[In the following essay, Henke provides an analysis of Exiles and its characters.]

Where does desire come from? From a mixture of difference and inequality. … It is inequality that triggers desire, as a desire—for appropriation.

(Hélène Cixous, “Sorties”)

ACT ONE: PASSIO IRASCIBILIS

Exiles, Joyce's single dramatic work, served as an important vehicle for the author's complex, sometimes convoluted investigation of heterosexual and homoerotic desire. Although Exiles may resemble a turn-of-the-century problem play, it offers, from a psychoanalytic standpoint, a provocative exploration of sexual and psychic mobility.¹ Like August Strindberg before him, Joyce is obsessed with the “name of the Father” as an index of authority and authorized familial identity. And he knows, instinctively, that the “merest hint of the mother's infidelity threatens to expose what Lacan calls the symbolic, … which is usually covered over, sutured, by the representations of … the imaginary of chivalry, the woman's presumed honour.”² In Exiles, Joyce is determined to inscribe the enigmatic fluctuations of erotic desire into a playful symbolic context. Sexual urgency is deliberately deferred—both by Richard Rowan the artist, who sleeps alone in his study and studies aesthetic parturition; and by Robert Hand, the suitor who courts Bertha in traditional chivalric guise in order to defer and displace his own homoerotic admiration for Richard.³

Richard has refused to submit to restrictive bourgeois practices and lives in a common-law marriage with a woman who bears his child but not his legal name and with a son who is called by the “nice name they give those children” rather than by the surname of the father. Denying Bertha and Archie the authorized status of wife and legitimate heir, he has abdicated patriarchal authority over the “unauthorized” (illegitimate, dispossessed, un-named) members of his household. Because he deliberately renounces the role of paterfamilias, center of power and law in the family configuration, his position is ill-defined and decentered by its very refusal to claim wife and child as legal possessions. The two subjects of his domestic hearth, not subject to familial mastery, are liberated and self-determined, theoretically free to author their own identities within the open spaces of paternal absence. Ostensibly disclaiming the rights of a traditional patriarch, Richard eschews stereotypical bourgeois roles and responsibilities. Though a biological progenitor, he rejects phallocratic privilege and abrogates false ideals of sexual fidelity sutured by an imaginary chivalry.⁴

Is Richard challenging Bertha's “presumed honour” by choreographing a titillating scenario of flirtation and sexual indulgence? Is he playing a modern Walter in a self-conscious revision of the tale of patient Griselda? At times his pompous proclamations make him seem an insufferable boor, testing a woman's love for the sheer satisfaction of claiming her spiritual fidelity. Richard's project, however, proves more cunning and metaphorical than earlier renditions of this age-old theme of adultery or the threat thereof. Although his curiosity is piqued, his voyeuristic tendencies are aroused in order to be left unsatisfied—to function as a “spur” to art through the arabesques and traces of abducted desire. Bertha's fidelity is banished to the margins of perpetual doubt, and her marital chastity becomes a matter of undecidability—a gap or aporia at the heart of logocentric control. The satiation of amorous longing is a riddle inscribed in the language of aesthetic desire in order to be reinscribed in the linguistic and symbolic realm of art.⁵Jouissance is deferred by a metaphysical quest for a profound, allconsuming love beyond the stirrings of physicality. In Joyce's unusual romantic drama, pleasure is always-already absent in fantasies generated by the libidinal displacements demanded by compensatory creation.

Socially, the public persona of Richard Rowan is acceptable to the Irish in the guise of a bohemian artist affiliated with a woman “not quite his equal.” But Bertha, his common-law wife, can be dismissed by the bourgeoisie as a mere “thing” the writer got entangled with. Loveless and friendless, she lives on the margins of Dublin society. “I gave up everything for him,” she declares, “religion, family, my own peace. … Do you think I am a stone?” (E 100). She remains alone and proud—tested by her husband, courted and idealized by Robert, and envied by the chaste (and chastened) Beatrice Justice.⁶

Bertha is the only adult in Exiles who is given no surname, though she inherits Richard's family name through their nine-year conjugal association. Her single appellation “Bertha” onomatopoetically suggests the process of birth, as well as the earth in its benevolent and maternal aspects. An early prototype for Molly Bloom as Gea-Tellus, she “is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts” (E 118). Joyce notes that “Robert likens her to the moon because of her dress. Her age is the completion of a lunar rhythm” (E 113). Clothed in lavender and cream, Bertha appears on-stage like an impressionistic vision. If her lunar beauty is reminiscent of the virgin-goddess Diana, her voluptuous physicality evokes the mythic presence of an earth-mother whose consciousness is rooted in instinctual drives. The semiotic dimensions of her fluid, fertile, passionate nature sharply contrast with the logocentric aspirations of both Richard the artist and Robert the sentimental philanderer.⁷

In his notes for Exiles, Joyce describes the play as “a rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher Masoch. … Richard's Masochism needs no example” (E 124). If Richard is acting out a masochistic need for punishment at the hands of a stalwart competitor, then Robert embodies stereotypical sadistic impulses: “The sadism in Robert's character—his wish to inflict cruelty as a necessary part of sensual pleasure—is apparent only or chiefly in his dealings with women towards whom he is unceasingly attractive because unceasingly aggressive. Towards men, however, he is meek and humble of heart” (E 125).⁸

Robert acts the part of a courtly lover, a latter-day Romeo equipped with overblown roses and saccharine compliments. His courtship of Bertha is romantic but evasive, as he tries to confess a secret, inarticulate passion. “There is one word which I have never dared to say to you” (E 31), he writes. Upon interrogation, he expresses his feelings in a euphemistic substantive clause: “That I have a deep liking for you” (E 31). Adulterous passion, like homosexuality, is evidently a love that dares not speak its name. Just as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses will define universal love simply as “the opposite of hatred,” Robert Hand tries to diffuse the impact of his avowal by translating “love” into an innocuous proclamation of “deep liking.” “Love,” a “word known to all men” (U 15: 1492-3), appears to be one that few can speak. It can be known but not uttered, thought but not expressed. Bertha tactfully reassures her suitor: “Now you have dared to say it” (E 31)—even though Robert has dared nothing and spoken less. The abashed courtier becomes still more elliptical when later interrogated by Richard, who, feigning the role of outraged husband, demands: “Explain to me what is the word you longed and never dared to say to her” (E 60). “Yes. I will,” Robert replies obediently, only to obfuscate, once again, the referent that seems to defy utterance: “I admire very much the personality of your … of … your wife. That is the word. I can say it. It is no secret” (E 60). Stumbling over still another unutterable word, “mistress,” Robert, in a gesture of obeisance meant to acknowledge Richard's conjugal appropriation of Bertha (the kind of appropriation Richard so clearly disdains), has recourse to the social euphemism “wife.”

Playing the part of chivalric lover in his conversation with Bertha, Robert complains of sleeplessness and torment and invokes stale romantic metaphors: “Your face is a flower too—but more beautiful. A wild flower blowing in a hedge” (E 32). Joyce himself professed in a 1909 love-letter to Nora Barnacle that her eyes were “strange beautiful blue wild-flowers growing in some tangled, raindrenched hedge” (SL 179). And in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, addressing Molly as his “mountain flower,” through impassioned wooing wins her heart. But here the sentiment is vacuous and clumsy, a cliché that moves Bertha to amusement rather than passion. She immediately challenges Robert's script: “I am wondering if that is what you say—to the others” (E 32). Instinctively, Bertha knows that the rhetoric of idolatry depersonalizes the beloved and denies her free subjectivity.

Swept along by the discourse of courtly love, Robert promises to lavish “long long sweet kisses” of worship over “your eyes. Your lips. All your divine body” (E 36). Once he has elevated Bertha to the status of divinity, he can freely proclaim his ardor in tones of humble, swooning adoration accompanied by strains of Wagnerian Liebestod. “My life is finished—over,” he insists melodramatically. “I want to end it and have done with it. … To end it all—death. To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down into the sea. … Listening to music and in the arms of the woman I love—the sea, music and death” (E 35). The assignation he makes with Bertha is filled with the penumbra of sacramental devotion. With lust cloaked in amorous sentiment, the cavalier can boldly vie for his lady's hand—not to mention her eyes, lips, and the whole of her “divine body” (E 36). Bertha, ingenuous but instinctively shrewd, finds Robert's inflated rhetoric as overblown as his roses.

For Robert, the language of courtship is definitely kinetic, and the Janus image of this sticky, romantic effulgence is little more than a pornographic discourse of lascivious compulsion. The moment he is alone with Richard, Robert reverts to homoerotic scripts dictated by male bonding and, in his candid “locker-room” conversation, turns a nostalgic gaze back to those wild nights of drinking and carousing that the bachelors once shared. Their language suggests Nietzschean aspirations: “It was not only a house of revelry; it was to be the hearth of a new life. … And in that name all our sins were committed” (E 41). As nascent supermen, both men rebelled in their youth against Irish provincialism and, determined to forge a new morality, asserted a “transvaluation of values” through drink, blasphemy, heresy, and womanizing. Robert, however, seems to have confused the existential freedom of Nietzschean liberation with the sybaritic delights of erotic libertinism. A dandy and a roué, he defends hedonistic practices with perverted notions of Aristotelian aesthetics. Recalling St Thomas Aquinas's definition of beauty, Pulchra sunt quae visa placent, or “that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases” (P 207), he defines sexual desire as an act of sacerdotal homage. A kiss, he suggests, is an expression of aesthetic devotion: “This stone, for instance … is so cool, so polished, so delicate, like a woman's temple. It is silent, it suffers our passion; and it is beautiful. … And what is a woman? A work of nature, too, like a stone or a flower or a bird. A kiss is an act of homage” (E 41).

Robert longs to idolize woman as a consummate “work of nature” and, aroused by what is common or universal about the female, he articulates an aesthetics of eroticism that seems more representative of the sensibilities of D. H. Lawrence than those of James Joyce. “After all, what is most attractive in even the most beautiful woman,” he insists, is her “commonest” qualities: “I mean how her body develops heat when it is pressed, the movement of her blood, how quickly she changes by digestion what she eats into—what shall be nameless” (E 41-2). In Lawrentian fashion, Robert celebrates the physical warmth and physiological process of “femaleness”—blood surging, bodily heat, digestion, and excretion. Through adulation of universal sensuous traits, he refuses to personalize feminine beauty. In this biological analogy, Robert reverts to a crude subject/object dichotomy: man is both perceiver and poet, woman the specular object perceived. Later, when Bertha defiantly asks, “Do you think I am a stone?” (E 100), she unconsciously challenges such extravagant Platonic homage.

Pledging his troth to Richard as lord and mentor, Robert claims: “I have faith in you, the faith of a disciple in his master” (E 44). But Richard, like Christ or Nietzsche, speaks in the metaphorical language of riddle and paradox. He lays claim to a stronger and stranger emotional union, the “faith of a master in the disciple who will betray him” (E 44). Richard feels convinced that like Christ and Charles Stewart Parnell, he will be betrayed by friends and disciples and, eventually, by the woman he loves. Like Kierkegaard, he defines ultimate spiritual possession as an act of sacrificial generosity: voluntary renunciation frees the individual from the ponderous burdens of jealousy and desire. Having choreographed the scene of temptation for Bertha and Robert, Richard may then withdraw, like the god of creation, “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork” and remain indifferent, “paring his fingernails” (P 215).

Despite his earlier renunciation of patriarchal privilege, Richard unwittingly assigns to Bertha the ambiguous status of a conjugal possession to be domestically hoarded or offered to a male competitor. Hence the irony of his parabolic lesson to Archie. “While you have a thing it can be taken from you,” he tells his son. “But when you have given it, you have given it. No robber can take it from you. … It is yours then for ever when you have given it. It will be yours always” (E 46-7). Bertha, evidently, is the thing in question and Robert the potential robber.

Acting according to Richard's directives, Bertha shares the secret of Robert's courtship and describes his wooing in lugubrious detail. Richard, in turn, claims both scientific and aesthetic detachment. As a voyeuristic priest of the eternal imagination, he hears the young woman's penitential confession and carefully draws out every titillating detail. Right down to the last question, “Were you excited?” (E 49), he mimics a Catholic prelate scrupulously eliciting sexual information from a penitent in the confessional. How did he kiss you? Was the kiss simple or lingual? “Were you excited? … Was he?” (E 49). In Catholic theology, the issue of passionate arousal determines the gravity of sexual transgression. Simple dalliance, carried too far, might still entail the commission of merely a venial sin. But if either partner allows him/herself to entertain impure thoughts to the point of physical excitation and consent of the will, the offense becomes mortal—the ethical equivalent of an act of fornication or adultery. It is this same kind of scrupulosity that Richard exercises in his prying interrogation of Bertha. If his wife remained unexcited in response to Robert's temptation, she has not yet “sinned in her heart.”⁹

Rowan is setting himself up as godlike artist, playing the manipulative role of writer-director in a drama of potential cuckoldry. Like God the Father, he plans a scenario of temptation that might well precipitate Bertha's sexual fall. The sado-masochistic psychodynamics of his scheme suggest that beneath his brash defiance of bourgeois morality lies a deeply repressed, almost paranoid fear of adultery and conjugal loss. Tormented by the emotional threat of Bertha's infidelity, Richard determines to plunge headlong into the “void of incertitude” and magnanimously offer his spouse to her ardent suitor, since, as he assures Archie, one cannot lose what one refuses to appropriate. At some level of awareness, Richard realizes that, in his role as manipulative voyeur, he can enjoy both the pleasures of vicarious participation and the delights of scopophiliac detachment.

Choreographing Bertha's incipient love affair, Richard maintains an attitude of aesthetic distance that exorcizes kinetic feelings of both desire and loathing. He stages a self-indulgent melodrama for the sake of evincing the “luminosity of doubt.” Self-consciously renouncing what he sees as a traditional male right to demand assurances of female chastity, he voluntarily embraces a stance of moral incertitude intended to exorcize sexual jealousy. It is significant that Richard protests as his motive for such unconventional behavior Bertha's freedom rather than his own. “I have allowed you complete liberty” (E 52), he proclaims. Yet he takes for granted the assumption that Bertha's liberty should be contingent on spousal benevolence. Autonomy of choice is not hers by right, but the implicit gift of an enlightened, somewhat condescending patriarch. Offering Bertha permission to be free, Richard arrogantly presumes that it is he who is responsible for, and has always controlled, her freedom.

Bertha is perhaps correct in her charge that Richard is “unnatural,” since he engineers this complex game of conjugal temptation precisely for the purpose of transcending nature. He wants to liberate himself from those troubling emotions of love and hate associated with erotic compulsion; and, as a Nietzschean superman of contemporary art, he desperately tries to fly above and beyond conventional nets of familial commitment. Like that earlier misogynist Stephen Dedalus, he seeks to impose a spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus onto the vagaries of an intimate relationship with a woman. Obsessed with a Nietzschean will to power, he attempts to control the semiotic fluidity of feminine desire by invoking logocentric strategies of intellectual mastery. If Stephen fled the adolescent temptress, Richard takes refuge from the vicissitudes of adult sexuality in the luminous incertitude of adulterous betrayal.

When Bertha hurls at Richard the epithet of “mother-killer,” she implies that he is somehow guilty of psychological collusion in his own filial alienation. She also suggests that Richard is attempting to kill the mother in herself. Although she approaches her spouse with candor and solicitude, Richard coldly rejects her proffered gift of fidelity. He thrusts both sexual freedom and ethical responsibility onto Bertha, only to revel in her understandable perplexity. He does, in fact, take advantage of her simplicity by using her as a moral and aesthetic pawn to implement his own psychological liberation. Trapped in a confusing labyrinth of inchoate passion, Bertha pleads for some kind of guidance. “Am I to go?” (E 55), she asks ingenuously. But Richard has already assimilated his mother's hardness of heart and, with a mask of iron, insists: “Decide yourself. … You are free” (E 56).¹⁰ Almost maniacally, and with religious determination, he struggles to liberate himself from the passio irascibilis that holds him enthralled. “He is jealous, wills and knows his own dishonour and the dishonour of her, to be united with every phase of whose being is love's end” (E 114). The transcendence he seeks “must reveal itself as the very immolation of the pleasure of possession on the altar of love” (E 114).¹¹

At this point in the drama, Joyce assumes an endlessly varied psychic and sexual mobility among his characters. Richard is, for Bertha, Robert, and Beatrice, an elusive object of Lacanian desire who refuses to authorize erotic consummation. The bereft Beatrice displaces her troubled affections onto Robert, who seeks Bertha as a surrogate for homoerotic attachment. All three characters revolve obsessively around Richard, the cunning choreographer of this melodramatic scenario. Frustrated in their passionate attraction to such an idiosyncratic artist, Bertha and Robert are thrust together as unwitting kinsmen to inaugurate a supplementary channel for the expression of repressed libidinal drives.

Richard, in turn, claims aesthetic rather than conjugal rights over the ingenuous Bertha, who proves faithful to him in her fashion. The seed of doubt introduces a note of perpetual desire—a gap or slippage that disseminates itself in the mind of the artist and catalyzes his creative instincts. His beloved, not wholly possessed, must constantly be renewed in his affections through the marriage of true minds that art alone can promise. Doubt, gashing a psychic hole into the seamless web of logocentric self-possession, thrusts the artist onto the edge of emotional incertitude and forces him to lay claim, over and over again, to a dream of love and paradisal communion that always-already eludes him.¹²

ACT TWO: THE CAT-AND-MOUSE GAME

If Richard Rowan assumes the role of “automystic” at the beginning of Act Two, Robert Hand embodies the more debased persona of “automobile” (E 113)—a mechanical and pusillanimous stereotype that borders on dramatic farce. Joyce's notes for Exiles suggest a vaguely homosexual motivation behind Richard's project: “The bodily possession of Bertha by Robert, repeated often, would certainly bring into almost carnal contact the two men” (E 123). Richard longs “to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously and to possess a bound woman Bertha through the organ of his friend” (E 125).¹³

When Richard storms Ranelagh Cottage, this “devil for surprises” appears like an avenging angel to catch Robert in the act. The two seem to have changed places in the play's cat-and-mouse game, and Richard takes sadistic pleasure in taunting his victim with proof of adulterous intent. The myopic artist, like Father Dolan in A Portrait, sees and knows all. “I was watching you,” he declares in a moment of voyeuristic triumph. Robert, the penitent sinner, immediately pleads insanity: “Yes, I was mad. But it was merely lightheadedness” (E 59). Like a remorseful child, he protests gratitude for being rescued from temptation and takes a life-long lesson from the master: “I cannot tell you what a relief it is to me that you have spoken—that the danger is passed” (E 61).

Arrogant and condescending, Rowan judges his rival fatuous, even lugubrious: “The whole thing made me sad all at once. … Like all men you have a foolish wandering heart” (E 61). Richard, of course, sets himself apart and claims exemption from the waywardness that governs “all men's” hearts. Professing the sublime detachment of sexual renunciation, he warns Robert that Bertha cannot be taken either by stealth or by violence: “Steal you could not in my house because the doors were open: nor take by violence if there were no resistance” (E 62). By denouncing Robert as a would-be thief, a man guilty of coveting his neighbor's wife, Richard implies that Bertha is a metaphorical possession—a piece of conjugal property which is his by right, but which he voluntarily and magnanimously forsakes. Robert himself reinforces this sense of female objectification when he compares Bertha to Galatea and praises Richard for his labors as a contemporary Pygmalion: “She is yours, your work. … And that is why I, too, was drawn to her. You are so strong that you attract me even through her” (E 62). Richard, he insists, has artistically sculpted Bertha's character and magically transformed her into a fascinating object of masculine devotion: “You have made her all that she is. A strange and wonderful personality—in my eyes, at least” (E 67).¹⁴

If Robert's description of love was Platonic in Act One, it now degenerates into a vindication of lust as the “law of nature,” an obsessive will to power that drives the male to uncontrollable acts of violence: “Those are moments of sheer madness when we feel an intense passion for a woman. We see nothing. We think of nothing. Only to possess her. Call it brutal, bestial, what you will. … No man ever yet lived on this earth who did not long to possess—… in the flesh—the woman whom he loves. It is nature's law” (E 63). It is a law, however, from which Richard claims singular exemption. “What is that to me? Did I vote it?” (E 63). “A lex eterna stays about him” (U 3: 48-9); but, proudly, he rejects it. Richard defiantly embraces the role of Nietzschean superman, the individual who renounces traditional morality and, through a transvaluation of values, becomes a law unto himself. With a note of hybris, he contemptuously asserts superiority over nature, identifying himself as “no man” or Outis, the epithet Odysseus used in his confrontation with the Cyclops and which, combined with “Zeus,” becomes the hero's true name. Like Nietzsche's Übermensch in Joyful Wisdom, Richard will proclaim “the new, the unique, the incomparable, making laws for ourselves and creating ourselves.”¹⁵ Raised above the crowd, he becomes “no man”—a self-generating artist/hero and, in his own mind at least, the superman of a new moral order.

Oblivious of the implications of Richard's avowal, Robert continues to argue not for joyful wisdom, but for the sensual joys of uninhibited passion. Both men and women are polygamous by inclination, he insists, but are prohibited by society from heeding the divine mandate inscribed in their hearts by the finger of God. Robert proposes the “immoral idea” that “a woman, too, has the right to try with many men until she finds love” (E 65) and even intends to write a book on the subject—perhaps a novel similar to Joyce's Ulysses.

Richard, however, responds to Robert's self-serving plan for sexual revolution with the diversionary tactic of enumerating his own conjugal misdemeanors. After nights of erotic revelry, he habitually courted the practice of rousing Bertha with detailed penitential confessions, then hysterically begging her forgiveness: “I cried beside her bed; and I pierced her heart” (E 66). His self-abasing acts of contrition were clearly designed to make Bertha a spiritual accomplice in his sado-masochistic practices. Playing the prodigal son, he demanded that she respond as Mater Dolorosa and offer her contrite spouse continual succor. Has Richard “killed … the virginity of her soul,” he wonders, through such strange and wild expostulations? In repeated trials of her forbearance, was he “feeding the flame of her innocence” with his guilt (E 67)? Ironically, Richard never seems to acknowledge that Bertha's heroic renunciation of sexual possessiveness has already preceded his own. Whereas Richard must fight against the passio irascibilis in a struggle that lasts nine years and three dramatic acts, he haughtily assumes that Bertha achieved such emotional detachment in the early stages of cohabitation. Richard and Robert, like Joyce their creator, apparently believe that women are “naturally” free of the torments of sexual jealousy.

Richard, moreover, lays claim to a different kind of conjugal prerogative by virtue of his self-defined role as artist-god. During their nine years of exile in Italy, he sought to improve his companion spiritually and intellectually by making her over in the mental image of psychic cohesion dictated by his own narcissistic needs. “I tried to give her a new life” (E 67), he boasts, entirely oblivious of the arrogance of such an assertion. Richard fails to realize that this premeditated and supposedly redemptive project was extremely manipulative. Like the sculptor Pygmalion, he set out to fashion Bertha's character as though she were a stone statue or a fictive persona in a nineteenth-century novel. Claiming authorship of her present personality, he redefines her as product (or child) of his fertile imagination and unwittingly exercises artistic authority over the parameters of her emotional life.

Richard's dream of godlike parturition appears all the more evident in an unpublished dramatic fragment documenting powerful fantasies of couvade: “I feel as if I had carried her [Bertha] within my own body, in my womb. … Her books, her music, the fire of thought stolen from on high, … the grace with which she tends the body we desire—whose work is that? I feel that it is mine. It is my work and the work of others like me. … It is we who have conceived her and brought her forth. Our minds flowing together are the womb in which we have borne her.”¹⁶ Having “birthed” Bertha from the womb of the intellectual imagination, Richard now complains that his wonderful creation has figuratively emerged stillborn: “She is dead. She lies on my bed. … And I know that her body was always my loyal slave” (E 68).

Richard finally reveals the hidden agenda behind his Kierkegaardian act of renunciation when he confesses an obsessive need to liberate himself from the ponderous emotional burden imposed by Bertha's fidelity. “I longed to be betrayed by you and by her—in the dark, in the night—secretly, meanly, craftily. … I longed for that passionately and ignobly, to be dishonoured 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” (E 70). Richard demands the possibility of erotic abjection as a necessary condition for the realization of creative freedom. Using the archetypal image of the phoenix, he intends to sacrifice both himself and Bertha on the altar of adultery, then to reconstruct from the ashes of this metaphorical holocaust a new, impalpable, and imperishable artistic project. Robert, taking up the rhetorical challenge, proposes a “battle of both our souls … against all that is false in them and in the world. A battle of your soul against the spectre of fidelity, of mine against the spectre of friendship” (E 70-1). Assuming a fin de siècle banner of Nietzschean heroism, Robert plots a moral rebellion against “the misery of what slaves call life” and exults in Dionysiac fantasies of redemption through a single ecstatic moment of jouissance, a “blinding instant of passion alone—passion, free, unashamed, irresistible” (E 71).

In this characterization of Richard and Robert, Joyce gives us embryonic versions of Shem and Shaun, the polarized twins of Finnegans Wake. Richard, the idealistic poet, manifests “that fierce indignation which lacerated the heart of Swift” (E 43). “Fallen from a higher world,” he sees himself as an avenging angel filled with “fierce indignation” at human fallibility. He resembles Shakespeare's Ariel—a sprite who, imprisoned in matter, cannot accept life as “cowardly and ignoble” (E 43-4). Robert, in contrast, protests that he has a nature modeled on Satan or on Shakespeare's Caliban: “I have come up from a lower world and I am filled with astonishment when I find that people have any redeeming virtue at all” (E 44). Even Robert's joke about public statuary adds comic resonance to this dramatic portrait of masculine mirror images. Richard, the narcissistic artist, is baffled by the difficulty of “getting down” from the elevated heights of philosophical idealism. Robert, the smiling public man, surveys the scene and declares: “In my time the dunghill was so high” (E 43). The scatological analogy suggests that Robert looks out complacently over the dunghill of a desiccated romantic tradition but continues to pile up the dung through his anachronistic, chivalric behavior.

Throughout the second act of Exiles, Bertha remains the center and focal point of the play's dramatic action. Like Molly Bloom in Ulysses, she is present in the mode of absence, and her figure is all the more powerful for its veiled, mysterious obscurity. When Bertha finally appears on stage, she proves to be a woman who “does things,” and her impatience sharply contrasts with the cerebral dialogue of the two men. Having once had the courage to elope with Richard without an explicit invitation, she may well be strong enough to turn the tables on her antagonistic partner and take up his unconventional challenge of adultery. “As I have the name I can have the gains,” she threatens. Having earned the name of “whore” through elopement, she might just as well have the gains of sexual freedom in her common-law marriage. When she appeals to Richard for emotional direction, he characteristically refuses counsel. “Your own heart will tell you,” he declares. “Who am I that I should call myself master of your heart or of any woman's?” (E 75). Richard, who claims to have given birth spiritually to Bertha, stubbornly refuses to exercise conventional prerogatives over his imputed creation. His self-conscious and overdetermined gesture of erotic renunciation proves both patronizing and noble-hearted. Richard foists the illusion of freedom onto Bertha in order to be free himself—not to court Beatrice, but to liberate his soul from the tormenting anxieties provoked by an uncontrollable (and culturally embedded) desire for exclusive sexual access to the body of the beloved.¹⁷

Abandoning his wife to the vertigo of existential choice, Richard leaves Bertha and Robert in a state of perplexity and confusion, like dumbfounded actors thrust together without benefit of a script. His strategies of emotional manipulation are particularly complex, since Richard masquerades as what René Girard would call a “model” for both Robert and Bertha, whose mutual attraction has most probably been evinced by Richard's cold-hearted indifference to them both. Robert Hand is shamelessly exploited in his role as the romantic mediator whose ardor provides a spur to resuscitate Richard's repressed desire for Bertha—a yearning revitalized by the ambiguities of Robert's adulterous intent. Nine years earlier, Richard successfully snatched Bertha from Robert's potential grasp by whisking her off to the continent without benefit of clergy. Using the vocabulary of a competitive sexual sweepstakes, he claims, triumphantly: “I played for her against all that you say or can say; and I won” (E 40). In order to rekindle the spark of his now flagging passion, he is obliged to cast Robert in the specious role of sexual rival. Richard apparently demands the deflecting presence of an avid opponent to reinforce his own gratifying illusions of emotional dominance.

Adopting a deceptively liberal stance of amorous indulgence, Richard nonetheless tries to exchange Bertha with Robert for the “use value” of conjugal doubt. In some sense, Bertha proves to be just as much an object of barter as was Freud's Dora. Richard hands over his consort in an act of generosity that reveals the slippage of authoritarian power in an attempt to trade Bertha for a metaphorical wound that will free him psychologically from the bonds of covetousness and from an amorphous conviction of radical lack. Refusing to appropriate the female body in marriage, he makes a dramatic gesture of connubial magnanimity, a grandiloquent “sacrifice.”¹⁸ By sublimating lascivious desire to the strictures of aesthetic control, Richard betrays the blind spot in his intellectual project. Because he lusts after the elusive freedom generated by undecidability, conjugal doubt alone can release him from the unsettling constraints of traditional marital commitment. By doubling the image of his common-law wife, by shattering the stability of her notions of fidelity and affective devotion, Richard can take mental refuge in the role of a detached artist free to recreate, in endless movements of godlike dissemination, a fantasy of his beloved as an imaginary (and unattainable) figure of wholeness and totalizing self-presence.¹⁹

ACT THREE: THE LUMINOSITY OF DOUBT

The third act of Exiles is dominated by a woman. If Richard and Robert articulate a logocentric philosophy based on “ideas and ideas,” Bertha cuts through the “pornosophical philotheology” (U 15: 109) of both men by persistently and triumphantly expressing the perdurance of female desire. Like Molly Bloom in Ulysses, she dwells on amorous reverie and continues to cherish the “great dream” that initially impelled her to elope with Richard, who has ostensibly abandoned his “bride in exile” and is gloriously wedded to his art.

Robert Hand's essay in praise of this “distinguished Irishman” is apparently intended as an allegorical rendering of Richard's domestic drama. In this narrative of exile and return, Bertha becomes analogous to Mother Ireland and Richard to the child who “left her in her hour of need” (E 99). Like Kathleen ni Houlihan, Bertha will prove the victorious mother/muse who recalls her wayward son—the man who, through “loneliness and exile,” will at last learn to love her (E 99). The servant Brigid, like a Greek chorus, prophesies that: “He'll come back to you again. Sure he thinks the sun shines out of your face” (E 90). But Bertha somberly demurs: “No, Brigid, that time comes only once in a lifetime. The rest of life is good for nothing except to remember that time” (E 91).²⁰

The final act of Joyce's drama is filled with riddles, questions, prophecies, and parables. All the characters seem to speak in tongues that hide encoded messages. Bertha instinctively manages to penetrate the convoluted psychodynamics of Richard's manipulation when she accuses: “For your own sake you urged me to it. … To be free yourself” (E 103). In a conversation with Beatrice, she angrily dismisses the masculine logocentric discourse of “ideas and ideas” (E 100). “Do you think I am a stone?” she asks bitterly. “I am very proud of myself, if you want to know. What have they ever done for him? I made him a man. What are they all in his life? No more than dirt under his boots! … He can despise me, too, like the rest of them—now. And you can despise me. But you will never humble me, any of you” (E 100). Reversing the Pygmalion/Galatea relationship earlier envisaged by Robert, Bertha claims with fierce, maternal pride that it is she who made Richard a man. Through love and passionate devotion, she spiritually gives birth to the mature artist who will, in turn, conceive and bring forth poetic ideas. At this point in the drama, Bertha emerges as a newly born woman, autonomous and free. She asserts, in her own right, a creative liberty that transcends the sexual imbroglio earlier engineered by Richard in his attempt to play choreographer and puppet-master in the drama of both their destinies.²¹

In the final act of the play, Bertha proudly lays claim to the kind of psychological autonomy that Richard has been trying to foist on her in the guise of purported benevolence. “You would like to be free now,” he challenges. “You have only to say the word” (E 103). When Richard brashly offers Bertha sexual liberty, she seizes the opportunity to assert emotional freedom. She taunts him with a fantasy of nightly trysts with a mysterious lover in acts of unbridled passion: “To meet my lover! Yes! My lover!” (E 104). There is an obvious note of mockery in Bertha's declaration of sexual independence, as she wryly comments: “You are a stranger to me. You do not understand anything in me—not one thing in my heart or soul. A stranger! I am living with a stranger!” (E 104).

Bertha has spent an unforgettable evening with Robert, but their veiled colloquy remains shrouded in mystery. The spectator, like Richard, is cast into a mire of metaphysical doubt. Robert and Bertha address each other in the figurative language of lovers, a discourse fraught with epistemological uncertainty.

ROBERT:
… Bertha? What happened last night? What is the truth that I am to tell? … Were you mine in that sacred night of love? Or have I dreamed it?
BERTH:
[Smiles faintly] Remember your dream of me. You dreamed that I was yours last night.
ROBERT:
And that is the truth—a dream? That is what I am to tell?
BERTHA:
Yes.
ROBERT:
… Bertha! … In all my life only that dream is real. I forget the rest.

(E 106)

When Bertha reminds her suitor of his dream of amorous possession during their “sacred night of love,” Robert, swept away on a tide of emotional ecstasy, cannot distinguish reality from dream. If their conversation is intended to reconstruct the highly coded language of courtly love, then Robert's assessment should be interpreted literally: the encounter was enacted according to “sacred” codes of conduct, and whatever intimacy the two lovers shared took sacramental rather than profane expression. The dialogue has a Platonic cast, and one might assume from this ambiguous tête-à-tête that their involvement stopped short of physical consummation.

Joyce, despite his popular reputation as a pornographic author, rarely gives us explicit representations of sexual coition. After tantalizing his audience, he invariably transfers erotic climax from the stage of drama to the scene of writing. Copulation is prepared for, imagined, fantasized, or recollected. But the moment of physical climax is always displaced onto a mimetic stage of impassioned fantasy, a stage of subjective and cultural representation. Erotic jouissance in the Joycean canon is played out in the register of écriture and endlessly supplemented by inflated reveries in the tumescent imaginations of his characters.

Robert Hand, like Keats transported by the song of the nightingale, wonders if his experience were a vision or a waking dream. For a clue to the mystery, we might consult another Keatsian lyric, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which suggests that: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.” In answer to epistemological queries, the poet would insist: “‘Beauty is truth, truth, beauty,’—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” The truth of Robert and Bertha's liaison resides in the lyrical recollections they privately share. Like the lovers portrayed on the Grecian urn, they eschew “a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed” by choosing the “happier love” of unconsummated passion, “forever warm and still to be enjoyed.”²² The couple can luxuriate in melodies of erotic expectation inscribed in consciousness by the suspension of physical release. Robert has dreamt of ecstatic union with Bertha, but his ineffable dream is all the more powerful for its lack of sensuous closure. It will take a plethora of forms in his imagination over a thousand and one nights of delectable fantasy, as he bears into voluntary exile the sacred chalice of Platonic devotion to a mistress who will remain “forever panting, and forever young” in her suitor's romantic memory.

Robert and Bertha mutually construct a dream of love, an imaginary encounter on the stage of aroused desire. Tantalized, they apparently defer physical satisfaction for the sweeter pleasures of erotic dissemination. Their affair seems to have been emotionally and linguistically seminal rather than a transaction involving an “ejaculation of semen within the natural female organ” (U 17: 2283-4). Language inaugurates an irruption of libidinal desire, a diffusion of sensual titillation through the infinitely deferred resonance of a haunting, unsatisfied dream. Bound together in a piquant discourse of amorous longing, the couple has left a gap in experience, creating a phallic wound of ever-living doubt that will, through a reversal (and triangulation) of metaphorical insemination, penetrate and impregnate the womb of Richard's own artistic imagination. Their collusion has freed him, in fantasy if not in fact, from the tedious fears of conjugal possessiveness. Refusing to covet the woman who would be his wife, Richard embraces the restlessness of emotional doubt in lieu of a socially sanctioned bond of law.

By ending the play on a note of paradox, Joyce fails to conclude his drama with the kind of traditional climax anticipated by Aristotelian poetics. He remarks in his notes: “The doubt which clouds the end of the play must be conveyed to the audience not only through Richard's questions to both but also from the dialogue between Robert and Bertha” (E 125). In a drama that deals prominently with the issue of libidinal desire, Joyce titillates his spectator but denies him/her the satisfaction of climatic release. The audience may feel a distinct sense of frustration at this teasing game of authorial manipulation. But, as Joyce would remind us, “doubt is the thing. Life is suspended in doubt like the world in the void. You might find this in some sense treated in Exiles (JJ 557).²³ In his notes for the play, Joyce declares: “All believe that Bertha is Robert's mistress. This belief rubs against his own knowledge of what has been, but he accepts the belief as a bitter food” (E 123). Although Robert chooses to leave Dublin, he evidently does not flee out of guilt or adulterous shame. He acquires the name of Don Giovanni without the gains of physical possession and accepts the salt bread of Dantesque exile as bitter, but inevitable fare. He has, perhaps, tasted the fruits of Eden without consuming the apple whole.²⁴

Ultimately, the text of Exiles confounds us with the inevitable confluence of art and life. “You dreamed that I was yours last night,” Bertha tells Robert (E 106). But what, finally, is the distinction between reality and dream? How much of human experience is real, and how much is a fictional projection of the creative imagination? Love, like art, largely transpires as a waking dream, a fabulation of subjective consciousness. Each individual tends to elevate sexual experience to the status of legend or myth, as the lover invariably weaves the fabric of erotic consummation on the warp and woof of private romantic narrative.

In a play filled with enigmas, Robert's confession of the truth to Richard suggests still further ambiguities. “I failed,” Robert avers. “She is yours, as she was nine years ago, when you met her first” (E 107). Robert insists that Bertha refused to yield to his entreaties and that he spent an evening of anxious peregrination culminating in a fly-by-night love affair, a “death of the spirit” with an unknown lady in a cab. It is perhaps telling that the stage-directions at this point call for a fishwoman crying “Dublin bay herrings!” (E 107). Joyce, in his usual punning manner, may be mocking Robert by implying something fishy about his alibi. The tale Robert narrates could be meant to function as a red herring in this convoluted maze of love and betrayal. Doubt is piled upon doubt, as Richard protests that he will never know the truth about the liaison—“Never in this world” (E 102). He hears demonic voices counseling him to despair, despite Robert's assurance that Bertha is still as faithful to Richard as she was nine years earlier. His assertion is deliberately ambiguous. Could Bertha have deceived Richard almost a decade ago, when the three first met? Is Archie, perhaps, Robert's son? “If he were mine,” Robert sighs, and identifies himself as Archie's “fairy godfather” (E 110).²⁵

Despite the accumulation of doubt and ambiguity in Exiles, one thing emerges clearly and remains constant throughout the drama—Bertha's powerful and enduring love for Richard. “I have been true to you,” she vows. “Last night and always” (E 110). “Surely you believe me. I gave you myself—all. I gave up all for you. You took me—and you left me” (E 111). Spiritually abandoned during their exile in Rome, Bertha has cherished a living memory of their youthful courtship and its passionate consummation. Like Molly Bloom, she nightly resurrects a life-sustaining vision of her husband in the guise of ardent suitor: “Not a day passes that I do not see ourselves, you and me, as we were when we met first. Every day of my life I see that. Was I not true to you all that time?” (E 111).

Bertha, the bride faithful in exile, appeals to her errant spouse in a gesture of profound tenderness and solicitude. By piercing her lover with the phallic weapon of triangulated desire, she inaugurates an ongoing quest for the elusive psychic gratifications of wholeness and self-presence associated with the Lacanian other. Richard, like Stephen's Shakespeare, has suffered “a deep wound of doubt” which can never be healed. “I do not wish to know or to believe,” he insists. “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” (E 112). In some sense, Richard is playing Freud's Fort/Da game with his common-law wife. By making her disappear as a conjugal possession, he can call her back, inscribed as an object of desire, in the realm of the symbolic order. Through an ostensibly sacrificial gesture, Richard lays claim to the language and mastery of the Father, while Bertha functions as a mystified (M)Other figure whose possible loss engenders an imaginary fissure perpetually sutured through aesthetic fantasy.²⁶

The wound itself will nourish the imagination of a writer who takes masochistic pleasure in the luminosity of doubt and proudly internalizes the pain of abjection. “The tusk of the boar has wounded him there where love lies ableeding. … There is … some goad of the flesh driving him into a new passion, a darker shadow of the first, darkening even his own understanding of himself” (U 9: 459-64). The certainty of either love or hate would be disastrous for Rowan the artist, who feels that he must nurture a “living, wounding doubt” as a spur to creativity. The gap in Joyce's aesthetic theory is deducible from the symbolic fissure that insinuates itself like a grain of sand into the oyster-shell of poetic vulnerability, or like the seminal influence that must impregnate the “virgin womb of the [artistic] imagination” (P 217). Penetrated by the sudden impact of jealousy, the writer's mind recoils from emotional pain and continually rehearses the traumatic event until trauma has been mastered in the realm of fabulation. Kinesis inaugurates those flights of restless fantasy that impel the insecure artist/lover to conjure alternative fictional worlds.²⁷

Richard's infamous wound in Exiles metaphorically invaginates his tormented creative consciousness. A perpetual stranger in the home he once knew, he choreographs an uncanny (unheimlich) project to detach himself from the umbilical cord of amorous need that links him, like a dependent child or a powerless embryo, to hidden and inaccessible female genital spaces. The cut in his psyche enables him to cut free. Traumatized by the threat of infidelity and conjugal loss, he gives birth in his head to an idealized image of the beloved and continually possesses her anew in the pain of doubt that will undoubtedly hurt him into poetry. Rejecting his inamorata as a sexual possession, he embraces her as a mystical figure of coherence and plenitude always-already denied—and thus sought after and pined for until longing erupts in artistic couvade. The emotional scar inaugurated by Richard's sacrificial renunciation of Bertha will be replicated over and over again in his turbulent imagination, as the disruptions of frustrated libidinal desire spur the insecure artist to compensatory acts of parthenogenetic creation.²⁸

At the conclusion of Exiles, Bertha, the mother/muse of Joyce's drama, has successfully given birth to the artistic hero who will return to her in the role of primordial lover. Asserting the irrepressible dignity of her nature, she draws her spouse into the fluidity of female desire and into the semiotic rhythms of unconsummated passion that burst forth in explosive discharges of creative energy.²⁹ As in all his later works, Joyce gives the last word in Exiles to a woman. Bertha offers Richard a tantalizing invitation to resurrection and emotional renewal so that, together, the couple might strive for, but never fully achieve, a prelapsarian (and wholly imaginary) experience of transcendent jouissance.³⁰ “Forget me, Dick,” Bertha pleads. “Forget me and love me again as you did the first time. I want my lover. To meet him, to go to him, to give myself to him. You, Dick. O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again!” (E 112).³¹

Notes

1. One of the reasons that Exiles is such a perplexing dramatic experiment is the very indeterminacy of its genre. Searching for an appropriate form, Joyce vertiginously mixes conventions and swerves from one dramatic genre to another. What begins as a comedy of manners quickly moves in the direction of romantic parody, melodrama, moral parable, and farce. Some of the play’s idiosyncrasies might be attributable to what Robert Adams identifies as the “buried piling on which Joyce’s play seems to have been constructed, … Scribe’s libretto for Meyerbeer’s opera, Robert le Diable. As piece of stagecraft, Scribe’s piece is a juvenile shocker in the lowest traditions of Victorian melodrama” (“Light on Joyce’s Exiles,” p. 98). In the opinion of Mary Reynolds, the origins of Exiles are decidedly Dantesque. The play, she tells us, “reproduces in part the closing episode of Dante’s Purgatorio,” when “Dante is reunited with Beatrice and receives from her the assurance that his poetic mission has divine validation. … Richard Rowan, the artist-hero of Exiles, defines a conception of live in a dialectic of moral freedom, and Joyce here deliberately constructs a modern and relativist interpretation of Dante's sequence: (Joyce and Dante, p. 165). According to Reynolds, Richard Rowan “is clearly a Joycean interpretation of the artist-pilgram of the Divine Comedy. But whereas “Dante’s exploration of the ‘struggle of the soul’ is theologically directed, Joyce’s comes near to being psychoanalytically directed” (ibid., 172).

2. Jane Gallop, Feminism and Psychoanalysis, p. 48. In his essay on “The Meaning of the Phallus,” Jacques Lacan explains the critical distinction between sexual need and erotic desire: “What is thus alienated in needs … reappears in a residue which then presents itself in man as a desire.… The phenomenology which emerges from analytic experience is certainly such as to demonstrate the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric and even scandalous character by which desire is distinguished from need. … Demand in itself bears on something other than the satisfactions which it calls for” (Feminist Sexuality, p. 80).

3. Joyce’s emulation of Ben Jonson probably influenced the fact that he gave his dramatis personae in Exiles a set of comic, almost parodic verbal handles. Richard Rowan is associated with the “rowan tree,” a Eurasian tree of the apple family with red, berry-like pomes. His surname recalls Hamilton-Rowan, although he denies lineal descent from the Irish patriot. The word “Rowan” further suggests a sense of firmness and mastery, subliminally associated with a “rower” or captain. Robert Hand, in turn, is identified as an aspiring “manipulator” (from the Latin manus). He wants a hand in everything and tries to intrude in Richard’s domestic situation by forcefully laying hands on Bertha. Robert proves to be a phallic imposter whose hands are everywhere, grasping for Bertha as a lover, then reaching for Richard as a leader and master. Rowan comes to the cottage to demand that Robert unhand Bertha; but instead, like Pilate, he washes his hands of the situation and goes off to pare his fingernails as the would-be lovers sort out their moral dilemma. A surprising number of references to hands are scattered n stage-directions throughout the play.

4. Rowan has refused to “mark the product of copulation with his own name” or reduce his partner to an ’anonymous worker, the machine in the service of a master proprietor who will put his trademark upon the finished product” (Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 23). Calling himself a “socialist artist,” Joyce wrote to Stanislaus in May 1905: “I cannot tell you how strange I feel sometimes in my attempt to live a more civilized life than my contemporaries. But why should I have brought Nora to a priest or a lawyer to make her swear away her life to me? And why should I superimpose on my child the very troublesome burden of belief which my father and mother superimposed on me?” (Letters II, 89).

5. This riddle, in turn, raises still another question. Has Richard indeed relinquished the phallus as “emblem of man’s appropriated relation to the virgin” (Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, p. 42) ? Or has he, instead, appropriated the womb, the original signifier of absence and mystery, by making himself the origin of aesthetic and imaginary creations that erase woman’s sexual/reproductive authority?

6. It is interesting that Joyce intended to give Bertha a youthful history of love, and loss, of amorous grief similar to that of Nora Barnacle and Michael “Sonny” Bodkin in actual life and of Gretta Conroy and Michael Furey in the Dubliners story. “The Dead.” In his notes for the play, Joyce imagines Bertha weeping over Rahoon, over “him whom her love has killed, the dark boy whom, as the earth, she embraces in death and disintegration. He is her buried life, her past.… His symbols are music and the sea, liquid formless earth … She is the Magdalen who weeps remembering the loves she could not return” (E 118). Bertha remains friendless and alone, protesting in an unpublished fragment of dialogue: “I was too simple and uneducated” (Robert Adams, “Light on Joyce’s Exiles?”, p. 91). Although Beatrice Justice could be a potential friend to Bertha, she is cat by Joyce in the role of antagonist and foil. Beatrice is described as a “slender dark woman of 27 years” (E16), dressed like a spinster and appearing like a shade. Joyce notes that her “mind is an abandoned cold temple in which hymns have risen heavenward in a distant past but where now a doddering priest offers alone and hopelessly prayers to the Most High” (E 119). Beatrice has served as Richard’s editor and ostensible inspiration, a virgin offered a novena of letters over the nine years of Rowan’s exile. Richard implies, moreover, that his flight from Ireland was meant as a judgement against this unfaithful Mercedes who, in a moment of weakness, sinned in a garden by pledging her troth to Robert with a kiss and a garter.

7. Until recently, a few critics have acknowledged the centrality of Bertha’s role in Exiles. Hugh Kenner claims that Bertha is a “neurotic woman” and a “parody of the exiled Eve” (Dublin’s Joyce, p. 89). His view is shared by Carole Brown and Leo Knuth, who see the play’s female protagonist as “little more than a psychological satellite,” (“Joyce’s Exiles,” p. 16). William Tindall indicts Bertha as Richard’s “stooge,” a woman who gullibly colludes in her own sado-masochistic victimization (A Reader’s Guide to James Joyce, p. 111). And Theo Dombrowski, romanticizing Richard’s ideal love, concludes that Bertha “does not want freedom” but “desires love as a kind of bondage” (“The Problem of Love,” p. 123). One of Bertha’s few critical defenders is Darcy O’Brien, who celebrates Joyce’s heroine as a symbol of innocence and a “secular Madonna … who bestows her soul’s virginity in love, that unnatural phenomenon which occurs but once” (Conscience, pp. 64–65). Ruth Bauerle, in her essay on “Bertha’s Role in Exiles,” offers convincing evidence that Bertha might be considered the “dominating figure of the drama.” See also Celeste Lougman’s essay “Bertha, Victress, in Joyce’s Exiles” and Bernard Benstock’s discussion of Exiles in a Companion to Joyce Studies.

8. According to Richard Ellmann, Joyce fashioned the character of Robert hand through a conflation of Oliver St John Gogarty, Vincent Cosgrave, Thomas Kettle, and Roberto Prezioso. “From his experiences with them Joyce drew the picture of a friendship which appears in the play: a friend is someone who wants to possess your mind … and your wife’s body, and longs to prove himself your disciple by betraying you” (JJ 356). Joyce evidently took much of his inspiration for Exiles from Prezioso’s dalliance with Nora—an interest which Joyce himself at first encouraged. Prezioso was a Venetian journalist who befriended Joyce in Trieste and “had a reputation of success with women.” He began making regular calls to Nora, and Joyce followed the flirtation as though it were a scientific experiment. When Prezioso, however, “endeavoured to become Nora’s lover rather than her admirer” in 1911 or 1912, Joyce sought him out and ’expostulated with him in the name of friendship and broken confidence.” In a semi-public spectacle, Prezioso was left weeping and humiliated in the Piazza Dante. Ellmann notes that “Joyce was half-responsible for Prezioso’s conduct, in an experiment at being author of his own life as well as of his work. No doubt he was taking too much upon himself, but he did not do so for pleasure, except perhaps the pleasure of self-laceration” (JJ 316–17). See also Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, p. 534. Cixous claims that Joyce slapped Prezioso, but I can find no biographical evidence of such uncharacteristic physical violence on Joyce’s part.

9. In James Joyce and Sexuality, Richard Brown notes Joyce’s satire of the sexual undercurrents of the Catholic confession and identifies this scene as a parody of the sacrament of penance. “Much of the tension of the play,” he tells us, “arises from the sexual inquisition to which Richard subjects Bertha” (p. 128). According to Michel Foucault, it was the Catholic pastoral of the seventeenth century which gave rise to the construction of a sexual discourse modeled on a rigorous and detailed confessional investigation, “an entire painstaking review of the sexual act in its very unfolding.” The priest was to examine a penitent in confession with the understanding that “everything has to be told. A twofold evolution tended to make the flesh into the root of all evil, shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings—so difficult to perceive and formulate—of desire. … Discourse, therefore, had to trace the meeting line of the body and the soul, following all its meanderings. … The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech” (History of Sexuality, 19–21).

10. A maternal ghost overshadows Rowan’s consciousness, spurred to rebellion against Mother Ireland by a matriarchal judge that ’turned aside from me and from mine” (E 23). Still fighting the haunting specter, Richard protests that it was, finally, his mother who drove him away. “On account of her I lived years in exile and poverty too” (E 23). She rejected her grandson as “a child of sin and shame,” nameless and godless. On behalf of himself and his son, Richard raises an angry cry of rebellion against the parent who bore him, then thrust him from her heart and affections. Yet it is her aspect—hard, cold, detached, and pitiless—that he purportedly seeks to emulate, proclaiming: “It is her spirit I need” (E 25).

11. Joyce remarks that “Bertha’s state when abandoned spirituality by Richard … 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. … Through these experiences 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 mortality” (E 115). If Bertha, as Joyce suggests, is to be perceived as a Christ-figure, Richard becomes God the Father, an all seeing patriarch testing Bertha’s faith through abandonment and suffering. Bertha resembles the scapegoat about to be sacrificed for the sins of humankind—in this case, male sins of jealousy and emotional avarice. In a symbolic drama that borders on allegory, Joyce has given us two Christ-figures—Bertha the victim and Richard the narcissistic man/god. Joyce admits in his notes for Exiles that Richard initiates this existential trial largely out of self-interest: “He is in fact fighting for his own hand, for his own emotional dignity and liberation in which bertha, no less and no more than Beatrice or any other woman is co-involved. He does not use the language of adoration and his character must seem a little unloving. But it is a fact that for nearly two thousand years the women of Christendom have prayed to and kissed the naked image of one who had neither wife nor mistress nor sister” (E 120).

12. It is not surprising that readers have, for the most part, found Joyce’s “semi-autobiographical” protagonist arrogant and annoying, if not insufferable. Darcy O’Brien sees Rowan as “a man driven by an unpleasant alliance of principle, perversity, and lust,” not to mention voyeurism, masochism, and homosexual urges (Conscience, pp. 60–1). Hugh Kenner describes him as a “lonely diety” obsessed with a need for mastery over all the characters in the drama (“Joyce’s Exiles,” p. 395). And Clive Hart judges Richard “consistently pompous, overmeticulous, and masochistic,” especially in his interaction with Bertha, “the only person in the play who is at all sympathetic” (James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” pp. 26–7). Perhaps the strongest indictment comes from Edward Brandabur, who believes that Rowan suffers from a sado-masochistic pathology in which “the neurotic both directs and plays conflicting roles” of torturer and victim. Controlled, in actuality, by a “spiritual allegiance to his dead mother,” Richard proves a moral and atheistic failure in the enactment of his narcissistic project (A Scrupulous Meanness, pp. 138, 131). John MacNicholas, in an excellent survey of “The Stage History of Exiles,” points out that literary critics have often had difficulty liking the play because Richard is himself so unlikable. “Apparently, only Harold Pinter has staged Exiles with unqualified success,” perhaps because “Joyce was struggling toward a new kind of theater. Ambiguity and stylized silences are at the center of this theatrical technique” (pp. 11, 23). Bernard Benstock believes that in Joyce’s drama of “three cat and mouse acts” (E 123), Rowan “is the major cat, a role that he tries to monopolize throughout but may have to relinquish before the end” (“Exiles,” p. 368). Benstock disagrees with those critics who see “Rowan as the dominant force in Exiles, the introspective and philosophical hero modeled by his creator on himself and therefore sacrosanct” (p. 377). Richard Brown, however, defends Rowan as a man who “situation is not one of ignorance, compromise, comedy and victimization but one where high principles and a degree of heroism may be attained” (James Joyce and Sexuality, p. 18).

13. A number of critics have defined the homoerotic attachment between Richard and Robert as an implicit homosexual affiliation. According to Hélène Cixous, the “real couple” in the play “is formed by the two men, their friendship defined by analogy with that of Jesus and Judas.” Robert, she observes, “is the reflection of Richard in a distorting mirror,” and Richard “denounces his own Judas in order to assume the crown of thorns” (The Exile of James Joyce, pp. 539–41). Bertha is reduced to a figurative sexual mediator, “the nebulous matter in which the two men wander, … the vas naturale, … the means of sexual communication” (ibid., p. 538). It is interesting, however, that Bertha and Beatrice are brought together in a similar homoerotic configuration later in the play, when Bertha is moved spontaneously to befriend Beatrice and to acknowledge her as an alter ego. She admires the other woman’s “lovely long eyelashes” and sad, myopic eyes. The two are united in their shared rejection by Richard. When Bertha boldly accuses her husband of egotistically manipulating them both, she offers an impassioned defense of Beatrice, whom Richard “made unhappy as you have made me and as you made your dead mother unhappy and killed her” (E 103). Beatrice, she ingeniously declares, “is a fine and high character. I like her. She is everything I am not—in birth and education” (E 103).

14. The idea of molding a woman in his own artistic image evidently appealed to Joyce, who saw a precedent for his relationship with Nora in William Blake’s choice of a marriage partner. Joyce declared in his 1912 essay on William Blake: “Like many other men of great genius, Blake was not attracted to cultured and refined women. Either he preferred to drawing room graces … the simple woman, of hazy and sensual mentality, or, in his unlimited egoism, he wanted the soul of his beloved to be entirely a slow and painful creation of his own” (CW 217).

15. Nietzsche, Joyful Wisdom, p. 168. Most critics have identified Richard as a Joyce figure and Robert as his alter ego and mirror image—Stanislaus/Bodkin/Gogarty/Kettle/Preziosi. Joyce's 1909 letters to Nora, however, reveal that the playwright has projected into the lascivious Robert many of his own complex and ambivalent attitudes towards sexuality. On 2 December 1909, Joyce wrote to Nora that “inside this spiritual love I have for you there is also a wild beast-like craving for every inch of your body, for every secret and shameful part of it, for every odor and act of it.” (SL 181). The next day he was “still in a fever-fit of animal desire” and assured Nora of her Circean powers to “turn me into a beast” (SL 181–2). Addressing her as “my dirty little fuckbird,” he praised her iteration of that “one lovely word” (SL 185). This four-letter monosyllable known to all men evidently refers to love as it dares not speak its name in Exiles.

16. Quoted in Robert Adams, “Light on Joyce’s Exiles,” p. 86. “I carried her away into exile,” says Richard. “and now, after years, I carry her back again, remade in my own image” (ibid).

17. Joyce’s own notorious jealousy is documented in his letters of accusation to Nora at the time of the malicious hoax perpetrated in 1909 by Vincent Cosgrave. Fearing that Nora had “stepped out” with Cosgrave during their own 1904 courtship, Joyce wrote: “My eyes are full of tears, tears of sorrow and mortification. My heart is full of bitterness and despair. I can see nothing but your face as it was then raised to meet another’s. O, Nora, pity me for what I suffer now. I shall cry for days. My faith in that face I loved is broken. … I cannot call you any dear name because tonight I have learnt that the only being I believed in was not loyal to me” (SL 158).

18. In Deceit, Desire and the Novel, René Girard describes, in a differnt literary context, the kind of triangulated desire characteristic of Richardd's self-deceptive strategy: “The hero seems to offer the beloved wife freely to the mediator, as a believer would offer a sacrifice to his god. But the believer offers the object in order that the god might enjoy it, whereas the hero of internal meditation offers his sacrifice to the god in order that he might enjoy it, whereas the hero of internal mediation offers his sacrifice to the god in order that he might not enjoy it. He pushes the loved woman into the mediator's arms in order to arouse his desire and then triumph over the rival desire” (p. 50). In an unpublished fragment, Richard insists that he “remade” Bertha in his own image for the sake of Robert, who “risked nothing and lived prudently” (Robert Adams, “Light on Joyce's Exiles,” p. 87). Robert retorts: “It is a queer kind of present, Richard, like the giver. You see of course that I have no intention of accepting it. No, you have made her new and strange. She is yours. Keep her” (ibid.).

19. Joyce observes in his notes for Exile that since “the publication of the lost pages of Madame Bovary the centre of sympathy appears to have been esthetically shifted from the lover or fancyman to the husband or cuckold.... This change is utilized in Exiles although the union of Richard and Bertha is irregular to the extent that the spiritual revolt of Richard... can enter into combat with Robert’s decrepit prudence” (E 115–16). As Richard Brown points out, Rowan’s own definition of “love” is elevated and highly mystical” “Love, for all Joyce’s desire to replace romantic mystifications with biological certainties, is not solely represented as sexual passion. Indeed Robert is the apologist for nature’s law of passion and Richard (and by implication Joyce too) condemns such a law as mere possessiveness,... saying that love is ‘To wish her well’” (James Joyce and Sexuality, p. 34).

20. Richard Ellmann tells us that “some of the wording and all the ambiguity” of Robert Hand’s article can be traced back to Thomas Kettle’s review of Joyce’s Chamber Music in the Freeman’s Journal 1 June 1907. Although Kettle describes Joyce as “a lover of elfin paradoxes” and the “very embodiment of the literary spirit,” he also complains that he can find “no traces of the folklore, folk dialect, or even the national feeling” of Ireland in Joyce’s collection of verses, whose melodies he compares “with harps, with wood birds, with Paul Verlaine” (JJ 261). According to Robert Adams, original fragments of the Exiles manuscript suggests that “Bertha’s innocence and girlishness, associated with the naïveté of Irish political life and the naturalness of Irish rural existence, were to appear within the play as memories of childhood scenes. Bertha was evidently to be a character deeply rooted in Irish soil” (“Light on Joyce’s Exiles,” p. 98).

21. As Ruth Bauerle points out, Bertha exhibits in this scene “a fundamental integrity of character which brings fulfillment. She manifests not only honesty and truthfulness, but also a profound personal wholeness of being.... Bertha, exiled, lonely, and manipulated, shows the greatest faith of all, that of the mistress in the lover who has betrayed her and may do so again” (“Bertha’s Role in Exiles,” pp. 123–4). This scene represents one of the few examples in Joyce’s canon of one woman befriending another. Bernard Benstock observes that Bertha’s “moment of defiance is capped with an offer of friendship with her presumed rival, and allegiance that transcends their rivalry for Richard.... The gesture of feminine solidarity consolidates Bertha’s position as she returns her focus to the men who have viewed her as their domesticated mouse” (“Exiles,” p. 374).

22. See John Keats, “ode to a Nightingale,” l. 79; and “ode on a Grecian Urn,” ll. 17–20, 25–30, 49–50:

                   Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
    Though winning near the goal — yet do not grieve;
                   She cannot fade, though thou hast no thy bliss,
    Forever wilt thou live, and she be fair!

    More happy love! More happy, happy love!
                   Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
                        Forever panting, and forever young;
    All breathing human passion far above,
                   That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
                        A burning forehead, and parching tongue.

    “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all
    Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

    Sheldon Brivic, in Joyce Between Freud and Jung, makes a connection between Keats’s theory of “negative capability” and Richard Rowan’s obsessional desire for a creative, “wounding doubt.” Brivic cites Keat’s famous letter of 21 December 1817 defining “negative capability” as the state of mind in which “a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (p. 122).

23. Joyce offered this description of doubt in answer to a question which he posed, rhetorically, to Arthur Laubenstein: “Which would you say was the greater power in holding people together, complete faith or doubt?” (JJ 557). When Laubenstein guessed “faith,” Joyce corrected him “No, doubt is the thing (JJ 557). As Simon Evans explains, Exiles “is deliberate in its withholding, for its audience as well as for its characters, the conditions of faith, knowledge, certainty, and belief” (The Penetration of Exiles, p. 36). John MacNicholas concludes that the final effect of Exiles “is anti-cathartic, which is to say that it is complex, impossible to categorize comfortably, vexing, arresting in the impenetrability of its doubt” (“Joyce’s Exiles: The Argument for Doubt,” p. 39).

24. Still another explanation of the ambiguous ending might be found in Joyce’s rather clinical analysis of sexual possibilities in the play: “Bertha is reluctant to give the hospitality of her womb to Robert’s seed … and for her the supreme concession is what the fathers of the church call emissio seminis inter vas naturale. As for the accomplishment of the act otherwise externally, by friction, or in the mouth, the question needs to be scrutinized still more. Would she allow her lust to carry her so far as to receive his emission of seed in any other opening of the body where it could not be acted upon, when once emitted, by the forces of her secret flesh?” (E 124). Richard Brown points out that here “the investigation of Bertha’s feelings also involves a kind of inversion of Catholic hierarchy of sins since, for her, in the modern situation of an adulteress, a ‘lustful’, ‘perverse’, ‘onanistic’ or non-reproductive sexual act is less of a ‘concession’ than a more conventionally legitimate one.” In Exiles, Joyce “achieved his most striking dramatic effects precisely by leaving unstated and mysterious the nature of Robert’s and Bertha’s desire and acts” (James Joyce and Sexuality, p. 57).

25. Compare Joyce’s somewhat paranoid query to Nora in his letter dated 7 August 1909: “Is Georgie my son? The first night I slept with you in Zurich was October 11th and he was born July 27th. That is nine months and 16 days. I remember that there was very little blood that night. Where you fucked by anyone before you came to me?” (SL 158). “I have been a fool. … In Dublin here the rumor here is circulated that I have taken the leavings of others. Perhaps they laugh when they see me parading ‘my’ son in the streets” (SL 159). The “demonic voices,” according to Robert Adams, might well be another vestigial remnant of Robert le Diable (“Light on Joyce’s Exiles,” p. 101).

26. As Anika Lemaire explains, every desire “is a desire to have oneself recognized by the other … and a desire to impose oneself in some way upon the other” (Jacques Lacan, p. 174). “Like the Forbidden, the Sacrifice manifests the rupture through which the symbolic establishes itself as an order distinct from the natural or profane material given” (ibid., p. 62). “Subjects in language,” writes Jacqueline Rose, “persist in their belief that somewhere there is a point of certainty, of knowledge and of truth. When the subject addresses its demand outside itself to another, this other becomes the fantasied place of just such a knowledge or certainty. Lacan calls this the Other — the side of language to which the speaking subject necessarily refers. The Other appears to hold the ‘truth’ of the subject and the power to make good its loss. But this is the ultimate fantasy” (Sexuality, pp. 55–6). Lacan insists that the “gap in this enigma betrays what determines it, conveyed at its simplest in this formula: that for each partner in the relation, the subject and the Other, it is not enough to be the subjects of need, nor the objects of love, but they must stand as the cause of desire … and to disguise this gap by relying on the virtue of the ‘genital’ to resolve it through the maturation of tenderness (that is by a recourse to the Other solely as reality), however piously intended, is none the less a fraud” (Feminine Sexuality, p. 81).

27. In The Penetration of Exiles, Simon Evans offers a fascinating discussion of Richard’s wound by exploring the etymology of the verb “to exile,” which he translates as “to wound,” from the Latin ex-ilia, “out of — entrails”; or, alternatively, “to leap out,” from the Latin ex-salire. “Exiles,” he observes, “is contained within the space vacated by those two derivatives, between the resonances of a symbolic wound that may refer either to a fatality or to the triumph of a resurrection” (p. 41).

28. Compare Stephen Dedalus’s aesthetic theory in “Scylla and Charybdis” and my own analysis in Joyce’s Moraculous Sindbook, pp. 65–73.

29. Ruth Bauerle concludes in “Bertha’s Role in Exiles” that Bertha has emerged triumphant, “revealing to Hand courage and honor; to Beatrice, friendship; and to Rowan, compassion and the knowledge that he cannot, finally, know. Having once made Rowan a man, she now makes him human. It has been Bertha’s night” (p. 128). Celeste Loughman, in a note on “Bertha, Victress,” suggests that Bertha proves to be “feminist in the best sense. She knows what she is and what she wants” and “seeks energetically to recapture and deal relationship” (p. 72).

30. I use the term “imaginary” in the Lacanian sense, defined by Alan Sheridan as “the world, the register, the dimension of images, conscious of unconscious, perceived or imagined. In this respect, ‘imaginary’ is not simple the opposite of ‘real’” (Lacan Ecrits: A Selection, p. ix). Jacqueline Rose explains: “Lacan termed the order of language the symbolic, that of the ego and its identifications the imaginary (the stress, therefore, is quite deliberately on symbol and image, the idea of something which ‘stands in’). The real was then his term for the moment of impossibility onto which both are grafted, the point of that moment’s endless return” (Sexuality, p. 54).

31. Although Hugh Kenner was the first to point out Bertha’s prelapsarian yearnings (Dublin’s Joyce, p. 89), Simon Evans offers a corrective: “It is not simply the first Adam that she misses. The meaning of her ‘again’ is that she sues for the second greater man as well” (The Penetration of Exiles, p. 38). Simon Evans and John MacNicholas have both pointed out the similarity between the erotic discourse of Exiles and the and the “reverential concupiscence” of Joyce’s earlier manuscript, Giacomo Joyce. compare, for instance, the textual notes in Exiles with the following description: “Grey twilight moulds softly the slim and shapely haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fineboned skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder” (GJ 3). See John MacNicholas, A Textual Companion, p. 13; and Simon Evans, The Penetration of Exiles, p. 22. According to Robert Adams, prudence and justice give way, in the final benediction of Exiles, to “a darker, more passionate relation, that between artist and his creation.” Bertha, having made Richard a man, “must now cherish him as a child; having created his work of art, the artist must now suffer it to create him” (“Light on Joyce’s Exiles,” pp. 103–4).