SOURCE: Tindall, William York. “Exiles.” In A Readers Guide to James Joyce, pp. 104–22. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1959.

[In the following essay, Tindall discusses the autobiographical nature of Joyce's works, with a focus on Exiles.]

However simple its surface, Exiles is one of the more difficult of Joyce's works. Questions of theme, motive, and general meaning plague audience or readers, whatever their chairs, in pit or closet. As Stephen Hero is the poorest, so Exiles is the most painful, of Joyce's works. Critics have found it of little or no value and so have most producers. But Joyce, lost in admiration of his accomplishment, found merits that escaped less generous critics. His concern and disappointment attended the general neglect.¹

Production denied him, Joyce insisted upon immediate publication, as if, for him, Exiles claimed a place in the sequence of his works between A Portrait and Ulysses. One may guess why; for here is another portrait of the exiled artist, this time as an all but middle-aged man. Thematic relations with A Portrait and Ulysses are close. Here too we find the conflict of pride with love, of inhumanity with humanity. Here, as in A Portrait, pride and inhumanity survive. Richard Rowan, the hero of Exiles, is kin not only to young Stephen, but to James Duffy of “A Painful Case” and to Gabriel of “The Dead”—but to a Gabriel who, lacking that last revelation, is unregenerate. Stephen is to be regenerated in Ulysses, but here, as in A Portrait, the proud, inhuman being who obsessed Joyce, remains a failure. Here is a kind of Stephen who, missing Bloom, remains loveless and alone.

The resemblance between young Stephen and middle-aged Richard is not surprising; for heroes related to the same image are related to each other. As if aware of Joyce's practice, Stephen says, we recall, that the artist uses his image. Joyce used it to create Stephen. In Exiles he used it again—or part of it—for Richard, who owes almost everything in character or circumstance to Joyce's idea of himself and to his experience. Like Joyce, Richard returns from exile in 1912. He still declines marriage with the intellectual and social inferior with whom he has eloped. Their son, like Joyce's own, calls father “babbo.” Such resemblances, exciting biographers, are too numerous and obvious to list. That Joyce made use of part of his image is certain. The point, however, is not resemblance but difference. Whatever he owes to Joyce, Richard is not Joyce, but another person, more or less detached from his creator and observed from a little distance. Sending his creature “scouting on the globe,” Joyce was impersonally personal again—or this, at least, seems his intention. That he failed to achieve the impersonality of his desire is one of the troubles with Exiles.² Not Joyce, maybe, Richard seems closer to Joyce and more involved with his feelings than Stephen ever was, even in Stephen Hero—closer than Shem. There is distance enough between Joyce and Richard to separate them, but it is only a little distance.

Not enough for irony. What best distinguishes Stephen from Richard is Joyce's attitude toward the one and the other. Though Stephen's kinsman and a sufferer from Stephen's complaint, Richard is taken seriously—as seriously as the Stephen of Stephen Hero or more so. Yet victim and hero are alike enough to make us wonder why Joyce bothered to change his image's name from Stephen to Richard. Was it an attempt to prove his image not himself, an attempt like that of Thomas Wolfe, who changed his image's name from Gant to Weber? Nothing seems likelier; but it may be that, with Ulysses in mind, Joyce reserved an image named Stephen for eventual success. Richard is older than the Stephen of Ulysses, and if the encounter with Bloom in 1904 is to fulfill its promise, Stephen could not return to Dublin a moral failure or a psychological monster in 1912. Another name was indicated for Joyce's persistent image; for Richard is the exploration of another possibility, another aspect of the same thing.

The choice of Dedalus as Stephen's surname is easy to explain; but why Rowan for Richard? The dictionary—always of use for following a writer so attentive to words—provides a possible answer while raising other questions. A rowan is an ash tree, a tree of life. Stephen carries an “ashplant” as walking stick, and Shem significantly waves one. Does the name Rowan imply life or creative power? If so, is this implication ironic or literal? The former would be better and more consistent with Joyce's habit, but the context suggests the latter. That a rowan tree, as the dictionary informs us, produces “pomes” may be relevant or not. In Pomes Penyeach, however, Joyce took his image as solemnly as here.

Exiles seems a drama, and Stephen commends dramatic art, though his commendation at that time is not necessarily Joyce's at this. Commending the dramatic, Stephen does not mean a play, however, but an attitude of author to work. Novel or lyric poem, according to that boy, can be as dramatic as drama, and must be, if good. Yet Joyce, dramatic enough to please Stephen in Chamber Music, Dubliners, and A Portrait, longed for dramatic drama. He had adored Ibsen for years, and, though devoted to Dante, had read Shakespeare with approval. The pity is that Joyce's drama is less “dramatic” in Stephen's sense, than Joyce's stories, verses, and novels. Sufficiently impersonal to distinguish Richard from Joyce, Exiles is not objective enough to be a play. Inclining toward what Stephen would call “lyric” art, Exiles fails to play on a stage, remote from the author, where a play must play. Actors on a stage guarantee nothing. Small producers have attempted Exiles in little theaters without great success.³ Maybe a great director and great players could transform it, sensitive to its inordinate demands, and maybe a great audience could follow it, but in the productions so far (so far as I gather) neither players nor audience could follow what seems (though is not really) there. The reader, to whom this play is now committed, is equally at a loss. Joyce liked riddles and created many; but what he fooled with here seems less riddle than confusion.

That enigma can be successful on the stage is proved by Hamlet and Waiting for Godot; but enigma, as there, must be embodied—massively. Here, although Richard is central, he lacks body to carry and offer what Joyce burdens him with. The load is too great, its shape too uncertain, and its surface too slippery for Richard; and those around him are no help at all. We puzzle over Hamlet and Beckett's bums, but Richard, though puzzling, is not solid enough or sufficiently “there” to detain most of us. He bothers those around him on the stage, for they are somehow involved; but the man in the audience, lacking such involvement, gives up or, if something is expected of him, goes home to write an essay at once dogmatic and hypothetical. What matters is that the conflicts centered in Richard and caused by him remain unsettled for those on stage or off it alike. Whether the play is tragic or comic as Joyce insisted, (Letters, 78) no satisfaction is forthcoming. All is lost, unhappily scattered—though that, of course, could be Joyce's point.

T. S. Eliot has blamed the author of Hamlet for inability to find an “objective correlative” or a suitable embodiment for what, if anything, he had in mind. The charge, as critics have observed, could be applied more fittingly to the author of Exiles. But to those who like enigma or confusion, from whatever inadequacy it spring or whatever intention, Joyce's play has much to offer. Nothing comes quite clear, and one may puzzle endlessly.

Yet neatness of structure and a workmanlike tidiness seem to promise clarity of meaning. Exits and entrances, timed as if by stage-business machine, commonly leave two of the four contenders before us. When a third intrudes, he or another immediately goes off to the other room, conveniently awaiting him in both sets. The symmetry is almost that of Cosi Fan Tutti. But neatness is all; and what seems promised never comes from those two contending in the parlor and those two in the other room or, if separate, from one there, one elsewhere, both away anyway.

Neatness offering enigma instead of clarity is not necessarily displeasing nor does it lack eminent example. Consider “Who Goes With Fergus?” by W. B. Yeats. But in this great lyric, the contention of neatness with mystery creates something worth puzzling over. Of Exiles we ask as we ask of “Fergus”: What is it all about? But we may add: What of it?

Not only neat, Exiles is familiar in kind. Familiarity also promises meaning without discomfort; for commonly what we are accustomed to yields more of the same thing. Like many of Shaw's plays, Joyce's play combines two traditional kinds: the well-made play, associated with Scribe or Sardou, and the play of domestic problems, associated with Ibsen.⁴ The first of these is empty but neatly contrived. Exits and entrances click along and nothing unprepared for happens. The second, familiar fifty years ago, discloses unpleasant people with difficulties in a room with a door to open or to slam. Joyce found both kinds congenial. Liking symmetry, he liked the first; and having discovered domestic problems in Dubliners, especially in “The Dead,” he came to like the second even more. The family with its tensions and its intruders, began to rival Dublin as his microcosm, offering all in little, all the world's concerns and all its history. Any family was pretty good for this, but a family in Dublin had everything.

Though familiar in kind, Joyce's well-made, domestic-problem play, disappoints our expectations. Apparently of Shaw's kind, Exiles is nothing of the kind. It resembles triangular Candida, to be sure—in reverse perhaps, with emphasis not here but there. Moreover, there is difference in shape since Joyce employs four characters instead of three. We may figure his extension of domestic geometry as a quadrangle complicated by internal triangles, as a three-sided quadrangle maybe or, better, a four-sided triangle. No geometrical extravagance seems too great for the inventor of “square wheels.” But back to Candida and Exiles. Similar problems of choice, freedom, and loyalty vex the figures. In Exiles, however, the rational simplicity of Shaw is nowhere around to clear the matter up. We are left with the uneasy feeling that Joyce's play, however familiar in appearance, occupies an area beyond Shaw's limits and his lights.⁵

Before attempting this dark, indefinite area, let us survey the action or whatever they call what happens on a stage. The action of Exiles, if we confine ourselves to what seems to happen there, is deceptively simple. Approximating the condition of the commonest reader, let us read, mark, and digest what we can.

Assimilated, the dialogue proves much has happened before anything happens here. Rejected by his mother, as she by him, Richard, a writer, has left Dublin for exile in Rome, accompanied by Bertha, with whom his principles forbid marriage. Their union has been blessed with Archie, a bastard. Dublin, impressed meanwhile by something so far beyond good and evil and so far away, has responded with rumor and gossip. But Richard, having written something, becomes famous enough to be endured. That much for what precedes the action.

The first act, in Richard's Dublin parlor, consists of a series of interviews. At one point three of the four principal figures are present, but elsewhere exits remove the crowding third. Plainly unhappy, Richard, like some inquisitor or prosecuting attorney, questions all motives but his own, which, however uncertain, he applauds. Failing to clear things up for us or for his three companions, he succeeds in making others as unhappy as he. These subtle and intricate interviews, making all heads swim, more or less establish the relations between Richard and the others and the relations among these. Beatrice, useful for “intellectual conversation” and aesthetic concern, serves Richard as subject, reader, and inspiration. If love at all, their love is sublimated, whatever Bertha suspects. Robert, the friend professing loyalty and commending prudence, is a smiling betrayer, bearing gifts. Like tempting Satan, he offers unworldly Richard the world or one of its parts, a chair in the faculty. Bertha, who is unable to read Richard's obscure celebrations of Beatrice, is simple, innocent, and honest. Doing her best, she tells Richard of Robert's plan for her seduction.

The quadrangular triangle, now fixed, is complicated by a line that Archie draws, in quest of horse and milkman. Initial letters bring hints of proportion to complicate Joyce's geometry. The two principal men bear names beginning with R, the ladies, with B. Is R to R as B to B, we ask, or is R to B as R to B? But such hints are deceptive, such questions vain; for there is nothing so plain as Euclid here.

The second act discloses Robert's love nest, once Richard's, too, and once and abode of Dublin's inadequate Muses. The seducer with his perfume pump and his Wagner awaits seductive Bertha. Richard is off with the vicechancellor, seeing about a job—or so prudent Robert, who has arranged this distraction, hopes. Not Bertha, however, but Richard comes through that door, with purpose far from clear. Is it to interrupt the scheduled seduction, to embarrass Robert, to dismay Beatrice, or to pain himself? Anyway, when Bertha enters to enjoy the flattery of notice, Richard proceeds to disguise passion by principle. Like Candida, Bertha is free to choose. Liberty must make no compromise with violence. But a natural woman prefers nature. Bertha is disappointed and annoyed when Richard departs, leaving choice to her and slamming Nora's door.

The third act, increasing Bertha's annoyance, confusion, and despair, increases Richard's incomprehensibility. It is morning and she is home again, probably intact; for Robert has spent the night in his office, praising Richard, and on the tiles, recovering. Archie has been out with his milkman, and Richard has been out with himself, as usual, on the strand. Attempting retaliation on his return, Bertha brings Beatrice up, and, failing there, tries curiosity and jealousy. But, disappointing her again, Richard prefers not to know what, if anything, has happened. Indeed, whatever her protestations, he will never know, he knows. This insufferable uncertainty means suffering for her and him alike, but he likes it; for suffering seems his pleasure. Calling her old lover back is vain. There is no lover there at all, and, lost between fraud and enigma, Bertha is alone.

Her quandary is exemplary. But although it ends this unpleasant play, claiming our attention for the moment, what detains us, relapsing into tranquility, is not Bertha but her relations with Richard or, better, himself alone. Like Beatrice and Robert, Bertha seems there to show Richard forth. However pathetic, she remains a stooge, a word as nasty as this play and therefore suitable. Like Stephen in A Portrait, Richard is surrounded by shadows, who provoke him as he perplexes them. They spend their time trying to understand him, without success. He, with illusion of success, spends his time trying to understand their effect on him. And we, trying too, are likely to misunderstand these misunderstandings. To understand anything we must consider Richard's motives and his conflicts. This is hard because, as from Baudelaire's temple, only confused intimations emerge. What they correspond to is the question.

Conflicts are the stuff of drama, and Richard has them in abundance, externally, between self and circumstance, internally, between feeling and idea or between parts of self. There are moral, social, and psychological conflicts, all centering in him. So furnished, the play about Richard should be better than it seems. A trouble may be overabundance of conflicts, each good in itself, but each conflicting with the others. None emerges to claim our notice as each cancels others out. Moreover, a conflict of conflicts, though intricate, subtle, and worthy of admiration, may be too complicated for audience or reader to follow. Puzzled rather than moved, we are lost in the intricate diffusion. Beatrice, Bertha, and Robert are no better off. Even Richard, trying to know himself, seems disconcerted by the mess.

Many of Joyce's earlier works culminate in self-realization—not that that guarantees literary merit. Not lack of self-realization, then, but of any realization may be a trouble here. If, however, Joyce meant to embody confusion suitably or the state of being at a loss or the impossibility of knowing, Exiles is a triumph, or was, at least, for him. Maybe he was his only audience. To suggest that, however, is to find Exiles a dramatic failure, something imperfectly separated from its creator. Triumph of a sort maybe, but not a play.

Returning to those conflicts, let us single out a few, for listing all appears too much or, maybe, too little. The great conflict of pride with love or of ego with humanity underlies Exiles as it underlies A Portrait and Ulysses. There it is, determining the scenes. But almost unaware of what he illustrates and once confesses, Richard does not fully know his failure pride; nor does he see that Bertha offers love and humanity to his self-centered inhumanity. He does not see that even Robert, offering lust, is offering a nearer approximation of love. Yet Richard is fully aware of some less basic conflicts: that between exile and nation; or that, since he is an “artist,” between art and journalism, represented by Robert; or that, since Robert is his competing opposite, between self and rival. Richard must be aware or all but aware of the conflict, evident to his companions and to us, between principle and feeling. Maintaining the moral principle of freedom and choice, he is victim of jealousy and of a possessiveness which, however natural, is at odds with principle—as his desire to follow Nietzsche beyond good and evil wars with common morality.⁶ Richard is also more or less aware of the contention between the Beatrice-adoring and the Bertha-wanting sides of his nature, or, to reduce these to abstraction, between need of talk and need.

These conflicts, both outer and inner, but between Richard and circumstance for the most part, are simpler, however, than those deeper within him: that between exhibited coldness, for example, and latent heat. Of still deeper conflicts he is partly aware sometimes but mostly unaware. Sometimes the three people around him, though almost unaware, hit as if by chance upon such conflicts. These are those that cause the difficulties.

Richard's deepest motives, though as nearly central as anything in this quarrel of motives, must be determined from what is hardly ever on the stage. Adequate signs, if there at all, are lost in a multitude of hints. Our position is not unlike that of Richard's three companions. We too are sure that something queer is going on within him or between him and them, but what that is remains uncertain.

The reason of this is certain enough, however. In a play the stage is where all is staged or adequately implied. In Exiles the stage itself, wooden and hollow-sounding, is where hints pass by, too fleetingly for capture. We begin to feel that whatever happens is happening somewhere else—inside Richard, we guess. Indeed, he seems to house the stage and the players on it. Since this private stage is out of sight and almost out of mind, their uncertainty about where they are or what is doing there is attended by anxiety. In the dark ourselves, we share their feelings—not without reason; for this interior stage, where they wander while we peer, is full of trapdoors to the cellar.

“We are approaching a difficult moment,” as Robert says, fearing “a new trap.” (552, 590) These traps and this private cellar, though not altogether unattractive to Freud, would have pleased Krafft-Ebing more. Analysts, however, crowd the actual boards, looking for cellar, and a crowd of confessors seems looking patiently for couches. “We all confess to one another here,” says Robert (596)—and here all probe remorselessly for the truth, down there in darkness. None more pitiless than these analysts, whether of others or of self, and none more eager than these confessors have adorned the boards, whether actual or internal, in our time. Disguised and offered as a domestic-problem play of the 1890's, Exiles is a study in the psycho-pathology of the same period, a Candida in appearance, but a Candida gone morbid.

Unqualified, these analysts of Richard scatter their diagnoses, agreeing only that, as Brigid puts it, he is “a curious bird,” always “off by himself,” maybe “a little mad,” and certainly hard to understand. (548, 603) “I am trying to understand,” says Robert. (591) “My God,” says desperate Bertha to her husband, “tell me what you wish me to do.” (589) Richard, on the other hand, complains that nobody understands him. (568) But scattering opinions, like pellets from a shotgun, sometimes find the mark. Richard is proud, self-centered, and loveless, according to some opinions and, to others, cruel. “Have you ever loved anyone?” asks Bertha, echoing Cranly's great question. “If you loved me or if you knew what love was you would not have left me. For your own sake you urged me to it.” (611, 616) “All,” she adds, “is to be for you.” (566)

As for Richard's cruelty to others and to himself, Robert and Bertha are often in agreement. He finds Richard's “experiments” on them more than a little cruel, (573, 590) and she, his inquisitions pitiless. “I fear a new torture,” says Robert, (590) anticipating other experiments, further inquisitions. Richard's cruelty to others seems obvious to these involved diagnosticians (whose findings we must check against his actions), but his cruelty to himself and his delight in suffering demand greater penetration—not too great, however for Robert and Bertha at their luckiest. Both find him a sufferer, inviting suffering. The motive, according to Robert, of Richard's lonely walk along the strand is “Suffering. Torturing yourself.” (623) The motive behind Richard's curious conduct at the love nest, according to both victims, is a longing to be betrayed by them. The idea of it “excited him,” (594) says Bertha, shrewdly. Even invited suffering is suffering, but he likes it.

Richard's “strange” conduct seems pretty well accounted for by these diagnoses, however amateur and partisan. But let us consider his own. “Struggling with himself” (according to a stage direction, 583), Richard offers an analysis of self that, although more enigmatic and more suggestive than their analyses of him, confirms them. Confessing “pride” and “guilt,” Richard adds: “In the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her.” There is, he finds, an “ignoble longing” deep within him and “a motive deeper still.” (583-84)

However vague this diagnosis, it suggests psychological depths that his conduct seems to illustrate. His enigmatic hint becomes a clue to what has bothered Bertha, Robert, and ourselves. Our growing suspicion that Richard is victim of the defect of love that Krafft-Ebing called sadism and masochism and that Richard's morbid condition is an underlying theme, conflicting with moral surface and domestic guise, causing difficulties by conflict with other areas and by itself alone, is corroborated by Joyce's recently published Notes to Exiles.⁷ Its “three cat and mouse acts,” says Joyce, are “a rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher Masoch. … Richard's Masochism needs no example.” Like masochistic Bloom, Richard wants “to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously and to possess … Bertha through the organ of his friend.” Although to us Richard's masochism seems complicated by sadism, its identical twin, for Joyce, not Richard but Robert is the sadist.

The intention is plain. What Joyce intended to do, however, is not necessarily the same as what he succeeded in doing. Intending one play, he may have written another. Our real evidence is the completed text, not these notes, which, however moving and instructive, are no more than work sheets for his guidance. So long as we take them for what they are, they may guide us, too, calling attention to much we might have missed and to much Joyce failed to do. Indeed, it is immediately apparent that the notes, not only clearer than the play, include more than it presents—and less.

As Joyce remains the true audience of Exiles, so he appears its true critic—though what he criticizes in these notes is not the thing before us but his idea of it. For him, the idea of Exiles includes his deepest obsessions and most personal concerns, displaying to his admiration that almost terrifying insight into self and those around him that others have found his mark. To us, judging by the text, Exiles seems his most painful case. However acute his notes, Joyce failed to embody his insights and obsessions in an object for an audience, something standing by itself without the aid of notes or comment, on a stage. Using the same pathological materials, Joyce gave them dramatic shape and independence in “An Encounter” and in the Circe episode of Ulysses.

Richard's morbid psychology, clearing many difficulties up, fails to clear all, nor does it bring the confusion of motives and conflicts into order. No single element can do that for this. Other difficulties remain, calling for notice, the curious title, for example. Richard, to be sure, is literally an exile, home for a holiday, but who are the other exiles? In his notes Joyce says that since Ireland cannot hold a Richard and a Robert, one or the other must go away. This explanation seems inadequate since the title is plural and either-or is not. Richard accuses Bertha of separating him from Beatrice. Is each of the four chief characters an exile in the sense of being separated from something? Richard's deeper exile seems by pride and perversion from love. So exiled, he becomes exile's agent, making others as like himself, and raising as much Cain as he is able. Robert is exiled from Beatrice, Bertha, and Richard by Richard. Beatrice is exiled by Richard from himself, Bertha, and Robert. Bertha, standing for love, is the principal victim. That is my guess; but, as Richard proves, uncertainty is our portion. “I can never know,” he says with equal pain and delight, “never in this world.”

Not much of a world, Exiles lacks the roundness and harmony of Joyce's great creations. It also lacks his customary attitudes toward his creation and its observers, embodied attitudes that I. A. Richards calls feeling and tone. There is little here of Joyce's irony and little of the gaiety that was to return in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. “I have always been a joyce crying in the wilderness,” he said, (Letters, 337) but that joyous voice is silent now and only wilderness remains. Almost nothing relieves the heavy scene. When Robert asks Richard to “be gay,” (558) he asks in vain; and vain his perfume pump, however absurd. Traces remain of irony, too, but too few. Selfish Richard accusing Beatrice of reluctance to give herself “freely and wholly” (536) is almost comic, and there is irony in Bertha's tragic call for her old “lover” back. Lover indeed.

The general heaviness and solemnity of Exiles may help us estimate Joyce's distance from his object and its nature. As we have seen, he generally used his image and his wife's for his matter. But insight, whether pitiless or pitiful, generally made this personal matter impersonal. Irony, humor, and gaiety of manner are the marks and agents of that distance from self he commonly achieved. The feeling and tone of Exiles, possibly implying distance unachieved, may indicate lyric and personal involvement with the matter, which, though handled remorselessly and with the usual insight, remains too close to home. Exiles is too personal for irony and humor. Untransmuted, the base matter never emerges from alembic and pipkin into light outdoors as philosopher's stone.

There is in Exiles, however, a certain stone that figures among objects of like importance: roses, water, and cows, for example, and wind and light. Such images, serving to connect Exiles technically with A Portrait, are similar in purpose and no less elaborate. But here they work less happily with one another in what they have for setting. What is good for novels need not be good for plays, and what is good for a good novel need not be good for a bad play. Noting such objects in his notes, Joyce calls them “symbols” or “attendant images.” The latter term seems happier; for these images, far from essential, accompany the action, adding meaning at times or condensing it. If meant to hold the play together, they fail, however. Moreover, some seem too perplexing for the immediate apprehension the stage demands. Others, more suitable, are obvious.

This stone is not one of these. Brought home by Bertha from the beach, where Richard walks, the stone lies round and beautiful in the parlor. Robert picks it up and fondles it, comparing its beauty and passivity to woman's. Robert swims “like a stone,” and Bertha asks: “Do you think I am a stone?” Associated with too many people, the stone corresponds to none. Richard, with whom it is associated least, seems stonier than the others; but Robert anticipates Shaun of Finnegans Wake and Shaun is a stone. Bertha and the stone have nothing in common but roundness and beauty. Obviously important, this stone lacks definite import. (542, 555, 556, 614)

Not so the roses that Robert hands Bertha. Stage business of the corniest sort centers in these blooms, as red and traditional as those of Robert Burns. Plainly, the roses of Robert Hand signify his love and the quality of its object, who, with the aid of mixed simile, is also as “beautiful and distant” as moon and music. Fingering petals, Bertha tears some off, and interrogated by Richard, crumples a handful. Richard throws a rose at her feet. She picks it up. Seeing Robert's hand in roses, Richard finds them “overblown” (like the roses of Stephen's poetic vision) and their abundance a “mess.” Are they too many or too common? Robert asks. They sadden him, says Richard. The roses of A Portrait and Ulysses are of a better sort and, with Dante's help, less commonplace. But here they help the action out as punctuation, the sentence. (540, 545, 551, 561, 563, 568, 569, 574)

Proceeding from A Portrait in their turn and anticipating Ulysses, cow and milkman are also in attendance. Like Stephen, Archie wants to horse around with milkman and see cows. That they are eleven in number is probably significant; for Archie is youth and eleven was to become Joyce's sign of renewal and hope in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Archie talks of “cow robbers” as Robert ponders assignation, and Richard calls Robert thief. We wonder if Bertha is a cow (as well as flower, moon, earth, and music) and Richard an imperfect milkman, to be replaced by another generation. (560, 561, 565, 575)

Images of light and wind confine themselves to love nest, save for the extinguished lamp in Richard's study. “I am in the dark here,” says Robert from bedroom. “I must light the lamp,” which, when lit, is pink. In the other room he turns the lamp up and down, putting it out entirely at last. But pink light shines from bedroom. “The wind is rising,” he announces, anticipating Finnegans Wake. Probably Shelley's wind of desire, Robert's wind makes lamp flicker. (592, 595, 597, 601, 605)

Shakespeare and experience associate the wind and the rain. Those gusts at the love nest are accompanied by rain. Bertha, like Gretta before her, has neither umbrella nor waterproof. Robert enters wet with rain, a summer rain, falling on earth. The second act ends with this symbolic shower, but Richard, dry in the downpour, contents himself with walking near water on the beach, like unregenerate Stephen or like Joyce himself; for what he liked almost more than anything, if not more, was walking beside the seaside.⁸

Most of such images must escape notice. But whatever they mean to an audience in the theater, their point for us, as careful readers, is this: giving the lie to some of Joyce's notes, they put Richard in his place, showing more than Joyce seemed aware of when he put them down. Writing is discovery; and in the process Joyce left his notes behind. The text before us—images and all—is all the proof we need.

Exiles resembles A Portrait not only in recurrent images that escape general notice but in parallels so ghostly that, invisible to any audience but Joyce himself, they seem meant for him alone. Brief references to the “fatted calf” and to “fierce indignation” (559, 613) seem hardly enough to establish Richard as the Prodigal Son and as Jonathan Swift; but Joyce's notes prove these parallels intended. We must agree that Swift, who became one of the principal parallels in Finnegans Wake, has much in common with Richard—in his degree. Both Dubliners, both writers, both psychologically odd, they both have two women to torture. Both torture them. But there are other parallels, about which notes are silent. Richard seems parallel to Jesus, Robert to Judas; Richard to Caesar, Robert to Brutus; and, like Stephen before him, Richard is like both Satan and God. To confuse the host, Richard seems Prospero, too.

Jesus, Judas, Caesar, and Brutus take their places in the theme of betrayal, one of the most evident in Exiles, and, if we may judge by its presence in A Portrait and Ulysses, one of Joyce's obsessions. Exiled artist is betrayed by friend. Robert professes himself Richard's “disciple” with a disciple's fidelity to his “master.” Seeing through his Judas, Richard-Jesus replies: “the disciple who will betray him.” (558) That Richard-Jesus, like Bloom-Jesus, longs to be betrayed, joins this theme to that of masochism. (583, 601) The Caesar-Brutus parallel, less firmly established, is based on a single reference to the battle of Philippi, where Brutus died. (559) If Stephen thinks he is Napoleon, however, why should Richard deny himself the eminence of Caesar? Brutus and Judas occupy a single pew in Dante's hell.

Devils are also in attendance here. Robert, tempting his master with worldly glory, seems swapping the role of Judas for that of Satan. But Richard, called a “devil” by Bertha, Robert, and Brigid (565, 572, 604), seems better as devil than Robert and better as a Satan than as a Jesus. Stephen, of course, is both Jesus and Lucifer. Failing to bring light, Richard is no Lucifer, save in pride. Richard seems one of the lesser devils, assigned to torturing and delighting in it. Yet, like Stephen, he thinks himself God. “I am what I am,” he announces, (616) putting it up to others to comprehend his august incomprehensibility.

No audience in the theater could follow such tenuous and conflicting parallels, still less, that of Prospero, which is even slighter and more dubious. Returning from the beach, Richard says, “The isle is full of voices.” (612) How to take this reference to The Tempest is uncertain, however. Prospero may be intended; for he, too, is a man of letters, betrayed and exiled. Stephen raises The Tempest in Ulysses as a kind of Ferdinand; but although “manmonster” of a kind, Richard is no Caliban, and it is he, referring to Prospero's work, who says: “The isle is full of noises.” Richard's “voices” are of those “who say they love me.” (623) In this chorus, however, his own voice, louder than the rest, carries the air.

Such are the problems that vex readers of Joyce. However sure we are that a reference to The Tempest means something and the distortion of Caliban's words something more, we remain uncertain of what they mean or how they work. To change uncertainties to certainties is the delight of critics, but as readers we are sure of one thing only: that Joyce used nothing casually or in vain. Avoiding certainty where none is justified, we follow him as we can.

Allusions are still more doubtful. Is Beatrice, who suggests Dante by name and remoteness, a product of his “refrigerating apparatus,” celebrated by Stephen? Do references by both Richard and Robert to Duns Scotus (581, 621) imply a shift from St. Thomas Aquinas, who presides over A Portrait, a change from the whatness of Thomas to the thisness of Duns? If so, why? Exiles seems happy with neither.

Yet, like the other works of Joyce, it rejoices in a number of characters and relationships that seem archetypal. Of these, the Fishwoman, calling “Fresh Dublin bay herrings,” (620-21) is the most difficult, exceeding the milkman in mystery. The fish, an ancient image associated with Jesus and serving as the Eucharist in Finnegans Wake, is probably an archetype—if by archetype we mean an image or pattern, formed by racial experience, that emerges from the writer's unconscious, intentionally or unintentionally, to give his writing significance and depth. (Jung is the authority.) But why is this Fishwoman crying fish here? The other women—Brigid, Richard's mother, Beatrice, and Bertha—seem to compose the image of Woman, certainly one of Jung's archetypes and central among Joyce's. Poor old women, Brigid and Richard's mother seem almost allegorical representatives of the Poor Old Woman or Ireland herself. Both are critical of Richard's independence, both find him odd, and the mother has refused forgiveness. Protestant Beatrice seems a sterile ideal, like Eileen, the Protestant girl in A Portrait or even Mercedes, but Bertha, plainly of the better sort, is all but the real thing.

Based, according to the notes, on Nora Joyce, Bertha is another Gretta, unable this time to disconcert another Gabriel. Bertha and Gretta are studies for Mrs. Bloom, whose image is the earth. The relationship between proud Richard and earthy Bertha, anticipating the relationship between Stephen and Mrs. Bloom, is that between intellect and reality. Joyce tried many women out before hitting on Mrs. Bloom. Bertha, not altogether the image of his desire, is among these tries.

The two men must be counted, too, among Joyce's obsessive archetypes and so must their relationship. Joyce saw domestic reality as the contention of equal and opposite rivals for earthy woman. Their conflict forms the pattern of almost all his work from Chamber Music to Finnegans Wake, where it achieves finality in the contention of Shem and Shaun. Shem is the introvert, incomplete until balanced by earthy woman and worldly man. Shaun is the successful extrovert. Present in some of the stories of Dubliners, these rivals find better bodies in A Portrait, where Stephen is a Shem and prudent Cranly a Shaun. In Ulysses Stephen contends with Mulligan on one level while Bloom contends with Boylan on another, and on still another, Stephen with Bloom; for all is relative. Not absolute, the types emerge in relationship to others.

The rivalry of Richard and Robert, the first a Shem, the second a Shaun in their present relationship, finds a place in this developing pattern. Like Cranly, Robert supports conformity. Like Stephen, Richard is the lonely rebel. Richard is an artist, Robert a journalist. That their conflict ends in a kind of draw is part of the pattern; for Joyce's contenders are not only opposite but equal. Uniting in the end, Shem and Shaun become the complete man. But there is neither union in Exiles nor victory, whatever the abundance of conflict. Made of the stuff of drama, Exiles somehow escapes it. As we have suspected, the trouble may be that Joyce, lacking the distance and the divine impartiality he achieved in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, embraced one of his contenders, loving him as himself.

Yet Exiles, like Bertha, is a good try. Trying to adapt old themes and methods to new form, to adapt a comic talent to heavy drama, Joyce was exploring. But exploration, however admirable, is not always triumphant. Exploring for Dr. Livingstone, the explorer may come upon Mr. Stanley. This parable, I am afraid, is not so plain as I meant it to be. Enough of parable, however. Enough of Exiles—or, as Robert says: “Enough. Enough.” (584)

Notes

1. Letters, 78, 86, 94, 97, 102, 105, 129, 142, 148, 150, 166, 289. Parenthetical numbers in the text indicate pages in The Portable James Joyce, Viking Press.

2. In his letter to Ibsen (Letters, 52) Joyce praises Ibsen's “lofty impersonal power,” his “higher and holier enlightenment.” Neither seems approximated by Exiles. See “Drama and Life,” Critical Writings.

3. Ezra Pound reported Exiles “impossible” for the English stage; and Shaw, rejecting it for The Stage Society, found it “obscure.” (Letters, 84, 133)

4. Francis Fergusson, whose reading of Exiles differs entirely from mine, compares Ibsen in detail. (Introduction to Exiles, New Directions, 1945) “The Portrait,” says Mr. Fergusson, “shows us the process of construction; Exiles gives us the completed masterpiece.”

5. Joyce dismissed Shaw as “didactic,” a “born preacher.” (Letters, 173) For domestic geometry see Finnegans Wake. (293-97)

6. For Nietzsche see pp. 584, 585, and “A Painful Case.” Joyce (Letters, 56) once signed himself “James Overman.”

7. New York, Viking Press, 1951. References in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake prove Joyce familiar with Krafft-Ebing.

8. Pp. 586, 591, 601-02. Letters, 244: “I could walk for ever along a strand.”