[In the following essay, Magalaner and Kain discuss reviews and varying opinions about Exiles.]

Joyce's sole surviving drama, Exiles, was composed during the spring of 1914. Gorman considered it the author's “farewell to the past” in that it represents his final allegiance to traditional literary form.¹ As a young man in Dublin at the turn of the century, Joyce naturally evinced great interest in the drama. His “Day of the Rabblement” essay protested the parochial tendencies of the Irish theater, with the directors “shy of presenting Ibsen, Tolstoy or Hauptmann,” or even second-raters like Sudermann, Bjornson, and Giacosa.² Amateur theatricals enliven the youth of Stephen Dedalus, as did charades for Leopold Bloom and undoubtedly many another late-Victorian Dubliner. The Dubliner has been as much a fancier of the theater and music hall as of the pub or race track. Even late in his career the author was known for his readiness at mimicry or a turn at a pas seul. Theatrical attractions—Leah, The Lily of Killarney, Marie Kendal, and the comedian Eugene Stratton—occupy the minds of Bloom and his friends in Ulysses.³ The translation of Hauptmann, which Joyce later transferred to Mr. Duffy of the “Painful Case” and the lost play, “A Brilliant Career,” are not so important as the author's devotion to Ibsen. This devotion, manifest in his learning Dano-Norwegian in order to read the work in the original, and in the first published essay, a review of When We Dead Awaken, is based not so much on literary merits as on Ibsen's value as a symbol of the defiant, misunderstood artist. Thus was Ibsen hailed in the essay in The Fortnightly Review. In words that prefigure Joyce's own later reputation he characterized the Norwegian, then seventy-two, as one whose name “has gone abroad through the length and breadth of two continents, and has provoked more discussion and criticism than that of any other living man.” There follows a list of the insults hurled at Ibsen—“meddlesome intruder,” “defective artist,” “incomprehensible mystic”—and, according to an English critic, “‘a muck-ferreting dog’”—epithets ready at hand twenty years later when Ulysses was published.

But, Joyce continued, Ibsen constantly gains stature, “as a hero comes out amid the earthly trials.” Master that he is, he has not been disturbed by the cries of petty detractors but has remained loyal to his vision, heedless of “the storm of fierce debate” raging about him.

Almost a year later Joyce wrote a letter to Ibsen congratulating him on his seventy-third birthday. A tentative apology for the “immature and hasty article” is followed by a more characteristic assertion that the undergraduate has “sounded your name defiantly through the college where it was either unknown or known faintly and darkly.” Discounting an impression of sentimental hero worship, Joyce claimed that “when I spoke of you in debating societies and so forth, I enforced attention by no futile ranting.”

The most important part of the letter, however, is the conclusion, in which Joyce conceived of an apostolic episcopal succession in art, with himself the chosen successor. To sophisticated minds the words may sound naïve or self-centered or both, but to Joyce, now without a church, to have a patron saint in the religion of art was an auspicious sign. In “The Day of the Rabblement” he had notified the public that the torch, passed to Hauptmann, would be taken by younger hands—“the third minister will not be wanting when his hour comes.” Now he confesses to Ibsen his readiness:

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, I give you greeting.⁴

The young aspirant to the temple of art had found a father.

The influence of Ibsen has been examined by Vivienne Koch Macleod and James T. Farrell. The parallels are numerous: rejection of narrow nationalism, estrangement from family, exile with its nostalgia, the concern with paternity, the dilemma of freedom and responsibility, the problem of the status of the artist. Mrs. Macleod feels that Ibsen provided for Joyce “an almost literal blueprint for his own life and art.” Farrell adds that both Norway and Ireland, being outside the major streams of European culture, were dominated by alien civilizations. Both countries disappointed their native authors, Norway in failing to aid Denmark, Ireland in remaining servile. Both were entering into a period of nationalist aspiration, but neither Ibsen nor Joyce accepted the narrow limits of national expression. These are interesting parallels, but Farrell is wise in not assuming that Joyce was aware of them or was motivated by them.⁵

Ibsen provides the topic of conversation in two of the most amusing genre scenes in Stephen Hero. The student has been carefully developing his theory of art (first step in the new theology he feels he must create) and is in a state of anxiety to communicate his ideas to someone, even if it be to a no more receptive audience than his mother, quietly ironing while Stephen struggles to explain his theories, “garnished with many crude striking allusions with which he hoped to drive it home the better.” His mother is “surprised to see the extraordinary honour” bestowed by her son upon Beauty, which, to her, is at best a drawing-room convention, at worst “a synonym for licentious ways.” She is discreet enough, however, to ask about Ibsen and to promise to read his “best” play, not, she adds, to censor his reading but, hesitantly and pathetically,

—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—amn't I right in saying “ideal”?

Her opinion of the plays she read was equally tentative. But her husband, who, expecting from Ibsen's notoriety some “anomalous torridity,” found the first half of the League of Youth merely tedious. Joyce slyly adds that his relief over his son's respectability was mingled with the disappointment of his expectations.

The interview with the President of the College is equally amusing. He accepts the hearsay about Ibsen unquestioningly, though he knows nothing of his work, and warns Stephen that in Ireland such paradoxical criticism as an essay on art will scarcely gain a following.

The young poet in Stephen Hero regards Ibsen as “first among the dramatists of the world,” an opinion that precipitates the bitter aftermath of his essay reading. One conservative student, falling back on the obvious, opined that “Macbeth would be famous when the unknown authors of whom Mr. Daedalus was so fond were dead and forgotten.” Ibsen's “sincere and boylike bravery,” his “disillusioned pride,” and his “minute and wilful energy” gave Joyce's concepts of art a militancy and masculinity not found in the typical aesthete.⁶

The spirit of Ibsen, like most of the formative influences of Joyce's youth, remained with him; in 1915 he essayed his own version of Ibsen's “naked drama” in Exiles. The memoirs of Stanislaus Joyce, so valuable in detailing the impact of literature on his brother, point out that one of the professors was so much impressed by the championship of Ibsen that he prepared a public lecture on Ibsen, borrowing books and information from the precocious student.

Despite Joyce's enthusiasm, When We Dead Awaken is not Ibsen at his best. To M. C. Bradbrook the last plays are, like Shakespeare's tragicomedies, inward visions rather than successful dramas. The “descending order of dramatic greatness” of the last four plays culminates in this bitter testament of futility. The sculptor Rubek has repudiated his high artistic ideals, rejected the love of his model and source of inspiration, and settled into a complacent marriage. On the return of the model, Rubek and she climb the mountain peak in the storm, achieving an ecstasy in death that they feared to attain in life. Miss Bradbrook sees “an apocalyptic symbolism” in the mountain setting, the contrasting characters, and the symmetrical construction. The “lurid glow” of madness anticipates Strindberg. The play seems “a last doom-session” of the playwright on his own career.

Resemblances between Exiles and Ibsen's last play are too striking to be accidental. In both cases a figure from the past returns to test the sincerity of an artist. Ibsen's almost symmetrical balance of characters—the worldly wife Maia and her hunter lover contrasted with the artist and the model Irene—is paralleled by Joyce in the contrast of the dedicated Richard and his loyal but less inspired wife with the worldly friends Robert and Beatrice. The motivations in Exiles are far more complex and unpredictable, however. The issue is not simply that of artistic integrity but a puzzling series of dilemmas concerning the limits of freedom, the demands of love, and the possessiveness inherent in marriage. It seems almost too much for the plot to carry, especially a situation so trite as that of testing a wife's fidelity.

Autobiographical elements are readily recognized—the self-imposed exile in Italy, the lovematch with a woman of inferior cultural status, the temptation to return to Dublin. Less apparent is the attitude Joyce takes to his fictional double, as shall be noted later. Richard shares with Stephen Dedalus a deep-seated suspiciousness of the motives of all, including himself; a desire to find a heroic model—here both Swift and Jesus; sexual distaste; a faint tinge of social concern; and resistance to alien voices, those of the public, but most emphatically that of the dead mother's spirit.

Though its superficial autobiographical interest has long been noticed, its haunting and evocative beauty has had few advocates, the most eloquent being Francis Fergusson. For most readers it remains less a successful drama than an abstract dialectic, an imperfectly realized debate upon principles not clearly perceptible. Without the temperament of Stephen Dedalus in mind, one may find Richard's scruples as tantalizing and infuriating as they are to his wife and friends. His supposed concern for “virginity of soul” is not clarified by his cryptic reference to it. With characteristic bluntness, George Jean Nathan reviewed a 1925 performance and found it “three hours of talk in a single monotonous key.” The words were not live and dramatic but “supine and sleepy” and the whole play seemed to have “the spirit and tempo of a German funeral.”⁷

Some failure in communication is noted by most critics. For Levin the theme lacks a proper correlative: “No playwright can afford to be a solipsist.” For Macleod the “implications are narrowed by centering them in the fairly negligible matter of a seduction”; for Farrell, the problems do not spring from the characters themselves, but are projected upon them by Richard. The lack of resolution makes it “a problem play that ends in a mood.” Williams finds the weakness in Joyce's use of representational speech and the absence of commentary; that is, in the limitations of the naturalistic method itself.

What is the basic theme? One who knows the complexity of Joyce's orientation should not be surprised that many answers have been given. We may distinguish two main types, the naturalistic and the metaphysical, the first centering on psychological problems, the latter dealing with ultimate contradictions in existence, but both giving serious treatment to the dilemmas confronting an idealistic individual in his relations to his social group.

The Little Review's symposium in 1919 represents both views. John Rodker, Israel Solon, and Dr. Samuel Tannenbaum stressed the psychological, Rodker interpreting the play as a conflict of will and instinct, Solon and Tannenbaum suggesting the theme of homosexuality. Later Dr. Alfred Barnes thought that Richard desired to be betrayed in order to escape guilt over his own infidelity. Jane Heap replied with an interpretation of Richard as “neither loved nor lover” but “an incarnation of love.” His effect on others is troubling:

In other people he breeds a longing akin to the longing for immortality. They do not love him: they become him.

He is wearied of his stigmata, yet in this “Midas tragedy” he finds that “Love strikes back at him from every source.” Sex is not a paramount concern to him; he terms it “a law of nature which he did not vote.” A man of finer quality than most, he sees at last that the others cannot reach his plane and suffers “because he cannot put upon them his special illumination about life and love.”⁸

In view of the play's tenuous nature, it is surprising to note how favorable are the early reviews. Only one, that in The Catholic World, was obtuse. Joyce is “so afraid of the obvious that he is timid even of the clear … leaving his audience hopelessly uncertain upon a vital fact of his plot.” It is a pity, the review continued, “to see such manifest literary talents wasted on so futile a piece of work.” Life is “difficult enough,” but “not so repulsively, and insolubly involved” as this. The Times Literary Supplement sensed “resources of spiritual passion.” The ambiguity is “merely distracting,” though the reviewer contradicts himself by showing that were Robert and Bertha false, it would “diminish the poignancy of his tragic doubt.” To Francis Hackett the play was so good “that the defects seem to be an illusion”; Joyce appears “intuitive and occult,” even though actions and words lack reality. Robert is too frivolous and trivial to be taken seriously by Richard, whose speeches on love and freedom “seem so unimaginable.” Padraic Colum emphasized the “unspoiled, alluring, unconventional, faithful” Bertha, the first notable woman in Joyce. Among other early reviews one may note that of Ezra Pound. Pound uses Joyce as a stick for beating the modern stage, which has succumbed to “interior decorators,” never daring to attack real problems.⁹

“To be made to wonder and to think about characters in a play is a rare experience,” said Desmond MacCarthy, to whom the work was worthy of comparison with Ibsen. Though professing to be unsure of its meaning, he ventured to characterize it as “a study in the emotional life of an artist.” The artist's imagination “opens the door to a hundred new subtleties and possibilities of action,” but his awareness of the feelings of others keeps him at a distance; hence one “can hardly believe he cares for anything but his own mood.” Bertha longs for an elemental simplicity but, having “eaten of the tree of knowledge,” realizes its impossibility. Robert and Richard reach mutual understanding: “consciousness that each is still at bottom solitary is, in a strange way, the tenderest bond between them.”¹⁰

On the psychological plane, Golding sees Richard as one “who attempts to execute in the medium of life the aesthetic doctrine which Joyce proceeded to execute in terms of words.” This involves his keeping “his soul to himself, with the corollary that he shall do nothing at all to prevent his associates keeping their own souls to themselves.”¹¹ James T. Farrell's reading is similar. Richard wishes “to avoid the dangers of sick conscience,” but it is impossible, for his goal of freedom is incompatible with his own nature. He can neither possess Bertha as the average man might, nor can he relinquish her, granting the freedom that his theory demands. The dilemma is psychological, resting on Richard's own ambivalent nature. Earlier, Joseph Wood Krutch had found an insuperable psychological dilemma at the heart of the play. Richard is “committed to a new morality and yet not sure where it will lead him.” The result is that he appears unnaturally fastidious in his moral judgment.

We meet our problems as best we may, but we do not even in our plays seek so desperately to create them.

Instead of creating a better adjustment to life, as in Ibsen's plays, the new Joycean morality seems merely an additional means of self-torture.¹²

Gorman describes the characters as “spiritual exiles,” “highly intellectualized explorers desirous of passing beyond the good and evil of a mutable world.” The play is both psychological (“the physical and mental reactions of these four characters”) and metaphysical (“that higher, lonelier drama which is played out in the intricate labyrinths of the brain”).¹³ To Fergusson the drama is metaphysical. Ibsen's heroes are Prometheans, seeking the good of humanity, but Joyce is a Daedalus, a pure artist, free of such feeling. Richard's tragic flaw “is not in him, but in his metaphysical situation.” He demonstrates the romantic motives of the others “like a priest or a physician,” the undernourished rebellion of Beatrice, the callow romantic revolt of Robert, both “an evasion of that complete, individual ethical awareness which Richard represents.” It is Fergusson who best evokes the austere beauty of the play. Richard's final scenes with Bertha, “in their quietness, their tender refusal of a passion which is always present,” are comparable to “the grave farewells of Racine's monarchs.” Each person expresses his own “intangible esthetic life which is itself and no other thing,” appearing “like one of the images in Dante's Hell: cut off, final, unchanging, and brilliant … against the surrounding darkness.” Richard is not merely an individual, nor merely the artist type: Joyce's theory that pity and terror attract the beholder by “whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering” implies that Richard resembles both “the unique bird man” and the pagan sages in Dante's limbo.¹⁴

Thus far there has been virtual agreement on the play's meaning—the presentation of the ultimate loneliness and doubt that must possess the soul, the inevitable exile of man. A contrary view is first expressed by Bernard Bandler. The exile of the secondary characters is not inherent in their nature, but imposed upon them by the impossible demands made by Richard, who “plays the role of the artist without accepting the responsibilities of being a man … the patient perfecting of the body which forms the soul.”¹⁵ Richard, then, is a horrible example of heresy, though, if I read Bandler aright, Joyce is unaware of the fact.

According to Hugh Kenner, the refutation of Ibsen is consciously Joyce's. Richard's revolt parodies both Ibsen's and Joyce's; his gift of freedom is meaningless. As an “ape of God” he has dominated everyone, forced them to a recognition of their isolation, and set them in the garden for their temptation. His demands upon himself and upon Bertha are impossible to live up to; rejecting society, and normal human needs, Richard thrusts everyone into “a joyless suburban limbo.” Pure ethical freedom and utter honesty belong only to angels; “The determination to behave in this angelic way leads fallen man to behave as a fallen angel: the oldest of theological common-places.”¹⁶

One hesitates to reject out of hand arguments so cogent as these. Bandler's criticism exemplifies the practice of taking a work of art as a text for a message of one's own. If a value judgment be neither consciously nor subconsciously in the author's mind, an interpretation based on such value might be called extraliterary, or perhaps extrapolative; that is, using the art object as the subject for an independent discourse upon morals or metaphysics. Much Marxist and dogmatic religious criticism is of this sort. In the case of Kenner, we meet the assertion that Joyce intends Richard to be, as Mulligan terms Stephen in Ulysses, “an impossible person.” To interpret Joyce's tone is a tricky business, as has already been suggested. But one cannot help but feel that Exiles is a serious work; there is no evidence of parody. To be sure, Richard may occasionally appear ridiculous in his demands, but it is the audience and not the dramatis personae who feel this. As for the shortcomings of Richard's personality, we must recognize Joyce's protective coloration of irony. Stephen Hero expresses it very well:

[As Stephen Hero could not use feudal terminology in love poems] with the same faith … he was compelled to express his love a little ironically. This suggestion of relativity … mingling itself with so immense a passion is a modern note: we cannot swear or expect fealty because we recognize too accurately the limits of every human energy. It is not possible for the modern lover to think the universe an assistant at his love-affair.¹⁷

One feels less irony in Exiles than in almost any other work of Joyce. A suspicion of narcissism intrudes more than once—see the stage directions describing Richard. Second, the problem seems to be deeply rooted in Joyce's own experience. Though Shaw could claim that he was happily unconcerned about being a parasite for years, one can easily see that Joyce, as a fledgling artist, never really at ease at his break from church and country, might have some misgivings at his unconventional marriage. Third, Joyce seems, despite his irony and cynicism, fundamentally romantic. He might at times see the artist as a posturing egotist, but it is unlikely that he would remain among the scoffers in regard to the major decision in his career. And finally, the recently published notes to Exiles confirm that though Richard is termed an “automystic,” there is a deep respect for his position. Indeed the notes are more permeated with Shelleyan romanticism than the play.

Padraic Colum sees in the work an echo of Joyce's “lonely and hazardous enterprise” of exile. All the characters are taken “beyond the accepted moralities … to where they have to make choices for themselves.” Colum stresses the role of Bertha. A fine characterization, with her tenderness, pride, and sorrow, she is also representative of “an immemorial and universal order,” the means by which Richard will be healed of his wound. “Exiles is a series of confessions; the dialogue has the dryness of recitals in the confessional; its end is an act of contrition.”¹⁸

The author's preliminary notes and plans constitute the most valuable of recent Joyce discoveries. The notes, several of which are dated November 1913, five years before the publication of the play, were found among Joyce's effects in Paris after the liberation. On his departure to the south of France in 1940, Joyce entrusted his books, manuscripts, and personal papers to his close friend and volunteer amanuensis, Paul Léon. Despite the tragic death of M. Léon in a concentration camp, most of the materials were preserved. The personal papers, left at the Irish Embassy in Paris, were placed in sealed deposit at the National Library in Dublin. The books and manuscripts were displayed at the La Hune exhibit in Paris in 1949, and a year later the entire collection was sold to the University of Buffalo Library.

The notebook reveals, as the play intimates, many of Joyce's basic preoccupations. The rejection of social convention, the attainment of pure spirit, is dramatized by Richard's repeated refusal to defend Bertha from Robert's advances: “His defense of her soul and body is an invisible and imponderable sword.” Though Robert in his romantic passion is unaware of these spiritual values, the outcome

should however convince Robert of the existence and reality of Richard's mystical defense of his wife. If this defense be a reality how can those facts on which it is based be then unreal?

But such ideal freedom is physically impossible. Joyce notes that love's necessary tendency is “union in the region of the difficult, the void and the impossible.” In the case of Beatrice (note the explicit rejection of Dante's vision) Platonic love ends in timid sterility; her mind, comments Joyce, “is an abandoned cold temple” of Protestantism. Bertha understands love as desire and companionship; before the higher goal she displays “lack of spiritual energy” and “mental paralysis.”

Yet Joyce is emphatic that Exiles must not be misinterpreted as a problem play: “Richard must not appear as a champion of woman's rights.” The metaphysical issues must not be clouded with emotional appeals: Richard “does not use the language of adoration and his character must seem a little unloving,” or, again, “The greatest danger in the writing is tenderness of speech or of mood.” Nor should the theme be considered a study of sensuality and adultery:

As a contribution to the study of jealousy Shakespeare's Othello is incomplete. It and Spinoza's analysis are made from the sensationalist standpoint …

Nothing remains but the static poise of the neoclassical drama. All the characters, the notes reveal, “are suffering during the action,” or, in more vernacular vein, “The play is three cat and mouse acts.” The mood is that of “a long, hesitating, painful story” similar to the changed point of view in literature from Rabelais and Molière to Paul de Kock, an interesting instance of Joyce's search for a literary tradition, as is his speculation on the affinity of Celtic philosophers such as Hume, Berkeley, and Bergson to “incertitude or scepticism.”

Richard comes closest to the ideal. He aims for “the very immolation of the pleasure of possession on the altar of love.” Though he too fails, he represents an inevitable advance; Robert both combats and prepares for this advance, as Wotan did Siegfried:

Every step advanced by humanity through Richard is a step backwards by the type which Robert stands for.

As an albeit imperfect representative of a higher order, he “is indignant when he discovers baseness in men and women,” an idea directly echoed in the play as Robert says:

You have that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart of Swift. You have fallen from a higher world, Richard, and you are filled with fierce indignation, when you find that life is cowardly and ignoble.

Richard's motives are, however, far from pure, and his realization of this fact throws him into the existentialist despair that troubles romantic readers. The first notation, “Richard—an automystic,” suggests an irony similar to that with which Dedalus is treated. His “baffled lust,” the notes tell us, is “converted into an erotic stimulus”; “he wills and knows his own dishonor”; he is a masochist. The play renders it thus:

… in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her. … I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonored for ever in love and in lust, to be. … for ever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame.

Caught in the dilemma of his unattainable ideal of purity, he fears that Bertha must lose her innocence in order to understand it; he has a prurient desire “to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously”; in his search for beauty, he is unaware that it rests under his own roof. With such remorseless logic, Joyce, the casuist of sin, unfolds the nature of human depravity.

Another theme emphasized in the notes is the possible union of the two men, the idealist Richard and the sensualist Robert, through their love of Bertha (note the resemblance to the final meeting of Bloom and Stephen in Ulysses). Bertha desires it, but there is some question as to whether the men do. At least, “Of Richard's friends Robert is the only one who has entered Richard's mind through the gate of Bertha's affection.” In the play Bertha explains: “I wanted to bring you close together—you and him.”

The notebook elaborates the suspicions that form so central a part of the play's dialectic tensions. Robert suspects that Richard is using Bertha as bait for his friendship; he is bitter that the rumors of Bertha's falseness are untrue; though he idolizes Richard, he is putting Richard's idealism to a test, realizing Richard's knowledge of his actions. Richard in turn suspects that Robert's friendship is false, that Robert may misunderstand his unpossessive attitude toward Bertha as a lack of love for her. In regard to Bertha, Joyce describes her state of mind when left in the cottage by Richard:

Bertha's state when abandoned spiritually by Richard must be expressed by the actress by a suggestion of hypnosis. Her state is like that of Jesus in the garden of olives. It is the soul of woman left naked and alone that it may come to an understanding of its own nature.

He also notes her resentment against Richard for not saving her.

One important facet of Joyce's thought is not sufficiently dramatized. He plans that Bertha shall undergo a spiritual awakening, which, were it made clear, would have brought her some conclusion or discovery to balance Richard's final and irremovable state of doubt:

… she will suffuse her own reborn temperament with the wonder of her soul at its own solitude and at her beauty, formed and dissolving itself eternally amid the clouds of morality.

Such a discovery Leopold Bloom seems to make as he meditates on the stars and the infinite perspectives of time.

It is toward Ulysses that the notebook points. The correspondences that form the texture of the Dublin epic are suggested by Bertha's age, twenty-eight, indicating the lunar cycle; the comparison between the female and the fertile earth looks forward, as Padraic Colum notes, to Molly Bloom. Indicative of the mythic awareness already at work are the parallels mentioned—with the New Testament, with Siegfried, and, here anticipating Finnegans Wake, with Tristan. Only one such is included in the play: Robert's twice asserted comparison of Richard and Swift.

The sharply defined contrast of Richard and Robert likewise points to the broad symbolic figures in Ulysses. Richard is “automystic,” Robert “automobile” (even the pun is late Joyce); they are, respectively, masochistic and sadistic, indicating Joyce's early interest in psychological terminology. Bertha's sensuality, classed by symptoms visual, gustatious, and tactual, anticipates the elaborate diagrams that Stuart Gilbert has revealed as underlying Ulysses. Joyce conceives of, then abandons, a project of following Bertha as wife of Robert in a series of epiphanies that suggests Ulysses:

For instance … ordering carpets in Grafton Street, at Leopardstown races, provided with a seat on the platform at the unveiling of a statue, putting out the lights in the drawing room after a social evening in her husband's house, kneeling outside a confessional in the jesuit church.

In the notes on Bertha we find the greatest amount of “felt life,” which is excluded from the naked drama of Exiles. In the play Bertha engages in no reminiscence, nor is her dialogue expanded beyond that necessary for her metaphysical situation. But the notebook gives indication of a character more fully developed than that of any other woman in Joyce, with the sole exception of Molly Bloom. More than a quarter of the notebook is devoted to images and experiences that lie in the background of Bertha's soul. Her mind, we are told, “is a grey seamist amid which common objects—hillsides, the masts of ships, and barren islands—loom with strange and yet recognizable outlines.” Five chains of images are listed, sometimes followed with narrative explanations. We read, under date of November 12, 1913:

Garter: precious, Prezioso, Bodkin, music palegreen, bracelet, cream sweets, lily of the valley, convent garden (Galway), sea
Rat: Sickness, disgust, poverty, cheese, woman's ear, (child's ear?)
Dagger: heart, death, soldier, war, band, judgment, king.

Bodkin is a young man buried at Rahoon, near Galway. One immediately recalls Gretta Conroy, in “The Dead,” weeping over her boy lover, Michael Furey. He is likened to Shelley, despite his homely name. He is “dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young.” Bertha “weeps over Rahoon,” an echo of the lyric in Pomes Penyeach: “Rain on Rahoon falls softly, softly falling.” Gretta, Bertha, and Nora Joyce—all from Galway. What personal motivations underlie these revelations?

Bodkin lies buried, Shelley arises in Richard, in “the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with; the part for which she loves him: the part she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence.” This is the movement that Exiles imperfectly shadows forth: Richard and Bertha are two unsuccessful Pygmalions, Richard attempting to raise Bertha to a spiritual awakening, Bertha trying to suppress the Shelleyan inspiration of her mate.

Bertha's images—bracelet, cream sweets, and the others—“are the trinkets and toys of girlhood,” Bodkin's symbols music and the sea, another anticipation of Ulysses motifs. Two other chains of images are given, symbols of girlhood and virginity. Joys and regrets of childhood are mingled with Bertha's awareness of her growing hair, “The softly growing symbol of her girlhood.” As she reaches maturity, “A proud and shy instinct turns her mind away from the loosening of her bound-up hair,” and in joining Richard she guards her inviolate individuality, embracing “that which is hers alone and not hers and his also—happy distant dancing days, distant, gone forever, dead, or killed?”

Other glimpses of Bertha are narrative in nature, recalling the epiphanies of Dubliners—Christmas Eve in Galway as a child, the emigration of her friend Emily Lyons. Bertha is tender, shy, virginal, a sensitive sketch never fully brought to life in Exiles. The pathos of her maturity colors the cryptic entry at the beginning of the notes, where we read that

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.

This conception also underlies the dialogue between Richard and Robert, in which the husband voices dark forebodings that he has killed “the virginity of her soul.”

John Kelleher, in his excellent review of the Colum edition, likewise attributes the relative failure in communication to the limitation of conventional dramatic form. Exiles has usually been regarded as curiously unsatisfactory, despite its being “full of fine things” and “obviously from a master's hand.” Joyce's characteristic method of procedure, the “interlocking of many epiphanies,” is barred by his choice of medium. Richard lacks humor, with “disastrous” results; worse, the undisguised “spiritual identification with Jesus” leaves both reader and characters stunned. To act out the process of confession is to make the story unreal. Nevertheless the notes intensify interest in the play, for they not only “confirm the lasting consistency of Joyce's thought” but indicate the importance of his later rejection of the lesser literary forms:

Previous to this he had wrought beautifully within a small space. Afterwards he wrought more beautifully and with infinitely greater humanity, and took as much time and space as he needed.¹⁹

Exiles, we may conclude, is a play with suppressed undertones, romantic, perhaps painfully personal. Joyce's adoption of the bare style of Ibsen prevents him from giving the richly symbolic associations that color his conceptions. The play fails as an adequate correlative for the manifold implications of these notes. Joyce's aesthetic practice fluctuates between the poles of romantic symbolism and Scholastic logic. Finnegans Wake is one extreme, Exiles the other. Though varying from the cumulative detail of Stephen Hero to the austere selectivity of Exiles, Joyce's happiest results were attained in the associationism of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The neoclassic beauty of Exiles is achieved by severe excision, a repression of the lyricism that perceptive readers find not only in Dubliners and the Portrait but in the pathetic and ridiculous dreams of Bloom, in the unsatisfied loneliness of Molly, and in the transcendently feminine Anna Livia Plurabelle.

Notes

1. Gorman, James Joyce, p. 227.

2. Ibid., pp. 71-73.

3. Richard M. Kain, Fabulous Voyager: James Joyce's “Ulysses” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1947), pp. 53, 57-58.

4. Gorman, James Joyce, p. 70.

5. Vivienne Koch Macleod, “The influence of Ibsen on Joyce,” PMLA, LX (1945), 879-98, and “The influence of Ibsen on Joyce: Addendum,” ibid., LXII (1947), 573-80. James T. Farrell, “‘Exiles’ and Ibsen,” in Two Decades, ed. Givens, pp. 95-131.

6. Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Spencer, pp. 83-87, 91-98, 40, 103, 41.

7. George Jean Nathan, “The Theater,” American Mercury, IV (April 1925), 499-504.

8. Anderson, ed., “The Little Review” Anthology, pp. 215-21.

9. The Catholic World, CVIII (1918), 404; “The Mind to Suffer,” The Times Literary Supplement (London), August 25, 1918; Francis Hackett, New Republic, XVI (1918), 318; Padraic Colum, “James Joyce as a Dramatist,” The Nation, CVII (1918), 430; Ezra Pound, “Mr. James Joyce and the Modern Stage …,” The Drama, VI (February 1916), 122-32.

10. Desmond MacCarthy, “Exiles,” New Statesman, XI (1918), 492-93; also in his Humanities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 88-93.

11. Golding, James Joyce, p. 81.

12. Joseph Wood Krutch, “Figures of the Dawn,” The Nation, CXX (1925), 272.

13. Gorman, James Joyce: His First Forty Years, p. 111.

14. Joyce, Exiles, ed. Francis Fergusson (New York: New Directions, 1945), pp. v-xviii.

15. Bernard Bandler, “Joyce's ‘Exiles,’” The Hound & Horn, VI (1933), 266-85.

16. Hugh Kenner, “Joyce's ‘Exiles,’” The Hudson Review, V (1952), 389-403.

17. Joyce, Stephen Hero, ed. Spencer, p. 174.

18. Joyce, Exiles, ed. Padraic Colum (New York: The Viking Press, 1951), p. 11.

19. John Kelleher, review of Colum edition, Furioso, VII (Spring 1952), 65-67.