[In the following essay, Brandabur discusses the themes of Exiles.]

“When you are a recognized classic people will read it because you wrote it and be duly interested and duly instructed, … but until then I'm hang'd if I see what's to be done with it.”

Ezra Pound to James Joyce, 6-12 September 1915, Pound/Joyce.

“Exiles is the final epiphany of the material organized epically in Dubliners.”

Hugh Kenner, “Joyce's Exiles.”

Critics see Joyce's play Exiles as his single failure, an opinion borne out by the infrequency of its performance. Aside from the apparent inability of Exiles to fulfill the conditions of its genre, the play remains an enigma which, writes Robert Adams, “has … regularly baffled and frustrated admirers to whom the intricacies of Finnegans Wake seem … child's play.”¹ Written between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, Exiles must have been a significant phase in Joyce's development. As Harry Levin has noted: “Richard [Rowan's] dilemma is a restatement of Stephen's; and, though the play is less autobiographical than the novel, it sketches a self-portrait at a later period.”²

Whether one perceives Exiles as an autobiographical statement or as a unique if puzzling dramatic situation, one should examine Joyce's depiction of complex human behavior in conjunction with the question of the artistic character of the play. In the end, one might either comprehend more accurately why the play fails, or one might come to think the play no failure after all. My view is that in Exiles Joyce inventively portrayed a pervasive theme as I have described it in Dubliners: the self lives slavishly through the experience of others, freely through direct involvement with the real. Joyce both explored and opposed exclusively vicarious experience; exploited and rejoiced in it. Earlier I have described an obsession with this form of experience as a feature of sadomasochistic neurosis. The concepts used in my explication of Dubliners have even more relevance to Exiles, which Joyce himself described as “a rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher Masoch.”³

Just back in Ireland from nine years in Italy, Richard Rowan meets again Beatrice Justice with whom he had corresponded for eight of the years and, a little later, her cousin Robert Hand, a journalist with whom Richard had once caroused. Robert has come to arrange an evening meeting between Richard and the university vice-chancellor, who will offer him a chair of romance languages. He has come also to schedule an evening assignation with Richard's common-law wife Bertha.⁴ In accordance with a mutual policy of complete openness, after Robert leaves, Bertha reveals the plan to Richard, who suavely encourages her to fulfill it. That evening, as Robert prepares to receive Bertha, Richard appears, casually reveals his knowledge of their pending liaison and, again, subtly urges Robert to consummate it. Richard departs, Bertha enters, admits to the stunned Robert her revelation to Richard. After a long, increasingly passionate discussion, they embrace. But, as the scene ends, it is unclear whether Bertha will spend the night or leave at once.⁵

The next morning, Bertha, at home, distraught, receives Beatrice who brings a newspaper essay by Robert heralding the return from exile of Richard, and the news that Robert has prepared to leave immediately for England. As they talk, Bertha reveals an affection for Beatrice. Beatrice leaves, Robert enters, declares to Bertha he “dreamed” the consummation of their affair the previous night. Bertha exits, Richard enters. Robert recounts the previous night to him. After Bertha left, he visited pubs, picked up a woman, had intercourse with her (“a death of the spirit”) in a cab. He returned home, wrote the essay, packed for his journey. The play ends with a dialogue between Bertha and Richard. She declares her unbroken fidelity; he announces his “wounding doubt.” Apparently, they will achieve the reconciliation she desires, holding Richard's hand as he lies down exhausted on a lounge. Like Gabriel in the conclusion of “The Dead,” who also reclines wearily after having engineered his own betrayal, and like Bloom at the end of Ulysses, who lies down beside faithless Molly, by the end of Exiles, Richard Rowan has earned a Joycean rest, fulfilled by Earwicker's nearly perpetual somnolence throughout Finnegans Wake. Like Bloom, Richard is weary. He has traveled through several modes of experience.

Ostensibly, Exiles dramatizes Richard Rowan's confrontation with conventional morality, which permits adultery only within a context of subterfuge. All parties to an adulterous liaison must either deceive their partners or friends, or they must play a game of deception however much their activities are known. Richard's insistence on openness confronts bourgeois morality, not by approving of adultery, but by disapproving of subterfuge; not by insisting on indiscriminate sexual liaisons, but by advocating freedom of sexual choice. Described in this way, Exiles might seem a dramatization of Nietzschean overstatement. It might have proved a serious artistic contribution to modern marital ethics, in the spirit of A Doll's House. But a play which could have tried the brain of Ezra Pound cannot be said simply to have dealt in a clear-cut way with an important if unorthodox issue.⁶ Hypocrisy and its attendant evils were within the target of Joyce's articulate contempt, as they have been for most artists. But if one sees the play chiefly as the dramatization of a conflict between middle-class morality and Joyce's advocacy of freedom and openness, one must view Exiles as a failure. In fact, the assault on bourgeois hypocrisy and marital commercialism serves in the play to rationalize the obsessive humour of Richard Rowan. Joyce could never have remained content even with the exposition of libertinarian pieties.

Richard Rowan's attack against the bourgeois concept of sexual morality fits into the system of partial truths and libertinarian clichés he uses to deceive himself, Bertha, and his friends about the sadomasochistic project which, as with most of Joyce's Dubliners, constitutes Richard's aim in Exiles. The evidence for this view abounds in the play and in Joyce's notes on Exiles. Richard acts to achieve vicariously his own abasement and that of Bertha and Robert, just as he needs to feel alive through their real or imagined sexual vitality. In this aim he is controlled by spiritual allegiance to his dead mother, his instructor in the techniques of sadomasochism. Thus, his project resembles that of Gabriel in “The Dead.”

In his notes, Joyce succinctly defined Richard's quest: “Richard unfitted for adulterous intercourse with the wives of his friends because it would involve a great deal of pretence on his part rather than because he is convinced of any dishonorableness in it wishes, it seems, to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously and to possess a bound woman Bertha through the organ of his friend” (p. 125). The statement suggests both the element of neurotic rationalization and neurotic wish-fulfillment in the play. Richard is “unfitted for adulterous intercourse” not out of any defect in himself, or out of moral disapprobation, but because however amoral he is a devotee of openness. Though his pronouncements would bear this flattering opinion out, his actual behavior does little to establish a devotion to openness, much to establish his reliance on imposture and subterfuge. As Hugh Kenner noted, “Exiles explores a counterposition of modes of insincerity.”⁷ The neurotic element in Richard, Joyce describes in the rest of his statement. Intercourse with Bertha could hardly be adulterous. But vicarious intercourse with her by imagining the experience of his friend would be adulterous because it would mean becoming his adulterous friend. One could hardly imagine a pretence more intricate than wishing to be an adulterous friend with one's own sexual partner. Thus, the reason which Joyce advances for Richard's unfitness for adultery, his aversion for pretence, may be in part a rationalization, though to cover precisely which desire is difficult to decide. Therefore, it is important to ascertain in Exiles the specific quest of Richard that informs it as a drama, referring throughout to Joyce's notes, though they are only slightly less cryptic than the play itself. Beginning with such an analysis, one can reassess Exiles as a work of dramatic art, and perhaps help explain and relieve the understandable bewilderment of critics from Ezra Pound onwards. As Robert Adams has noted:

The reader's problems with Exiles are primarily problems of motivation, not of episode … We do not know for sure that Richard wants the chair of romance literature; we do not know whether Robert wants him to have it, or why. We may be certain that if Richard loves Beatrice Justice (as Bertha vigorously insists he does), it is in a pretty remote and theoretical way; but how does this love, or any other consideration involving Miss Justice, contribute to this conclusion? What is, in fact, the nature of this conclusion? It is clear that the departure of Robert represents the end of a threat; but the end of the play is by no means the triumph of true love. Richard says it is not. It is not in the darkness of belief that he now desires Bertha; he desires her “in restless living wounding doubt,” and proposes … to reestablish his menage on that basis. There is a preliminary problem here as to what he is talking about; there is a further question whether, when we understand him, we can prevent him from seeming a Narcissistic prig. On all these scores, Exiles represents an outstanding piece of unfinished Joycean business.⁸

One may begin to decipher Richard's motivation by thinking of it as the desire to resolve a conflict which is “in” himself. This acting for resolution of a conflict; this “agon” defines Richard as a protagonist. One may express it by following a hint from Francis Fergusson's Idea of a Theatre: that is, to express the “action” in a play by an infinitive phrase.⁹ Thus, the “action” in Oedipus Rex, for example, might be expressed in the phrase “to find the culprit.”¹⁰ Several infinitive phrases might render the action in Exiles. In the preceding plot summary of Exiles, the infinitive most appropriate might read: “to stage his own betrayal.” Insofar as Richard acts for this immediate end, he may also be said to act for a purpose more remote: “To rise above bourgeois morality,” in spirit of what Hugh Kenner describes as that of exiles “above the spiritual snowline,” who “adhere to the Ibsen-Wagner-Nietzsche image of liberated life.”¹¹ But I have suggested that this infinitive serves as a rationalization of Richard's true aims. Here psychoanalytic perception helps focus what Joyce put into the play, that Richard's aim is to act out the wishes of his dead mother. Therefore, it is a matter of determining not only what Richard wants, but what his mother wants him to want. Like Richard, we must proceed to an interrogation of spirits.

In Exiles, the decision to act according to his mother's wishes does not occur until Richard has resolved in himself a “conflict” between the spirit of his father and mother dramatized through dialogue early in the first act. Richard has been talking with Beatrice Justice, whom he has not seen for nine years, though they had corresponded for the past eight. He has questioned her about their relationship. He has exerted on her a hypnotic effect she cannot define. In his life, in his recently published book, and in his letters to her, he has expressed something in her soul which she could not express for lack of courage. He has been preoccupied with her soul because of Beatrice's childhood pledge of love to Robert Hand. In this way, early in Exiles Joyce establishes Richard's inclination to project himself imaginatively into a menage a trois, in this case going back many years. Though later his obsession will work within the Richard-Bertha-Robert triangle, here early in the play he reveals an involvement in a triangle involving Beatrice instead of Bertha. His final diagnosis of Beatrice's plight is that, “You were drawn to him as your mind was drawn towards mine. You held back from him. From me, too, in a different way. You cannot give yourself freely and wholly” (p. 22). This diagnosis leads to Richard's first self-revelation: “O, if you knew how I am suffering at this moment! For your case, too. But suffering most of all for my own. With bitter force. And how I pray that I may be granted again my dead mother's hardness of heart! For some help, within me or without, I must find. And find it I will” (p. 22).

From the ensuing dialogue with Beatrice, it is clear that Richard's mother had bitterly opposed both his relationship with Bertha and his defection from the Church. Though on her deathbed she had urged him to break with his past, he had remained unmoved, like Stephen Dedalus. The meaning of his prayer to be granted again his dead mother's hardness of heart, is that he had used against her on her deathbed the same hardness she had used against him. Typically Joycean, she indoctrinated Richard in the policy of meanness. He wishes to be granted again the hardness of her spirit, not now solely against her but in league with her against his present “enemies,” the “disciples”—Bertha and Robert—with faith great enough to betray him (p. 44). Like James Duffy, in “A Painful Case,” Eveline in “Eveline,” Gabriel in “The Dead”; like Stephen in Ulysses, Richard will act out parental hard-heartedness from a feeling of guilty pity, queasy remorse, and sadistic meanness. This tortured motivation he expresses to Beatrice: “fiercely: How can my words hurt her poor body that rots in the grave? Do you think I do not pity her cold blighted love for me? I fought against her spirit while she lived to the bitter end. He presses his hand to his forehead. It fights against me still—in here” (p. 23). However he does not undertake an unseating of her internal tyranny so much as he enlists her spirit in a tyranny of his own, by which he acquiesces in a maternal imperium he had once opposed. He will be, in Hugh Kenner's terms, “a lonely deity,” who “must on principle dominate everyone.”¹² His mood compares with that of Stephen in “Nestor,” looking down on his young pupil in Deasy's school. After a meditation on mother's love, “the only true thing in life,” Stephen thinks: “My childhood bends beside me, too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly. Mine is far and his secret as our eyes. Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned” (Ulysses, p. 28). Richard's declaration to Beatrice leads to a brief struggle between his sympathetic inclinations, identified with the spirit of his “smiling handsome father” (whose picture is on the wall), and the hardness he derives from the cold spirit of his mother. This is a final phase in his determination towards severity. The recollection of his mother's rage against him precipitates a brief conflict in which there are elements of contempt and admiration: “There were tongues here ready to tell her all, to embitter her withering mind still more against me and Bertha and our godless nameless child. Holding out his hands to her. Can you not hear her mocking me while I speak? You must know the voice, surely, the voice that called you ‘the black protestant,’ the pervert's daughter. With sudden selfcontrol. In any case a remarkable woman” (p. 24).

In his voice, Richard expects Beatrice to hear the voice of his mother, which establishes the extent to which she is “in” him and to which he must commit himself to acting out the wishes of her spirit. But he must pay homage also to the gentler spirit of his father: “approaching, touches her lightly on the shoulder, and 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. 24).

In Richard's imagination, two deathbed scenes are constantly alive. The dead parents struggle unceasingly for resurrection in the voice of their living son, by which struggle they are truely the “living dead.” Richard soon resolves the conflict between the gentle spirit of his father and the fierce ghost of his mother: “gazing again at the drawing, calmly, almost gaily: He will help me, perhaps, my smiling handsome father” (p. 25). At this point Robert's knock is heard. Richard says, “No. No. Not the smiler, Miss Justice. The old mother. It is her spirit I need. I am going” (p. 25). This spirit he hears throughout Exiles. She tells him what to do and she steels his soul in the undertaking. Richard's identification more with the maternal than with the paternal principle is apparent in a manuscript fragment Joyce originally wrote to be included in Act II in a scene between Richard and Robert. Here he explicitly perceives himself in an embryologically maternal role and he puts aside Robert's application of the paternal to him:

ROBERT:
… You are so young and yet you seem to be her [Bertha's] father and mine.
RICHARD:
… you say I am like her father. Do you know what I feel when I look at her?
ROBERT:
What?
RICHARD:
I feel as if I had carried her within my own body, in my womb.
ROBERT:
Can a man feel like that?
RICHARD:
Her books, her music, the fire of thought stolen from on high out of whose flames all ease and culture have come, the grace with which she tends the body we desire—whose work is that? I feel that it is mine. It is my work and the work of others like me now or in other times. It is we who have conceived her and brought her forth. Our minds flowing together are the womb in which we have borne her.(13)

In this fragment, as Robert Adams observes, Richard employs “a familiar and beloved metaphor” of Joyce's, the image of the culture hero among culture heroes who creates in the womb of his own superior imagination the very creatures he desires, as was true of Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist. In less exalted terms, he acts also out of identification with the “old mother” of his imagination, responsive to the ghostly ventriloquism of Mrs. Rowan.

If Richard's obsessive humour grows out of an allegiance to his dead mother, it remains to describe the operation of his humour. Then we should be able to speculate as to why his mother should wish him to act as a sadomasochist, living vicariously on the experience of his friends.

From the moment of his decision to employ the spirit of his mother, Richard behaves with a studied hardness, as Robert Hand perceives in their first dialogue: “You have your iron mask on today” (p. 38). Richard's face now wears his mother's sternness. Proceeding from a spiritual world, this severity suggests also an application to the physical world of angelic standards.¹⁴ Once again, it is Robert Hand who divines in Richard the spiritual element which he incongruously identifies as the saeva indignatio of Jonathan Swift:

ROBERT:
with animation. You have that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart of Swift. You have fallen from a higher world, Richard, and you are filled with fierce indignation, when you find that life is cowardly and ignoble. While I … shall I tell you?
RICHARD:
By all means.
ROBERT:
archly. I have come up from a lower world and I am filled with astonishment when I find that people have any redeeming virtue at all.

(pp. 43-44)

Richard does not repudiate his place in Robert's naive diagram of higher and lower worlds, nor does he openly agree with it. But his subsequent manipulation of Robert and the others indicates that he does make use of it. In this diagram, he is a fallen angel; Robert a devil. Richard is amusingly described as a Swiftean angel. But later in Act One, Bertha accuses Richard himself of “the work of a devil” (p. 51) when she discovers the plan to reveal to Robert his knowledge of their assignation. Richard does not remain celestial, nor Robert diabolical throughout. Then again, despite their prevailing inclinations, neither is Richard consistently masochistic nor Robert consistently sadistic, though indeed Joyce directly stated such an interpretation in his notes. “Had not Robert better give Bertha a little bite when they kiss? Richard's Masochism needs no example” (p. 124).

Joyce's concept of sadism and masochism appears to have resembled the incomplete notion that they were phenomena differing chiefly in that the sadist loves to inflict pain, the masochist to suffer it. On this level of understanding, Joyce attempts consistency. For example, Robert enjoys pinching little Archie's ear; Richard enjoys his own betrayal. But Exiles is a deeper study of sadism and masochism than Joyce realized. His depiction of psychopathology verifies Wilhelm Stekel's observation that sadomasochism is a single phenomenon in which the neurotic both directs and plays conflicting roles:

The great secret which other authors have already suspected, that we have to do with a bipolar phenomenon, becomes through the experiences of analysis a self-evident fact. The paraphiliac identifies himself with his object; he feels himself into it so that he can experience both conditions: triumph and defeat, power and subjection, activity and passivity, male and female, resistance and the overcoming of it. The specific scene which he is always wanting to repeat is a drama, a fiction, in which he as the author feels with the actors, suffers and enjoys.¹⁵

Stekel stresses the sadomasochist's compulsion towards repetition, usually of a childhood scene he witnessed or imagined, ordinarily involving his parents in an act of violence, perversion, or betrayal. Thus he writes: “Sadomasochism is a form of psychosexual infantilism. The impulse shows an obsessive character and manifests itself as a repetition compulsion. In all cases of sadomasochism we shall find the entire instrumentarium of infantilism and with it a well developed fetishism accompanied by its most important phenomenon, flight from the partner.”¹⁶

Whatever psychoanalytic construction one might imagine, nothing in Exiles could possibly establish that Joyce portrays Richard Rowan in the process of staging the compulsive repetition of a childhood scene. More probably, he is under a compulsion to stage the enactment of a relatively recent scene, sharply etched in his imagination. This scene, this drama, he sets up and manipulates according to the directions of his dead mother, and to some extent the drama repeats his own experience with her as well as the command he had ignored nine years earlier. Therefore, his compulsion is to enact both what he had experienced at the time of his exile with Bertha, and what he had refused to acquiesce in on command of his mother. He must take Bertha off again through imagined participation in the experience of Robert with her, and he must reject Bertha at the behest of his mother. Like Gabriel in “The Dead,” Richard stages a second honeymoon through the experience of another man with his sexual partner, according to the instructions of the dead. He becomes playwright, director, and vicarious actor in a play within a play. Old Mrs. Rowan is his muse.

For its connections with theatre, the most intriguing aspect of Richard is the quest for vicarious experience Joyce emphasizes in his notes. Richard “wishes, it seems, to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously and to possess a bound woman Bertha through the organ of his friend” (p. 125). This quest for experience at second hand is particularly apparent in Richard's interrogation of Bertha concerning the exact details of her meetings with Robert:

BERTHA:
… Then he caressed my hand and asked would I let him kiss it. I let him.
RICHARD:
Well?
BERTHA:
Then he asked could he embrace me—even once? … and Then …
RICHARD:
And then?
BERTHA:
He put his arm around me.
RICHARD:
Stares at the floor for a moment, then looks at her again. And then?

(p. 48)

Aware that Richard's obsession with these details is peculiar, Bertha asks him, “Does all this disturb you?” Richard replies, “I want to find out what he means or feels just as you do.” In the spirit of neurotic experimentation, Richard proceeds with the interrogation:

BERTHA:
He asked for a kiss. I said: “Take it.”
RICHARD:
And then?
BERTHA:
Crumpling a handful of petals He kissed me.
RICHARD:
Your mouth?
BERTHA:
Once or twice.
RICHARD:
Long kisses?
BERTHA:
Fairly long. Reflects. Yes, the last time.
RICHARD:
Rubs his hands slowly; then With his lips? Or … the other way?
BERTHA:
Yes, the last time.
RICHARD:
Did he ask you to kiss him?
BERTHA:
He did.
RICHARD:
Did you?
BERTHA:
Hesitates, then looking straight at him. I did. I kissed him.
RICHARD:
What way?
BERTHA:
With a shrug. O simply.
RICHARD:
Were you excited?
BERTHA:
Well, you can imagine. Frowning suddenly. Not much. He has not nice lips … Still I was excited, of course. But not like with you, Dick.
RICHARD:
Was he?
BERTHA:
Excited? Yes, I think he was. He sighed. He was dreadfully nervous.
RICHARD;
Resting his forehead on his hand. I see.

(p. 49)

The atmosphere has been that of the confessional, Richard delighting in details of the erotic behavior of a young woman, an opportunity sought but denied to Stephen Dedalus in Stephen Hero and in A Portrait. Much like Lenehan in “Two Gallants,” Richard participates in a liaison between his friend and a woman by dwelling on the imagination of erotic detail. But his gratification exceeds that of Lenehan because he can interrogate the woman directly. Therefore, when Bertha admits at least one “fairly long” kiss with Robert, Richard “rubs his hands slowly,” a gesture of satisfaction not granted to Lenehan or Gabriel Conroy, his predecessors in vicarious experience. His interrogative tone throughout is calm where that of Lenehan had been anxious and of Gabriel uneasy.

Despite the compulsive need for erotic detail, Richard does not require the certainty that Bertha and Robert consummate their affair. Exiles ends with still another inquiry, the function of which is not so much to elicit conviction as to establish doubt. Here, Bertha questions Richard:

BERTHA:
It is not true that I want to drive everyone from you. I wanted to bring you close together—you and him. Speak to me. Speak out all your heart to me. What you feel and what you suffer.
RICHARD:
I am wounded, Bertha.
BERTHA:
How wounded, dear? Explain to me what you mean. I will try to understand everything you say. In what way are you wounded?
RICHARD:
Releases his hand and, taking her head between his hands, bends it back and gazes long into her eyes. I have a deep, deep wound of doubt in my soul.
BERTHA:
Motionless. Doubt of me?
RICHARD:
Yes.
BERTHA:
I am yours. In a whisper. If I died this moment, I am yours.
RICHARD:
Still gazing at her and speaking as if to an absent person: I have wounded my soul for you—a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness—for this I longed. And now I am tired for a while, Bertha. My wound tires me.

(p. 112)

As Richard's final speech, this must suggest what he has worked to achieve throughout the play. Right after it, “he stretches himself out wearily along the lounge” (p. 112). Under the circumstances, a “wounding doubt” has not been easily evoked. Sadomasochistic projects require considerable ingenuity and energy since they usually involve a progressive sophistication of pain. Each vicarious adventure quickly fades; ingenuity alone can improve upon preceding experience, as with the ancient debauchees in de Sade's books who evolve more and more complex erotic engineering to satisfy their wearying desires. Though they gradually become impotent, they never really give up.

In this context, Richard's “wounding doubt” appears a refinement of the sadomasochistic quests in Dubliners. The progression in Dubliners is to more sophisticated treatments of sadomasochism—from the bold threats of an old pervert in “An Encounter” to the aesthetic sadomasochism of Gabriel in “The Dead.” But even Gabriel does not enjoy “wounding doubt,” so much as the certain realization that Gretta once loved Michael Furey. Richard achieves not only a wounding doubt, but the bonus pleasure of Bertha's eager solicitude: “Forget me, Dick. Forget me and love me again as you did the first time. I want my lover. To meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him. You, Dick. O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again!” (p. 112).

In Exiles, Richard both avenges himself on his mother and satisfies her. His revenge is in proving to her spirit that he is above the Irish-Catholic moral code; his pleasing her is in having spoken with her voice and acted according to her spiritual instruction, thereby proving to her that she had been correct in opposing his liaison with Bertha. This dual satisfaction, revenge and fidelity, is in his voice in the final speech, where “speaking as if to an absent person,” he addresses not only Bertha but his mother as well: “I have wounded my soul for you—a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed” (p. 112).

Spiritually symbiotic with his mother, in wounding his own soul he has wounded her. Also, he has injured Bertha with whom he had longed “to be united … in body and soul in utter nakedness” (p. 112). His sadistic revenge and pleasure are more sophisticated than the crude physical injuries worked by Eugenie and her friends on Madame de Mistival in de Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom. There, in ecstasy, Eugenie watches her mother violated by a syphilitic valet, then sent forth nude, her sexual organ sewn shut.¹⁷

Richard's masochism also surpasses the comic tortures achieved in Masoch's Venus in Furs by Severin, whose final abasement is to be whipped by his rival. This degrading satisfaction corresponds to Richard's more refined torment at the end of Exiles. He “witnesses” vicariously his own betrayal and he enjoys the possibility that Robert has beaten him. The refinement is that he visualizes an erotic betrayal he does not actually see, doubts whether it has really occurred, and is solaced in his ambiguity by Bertha.

Also, in Exiles, the experience of the female characters counterplots that of the men. Richard and Robert would come together through the common vessel, Bertha, as Joyce suggested in his notes: “The bodily possession of Bertha by Robert, repeated often, would certainly bring into almost carnal contact the two men. Do they desire this? To be united, that is carnally through the person and body of Bertha as they cannot, without dissatisfaction and degradation—be united carnally man to man as man to woman?” (p. 123). But Bertha and Beatrice would come together through the common vessel Richard. One significance of the uneasy encounter between the women in Act III is in the suggestion of lesbianism, in Bertha especially through an image of the eight-year epistolary affair between Richard and Beatrice. As a sketch of feminine sexual experience, Joyce's portrayal of Bertha predicts the insightful portraits of the inner imaginings of Gerty McDowell and Molly Bloom in Ulysses, as it is a further development of the studies in Dubliners of Eveline, Maria, Emily Sinico, and Gretta Conroy, Bertha's immediate predecessor.

Bertha's conversation with Beatrice turns at first on her assuming their common “intimacy” with Richard:

BEATRICE:
… If any change has come into [Richard's] life since he came back you must know and feel it.
BERTHA:
You could know it just as well. You are very intimate in this house.
BEATRICE:
I am not the only person who is intimate here. They both look at each other coldly in silence for some moments. Bertha lays aside the paper and sits down on a chair nearer to Beatrice.
BERTHA:
Placing her hand on Beatrice's knee. So you also hate me, Miss Justice?
BEATRICE:
With an effort. Hate you? I?
BERTHA:
Insistently but softly. Yes. You know what it means to hate a person?
BEATRICE:
Why should I hate you? I have never hated anyone.
BERTHA:
Have you never loved anyone? She puts her hand on Beatrice's wrist. Tell me. You have?

(p. 97)

Notwithstanding Bertha's knowledge of the long correspondence between Beatrice and Richard, it turns out that the “other person” intimate with Richard is Robert Hand. But in the course of this exchange, Joyce suggests, chiefly through stage directions, Bertha's attraction for Beatrice. Taking her hands, Bertha precipitates an understandable nervousness in Beatrice:

BERTHA:
Going to her impulsively. I am in such suffering. Excuse me if I was rude. I want us to be friends. She holds out her hands. Will you?
BEATRICE:
Taking her hands. Gladly.
BERTHA:
Looking at her. What lovely long eyelashes you have! And your eyes have such a sad expression!
BEATRICE:
Smiling. I see very little with them. They are very weak.
BERTHA:
Warmly. But beautiful. She embraces her quietly and kisses her. Then withdraws from her a little shyly.

(p. 101)

At the conclusion of this scene, Bertha again takes Beatrice's hand and says:

It is so strange that we spoke like this now. But I always wanted to. Did you?
BEATRICE:
I think I did, too.
BERTHA:
Smiling. Even in Rome. When I went out for a walk with Archie I used to think about you, what you were like, because I knew about you from Dick. I used to look at different persons, coming out of churches or going by in carriages, and think that perhaps they were like you. Because Dick told me you were dark.
BEATRICE:
Again nervously. Really?
BERTHA:
Pressing her hand. Goodbye then—for the present.

(pp. 101-102)

In notes which refer to Bertha, Joyce was somewhat more explicit about lesbianism. He explains two lists of words which associate with Bertha. The first refers to Christmas at Galway. A girl “thumps the piano and sits with her dark-complexioned gipsy-looking girl friend Emily Lyons on the window sill” (p. 121). Later, Emily leaves for America. Her friend “cries for the pain of separation and for the dangers of the sea” (p. 121). Emily becomes an image for the girl's own departing youth, and a “prophecy of a later dark male” (p. 122). The conclusion of Joyce's note sheds considerable light on the liaison between Bertha and Beatrice and its meaning in Exiles:

A faint glimmer of lesbianism irradiates this mind. This girl [Emily] too is dark, even like a gypsy, and she too, like the dark lover who sleeps in Rahoon, is going away from her, the man-killer and perhaps also the love-killer, over the dark sea which is distance, the extinction of interest and death. They have no male lovers and are moved vaguely one towards the other, the friend is older, stronger, can travel alone, braver, a prophecy of a later dark male. The passiveness of her character to all that is not vital to its existence, and yet a passiveness which is suffused with tenderness.

(p. 122)

As a gloss on the relationship between Bertha and Beatrice, this note deserves careful attention. If the “mind” Joyce describes refers to Bertha, Joyce has attributed to her an aggressive destructiveness. She is “the man-killer” and perhaps “the love-killer,” fixed in a way reminiscent of Gretta in “The Dead” on “a dark lover who sleeps in Rahoon.” Was she destructive to him as she is to his feminine counterpart, the “dark” gypsy-like Emily? The two women mentioned in Joyce's notes have “no male lovers,” and are “moved vaguely one towards the other.” Though the Bertha figure is aggressively destructive, her dark-haired friend, like Beatrice Justice, is older, stronger, braver. These attributes notwithstanding, she is not imagined as aggressively destructive, but as passively tender. In this strange alliance, the Bertha figures appears sadistic, Beatrice masochistic. As a gloss on Exiles, Joyce's note suggests that Bertha and Beatrice engage in the usual sadomasochistic pas de deux practiced more elaborately by a series of Joyce's male partners, of whom Richard and Robert are perhaps the most obvious examples. The feminine relationship constitutes a subplot, stemming from Joyce's instinctive sense of dramatic counterpoint, and from his preoccupation with liaisons dangereuses.

In Giacomo Joyce, Joyce devoted further attention to a figure shrewdly imagined as a femme fatale. Here, the object of his attention seemed a combination of Bertha and Beatrice, her “pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her movements are shy and nervous.”¹⁸ Throughout Giacomo Joyce, the narrator perceives the young woman in images of alluring if hazardous animality. Even her handwriting is “cob-web” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 1), the edges of her gown “web-soft,” her stocking, “a leg-stretched web” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 9). Her lips are “long lewdly leering”; they are “dark-blooded molluscs” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 5). She reveals a “lithe smooth naked body shimmering with silver scales” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 7). As she walks, her hair “slowly uncoils and falls.” Her dark, suffering eyes are “beautiful as the eyes of an antelope,” her speech after an operation, that of “a bird twittering after storm” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 11), her voice to Mamma that of a frightened pullet (Giacomo Joyce, p. 12). Eventually, she becomes a deadly snake: “She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.—Jim, love! Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed me: a cold night-snake. I am lost!” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 15). In her velvet iris a “burning needleprick stings and quivers” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 1). Her face is fascinating and revolting, a study in decadence: “Shadows streak her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour lurking within the softened pulp of her eyes” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 2). Later, she greets him “wintrily and passes up the stair case darting at me for an instant out of her sluggish sidelong eyes a jet of liquorish venom” (Giacomo Joyce, p. 15). Throughout this extraordinary document, the woman, however alluring, has been pictured as deadly and destructive. One cannot be sure of a direct connection between the depiction of Bertha and Beatrice and the depiction of a woman in Giacomo Joyce, though Exiles was on his mind at about the same time as the events depicted in Giacomo Joyce.¹⁹ Richard Ellmann remarks, “Joyce was not the man to repeat himself, so it seems probable that at some time before mid-November of 1914 he had decided to pillage rather than to publish Giacomo Joyce. He did so not only for the sake of A Portrait but also for Ulysses and for his play Exiles.”²⁰ Ellmann does not say what Joyce pillaged from Giacomo Joyce to enrich Exiles, but certainly in their combination of dark destructiveness and tender passivity, in their mutual exoticism, in their ambiguous attraction for an exiled Irishman, Bertha-Beatrice resemble the composite woman in Giacomo Joyce. They also fit what Stanislaus Joyce referred to as his brother's “Iago complex,” that women were the radix malorum, a view further suggested by the permeation of Exiles with the deathly iciness of Richard's mother, which might well correspond to the erotic iciness implicit in the Bertha-Beatrice alliance.

After the explications of sadomasochistic project in Exiles, it might seem perverse to affirm that after all Joyce's cryptic play is a comedy of humours, permeated more by a tone of sardonic amusement than of high seriousness. Had Joyce followed the model of Ibsen in theme and tone as well as in structure and theatrical trapping,²¹ we might have had a highly serious exploration of contemporary ethic which could have ended like Hedda Gabbler on a tragic, or at least on a melodramatic note. One of the earliest readers, Ezra Pound, wrote Joyce that, “if there were an Ibsen theatre in full blast I dare say your play could go into it.”²²

Perhaps because he took it, not without reason, as an Ibsen-like play, Pound's further remarks on Exiles bear consideration here. They establish the impression Exiles would have made on the Ibsen-conditioned consciousness. In his essay on “Mr. James Joyce and the Modern Stage,” Pound castigates contemporary theatre, particularly Shaw (“the intellectualized cheese-mite”) for “trivialized Ibsen”:²³ that is, in Shaw, “Ibsen with the sombre reality taken out, a little Nietzsche put in to enliven things, and a technique of dialogue superadded from Wilde.”²⁴ Though Pound objected to Exiles as “unstageable,” he did not question its stageability on the grounds it was a bad play:

It is distinctly a play. It has the form of a play … an inner form … the acts and speeches of one person work into the acts and speeches of another and make the play into an indivisible, integral whole. The action takes place in less than twenty-four hours, in two rooms, both near Dublin, so that even the classical unities are uninjured. It could not … be anything but a play. And yet it is absolutely unfit for the stage as we know it. It is dramatic. Strong, well-wrought sentences flash from the speech and give it “dramatic edge” such as we have in Ibsen, when some character comes out with, “There is no mediator between God and man”; I mean sentences dealing with fundamentals.²⁵

For Pound, the problem with Exiles was not in the play but with prospective audiences: “The trouble with Mr. Joyce's play is precisely that he is at prise with reality. It is a ‘dangerous’ play precisely because the author is portraying an intellectual-emotional struggle, because he is dealing with actual thought, actual questioning, not with cliches of thought and emotion. … It is untheatrical, or unstageable, precisely because the closeness and cogency of the process is, I think, too great for an audience to be able to follow … under present conditions.”²⁶ And yet, Pound reasoned that the “actual thought, actual questioning in Exiles,” too great for an audience to follow, had to do with what I have previously described as rationalizations of Richard's quest in Exiles: “[Joyce] is actually driving in the mind upon the age-long problems of the rights of personality and of the responsibility of the intelligent individual for the conduct of those about him, upon the age-long question of the relative rights of intellect, and emotion, and sensation, and sentiment.”²⁷ As Samuel Beckett wrote in Endgame; “The old questions, the old answers. There's nothing like them.”

Pound attributes a rather more solemn intent to Exiles than Joyce, an eternal comic, perhaps even cynic, may have intended. But if Exiles proves less serious than Pound thought, it is not trivial—not either Shavian or Wildean. It is a comedy without conventional amusement, but with a black laughter that was ahead of its time. Therefore, Pound was correct in saying that audiences were not yet ready for Exiles. We have since grown accustomed to the savage humor of theatre of cruelty, of which Exiles portends, in theme and tone if not in technique and structure.

In a recent essay, David Hayman has even perceived farcical elements in Exiles which, with one exception (the character of Robert Hand) escaped Pound.²⁸ Though Hayman goes too far in calling Exiles “a bedroom farce,” his perception may be closer to the Joycean mode than Pound's rather more grave perception. Hayman feels that Joyce “soberly approaches the more conventionally comic in Exiles”:

Adultery, both physical and spiritual, is the focus of the play's many themes. It is taken seriously, but Joyce was aware of its traditionally comic function as he was of what he called the “modern” tendency to divert the audience's sympathy from the “fancyman” to the cuckold. Already in the notebook for Exiles the male principals resemble the traditional comic opponents, the volatile trickster who takes advantage of social complacency and the passive victim rendered vulnerable by his refusal or inability to conform to the surface mores of society. If Joyce fulfills his aim to revitalize the relationship by reversing our sympathies, his success is due in large measure to the retention of some of the traditional qualities of both stereotypes … fallen angel and risen demon, Lucifer and Mephistopheles, or Pierrot and Harlequin, Richard and Robert are capitalizing on their disabilities in true clown fashion.²⁹

Professor Hayman's opinion is within the context of an admirable effort to define the “forms of folly”—the farcical mode—throughout Joyce, and throughout modern literature. His overall explanation is eminently valuable and useful, but in discussing Exiles he may have had to stretch a point to make one. “Played broadly,” as he suggests the play be produced, Exiles could indeed be farcical, though such might be true of many serious plays. Certainly, it is not obvious either from the text of Exiles or from Joyce's notes that he thought of the play as a bedroom farce. What is clearer is Joyce taking his usual mischievous amusement in the plight of his characters while at the same time another aspect of his personality took them seriously. The incongruity in Exiles between a quixotically ridiculous quest for neurotic vicarious experience, and the high seriousness of the more “intellectual” dialogue accounts for some of the amusement the play may yield. But this amusement does not strike me as essentially farcical, however much it may approach farce on the scale of our response to humor.

If David Hayman goes too far in describing Exiles as a farce, Ezra Pound had gone to the other extreme in dwelling on its serious intent. With Joyce, the truth usually lies somewhere in between. The problem remains to describe Exiles as a comedy in a uniquely Joycean mode. Northrop Frye's theory of comedy—particularly what he says about comedy of humours—will be useful here.

In the simplest formulation of comic structure, “a young man wants a young woman … his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal … near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will.”³⁰ It is enlightening to assume for now that Exiles proceeds upon a similar formula. Richard wants Bertha. His mother has opposed this desire. He overcomes this opposition and “has his will.” Though the explication of sadomasochistic quest in Exiles demonstrates the inadequacy of this simple formula for a play so complicated, the formula cannot be put aside completely. Richard does “want” Bertha, his comic bride. Obviously, he had achieved a comic triumph nine years earlier. But there is a sense in which he once again triumphs in the present of the play. The context in which he wishes to “have” Bertha differs chiefly in detail from an archetypal comedy which traditionally ends with a marriage feast, and has involved the overcoming of parental opposition. As Frye perceives, the hero overcomes parental opposition often by incorporating the antagonist into the “new society” at play's end.³¹ Even this is true of Exiles. The “new society” is in Richard's imagination, which teems with couplings he vicariously enjoys. Among these is the spiritual unison with his dead mother, along with a considerably altered but nonetheless conclusive liaison with Bertha. Thus he neurotically incorporates the opposing parent into his new society.

In addition, through the medium of Bertha as common vessel, he has united himself vicariously with Robert Hand. Furthermore, the “counterplot” which centers on the lesbian connections between Bertha and Beatrice brings them together with Richard as their common vessel. The wedding festivity at the end of Exiles occurs chiefly in Richard's imagination, where a spintrian liaison contorts, presided over by the stern ghost of Mrs. Rowan. It would be difficult to find a more intricate fulfillment of the simple comic formula Frye describes.

In March 1903, Joyce had predicted to his mother that he would write a comedy in about nine years.³² According to Richard Ellmann, shortly before this assertion, Joyce had spent his days in Paris reading Ben Jonson, “studying both plays and poems to improve his own technique.”³³ Though Joyce carefully studied Jonson's plays, a direct influence on Exiles of the Jonsonian comedy of humours cannot be established. The protestant moral vision underlying Jonson's comedy³⁴ would differ radically in any case from that of Joyce, whose vision in its origin was a combination of the medieval and the Irish-Catholic.³⁵

Obviously, the dramatic techniques in Exiles owe far more to Ibsen than to any other playwright. We are left with the observation that Joyce read Jonson's comedies at about the time he predicted a comedy of his own, that he may have written Exiles to fulfill his own prediction, and that his vision became progressively more comic, as in Dubliners. But, in addition, Exiles both verifies and complicates Northrop Frye's description of the comedy of humours, in which “the humour's dramatic function is to express a state of what might be called ritual bondage. He is obsessed by his humour and his function in the play is primarily to repeat his obsession.”³⁶ Bound to his mother and to the sadomasochistic project they mutually engender, Richard functions dramatically as a humour who both manipulates and obstructs the other characters. But he must also be a comic hero within the simple formula used earlier and in the struggle to reject his bondage. Confirming his bondage and rejecting it, Richard emerges enslaved and liberated.

But there is another form of bondage which confirms him as a comic hero. Dublin's behavior is circumscribed by an Irish-Catholic-bourgeois moral code based on the right of mutual possession by husband and wife. Though Richard's struggle against this bondage provides the rationalization for his sadomasochistic project, he denies its application to his own affairs: “Who am I that I should call myself master of your heart or of any woman's? Bertha, love him, be his, give yourself to him if you desire—or if you can” (p. 75). Richard is both a comic hero and a culture hero whose non-serviams prepare for a utopian society which would challenge the control of erotic experience by conventional society. In Exiles Joyce asserts and parodies the erotic utopias which have been the stock in trade of sadomasochistic literature since de Sade's cunningly equipped castle set off from the world of conventional experience,³⁷ or Masoch's Carpathian mansion simmering in a Central European backwood spa.

The scene of past orgies and present assignations, Robert Hand's cottage at Ranelagh is both an image of comic freedom from Dublin's severe regulation of sexual mores, and what Frye calls the “sham utopia,” often found in comedy of humours: “a society of ritual bondage constructed by an act of humourous or pedantic will, like the academic retreat in Love's Labor's Lost.”³⁸ Created more out of whimsey than erotic efficiency—the special perfections of de Sade and Masoch—the operations room in Robert's cottage, Joyce describes at the beginning of Act II:

On the right, forward, a small black piano, on the rest of which is an open piece of music. Farther back a door leading to the street door. In the wall, at the back, folding doors, draped with dark curtains, leading to a bedroom. Near the piano a large table, on which is a tall oil lamp with a wide yellow shade. Chairs, upholstered, near this table. A small cardtable more forward. Against the back wall a bookcase. In the left wall, back, a window looking out into the garden, and, forward, a door and porch, also leading to the garden. Easychairs here and there. Plants in the porch and near the draped folding doors. On the walls are many framed black and white designs. In the right corner, back, a sideboard; and in the centre of the room, left of the table, a group consisting of a standing Turkish pipe, a low oil stove, which is not lit, and a rocking chair. It is the evening of the same day.

(p. 57)

It is the kind of room into which a girl might be invited for a look at the “framed black and white designs” on the wall, and where she might be conscious of the arty exoticism of “a standing turkish pipe.” These details and the subsequent description of Robert Hand, preparing for his conquest of Bertha, Ezra Pound thought the most amusing and stageable in the play. The stage directions read:

Robert Hand, in evening dress, is seated at the piano. The candles are not lit but the lamp on the table is lit. He plays softly in the bass the first bars of Wolfram's song in the last act of “Tannhäuser.” Then he breaks off and, resting an elbow on the ledge of the keyboard, meditates. Then he rises and, pulling a pump from behind the piano, walks here and there in the room ejecting from it into the air sprays of perfume. He inhales the air slowly and then puts the pump back behind the piano. He sits down on a chair near the table, and smoothing his hair carefully, sighs once or twice. Then, thrusting his hands into his trousers pockets, he leans back, stretches out his legs, and waits. A knock is heard at the street door. He rises quickly.

(pp. 57-58)

What Pound described as “the exquisite picture of Robert squirting his perfume pump,”³⁹ hints at Joyce's evaulation of this sexual utopia as a sham, the stage setting for Robert's heavy-handed Don Gioviannism, as it had been years before also for Richard's rather more somber debaucheries.⁴⁰ Even those had about them the air of professorial experimentation, the operation of Richard's pedantic will as a counterpoint to the clumsy vulgarity of Robert Hand. Describing their earlier use of this cottage, Robert remembers the pleasure, Richard the experiment:

ROBERT:
… Lord, when I think of our wild nights long ago—talks by the hour, plans, carouses, revelry …
RICHARD:
In our house.
ROBERT:
It is mine now. I have kept it ever since though I don't go there often. Whenever you like to come let me know. You must come some night. It will be old times again. He lifts his glass, and drinks. Prosit!
RICHARD:
It was not only a house of revelry; it was to be the hearth of a new life. Musing. And in that name all our sins were committed.

(pp. 40–41)

Psychologically, Richard's pedantic will is a function of sadomasochistic neurosis; dramatically, it is a function of his obsessive humour. In Exiles these are identical. Thus, the “action” of Exiles, Richard's quest for vicarious experience at the behest and in spite of his dead mother, is also the action of a humour who, in Frye's terms, “is able to force much of the play's society into line with his obsession.”⁴¹ In psychoanalytic terms, Richard's obsession is a repetition compulsion stressed by Stekel as common to all sadomasochistic neuroses. Compelled to reenact the scenes which trouble his imagination, he must force himself and all the other characters in the play to play predetermined roles. Dramatically, this compulsion to repeat is identical to a governing principle of comedy of humours, “that unincremental repetition, the literary imitation of ritual bondage, is funny.”⁴² David Hayman's perception is close to this when he notices in Exiles Joyce's approximation to the Bergsonian view “of the comic man as a machine.”⁴³ Described in Joyce's notes as an “automystic” (Notes to Exiles, p. 113), Richard amuses in that he is the slave to a form of ritual bondage to his mother and to the past which forces him into obsessive repetition. In this sense like the typical Dubliner he is a mechanical man, as bound to past patterns as Patrick Morkan's horse in “The Dead,” which was obliged to reenact his everyday treadmill existence even when for a Sunday he was ridden through the park. In drama as in life, the compulsion to repeat is often the compulsion to reenact. Life becomes theater because it has been so from the first instant of wish to stage scenes contradicted by reality. As Stekel points out, the neurotic is both actor and spectator in a scene he once witnessed as a drama and has since embroidered. Unless released by therapy or death from his ritual bondage, the sadomasochist must stage progressively more enslaving scenes. His ultimate neurotic wish will often be a variation of Severin's in Venus in Furs. Ritual bondage becomes concretely realized through the imagery of imprisonment: the quintessential torment is to be tied and beaten, hence the preponderance of chains and locks, ropes and whips in sadomasochistic pornography. Exiles is not pornographic, but the psychological patterns of deviant pornography are there. By the highly theatrical Circe episode in Ulysses, the sadomasochistic ritual bondage of Leopold Bloom of whom Richard is a portent will become concrete, and Joyce will employ the imagery of pornography to express it. In Exiles, part of Richard's quest has been to throw off the bondage of conventional morality. Thus at the end he says to Bertha that he wished “to hold you by no bonds” (p. 112). He himself prefers the subtler confinement of “wounding doubt,” which would henceforth inhibit his response to her more effectively than real chains, and would at the same time allow his response to her to be the enactment of his compulsive need for betrayal, one of Joyce's recurrent motifs. The rejection of conventional bonds—marriage, friendship, loyalty—all of which require betrayal, is so important a theme in Exiles that Richard must put it in the form of a parody of Christianity. As he says to Robert in the first act: “There is a faith still stranger than the faith of the disciple in his master … The faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him” (p. 44).

In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye recognizes a similarity between the action of conventional comedy and that of psychoanalytic procedure. The total mythos of comedy, implies “a stable and harmonious order disrupted by folly, obsession, forgetfulness, ‘pride and prejudice,’ or events not understood by the characters themselves, and then restored.” “Ritually,” Frye says, “this ternary action is … like a contest of summer and winter in which winter occupies the middle action; psychologically, it is like the removal of a neurosis or blocking point and the restoration of an unbroken current of energy and memory.”⁴⁴ This ternary structure is not ordinarily present in a play, but it is usually implied. In Exiles, however, there was never a “golden age,” only the neurotic family structure of “smiling handsome father,” “cold-hearted mother,” and Richard, caught in the middle, preferring his sunny father but finally conforming to his spooky mother. The third part of this ternary structure is implied in Richard's sad, Ibsenian wish to kindle the joy of life in “the hearth of a new life.” However, Exiles remains in the ironic mode because the new life turns out to be a sham utopia, teeming in Richard's imagination, parodied by the sex-nest in Ranelagh. Psychologically, the play does not lead to the removal of “a neurosis or a blocking point,” and thus there is not in Exiles “the restoration of an unbroken current of energy and memory” (p. 171). At the end of the play, bereft of energy, Richard “stretches himself out wearily along the lounge” (p. 112). Memory is only more deeply repressed.

Notes

1. Robert Adams, “Light on Joyce's Exiles? A New MS, a Curious Analogue, and Some Speculations.” Studies in Bibliography 17 (1964): 83.

2. Harry Levin in The Portable James Joyce (New York, 1959), p. 528.

3. Joyce, “Notes by the Author,” Exiles (New York, 1965), p. 124. Subsequent references to the notes and to the play will be from this edition and will be noted in parentheses after the quotations.

4. Joyce left it unclear whether Bertha and Richard are married at the time of the action in Exiles. Clearly, they had gone off to the continent unmarried. Richard speaks of old Mrs. Rowan's objections concerning his “nameless” child, which implies that Archie is illegitimate (Exiles, p. 24). However, Joyce also wrote in the notes of Richard's wish to experience adultery vicariously through the affair between Robert and Bertha (Notes, p. 125). Since Robert is unmarried, this would imply that Bertha must be married. But the dramatis personae lists only “Bertha,” not that she is Richard Rowan's wife. From all of this it appears to me that Bertha and Richard are not legally or sacramentally married, but they look upon themselves as husband and wife nevertheless. I suppose it is accurate enough, then, to refer to Bertha as Richard's commonlaw wife.”

5. Critics have usually avoided this question, which I take to be crucial. In his recent extended commentary on Exiles, Darcy O'Brien does not even discuss it. The Conscience of James Joyce (Princeton, 1968), pp. 55-69. Before him, neither Pound nor Kenner questioned whether Robert and Bertha actually sleep together. Robert Adams says that they “keep an assignation” but does not actually say they have intercourse. Adams, “Light on Joyce's Exiles,” p. 84. In his notes, Joyce seems to have wished the audience to be in doubt. “The doubt which clouds the end of the play must be conveyed to the audience not only through Richard's questions to both but also from the dialogue between Robert and Bertha” (Notes, p. 125). However, he also wrote: “All believe that Bertha is Robert's mistress. This belief rubs against his own knowledge of what has been, but he accepts the belief as a bitter food” (Notes, p. 123). I take this to mean that at the end of Act II, Bertha leaves immediately. Robert is left frustrated, hence his bitterness. When he tells Bertha he “dreamed” their consummation he means just that. In Act III, his recounting to Robert the events of the evening should be taken at face value. In Exiles practically all of the sexual “action” takes place in the characters' imaginations.

6. “Roughly speaking, it takes about all the brains I've got to take the thing, reading. And I suppose I've … more intelligence than the normal theatre goer (god save us).” Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, with Pound's Essays on Joyce, ed. with commentary by Forrest Read (New York, 1967), p. 45.

7. Hugh Kenner, “Joyce's Exiles,” Hudson Review 5 (Autumn, 1952): 390.

8. Adams, “Light on Joyce's Exiles,” pp. 84–85.

9. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theatre (New York, 1953), p. 244.

10. Ibid.

11. Kenner, “Joyce's Exiles,” p. 397.

12. Ibid., p. 395.

13. Adams, “Light on Joyce's Exiles,” p. 86.

14. Kenner stresses this aspect of Exiles: “Ethical freedom which shall not be anarchy and utter honesty which shall not be corrosive are proper, it is not merely wry to remark, to a society of angels. Angels strictly speaking: unfallen beings of perfect rationality, in whose society there is no marrying nor giving in marriage. The Exiles to whom this perfection is impossible are exiled from Eden: that is the ultimate meaning of the play.” Kenner, “Joyce's Exiles,” p. 392.

15. Wilhelm Stekel, Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, vol. 1 (New York, 1963), p. 6.

16. Ibid., p. 59.

17. Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom in The Complete Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings (New York, 1966), pp. 362–367.

18. James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce, Richard Ellmann, ed. (New York, 1968), p. 1. Subsequent references to Giacomo Joyce in parentheses are to this edition.

19. “It would appear that the events and moods collocated in Giacomo Joyce took place between late 1911 and the middle of 1914. While Joyce probably relied to some extent on earlier notes, he could not have written it down as a whole before the end of June 1914.” Richard Ellmann, introduction to Giacomo Joyce, p. xv.

20. Ibid., p. xvi.

21. Here, I assume what may be invalid, that the overall spirit in Ibsen is serious. His tone may also be sardonic, thus closer to the spirit in Joyce than I have said. Certainly, in tone and theme the later Ibsen, particularly of When We Dead Awaken, resembles Joyce. But to critics like Pound and probably to most audiences it was not obvious that Ibsen was not entirely serious, especially in middle plays like An Enemy of the People and Hedda Gabbler.

22. Pound to Joyce, 6-12 September 1915, Pound/Joyce, p. 47.

23. Ibid., p. 51.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 50.

26. Ibid., p. 52.

27. Ibid., p. 56.

28. Pound noted “the exquisite picture of Robert squirting his perfume pump.” Pound to Joyce, 6-12 September 1915, Pound/Joyce, p. 47.

29. David Hayman, “Forms of Folly in Joyce: A Study of Clowning in Ulysses,” ELH 34, no. 2 (June, 1967): 262.

30. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 163.

31. “The tendency of comedy is to include as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated.” Ibid., p. 165.

32. “My book of songs will be published in the spring of 1907. My first comedy about five years later.” Joyce to Mrs. John Stanislaus Joyce, 20 March 1903, Letters, vol. 2, p. 38. Since Exiles was published in 1914, Joyce was off in his prediction by only two years—assuming that Exiles was the comedy he prophesied.

33. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (New York, 1959), p. 124.

34. See James D. Redwine, Jr., “Beyond Psychology: The Moral Basis of Jonson's Theory of Humour Characterization,” ELH 28, no. 3 (September, 1961): 316-334.

35. “[Joyce's] whole mind showed the mental and moral training of the Church.” Mary and Padraic Colum, Our Friend James Joyce (New York, 1958), p. 135. This has been gone into at such length by various scholars, such as Noon and Sullivan, that I see no point in belaboring it.

36. Frye, Anatomy, p. 168.

37. A place of incredible debaucheries, Durcet's chateau in The 120 Days of Sodom is impossibly inaccessible. A bridge over a thousand foot precipice once removed or destroyed, “there is not on this earth a single being, of no matter what species you may imagine, capable of gaining a small plot of level land.” Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings (New York, 1967), pp. 236-237.

38. Frye, Anatomy, p. 169.

39. Pound, Pound/Joyce, p. 47.

40. Hugh Kenner refers to Joyce's explicit repudiation in Exiles of “the Norwegian's [i.e. Ibsen] Utopia-at-the-other-side-of-free-love.” Kenner, “Joyce's Exiles,” p. 389.

41. Frye, Anatomy, p. 169.

42. Ibid., p. 168.

43. Hayman, “Forms of Folly in Joyce,” p. 262.

44. Frye, Anatomy, p. 171.