SOURCE: Farrell, James. “Exiles and Ibsen.” In James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, edited by Seon Givens, pp. 95–131. New York: The Vanguard Press, Inc., 1948.

[In the following excerpt, Farrell discusses how Joyce was influenced by Ibsen in writing Exiles.]

It is commonly known that James Joyce, in his youth, was influenced by Ibsen's plays. Formally, this influence is most clearly revealed in Joyce's play Exiles; in fact, Exiles has often been criticized as being too imitative of Ibsen. However, the influence Ibsen exerted on Joyce was more than merely formal or technical, for Joyce's attitude toward Ibsen was very complex: it was profound, and it involved Joyce's entire nature.

Joyce discovered Ibsen and admired him with deep sincerity. He even learned Norwegian in order to read Ibsen in the original. And, according to Joyce's friend Frank Budgen, Ibsen was one of the very few writers whose works Joyce read completely.¹ Yet there was also a certain self-consciousness in his admiration for Ibsen.

For Ibsen was an artist who had achieved the kind of fame and influence Joyce, as a youth, desired to achieve. Young Joyce closely identified himself with Ibsen. At the same time, he saw himself both as one of the younger generation for whom Ibsen had spoken and as one of Ibsen's successors. Ibsen's plays became a banner for Joyce to wave in Dublin in proud defiance. He could demand that these plays, along with works of Hauptmann and Tolstoy, be presented by the Abbey group, which had then but recently been formed; he could defend Ibsen against ignorant and malicious attacks. And he could experience a vicarious feeling of triumph in the almost universal recognition Ibsen had received in the civilized world. Ibsen, already old, had won his battle. To Joyce, he was beyond mere criticism. He was a great and dominating figure who belonged in the great world existing beyond Ireland. He was one of the men who had molded a great literary tradition.

In March, 1901, on the occasion of the seventy-third birthday of the Norwegian dramatist and poet, Joyce addressed a letter of felicitation to Ibsen. It is admiring, youthful, and self-conscious; and it approaches the presumptuous and even the unconsciously cruel. This letter is somewhat different from other expressions concerning Ibsen which Joyce wrote in the same general period of his youth. In Stephen Hero, for example, there is a very touching scene between Stephen and his mother in which Ibsen's work figures. This scene occurs in a chapter which reveals young Stephen in the process of developing and writing out his own conceptions of art. Stephen “was persuaded that no-one served the generation into which he had been born so well as he who offered it, whether in his art or in his life, the gift of certitude.”² He was dubious concerning the claims of the patriots. His predilection was for the premises of the scholastics. Saturating himself in the life around him, Stephen was also intensely absorbed in himself. According to Herbert Gorman, Joyce, in the early 1900's, sent to William Archer a play which he had dedicated to his own soul. Stephen, in this manuscript, is of the belief that “the poet is the intense centre of the life of his age to which he stands in a relation than which none can be more vital.”³ Stephen's self-absorption can be seen as related to the conviction that he is preparing himself to have a vital relationship with the life of his own times. And he feels a need for intelligent sympathy. This is one of the motives impelling him in a state of agitation to give his essay to his mother to read.

After Mrs. Dedalus has read the essay, she speaks of Stephen's idol, Ibsen. Then she remarks that Ibsen must be a great writer. Stephen asks if she wants to read the plays. She tells Stephen that before her marriage she had read a great deal and had taken an interest in plays.

“—But since you married neither of you so much as bought a single book,”⁴ Stephen says.

The mother also says: “—Of course life isn't what I used to think it was when I was a young girl. That's why I would like to read some great writer to see what ideal of life he has …”⁵

After reading Ibsen, she tells Stephen that Ibsen is a wonderful writer. Stephen asks if she thinks the plays immoral. She replies that Ibsen treats of subjects of which she knows little; she doesn't know if it is or isn't entirely good for people to be ignorant of these subjects, but she thinks knowledge of them might do harm to some “uneducated unbalanced people.” She begins to speak then of Stephen. He sidetracks her by asking if she thinks the plays are unfit for people to read. To Stephen, her reply is merely “well-worn generality.” But Mrs. Dedalus gives some of Ibsen's plays to her husband to read. He selects The League of Youth with the hope that it will remind him of his own youthful roisterings. He abandons reading the play because it is too tedious. From neither of his parents does Stephen get allegiance.

In his birthday letter to Ibsen, Joyce wrote:

I have sounded your name defiantly through the college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly. I have claimed for you your rightful place in the history of the drama. I have shown what, as it seemed to me, was your highest excellence—your lofty impersonal power. … And when I spoke of you in debating societies and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.⁶

Joyce's early and deep attraction to Ibsen became the basis for a major identification when he was breaking with his entire past. Ibsen, even more than Mangan, Pater, or Newman, was the writer whom Joyce saw as an inspiration. The rejection of Ibsen, he thought, meant the rejection of himself; at the same time, the adverse reactions confirmed Ibsen's greatness and were Stephen's own proof that Stephen had taken the right course in his decision to be the rebellious and dedicated artist. In the same letter to Ibsen, Joyce also wrote of “what bound me closest to you.” This he did not tell others when he forced them to heed the name of Ibsen. He expressed his feeling of a close bond as follows:

… 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.⁷

At the time, Joyce had already come through his own first inward battles. He had rejected religion; he had launched forth against “the rabblement”; he had asserted his views and his determination to be independent. This independence was seen in terms of an escape from Ireland—escape on the intimate and personal level, escape on the level of social restraints and sanctions, escape on the level of ideas and aspirations. He would move into the great stream of European culture.

But Joyce's letter reveals a tactlessness which should be remarked on. For he also wrote to Ibsen:

… Your work on earth draws to a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you. … As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give you greeting—not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, not sadly, because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously nor sentimentally—but joyfully, with hope and with love. …⁸

Joyce was, in other words, announcing his readiness to take Ibsen's place, to carry on. The road to his manhood and maturity has been made the easier because of Ibsen. He salutes the old man and tells him that he is soon to die. And Ibsen, assumedly a spiritual father, can understand this: he can understand that Joyce, his spiritual son, will go his own way, seeking to emulate Ibsen's own “inward heroism.” Joyce sends love to the man who has helped him from afar; he repays a debt and affirms his own youth and serious intentions.

Not only had Joyce read much of Ibsen and become familiar with the controversies that had raged around him, but we can also assume that he had some familiarity with the story of Ibsen's life as it was publicly known at the time. There are some interesting if general parallels in the lives of Ibsen and Joyce. One cannot be sure that Joyce consciously recognized these parallels or that he was, accordingly, motivated by them. But the parallels are, in any case, highly suggestive.

Ibsen, like Joyce, grow up in a small country not directly involved in the main streams of European culture. He, also, lived his early life in a setting of provincialism and cultural backwardness. Just as the English shadow hung over Irish culture in Joyce's youth, so did the Danish shadow hang over Norwegian culture in Ibsen's youth. Ibsen, like Joyce, faced the problem of being an artist in such a country. The course of Ibsen's development demanded, as did that of Joyce's, that he burst all the bonds which threatened to confine him.

For many years, Ibsen was a voluntary exile, as Joyce was later to be. During this exile, Ibsen was bitter concerning the lives and conduct of his own countrymen. This bitterness was bound up with a feeling of national disappointment. In Joyce's case, this great national disappointment was the fall of Parnell. In Ibsen's life the disappointment was the failure of the Norwegians to join with Denmark when that country was attacked by Prussia. Ibsen, like Joyce, believed his own countrymen had lacked manliness. Spending years in his self-imposed exile, he maintained a firmly independent attitude.

In Joyce's early days, Ireland was beginning to express afresh desires for cultural autonomy. Irish culture was saturated with national ideas. Norway, during Ibsen's youth, also began to develop national cultural ideas, and Ibsen, at one stage of his career, played a role in the national cultural upsurge. Both Joyce and Ibsen rejected nationalist cultural premises, substituting for them broader European premises and concepts. The young Joyce thus described Ireland as an “afterthought of Europe.”⁹ Georg Brandes, the continental critic who perhaps understood Ibsen best in his own lifetime, and who was most sympathetic to him, wrote in Creative Spirits of the Nineteenth Century: “He [Ibsen] has … no consciousness of being the child of a people, a part of the whole, the leader of a group, a member of society. …” Brandes also quoted from a letter of Ibsen expressing the latter's disappointment with the conduct of his countrymen during the Schleswig-Holstein war. Ibsen wrote Brandes: “We should have been brought into the movement, should have belonged to Europe. Anything in preference to remaining isolated.” And in a speech to students in Christiania, delivered in 1874, Ibsen declared:

A poet belongs by nature to the race of the long-sighted. Never have I seen home, and the living life of home, so distinctly, so circumstantially, and so closely, as from a distance and in absence.

Independence and dissatisfaction—a dissatisfaction both on the personal level and on that of ideas—are here bound up with the rejection of nationalism and the looking outward to Europe. …

IV

Joyce's play Exiles, written in 1914, has been criticized more than have his other writings, with the possible exception of Finnegans Wake. Many admirers of Joyce's work speak of this play with reservations. Dramatic critics and other theatrical persons have frequently asserted that it will not “play.” I would not hazard any opinion as to its being a drama which will really “play.” It is obvious, however, that Exiles, if played at all, could be presented only to a highly alert and sensitive audience. It would demand an intelligent audience, perhaps a special one.

The relationship of Exiles to Ibsen's dramas is also a commonplace in the commentaries on Joyce. Joyce's description of the “naked drama” in Ibsen can be applied to Exiles. The great question which Exiles purports to open up is that of human freedom and human dignity; in this instance in a marital relationship.

The major character of Exiles is Richard Rowan, an Irish writer who has returned to Dublin after living abroad for a period. I think we are justified in observing that there is some relationship between Richard Rowan and Joyce himself, although not so close a relationship as that between Joyce and Stephen Dedalus. Richard Rowan is a man of the same cast of personality as Joyce seems to have been. He is out of the swim of Irish life, and he has studied Aquinas. When younger, he had some roistering experiences with his friend, the journalist Robert Hand. Motivated by the desire and the determination to be a free man, he had gone abroad with Bertha, who is culturally and intellectually inferior to him. He has molded her character so that she seems to have become something of an image of what he had wanted to make of her. It would almost seem that Rowan had approached Bertha, lived with her, not only as a mate and lover, but also as an artist who had re-created her very personality. The creation of art is a central, thematic motif in Joyce's writings.

Bertha and Richard have one child, Archie. Richard is not too attentive to him. He is absorbed, really, in himself and in his own problems. Bertha is a good wife and mother, and she is more or less submissive to Richard, the center of the household. Beatrice Justice, a cousin of Robert Hand and Archie's music teacher, is a rather pathetic creature. There exists between her and Richard a kind of spiritual or Platonic affinity. When he was away from Ireland, her letters inspired him. She, more than his wife, is in his mind when he writes. She might understand him better. Bertha cannot understand her husband, just as the Dedalus' could not understand their son.

Richard's old friend Robert Hand, the journalist, comes to see the Rowans. He is less intense, less logical, less penetrating and talented than Richard. He seems to induce Richard to remain in Ireland and attempts to get him a job. He flirts with Bertha and tries to arrange a rendezvous with her at his cottage. In the old days, he and Richard had used this cottage for parties and for liaisons. The failure of the rendezvous, Richard's visit to this house and then his wife's, suggest the Ibsenian drama with the recurring ghosts of the past.

If this play is to be located in a tradition, it is obviously that of Ibsen. Structurally, Exiles bears many resemblances to Ibsen's plays. In describing Ibsen's dramas, Joyce remarked that the time is usually a short span of a day or two. The time sequence of Exiles is similarly short, with all the action and revelations taking place in two days. In referring to Ibsen, Joyce used the phrase “the analytic method,” by which he meant that form of combined retrospective analysis and revelation (“epiphanies”) whereby the characters explore the past, tell one another what they thought and why they acted as they did, and in this way reveal a past relationship which colors the present situation. This method also served Ibsen as a means of characterization. It allowed him to establish his characters, to give them depth and credibility. At the same time, this analysis served as a means whereby he laid out his plot or problems. No theoretical method is of much meaning without its application, and in writing—especially, perhaps, in playwriting—application demands insight. We cannot fully explain Ibsen's penetrating insight by his method. But we can say that his method was highly valuable and useful as a means for projecting his insight.

Joyce used an Ibsenian situation, but the insight applied to this situation shows many differences from that of Ibsen.¹⁰ The organization of Exiles is similar to that of Ibsen's plays but strikingly different from that in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce tried to create “naked drama,” drama which reveals life itself and is, in this sense, more than mere characterization. We have written evidence that this was Joyce's purpose; but a comparison of Exiles with Ibsen's plays would also make this obvious. The “naked drama” of men and women seeking freedom and dignity and faced, in their effort, with the pressure of social convention, is focused in the attention paid to the hero, Richard Rowan. Richard Rowan dominates the play. He is the most perceptive character in this small group. He knows more about what is going on than do any of the others. He insists on utter frankness. Bertha must know him as he is; he must know her as she is. There must be no secrets between them. Thus, the effort of Robert Hand to seduce Bertha is no secret to Richard, although Robert is not aware of Richard's knowledge.

A considerable portion of Richard's dialogue is concerned with questioning the other characters and ascertaining their motives. Within the play, Richard serves as a vehicle for the author. But he is different from such a vehicle as Dr. Stockmann in An Enemy of the People. Dr. Stockmann goes through a cycle of experiences which motivate and justify his final decision, expressed in the remark that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” But to Richard knowledge comes instead through verbal questioning, analysis, and moral discussion, this last partly based on his training in Aquinas. Whereas in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Joyce utilized Aquinas as a means of presenting formal esthetic ideas and a formal statement of Stephen's aims, here he partially relies on Aquinas in order to discuss the intimate emotional problems of men and women, to deal with these morally, and to establish and explain a concept of freedom and dignity. Of course, in Ibsen's plays, too, one character may be dominant. Hedda Gabbler is an instance. Hedda dominates the play, and her moods and conduct control the actions of all the other characters. But Hedda does not dominate by intellectual superiority. In The Master Builder, Solness, the most intelligent character in the play, does not completely dominate the plot or the actions of the other characters. In fact, he is influenced by Helga Wrangel. But Richard does dominate and influence. His thoughts, desires, and determination, his inner problems, dictate the events in Exiles.

Thus, while there are similarities between Ibsen and Joyce, an important difference must also be stressed. Within a structure essentially Ibsenian, Joyce introduces a character who is more “subjective” than any of the leading characters of Ibsen. In Ibsen, the actions of the past, revealed by retrospection and analysis, form the basis of the plot structure. In Exiles, these actions, revealed in, let us say, an Ibsenian manner, are merely motivating factors. The present attitudes of Richard constitute the basis of the play. And these grow out of a tenuously adumbrated emotional conflict within his own nature. He wants to be free. He insists that his wife be as free as he. He is pushing her into accepting or rejecting the proposition of a liaison offered her by Robert Hand; any such liaison must be the result of a conscious act on her part. Richard, moreover, insists that he know of this conscious choice, and that his friend Robert Hand know that he knows. At the same time, he is pulled and torn by jealousy. The woman he has molded, almost in the spirit and manner of an artist molding the character of a heroine in a novel or play, must now act on her own, in freedom and in frankness.

Another point of difference between Ibsen's plays and Exiles is to be seen in the way women are represented. In many of Ibsen's plays, woman is the victim; and the victimization of woman, due to a position of sexual and social inequality, is tragic in the Ibsenian world. This attitude can be seen in more than one of Ibsen's plays. An instance is Hedda. She is really victimized because, as Ibsen stated in one of his letters, his “intention … was to indicate that Hedda, as a personality, is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than as her husband's wife.¹¹ Her father is an unseen ghost influencing Hedda. She is living in a house that suggests her father's house. She plays with, and finally kills herself with, her father's pistols. Moreover, the yearning and need for freedom on the part of Ibsen's women comes from an inner impulse. Nora slams the door because she must be a human being, not her husband's doll. But the entire problem of personal freedom for Joyce's Bertha is imposed from without. And this imposition continues past the relationships between Richard and Bertha. Richard created her. He continues to mold her character during the course of the play. I have already mentioned that truth is an integral element in the plays of Ibsen. It is ironical that in Ibsen's plays the truth does not necessarily set the characters free—as I have noted, in The Wild Duck Gregers Werle brings on catastrophe by telling the truth. Truth is equally integral in Exiles. But it is something which concerns Richard Rowan alone. Bertha, Beatrice, and Robert Hand do not feel the same need of truth that Richard does. Whereas a character like Nora discovers the truth in spite of her husband, Richard is impelled to force truth on his wife, regardless of her own needs. He does this because he feels that he must know the truth. How Richard dominates the play so that his needs, his problems, and his concerns play a causal role in the actions of the other characters is partly to be seen in his interest in the truth. He must know what Robert Hand has said to his wife and what she has said; whether he has kissed her or not, and how he has kissed her. And he must also know whether or not she consents to a liaison. But even though Bertha will tell him, still, as he says in the third act, he “will never know. Never in this world.”¹² In his last speech, Richard tells Bertha that he desires her in “restless living wounding doubt.”¹³ And he had longed for something else—to hold her by no bonds, not even by those of love. He had wanted to “be united” with her “in body and soul in utter nakedness.”¹⁴ But he is tired, tired by his wound. And she in turn asks him to forgive her, asks him, her “strange wild lover,”¹⁵ to come back to her.

The emotions of the play also involve guilt. The element of guilt was integral in Ibsen's plays. Actions in the past have injured those who are living in the present. Rubek, in When We Dead Awaken, feels the pincers of guilt, and Irene deepens this feeling. He had killed her human, womanly love for the sake of the statue he made of her. It would seem that Joyce, in his characterization of Richard Rowan, deals with guilt at the point where Rubek left off. Richard's concern with truth—his demand to know, his stringent insistence on permitting his wife to be free—all this suggests an effort so to act in the present that he will not, when he is older (when he is middle-aged, like Rubek), be faced with an Ibsenian ghost of conscience. He does not want to make his wife's life poorer in love. When he speaks with Robert Hand about Bertha and his own attitudes, there are references to the law of change in nature. This conversation also deals with moral fear, and Richard accuses Robert, whom he has known since boyhood, of not understanding moral fear. Richard's fear is a moral one; it is guilt. Richard tells Robert:

… She is dead. She lies on my bed. I look at her body which I betrayed—grossly and many times. And loved, too, and wept over. And I know that her body was always my loyal slave. To me, to me only she gave …¹⁶

At this point he breaks off, because he is unable to continue. Robert tries to give him assurance. Turning almost fiercely toward Robert, Richard declares that he is not afraid, not fearful that she has not loved him loyally. His real fear is

… that I will reproach myself then [when Bertha is dead] for having taken all for myself because I would not suffer to give to another what was hers and not mine to give, because I accepted from her her loyalty and made her life poorer in love. That is my fear. That I stand between her and any moments of life that should be hers, between her and you, between her and anyone, between her and anything. …¹⁷

For these reasons, then, he dares not stand between Robert and Bertha. But nonetheless he does stand between them. He demands to know the truth, insisting that only if he knows will any act of his wife be free and open rather than dark and secretive.

This situation has further parallels with When We Dead Awaken. Rubek has killed the soul of Irene by making from her a cold statue. There is a duality in the woman Irene and the statue fashioned by Rubek. In Exiles there is also a duality. Bertha, Richard's wife, is also his creation. Richard tried to give his wife new life, and he tortures himself, in the presence of his friend, by declaring that he has taken “her girlhood, her laughter, her young beauty, the hopes in her young heart.”¹⁸ Further, there is the shadow of Richard's dead mother. And here is the real duality in Exiles—Bertha and the dead Mrs. Rowan.

In the first act, when Rowan is talking with Beatrice, she says that it is difficult to give oneself wholly and freely. Richard speaks about what he is, at the very moment, suffering. He suffers for the frustration of Miss Justice and, even more, for himself. Then, with “bitter force,” he cries out: “And how I pray that I may be granted again my dead mother's hardness of heart!”¹⁹ His mother had not sent for him when she died. “She died alone, not having forgiven me, and fortified by the rites of the church.”²⁰ She had written a letter before her death, warning him, bidding him to “break with the past.”²¹ She turned aside from him and from his.

How can my words hurt her poor body that rots in the grave? Do you not think that I did not pity her cold blighted love for me? I fought against her spirit while she lived to the bitter end.²²

Then he presses his hands to his forehead before saying: “It fights against me still—in here [his head].”²³ And he goes on:

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 … not for her death but for some understanding of me, her own son, her own flesh and blood; that never came.²⁴

He needs the spirit of this old woman, now dead—his mother. He can neither possess fully nor can he relinquish his possession. Here he is explaining the motivation for the wounded doubt to which he gives voice in the final scene. He needs the hardness of heart he saw in his mother, for it is, in his case, linked with intelligence. He is a modern man, seeking to bring the light of reason into the most intimate and complicated personal relationships. He wants to be logical about human emotions. Briefly, Richard has never resolved his emotional conflict concerning his dead mother, the “ghost” of Exiles. He is bitter and hurt. In his youth he was misunderstood.

We can assume that Richard's nature is akin to that of his mother. His appeal to logic and intelligence is chilled. (How different this is from Dr. Stockmann's temperament and faith in truth!) In effect, Richard relates hardness of heart with rationality. This is cleverly revealed in the first act, when he thinks of his father. Talking with Beatrice, he points to a picture of his father on the wall. He asks her, “Do you see him there, smiling and handsome … ?”²⁵ He remembers the night his father died, and the man's last thoughts. Richard was then a mere boy of fourteen. The father called young Richard to the bedside, knowing that the boy wanted to go to the theater to hear Carmen. He told the mother to give the lad a shilling. Richard kissed his father and left. “Those were his last thoughts as far as I know.”²⁶ He asks Beatrice, “… Is there not something sweet and noble in it?”²⁷ I stress the detail that this remark is put in the form of a question, rather than of a positive declaration, for, almost immediately after speaking these lines, he says, “No, no. Not the smiler. … The old mother. It is her spirit I need. …”²⁸

Richard is his mother's son. And the “ghost” of his dead mother somehow shows up in Beatrice. There is something of the same chill in her Protestant nature that there is in Richard's Catholic nature. She cannot give herself wholly and freely. Seeing Beatrice on his return to Dublin, Richard unburdens himself of his guilts and feelings. He has returned to scenes that remind him of his mother. She was alive when he left; she is now dead. He is bitter because she did not call for him, forgive him. But the play makes it clear that by leaving Ireland he was escaping from her; he ran off in such a way as to suggest that he did not want forgiveness. Now he is bitter because he did not get what he did not want.

Richard could not speak in this fashion to Bertha, but he can to Beatrice. In the last act, Bertha tells Beatrice:

… I do not understand anything that he writes … I cannot help him in any way, when I don't even understand half of what he says to me sometimes.²⁹

This would suggest that the basis of the misunderstanding between Richard and Bertha is cultural. But he ran off with her rather than with Beatrice Justice, who, like Richard, is Bertha's cultural superior. And Bertha senses that there is more to the misunderstanding between Richard and herself than her lack of understanding of his ideas and his writings. In the final part of the third act, Bertha reveals this fact. She tells her husband that Beatrice is the person for listening to him, not she. Richard accuses his wife of having driven away Beatrice. Bertha answers:

… I think you have made her unhappy as you have made me and as you made your dead mother unhappy and killed her. Woman-killer! That is your name.³⁰

Bertha curses the day she met Richard and calls him a stranger. Agitated, and after a burst of tears during which she has sunk to the floor, she says she is “living with a stranger.”³¹

We can easily deduce that, culturally, Bertha is on the level of Richard's mother rather than of Beatrice, whom she describes as “everything I am not—in birth and education.”³² Also, we can justifiably assume that her nature is more maternal than was his mother's. He has taken this nature and tried to recreate it. He has put something of his own chill into it. The play makes clear that his basic image of womanhood has been given to him by his mother. The woman he has so loved and created, he now wants to set free from bondage. He is, in effect, giving her away to a lover and, at the same time, tearing himself with acute agony because he is doing so. His friend Robert Hand says to Bertha:

… he longs to be delivered … from every law … from every bond. All his life he has sought to deliver himself. Every chain but one he has broken and that one we are to break, Bertha—you and I.³³

Here is the crux of Richard's emotional struggle. He is delivering not only Bertha but himself.

This suggests another difference between Exiles and When We Dead Awaken. Rubek's feelings and problems are integrally linked with his art. His guilt feelings are bound up with his career as an artist. He has had a different relationship with Irene from that which Richard has had with Bertha—a professional relationship. Concerned with his own esthetic aims, he has poured his own love and humanity into his creation. He and Irene then parted, and he lost his inspiration. He has done no more work that satisfied him. He has done many portraits, and in these he has subtly made his subjects look like pigs. Moreover, he talks more of his art than Richard does. We get a clearer idea of what kind of artist Rubek is than we do in the case of Richard.

The problems Ibsen treated, not only in When We Dead Awaken but also in many of his other plays, are more equitably distributed among the characters than are the problems in Joyce's Exiles. Rubek's problems, his guilt, and his hopes are not rendered dramatically important at the expense of Irene or Maia. But in Exiles Richard's problems are stated at the expense of other characters: the concerns of Richard overwhelm those of the other characters. Herein lies, I believe, the real reason why so many critics have frequently expressed dissatisfaction with Exiles as a play. This dissatisfaction has often been voiced in the charge that Joyce has no dramatic talent. His main drama is the subjectivized, psychological drama of Richard Rowan. This subjectivized, psychological drama is projected onto the other characters, and the conflict of the play itself remains unresolved, for at the end Richard is still as torn as he was at the beginning. The cultural distance between Richard and Bertha is drawn out as a framework, as it were, for the distance between them because of the internal division within the consciousness of Richard Rowan.

Richard's lack of success in his own creation is revealed as Bertha's latent bewilderment is brought into the open. With Bertha he has failed. He must remain wounded by doubt or else see his failure nakedly. He remains wounded by doubt. He is not delivered; he cannot bring deliverance to himself. He has created Bertha on the basis of his own divided soul. Here is his real wound. Bertha wants only his love. The implication is, then, that Richard is too wounded to give her the love she craves. They stand facing each other in the Dublin home to which they have returned, spiritual exiles from each other.

It would seem that Richard Rowan, trying to avoid the dangers of a sick conscience, in the end finds himself with precisely what he has sought to escape. Ibsen's denouements were more definite than this. But the difference between Ibsen and Joyce here is not merely one concerning the denouement. It is a difference in insight. Richard Rowan could not be called an Ibsenian character. This suggests that, while there are parallels between Ibsen's plays and Exiles in structure and in the type of situation used, there is a definite difference in inner content.

V

Edmund Gosse, in his life of Ibsen, quotes a remark of Hazlitt:

The progress of manners and knowledge has an influence on the stage, and will in time perhaps destroy both tragedy and comedy. … At last there will be nothing left, good nor bad, to be desired or dreaded, in the theatre or in real life.³⁴

Gosse states that Ibsen's early drama Lady Inger at Östraat exemplifies Hazlitt's remark. Inasmuch as I am not familiar with this particular play, I cannot discuss the relevancy of Gosse's claim. However, Hazlitt's observation is suggestive. If anything, the progress of knowledge exerted an increasingly great influence on drama, on all art, during the nineteenth century. But Ibsen's later plays demonstrate that the theater was not killed as Hazlitt forecast. Ibsen's dramas would be unthinkable without the growth of science. The role of truth and of heredity as Ibsenian motifs show this to be the case. Ibsen's dramatic situations are those all of us could meet in our lives. Ibsen's characters exist on the same level of experience as we ourselves do. The same sort of spiritual and social catastrophes that overwhelm some of his characters could overwhelm us. Ibsen's characters have a representative quality: they are like many people who have lived, and who still live, in the real world. To use words which have now become mere abusive terms, Ibsen's plays are realistic and naturalistic. A considerable knowledge of men and women, of characters and events, stands behind these plays.

With these facts in mind, we can attempt to indicate an additional significance of Joyce's phrase “naked drama.” Ibsen's use of a method of retrospective analysis and revelation permitted him to show us people on the stage as they were engaged in the process of discovering some of the secret and mysterious meanings of their own lives. They pressed closely toward gaining a clear conception of their own aims, aspirations, and desires. In other words, their hidden impulses were brought into the open. These hidden impulses are the major source of dread, if we interpret dread to mean anxiety in the Freudian sense of the term. Through the development of what is loosely called naturalism and realism, writers have for many decades been tending to unveil the psychological mysteries of man, even to use this very process of unveiling as part of the stuff of drama. In this sense, one can say that Ibsen's plays are describable as “naked drama.” And, in aim, Exiles is similar. It is a psychological play, concerned with stating, dramatically and realistically, the secret drives of its characters. This is done in a setting of reality.

Thus Joyce was seeking to achieve the kind of effects Ibsen did. Ibsen was concerned with creating real and plausible people, with showing them to us as they lived in a world as real as our own. It is a commonplace now to say that his ability to achieve this artistic aim was uncanny. Many critics have already commented on the marvelous integration in his plays. Character and situation are so presented that an overpowering sense of reality is established. Even though this is all readily accepted in the literature on Ibsen, I should like to illustrate Ibsen's technical capacity with one example. Regardless of all other considerations, The Doll's House would lose its power of sustaining any dramatic illusion if the author had not provided for the care of the children after Nora slams the door. If Nora left a home in which the children were orphaned, threatened with the danger of having no love, no security, no proper care, then audiences all over Europe would have reacted to this play with disgust. The motivation of Nora would have been destroyed. Her actions would have seemed unjustified. Ibsen laid no great stress on the Helmer children. Casually, in passing, almost as though it were not even noticed and as though the author had never thought of this problem, the situation of the children in the Helmer home is integrated into the play. The nurse is stamped as a nurse. Thus, when Nora leaves, one doesn't think that now the children are left so orphaned as to have their lives ruined. The children do not seem to be the real victims when Nora slams the door in order to express her driving need for freedom, maturity, dignity, and individuality. Ibsen's dramas are marked by their internal consistency. Internal consistency in so-called naturalistic drama is extremely difficult to maintain, for one has fewer tricks, devices, off-stage aids at one's command. What happens must happen as though it were taking place not on a mere stage but in real life.

But Ibsen often resorted to a symbolism which the characters themselves expressed. We have noted this. The desire for freedom is expressed again and again by Ibsen's characters. The pathos in this desire is often seen in the fact that, in the last analysis, it can only be expressed in a metaphor, in a yearning for the heights, for the air, the sun, and the mountains. But this symbolism of freedom is not false or artificial in the Ibsenian drama. It flows out of the nature of the character. In the case of Rubek or Solness, a poetic symbolism reveals a man seeking to break the bonds of possibility in this world, a man wanting more than life might give. The Ibsenian character, struggling to express his or her individuality, thus finds in poetic expression the highest expression of the aim to be free. The closer a character comes to being an artistic type, the closer he is to the author himself, the more likely he or she is to use this symbolism. Freedom does not have the same meaning for Nora Helmer that it has for Rubek. Nora is rushing out into the world to discover herself and to be a free woman; Rubek is going up to the mountaintops in a snowstorm in order to try and find the glory of the world. Nora and Rubek are both consistent with themselves. Symbolism is used to enforce Ibsen's sense of reality. And whether this yearning for freedom is revealed as Nora's reveals itself, or with the aid of symbols as with Solness and Rubek, Ibsenian characters seek freedom only when they are shown to be ready for it. This fact is negatively demonstrated in the ironical treatment of truth in The Wild Duck.

George Bernard Shaw—who, in my opinion, understood many of the salient aspects of Ibsen more clearly than a number of other critics and commentators—remarked, in The Quintessence of Ibsenism:

… people cannot be freed from … failings from without. They must free themselves. When Nora is strong enough to live out of the doll's house, she will get out of it of her own accord if the door stands open; but if before that you take her by the scruff of her neck and thrust her out, she will only take refuge in the next establishment of the kind that offers to receive her. Woman has thus two enemies to deal with: the old-fashioned one who wants to keep the door locked, and the new-fashioned one who wants to thrust her into the street before she is ready to go.³⁵

Exiles, as concerned as it is with the freedom of a woman—Bertha—does not show Bertha freeing herself because she is ready; nor does it clearly show her loyally rejecting a proposal to be free—to have an extramarital relationship—because she is a free spirit and decides against taking such action. Thus, behind the theme of freedom and dignity in Exiles, we see the factor of control, the control of another destiny. Richard Rowan is intelligent; he suffers in the play. At the same time, he is a busybody. And it is in this fact that Exiles differs from Ibsen's outstanding dramas. The characterization of Richard is not of a type to carry the weight of the theme—the theme of freedom and dignity. Richard really destroys some of the dramatic intensity of the play. The Ibsenian bones of Exiles are more apparent than is the Ibsenian spirit.

As Shaw demonstrated with admirable clarity in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, Ibsen's plays imply an attitude of moral relativity. The theme of Exiles also implies moral relativity. But the main character, who gives expression to this theme, is prevented by his nature from practicing moral relativity. His ideals of freedom are incompatible with those elements of his character which stamp him as his mother's son. And the naked revelation of the play, the “epiphany,” if we use a phrase Joyce was fond of in his youth, is really to be seen as the exposure of Richard's wound. Exiles is concerned with “the naked drama of life.” But the hero—one who is intensely subjectivized—is, at the end, spiritually wounded. Consequently the play is not sufficiently resolved: the ending is inconclusive. It lacks a catharsis. Richard himself experiences no catharsis. The Ibsenian situation of Exiles calls for a catharsis. Exiles is really a problem play which ends in a mood. This is insufficient. If Exiles is to be accepted as a play stating a problem and exposing and focusing its inner essences, then it needs to be pointed out that the terms of this problem are distorted by the specific characterizations. We have already suggested this point. Richard Rowan distorts the general problem with his own wounded spirit: Bertha is not ready for the freedom he would give her. The problem melts into a psychological dilemma.³⁶

VI

This analysis does not permit us to come to one single conclusive explanation of Ibsen's influence on Joyce. That influence is too complicated. But it does suggest that there were both definite affinities and definite differences between the temperaments of Joyce and Ibsen. Both were independent and stood alone. And it might be said that each in his lonely independence had an exiled consciousness. Ibsen's honesty, his independence, his stress on freedom strongly attracted the young Joyce. Ibsen began as a poet, utilizing old Scandinavian legendary material as his source. For a short time, but without fanaticism, he was a cultural nationalist. His youthful ideal was one of sacrifice, of heroism, and of romantic action. Living in Norway, he was stirred by the revolutions of 1848. In veering from poetic drama to naturalistic plays, he developed themes of defeated idealism and of the relativity of truth and morals. Out of a world of contrasts, of guilts and broken words and catastrophic personal disasters, there comes forth a yearning for freedom and for the ideal.

If we consider the question of freedom in Joyce's work, and if we look outside of Exiles, we can note that freedom has not precisely the same significance for him as for Ibsen. The problem of Stephen Dedalus is that of freedom. But freedom for him is to be found in priestly dedication to the ideal of art. And art, as he conceives it, permits a purgation of all emotions but those of pity and terror. There is a difference between Joyce and Ibsen, but it need not be seen as a criticism of either. Ibsen's freedom is the freedom of man; Joyce's is the freedom of the priestly artist. Ibsen, as it were, symbolically climbed the heights: he saw the eagle in the sun. But there is the restraining disillusionment in his work: life is not the ideal. Joyce deliberately chose the name of Dedalus. Stephen Dedalus, the son, would fly away to the sun of freedom. In Stephen Hero, the young Stephen wants to experience all of life. In the Portrait, his goal is art, the life of art. For him, art is a form of living; art is freedom. The difference in temperaments between Ibsen and Joyce is suggested in their work. Rubek, in When We Dead Awaken, is disillusioned with art. Stephen goes from the disillusionments of his home life and his Irish experience to the ideal of art. His priestly dedication to art is one of purgation, purgation of all that would have led a Rubek to go to the highest mountain with Irene in a snowstorm. Encouraged, inspired, moved by the example of Ibsen, Joyce, as a youth, was moving in a dialectically opposite direction. He was seeking his own self-fulfillment. That self-fulfillment, insofar as it is mirrored in his work, is to be seen more clearly delineated in his other writings than in Exiles. The play is much more significant as a document concerning Joyce, as a means of checking the influence on Joyce of Ibsen, as a personal “epiphany” of the author, than it is in the history of the drama.

Ibsen also exerted a technical influence on Joyce. We have seen that young Joyce commented on how many of Ibsen's plays occur in the short space of a day or two. Exiles has the time span of two days; Ulysses has a time span of a day; Finnegans Wake, of one night. Joyce's remark in his essay is insufficient to establish the fact that the time span of Ibsen's plays influenced Joyce's writing. But the remark, plus these parallels, does suggest that this question of time span was on Joyce's mind. Also, it well might be that Ibsen stands behind Joyce's use of dialogue. There is, for instance, a certain brevity and sharpness to Joyce's dialogue. The dialogue of Stephen Hero, with this sharpness and brevity, and with many subtly characterizing touches, was undoubtedly influenced by Ibsen. And the dialogue here forecast much of the use of dialogue in A Portrait and in Ulysses. But much more important than these or other possible influences there was the example of Ibsen. Edmund Gosse, in his biography of Ibsen, wrote: “To a poet the achievements of his greatest contemporaries in their common art have all of the importance of high deeds in statesmanship and war.”³⁷ Ibsen's accomplishments were among the high deeds inspiring Joyce.³⁸ The young poet, destined to be one of the great writers of the twentieth century, found for his model, for his example, one of the truly great writers of the end of the nineteenth century. The influence of Ibsen on Joyce further bears testimony to the continuity and to the international character of art. Ibsen, breaking the bonds of nationalism to become one of the great European writers of his age, in turn inspired the young Joyce to yearn for a place in the great European stream of culture rather than merely that of Ireland. And by moving forth into the great stream of European, in fact, of world, culture, each artist in turn became perhaps the greatest writer of his own country.

Notes

1. Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1934), p. 181.

2. James Joyce, Stephen Hero, A Part of the First Draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, edited from the manuscript in the Harvard College Library by Theodore Spencer (New York: New Directions, 1944), p. 76. The section to which I refer, concerning Ibsen, is to be found on pages 84-88.

3. Ibid., p. 80.

4. Ibid., p. 85.

5. Ibid.

6. From James Joyce, copyright 1939 by Herbert Gorman, and reprinted by permission of Rinehart and Company, Inc., Publishers. P. 70.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., p. 135.

10. For another discussion of the relationship of Joyce and Ibsen, see “The Influence of Ibsen on Joyce,” by Vivienne Koch Macleod, PMLA, LX: 3 (September, 1943), pp. 879 et seq. Vivienne Koch Macleod discusses Exiles mainly in relationship with Brand, Peer Gynt, and Love's Comedy. She points out that there was a definite parallel between Ibsen's relationship with his parents and Joyce's with his. She explains why Exiles is not “successful” by stating that it “involves profound issues” but that “its implications are narrowed by centering them in the fairly negligible matter of a seduction.” My own analysis of Exiles would indicate that I do not accept this judgment. However, I would add that my own analysis, completed before I had read Miss Macleod's, is, in various details, similar to hers. Miss Macleod sees thematic similarities between Joyce and Ibsen in their treatments of “the nature of the artist as man and as citizen.” I would accept this, if my own points concerning differences such as those I will make concerning Richard Rowan and Rubek are also considered. I would suggest that the interested reader see Miss MacLeod's essay.

11. Collected Works of Ibsen, introd. v. X, p. viii.

12. James Joyce, Exiles (Norfolk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1945), p. 139. Copyright 1918 by B. W. Huebsch, 1946 by Nora Joyce; all quotations by permission of Viking Press.

13. Ibid., p. 154.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., p. 86.

17. Ibid.

18. Ibid., p. 84.

19. Ibid., p. 12.

20. Ibid., p. 13.

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid., p. 14.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid., p. 15.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 16.

29. Ibid., p. 132.

30. Ibid., p. 140.

31. Ibid., p. 141.

32. Ibid., p. 140.

33. Ibid., pp. 115-16.

34. Edmund Gosse, Henrik Ibsen (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1917), p. 54.

35. G. Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1917), p. 104.

36. Francis Ferguson, in his introduction to the New Directions edition of Exiles, argues that in Exiles Joyce created an image that is a “timeless artifact,” and that “the tragic flaw is not in him [Richard Rowan] but in his metaphysical situation.” While I do not question Mr. Ferguson's seriousness, I would point out that this kind of conception reveals how literary and dramatic critics often sentimentalize and distort the significance of works of art. What metaphysical situation exists in Exiles in which there is a tragic flaw? And what does it really mean, if anything, to declare that Richard Rowan should be described as an image to be seen as a “timeless artifact”? My own analysis runs counter to all such interpretations of Joyce's Exiles, or, for that matter, of the drama as a whole. In this way, the dramatic quality of Exiles is reduced, and it seems to be a talky play, even though it contains characterizations which are drawn with a remarkable clarity and honesty.

37. Henrik Ibsen, p. 76.

38. Shaw's The Quintessence of Ibsenism was published in 1891. It contains an appendix on acting, in which Shaw indicated the influence of Ibsen in England at the time. He wrote: “Playwrights who formerly only compounded plays according to the several prescriptions for producing tears or laughter, are already taking their profession seriously to the full extent of their capacity, and venturing more and more to substitute the incidents and the catastrophes of spiritual history for the swoons, surprises, discoveries, murders, duels, assassinations, and intrigues which are commonplace of the theatre at present” (p. 149). The example of Ibsen served as an influence on ordinary run-of-the-mill playwrights. On the basis of this fact, we can well sense how much more intensely this example would affect an ambitious young genius. Ibsen's very work helped to give added dignity to the vocation of art. Thanks to men like Ibsen, it was easier for Joyce to dedicate himself to the life of art.