern Gea-Tellus, as Molly Bloom was to be in Ulysses. But Joyce develops other traits in her. She becomes a bit confused, though she behaves naturally and remains composed when Robert confesses his love and asks for permission to kiss her, but when Richard tells her that he is going to visit the cottage where Robert has arranged for the rendezvous she becomes furious and miserable. In the second act her bewilderment grows; and she begs her husband helplessly to tell her what to do (p. 106). In the last scene, in her concluding words, she is again the woman who instinctively knows her way—something of an earth-symbol again—but by then we have witnessed her realistic misery for so long that the symbolic side of her character has been considerably weakened. The final impression is one of a beautiful, bewildered, essentially human woman without the consistently symbolic function of some of Ibsen's ‘Scandinavian women’.

The first two lines of Joyce's notes give us the cryptic information that Richard is ‘an automystic’ and Robert ‘an automobile’. Here, too, Joyce has probably had some symbolic properties in the two characters in mind, but I cannot find that these are developed in the play. Archie's role, on the other hand, is left virtually untouched in the notes while in the play he seems to carry greater symbolic weight than the adults. He is happy as none of the grown-up people are; he enters the room through the window twice, obviously a thing Joyce has included to suggest the atmosphere of sunlight and fresh air which Archie brings with him. He stands in the play as the embodiment of the possibilities of the future. ‘Perhaps, there, Richard’, says Robert, ‘is the freedom we seek—… In him and not in us’ (p. 158).

Joyce has tried, it seems, to unite the first impression he had of the perfect drama which should be realistic as A Doll's House and Pillars of Society were and his later understanding of Ibsen's use of symbols. The result is not a play like The Wild Duck, where there is a symbiosis between parlour-realism and poetic symbolism. Exiles remains a play firmly in the realistic tradition—with patches of symbolism rather incongruously stitched to it. Again, as in the case of the early epiphanies, Joyce was not quite successful as an epigone. But that he could master an interplay between realism and symbolism is evident from the other work he was engaged on in 1914. Writing A Portrait, Joyce did not feel the same oppressive weight of Ibsen's example; and lessons from the master could be incorporated more naturally in these books.²

That Joyce's reading of Ibsen influenced the dramatic art of Exiles can also be demonstrated in other aspects of the play. The dialogue is strikingly similar to that of Ibsen's later works, as the following example from the first act of Exiles can illustrate. Most of the information which the audience can glean from the scene between Richard and Beatrice in Act I is couched in the same evasive dialogue that Ibsen very often used to hint at some important point. Richard asks a question that requires nothing but yes or no for an answer, but Beatrice does not answer straightforwardly:

RICHARD:
… Tell me, Miss Justice, did you feel that what you read was written for your eyes? Or that you inspired me?
BEATRICE:
(Shakes her head.) I need not answer that question.
RICHARD:
What then?
BEATRICE:
(Is silent for a moment.) I cannot say it. You yourself must ask me, Mr Rowan.
RICHARD:
(With some vehemence.) Then that I expressed in those chapters and letters, and in my character and life as well, something in your soul which you could not—pride or scorn?
BEATRICE:
Could not?
RICHARD:
(Leans towards her.) Could not because you dared not. Is that why?
BEATRICE:
(Bends her head.) Yes.

(pp. 21-22)

In the dialogue of Ibsen's later plays a question is often answered by a new question, by a declaration of ignorance or by a blunt unwillingness to answer, as this example from The Masterbuilder will illustrate:

SOLNESS:
(closing the folder, getting up, and going nearer to her) You just see, Aline—in future things will be better with us. Far more comfortable. Life will be easier—especially for you.
MRS Solness:
(looking at him) In future?
SOLNESS:
Yes, believe me, Aline—
MRS Solness:
Do you mean—because she's come here?
SOLNESS
(checking himself): I mean, of course—when we've once moved into the new house.
MRS Solness:
(taking her outdoor coat) Oh, do you think so, Halvard? That it will be better then?
SOLNESS:
I can't believe it won't. And surely you think so too?
MRS Solness:
I don't think about the new house at all.

(Act II, Una Ellis-Fermor's translation)

In Ibsen and Joyce alike, the dialogue tends to be long-drawn with too much mincing of words. Still, at times, both attain a fine balance between suggestiveness and clarity—Joyce notably in the last scene of Exiles, Ibsen through whole plays. At his best Ibsen escapes flaccid dialogue by introducing richer overtones than Joyce does. In the extract from The Masterbuilder quoted above, the new and the old house of the Solness family—both heavy with symbolic meaning and effective reminders of the past—add significance to a dialogue that would otherwise be limp, as does the shadow of the intruder, Hilde Wangel.

Since Joyce sets Exiles going with Richard Rowan's return to Ireland, he has to give the necessary information about the past in retrospective glimpses. Early in the first act Richard and Beatrice start recalling the days before Richard left Ireland and their correspondence during the years when he was away. What is eventually revealed is the story of Richard's elopement with Bertha. The relationship between the four main persons was very much the same at that time as it is in the play. In her intellectual way, Beatrice has been drawn towards Richard all the time; and Richard has found in her the intellectual companion he could not find in Bertha. Robert has been in love with Bertha all the time, and lost her when she went abroad with Richard, as he loses her at the end of the play when she says to her husband, ‘I am yours’ (p. 162). As the emotional patterns and the conflicting forces of the past are just the ones we meet on the stage, the gradual retrospection becomes no overwhelming revelation to the characters and the audience; it does not basically change the attitude of the persons while they are on the stage and therefore leaves Exiles without the growth in the characters and in their understanding of each other which Ibsen is careful to present. In When We Dead Awaken Maja understands how closely Rubek is tied to Irene and leaves him; Rubek gets to know how futile his life has been; and Irene comes nearer an understanding of her role in Rubek's life and at the end loves him again. All this, improbable though it may be, happens as a consequence of the past that is unrolled. Similarly, in The Lady from the Sea, the full knowledge of the past—revealed on the stage—alters the lives of Ellida, Dr Wangel, and the Stranger. In Exiles the past is only loosely related to the present, and unable to change the characters and motivate the action. We have seen that Joyce was aware of the importance of retrospection as a dramatic device. He praises Ibsen's use of it in his review of When We Dead Awaken. At that time, however, Joyce was not aware of the dynamic nature of the past as Ibsen unrolls it; and Exiles testifies to no deeper insight into this aspect. As it is revealed in Joyce's play, the past is without sufficient dramatic force.

In dialogue, use of symbols, and retrospective technique Exiles presents itself as a hotchpotch of material—partly well grasped and partly not—from Ibsen. The characters and the incidents in the play strengthen this impression, while at the same time they show that it is from Ibsen, and not from nineteenth-century drama in general, that Joyce derived most of his ideas about dramaturgy. The many analogies to the action and the dramatis personae in Ibsen indicate that Joyce's imagination drew on the dramatic world of the Norwegian all the time, and that he used this world even when the situation or character remembered seems to us to fit ill into its new place. Indeed, elements from Ibsen are used so indiscriminately that it makes more sense to describe them one by one, as I shall do in the following, than to attempt to discuss them in relation to any thematic core in Exiles that might have given them all a coherent meaning in their new context.

The human situation that we meet in the opening scene presents a good example of Joyce's indebtedness. Richard Rowan comes home after years in a foreign country, just like Professor Rubek in When We Dead Awaken and Osvald in Ghosts, or Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck, who returns from a self-imposed exile in an inland mining area. Indeed, almost all Ibsen's later plays are set in motion by some person who returns home. Like Rubek and Osvald, Richard is an artist, even if he is unlike Rubek in that he has completed no acclaimed masterpiece and unlike Osvald in that he has achieved something.

Robert Hand, the friend of the family, has near spiritual relatives in Ibsen, where an important role is often given to such a ‘friend’, who may set the plot going or be a foil to another character. Good examples are Arnholm in The Lady from the Sea and Kroll in Rosmersholm. In Hedda Gabler Judge Brack wants to seduce the wife of his friend and brings news of a professorship, just as Robert Hand does in Exiles.³

In his early writings Joyce noticed Ibsen's preference for a set of three characters,⁴ and one of Ibsen's triangles is mother-father-only child. Joyce may well have got some impulse towards the introduction of Archie as an only son from Ibsen. Another reason why Joyce gave Richard and Bertha only one child was probably his wish to avoid too conspicuous similarities between the Rowans and his own family, which supplied so much material for Exiles.

Bitter conflicts between the generations are revealed in the play. In a tense scene Richard Rowan tells Beatrice about his mother:

She drove me away. On account of her I lived years in exile and poverty too, or near it. I never accepted the doles she sent me through the bank. I waited, too, not for her death but for some understanding of me, her own son, her own flesh and blood; that never came.

(p. 27)

After having prayed for his ‘dead mother's hardness of heart’, he turns to the memory of his father:

(… points to the crayon drawing on the wall.) Do you see him there, smiling and handsome? His last thoughts! I remember the night he died. (He pauses for an instant and then goes on calmly.) I was a boy of fourteen. He called me to his bedside. He knew I wanted to go to the theatre to hear Carmen. He told my mother to give me a shilling. I kissed him and went. When I came home he was dead. Those were his last thoughts as far as I know.

(p. 28)

He goes on to say, ‘He will help me, perhaps, my smiling handsome father.’ Richard Rowan's parents and his attitude to them have close parallels in Peer Gynt. The spendthrift Jon Gynt, Peer's father, was smiling and handsome. Mother Åse has nothing of the rigidity of Richard's mother, but is, like her, conventionally religious. Mrs Rowan died ‘fortified by the rites of holy church’ (p. 26); Mother Åse asks Peer to fetch her collection of sermons and read to her. Brand offers an equally interesting resemblance: the conflict between Richard and old Mrs Rowan is as bitter and deep as the gulf between Brand and his mother. In one way the roles are reversed, however. In Brand the mother is worldly and the son wholly dedicated to his ideals, while in Exiles it is the son who does not conform to the religious standards of the mother. In both plays the mother dies without any reconciliation with the son. These similarities are striking, but the mother-father-son situation in Exiles is not simply an echo from Ibsen. It is an essential part of Joyce's idea of a family; and its roots can be seen in his own early life.⁵

Exiles offers another similarity to Ibsen in the possibility of a renversement des alliances as we find it in When We Dead Awaken. Professor Harry Levin suggests this⁶ and is right, I think, in saying that it is nothing but a possibility in Exiles. The double set of partners certainly bears a strong resemblance to When We Dead Awaken, though one must stretch the imagination rather far to find, as Mrs Macleod does,⁷ clear correspondences between Ulfheim and Robert Hand, Maja and Bertha, Irene and Beatrice, Richard Rowan and Rubek. The differences between them are as marked as the similarities. It is the situation embodied in When We Dead Awaken which is revived in Exiles.

Behind this situation, as well as behind the conflict between generations, the family-relations in John Gabriel Borkman can be glimpsed. Richard Rowan remembers his mother's ‘hardness of heart’; a similar mother and the same metaphorical description of her heart can be found in Ibsen's play. Mrs Borkman's heart is ‘cold’ and ‘hard’; and she wants to possess her son and form him in her own image, but in the end the son chooses a woman who presents a clear contrast to the rigour of the mother. Though unlike Bertha in most respects, this woman, Mrs Wilton, serves like her as a symbol of human warmth; and in her company the young man can live a life in freedom from the restrictions that his mother wanted to impose on him. The older generation in Ibsen's play offers another analogy to the lives of Richard, Bertha, Beatrice, and Robert Hand. Richard has John Gabriel Borkman's dedication, and like him he has had to choose between two women, one whom he loved and one who might further his career. Borkman's choice is not Richard's; Joyce's hero chooses the woman he loves, and thus the marriages of the heroes are different in tone and content in the two plays. In spite of this, there occurs both in John Gabriel Borkman and Exiles the possibility of a renversement des alliances—in Joyce when Bertha and Richard misunderstand each other, in Ibsen in the renewed understanding and love between John Gabriel and Ella Rentheim. In John Gabriel Borkman the slighted lover is very much in the background; and the whole analogy between the two plays is, of course, only moderately close, but still close enough to provide another illustration of Joyce the dramatist working on patterns that can be found in Ibsen.

In the themes and attitudes that underlie the various incidents and the individual characters of Exiles there are further similarities to Ibsen.⁸ An important theme is brought out in Richard's attitude to his wife. He wants her to choose between him and Robert in freedom. When Bertha accuses him, ‘Because I am simple you think you can do what you like with me’, he repeatedly answers, ‘I have allowed you complete liberty’ (p. 73). Even when Bertha appeals to him to decide for her, he declines:

BERTHA:
… Why do you not defend me then against him? Why do you go away from me now without a word? Dick, my God, tell me what you wish me to do?
RICHARD:
I cannot, dear. (Struggling with himself.) Your own heart will tell you. …

(p. 106)

The resemblances are great between the treatment of this idea in Exiles and in The Lady from the Sea.⁹ When the Stranger enters in the last act of Ibsen's play Dr. Wangel first insists on his right as husband to decide for Ellida. But when he understands that she must feel free to regain her mental health, he leaves all talk of authority and says hesitantly, but decisively: ‘And so—so I'll—cancel the bargain at once.—You may choose your way now—in full—in full freedom.’ The play ends in a short dialogue between Ellida and her husband about her new life ‘in freedom’ and ‘under responsibility’.

Both Bertha and Ellida—in their freedom—eventually choose their husbands, but the situations they are placed in are widely different. Dr. Wangel has a great capacity for love, but is conventional and possessive, a pillar of society quite unlike Richard Rowan. It takes the combined elements of a love that is refined during the play and a doctor's eye for a cathartic treatment to change Wangel's attitude so that he allows Ellida the freedom she needs. Richard, on the other hand, presses freedom on Bertha, who really wants to be guided by her husband. Richard even wants her to be unfaithful in order to see his jealousy fulfilled:

In this play Richard's jealousy is carried one step nearer to its own heart. Separated from hatred and having its baffled lust converted into an erotic stimulus and moreover holding in its own power the hindrance, the difficulty which has excited it, it must reveal itself as the very immolation of the pleasure of possession on the altar of love. He is jealous, wills and knows his own dishonour and the dishonour of her, …

(Notes, pp. 163-164)

Richard's motives are of two sorts, partly concern for his wife that she should be a person in her own right, and partly masochism and even sadism. Joyce was aware of this and calls the play ‘a rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher Masoch’ (Notes, p. 172). The idea of love that emerges from the marriage of Bertha and Richard is tragic in its final consequences. The freedom of the individual can never be reconciled to the demands of love. Freedom and love are both fundamental values, and they seem mutually exclusive in the last scene of Exiles. As the conclusion of The Lady from the Sea is exactly the opposite—freedom and love can coexist and even reinforce each other in a marriage—there is no question of Joyce having taken the denouement of his play from Ibsen.¹⁰

The theme of freedom for the wife is one among others in Exiles, while it is the centre of The Lady from the Sea. ‘The affirmative doctrine of freedom and responsibility’ which Mrs Macleod finds in Exiles¹¹ is partly overshadowed by other motifs: jealousy as portrayed in Richard, treacherous friendship as in the relations between Richard and Robert, and what looks like another main theme, the artist's—and man's—loneliness. In Finnegans Wake Joyce asks, ‘Was liffe worth leaving?’¹² This is just the question Ibsen, in a less oblique way, put to himself and his audience in When We Dead Awaken. Richard Rowan in Exiles has faced a similar problem: should he leave Bertha (life) to live with Beatrice whose congeniality is of great importance to his art, but who is ‘dead’ compared to the motherly, earthly, womanly Bertha? Bertha admits readily enough that she does not understand her husband's ideas and adds about Beatrice, ‘She will understand it!’ (p. 76). But again there is a difference between When We Dead Awaken where Irene meant an overwhelming inspiration and at the same time represents life, and Exiles where Beatrice's mind, in Joyce's own words,

is an abandoned cold temple in which hymns have risen heavenward in a distant past but where now a doddering priest offers alone and hopelessly prayers to the Most High.

(Notes, p. 168)

The title of the play was meant to stress another side of the same predicament:

Why the title Exiles? A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her payable on their return. The elder brother in the fable of the Prodigal Son is Robert Hand. The father took the side of the prodigal.

(Notes, p. 164)

Like the Prodigal Son Richard Rowan left his country and the conventional life his mother wanted him to live. But the theme of exile is not developed in terms of the artist's estrangement in the play—and Joyce may have felt that the title which he had decided on at an early stage was somewhat incongruous as he gave it supplementary and more matter-of-fact meaning in the notes: ‘Exiles—also because at the end either Robert or Richard must go into exile.’ (Notes, p. 172.)

Beneath the actual exile to which either Robert or Richard is consigned, as well as beneath the art-versus-life dilemma, there may be the related and more basic theme of ‘the ultimate loneliness and doubt that must possess the soul, the inevitable exile of man’.¹³Exiles ends on this note, Richard stubbornly repeating that he has ‘a deep wound of doubt’ in his soul. Richard is essentially lonely in the play; but other characters like Robert and especially Bertha seem to me to carry rich possibilities of human contact; and Richard's own loneliness is so willed that it cannot, without a great many qualifications, represent the sort of loneliness that must possess the soul. Loneliness in Ibsen is a different thing. In An Enemy of the People Dr Stockman finally finds himself triumphantly alone and says, ‘The strongest man in the world is the one who is most alone’. But his loneliness is political; he stands happily surrounded by his family with which he feels one when he says this. And even though the heroes of Ibsen's later plays, a Solness or a Rubek, are unique, and therefore to a certain extent lonely men, they respond to, and develop in close fellowship with, another person. Hedda Gabler and John Gabriel Borkman are lonely, but both have been brought by outer forces and their own deceptions into their isolation: their exile is not inevitable in the way Joyce intended Richard's to be.

While Ibsen's later plays generally centre round one motif, Exiles has no focus, and the themes in it scarcely fuse in an organic whole. The theme of freedom for the wife is weakened by being centred ‘on the fairly negligible matter of a seduction’, as Mrs Macleod points out.¹⁴ Even if a seduction is not always a negligible matter, it is so half-hearted in Exiles—the only one who seems to want it with some zest is the husband—that Richard's words about liberty become much too grand for the situation. The artist's dilemma is weakened in a similar way: too little is made of Richard as a writer and Beatrice as a source of inspiration to make it a focal theme. And loneliness as an inescapable quality in life is not well exemplified in a man who wants to be lonely.

A reason for this lack of a thematic centre may be found in one of the impulses that made Joyce write the play: Exiles is a work that grew out of a marital crisis which Joyce felt very acutely; so acutely, I think, that the artistic detachment he had praised in Ibsen and made his programme in A Portrait was lost in ‘the rough and tumble’. For Exiles does not owe almost everything to Ibsen except its poor execution. Joyce has certainly imitated Ibsen's dialogue and retrospective technique; and the characters as well as the action and the ideas of Exiles remind one of Ibsen. But the urge to write the play and the basic situation in it came from Joyce's own life: Joyce had gone abroad with a woman without marrying her; he had been away from his country for many years; he had, he thought, been met by treachery when he returned; and he had seen another man make advances to his wife. This man was the Triestine journalist Prezioso, who had been a good friend of Joyce, had helped him with references for applications and had some articles by Joyce published in his newspaper. One of his tributes to Nora is found in Exiles where Brigid says to Bertha: ‘Sure he thinks the sun shines out of your face, ma'am’ (p. 128). Nora told her husband everything, just as Bertha does. But Joyce, unlike Richard Rowan, told Prezioso to keep off. Still, Joyce had allowed Prezioso's endeavours for some time, and, says Ellmann, ‘studied them for secrets of the human spirit’.¹⁵

Further, Joyce's trip to Ireland in 1909 was put into Exiles, incident by incident:

The trip to Dublin had been at once turbulent and pointed. Moving through the events of Joyce's brief stay there are, in phantasmagoria, the outlines of Exiles and Ulysses. … In Exiles Robert Hand, Richard Rowan's best friend, cordially tries to help him secure a post as professor of Italian at the University, writes about him in the newspaper, and at the same time tries to cuckold him. The cordiality is Gogarty's, the attempt to help him with a teaching position and an article in the newspaper is Kettle's, the attempt to cuckold him is Cosgrave's.¹⁶

Thus, incidents, characters, and themes from Joyce's immediate experience were used in Exiles. As Ibsen was one of those who formed Joyce's understanding and interpretation of his own life he may be indirectly responsible for the form and emphasis of some of the personal matter in the play; but the raw materials are essentially Irish and personal, rather than literary and Norwegian. It was when he elaborated on his material to fashion the play that Joyce had Ibsen in mind all the time; and it is at this stage of composition—a fairly late one—that most of the Ibsen-elements we have considered found their place in Exiles. This lateness is certainly one of the reasons why some of the situations that Ibsen provided would not function as objective correlatives to what Joyce wanted to express.

Another reason why Exiles gives us the impression of being a poor attempt to write an Ibsen play is altogether different: Joyce did not set out only to write a realistic play; he also intended to do something that Ibsen had not done: he wanted to write a ‘metaphysical’ play.¹⁷ Richard Rowan is conceived as an ‘automystic’; and enigmatic though the word is, it indicates, I think, that Richard is not primarily seen as a social being whose actions and thoughts influence, and are influenced by, his surroundings, but as an individual separated from human fellowship. He is meant to fight out his problems with forces more general and more mystical than impulses from his wife and friends. In my opinion, Joyce has not succeeded in bringing out this metaphysical dimension in the play; but the intention is there and accounts for much of the solipsism present in the portrait of Richard Rowan.¹⁸

Exiles is sometimes seen as a landmark in Joyce's relations to Ibsen—as far as Exiles apprenticeship, after the play artistic independence. A. Walton Litz says, ‘In Exiles he exorcised the spectre of Ibsen, …’.¹⁹ It is true that Ibsen is nowhere more immediately recognizable than in this play; but this is due to the fact that Exiles is a work in the same genre as Ibsen's. Joyce could take over ready-made techniques and situations as he had done in his ‘dramatic’ epiphanies. But the adaptability of Ibsen's devices is no true measure of the influence of the Norwegian on Joyce. This influence is equally well, or better, illustrated in Ulysses, to the style and structure of which Ibsen's plays contributed even though none of the devices of a playwright could be used without modifications in that book.

If Stephen is a character made of the sum total of the characteristics of the heroes in Ibsen's early plays, or if he is built on Joyce's early life and this life was decisively influenced by Ibsen, then it may be true to say that Exiles marks the end of a period of dependence. For Exiles, and A Portrait which was completed in the same year (1915), are the last works in which the rebellious artist (Stephen and Richard) is a main character. But if one tends to think that the raw materials for Stephen came from Joyce's own life, and that his youth and early manhood was determined largely by other forces than a dramatist whom he chose as his idol, then Exiles presents no evidence of being a watershed in Joyce's relations to Ibsen. From the first epiphanies to Ulysses Ibsen provided equally important help on another plane, that of literary art and craft; and, what is highly significant, there were parallels to be found in Ibsen, not only to Stephen and Richard Rowan, but to Bloom and HCE, who represent Joyce's altered attitude to artists and common men.

Notes

1. These notes were first published in the 1952 edition of the play. Their fate is traced by Magalaner and Kain:

   ‘The notes … were found among Joyce's effects in Paris after the liberation. On his departure to the south of France in 1940, Joyce entrusted his books, manuscripts, and personal papers to his close friend and volunteer amanuensis, Paul Léon. Despite the tragic death of M. Léon in a concentration camp, most of the materials were preserved. … The books and manuscripts were displayed at the La Hune exhibit in Paris in 1949, and a year later the entire collection was sold to the University of Buffalo Library.’

   M. Magalaner and R. Kain, Joyce: The Man, the Work, the Reputation (N.Y.: New York Univ. Press, 1956), p. 139.

2. Cf. Chapter III.

3. Cf. P. Colum, ‘Introduction’, Exiles, p. 8.

4. Critical Writings, p. 99.

5. Cf. Chapter IV.

6. James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 34.

7. V. K. Macleod, ‘The Influence of Ibsen on Joyce’, PMLA, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Sept. 1945), p. 894.

8. Cf. James T. Farrell, ‘Exiles and Ibsen’, in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. S. Givens (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1963), pp. 110 ff.

9. These resemblances have been discussed at length by Mrs Macleod, op. cit., pp. 894-895.

10. In his insistence in Exiles on the romantic agony of impossible love Joyce may have been influenced by Knut Hamsun and Gunnar Heiberg, the foremost Norwegian exponents of a fin-de-siècle attitude to love.

11. V. K. Macleod, op. cit., p. 895.

12. Finnegans Wake, p. 230, 1. 25. ‘Liffe’ means life as well as the Liffey, which again is a symbol of Anna Livia, the great paragon of an earthbound, life-giving, non-intellectual woman.

13. M. Magalaner and R. Kain, Joyce: the Man, the Work, the Reputation (N.Y.: New York University Press, 1956), p. 137.

14. V. K. Macleod, op. cit., p. 895.

15. Ellmann, p. 327.

16. Ibid., p. 300.

17. Cf. Francis Fergusson's introduction to Exiles (Norfolk: New Directions, 1945), pp. v-xviii.

18. Cf. Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London. Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 34.

19. The Art of James Joyce (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961), p. 4.