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

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

IRENE:
I held up three fingers in the air and swore that I would go with you to the world's end and to the end of life. And that I would serve you in all things.
PROFESSOR Rubek:
As the model for my art.
IRENE:
In frank, utter nakedness.

But there is no such bewilderment in Exiles, and in the last scene Richard can tell Bertha, “It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless, wounded, living doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even in love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness—for this I longed.” It is like the analogy between Stephen Dedalus on one side, a bird-man, unique, soaring straight toward the Sun, and on the other, Brand with his gloomy aspiration, and Peer Gynt with his irresponsible histrionics. In each case we gulp, we gape, we are astounded as though by a superb stunt. This “stunt,” both in Exiles and in the Ibsen plays, is a feat of the author's mind, a presentation of new and startling simplifications. All drama depends on some sort of simplification. But Sophocles and Shakespeare offer us theirs as distillments of common, traditional human wisdom, and though their insights may be ever new, the newness, and the author's discovery of it, is never the point. In Ibsen and Exiles the newness is the point, and in Exiles the point is the finality also.

The difficulty with the genre of modern drama is that the characters are obliged to debate their rights and wrongs more self-consciously than is either credible or dramatic. They analyze their motives and their feelings for each other with an omniscience which should be left to the author and the audience, for the reason that such understanding is not dramatic, only the effort to understand is dramatic. Yet if a modern character does not understand himself from the first, how is a modern audience to follow? Antony or Antigone, when they stepped on their stages, could be sure of being accepted as having some significance, but Hedda Gabler is obliged to expound her own psychology, and Dr. Relling of The Wild Duck to explain the symbolism of the play like a rather shamefaced little Ibsen on the lecture-platform. Mr. Joyce, faced with this problem, manages differently. His characters all come clear in the mere presence of the compelling and inquisitorial Richard. He makes their halting apologias more credible, as he makes them more complete, once you grant him Richard, in the light of whose mind and under the influence of whose strenuous ethic everything is presented.

“If the spirit is a lamp within us, glowing through what the world and the flesh make of us as through a ground-glass shade, then [Ibsen's people] are lamps burning, as in tasteless parlors, with the lamps practically exposed,” said Henry James. He was thinking partly of that ardent explicitness of theirs, partly of the provincial society in which they moved, which offered not a shred of manners to clothe their scruples in, and partly of their story, which was characteristically that of a strong individual's struggle to defend his soul from that same surrounding bare provinciality. This description fits Exiles in many ways. The provincial setting is similar, and the story (insofar as there is a story) is about a similar struggle. And the characters meet, if at all, on the basis of the barest facts of the inescapable human relations, those of parent to child and of man to woman. There is the lamp of the spirit with a vengeance, but with its flame not “practically exposed,” but as near to “utterly naked” as Rowan-Joyce can make it. Richard Rowan will not have it that the world and the flesh can make him a whit different from what he chooses to be. And the mind of this Rowan-Joyce being is far less provincial than James's own.

This is as much as to say that Exiles is by no means to be thought of as an Ibsen type of play in the sense in which Strindberg's, for instance, or Andreyev's or some of O'Neill's plays belong in that category. These writers have run the Ibsen prophetic or didactic tradition up several blind alleys, where it is expiring loudly but without vision, force or dignity. Ibsen had no Ibsen to study; and his followers, taking the direction he marked out, have failed to profit by his example. But the author of Exiles has precisely profited by Ibsen's example, taking what he needed of Ibsen's technique to state once and for all what is inescapable in Ibsen's story or theme. He finishes off the modern intellectual drama, the drama of “individualism,” the drama which attempts to dispense with tradition. Yet at the same time he attains a static perfection of vision which carries him quite beyond that genre, and even amounts to destroying it. This may be shown in a number of ways.

Take, for instance, the perfection of Mr. Joyce's portraits in Exiles, Ibsen and his characters, however faithless they may be, and however set on maintaining their freedom and integrity of soul, acknowledge that there is something which is true of them and of others also. In The Wild Duck they are pursuing that Germanic notion the Life Illusion. Ibsen's preliminary sketches for his plays show that he would get the idea of the action first, and work out his portraits later. He writes, after working for some months on The Wild Duck, that he is about to begin “the more energetic individualization” of his people and of “their modes of expression.” For him an idea for a play was an idea for a single action, which, of course, depends on having all the characters oriented with reference to some common, even if unrealized object of desire, or good. In consequence of the nature of this object, which Ibsen was always changing his mind about, the autonomy of his characters often suffers. The action illustrates a thesis, which is Ibsen's own current notion about ultimate questions; and the people are fragments of Ibsen, created out of his sympathy and fed with his life. Lacking a traditional theme like those of the Greeks or Elizabethans, Ibsen's actions remain like umbilical cords which he could never cut. But Mr. Joyce substitutes for action a motionless picture, and for a thesis a metaphysical vision of a kind of godless monadology or Pluralistic Universe, of a consistency and strictness which William James the liberal never dreamed of. So it serves the consistency of his vision to bring out all the qualities of his people which make them what they are “and not another thing”; which distinguish them, above all, from Rowan-Joyce. Ibsen was interested in what people do, and in the effort to show their actions as significant sometimes seems to do violence to what they are. If Mr. Joyce falsifies his people, it is in the opposite way. However much he may sympathize with them, he sees them, much more than he invents them out of his own inner life—sees them as hopeless, “looks and passes,” like Dante touring Hell; and cuts them off, with the most sober and delicate exactitude, in their actual frivolity and darkness.

An analysis of this kind might be pursued indefinitely, as though along a thousand centripetal spirals leading ever more subtly up to the unity of the work. It leads beyond the play as play, as soon as we see that there is no action here as other dramas have taught us to understand action. A hasty reading of the play might lead one to believe that the action was Robert's unsuccessful attempt to seduce Richard's wife. Another reading will show that this is only part of a larger whole. The first scene of the play, a conversation between Richard and Beatrice, which takes up so much of the first act, is almost complete in itself, and is not scenically part of the development of Robert's attempted seduction. It is connected with it through Bertha's jealousy of Beatrice, but we do not discover this until it is too late for it to help our understanding of the action as it would unroll on the stage. But the portrait of Beatrice is very strictly part of Mr. Joyce's group picture, with its symmetrical and balanced contrasts, its compared incommensurables. One might try to see the action as Richard's attempt to survive in Ireland, but the more deeply we study him the less does this seem to be what he is attempting. His effort is to remain himself, and he does so, agonized but unchanging, from beginning to end. In the last speech of the play, a speech of extreme beauty, wherein a Joycean character comes very near the Ibsen trick of speaking with the author's voice, Bertha places Rowan-Joyce himself among the exiles: “Forget me, Dick,” she says. “Forget me and love me again as you did the first time.” Which we see—if we remember that all is shown in the light of Richard's mind—as making the exile-vision absolute, removing it from the relativity or meaningfulness of action. For action is the lingua franca on which drama as an art among other arts depends; it is the common guide-line for actors and audience, and it gives the meaning of the play in terms of something outside itself. It is meaning in this sense which Mr. Joyce has been at great pains to eliminate.

Exiles is thus a “drama to end dramas.” And it invokes to this end the authority of life “caught in the fact”—an ultimate fact, we are supposed to feel, not the mere real circumstances, which is what Henry James had in mind when he applied this phrase to Ibsen. “The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination,” Stephen Dedalus tells us, without even mentioning action. What he means by the esthetic image is explained in the much-quoted definition from Aquinas: “Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.” In these terms we are obliged to understand the wholeness of Exiles as the exile-vision itself, the godless monadology, and its “harmony” as that consistent complexity in which we are even now involved. As for the radiance, Stephen interprets it thus: “The connotation of the word is rather vague—It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter was but the shadow, the reality of which it was but the symbol—But that is literary talk—The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas or whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination.” We see some of the implications of this distinction when we remember the words of Aristotle: “When its object is the what, in the sense of the quiddity, and there is no predication, thought is in every sense true.” Mr. Joyce has been concerned to save the truth and authority of his image by removing every trace of radiance as symbolism, which amounts to predication, to meaning in relation to other images, whereby Exiles would take its place, as a play, not a metaphysical vision, in due relation to other images. Hence that unique glare, as of a spot of brilliant light in surrounding blackness, before which we are supposed to come to rest “in the silent stasis of esthetic pleasure.”

If the authority of the exile-vision stops you “cold,” you must come to rest indeed—like Beatrice, perhaps, “with pride and scorn in your heart,” but like her caught in the fascination of what it claims as intelligibility in terms of itself. If not, you must explain it in terms of Rowan-Joyce as a human being. Nowhere outside Exiles will you find human isolation so finely rendered—that obstinate incommensurability of human longings which seems to be the cold little wisdom special to our time—both in its bracing fear and exaltation, and in its pity. Yet even while you mourn and thrill you may begin to feel, as in Ibsen, that the case is too special to be satisfying, and the simplification, however brilliant, somehow arbitrary. This is my experience. The “silent stasis of esthetic pleasure” gives place, for me, at a certain point, to an obsessive circling of the mind around a fixed, compelling thought, which is the Stephen-Rowan-Joyce thought of himself. It is this being which is both the shadow and the idea of Exiles, if we ask it to have a meaning, and it is this being we must question. This may only be done with the help of Mr. Joyce's other works.

The Joycean cycle will doubtless not be understandable till long after it is completed. But it may already help us to make the Richard-Stephen character conceivable. Surely the barren askesis of his life, as we are shown it in Exiles, is intolerable?—But Exiles shows us only the ethical side of that character, and only a moment in his relation to the other personages. Richard is evidently the continuation of Stephen; Robert seems to be another incarnation of Mulligan. Richard is also in some ways intermediate between the Stephen and the Bloom of Ulysses. Most important of all, the other works, which are more directly concerned with his consciousness, show us the perceptions he lives by and for fragments of beauty which are for him equivalents neither of the Dantesque Esser beato nell' atto che vede nor of Aristotelian contemplation.

With the aid of the larger Joycean testimony, too, we can get a more exact conception of the relation between Exiles and Ibsen. Both Ibsen and Stephen-Richard Joyce are rebels, but they are rebelling against very different things, and their rebellions differ greatly in consequences. Ibsen could write, “I believe there is nothing else and nothing better for us all to do than in spirit and truth to realize ourselves,” which sounds, as sheer rebellion, Joycean. But he was rebelling against the decayed Norwegian Protestantism, and turning its own weapons against it: “You surely will not blame me,” he had said many years before, “because Brand may have given pietism something to lean on. You might just as well reproach Luther with having introduced Philistinism into the world; it was certainly not his intention to do so, and he must therefore be held blameless.” His rebellion was comparatively futile, because he was rebelling against a lack. Or you may put it that he did not believe in what he was rebelling against, and so ends, where he began, in the void. 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; if he touches them, it is with one of the weapons of that system which he permits himself to use, and if the spirit of his dead mother is still terrible to him it is because she appears with the Church behind her. Ibsen's revolt may seem to us, in Ibsen's own light and in the light of the Joycean summa of rebellion, futile; but we can understand it and sympathize with it because the lack which was its occasion was inescapable for him and for many of us also. Stephen-Richard's revolt appears in comparison unique, gratuitous, almost perverse, because he believes in its object to the extent of feeling that he risks damnation in refusing it his submission. Why, we are bound to wonder in our poverty, does he so unequivocally reject Catholicism, when he uses something very like its own prayer and confession in his personal discipline, and its own wisdom in sharpening the eye of his mind?—But his early education under the Jesuits gave him the key to the riches of Catholic theology almost before he was aware of needing them. And then by revolting against it he brings it to life and to light as many a pious exegete “in the darkness of belief” fails to do. Only a man who was a believer in all but the most fundamental sense could risk everything on a doctrine which he can see as a heresy (perhaps the doctrine that his pride is the essence of that soul which he is above all things concerned to preserve, instead of its deepest blemish). The work of Ibsen may speak to our need for a faith even if it leads nowhere, but Exiles, rightly understood, appeals only to the eye of the mind. It is a point in the heroic but necessarily unique living out of a “heresy”; it is like a new geometry, based on the denial of a Euclidean axiom, and worked out, to the enrichment of mathematics, in accordance with mathematical laws.

Meanwhile there remains one's delight in Exiles as the most terrible and beautiful of modern plays. This delight, like one's admiration for the Joycean sanity and common sense, is the mark of a certain stage in the understanding of it; but in the same way it has its truth, it is there to return to, and it is to be preserved with the utmost care as a part of the experience of Mr. Joyce's work which consents to take its place alongside other experiences.