SOURCE: Kenner, Hugh. “Exiles.” In Dublin's Joyce, pp. 69–94. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956.

[In the following essay, Kenner discusses the pseudo-liberation of Exiles.]

Gabriel Conroy yearned for the snows. Exiles—an austere ungarnished play—inspects that pseudo-liberation; its Richard Rowan is a Gabriel Conroy liberated by Ibsen, the Ibsen with whom Joyce had been flirting for a dozen years. Having abolished Dedalus—rebellious superbia—as a point d'appui for art, Joyce now abolished him as an ethical theory.

Exiles is not an apologia for Richard Rowan; we should be prepared to find him suspended in a void, and that is exactly what we do find. Hence the bewilderment of readers who, traversing the canon chronologically, come to him fresh from the soaring close of the Portrait instead of from the final pages of Dubliners. The play's roots are in Joyce's first cycle, though it was written after the start of his second; for reasons that will soon be apparent, Joyce could not attempt it till he had completed the Portrait, and had to finish it before he could get on with the already-drafted Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus is as much envacuumed as Richard, but sufficient eloquence of Byronic revolt surrounds Stephen to make this fact easy to overlook. Contemplation of Richard Rowan's unequivocally joyless arrogance makes Stephen-worshippers feel they've been had.

Exiles frees Joyce from Ibsen the undernourished doctrinaire whose “wayward, boyish” pseudo-rigours of revolt had for some years compromised a portion of his spirit. The repudiation of the Norwegian's Utopia-at-the-other-side-of-free-love is explicit. This must be clearly grasped, because the impossibility of squaring the play with what Shavian Ibsenism may lead us to believe is its “message” has probably stymied more readers than any other difficulty. We had better turn at once to one of the epiphanic moments. Robert Hand (“with growing excitement”) proposes to Richard, with the favours of Bertha as prize, “a battle of both our souls, different as they are, against all that is false in them and in the world”:

All life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice. Will you, Richard? Have you the courage? Even if it shatters to atoms the friendship between us, even if it breaks up for ever the last illusion in your own life? There was an eternity before we were born: another will come after we are dead. 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.

E89/99.

“It is the language of their youth,” comments Mr. Francis Fergusson,¹ “and it sounds like the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, or the Wagner of Tristan.” And, Mr. Raymond Williams adds, it is also the language of Ibsen.² It is the language, furthermore, of the Transition-sponsored official image of Joyce, and of the Transitionists' intercorruption of art and life. It translates the inherent recklessness of aesthetic juxtaposition and manoeuvre into a modus vivendi. “The intense instant of imagination, when the mind, Shelley says, is a fading coal”, U192/183, is corrupted by Robert into “the blinding instant of passion … by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life”. This is not to weigh the way of the Heathcliffs against the cautious prudential arrangements of the Lintons. Joyce always weighs the parody against the parody. Robert is a Linton posturing as a Heathcliff. Exiles explores a counterposition of modes of insincerity. It weighs against the “scrupulous meanness” of “chairs, upholstered in faded green plush”, E1/15, and “Death of the Very Reverend Canon Mulhall”, E134/142, nothing more radically antithetical than the Liebestod of Robert Hand:

ROBERT:
(Presses her to him.) To end it all—death. To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down into the sea.
BERTHA:
Please, Robert …
ROBERT:
Listening to music and in the arms of the woman I love—the sea, music and death.

E34/46.

We must not be misled by the plausibility of speech and costume into supposing that this is any less “faded green plush” than the armchairs of the Merrion drawing-room.

Ibsen imagined talk like this to be an absolute and a defiance of the drawing-room. Joyce exhibits them as continuous modes. When Robert proclaims the eternal law of passion:

ROBERT:
(Still more warmly.) I am sure that no law made by man is sacred before the impulse of passion. (Almost fiercely.) Who made us for one only? It is a crime against our own being if we are so. There is no law before impulse. Laws are for slaves.

E116/125.

—he both echoes Ibsen:

… set up voluntary choice and spiritual kinship as the only determining factors for union—that is the beginning of a freedom that is worth something. … Who can guarantee that two and two are not five on Jupiter?³

—and fulfils the mode in which he is exhibited at the beginning of the second act, ejecting sprays of perfume into the summerhouse from a pump which he keeps behind the piano, E69/80: a context for his passion, one would think, sufficiently ludicrous to prevent anyone supposing that he is voicing the “doctrine” of the play. Mr. Williams acutely remarks that “when quotations are sought by commentators intent on illustrating from this play the ideas which they assume to be the persistent attitude of Joyce, it is from Robert only that they can be found.” And Robert is not an univocal antithesis for Richard; Robert is in many respects simply Richard hauled down into visibility. “… The audience,” Joyce wrote in a note-book, “every man of which is Robert and would like to be Richard.”

IBSEN THE LANGUAGE OF RICHARD'S YOUTH

“It is the language of my youth”, admits Richard wearily of Robert's mauve bravado. It was also the principle of action of his youth, and it betrayed him.

This fact cannot be pinned down too securely. The paradigms of Richard's conduct nine years before—the shunning of his mother, the hegira with Bertha—are those of Ibsen. He had transformed, naively, Ibsen's diagnosis of social dishonesty into a principle of action, exactly as did the impossible Norwegian himself, and as Joyce did in 1904. Richard versus his mother:

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

E14/27.

Ibsen versus his family:

Do you know that I have separated myself for life from my parents—from all my kin—because I could not continue in a relation of incomplete understanding?⁴

Ibsen confused the impercipient inertia of much human conduct with the matrix of convention and artifice in which social and familial relationships are necessarily enacted. His irascible catchwords, “ruthless honesty”, “giving oneself wholly and freely”, have paralysed most readers as they paralyse Robert Hand; but they conceal superbia, not angelic rectitude. He wrote to his sister Hedvig on hearing of his mother's death, “I cannot write letters; I must be present in person to give myself wholly and completely”; this was meant to look like a desire for honest emotion circumventing the spectre of merely conventional grief, but what comes out is a determination not to appear at all unless he can steal the show.

THE TUG OF IBSEN

In the life of the mind there is no such thing as an unwilling victim. What did Joyce want with such a master in the first place?

Joyce the citizen-exile confronting the dual Dublin, the Dublin of “sordid and deceptive details” and that of civic intelligibility, was filled with “such a sudden despair as could be assuaged only by melancholy versing” and had “all but decided to consider the two words as aliens to one another … when he encountered through the medium of hardly procured translations the spirit of Henrik Ibsen”, S40/32. That was when he was at college, in the Chamber Music days, before he had written any of Dubliners.

Ibsen, like Joyce, like Flaubert, was a provincial artist. But the blood of Paris flowed, however sluggishly, through Flaubert's Rouen; it was Ibsen's province that was the more like Joyce's, related to Europe not as a torpid member to a body but as a heatless satellite to an over-rated sun. Like Ireland, his Norway was an outlying province of Europe. Like Ireland, it was vacuous and criss-crossed with parlour-bourgeois suspicion. Like Ireland, it was sustained by prohibitions rather than customs. Like Ireland, it brooded on an epic past (Dublin itself was in fact a Scandinavian settlement). Dano-Norse relations strikingly resembled Anglo-Irish. Both Joyce and Ibsen wrote in a conqueror's tongue, while dialects of the autochthonous language continued to be spoken in the country-side.

“I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit”, P221/215, mused Stephen of an English convert's tongue. The example of Ibsen probably encouraged him to foster this fructive unrest instead of, as a young man, aligning his stubbornness with Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the Gaelic League. Ibsen in his earlier years had been similarly involved in a campaign for a national drama and a purely Norwegian language. Persuading himself of a vocation to recall to the people “the rich imagery of the past” and “the forgotten tales of childhood”, he wrote one popular success, was perplexed by a series of failures, and cut his losses after wasting fifteen years.

Ibsen's willingness to cut a loss exemplified the self-confidence by which Joyce was most strongly drawn to him (“A man of genius makes no mistakes”, said Stephen. “His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery”, U188/179.) His example, as it proved, almost wrecked Joyce's career, because it was ethical as well as professional. Having first become interested in Ibsen as a man who could help him write through the concrete fact without abandoning it, and set himself to learn Dano-Norse because he sensed a resilience in Ibsen's mind incompatible with the barren Archerese of the translations,⁵ Joyce soon became absorbed in the biography—disgust with the homeland, exile, early poems, middle monuments of construction and solidity accompanied by succès de scandale, later symbolic experiments denounced by fellow-travellers as madness—which, excepting the ultimate return to homeland fame, was to correspond so strikingly with his own. A few weeks after his eighteenth birthday he published in the Fortnightly Review (April 1, 1900) an account of the recently-issued When We Dead Awaken; the opening paean indicates how, in his mind, the stress came to fall:

Seldom, if at all, has he consented to join battle with his enemies. It would appear as if the storm of fierce debate rarely broke in upon his wonderful calm. The conflicting voices have not influenced his work in the very smallest degree.

In the conversations of about this time, epitomized in the Portrait, the dramatic artist is “refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails”, P252/245. That image suggests a somewhat self-conscious impersonality; in 1901 he wrote Ibsen a birthday letter suffused with confidential discipleship:

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

Part of the appeal of this “inward heroism” is ascribable to the fact that Joyce encountered Ibsen at about the time when he was losing his Catholic faith. “Jeg laegger med lyst torpedo under Arken!” (I'll gladly torpedo you the Ark!) Ibsen had written in Til min ven revolutions-taleren, and in Stephen Hero we read,

Anyway you won't repeat what I say to your confessor in future because I won't say anything. And the next time he asks you “What is that mistaken young man, that unfortunate boy, doing?” you can answer “I don't know, father. I asked him and he said I was to tell the priest he was making a torpedo.”

S210/187.

It was natural for the Stephen Dedalus persona, martyr plus aeronaut, to attach itself to the man who roared at a review of Peer Gynt, “My book is poetry, and if it is not, it shall be. The conception of poetry shall in our land, in Norway, come to adapt itself to the book”; who at 16 told his sister that his ambition was to attain the utmost perfection of greatness and clarity and after that to die; and who insisted with the vehemence of uneasiness that he did not write only for the immediate future but for all eternity. When a friend rejoined that in a thousand years even the greatest man would probably be forgotten, Ibsen was quite beside himself: “Get away from me with your metaphysics. If you rob me of eternity, you rob me of everything.”

FLAUBERTIAN IBSEN

The artist lives in two worlds, the world he understands and the world his characters understand. Insofar as he defines the former by disdaining the latter, his work is fissioned by an Ibsen's centrifugal letch toward eternity. In his best work, Ibsen achieved “the syllogism of art”, the mediation between the two worlds, by starting with the given, “bending upon these present things”, with no corruption of practical passions. This was evident to Joyce from the first. It was Ibsen's solid merit. In a portion of the Stephen Hero MS. that can hardly date later than 1904, the following exchange occurs:

—Ah, if he were to examine even the basest things, said the President with a suggestion of tolerance in store, it would be different if he were to examine and then show men the way to purify themselves.

—That is for the Salvationists, said Stephen.

—Do you mean …

—I mean that Ibsen's account of modern society is as genuinely ironical as Newman's account of English protestant morality and belief.

—That may be, said the President, appeased by the conjunction.

—And as free from any missionary intent.

The President was silent.

S92/79.

“Naturalism”, as Joyce saw instantly, is an essentially ambivalent convention. It parades an ironic obsession with what the characters see in order to express what they ignore. It affords the artist immersed in a provincial society leverage for exhibiting the condition of man. For fallen man the intelligible can be attained only by submission of the intellect to the inherent opacity of matter. Provincial man is doubly fallen. He buries even the intelligible realities available to him in yet more matter. He devotes his frantic concern to clocks and furniture. Hence Joyce's scrupulous prescription, in the Exiles stage-directions, of such details as the “floor of stained planking”, which has occasioned some surprise in devotees of the Fabulous Artificer. “Respectable” furnishings were par excellence the epiphanizing “present things” of the nineteenth century. “At no other time in history,” comments Joyce's good friend Siegfried Giedion, “did man allow the goodly ordering of his surroundings to suffer such decay. … Taken one by one, the statues, pictures, vases, carpets, are harmless and insignificant. … But viewed in their totality, accumulated museum-fashion, as the custom was, their bastardized forms and materials react upon the spectator and corrode his emotional life.”⁶ In Richard Rowan's drawing-room a kind of faded elegance has been imposed on these abominations; but Robert Hand's cottage, with its piano and “standing Turkish pipe”, is a hothouse for eerie banalities of passion. The century externalized its darkest passions in furniture as nowhere else, as Max Ernst saw (see Giedion's reproductions, pp. 386-7, of a typical interior and an Ernst collage). In Finnegans Wake we catch a glimpse of Shem the Penman “self exiled in upon his ego, a nightlong a shaking betwixtween white or reddr hawrors, noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom (may the Shaper have mercery on him!) writing the mystery of himsel in furniture.” F184. In Ulysses Joyce wrote the comic mystery of Bloom in the Ithaca inventories: The existing:

A timepiece of striated Connemara marble, stopped at the hour of 4.46 a.m. on the 21 March 1896, matrimonial gift of Matthew Dillon: a dwarf tree of glacial arborescence under a transparent bellshade, matrimonial gift of Luke and Caroline Doyle: an embalmed owl, matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper.

U692/668.

The envisioned:

… bentwood perch with fingertame parrot (expurgated language), embossed mural paper at 10/- per dozen with transverse swags of carmine floral design and top crown frieze … water closet on mezzanine provided with opaque singlepane oblong window, tipup seat, bracket lamp, brass tierod brace, armrests, footstool and artistic oleograph on inner face of door. …

U698/674.

The Ibsen technique of turning sordid particulars into numinous symbols was Joyce's point of departure here, though it is obvious that he had assimilated Flaubert's sardonic meticulousness as well. A rotting ship, a captive wild duck in an attic—externals, scrupulously documented, masking psychological and supernatural realities to which, until the catastrophe, the protagonists are indifferent—such is Ibsen's image of the condition of a whole society. When William Archer attributed to senile decline the sacrifice of surface reality to underlying meaning in When We Dead Awaken:

Take for instance the history of Rubek's statue and its development into a group. In actual sculpture this development is a grotesque impossibility. …⁷

he betrayed the same notion of naturalism-as-documentation that has caused many readers to attribute to a humourless mania Joyce's statement that “Ithaca” was the best episode in Ulysses. There are several indications that Bloom would like to write the sort of book many readers imagine Ulysses to be:

Time I used to try jotting down on my cuff what she said dressing. Dislike dressing together. Nicked myself shaving. Biting her nether lip, hooking the placket of her skirt. Timing her. 9.15. Did Roberts pay you yet? 9.20. What had Gretta Conroy on? 9.23. What possessed me to buy this comb? 9.24. I'm swelled after that cabbage. A speck of dust on the patent leather of her boot.

U69/62.

This sort of naturalism is a Bloomian product, by Blooms for Blooms. The documentary fussiness of Exiles, as of Ibsen's work from Pillars of Society to The Master Builder, is oriented not toward “reality” but toward images of paralysis and claustrophobia. The furniture of the elaborate stage-directions is there, so to speak, for the characters to trip over.

PROMETHEAN IBSEN

The techniques of ironic naturalism were less central for Ibsen than they were to be for Joyce. Ibsen invented the problem-play in part to exploit a problem he could not solve: whether the artist was not a Prometheus crucified to “facts”. A stanza of his that the young Joyce used often to quote:

To live is to war with the troll
In the caverns of heart and of skull.
To write poetry—that is to hold
Doom-session upon the soul(8)

—has Prometheus Vinctus implications that an older Joyce elicited in assimilating Ibsen's image to that of the Scandinavian HCE undergoing, bound to his bed, a nightlong introspection looking forward to the (unwritten) epilogue When We Dead Awaken: “hungerstriking all alone and holding doomsdag over hunselv, dreeing his weird, with his dander up, and his fringe combed over his eygs and droming on loft till the sight of the sternes, after zwarthy kowse and weedy broeks and the tits of buddy and the loits of pest and to peer was Parish worth thette mess”, F199. (The last two lines of the stanza read in Norwegian, “At digte—det er at holde / dommedag over sig selv.” “To peer”: to Peer Gynt.)

Ibsen unbound Prometheus by dismissing all human bonds as sentiment. The myth that contains his life-work was projected in a poem, On the Vidda, written at 32. Its themes reach forward to his last play, When We Dead Awaken. In the poem a young man from the valley, conventionally in love, is visited on holiday in the mountain uplands by a strange hunter “with cold eyes like mountain lakes” who induces him to stay on the vidda all summer and when his mother's cottage burns points out the beauty of the fire and advises on the best way to get the view. The youth takes to heart this lesson in detachment. When his betrothed finally marries another man, having understandably tired of awaiting his return, he curves his hand to impose pictorial composition on the wedding procession winding through the valley trees. “Self-steeled he looks on at joy from above life's snow-line. The Strange Hunter reappears and tells him he is now free. …

Now I am steel-set: I follow the call
To the height's clear radiance and glow.
My lowland life is lived out, and high
On the vidda are God and liberty—
While wretches live fumbling below.”(9)

The author of The Holy Office (1904; aetat. 22) took several gestures from this poem:

So distantly I turn to view
The shamblings of this motley crew,
The souls that hate the strength that mine has
Steeled in the school of old Aquinas.
Where they have crouched and crawled and prayed
I stand, the self-doomed, unafraid,
Unfellowed, friendless, and alone,
Indifferent as the herring-bone,
Firm as the mountain ridges where
I flash my antlers in the air. …(10)

Joyce had this poem printed and mailed to all its victims. Even after the scrupulous writing of Dubliners was under way, the Ibsenian Dedalus remained a pose behind which he could most readily mobilize his rhetorical energy. When nearly ten years later he turned the Dedalus aesthete himself into an aesthetic object, Stephen remained for him something more than comic. There is tragic necessity in the spectacle of the aesthete's mask being fused to the young sensitive's flesh: the necessity, for a provincial artist deprived of any respectable traditions, of becoming the enemy of his society in ways incompatible with remaining in touch with human wisdom. The split artist, like Shem the Penman “honour bound to his own cruelfiction”, F192, reflects the split man of the split community. Ibsen got no further than that.

That was enough, however, to energize some remarkable plays. Six years after On the Vidda he displayed, in Brand, some uneasiness about its naive heroics. Brand as clergyman (a more general statement of the artist as communal scapegoat) makes, like the young man on the heath, one ruthless sacrifice after another in the spirit of self-conscious humility which Murder in the Cathedral has focussed as the ultimate, subtlest temptation. Having demanded the supreme sacrifice of his mother, his child, his wife, and his congregation, he winds up among the mountain-peaks of his ambition and in the Ice-Church appropriate to his nature; when finally, renouncing Pride and calling on the God of Love, he melts the ice, he and his troll-lover are engulfed in the ruins.

IBSEN THE DUPE OF HIS PROGRAMMES

The fifth-act writing-off of Brand's whole career as hubris doesn't balance the doctrinaire intensity with which it has been presented in the first four. That is an index of Ibsen's problems. His was far from being a unified sensibility. It must strike any reader of his biography that much of his intellectual life was conducted in jejune slogans:

Undermine the idea of the State, set up voluntary choice and spiritual kinship as the only determining factors for union—that is the beginning of a freedom that is worth something. Yes, my dear friend, it is imperative not to let one's self be frightened by its venerable vested rights. The State has its roots in time, it will culminate in time. Greater things than this will perish: all religions will perish. Neither moral principles nor artistic forms have any eternity ahead of them. How much are we at bottom obliged to hold fast to? Who can guarantee that two and two are not five on Jupiter?¹¹

Denial of the rational and political nature of man could scarcely go farther. Ibsen thinks of the State, and by extension all frames of reference for action—religious, moral, aesthetic—as convertible with the police. He was even accustomed to using his question about two and two as a serious argument. This skeletal righteousness deprived of all social, political, or theological context is in sharp distinction from the sense of collective wisdom that secures Wordsworth (who denied its intellectual roots) a dignified place in the English tradition, and that for fifty generations from Cicero through Augustine to Erasmus had nourished a complex communal sense of which Wordsworth furnishes only the death-mask. It is only because he is serious and tenacious, involved by his technique in close scrutiny of mundane existential groupings, and not because he is in contact with even a simulacrum of wisdom not himself, that Ibsen's dramas are saved from anarchy.

Behind Ireland, however, via Rome, stood the past of Christian Europe; behind Norway stood nothing remotely comparable. If Ireland was “the afterthought of Europe”, it was still European. And if Norway had little to teach Ibsen, he learned nothing from leaving it. His revolt against its bourgeois frontier-ethics became enfleshed in nothing better than stern intentions: hence the stiff boniness of Brand.

In the five chapters of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce rewrote the five acts of Brand in a civic perspective Ibsen knew nothing about. It is from Brand (the name means both “sword” and “fire”) that many of the most humourlessly arrogant gestures of Stephen Dedalus are derived: his behaviour at his mother's death-bed,¹² his rejection of the Christianity of the clergy, his romantic positives expressed in terms of “the spell of arms and voices” and of “exultant and terrible youth”, P298/288, corresponding to Ibsen's “flashing eyes” and his dawn above the ice-fields. Joyce saw, however, what Stephen was revolting from: from a father in whom the great past of Europe was depraved, to an ideal father whose wings were expected to bear him above the depravity. But above the depravity was away from the reality; Stephen found himself allied instead with a third father, Leopold Bloom, in whom the great past of Europe didn't exist. In the company of Buck Mulligan (a variation on Peer Gynt) the new Brand came to grief beneath the eyes of an author who “examines the entire community in action and reconstructs the spectacle of redemption” S186/165.

Before writing Ulysses Joyce had to fight Ibsen with Ibsen's own weapons: in Exiles he brings an Ibsen hero to nullity within the context of an Ibsen play.

THE UNSUCCESSFUL ANGEL

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 comprehension 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.

The determination to behave in this unfallen way leads fallen man to behave as a fallen angel: the oldest of theological commonplaces. “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”, E154/162. But human kind cannot bear that kind of reality. Here is what actually happened:

ROBERT:
Richard, have you been quite fair to her? It was her own free choice, you will say. But was she really free to choose? She was a mere girl. She accepted all that you proposed.
RICHARD:
(Smiles.) That is your way of saying that she proposed what I would not accept.
ROBERT:
(Nods.) I remember. And she went away with you. But was it of her own free choice? Answer me frankly.
RICHARD:
(Turns to him calmly.) I played for her against all that you say or can say; and I won.

E41/53.

That he has raised her to coangelic status is a gratuitous pretence: the imposition of will upon will is as sharp as in the most abstract dealings via a marriage-broker. The Ibsenite rebel “emancipates” no one but himself: the “gift” of freedom he claims to confer is as Bertha sees meaningless, as much so as the analogous gift once offered another woman by Lucifer. He cultivates a habitual exasperation with whatever is not reduced to an orbit intelligible to him because imposed by him—again like Lucifer—and he finally deals with an uncooperative milieu by banishing it. Exile is his invariable destination, as it was for Ibsen. In writing this play Joyce clarified and purged this motive among his many motives for leaving Dublin. In explicating the plight of Richard Rowan, Exiles became Joyce's abolition of the last shreds of Stephen.

SAD SUPERBIA THE KEYNOTE OF RICHARD

Richard, paradigm of the way the dignity of naked revolt works out in practice, is after nine years god-like and wretched. He casts off, as he progresses, images of himself, indifferently in human or in verbal material. Robert is the creature of his youth, come to terms a little with Dublin but ethically arrested at the phase in which Richard formed him in 1903. Beatrice he remakes in his book in progress. As for Bertha, “You have made her all that she is”, Robert acknowledges.¹³

RICHARD:
(Darkly.) Or I have killed her.
ROBERT:
Killed her?
RICHARD:
The virginity of her soul.
ROBERT:
(Impatiently.) Well lost! What would she be without you?
RICHARD:
I tried to give her a new life.
ROBERT:
And so you have. A new and rich life.
RICHARD:
Is it worth what I have taken from her—her girlhood, her laughter, her young beauty, the hopes in her young heart?

E83/94.

In his working notes Joyce glosses “the virginity of her soul”:

The soul like the body may have a virginity. For the woman to yield it or for the man to take it is the act of love. Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarce repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul. It is the repressed consciousness of this inability and lack of spiritual energy which explains Bertha's mental paralysis.¹⁴

The definition of love is given (“hesitatingly”) by Richard early in Act II:

ROBERT:
But if you love … What else is it?
RICHARD:
(Hesitatingly.) To wish her well.

E78/88.

Conceived as that and not as a desire to possess her, it is “unnatural” in an exact sense: it transcends appetitive nature. That is the psychological basis for the indissolubility of marriage: a psychological orientation corresponding to the metaphysical fact against which the Exiles are dashed.

Richard the ape of God has made Robert; he has made Bertha; and he sets them in a country-house with a garden, his new man and new woman. Unlike the God in Genesis, he imposes no conditions; but she who has united her soul to his in performing the act of love cries out for conditions:

You urged me to do it. Not because you love me. If you loved me or if you knew what love was you would not have left me. For your own sake you urged me to do it.
RICHARD:
I did not make myself. I am what I am.
BERTHA:
To have it always to throw against me. To make me humble before you, as you always did. To be free yourself. …

E139/147.

The parody of “I AM WHO AM” is too close to be accidental. Bertha and Robert, creatures of a rational idealist, are enacting the generic rational idealist's resentment at the God who set the baited trap in the Garden: “To have it always to throw against me. To make me humble before you, as you always did. To be free yourself.” The “freedom” Richard continually exhibits himself as conferring on her has similar coordinates. He bestows free will on his creatures:

RICHARD:
(Controlling himself.) You forget that I have allowed you complete liberty—and allow you it still.
BERTHA:
(Scornfully.) Liberty!

E61/73.

and later:

BERTHA:
… Am I to go?
RICHARD:
Why do you ask me? Decide yourself.
BERTHA:
Do you tell me to go?
RICHARD:
No.
BERTHA:
Do you forbid me to go?
RICHARD:
No.

To the garden she goes; but he, an enlightened man understanding the nugatory significance of outward acts, an imperfect god incapable of knowing the inner springs of his creatures' volition, knows that he will never know whether or not she has plucked the fruit.

THE ABOLITION OF THE COMMUNITY

It is in his role as lonely deity that Richard catechizes everyone: both because he must on principle dominate everyone, and because his only hope of palliating “the soul's incurable loneliness” is to bring others to the condition of himself:

RICHARD:
(With some vehemence.) Then that I expressed in those chapters and letters, and in my character and life as well, something in you own soul which you could not—pride or scorn?
BEATRICE:
Could not?
RICHARD:
(Leans towards her.) Could not because you dared not. Is that why?
BEATRICE:
(Bends her head.) Yes.
RICHARD:
On account of others or for want of courage—which?
BEATRICE:
(Softly.) Courage.
RICHARD:
(Slowly.) And so you have followed me with pride and scorn also in your heart?
BEATRICE:
And loneliness.

E8/22.

He must make a convert. He cannot. The context of civic society once abandoned, each inquisition of the isolated person exposes that same fact: each is alone. “I am living with a stranger,” cries Bertha at the height of the last cross-examination, E141/149; and looking back even on her days in Rome: “I was alone”, E153/161.

It was not Richard of course who abolished the community for Robert and Beatrice, whatever his responsibility toward Bertha. The community Robert serves with diffidence and factitious gusto, arranging luncheons with the vice-chancellor, mobilizing the facile rhetoric of the daily paper, has abolished itself. It provides no context for meaningful living. To that extent it is Irish paralysis that is epiphanized in that chorused affirmation of loneliness.

Yet as much as the man who remains in the paralysed community, the man who abandons the wreckage of the community for the vidda above the snow-line comes to a paralysing realization of nakedness, tortured like Richard by the voices of those who say they love him, telling him to despair, E149/157.

THE ULTIMATE FOURFOLD

In Exiles the Joycean theme of dual vocations and dual femininity reaches explicit geometrical statement. The lyric mode, Chamber Music or the Portrait, is enclosed within a single person of whom the others are projections. In the drama, Richard swamps the other characters for reasons that are thematic, not traumatic; not because Richard “is” Joyce, but because the other three characters are being carefully exhibited as versions of Richard because creatures of his. For Richard, the procedures of the lyric poet are a modus vivendi. The theme of Exiles is Richard's agon; Robert, Beatrice, and Bertha may be said to exist to explicate aspects of his mode of being and phases of his plight.

The list of characters, reinforced by alliterating names, maps out the scheme explicitly: the men:

Richard rowan, a writer.
Robert hand, journalist.

Robert the commercialized parody of Richard is a “Hand”, not a mind. As for the women:

Beatrice justice, his cousin, music teacher.
Bertha.

Bertha is without status: simply “Bertha”. Richard has deprived her not merely of regularized union, but of social meaning: even of a surname. Hence the void in which throughout the play she vibrates. The weight of thematic symbolism rests on Beatrice. Her Christian name and her function as inspiration for Richard's writing point back to Dante; but Dublin, 1912, is a Florence of “scrupulous meanness”. This Beatrice is “music teacher”. The cardinal virtue contained in her surname is ossified toward Protestant ethical rigidity: what resounds in her ears is not the choir of heaven but “the buzz of the harmonium in her father's parlour. … The asthmatic voice of protestantism”, E24/36.

These three explicate three aspects of Richard. Robert's naive Wagnerian cheapness, both contrasted with and continuous with his life of practical affairs (“I must see part of the paper through every night. And then my leading articles. We are approaching a difficult moment. And not only here”, E37/49), is simply the self-consciously dramatistic component of Richard's autarchic idealism. Joyce headed a page of working notes for the play, “Richard: an automystic. Robert: an automobile.” The common factor is “auto”. Robert's superbia is unglamorous: at one time or another during the play he repeats virtually every action of Richard's, and exposes the sterility of these actions by transferring them to his own kind of emotional material. His epigram about statues, E45/56, echoes Richard's attitude to the vice-chancellor, E37/49. His evening with the divorced wife of a barrister, E147/155, echoes Richard's betrayal of Bertha, E83/93. He thinks of the beautiful as the concupiscible (“the qualities which she has in common with [other women]. I mean … the commonest”, E43/55) but surrounds his desire with vulgar idealism: a kiss is an act of homage. For Richard a kiss belongs to the practical world, an act of union; above it moves the austere mind, carefully separating, in the mode of Stephen's aesthetic, that which presents the most satisfying relations of the sensible and that which we grossly desire.

Richard's attempt to maintain human relations with his wife at the level of pure apprehension at which he conducts a Dedalian analysis of beauty is as quixotic, and insulting, as Robert's sensuality. Both are idealisms: it is not, despite Robert's attempt to equate promiscuity with “nature”, either the natural vs. the cerebral or the common vs. the refined that is really in question. Bertha's attraction on the one hand towards a husband whom she cannot understand and who does not understand her, E132/140, on the other hand towards a lover the factitiousness of whose genial carnality (“There is no law before impulse. Laws are for slaves. Bertha, say my name!”, E116/125) she cannot but suspect, underlines the dislocation of both the masculine natures in the play. Richard respects the privacy of everything but her mind. No more than Robert's beglamoured vulgarity can Richard's desire to live in austere detachment like a novelist among his characters be called integral humanism.

THE CONTEXT OF “GIVING”

The Exiles above the spiritual snowline adhere to the Ibsen-Wagner-Nietzsche image of liberated life as a perpetual passion of reiterated giving, a self-conscious angelic unselfishness. To say that they have no sense of the meaning of community, civitas, is to say that human nature for them is a flame asserting itself against a background of shadows. The cold is their element, as it was Gabriel Conroy's. Habit, order, custom, are “for slaves”; in the same way, Stephen in the Portrait rejects the support of habit amid the difficulties of uniting his will, instant by instant, with that of God, P283/274; for it is only so that he conceives a valid mode of love. That custom is ignoble is the persistent Romantic illusion; that it is cheating is the Puritan version. Richard's way of neither swearing nor expecting eternal fidelity surrounds himself and Bertha with the constant demands of a moral reality too strong for men. We have neither angelic wisdom nor angelic supplies of energy; we cannot live forever on the passionate qui vive; to be neither encouraged nor forbidden at every point is the condition not of human liberty but of human paralysis. Richard rapt himself and Bertha out of a community of paralytics, only to immerse himself and her in a paralysis still more naked; hence the dead stop to which Exiles grinds. The guidance of a habitual communal order is not an evasion but a human necessity.

It is perhaps because the image of Richard's state is a little too dispiriting—surrounded not even with a rhetoric of despair—that Exiles hasn't been revived as an “existentialist” play. Kierkegaard is the ethical ancestor both of Ibsen and Sartre, and Richard is very like a Sartrian hero, refusing to guide his wife very much as Sartre in his famous parable was unable to advise the young man torn between the Resistance Army and his mother's wishes, because the young man must be left free. We have seen apropos of Ibsen that “revolt” of Richard Rowan's kind depends on all universals being equated with the police. As it is exhibited in Ulysses, Dublin society in 1904 furnished persuasive grounds for such an equation; the interpenetration of priest and policeman in the “Lestrygonians” episode, like their juxtaposition in Dubliners (“Grace”, passim), expresses adequately the context against which Joyce found it important to assert the inscrutable subjectivity of moral action.

That is not the same thing, however, as asserting the unreality of moral law. That is where Kierkegaard comes in.

Kierkegaard's great error, amid all his great intuitions, was to separate and oppose as two heterogeneous worlds the world of generality, or universal law, and that of the unique witness (unjustifiable at the bar of human reason) borne by the “knight of the faith”. Consequently, he had to sacrifice, or at least “suspend” ethics. In reality these two worlds are in continuity; both form part of the universe of ethics, which itself is divided into typically diversified zones according to the degrees of depth of moral life.¹⁵

The Exile repeats “Kierkegaard's great error”; he talks of “expressing himself”, of “obeying the law of his being”, as though “the world of generality”, just because it doesn't provide adequate support, were meaningless. And abolishing “the world of generality”—Dublin—making, in Maritain's phrase, “the formal element of morality consist in pure liberty alone”, the Exile and his creatures enter not the melodramatic universe of Sartre but a joyless suburban limbo:

In short, by suppressing generality and universal law, you suppress liberty; and what you have left is nothing but that amorphous impulse surging out of the night which is but a false image of liberty.

RICHARD:
(Controlling himself.) You forget that I have allowed you complete liberty—and allow you it still.
BERTHA:
(Scornfully.) Liberty!

This drama is older than Kierkegaard; it is at least as old as Milton, in whose myth, Mr. Empson remarks,

The Fall is due to carelessness, letting Reason slip for a moment, not living quite for ever in the great Taskmaster's eye. … Milton uses [the myth] to give every action a nightmare importance, to hold every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. It is a terrific fancy, the Western temper at its height; the insane disproportion of the act to its effects implies a vast zest for heroic action.¹⁶

Milton's Adam and Eve were exiled from the purlieu of a God not less dispiritingly self-righteous than the city fathers of Dublin; they go forth united into a free world amid equivocal calm:

Some natural tears they dropt, but wip'd them soon;
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest. …

“The world was all before them.” The nineteenth century is strewn with sequels to Paradise Lost. Wordsworth:

The earth is all before me. With a heart
Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty,
I look about.

So the first page of The Prelude; and we know how that poem grows arid. Dickens: “The world lay all before him”: so Pip in sight of London, and we know what became of his Great Expectations, and what father from the antipodes, the underworld, he found. Joyce: “How simple and beautiful was life after all. And life lay all before him”: so Stephen after his return to the Church, and we know what became of his pious determination to “unite his will instant by instant with that of God”, and what father he took cocoa with in Eccles Street. In Exiles the equivocal calm of the close of Paradise Lost becomes the acknowledgment of one exile that he is irrecoverably wounded, of the other that she yearns for her prelapsarian strange wild lover. “O my strange wild lover, come back to me again!” In another context we shall be describing Bertha's final speech as kittenish malaise. It is that and it is more. The neurotic woman is a parody of the exiled Eve.

“The soul being unable to become virgin again” is the image around which Joyce chose to construct his drama of beings inadequate to the Miltonic holding of every instant before the searchlight of the conscious will. He chose that image because it was the inadequacy of that formulation to mankind that he sought to display, not just the inadequacy of mankind to the formulation. “The soul … not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul” is a human fact, not an affront to Ibsenite idealism. “We cannot swear or expect eternal fealty”, S174/155, but neither can we unaided perpetually repeat the act of love and giving. Beatrice cannot perform it at all: Beatrice is “the diseased woman.” But Bertha has performed it once, and Bertha is a human limit. (There is a superhuman limit, but Joyce omits the saints.) The “battle of both our souls, different as they are, against all that is false in them and in the world. A battle of your soul against the spectre of fidelity, of mine against the spectre of friendship”—the battle that Robert proposes to Richard is irrelevant to the context of their plight. It is not “a victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice” that will solve their exile. It is not the commandments of cowardice that inhibit a repetition of the act of love. The conventional marriage into which Bertha and Richard are settling down is not a retreat but as much of a fulfilment as is allowed. As the family, so the City. The City is not a refuge from the demands of alert living but the context of meaningful life. The city with a small “c” is “the centre of paralysis”

BERTHA AND ANNA LIVIA

In Finnegans Wake, the dramatic phase of the second cycle as Exiles of the first, Joyce reversed for the western world that current that has flowed from Milton's exile-myth into the romantic night-world. He worked in that last book with the help of a prime romantic attempt to make the soul virgin again, Lewis Carroll's, and restored the child in Wonderland to the City. There is nothing of this sort in the Wake that isn't potentially present in Exiles, however, and the last pages of the later book carefully recapitulate the last pages of the earlier. The quality of Bertha's yearning is reproduced, but the soul is allowed finally to cast itself out on the ocean that gave it being. At last, via its analogies with human affection, the dimension of sanctity enters. “Highhearted youth comes not again”, as we are told in “Bahnhofstrasse”, and as it is put in another poem in Pomes Penyeach,

O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return.

“You took me—and you left me”, Bertha tells Richard.

“You left me and I waited for you to come back to me.” She asks him to “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.” But this can only be done in what would be a new life, each of them restored to virginity, meeting once more. This is one meaning of the metempsychosis theme that runs through Joyce's work: redemption. The river perpetually reborn, laving the City and returning to the sea, is an image of daily life perpetually redeemed, as for Bertha and Richard it is not likely to be redeemed. Here is Bertha's longing at full length:

BERTHA:
Yes, dear. I waited for you. Heavens, what I suffered then—when we lived in Rome! Do you remember the terrace of our house?
RICHARD:
Yes.
BERTHA:
I used to sit there, waiting, with the poor child with his toys, waiting till he got sleepy. I could see all the roofs of the city and the river, the Tevere. What is its name?
RICHARD:
The Tiber.
BERTHA:
(Caressing her cheek with his hand.) It was lovely, Dick, only I was so sad. I was alone, Dick, forgotten by you and by all. I felt my life was ended.
RICHARD:
It had not begun.
BERTHA:
And I used to look at the sky, so beautiful, without a cloud and the city you said was so old: and then I used to think of Ireland and about ourselves.
RICHARD:
Ourselves?
BERTHA:
Yes. Ourselves. Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that. Was I not true to you all that time?
RICHARD:
(Sighs deeply.) Yes, Bertha. You were my bride in exile.
BERTHA:
Wherever you go, I will follow you. If you wish to go away now I will go with you.
RICHARD:
I will remain. It is too soon yet to despair.

E153/160.

One by one, in Anna Livia's great final speech, the materials recur: “It seems so long since, ages since. As if you had been long far away”, F622.

The poor child with his toys—“Or see only a youth in his florizel, a boy in innocence, peeling a twig, a child beside a weenywhite steed. The child we all love to place our hope in for ever”, F621.

The roofs of the city and the river—“Agres of roofs in parshes. Dom on dam, dim in dym. And a capital part for olympics to ply at”, F625.

The sky, so beautiful, without a cloud—“My great blue bedroom, the air so quiet, scarce a cloud”, F627.

You and me, as we were when we met first—“Sea, sea! Here, weir, reach, island, bridge. Where you meet I. The day. Remember!”, F626.

Wherever you go I will follow you—“It's Phoenix, dear. And the flame is, hear! Let's our joornee saintomichael make it. Since the lausafire has lost and the book of the depth is. Closed. Come! Step out of your shell! Hold up you free fing! Yes”, F621.

And the strange wild lover: Bertha's “I want … to meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him” becomes Anna Livia's “One time you'd stand forenenst me, fairly laughing, in your bark and tan billows of branches for to fan me coolly. And I'd lie as quiet as a moss. And one time you'd rush upon me, darkly roaring, like a great black shadow with a sheeny stare to perce me rawly. And I'd frozen up and pray for thawe. … But you're changing, acoolsha, you're changing from me, I can feel. Or is it me is? I'm getting mixed. Brightening up and tightening down,” F626 … “And it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms”, F627. The father whom she shuns (“Save me from those therrble prongs!”—God's thurible, Neptune's trident, and the generative organs of der Herr) is both like and other than the husband who has turned from her. On the natural level, a long-married woman toys with the notion of going back to her people (“I'll slip away before they're up”) but shrinks from the thoughts of a parental interview (an inversion of Eveline in Dubliners). On one allegorical level, she shrinks from the husk her husband has become, and longs for his earlier self (“If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings”—Viking ships entering the Liffey—“like he'd come from Arkangels, I sink I'd die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup.”) She would gladly lave those vessels as Magdalene washed the feet of Christ: the emotions of time Jesum transeuntem are woven into her situation. On the anagogical level, she is borne ineluctably toward the Face she would not meet. Her husband was Christ in her life. The two fuse, the one she is leaving, the one she goes to meet. The keys—“How you said how you'd give me the keys of me heart. [‘My’, not ‘your’ heart: the freedom Richard offered Bertha] And we'd be married till delth to uspart”—are fused with the keys that were given to Peter in the “tu es Petrus” on the first page of the book. “The keys to. Given!”, F628. That is the cry that Bertha cannot utter.

THE USE OF IBSEN

Joyce wouldn't have taken an ethical ideal from Ibsen if he hadn't wanted it, and one of the obscurer forces infusing Exiles is the discovery that he had wanted it and couldn't blame Ibsen for supplying it; the discovery, in short, that what he had gotten from Ibsen had been an explication of his own undeveloped desire to upstage Dublin. The discovery that what was gotten was wanted is usually attended by a violent repudiation of the scapegoat “influence”: Milton inveighing against pagan culture, for instance, or Blake the lifelong systematizer noisily repudiating Locke. Joyce was honest enough to see that Ibsen had taught him indispensable procedures; that he had wanted the ideas he had swallowed along with the procedures; and that the desire for those ideas had something to do with Dublin and deserved externalization as part of his subject. His primary datum, Chamber Music itself, is alloyed. Part of its sentimentality belongs to singing Dublin, part was intruded, under the guise of classic discipline, by the same adolescent Joyce who fell for Ibsen:

He who hath glory lost, nor hath
          Found any soul to follow his.

Yet the whole of Chamber Music is a Dublin product; the artist, especially in the lyric mode, is part of his subject, and it is futile to pretend otherwise.

Hence Joyce drew off the rebellious heroics and cast them as a running sub-plot to his later works: first Richard Rowan, then Stephen Dedalus, then Shem the Penman; a metamorphosis of sham personae containing and controlling all the errors implicit in the relation between Dublin and its “liberated” victim. These figures, impurities from the chemical process to which the artist was submitting Dublin, prove to be of permanent interest, just as Dublin is; the emancipated victim is not only the nineteenth-century tragic hero, he has affinities, through Prometheus and Oedipus, with the permanent mind of Europe.

That is why Joyce directed so much labour to the purification of what he had taken from Ibsen. Ibsen was both a catalyst and a heresiarch: a warning. He understood as did no one else in his time the burden of the dead past and the wasterfulness of any attempt to give it spurious life: his “I think we are sailing with a corpse in the cargo!” corresponds to Stephen Dedalus' apprehension of the nightmare of history from which H. C. Earwicker strains to awake. But he had never known, and could not know amid the frontier vacuum of the fiords, the traditions of the European community of richly-nourished life; and the lonely starvation of his ideal of free personal affinity in no context save that of intermingling wills inspired Joyce with a fascination that generated Exiles and a repulsion that found its objective correlative when Leopold Bloom, reversing Gabriel Conroy's lust for snow, shuddered beneath “the apathy of the stars”, U719/694.

Notes

1. Preface to the New Directions edition, x.

2. “The Exiles of James Joyce”, Politics and Letters, Summer 1948, 16.

3. This and subsequent obiter dicta of Ibsen's in the present chapter are from letters printed by his biographer Koht. (Halvdan Koht, The Life of Ibsen, trans. McMahon and Larsen.)

4. Letter to Björnson, 1867.

5. “His writing can be understood only in terms of the Norse, with its clear, pungent but concrete vocabulary, its strong live metaphors (‘we felt our hearts beat strongly towards him’), its lack of reverberations or overtones.” Miss M. C. Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian. It is, for instance, important to know, apropos of a phrase in Rosmersholm, that kinsmen in Norwegian are skyldfolk, those who share a common guilt: a typical instance of thematic density that defies translation.

6. S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command. The entire fifth section of this book deserves careful study in connection with Joyce's elaborate description, complied from furniture catalogues, of Bloom's dream cottage.

7. Introduction to When We Dead Awaken.

8. Miss Bradbrook's translation.

9. The verse translation and the quoted phrases are Miss Bradbrook's; the outline is abridged from hers. No complete English version of the poem seems to be available.

10. Gorman, V, ii.

11. Letter to Georg Brandes (1871).

12. Not a piece of autobiography, as Stanislaus Joyce assures us: Hudson Review, II-4, 491.

13. “I am simply a tool for you”, she says herself, E95/105.

14. Facsimile reproduction in the James Joyce Yearbook, Paris, 1949, facing p. 49.

15. Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent, trans. Galantiere and Phelan.

16. W. Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral.