[In the following essay, Williams examines Exiles as dramatic fiction.]

This is a reconstruction of the later part of a lecture, the earlier parts of which were based on the essay The ‘Exiles’ of James Joyce, written in 1947 and now contained in Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (London: Chatto & Windu, 1968). An explanatory link has been written for the present publication.

The play Exiles has usually proved difficult for students of Joyce, and especially for those who are interested in the innovatory fictional methods which are of course his major achievement. I said most of what I thought could be said about the play in an essay written in 1947, though then as now not looking at the marginal and speculative relations between the play and Joyce's life and biography. But there is still one point which I would like to try to take further, and I can begin from a sentence in that earlier essay which I do not now, in terms, agree with. I wrote then:

The result of the words of the play is not an experience formally different in kind from that of Joyce's more famous work.

Read in context this can be taken as what I still believe to be true, that the theme of Exiles is very close to, indeed integral with, the themes of the major fiction. Yet though I then went on to discuss some of the differences between dramatic and fictional writing, which I think ought now to be our central concern, I limited this emphasis by running the two points together: on the one hand ‘the words of the play’ and ‘formally different’; on the other hand ‘the result of the words of the play’ and ‘an experience formally different’. What I now want to move to, in clearer terms, is a consideration of the radical differences in formal composition. At the broadest level of theme the earlier descriptions as ‘result’ and ‘experience’ can still, in general, stand. But the immediate results, as I shall try to show, are more radically different than I then began to indicate. Moreover, the point has some wider importance in the matter of relations between dramatic and fictional writing, and their analysis.

The central formal point is that in dramatic composition the writing of speech is a virtually total and explicit mode. Indications of certain actions may also be written, but as instruction for performance rather than words to be performed. Thus, speech is radically separated from anything in the nature of general narrative, analysis or commentary. But while this is necessarily true, at the most general level of dramatic composition, it is also true that the composition of words to be spoken in performance must not be reduced, as it is within the assumptions of naturalist drama, to the simple representation of speech, in the sense of words exchanged between characters in the course of represented behaviour. On the contrary, in conventions as various as the chorus of Greek drama, the messengers narrating other events in Greek and Elizabethan drama, the soliloquy over its range from local and private address to its most developed forms in the speaking of ‘unspoken’ or ‘indirected’ thought, and many other formal methods, the dramatic composition of speech includes functions which in more modern forms have been separated out as, in drama, the representation of direct speech between characters, and, in fiction, the enclosure of such representations within authorial narrative, analysis and commentary. It was of course within these conditions of separation and specialisation that Joyce was beginning to write.

We can then look back for a moment at the beginning of Joyce's idea of ‘epiphanies’, in Stephen Hero:

By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.

(S H: 216)

‘Speech or gesture’, but the examples he gives are of speech. Then at once in recording them (and I think we have to say that they must have meant more to him than they now can to us) he starts writing what is in effect a fragment of text of a modern play:

THE Young Lady:
(drawling discreetly) … O, yes … I was … at the … cha … pel. …
THE Young Gentleman:
(inaudibly) … I … (again inaudibly) … I …
THE Young Lady:
(softly) … O … but you're … ve … ry wick … ed. …

(S H: 216)

The bracketed characterisations of tone are derived from the form of a play-text as this stabilised, under new conditions, in the nineteenth century, with some evident influence from the novel. The bracketed direction can be read, there, as an indication to actor or director, though in practice they are more often indications to the reader, providing a minimal further characterisation, beyond the spoken words, of a kind now familiar from fiction. Yet indeed there is already a further problem, not to say confusion, for one of Joyce's characterisations is ‘inaudibly’, which is across the line from any dramatic writing of speech, into the different mode of fictional representation, which can include the inaudible or the fully unspoken.

Now it is a misunderstanding of high naturalist drama, in say Ibsen or early Strindberg or Chekhov, to suppose that they repressed all functions of speech or of dramatic writing other than the representation of probable conversation between persons in everyday behaviour. Indeed one of the basic themes of this major drama is the unresolved tension between what has happened or is happening and what can be spoken about. Rejecting the conventions of theatrical speech, as these had stabilised and ossified in the dominant intrigue drama, the new dramatists entered an area of conscious tension, at one level between what needed to be said and what, within specific social limitations, could actually be said; at another level between what people wanted to say and the different objectivities of need and limitation. Thus we find the unusual and widely misunderstood phenomenon of a prolonged working within the forms of everyday speech which is at the same time a profound if unfinished critique of the state of being which these at once represent and misrepresent. From Ghosts and Rosmersholm and The Wild Duck to John Gabriel Borkman and Little Eyolf, Ibsen at once wrought these speech forms, in a newly concentrated intensity, and set them in tension with an only ever partly articulated dimension of otherness—other modes of being and of desire, indicated beyond the dramatic action rather than represented within it. Strindberg, from Lady Julie onwards, expressed a comparable tension by including forms of physical action and visual presence which more directly dramatised a destructive interaction, while in the method of ‘contrapuntal’ dialogue—a loosening of speech from simple fixed identity with characters, a composition of speech as both voluntary and involuntary relationship—he began to find ways of presenting rather than simply representing a flow of interactive experience. Chekhov, following Ibsen in the indication of a general dimension of otherness, from The Seagull to The Cherry Orchard, developed in his later plays what I have called the dialogue of a ‘negative group’: a composition of units of everyday speech into a shared failure of communication. All this is very different from what later became known as ‘naturalist dialogue’, in the drama of the naturalist habit, in which what is represented as said is taken as all that can or needs to be said: an unproblematic medium, through which character and action appear.

Those who are surprised by Joyce's close attention to Ibsen, through so much of his writing life, have been misled by the formulations and practice of the naturalist habit and have failed to see, beyond it, the directly connecting preoccupation with levels of being and communication and with the problems of writing them. Moreover, in Joyce as in Ibsen, there is a conscious relation between these general problems and a pervading sense of a network of illusions, self-deceptions, deceptions of others, and lies. It is in this sense, strengthened by certain structural similarities between the situations of the Norwegian and the Irish writer—an autonomy of craft and conviction within the simultaneous rejection of both the local subordinated and the wider dominant cultures—that it is no surprise to find Joyce recording ‘the spirit of Ibsen’ blowing ‘through him like a keen wind’ (P: 179).

But what is then really surprising is that when he came to write his play, Joyce selected a more singular mode. In effect none of the devices of disturbance, dislocation or limitation of speech, none of the indications of unarticulated modes of being and desire beyond its specific and structurally limited forms, is attempted. Of course Joyce does not then rest on the representation of everyday speech as itself. He moves, instead, in a quite different direction, to forms of mutual self-presentation, in a rhetorical and even declamatory mode. Standing right back, we can observe the cold clash of egos which such a mode sustains. We can see, clearly enough, at once the centrality of the drive to an assertion of exiled identity, and the registered consequences of this drive on others who still seek and need relationship while this deliberate distancing occurs. Thematically there is no problem: the need and the loss are very precisely defined. But then the precision of the definition is in its own way an obstacle to recognition of the substance of what is being defined. It is a linguistic mode of enclosure and presentation, not of exploration.

ROBERT:
… There was an eternity before we were born: another will come after we are dead. The blinding instant of passion alone—passion, free, unashamed, irresistible—that is the only gate by which we can escape from the misery of what slaves call life. Is not this the language of your own youth that I heard so often from you in this very place where we are sitting now? Have you changed?
RICHARD:
[Passes his hand across his brow] Yes. It is the language of my youth.

(E: 99)

This is, paradoxically, the language of dramatic declamation which in their different ways Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov at once rejected and complicated. It is the language of the predominant actor-manager, ‘self-exiled in upon his ego’ (FW: 184). The major naturalist dramatists had profoundly destabilised this kind of assurance. Such declarations were still made, but within a dramatic context which interrogated, indicated or undercut them. It is true that the persons of Exiles fail to communicate, though the strict form of this is more local, unfortunately echoing Joyce's misleading definition of drama as ‘the form wherein [the artist] sets forth his image in immediate relations to others’ (P: 218). The assertion of singularity is an inescapably negative form: the immediate relations are cancellations and avoidances. But this persistent and central theme is enclosed, rather than embodied, in the conscious singularity of the language.

This is then the point about formal difference. The play is written as words spoken between persons in a prescribed and limited locality. It excludes virtually all other forms of dramatic action and dramatic speech. Singular characters are isolated, within their own presumed resources, in a deliberately limited and locally represented time and space. The disturbing indications of incompleteness, the internal interrogations of these local assurances, which were present in the major naturalist drama and which Joyce explored and embodied in quite new ways in his innovatory fiction, are in Exiles overridden by explication, argument and conscious exchange.

In terms of its period, this can be made a contrast between dramatic and fictional modes of writing. It is still an open question whether the necessary processes of interrogation and disturbance can be adequately realised by the devices of indication, faults between levels, internal negations and incompletenesses which major naturalist drama relied on, and which have since been erected into whole forms, discarding the more recognisably naturalist ballast and then often, in fact, losing the essential tension. But in fiction these modes were more immediately accessible, in various devices of narrative, analysis and commentary, but just as clearly, in Joyce, in specific transformations of the conventions of speech, place and time. When we come now to analyse dramatic language we can readily observe the differences between this fictional range and what can be made to appear, as in Exiles, represented speech which stands alone. In the practices of a specific period this is an adequate working distinction. But more generally it is inadequate. It is not only in the most obvious examples from earlier drama, such as the storm scenes in Lear or the soliloquies in Hamlet, but also more generally in that writing of actions in which speech is a dominant mode but then speech of many kinds, with operational variations in level, direction and address, that we find, inescapably, different essential forms of the language of drama. These need to be analysed beyond the functions of representation and exchange, setting forth character and action in singular forms, to which both much modern criticism and most modern theatrical practice have tended to reduce dramatic writing. We should be especially able to go beyond this if we extend formal comparisons beyond the cases of drama and fiction, into the now major evidence of film composition, which bears very closely on just these problems and solutions.

But we shall not get there from Exiles, except negatively. The play effects its exchanges, defines its singularities, at a point of temporary stasis, at once after and before adequate conventions of complexity and mobility. The moment of ‘epiphany’ is not realised but transcribed, and is then not manifestation but exposition. The play achieves its deliberately localised effect, but it is ironic, reading or watching it, to find Joyce in temporary exile from the place he made his home: the area not of representing but of transforming practice.