[In the following essay, Maher compares Exiles to Hamlet and examines the relationships of the characters in Exiles.]

Joyce described Exiles as “three cat and mouse acts” (Exiles 123); he also called it “a comedy in three acts” (Letters I, 78). The comedy of Exiles will not be felt, however, if we mistake the play for a drama of ideas. If we do, we are the mouse being teased by Joyce. The play is an extraordinarily tactile and auditory play: it shows everything and states nothing. Only if we assiduously avoid trying to make the play fit into a discursive framework, into some message Joyce is developing progressively act by act, will we hear and feel the comedy.

Furthermore, if we focus only on Richard as the hero of the play or as the character through whom Joyce's theories of life are being revealed, we will not see the melodrama in Richard's every speech. Mallarmé admired Shakespeare's Hamlet because it was structured on “the only plot in drama: the struggle, in man between his dream and the fates allotted to his life by evil fortune.”¹ He believed that Hamlet lay “halfway between the old multiple-action method and the Monologue, the drama of the Self, which belongs to the future. The hero is alone—all others are secondary—and simply walks, reading in the book of Himself, who is a lofty and living Symbol. His glance ignores all others.”² The interest in Hamlet, for Mallarmé, lay in watching the progression of Hamlet's mind—the surprising and disturbing shifts and turns his mind takes throughout the action: “This walker in a labyrinth of agitation and grievance so prolongs its windings with his unfinishing of an unfinished act, that he sometimes seems to be the only reason for the existence of the stage and of the golden, almost moral, space which the stage protects.”³ Like Hamlet, Richard is a baffling character: his drama is “his unfinishing of an unfinished act,” the drama of the hero paralyzed in action because he doubts that he really knows the correct method by which to govern his actions. But Exiles will fail as comedy if we follow the devious windings of only his mind. What makes the play a most difficult comedy to follow is the fact that Joyce shows simultaneously the twistings and turnings of four minds—not only Richard's windings but also those of Robert, Beatrice, and Bertha.

Joyce alerts us to his mimicking of mental progressions by structuring the play, sequence by sequence, to reveal the different mental strategies that characterize the four characters. He also has the characters themselves reveal information at strategic points in the play that requires us to scrutinize earlier sequences to test the truth of this information. As we thus become more consciously involved with the way each character's mind operates, we begin to see the action of the play in continuously shifting and discontinuous perspectives. The comedy of Exiles lies in our clearly hearing the startling degree of inconsistency and misunderstanding that take place whenever two or more characters come together. In structure, Exiles is mosaic: its action is only very loosely linked by discursive or chronological connectives. Essentially, it moves forward and backward simultaneously through the jarring juxtapositions of different sensibilities. The play must be heard as musical orchestration, not seen as the logical development of a thesis.

What links Hamlet to the technique of Exiles and also to the technique of an impressionistic writer like Henry James is its emphasis on the revelation of a mind in act rather than on the development of a single, “correct” moral perspective. It is as if the progression d'effet in Hamlet, Exiles, and a Jamesian narrative were achieved by the conscious manipulation of the action so that the action is always being deterred from reaching its climax: it suddenly shoots off on a new and unexpected perspective (compare the “digressions” of the revenge tragedy). Ford Madox Ford's discussion of the type of action in a Jamesian short story describes quite accurately the movement of the comic action in Exiles:

According to James's conscious canons an author is justified in sacrificing, if not the inherent probabilities of his “affair,” then at least the photographic realities, to his sense of beauty. And “beauty” James defined as the fun, the interest, the amusingness, the awakening qualities of a story.

Action, that is to say, in the sense of anybody's doing anything, is singularly rare in any of James's nouvelles; but what the French call progression d'effet is never absent from the almost apparently negligible of them. The aspect of the ‘affair’ in hand will change incredibly whilst the characters do no more than sit in arm-chairs or open bookcases. In that sense nouvelles by James, however much they may resemble ‘studies,’ are never anything of the sort. The treatment of mental progressions is so rare in Anglo-Saxon … fiction that the unsuspecting reader might well mistake the mood of The Lesson of the Master for the mood of Bielshin Prairie, which is a true sketch.⁴

If we persist in seeing a Jamesian story as realistic or naturalistic, Ford Madox Ford is saying, we will ignore the intensity James achieves by a very conscious manipulation of the order of his events and revelations, very much in the way that a Symbolist poet like Mallarmé manipulates the order of individual words in a poem. Exiles also uses this Symbolist technique of intensely felt, abruptly juxtaposed elements that logically do not seem to fit together or to follow one another. The only logic in Exiles comes from what we can make of the characters' illogical behavior. The discontinuous aesthetic of Exiles is that of the newspaper.⁵

Exiles progresses by means of a double plot. At the beginning of Act I, an excerpt of dialogue between Richard and Beatrice resembles an excerpt between Robert and Bertha at the end of Act II:

RICHARD:
Do you love him [Robert] still?
BEATRICE:
I do not even know.
RICHARD:
It was that that made me so reserved with you—then—even though I felt your interest in me, even though I felt that I too was something in your life.
BEATRICE:
You were.
RICHARD:
Yet that separated me from you. I was a third person I felt. Your names were always spoken together, Robert and Beatrice, as long as I can remember. It seemed to me, to everyone …
BEATRICE:
We are first cousins. It is not strange that we were often together.
RICHARD:
He told me of your secret engagement with him. He had no secrets from me; I suppose you know that.
BEATRICE:
Uneasily. What happened—between us—is so long ago. I was a child.
RICHARD:
Smiles maliciously. A child? Are you sure? It was in the garden of his mother's house. No? He points towards the garden. Over there. You plighted your troth, as they say, with a kiss. And you gave him your garter. Is it allowed to mention that?
BEATRICE:
With some reserve. If you think it worthy of mention.

(Exiles 20-21)

ROBERT:
… The past is not past. It is present here now. My feeling for you is the same now as it was then, because then—you slighted it.
BERTHA:
No, Robert. I did not.
ROBERT:
Continuing. You did. And I have felt it all these years without knowing it—till now. Even while I lived—the kind of life you know and dislike to think of—the kind of life to which you condemned me.
BERTHA:
I?
ROBERT:
Yes, when you slighted the common simple gift I had to offer you—and took his gift instead.
BERTHA,
looking at him: But you never …
ROBERT:
No. Because you had chosen him. I saw that. I saw it on the first night we met, we three together. Why did you choose him?
BERTHA:
Bends her head. Is that not love?
ROBERT:
Continuing. And every night when we two—he and I—came to that corner to meet you I saw it and felt it. You remember the corner, Bertha?
BERTHA:
As before. Yes.
ROBERT:
And when you and he went away for your walk and I went along the street alone I felt it. And when he spoke to me about you and told me he was going away—then most of all?
BERTHA:
Why then most of all.
ROBERT:
Because it was then that I was guilty of my first treason towards him.

(Exiles 84)

The differences between Richard and Robert are so aptly “caught” in these juxtaposed parallel passages that comments about their significance become virtually more abstract than informative. All four characters are speaking of events that took place nine years before the play opens. Apparently there were two triangles, the first consisting of Richard, Robert, and Beatrice, and the second of Richard, Robert, and Bertha. Richard ran away with Bertha, and Robert and Beatrice remained behind in Ireland. Beatrice's attraction to Robert waned when she discovered that he was “a pale reflection” of Richard (Exiles 21). The play probes the theoretical question of the couples' possible mismating. Should Richard have married Beatrice, and Robert Bertha?

The way each male treats the “other woman” is typical of the differences in the philosophies each follows. The two females want personal relationships but the two males act out ideological positions. Robert's provincial ideas are now middle-class and outdated. His stand, that “no law made by man is sacred before the impulse of passion” (Exiles 87), is very passé to Richard who has been living on the Continent, and who is aristocratically arrogant in temperament. As an intellectual artist, his style is the new sublime, the new high style, and he follows the newest mode of conduct. Like Robert, he is opposed to restrictive conventional morality, but unlike Robert, he wishes to destroy all romantic illusions that man may cherish concerning his heroism. He is the serious artist repelled by the clichés and influence of the popular press and its “artists.”

Now it is interesting that there is some doubt for each man about the question of whether or not he was actually attracted to the “other woman.” In typical fashion, Richard conceals the fact that he may have been attracted to Beatrice, and emphasizes instead the fact that she may have illusions concerning her relationship with him. Though they have been corresponding for eight years, Richard makes it cruelly clear to her that she is not his muse—she must be very clear about this point: “Tell me, Miss Justice, did you feel that what you read [of his new book] was written for your eyes? Or that you inspired me?” (Exiles 19). She could not possibly be his muse because, unlike Bertha, she never dared to support him publicly or to run away with him. Though he does betray some jealousy when he emphasizes that Beatrice publicly chose Robert over him, he refuses to let Beatrice nourish any illusions that anyone as middle-class as she could inspire him: “I expressed in those chapters and letters, and in my character and life as well, something in your soul which you could not—pride or scorn?” (Exiles 20).

Just how unfeeling and blind Richard is in this sequence is fully revealed only in Act III when Beatrice blushingly confesses to Bertha that it was she, and not Robert, who was responsible for the Rowans' return to Ireland. At the beginning of Act I, Beatrice is rushing to the Rowan household on the pretext of giving Archie, Richard's son, a music lesson (“Archie, suddenly to Beatrice: And, besides, you didn't bring the music” [Exiles 29]). Twelve days earlier, Richard had told her that he used their correspondence (to Beatrice—her only meaningful relationship in life) to expose her type in his newly published book. As she had nine years earlier when faced with Richard's seeming indifference to her, she retreated into her religion. But her stay with her gloomy, protestant father in Youghal has driven her back to Richard whom she finds more stimulating than her narrowly moral father:

ROBERT:
… I know what is in Beatty's ears at this moment.
To BEATRICE: Shall I tell?
BEATRICE:
If you know.
ROBERT:
The buzz of the harmonium in her father's parlour.
To BEATRICE: Confess.
BEATRICE:
Smiling. Yes. I can hear it.
ROBERT:
Grimly. So can I. The asthmatic voice of protestantism.
BERTHA:
Did you not enjoy yourself down there, Miss Justice?
ROBERT:
Intervenes. She did not, Mrs. Rowan. She goes there on retreat, when the protestant strain in her prevails—gloom, seriousness, righteousness.
BEATRICE:
I go to see my father.
ROBERT:
Continuing. But she comes back here to my mother, you see. The piano influence is from our side of the house.

(Exiles 30)

Richard fancies himself a misunderstood Messiah or culture hero who has returned to Ireland to liberate his people spiritually by giving them an example of truly unselfish love. He has, however, no real understanding of the horror of Beatrice's existence: “But what is this that seems to hang over you? It cannot be so tragic” (Exiles 21). Beatrice, the intellectual, has found “ideas” rather cold and isolating companions. She would much rather have a personal relationship with Richard (“I would try,” Exiles 22), but since she is very shy and reserved and he will discuss only ideas with her, she must be content to seem to admire his courage in living his ideas. The nature of the relationship between Richard and Beatrice is revealed indirectly—by hints and cross-references. Richard's version of their relationship must be juxtaposed with Beatrice's cryptic answers and guarded actions. It is difficult to believe that Richard solemnly and righteously says the things he does to her.

Robert's treatment of Bertha is completely antithetical to Richard's treatment of Beatrice. Though there is no very convincing evidence in the play that Robert's attraction to Bertha nine years earlier was, if anything, any more than physical desire, he glamorizes their past relationship:

ROBERT:
Unheeding. I advised Richard to go alone—not to take you with him—to live alone in order to see if what he felt for you was a passing thing which might ruin your happiness and his career.
BERTHA:
Well, Robert. It was unkind of you toward me. But I forgive you because you were thinking of his happiness and mine.
ROBERT:
Bending closer to her. No, Bertha. I was not. And that was my treason. I was thinking of myself—that you might turn from him when he had gone and he from you. Then I would have offered you my gift. You know what it was now. The simple common gift that men offer to women. Not the best perhaps. Best or worst—it would have been yours.

(Exiles 85)

While Robert, at this point in the play, is offering Bertha what the sterner Richard cannot offer Beatrice—a “blinding instant of passion” (Exiles 71)—Bertha is wanting to believe what he says, but because Richard had exposed Robert earlier as a common liar, thief, and fool who had invited her to the “house of revelry” where he had conducted many previous, supposedly shameless affairs, she cannot allow herself to take Robert's passion for her seriously. It is at this point also that she confesses she had hoped that Robert really was attracted to her because she fears that Richard finds her inferior to Beatrice. She believes that Richard prefers the intellectual and respectable woman who did not impulsively run away with him. If Robert can see her true worth, then Richard, she hopes, may become jealous, see that she isn't immoral, and love her again. But Robert persists in seeing her as “a strange and beautiful lady” (Exiles 86), in trying to glamorize her real worth. She is “a strange and beautiful lady” to him because she is the creation of his cultured friend Richard who has Europeanized himself and his wife: “These cigars Europeanize me. If Ireland is to become a new Ireland she must first become European” (Exiles 43). Richard has made Bertha, Robert believes, into a sophisticated woman. She hasn't the provincial morals of Irish women. Trying to seduce Bertha, his best friend's commonlaw wife, would provide him with new sensations.

Bertha's real worth or beauty as it appears in the play is her lack of sophistication, her low or peasant style. She has never been able to grasp or appreciate her husband's subtle ideas. She still instinctively attributes basic motives to the actions of the other characters. Her peasant simplicity contrasts with Robert's commercialized romantic simplicity (“There is no law before impulse,” [Exiles 87]), and her childlike forthrightness and openness remain unappreciated by Richard's more devious mind. When Richard tells her that she is free to proceed in her “affair” with Robert, she is confused by his actions at the end of Act I. He claims Robert's advances to her do not make him jealous even when he makes her spell them out word by word, touch by touch, kiss by kiss. He will not hinder Robert from continuing, but he also will not let them continue the affair without telling Robert that he is common and untrustworthy, and that Bertha has faithfully told him everything from the first. To Bertha's simple mind Richard is not giving her her liberty at all, since Robert will never reveal his love for her if he is told that she betrayed him. She cannot understand the “high kind of feeling” Richard claims to have for her (Exiles 54), and assumes that he is yielding her to Robert because he doesn't love her anymore and prefers Beatrice.

Once we begin to hear the misunderstandings and inconsistencies in Exiles, they become cacophonous. Throughout the double plot, Joyce mimics for us, side by side, the different movements of Robert's and Richard's minds. The way Robert's mind operates is imaged startlingly in Act I, for example, in his conversation, first, with Bertha and, then, with Richard. The following quotations are excerpts from Robert's speeches to these two people:

I think of you [Bertha] always—as something beautiful and distant—the moon or some deep music.

(Exiles 32)

I have the right to call you by your name. From old times—nine years ago. We were Bertha—and Robert—then. Can we not be so now, too?

(Exiles 33)

I want to speak to you, Bertha—alone—not here [at Richard's house]. Will you come [to his cottage at Ranelagh]?

(Exiles 36)

[To Richard] Good Lord, how warm it is today! The heat pains me here in the eye. The glare.

(Exiles 37)

I was wrong. Suavely. Here is how the matter stands, Richard. Everyone knows that you ran away years ago with a young girl … How shall I put it? … With a young girl not exactly your equal. Kindly. Excuse me, Richard, that is not my opinion nor my language. I am simply using the language of people whose opinions I don't share.

(Exiles 39)

Richard, have you been quite fair to her [Bertha]? It was her own free choice, you will say. But was she really free to choose? She was a mere girl. She accepted all that you proposed.

(Exiles 40)

[“What is most attractive in even the most beautiful woman” are] Not those qualities which she has and other women have not but the qualities which she has in common with them. I mean … the commonest.

(Exiles 41-2)

Gravely: I fought for you [Richard] all the time you were away. I fought to bring you back. I fought to keep your place for you here. I will fight for you still because I have faith in you, the faith of a disciple in his master. I cannot say more than that.

(Exiles 44)

Robert's conversation with Richard ends with his arranging for his best friend to meet the vicechancellor of the university to see about obtaining a post at the very hour he has arranged to meet Bertha at his “house of revelry.”

What is remarkable about the movement of Robert's mind is its logical inconsistency coupled with its consistent sentimentalism and sensationalism. One moment he is a romantic lover; the next, a nervous seducer with a headache, fearing Richard may be watching his movements with Bertha; then, he is a writer of leading articles who understands the common point of view; then, a vulgar sensationalist; then, a faithful disciple who is carefully arranging to betray his master. But if we think of Robert as a blackhearted villain, we miss the point of Joyce's remarkable juxtapositions. Robert is genuinely suffering in the sequences with Bertha and Richard because he means what he says to both of them, and yet is uneasy because he is obviously betraying his friend. He is attracted to Bertha and he sincerely means the clichés he uses when speaking to her in his language of adoration. He does want to help Richard and he sincerely means his public-duty clichés. His speeches and their inconsistencies mimic the intelligibility of the front page of a newspaper or the incredible dialogue and action in a commercial novel, and these two media, in turn, image his mind. Richard wishes Robert to be honest, to tell him the truth, not to betray him “craftily, secretly, meanly—in the dark, in the night” (Exiles 69), but Robert's problem is that he does not know the truth. His mind has as many inconsistencies and unresolved contradictions as there are on display in the popular press. Unlike Richard, he speaks in the style of the people and his mind is as carelessly and thoughtlessly organized as his article “A Distinguished Irishman” is in the third act (Exiles 99).

The movement of Richard's mind is more baffling and complex than Robert's, but basically it is characterized by his struggle to be more consistent and truthful than his journalist friend. When Bertha, following Richard's code of complete truthfulness, tells him of Robert's advances, her revelation embarrasses and irritates him. Since he regards her as his muse he is reluctant to yield her to Robert. She followed him into exile without even being asked and he is proud that she chose him over middle-class Dubliners: “I played for her against all that you [Robert] say or can say; and I won” (Exiles 40). Unfortunately, he no longer believe in the language of passion because he believes that all men, in the core of their hearts, are basically ignoble. Robert's affair with Bertha offends him: his friend's frightened eyes and “great mass of overblown roses” are obviously the stock-in-trade of the bourgeois seducer (Exiles 61). He cannot yield Bertha to such a pathetic lover. But since Richard also hates middle-class morality—he scorned his mother's “cold blighted love” because she placed her religion before her love for him (Exiles 23)—he can't forbid Bertha to yield herself to Robert. Since he has betrayed Bertha carnally himself, he cannot deny her “moments of life” with Robert (Exiles 69). Though he cannot really conceive of Robert as experiencing the blinding instant of passion—passion, free, unashamed, irresistible” (Exiles 71), he also cannot inconsistently deny Bertha her freedom. Furthermore, he fears Bertha may even be better suited to Robert, for she has never really taken to her rich new life in exile: “her girlhood, her laughter, her young beauty, the hopes in her young heart” have all been taken from her (Exiles 67).

The result of Richard's attempts at rational and moral consistency in his behavior is that, in Act II, on the point of yielding Bertha to Robert for very logical reasons, he suddenly confesses to Robert that he may himself, in truth, be motivated by selfish reasons, saying that “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, to be dishonoured for ever in love and in lust, to be …” (Exiles 70). He tells Robert and Bertha to free themselves—he will not and cannot accept the responsibility for their actions, because, secretly, he wanted to revenge himself upon Robert by allowing him to seduce Bertha, to acknowledge the worth of his chosen muse.

Now while Robert, the “automobile,” the journalist (Exiles 113), is offering Bertha glamour which is really an illusion or commercialized sensationalism or the result of fragmented mental analysis, and while Richard, the “automystic” (Exiles 113), the serious artist with a fierce conscience and inner gaze, is trying to treat her with fairness and justice, offering her no illusions, only the rational way of proceeding, and not sadistically playing upon her sympathies, what the play is about suddenly jumps out at us. Against such speeches of Richard's as these:

Have you [Robert] the luminous certitude that yours is the brain in contact with which she must think and understand and that yours is the body in contact with which her body must feel? Have you this certitude in yourself? … Once I had it, Robert: a certitude as luminous as that of my own existence—or an illusion as luminous.

(Exiles 63)

You [Bertha] may be his [Robert's] and mine. I will trust you, Bertha, and him, too. I must. I cannot hate him since his arms have been around you. You have drawn us near together. There is something wiser than wisdom in your heart. Who am I that I should call myself master of your heart or of any woman's? Bertha, love him, be his, give yourself to him if you desire—or if you can.

(Exiles 75)

we must juxtapose the speeches of Bertha:

I gave up everything for him, religion, family, my own peace.

(Exiles 100)

… I am only a thing he got entangled with and my son is—the nice name they give those children. Do you [Miss Justice] think I am a stone? Do you think I don't see it in their eyes and in their manner when they have to meet me?

(Exiles 100)

Yes, dear. I waited for you. Heavens, what I suffered then—when we lived in Rome!

(Exiles 111)

Against Robert's:

All life is a conquest, the victory of human passion over the commandments of cowardice.

(Exiles 71)

we must juxtapose the rejected Miss Justice's speech:

O, not in the least tragic. I shall become gradually better, they tell me, as I grow older. As I did not die then [when Richard went away] they tell me I shall probably live. I am given life and health again—when I cannot use them. Calmly and bitterly. I am convalescent.

(Exiles 22)

Before the years of suffering which these women have endured, and which is really what Exiles is attempting to make us feel, Richard and Robert shrink to the level of chattering fools arguing about the relative merits of being free and being unselfish. What neither Richard nor Robert knows how to do is love. The true romantics in the play are the women who put up with the betrayals of the men and yet continue to desire personal relationships with them. And they are even scorned for having illusions about their relationships with these men. Richard speaks of his mother's “cold blighted love”; yet he indignantly says that he “never accepted the doles she sent [him] through the bank” (Exiles 23). She could no more give up her religion than Richard could follow it. Richard scoffs at Bertha's suspicions that he wants to desert her for Beatrice, and that he once tried to ruin Beatrice but did not succeed (Exiles 103); but we must recall that Richard not only did not try to ruin Beatrice, but could barely bring himself to be friendly toward her once he learned she had adolescently plighted her troth “with a kiss” to Robert. At the end of the play, Bertha lets each man believe what he wants to hear. She lets Robert believe his dream of her and she reassures Richard that she has not betrayed him! In typical fashion, he resolves his own dilemma of whether or not he should have yielded Bertha to Robert by striking the noble generous pose of the unselfish lover: “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” (Exiles 112). Just as Robert can talk about blinding passion without feeling any, so can Richard, Hamlet-like, dramatize man's ignobility without even beginning to feel his own. Exiles is a cacophony of man's illogical behavior. By the end of the play, the progression d'effet is deafening.

Exiles shatters some nineteenth-century categories. If the image of Robert's mind finds its analogies in the postures of romantic novels and of the leading articles in a provincial-minded newspaper, Richard's mind is analogous to the solemn crusader articles of the nineteenth-century press, which shamelessly exposed human corruption. Ultimately, however, his fierce, melodramatically moral tone is softened by the frustrating knowledge of his own ambivalent motives and dark desires. His being less hypocritical than the self-righteous crusader changes him into a Hamlet-Mallarmé-Ibsen figure. For all his hatred of the middle-class press, the serious nineteenth-century artist, Exiles shows, proves to be united in brotherhood to the common journalist.

Joyce's linking of the intellectual Beatrice with the impulsive Bertha shatters the nineteenth-century literary adoration of the passionate woman who gives herself wholly and freely to the artist without question and without shame. Bertha finds that being relegated to the role of Richard's muse prevents her from having a more human relationship with him. Once their early passion has waned, Richard neglects her while she tries to live a more domestic, if less inspiring, role. She even comes to envy Beatrice's less generous and more prudent nature. What links the two women is their willingness to sacrifice idealistically romantic values for an imperfect but more personal relationship. Beatrice and Bertha are more human versions of Richard and Robert, with Beatrice clearly seeing through Robert but admiring Richard, and Bertha clearly seeing through Richard but admiring Robert. In the final act, Richard and Robert continue to hold their poses, but Bertha effects a reconciliation with Beatrice.

Notes

1. Mallarmé: Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters, trans. Bradford Cook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1956), p. 57.

2. Ibid., p. 139.

3. Ibid., p. 57.

4. Ford Madox Ford, Henry James: A Critical Study (New York: Octagon Books, 1964), pp. 167-68.

5. For the aesthetic of the newspaper, see Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), pp. 2-7.