[In the following essay, Fergusson examines the place of Exiles in Joyce's oeuvre and from an historical perspective.]

Exiles was written during the spring of 1914, the year in which Dubliners was published, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man completed, and Ulysses begun. It is a play of the end of youth, or the knowing threshold of maturity,

En l'an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues.

Joyce was in complete possession of himself and his literary powers. He paused for a last look at the soul which Stephen Daedalus had been impiously constructing, a vehicle winged for the exploration of new and perhaps forbidden realms, a fresh “conscience of his race.” The Portrait shows us the process of construction; Exiles gives us the completed masterpiece. The timeless artifact of Richard Rowan is an image on the mind's eye “luminously apprehended as self-bounded and self-contained,” a work of art as Stephen Daedalus defines art. Exiles is thus at once, and by the same token, a singularly elegant and self-conscious piece of dramaturgy, and a brilliant image of the ethical being of the young Joyce. When the author finished it and returned to his labors on Ulysses he lost interest for good in the “artist as man,” and his vitality passed into the narrative itself and its characters. Joyce himself is henceforth lost to sight behind or beyond his work.

Exiles is thus important for the understanding both of Joyce and of modern drama between Peer Gynt, say, and Murder in the Cathedral; but it has been studied less than any of the other works in the canon. The more obvious wealth and virtuosity of Ulysses and the more explicit discursive clarity of Portrait of the Artist have eclipsed it. It is in itself an austere and difficult work. Being naturalistic drama, it represents in its three acts as much life and thought as we are accustomed to getting in the looser bulk of a long novel. The reader must let his thought and imagination play over the characters and their stories a long time if he is to appreciate the weight of experience which they can convey. He must recall what he knows about Joyce, Dublin, Ibsen, and the Scholastic philosophy which is Rowan-Joyce's favorite weapon. To enjoy the play's beauty of form, one must think of Ibsen's dramaturgy, which was Joyce's starting point, as well as of Stephen Daedalus's doctrines of art. The present essay is intended to provide a sample of such an analysis, with some of the facts and ideas which a reader would need really to enjoy the play.

THE SPIRIT OF IBSEN

Mr. Herbert Gorman says in his excellent biography¹ that in Exiles Joyce was paying his final compliment to the influence of Ibsen. This influence—“the spirit of Ibsen, like a keen wind, a spirit of wayward boyish beauty”—Joyce felt at the beginning of his career and never disowned. Even as late as 1934, when he saw a production of Ghosts in Paris, he could write a poem in which he playfully pictured himself as “the ghost of Captain Alving,” a “Viking” whose ship was scuttled. Whenever Joyce turned his attention to the figure he cut as a man, he got the picture of one of Ibsen's dispossessed but unregenerate Vikings, before life, exiled or ghostly.

When We Dead Awaken was the play of Ibsen's which possessed Joyce's imagination above all the others. It was the subject of his first literary effort, when he was about eighteen, an article in the Fortnightly Review, after which he wrote Ibsen a proud and touching letter, saluting him as guide, master and friend. Exiles was written thirteen years after the article; but it is parallel in so many ways to When We Dead Awaken that it may be read as a further commentary upon it. Both plays are about the tragic contradiction between love and complete spiritual freedom and integrity: Rowan-Joyce's explanation to Bertha, “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,” directly echoes the affair between Rubek-Ibsen and his Irene, which was also to have been a relationship of “frank, utter nakedness.” The casts of characters in the two plays are similar: two men and two women, tied together yet kept apart by their various versions of love and freedom, and isolated, as a group, by the dreary anarchy, the moral emptiness, of the modern world. In both the central character is a portrait of the artist, Rubek the sculptor corresponding to Rowan the writer. But Rubek is at the latter end of life, while Rowan is at the beginning; and though Joyce has taken an Ibsenesque theme, he has played another and perhaps final variation upon it. Richard Rowan is forewarned and forearmed by Ibsen's terrible example, and he is (as he put it in a defiant poem addressed to his Dublin colleagues) “steeled” as Ibsen was not “in the school of old Aquinas.” Exile, defiantly and adventurously accepted, replaces the literal death which Ibsen, exhausted, near hysteria, felt to be so near.

When We Dead Awaken is so profoundly gloomy that one might not see, at first, why it should have inspired a very young man, even Joyce, with the lust for life and high endeavor. Professor Rubek, the sculptor, who had started out in youth with Irene “to the world's end and to the end of life,” to serve life and love and art “in frank, utter nakedness,” now finds himself in the triviality of a summer resort, not at the end but at the vulgarization of that life, love and art which he still rather frantically craves. His present wife, Maia, is seduced by a hard-drinking wolf- and woman-hunter; and when Irene reappears he can only resolve his “posthumous” affair with her by a suicidal expedition to the top of the mountain in a storm,

Surexcité par Emporheben
Au grand air de Bergsteigleben.

It is Ibsen's vision of the end of his road—one of the many pictures of the disillusioned fag end of romanticism, like D. H. Lawrence's captain in The Captain's Doll, absurdly sliding about on the glacier to the amusement of the tourists, or Eliot's violated young girl in the beginning of The Waste Land, who feels free in the mountains and goes south in the winter. In this play moreover, Ibsen's discouragement seems to be connected with a weakening of his powers as a dramatist. The characters are a little thin and diagrammatic, by his standard; the symbolism a little crude and ill-digested. If you project this enfeeblement a little farther you reach the nerve-wracking helplessness of O'Neill. And yet, When We Dead Awaken still has that quality which distinguished Ibsen, and Joyce after him: “The lamp of the spirit” still burns, as Henry James put it, “as in tasteless parlors, with the flame practically exposed.” It is Ibsen's relentless clarity of vision, the moral courage to accept all consequences, that inspired the young Joyce. It must have seemed to him to promise life itself, compared either with the unproductive traditionalism of the Church, as he saw it, or with the evasive mists of the Irish Renaissance. He accepted the perils of this individual integrity of vision, made this conception of the heroic modern artist his own, completing it and bringing it to rest in the soberer light of “old Aquinas.”

When We Dead Awaken may be described as a quest, by Rubek and the others, for an object (“Life” or “Freedom”) which is symbolized by the lonely snow peaks. But Richard Rowan, as we see him in Exiles, is no longer seeking, changing or developing. He recognizes the half-understood “language of his youth”—Wagnerian, or Nietzschean, or Ibsenesque—when Robert Hand reminds him of it; but he now disowns it. He places it, along with its confused motivations (to which Beatrice and Robert and even Bertha are still subject) in the light of his present motionless clarity. When Richard is on the scene he demonstrates the romantic motives of his former friends, in their cowardice or dishonesty, like a priest or a physician, and by a process of question and answer which reminds one of the Quaestiones of the Summa. And because of Richard's almost hypnotic influence, the result of his superior courage and intelligence, the other characters are always explaining themselves to each other even when Richard is not physically present.

Because Joyce is so richly aware of the “cultural conditioning” of his Dublin friends—those nets of loyalty, habit, modes of thought and feeling put out to catch the soul, but which he has carefully eluded—his demonstrations of Beatrice Justice and of Robert Hand are demonstrations of the Zeitgeist also in many of its components. Under Richard's sad and unmalicious questioning, Beatrice is revealed as Protestant, musical and celibate. It is the pride and scorn in her heart which attached her, in youth, to Richard; her cowardice, her inability to give herself freely, which now eternally separates her from him, in fact and in essence. Behind her we see many a provincial Protestant community, with its undernourished rebels. She is like an Ibsen character caught, so to speak, in the act—brought guiltily and hopelessly to rest in the light of Richard's understanding.

Robert Hand, as we discover in the great scene in the second act between him and Richard, has been seduced by another and apparently opposite face of the Demon of the Absolute. He too can claim kinship with Richard on the basis of the impulses and slogans of their youth:

ROBERT:
All life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice. … The blinding instant of passion alone—passion, free, unashamed, irresistible—that is the only gate by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life. Is not this the language of your own youth that I heard so often from you in this very place where we are sitting now? Have you changed?
RICHARD:
(Passes his hand across his brow.) Yes. It is the language of my youth.

It is the language of their youth, and it sounds like the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, or the Wagner of Tristan. But Richard is now as completely separated from Robert, in fact and in essence, as he is from Beatrice. The place where they are now sitting has been transformed by Robert's fin de siècle taste: the lamps are pink-shaded, the air perfumed, Robert wears an arty velvet jacket. The soft sounds of Tannhäuser, which Robert plays on the piano at the opening of the scene, have replaced the desperation of the Liebestod. And under Richard's grave questioning we see that Robert's attempt to seduce Bertha has none of the heroic intransigence of the demand for Love or Death, or for the two as one. It is not even certain that he wants Bertha specifically; perhaps it is rather, through her, the destruction or possession of Richard. He seeks, as Richard brings out, to “know in soul and body, in a hundred forms, and ever restlessly, what some old theologian, Duns Scotus, I think, called a death of the spirit.” His erotic “giving” appears to be, as much as Beatrice's timid spiritual parsimony, an evasion of that complete, individual ethical awareness which Richard represents.

It is characteristic of Joyce that he should present Robert not only with sadness but with ironical humor. When Robert packs his bag (as we learn in the third act) Bertha is afraid he is going to commit suicide. Apparently she has taken his Wagnerian blarney at face value. But be is only going to visit his respectable cousin in England, seeking relief (or spiritual death) in a gentler form. Robert Hand is one of Joyce's careful portraits of the warm-hearted Irishman of irresistible charm.

All of the characters in Exiles were tempted in youth by heroic postures, but at the time which the play shows, only Richard's heroism is unbroken, only his intellectual integrity intact. This enables him, not to condemn, but to perceive, everyone. If there is a moral to the play, it is against his principles to give or even suggest it. Yet Rowan-Joyce's undimmed awareness is the center of the composition at every level, the clue at once to its matter and its form. To understand this, and to appreciate the play's perfection of form, one must reflect on Stephen Daedalus's doctrines of art.

THE ARTIST AS HERO

The Modern Library editions of Joyce's works carry the familiar device of a sprightly naked figure prancing, presumably to the relief of ignorant humanity, with a streaming torch. The effect is to associate Joyce's work with the Promethean themes of “modern” literature. Stephen-Richard-Joyce would reject the kinship with other modern writers which this implies. When he toys with the notion of a mythic parallel to his destiny he chooses not Prometheus but Daedalus. The artist in his flight is as impatient as Prometheus of divine restraints, but he is not, like Prometheus, attached to the service of humanity. He ascends for the exhilaration of the ride, and to satisfy his own nature. The art whereby he rises is almost identical with the flight, as the flight is with his being. His being and his art are both self-contained, and both “free” alike of God and of man.

The originality of this conception of art and individuality may be grasped by comparing Richard Rowan, the center of Exiles, with Rubek, the center of When We Dead Awaken. Rubek feels indissoluble analogies between his drive for the peaks, the yearnings of the other characters, and the Zeitgeist, to which he appeals in the audience. He is (for all his clarity) partly moved by passion, exploring a mystery he still feels as both common and ultimate. The motivation of the play as a whole (its forward movement in time) is thus, as Aristotle would put it, both ethical and pathetic. Hence there is a Bacchic, or choral, or mob element—call it what you will—in Ibsen's play; as though Ibsen still felt that some god or demon might be speaking, somehow, in the voice of individual passion or in the solicitations of common feeling. It is this “pathetic motivation” which Joyce was at great pains to eliminate from the character of Richard, and also from his play, as the clue to its temporal progression or its composition. It is not that Richard is unfeeling, but that he rejects, completely, his feelings and others' as a guide to action. “God,” says Stephen Daedalus, “is a cry in the street.” And it is not that he does not intend his play to move us, but rather that esthetic pleasure is to follow perception of the object he is constructing. According, in the development of the composition, it is the eye of the mind which moves, movingly, heroically, “free” of feeling.

Richard Rowan's complete rejection of “the mob in himself,” as Mr. T. S. Eliot has put it, makes his agony very much like that of the “purely heroic” drama of French seventeenth-century rationalism. Undeluded, unsurprisable, fixed on the tragic split between freedom and intellectual integrity on one side and love on the other, he is now brother to the heroes of Racine and Corneille who face without flinching the irreconcilable conflict of Reason and Duty against Love or Passion. He is as profoundly irreligious as they, with their Kantian autonomy of intellect, whose being consists in decreeing the laws of its own nature. Like them, he is so complete a hero that he can never become a scapegoat, never suffer a change of heart or a new insight, to the regeneration of his own or the public life. The tragic flaw is not in him, but in his metaphysical situation, which he demonstrates, beneath the changing facts and feelings of concrete experience, as ever the same. At Richard's fixed and ultimate point, the esthetic image is as ever present in the mind's eye as the moral object is. Hence his drama is basically a demonstration, esthetic, rational—like that of Racine. It is neoclassic rather than classic; for it carefully eschews the ritual sacrifice which is the basis of Sophoclean drama, and which Ibsen rediscovers, in a way, and in his naturalistic terms.²

A careful reading of Exiles will show how self-consciously Richard rejects any sacrificial motive, either in himself or in others. “There is a faith still stranger,” he coldly remarks to Robert, “than the faith of a disciple in his master: the faith of the master in the disciple who will betray him.” Robert and Beatrice have both presented themselves as his rather treacherous disciples, ostensibly offering the sacrifice of their faith and service, actually wishing also to join him by bringing him down to their level or destroying his integrity. Richard sees himself as potentially a martyr or type of Christ, but (whether he feels that he knows too much, or is committed to another destiny) he refuses the role and all its relationships as both shameful and dishonest. He will neither take the responsibility of being anyone's “master” nor allow anyone else to sacrifice anything to a supposed loyalty to him. This amounts, in his strict interpretation, to utter solitude.

One may notice parenthetically how similar Richard's plight is to that of Eliot's Thomas of Canterbury. Thomas aspires to sainthood, the Sophoclean or Christian role of scapegoat, which Richard won't have; but he discovers that a self-appointed scapegoat is as irrelevant as a self-appointed hero. It is, I think, a question, whether even his martyrdom, as Eliot shows it, really saves him from the machinery of his own intellect and from “damnation in pride.”

It is comparatively easy for Richard to separate himself from Robert and Beatrice, but Bertha, by whom he has a child, with whom he is trying to live in “frank, utter nakedness” of soul, is a hostage to the others and to the disorderly world of concrete experience. It is in his relation to Bertha that the split between his intellectual integrity and love—never, in any of its forms, quite digestible by the intellect; always, in our experience, somewhat ambiguous—becomes truly tragic. The scenes between Richard and Bertha, especially the last one, are as beautiful as any love scenes in modern drama. In their quietness, their tender refusal of a passion which is always present, they are like the grave farewells of Racine's monarchs, who are poised for five acts on that point of vibrant stillness, that motionless turn from love to duty. Yet they differ from Racine's scenes in one important respect: Richard is the only character on or off stage who understands the issues, while in Racine or Corneille the characters and the audience are all supposed to share the common light and glory of Reason, which is also duty, the basis of manners, the social order, and the state. The neoclassic hero's integrity is identical with his place, his responsibility, and his gloire; but Richard's is presented as the law of his own nature only, and hence as his exile and his invisibility. Titus's freedom from the servitude to passion is the same as Bérénice's, but the freedom which Richard has attaches and subjects Bertha, because she cannot understand it. The “reasons of his heart” she grasps, but the reasons of his reason, which he always obeys, she does not see; and between his intellectual integrity and her love she is held prisoner more completely than she could have been by the ritual sacrifice of the conventional marriage promise.

Stephen Daedalus's theories of art, as he explains them to the unwilling Lynch, throw a good deal of light upon the connections between Joyce's static, neoclassic conception of drama and his absolute ethical individualism. “The tragic emotion is static. Or rather the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. … The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts.” He interprets this with the utmost strictness, for he maintains later that art, as such, has no meanings whatever outside itself. He is discussing Aquinas on beauty. He accepts integritas and consonantia, but he mistrusts claritas as perhaps imperiling the independence of art. “I thought he might mean that claritas was the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything, or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination.”

One is reminded of Richard's esthetic and logical gratification when he exclaims to Bertha, “I see you as you are”; of his pitying perception, after questioning, of Beatrice “as she is” in her timid pride and scorn; of his unavailing insistence that the others see him “as he is.” Stephen-Richard takes the quiddity of the work of art or of the person as absolute and unrelated. The dramatic form, Stephen explains, is “the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to others,” and later, “the dramatic form is reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied around each person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes a proper and intangible esthetic life.” In Exiles each person has indeed an intangible esthetic life which is itself and no other thing so completely that it appears to us like one of the images in Dante's Hell: cut off, final, unchanging, and brilliant in its irrelevancy, against the surrounding darkness.

It is clear that Stephen-Richard-Joyce took from Aquinas and Aristotle chiefly a rigorous intellectual method with which to “rationalize” his own individualism and the absolute art the sought. Aquinas with his realism has no doubt of the quiddity, the integral actuality of things, persons and works of art. But he sees them in a vast web of analogical relationships ultimately sustained and clarified in God. The individual has his inner harmony and intelligibility, yet is intelligible ultimately only by analogy with other things. Aristotle's theory of drama is in effect similar: action, which all the characters share by analogy, and not character, he took to be its fundamental matter, the object which it imitates. Here too the individual, though actual at any moment, is not absolute in a Joycean way, or static like the heroes of rationalism.

The divergence from Aquinas and Aristotle is completely self-conscious and consistent. Joyce must diverge at this point, making his Thomism godless, interpreting Aristotle in a neoclassic sense, if the freedom of exile is to have its demonic completeness. One may well ask, I think, whether the drama to end all dramas, which results, is performable. Certainly it is actable “in itself,” for though Joyce has nothing to say about action, he apprehends directly the psychic movements of every character at every moment, and thus composes always, like Ibsen, in “the form of action,” the direct histrionic medium. The play has its paradoxical unity of action: the demonstration by all the characters in their various ways of their eternally separate “quiddities.” It would be difficult to act properly, for the part of Richard would make terrible demands on the insight of any actor, and the play as a whole requires the same patient attention to naturalistic detail as Ibsen does. But the real question of its performability is of another order: the play as a whole has the same anomalous relation to its hypothetical audience as Richard has to the other characters.

We are warned in a thousand ways to perceive Richard and his drama as simply unique. Yet there is Stephen's definition of Pity and Terror. “Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering and unites it with the secret cause.” In this doctrine the esthetic pleasure in the perception of images of human life would seem to depend, precisely, upon “some force of generalization.” If so, Joyce intended his audience, once the uniqueness of the esthetic object had been perceived, to make it intelligible and acceptable by analogies, as the present essay has tried to do. Richard is both like the unique birdman, moved by a “spirit of wayward, boyish beauty,” to an impossible stunt, and the pagan sages whom Dante meets in Hell between the nameless hordes of the trimmers and Paolo and Francesca with their windy wailing. Their intellect, which does not know God, raises a hemisphere of light in the darkness, and quiets the air, in which they live “in desire but without hope.” Both are images of exile and solitude, which is grave and constant enough in human experience, full enough of pity and terror to satisfy an audience which came to understand it.

Notes

1. James Joyce, by Herbert Gorman, Farrar and Rinehart, 1939. Many of the facts in this essay are taken from Mr. Gorman's study, which contains many writings by Joyce which have not been published elsewhere.

2. Mr. Kenneth Burke has remarked that “ritual drama” moves in a rhythm of “purpose to passion to perception.” Exiles is fixed at “perception.”