[In the following essay, Clark outlines the critical reception of Exiles.]

The golden anniversary of the appearance of James Joyce's only surviving play,¹Exiles, is an occasion to note the relative and odd neglect accorded to this play in its first half century. An examination of the best Joyce bibliography² shows that only twenty-three of nearly 1500 entries are concerned with the work. Of these nearly half are limited to fewer than three pages of review of performances and the most elementary analysis of theme and character. Several others debate the rather insignificant question of whether the play is an “Ibsenite” drama or not. No more than six are significant contributions to Joyce scholarship.

One is initially puzzled by this neglect of a drama Francis Fergusson has called the “most terrible and beautiful of modern plays.”³ It is a work of profound importance in the study of Joyce's personality and temperament—a microcosm of the Joycean quest for freedom and “escape” from the traditional, the middle-class, the pedestrian. If Joyce is writing autobiographically in the character of Richard Rowan, as most believe, then the Joyce who is revealed is defeated by the very forces he ideationally scorns and rejects—the middle-class morality foreign to the artist who seeks without success a total freedom.

Perhaps it is the impossibility of explaining away Joyce's intellectual and emotional defeat which largely accounts for the neglect and shallow interpretations of Exiles by those who view its author as a hero of artistic freedom. The artist's white plume is held high—but at a terrible cost to the psyche.

That Exiles draws upon Joyce's personal experiences and attitudes can hardly be questioned or challenged, nor have commentators failed to make the identification of Joyce with Richard Rowan (named in commemoration of a friend of the patriot Wolfe Tone) and Nora Joyce with Bertha. Richard Ellmann frequently points out verbal and ideational parallels between Exiles and Joyce's personal writings and conversations.⁴ Robert Hand, who succeeds in cuckolding Richard while seeming to be his best friend, combines the easy cordiality of St. John Gogarty, a favorable newspaper article by Thomas Kettle in Joyce's defense, and Thomas Cosgrove's attempted seduction of Nora (James Joyce, p. 300), as well as an ardent Italian named Roberto Prezioso, whose flirtations with Nora were vaguely encouraged by Joyce's friendliness and hospitality (James Joyce, p. 328).

In his well-known Fortnightly Review article of 1900, Joyce expressed great admiration for and devotion to the person and art of Ibsen. It is tempting to suggest parallels between the lives and attitudes of Ibsen and Joyce: origin in back-water provinces of Europe; attempts to relate their art to the broad current of European culture; rejection of home, church, community, country; self-imposed exile; unrelenting dedication to their art; refusal to compromise principle or join battle with hostile critics. Even at eighteen Joyce saw Ibsen as a model:

I did not tell them what bound me closest to you. I did not say how what I could discern dimly of your life was my pride to see, how your battles inspired me—not the obvious material battles but those that were fought and won behind your forehead—how your willful resolution to wrest the secret from life gave me heart, and how in your absolute indifference to public cannons of art, friends and shibboleths you walked in the light of your inward heroism

(quoted in James Joyce, p. 90).

Joyce's 1901 pamphlet, “The Day of the Rabblement,” is a scathing denunciation of the Irish Literary Theatre; it concludes with an intense panegyric to the dying master in Christiania and boasts that a new follower, evidently Joyce, is standing by the door ready to follow Ibsen's example.

Joyce emulated Ibsen by leaving his homeland in 1902, returning the next year on the occasion of his mother's death. Interrupted by four other short visits, none after 1912, Joyce's life was an exile. There is no parallel to Ibsen's eventual return to Norway amid fame and veneration. With Joyce went Nora Barnacle, whom he would later marry. It will be remembered that Richard Rowan, the hero of Exiles, also spent some time abroad with a woman who was not his wife and also returns to Ireland for his mother's death.

Exiles, written in 1914, comes between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. The struggle to have the play produced and published was prolonged. The Stage Society of London and Yeats for the Abbey rejected it, the latter because Exiles was “the type of work the Abbey had never played well” and was “too far from the folk drama.”⁵ On May 25, 1918, Exiles was published by Grant Richards in England and B. W. Huebsch in New York. An unsuccessful, single performance occurred in Munich in 1919; a short New York run took place in 1925. In 1926 W. G. Fay produced Exiles for the Stage Society in London.

Exiles is a realistic, even naturalistic play, dividing its settings between a house in the Dublin suburb of Merrion and a cottage in Ranelagh. The time is the summer of 1912. Contemporaneity is stressed throughout. The stage directions are explicit to the point of tedium in detailing specifics about the set, calling, for example, for chairs “upholstered in faded green plush.”⁶

The principal characters of the play are four. The hero is Richard Rowan, a writer of great intellectual perception, a student of Aquinas, who has lived for nine years a self-imposed exile in Italy. He left Ireland because, as an artist, he feels the need to free himself from any inhibiting law or custom. To win and at the same time to demonstrate this complete freedom as well as to seal his choice irrevocably, Richard has taken with him a young woman possessed of physical charm but slight intellectual powers. Bertha has lived with Richard for nine years and has borne him a son, Archie. The couple has based its relationship on mutual freedom. No law or convention will bind Richard and Bertha. Nor will feelings of loyalty, gratitude, or duty. Richard has insisted upon these conditions since they are consistent with his goal of total freedom. Bertha has stifled her feelings and subjected herself to the will of her lover to gratify him. Richard has sought to create out of Bertha a companion in liberty.

In Ireland is Beatrice Justice, a music teacher, intellectually inclined but physically unattractive. She has known Richard before his flight to Italy but has lost him to Bertha. During the exile she has regularly corresponded with him, supplying him that intellectual companionship he misses in Bertha. Beatrice is unable to maintain her role in this intellectual marriage when Richard returns, for she loves him passionately. The fourth member of this group is Robert Hand, a journalist and school companion of Richard in the years gone by. He is juxtaposed to Richard, a man of easy living and happy sensuality who is not inclined to deep thought. He is reminiscent of Judge Brack in Hedda Gabler. He is a foil to Richard's intellectuality and Spartan-like seriousness. In Richard's presence Robert is a disciple of his dogma, but once alone he quickly backslides into easy-going pleasure.

Richard finds the entrenched values of Ireland intolerable and seeks to escape them. His mother, a woman of strong spiritual and moral principles, has ostracized her son from his family and from his church. Richard returns to Ireland only because she has died, never forgiving her son; he is bitter at the thought that her hardness of heart has been fortified and even sanctified (as in the case of Joyce himself) by the rites of the church. Richard's father is also dead; he was a man of carefree ease, a lover of the arts, one who sought the happiness of his son at any personal inconvenience.

Richard's guiding principle is a love of and search for complete freedom from convention and custom. He feels that only the restrictions imposed by the artistic temperament can rein his activities. Richard has become an intellectual crusader who has one disciple, Bertha, for certain and perhaps two more, Beatrice and Robert. Bertha had been little more than a child when she chose Richard in a sacrifice of her scruples and those of the world around her on the altar of her love. The relationship has not been a completely happy one, for each partner is determined in the belief that truth is the means by which freedom can be won.

Bertha's sacrifice of scruples has lost her respect among her former associates. Since she has been dominated by Richard in Italy and loves him passionately, she has hardly missed her ethical principles. Still, she does not completely share her lover's theory, as her frequent attempts to hide the truth bear witness. Despite Richard's demands for freedom of action and a “sophisticated” attitude toward marital fidelity, Bertha resorts to middle-class jealousy when Richard is carnally unfaithful to her in Italy and spiritually unfaithful to her in his correspondence with Beatrice. She comes to hate Beatrice, but later realizes that her feeling is envy, which dissipates hate. Bertha is victim of her birth and rearing, for hers is a position socially inferior to that of Richard. She is also a person of little education. Envying Beatrice her intellect and training, she is superior to her in the possession of Richard. Still she feels insecure in her love and risks all in her desperate affair with Robert Hand, not to enjoy a few moments of animal love, but to test Richard's love in the hope that it may turn out to be as human as hers. But Richard does not become jealous—he is true to his own ideals, a steadfastness which completes Bertha's defeat. She has fatally misjudged her lover's reaction. Realizing that she has erred, she retreats to the safe harbor of an untruth. She swears that she has not been unfaithful and renews her profession of love to Richard. Caught in a lie, she wounds Richard in the blatant rejection of his principle. Betrayed, Richard concludes, “I have a deep, deep wound of doubt in my soul” (Exiles, p.162).

Robert Hand is the male counterpart of Bertha. He, too, is essentially an animal nature, a hedonist whose only end is pleasure. He shows himself to be outside any moral law which does not contribute to his search for pleasure. His lack of principle horrifies Richard who, for all his rebelliousness, is true to his own beliefs.

ROBERT:
I believe that on the last day (if it ever comes), when we are all assembled together, that the Almighty will speak to us like this. We will say that we lived chastely with one another …
RICHARD:
Lie to Him?
ROBERT:
Or that we tried to. And He will say to us: Fools! Who told you that you were to give yourselves to one being only? You were made to give yourself to many freely. I wrote that law with My finger on your hearts.

(Exiles, p. 90)

The triangle of Richard-Bertha-Robert is much more than a record of a seduction. It reflects Joyce's challenging ideas of friendship, discipleship, and loyalty. Robert Hand declares his loyalty to Richard in Act I, but gets an unexpected reply.

ROBERT:
I fought for you all the time you were away. I fought to bring you back. I fought to keep your place for you here. I will fight for you still because I have faith in you, the faith of a disciple in his master. …
RICHARD:
There is a faith still stranger than the faith of the disciple in his master.
ROBERT:
And that is?
RICHARD:
The faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him.

(Exiles, p. 58)⁷

The implicit request for betrayal of friendship as a testimonial of Robert's acceptance of Richard's creed is made explicit in Act II:

RICHARD:
Because in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and her—in the dark, in the night—secretly, meanly, craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be … for ever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame.

(Exiles, pp. 97-98)

Ellmann believes that “Joyce shared something of Richard's secret longing (James Joyce, p. 288) and observed that Joyce's closest link with the admired Parnell was “Parnell's profound conviction that, in his hour of need, one of the disciples who dipped his hand in the same bowl with him would betray him” (James Joyce, p. 331). Joyce drew the picture of a friend as “someone who wants to possess your mind (since the possession of your body is forbidden by society) and your wife's body, and longs to prove himself your disciple by betraying you” (James Joyce, p. 366).

Robert seemingly accepts this view. Speaking of a new kind of fight, he views the relationship of Richard and Robert as a “battle of your soul against the spectre of fidelity, of mine against the spectre of friendship. All life is conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice” (Exiles, p. 99). Robert seduces Bertha and pays for his night of pleasure in a way characteristic of him—by writing a leading article praising Richard and urging his acceptance in Ireland. Had Robert been true in his discipleship, the seduction would be confirmed. Richard could take pleasure both by feeling betrayed and by witnessing the acceptance of his creed of freedom and truth by friend and by lover. But on the morrow Robert and Bertha deny all; Robert shows his vacillating character by fleeing from the truth. Robert fails as a friend both by Richard's standards and those of conventional society.

Beatrice is also an unfortunate character. She is, to Richard, only a half-being, an intellectual attraction coupled to a physical repulsion. Richard is content to have her as an intellectual companion, another friend. But Beatrice fails him, too, since she is unable to control her love. Richard is forced to abandon her entirely, for he does not want her as a lover.

Richard's hopes are thus thwarted on all levels. In his attempt to give Bertha freedom, he has denied her even the slightest chance of achieving it. By leading her to abandon her values, he has made her completely subservient to him. Burdened with Archie and the rejection of society, she is not free to leave him after nine years of illicit life, nor is she free to stay with him in view of her love and his attitude towards it. It is this realization that leads her to call Richard a “womankiller” (Exiles, p. 148). Yet she is the product of her background to such an extent that she does not want her freedom even if she could win it. She wants normal, conventional love and security. At the end of the play she reverts to her simple love of Richard and hope in her family.

Robert was never an achievement for Richard. Unlike Bertha Robert is known as a fair-weather disciple. His defense of Richard in Ireland is only a token showing; his attempts to win a place for him are no more than bravura and old-school ties, one more editorial campaign. The two have very little common ground on which to meet. Richard comes to realize the disparity between them more and more as the play moves on.

Beatrice also fails to fulfill Richard's hope for her. Her role was to be the intellectual side of Bertha's personality, but she is unable to keep the relationship on an intellectual basis. It is Bertha, not Richard, who establishes a rapport with Beatrice at the end.

Exiles. A cursory reader may assume that the title refers to the long stay in Italy, but reflection reveals much more significance. Richard Rowan is more an exile in the third act of the play than at any other time. He is exiled not only from home, church, country. He is exiled even from Bertha, Robert, and Beatrice. His state at the end is marked by a total frustration of his ideals. Richard can no longer put his trust in the truth and in his own intelligence. At long last he comes to the truth that he has opposed values and conventions which are too well established. Home, religion, country have been sacrificed. And now the basic needs of love and friendship, both on his terms and those of society, are escaping him. In the end Richard returns to the order he would destroy or subordinate—marriage and family. His ideals frustrated, burdened with a “deep wound of doubt which can never be healed” (Exiles, p. 162), he is left with two certainties—the love of Bertha and the existence of Archie. Richard's last lines (“And now I am tired for a while, Bertha. My wound tires me”) present a microcosm of the rebel who finally knows that no man, whatever his qualifications and zeal, can set himself against spiritual, social, and moral values and hope to succeed or even persist without paying a frightful price in terms of the spirit.

Herbert Gorman, the first biographer of Joyce, a man far beyond his depth in the company of his subject, states parenthetically (and naively) that Joyce could hardly be said to have solved the problem he presented in Exiles.⁸ J. T. Farrell agrees that the “conflict remains unsolved,”⁹ and Harry Levin feels that the play ends without a solution in a vague mood of depression.¹⁰ Ellmann twists the final mood of depression and loss into something like a triumph for Richard. “The winner is not named, but there can be no doubt that Robert feels he has lost, and that Richard retains his moral ascendancy. His mind dominates the actions of Robert and Bertha, whatever their actions may be. Richard is a metaphysical exile, and a metaphysical victor” (James Joyce, p. 366). That Richard is a victor, whether “metaphysical” or not, is highly questionable. A winner indeed is not named, but it is the established order which triumphs over the rebel to it. Neither the artist nor any one else can wholly separate himself from his background; that is the solution, albeit a negative answer, to the “problem” the play poses. Richard Rowan is defeated in his attempt. He rather despairingly turns to love and parenthood as one who begins to realize the great force the relationships of man to wife and child have. As Richard could not accomplish the break with tradition and convention, neither could his creator. It is this opinion which makes Gorman's biography shallow and superficial in its optimism; apparently the complexity of Joyce's character eluded him. Joyce's background of strong Catholicism, nurtured at his mother's knee and enriched intellectually by the Jesuits in Dublin, ingrained in Joyce a grasp of fundamental attitudes that no amount of denial could wholly remove or eradicate. It is probably the failure to escape the ethical teaching of the Catholic Church and Joyce's knowledge of that failure which makes him blasphemous in some of his work. It almost seems as if he were determined to expell traditional beliefs and attitudes by the force of his denials.

Joyce significantly points out that Robert and Beatrice are Protestants and that Richard and Bertha are Catholics. This is a key distinction, for it helps to explain a great deal which has escaped some commentators. Protestantism had its origin in a transvaluation of established order and custom, and as a result its followers are more capable of initiating their own renascence. But to the Catholic, the traditional ethic and the social and moral order are of long standing. While Beatrice is not shocked by Richard's attempt to overturn traditional values, Richard is repelled by Robert's bland paganism. Richard struggles against a monolith; Robert's vacillation has no solid base with which to contrast. Fergusson is right when he writes that Joyce-Rowan strove to overturn too much:

But Stephen-Richard is revolting against the tremendously solid structure of scholastic theology. If Robert or Beatrice or Bertha touch him now and again it is because they unconsciously illustrate the vitality of some side of the belief he is denying … and if the spirit of his dead mother is still terrible to him it is because she appears with the church behind her.¹¹

In this light the influence of Richard's mother takes on new significance. Her ostracism of her son is final and, because of her death, unalterable. Richard realizes the finality of this decision, knowing it is strengthened by the approval of the church. Here Richard opposes the two forces most dear to him: family and church, both irrevocably opposed to him and the ideals for which he stands. Is it any wonder that he bitterly remarks, “She died alone, not having forgiven me, and fortified by the rites of holy church … While she lived she turned aside from me and mine. That is certain” (Exiles, pp. 26-27).

Joyce's main concern is the problem he set for himself. His characters are of interest to him only in so far as they share in the “naked drama” of the problem. As in other works, Joyce's participation in the leading character tends to cut him off from other characters. Thus Joyce, as Richard, sees through Richard's eyes and with Richard's temperament the attitudes and ideas of others. There is a barrier between Richard's character and the others—almost as if Joyce himself did not foresee the end of the play until it was upon him in his role as Richard. The hero completely dominates the action, such as there is, until his defeat. Bertha remains a shadowy figure whose motives are only dimly discernible. Robert and Beatrice remain on the periphery of the problem. Joyce does not seem to be interested in these characters in themselves, but only as they influence the life of Richard and bring the problem into focus. These figures take on the coloring of forces being hurled at Richard; they are hardly individuals at all. It is no great exaggeration to remark that Robert's mother, who does not appear as a character in the play, is as real a force as Robert or Bertha. They all exist only in relation to Richard—even in the seduction scene; Bertha's infidelity is more important to Richard than to her—and is of little importance to Robert. Characters like Archie and the servant Brigid are designed to gain relief from the tense discussions of Richard and the principal characters. But even when these periods of relief come, the relaxation is minimal because of cryptic comments passed by Richard or some other character. These comments are not significant in their context, but become so in the light of subsequent developments. Joyce's skill in injecting these pointed and meaningful remarks is very skilled.

Joyce was writing in an atmosphere different from that of Ibsen. Ibsen rebelled, as did Joyce, but Ibsen was better able to rebel successfully since he opposed a relative void—a vague Lutheranism already dying in Norway to which he attempted to deliver the coup de grâce.¹² But Joyce, and through him Richard, is contending with a much more healthy and entrenched force. Opposition is frustrated at every turn. Richard thinks he has accomplished his break with tradition; his confidence is built up during his long absence. But the return to Ireland brings him home to truth as well: he has not succeeded; only his fond hopes gloss over his failure. It is here that Richard's anxiety for the truth rises to complete his defeat. Were he content to let the half-truth remain, he might have cushioned his frustration. There is no doubt in the “doubt” of which Richard speaks on the last page of the play.

Exiles is, in Fergusson's words, a “terrible and beautiful” play. Its terror is the frustration of Richard and his ideals, its beauty the beauty of order, an order not to be overturned by any individual, no matter how talented, perceptive, or zealous. Richard's defeat is a victory for tradition. Many readers may feel dejected at Richard's loss; others may feel consoled by the triumph of values stronger than Richard.

In general critics of Joyce regrettably have not examined Exiles as a reflection of Joyce himself and have tended to ignore or subordinate it as a commentary on Joyce's biography. But Exiles gives to the careful reader a deep insight into the problem of Joyce's philosophy, providing an answer to the fact of his long exile more meaningful than any verbiage about the nature of the artist and his need for seclusion. Joyce was in a terrible position. His personality was such that it was repulsed by the teaching of his mother and the Jesuits, but he was unable to extricate himself completely from their influences. Thus his life was a series of paradoxes, which makes of Joyce a figure of tragic interest. His self-imposed exile takes on greater meaning, for in his flight he sought escape from his background and in a sense, from himself. But escape was a sham, a facade. Deep down he was a turmoil of doubts and confusions painted so movingly in the character of Richard Rowan. A return to Ireland and the seat of his tradition brought Rowan's ideational collapse. A similar return by Joyce had to be avoided—and was avoided. His life was spent wandering about Europe while his heart remained in Dublin through the medium of old newspapers, handbills, posters, program.¹³ Like Ibsen, his love for his homeland was deep-seated even though the mystery of his temperament denied him rest in his native land. Some fail to grasp the paradox of Joyce. But the riddle begins to disappear in the light of Richard Rowan. Joyce fled Dublin to flee reality and himself. His failure to do so is the story of Exiles, a play of great importance as a testimony of the futile quest of its creator.

Notes

1. Early in his writing career, Joyce wrote another play called A Brilliant Career, dedicated to his own soul. He sent it to William Archer, whose commentary about it is preserved. Joyce destroyed the play in 1902.

2. R. H. Deming, A Bibliography of James Joyce Studies, U. of Kansas Library Series No. 18 (Lawrence, 1964).

3. Francis Fergusson, “‘Exiles’ and Ibsen's Work,” Hound and Horn, V (April-June, 1932), 353.

4. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959), pp. 29, 96, 166, 175, 183, 211-212, 251n, 289, 293, 317, 331. This work will hereafter be referred to as James Joyce, with page numbers cited in the text of the present study.

5. Quoted in Pound/Joyce. Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce, ed. Forrest Read (New York, 1967), p. 94.

6. James Joyce, Exiles (London, 1952), p. 15. All quotations from the play will refer to this edition.

7. Pound thought this a “rememberable sentence” although he did not think the play up to Joyce's other writings. Cf. Pound/Joyce, p. 58.

8. Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York, 1939), p. 226.

9. J. T. Farrell, “Exiles and Ibsen,” James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Seon Givens (New York, 1948), p. 122.

10. Harry Levin, James Joyce (London, 1941), p. 38.

11. Fergusson, p. 352.

12. Ibid.

13. Gorman, p. 185.