[In the following essay, MacNicholas examines Exiles on its merits as a play, rather than in relation to Joyce's other works.]

James Joyce wrote two prose plays: the first he dedicated to his own soul and then destroyed; the second receives attention perhaps only because of its association with its more magnificent siblings. Even though many people have recognized its brilliance, few have conceded that Exiles is a good play.¹ Much of the criticism betrays the fact that it has been read primarily as a commentary upon Joyce's fiction—which is certainly a legitimate critical approach but does a disservice to Exiles unless the play is also evaluated on its own terms. The widely held assumption that Exiles is the aberration of a novelist, not the work of a playwright, is unlikely to yield a useful appraisal of the play's dramatic merits. Equally unproductive is an uncritical clanking of a chain leading to Ibsen. Exiles utilizes the stage conventions of realism and contains many superficial details of plot and situation which have counterparts in various plays by Ibsen, but the primary force of Exiles is in no way simply derivative. It should be remembered that Joyce was not in his youth when he wrote this play. It was written during 1914-1915, a period approaching the midpoint of his career, directly after A Portrait of the Artist was completed. Ulysses was already under way. By 1914 Joyce's knowledge of modern theater, not just of Ibsen, was immense. As early as 1901 Joyce could allude to the dramatic works of Tolstoy, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Bjornson, Giacosa, Yeats, and Strindberg in “The Day of the Rabblement.”

The texture of Exiles presents an austere and elaborately crafted surface which, like all of Joyce's major work, demands careful examination. A major critical issue, whether Robert and Bertha actually have sexual intercourse, has been almost completely ignored or misrepresented. Joyce constructed a delicate but impenetrable veil of doubt over their actions after the curtain descends at the close of Act Two. Act Three performs a sleight of hand by intensifying the uncertainty. Joyce gives the audience information sufficient to keep the possibility of Robert and Bertha's adultery alive, but insufficient to draw a definite conclusion. The ambiguity of the result of their assignation and the consequent ambivalences in the denouement, so unlike the theatrically clean strokes which resolve most of Ibsen's plays, have been frequently interpreted as dramatic weaknesses. My view is that, on the contrary, these “weaknesses” provide the substance for Exiles' subtle but powerful conclusion.

Everything is not ambiguous. It is apparent that Robert will leave Dublin and that his departure represents a victory of sorts for Richard, but his reason for leaving is not at all clear. He may be leaving because he cannot continue social relations with either Richard or Bertha after failing to fulfill what he regards as a dishonorable desire. His ardor, however, has not cooled on the following morning:

ROBERT:
… Your image was always before my eyes, your hand in my hand, Bertha, I will never forget last night. He lays his hat on the table and takes her hand. Why do you not look at me? May I not touch you?
BERTHA:
Points to the study. Dick is in there.
ROBERT:
Drops her hand. In that case children be good.

(Exiles 105)

Robert seems chastened not by a guilty conscience but by the proximity of Bertha's husband. That Bertha does not want to meet Robert's eyes suggests but does not establish her guilt.

When Robert asks Bertha what he should tell Richard of their activities, she replies, “The truth! Everything!” (p. 105). One possible inference from this exchange is that “everything” has not been revealed to the audience and that they have indeed committed adultery. This inference is strengthened when Robert objects, “No, Bertha. I am a man speaking to a man. I cannot tell him everything” (p. 105). But other possibilities must be considered. Perhaps they are only technically innocent of adultery. Perhaps Robert was impotent, or perhaps a sexual climax was brought about by external means, as Joyce muses in his notes to the play.² It could be that their evident disappointment reflects a disillusion of sexual performance. No matter what did happen, it could not measure up to their expectations.

Dreams are often more pleasant and psychologically accommodating than facts, and so Robert inquires, “Were you mine in that sacred night of love? Or have I dreamed it?” (p. 106). That he must ask Bertha to instruct him designates several possible motives: he may want to protect her and himself by corroborating his story with the one she will tell; he may even still be checking on Bertha's allegiance to Richard; or he may simply be afraid and need her guidance. In any case, it establishes Robert as a man from whom the entire truth about an intimate and embarrassing situation may not be reliably expected. Robert's fondness for secrets and intrigue has already been shown in Act One. Regardless of motive or event, his character demands the veneer of respectability.

Bertha, who “smiles faintly,” replies to Robert's question: “Remember your dream of me. You dreamed that I was yours last night” (p. 106). This suggests that the dream is not the reality and that Robert did not succeed, a conclusion which Edward Brandabur reaches.³ But possession here could mean something other than physical union, and the context of Robert's discussion with Richard about love in Act One obligates the audience to evaluate Bertha's words carefully. Her response could plausibly be interpreted in this manner: “Although you did possess me physically I am not yours because long ago I surrendered my soul to Richard; and the intensity of your longing for me has made you dream that I was yours.” Why does Joyce indicate that Bertha smiles faintly? Is it a wan smile drawn from a sense of loss and futility? Or does it undercut the surface meaning of her words? Part of this exchange, however, is certain: Robert must be content with only a dream—the surest sign that any further appeal to Bertha's allegiance is unavailing.

When Robert and Richard confront each other in Act Three, Robert's first words to him are enigmatic. Richard thanks Robert for the newspaper article, and Robert replies: “There is nothing to thank me for, Richard. Now and always I am your friend. Now more than ever before. Do you believe me, Richard?” (p. 106). Why “Now more than ever before”? The implications are that Robert was unsuccessful with Bertha or has conquered his lust for her. But there is a hint here that Robert and Richard are more closely bonded together because they have physically possessed the same woman. Richard has said that Robert's motives were obvious when he, Richard, entered in Act One. Before Bertha comes to the cottage in Act Two, Richard describes his emotions resulting from having seen Robert earlier that afternoon: “I told you that when I saw your eyes this afternoon I felt sad. Your humility and confusion, I felt, united you to me in brotherhood. He turns half round towards him. At that moment I felt our whole life together in the past, and I longed to put my arm around your neck” (p. 69). The cause of the “humility and confusion” is, of course, Robert's attachment to Bertha, just as a bond of their past life is also Bertha. This unusual idea of unity between the two men is repeated in one of Richard's last remarks to Bertha before he left her alone with Robert in Act Two: “I cannot hate him since his arms have been around you” (p. 75). Bertha tells Richard, “I wanted to bring you close together—you and him” (p. 112). The question of the union of two men through the agency of the same woman occupied Joyce's mind during the formation of the play and was insinuated in the text.⁴

Related to this interpretation is the possible irony of Robert's words, “There is nothing to thank me for.” If he had seduced Bertha, it would give him a slightly sadistic pleasure to say these words. Furthermore, the article itself contains Robert's stab at Richard, who left Ireland “in her hour of need” (p. 99). This remark stands out quite clearly because it is ironic that the disciple should accuse the master of betrayal. Robert's article surrounds this accusation with laudatory, if pedestrian, prose. Its tone reveals a duplicity of motive, but exactly what is Robert's motive for making this charge? Anger at Richard for taking Bertha to Italy and betraying her sexually? Anger at him because Bertha, in spite of his efforts, has remained faithful to Richard? Or guilt from sexual activity with her? We simply do not know.

Finally Robert's abjection and denial of adultery are undercut by the intrusion of the Fishwoman, whose cry—“Fresh Dublin bay herrings!” (p. 107)—is crucially timed to follow the long silence which ensues Robert's question quoted above: “Do you believe me, Richard?” Her cry is repeated directly after Robert's avowal to tell the truth. But the Fishwoman's cry does not prove anything, just as the foregoing dialogue establishes nothing other than a deliberate clouding of fact. Joyce could easily have removed the ambiguity in the dialogue between Robert and Bertha in Act Three, or in a stage direction indicating Bertha walking into Robert's bedroom at the end of Act Two. The viewer or reader may suspect that Joyce has been meretriciously coy with the audience's legitimate curiosity. Why lead us to the threshold of a meticulously prepared event only to blindfold us?⁵

It is irritating not to have certain knowledge of the activities of Bertha and Robert after the fall of the curtain in Act Two, but perhaps this irritation is part of the effect Joyce wanted to achieve. The spiritual suffering of all the characters, particularly of Richard, is the focus of the play. The structure of the play makes the fact of adulterous sexual intercourse subservient to that suffering. The “wound of doubt” is what the play builds toward, and if we do not witness Richard inflicting this wound upon himself, the play fails. It appears that Joyce wanted to create in the audience the same basis of doubt which Richard himself perceives. An obstacle, nearly overwhelming if we step aside to measure it, Joyce sets for himself is that Exiles solicits the audience's sympathy for Richard, whose agony does not result from adverse strokes of fortune but ensues almost completely from his own will. He more than anyone else has engineered his doubt. His obsession with cuckoldry has a Jonsonian extremity about it. It is a humor which does not flatten Richard's characterization because Joyce has so thoroughly circumstanced it. That we may feel any sympathy at all for Richard is a measure of Joyce's dramatic skill.

Because the audience does not know if Robert was successful, it can be in the best position possible to receive the full impact of the doubt which Richard feels. If the alternatives are considered, the strategic advantages for the audience to be also in doubt become apparent. If it had been established that Robert did not succeed, Richard's doubt would seem contemptible, or even slightly ridiculous. The basis on which we credit his suffering would be greatly reduced. If, however, it is acknowledged that Robert did succeed, it would render Bertha a liar (that Robert would lie is an accepted fact already), and the implication of the beginning of an altered but more authentic relationship with Richard would be diminished if not completely negated. Therefore, it is doubt which Richard seeks and it is doubt which he and the audience get: a deep and richly perplexing incertitude substantiating the play's comic movement.

A poetic density graces Richard's final words, which express, among other things, a reluctant acceptance of his fallen state: “I can never know, never in this world. I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care. It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness—for this I longed. And now I am tired for a while, Bertha. My wound tires me” (p. 112). The wound humanizes Richard because, as he foresees, it forces him to abandon the posture of the omniscient artist-god. The wound lives; the old idea of union without bonds Richard discards: “for this I longed.” To pursue seriously a marital relationship without bonds in the absence of complete knowledge is to court disaster because such doubt-obliterating knowledge does not exist in this world. Hence Richard's words—“I do not wish to know or to believe. I do not care”—indicate neither flippancy nor apathy toward Bertha. Richard is indifferent only to a kind of knowledge which he knows he cannot obtain, “never in this world.” Doubt is Richard's adjustment to sublunary existence. In his final words we see a strength in the affective part of Richard's soul. Although doubt wounds, it also lives; therefore, it implies Richard's continued emotional involvement with Bertha. But Exiles does no more than imply, for its method is the invention of a possibility, not the ratification of a result. Does the conclusion of Ulysses do more than invent the possibility of Bloom's reassertion of himself at home with Molly?

To recreate the soul out of the ruins of its shame was Richard's stated ambition (p. 70). Seen from this perspective, the ending of the play is comic, suggesting a renewal, an accommodation to an authentic order. In his correspondence Joyce referred to Exiles as a comedy. To specify in detail why this play is a comedy exceeds the scope of this inquiry, but a question Joyce put to Arthur Laubenstein several years after he had written Exiles might supply a beginning point. “Which would you say,” Joyce asked, “was the greater power in holding people together, complete faith or doubt?” Laubenstein chose faith, but Joyce demurred: “No, doubt is the thing. Life is suspended in doubt like the world in the void. You might find this in some sense treated in Exiles” (JJ 567-68). Joyce insists that doubt is an essential condition of the fallen state. As if to emphasize the myth physically on stage, Joyce has Richard stretch himself fully out along the couch at the end of the play, hearing Bertha's impassioned plea for a regeneration of their relationship.

It is important to recognize that by refusing to disclose to the audience certain knowledge of Robert and Bertha's actions Joyce has made the play far more static. The sensational incident is withheld. That Joyce would structure Exiles in this manner is not surprising. He had written much earlier that neither the action, the incidents, nor the characters were of paramount concern in Ibsen's plays. “But the naked drama—either the perception of a great truth, or the opening up of a great question, or a great conflict which is almost independent of the conflicting actors, and has been and is of far-reaching importance—this is what primarily rivets our attention” (CW 63). Joyce's review of When We Dead Awaken can be applied to Exiles, which does conclude with the “opening up of a great question.” The question might be put in this way: what is the nature of personal freedom in marriage, and what are the conditions which will sponsor this freedom? The doubt which Joyce carefully creates dislocates the audience's natural tendency to take sides with either Richard or Bertha. Had Joyce resolved the doubt, the impartiality in our view of Richard and Bertha's struggle to sanction each other's freedom would have been precipitated out of the play. Brecht never made a more rigorous appeal to an audience's intellect. Therefore, even though Exiles ends in an awesome uncertainty, it does not stumble into a vague mood. If the play specifies the components of doubt, if it evokes the conflict out of which doubt emerges, and if it forcefully conveys the protagonists' responses to that doubt, then has not the playwright done his work?

The conclusion of Exiles succeeds, I believe, in attaching dignity to the spiritual suffering arising from an entrenched skepticism. In the last moments Richard finds himself in an escalated equilibrium created by dynamically counterbalanced forces: Bertha's need to be loved and accorded her rightful status as his wife versus Richard's painful awareness of his human limitations and of the limitations of his marriage upon which he has placed a calculated, immense strain. But Richard does not despair. He twice renounces despair at the conclusion. That he does so, given the intensity and substance of his suffering, shows that his spiritual integrity is more than intact; it is admirable, and it raises his stature accordingly. Exiles' final effect, therefore, is anti-cathartic, which is to say that it is complex, impossible to categorize comfortably, vexing, arresting in the impenetrability of its doubt. It is, as Ezra Pound said of “Araby,” “much better than a ‘story,’ it is a vivid waiting.”⁶

Notes

1. Ezra Pound wrote a judgment in 1933 which has had wide currency: “Exiles is a bad play with a serious content; the effect of Ibsen is everywhere apparent; the play's many excellences are those of a novelist and not of a dramatist” (Pound/Joyce: The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce, ed. Forrest Read [New York: New Directions, 1965], pp. 249-50). James T. Farrell has argued that “Exiles is a problem play which ends in a mood. This is insufficient” (“Exiles and Ibsen,” in James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism, ed. Sean Givens [New York: Vanguard, 1948], p. 128). B.J. Tysdahl concludes that “In dialogue, use of symbols, and retrospective technique Exiles presents itself as a hotchpotch of material—partly well grasped and partly not—from Ibsen” (Joyce and Ibsen: A Study in Literary Influence [Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1968], p. 92). Darcy O'Brien thought Exiles too abstract: “Joyce's genius was best exercised upon more concrete grounds” (The Conscience of James Joyce [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968], p. 68). Bernard Benstock wrote that Exiles is perhaps less than a play, although more than the sum of its parts (“Exiles: ‘Paradox Lust’ and Lost Paladays,” ELH, 36 [Dec. 1969], 740-41). Edward Brandabur stated that “Critics see Joyce's play Exiles as his single failure, an opinion borne out by the infrequency of its performance” (A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce's Early Work [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971], p. 127). Other similar judgments could easily be documented. Significant exceptions to this trend are Francis Fergusson's opinions in “Exiles and Ibsen's Work,” Hound and Horn, 5 (April-June 1932), 345-53; and in the chapter “Joyce's Exiles,” in The Human Image in Dramatic Literature (New York: Doubleday, 1957), pp. 72-84. Perhaps Harold Pinter's productions in 1970 and 1971 have demonstrated that Exiles can be staged successfully.

2. “It is certain that [Bertha's] instinct can distinguish between concessions and for her the supreme concession is what the fathers of the church call emissio seminis inter vas naturale. As for the accomplishment of the act otherwise externally, by friction, or in the mouth, the question needs to be scrutinized still more. Would she allow her lust to carry her so far as to receive his emission of seed in any other opening of the body where it could not be acted upon, when once emitted, by the forces of her secret flesh?” (Exiles, p. 124).

3. Brandabur observes correctly that most critics have sidestepped this issue. However, he does not discuss it fully either (A Scrupulous Meanness, p. 129, n. 5).

4. “The bodily possession of Bertha by Robert, repeated often, would certainly bring into almost carnal contact the two men. Do they desire this? To be united, that is carnally through the person and body of Bertha as they cannot, without dissatisfaction and degradation—be united carnally man to man as man to woman?” (Exiles 123).

5. It is tempting but unwise to resort to Joyce's valuable notes as primary evidence to reach a conclusion. The notes are, after all, only working notes and do not necessarily represent Joyce's final intentions. Exiles, however, can serve as an elaborate gloss on certain of the notes: “All Celtic philosophers seemed to have inclined towards incertitude or scepticism—Hume, Berkeley, Balfour, Bergson” (Exiles 125).

6. Pound/Joyce, p. 28. This quotation is from the July 15, 1914 edition of The Egoist.