[In the following essay, four authors discuss their own opinions about Exiles.]

BY JOHN RODKER

Again in this play Mr. Joyce exploits that part of mind merging on the subconscious. The drama is one of will versus instinct, the protagonist Richard Rowan, a writer. This particular psychological triangle is one of barely comprehended instincts, desires for freedom (equally undefined), emotions that hardly crystallise before fading out. Inter-action of thought and will is carried so close to this borderline that the reader fears continually lest he miss any implication. Analysis digs continually deeper. At a certain moment it is lost. Mind will go no further.

People are built on no plan and since it is impossible at any moment to say that either will or instinct is dominant, the author lets the curtain fall finally on the hero's temporary surrender to both.

RICHARD:
(still gazing at her and speaking as if to an absent person). I have wounded my soul for you—a deep wound of doubt which can never be healed. 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.

The play is particularly à propos. Everyone talks of individual freedom,—(Stirner is a name to conjure with, though unread),—identifying it in some obscure way with Women's Suffrage. But the issues are psychological and no spread of popular education will simplify them. In this case Rowan leaves his wife to do as she will. She naturally reviles him for leaving her without the prop of his decisions. After nine years of conjugal life she is unable to make up her mind as to whether she needs a lover. If in the end she does not sin, it is because she uses her virginity as he his profligacy; for pride and humiliation. I have read the play often but without arriving at whether it is an ultimate cowardice or love for her husband that keeps her faithful. To Rowan detail of what has happened does not matter. The atmosphere of their communion would make a more treacherous betrayal than any carnal sideslip. That he can never know.

His anguish at the possible withholding from his wife of any instant of experience which might make her life more full may be interpreted as moral strength or cowardice. Where it is his will demanding Bertha's freedom, he is diffident, but instinct in him speaks fiercely. … “I told you that I wished you not to do anything false and secret against me—against our friendship, against her; not to steal her from me, craftily, secretly, meanly—in the dark, in the night—you, Robert, my friend. …” (Looks away again; in a lower voice) “That is what I must tell you too. Because in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her—in the dark, in the night—secretly, utterly, craftily. By you my best friend and by her. I longed for that passionately, crazily, ignobly, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be. … To be forever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame.”

The play is very romantic, poetical in a manner rare among plays. It is as fervent as the Seagull of Tchekhof. It was no small achievement of Mr. Joyce to have made dramatic such very pure cerebration, and that with a touch so delicate that no most intricate part of the mechanism has suffered by the inquisition. One sees Ibsen ruining such a situation with coarse fingers. Tchekhof got his purity of apprehension from taking people by their instincts. Joyce has done the same thing with a difference. Not that his people have necessarily more brains, but beyond instinct the brain ramifies into obscurer delicacies. The implication of Exiles are so numerous—each one subject for minute elucidation—that only with great familiarity would a total impression be possible. Tchekhof's subtleties are plain-sailing, instinctively apparent, so that for stage purposes he is the last word in effectiveness. Exiles will have however to become classical—a repertory play, seen often—before any audience can be familiar with it. It is a play which though perfect as literature, might easily lose significance on the stage: it is too full of meat. The most accustomed stomachs only will avoid indigestion.

Nevertheless a production should be full of interest. No manager will, I fancy, care to produce a play without a real suicide, even though it be a “death of the spirit” that drops the curtain; but a small theatre, of which there are many in America and one or two in this country, might easily gain a reputation for intelligence by its production.

BY ISRAEL SOLON

Let me say at once that I was most painfully disappointed with James Joyce's Exiles. My disappointment was so keen because of what he might have achieved and came near achieving but failed to achieve. His merely good is not good enough where the great was so nearly within his reach. With that theme, the author of the Portrait and Ulysses should have achieved nothing short of the sublime. No poet since Sophocles has had so dramatic a vehicle. Indeed, I think Joyce's the more dramatic.

Sophocles took for his theme the fate of a man incompletely born and who was therefore bound to rejoin his mother. Sophocles held that man strictly to his inheritance. And so vividly did he present his argument that to this day those of us who are doomed to love our own mothers are forced to accept his terrible but valid judgment. We may fling a feeble fist at whatever gods we choose; escape our doom we can not. James Joyce in Exiles has taken for his dramatic vehicle the fate of two men who are in love with each other and who are at the same time excessively amenable to all social coercion. Bound by the letter of conventional morality more completely than most men, the disguises winked at by organised society and thereby made available to most men is not available to these two men. They will have nothing they may not have openly. Drawn to each other from within and held back from without, these two men are doomed to keep within sight of each other but beyond the reach of each other. The “eternal triangle” of our conventional comedy is repulsive to these men. Here is matter worthy of the very best that James Joyce has it within him to lend. Why, then, does James Joyce fail to achieve that measure of greatness we have every right to expect of him and the theme he has chosen?

I believe it is because he has failed to make his characters conscious of what fate has in store for them. Had he made these men fully aware of what their lives held for them, the rôles fate meant them to play, and he, furthermore, made them struggle valiantly against it, then if they had won in the end we should have had great comedy, and if they lost we should have had sublime tragedy. Consciousness would have made of them such responsible human beings as would have engaged our sympathies to the utmost; whereas unconsciousness has left them feeble victims blindly wallowing to no purpose. And since it is unthinkable to me that the author of the Portrait and Ulysses could be lacking in moral courage, I am forced to the conclusion that James Joyce was not himself aware of the matter of his play.

BY SAMUEL A. TANNENBAUM, M. D.

Exiles will in all probability prove to be cavaire to the general, not only because it is open to the obvious criticism that it is not true to life, but because its subject-mater is one that unconsciously stirs up the most passionate resistances of a reader unaccustomed to the most honest and deep-searching self-analysis. To the psychologist trained in psychoanalysis, on the contrary, the book will be agreeably welcome as an inspired contribution from the depths of an artist's soul to one of the most tabooed and falsified motives of human conduct,—we mean homosexuality. It is true that the reader unlearned in such matters, and perhaps the author too, may not be aware that this is the theme of the play and may look for it in vain. Of course, this is not all there is to the play; just as in a dream the main motive is overladen and disguised with other subsidiary motives and rationalizations, so is it in the drama before us.

The comparison of Exiles with a dream may be carried much further. Every work of fiction is its creator's dream; the more fictious, the more dream-like, the more apparently absurd and unreal, the truer it is to the hidden forces in the maker's soul and the truer too to the generality of mankind for whose repressed springs of action the poet is the mouthpiece. Exiles very often reads like like a dream and must be interpreted as such. As such it may be said to derive its motive power from the author's repressed but most urgent impulses, to emanate from the unconscious forces within him and to enable him to gratify in this “harmless” way his unacted and unactable longings. In all this, it need hardly be said, there is not the slightest reproach for or condemnation of the dramatist: every purely fictitious literary work is the self-revelation of a burdened soul that saves itself from a neurosis or from a perversion by the cathartic effect of the creative process.

Richard Rowan's, the protagonist's, homopsychism is never once referred to in the story but is clearly to be deduced from his character and conduct. He has no love for his dead mother and several times refers bitterly to her hardness of heart, at the same time crediting her with having been a remarkable woman; of his “handsome father”, on the contrary, he always speaks with great affection. He is utterly incapable of making love to a woman or of loving one unless she is or has been in love with a man to whom he is attached; for this reason he connives at his life-long friend's, Robert Hand's wooing of his wife and urges her, nay, goads her on to be unfaithful to him. The author subtly and delicate leads us to infer that Richard and Bertha are living a life of abstinence ever since his betrayal of her nine years before and that he gives her full freedom only that they might thus be reunited. Speaking to Robert of the moment when he surprised him wooing Bertha, he says: “At that moment I felt our whole life together in the past, and I longed to put my arm around your neck”. A little later he says to him: “In the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her—in the dark, in the night—secretly, meanly craftily. By you, my best friend, and by her. I longed for that passionately and ignobly”. Being asked why he did so, he replies: “From pride and from ignoble longing. And from a deeper motive still”. From a psychological point of view it is important, too, to note that before Richard's marriage he and Robert had for years shared a house in the country as a rendez-vous for erotic escapades. Of course Richard rationalizes his motives in his unconscious conflict with his latent passion (“I fear that I will reproach myself for having taken all for myself because I would not suffer her 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”), but even the few sentences we have quoted prove the correctness of our deduction concerning him. Fully to comprehend this splendid portrait of a type of artistic soul that one meets often enough in real life, though exiled, it is necessary not to overlook Richard's intensely masochistic and voyeur impulses. He delights in putting himself in situations that entail a great deal of anguish for him, and he compels his wife to give him the fullest details of his friend's assaults upon her honor. That he can be cruel too on occasion is not at all surprising; by virtue of the law of bi-polarity the masochist is also a sadist.

The portraits of the Wife, the Friend, the Other Woman and even the Child are interesting characterizations that will repay careful study. They are all intensely individualized and unquestionably human though not conventional. Archie, aged eight, is one of the few life-like children to be found in literature and is introduced into the play very effectively—perhaps because in portraying him the author was inspired by Shakespeare's Prince Mamillius to whom the little lad bears a strong resemblance. (Incidentally it may be remarked that The Winter's Tale is largely unintelligible if we fail to see the homopsychic conflict in it and do not recognize the erotic relationship between Leontes and Polixenes. Othello's fate too might have been different had it not been for his unconscious love for Cassius.

Many of the minute details of this play, such as Richard's slip of the tongue about his interest in Robert's cottage, Beatrice's forgetting to bring her music, Bertha's sudden attack of fear when Robert speaks to her from the bed-room, etc., prove Mr. Joyce to be a fine psychologist and a keen observer of human nature. But his courage to be true and unconventional, combined with the fact that his chief characters are neurotic, exiles, will we fear doom him to a small but select following.

BY JH

I find it difficult to put any of my thoughts on Exiles into words. They are not used to words: they die. I feel that Joyce's play has died in words. I do not mean because of the words literally,—all Art is linguistic. But even Art must fail many times before it conquers those things whose nature it is to keep themselves a secret from us forever.

On the surface the play gives itself up to many interpretations. Propagandists declare it is a play on the freedom of the individual. Other reviewers talk of triangles and Ibsen and neurotics. All these things are easy and semi-intelligent things to say. But when it is unanimously agreed that Joyce hasn't “put over his idea clearly” or that he hasn't known just what he was trying to put over, I grow a bit nervous and wonder why it doesn't appear to them that perhaps Joyce couldn't reach their darkness. I also wonder why not read Exiles with Joyce in mind. The man who wrote A Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses, a highly-conscious, over-sensitized artist living at the vortex [Zurich] of modern psychology, would scarcely go back to dealing with material in a pre-Nietzsche manner. Joyce is not Galsworthy; on the other hand he is not D. H. Lawrence. And to discuss courage in connection with Joyce is ridiculous. Joyce outlived courage in some other incarnation.

There are people, a few always the artist I should say, who inspire such strong love in all who know them that these in turn become inspired by love for one another. The truth of the matter is that such a person is neither loved nor lover but in some way seems to be an incarnation of love, possessing an eternal element and because of it a languor, a brooding, a clairvoyance of life and a disdain. In other people he breeds a longing akin to the longing for immortality. They do not love him: they become him. Richard is one of these.

There is much talk of freedom in the play. Everyone wanting everyone else to be free, it is shown that there is at no time any freedom for anyone. The discussion of the wife's decision when she went away with Richard—unasked by him—proves she has no freedom to make a decision. She may have been in love with Robert; but she had no choice: she was Richard. Robert is in love with Richard, has always been; but he is an unthinking, natural man. He follows nature with his brain and thinks he is in love with Richard's wife, a woman being the conventional symbol for a man's love. But when he has a meeting with her and they are left alone by Richard in perfect freedom they are foiled, they are both Richard, both trying to reach Richard, not each other. Richard's old conflict with his mother (just indicated) was based on her refusal to become him. The wife sees the child going the way of all of them.

There is no where in the world for Richard to turn for love. Sex as other men know it can be for him only a boring, distasteful need of the body. Love strikes back at him from every source. His becomes a Midas tragedy.

He is tormented by the commonplace “beaten path” love-making of Robert and his wife. He asks her infinite questions; he directs the love-making to save his sensibilities. He says to Robert: “Not like this—this is not for people like us.” Yet he wishes darkly that they had dishonoured him in a common sneaking way. Not that he cares for either of them, not that he cares for honour or for conventions, but then he might have been free of them. They would have acted for once without his spirit having been the moving force.

We see Richard wearily contemplating his despair. There is much of the child in Richard. He has a need to create some hold on life, some connection with the experiences of other men. He chooses the least uncomplimentary to himself of those in the play as the symbol through which he can make his connection with love. He sees himself less handicapped intellectually in the music teacher, so he loves love through her. When they taunt him with her he answers “No, not even she would understand.” He writes all night endless pages at this image of himself, and in the morning walks on the beach maddened by emptiness and despair. At the last curtain he falls on to a couch, worn and helpless, in need only of a “great sweet mother”; but he must be forever on the wheel: his wife kneels beside him babbling of her love.