SOURCE: "Joyce's Chamber Music: The Exile of the Heart," in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 4, Winter, 1959, pp. 349-56.

A common practice in much Joyce criticism is to dismiss Chamber Music as youthful trivia. Such an estimate is tempting because the thinness of the poems is indeed blatant when they are compared even with the fiction not far removed in conception, Dubliners and Stephen Hero. Confirmation of this now traditional disparagement is found in Joyce's own flippant rejection of the poems as "a capfull of light odes." While his critics are hardly to be blamed for neglect of obviously slight verse, the result has been a blind spot in our understanding of Joyce the man and his total accomplishment: if we ignore Chamber Music we lose additional evidence of the amazing unity of his work, and we lose a dimension in our view of at least one of his characteristic themes.

Critical analysis of the technical aspects of the Chamber Music sequence has been adequate. Since the early review by Arthur Symons, assessments of the competence of the verse and of the various influences which went into its making have been offered by Morton Dauwen Zabel, Hugh Kenner, and William York Tindall. But among these commentators only Kenner and Tindall have undertaken discussion of theme.

Tindall's preface to the Columbia University Press edition of these first poems offers valuable commentary on the textual problems and supplies much biographical data. In the discussion of theme, however, he insists upon the self-limiting terms of "Freudian" analysis or, alternatively, upon the Joyce-had-a-clever-but-nasty-mind reading which detects cloacal overtones throughout the sequence. Though there is no doubt that Tindall's methods allow him to discover a surprising subtlety and suggestiveness in these youthful verses, his interpretations are often overerudite and labored. The effect is to eclipse a theme which had its first expression in the poems and was to be repeated in all subsequent work. Chamber Music is Joyce's initial exploration of the conflict of love and creativity, a dilemma which never lost its power to absorb Joyce, both as artist and as man.

Hugh Kenner's analysis, a brief chapter in his Dublin's Joyce, recognizes that the anonymous maiden of Chamber Music reappears with modulated though basically similar symbolic status as "E. C." in Portrait of the Artist, as Beatrice in Exiles, and as Iseult in Finnegans Wake; but he does not trace her presence in "A Prayer" of Pomes Penyeach, in several of the stories in Dubliners, and in Ulysses. While Kenner is to be credited with a sketch of this pervasive feminine force, the complete job remains to be done. That undertaking, however, will be hampered until we see more clearly that Chamber Music must be the point of orientation.

The sequence of lyrics depends upon a quite conventional metaphor for its unity, which reminds us once again that young Joyce was familiar with the lyric and sonnet-sequence traditions of the English Renaissance. The threefold cycle in the evolution of the love-relationship is paralleled with the spring-summer-autumn seasonal cycle and (though with less consistency) the dawn-noon-evening progression of the day. Each of the seasons of love finds its appropriate symbolism in the corresponding season of nature and, when useful in a particular lyric, the period in the day of love is rendered in terms of the mood and atmosphere of the hour. The winter season, which is only implied, follows the closing of the thirtysix poem sequence and serves a double purpose: it marks the end of the love cycle, in which the lovers, recognizing the degeneration of their passion, accept the bleakness of their separate ways; and thus, in terms of the mature insights achieved near the end of the autumnal stage, the entire experience (at least for the boy) appears to have been a time of "deep slumber" and "death."

This final inversion of the seasonal symbolism points to the vital theme of the entire sequence—the initiation of the lovers into the limitations of the passional experience. Poems I-XIII develop the romantic-sentimental phase wherein each of the lovers is absorbed in a fearful duelling for possession of the other. Attracted by the siren-like song of the maiden, the youth abandons his book, the symbol of intellectual motives, and leaves the insular security of his room to join his temptress:

I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.
("V")

In the following lyric ("VI") the consciousness of the youth retreats from the "austerities" implicit in his initial solitude and the logic of bookish motives, and he begs the girl to admit him into her love. In subsequent poems this shirking of his lonely destiny is overcome. Thus in terms of the metaphor before us at the moment, their love should be regarded as the womb from which the creative spirit is to be born.

In poem "XII" "the bridal wind is blowing / For love is at his noon." In "XIV" (Stanislaus Joyce suggests echoes of "The Song of Solomon") the lover addresses his beloved as "my dove." And so, though he has earlier called for a surrender of her virginal sentiments ("X," "XI," "XII"), phase one closes in an aura of idealism and holiness, soon to be dispelled by the awakening and consequent dialectics of the emerging season. As Joyce explains in a letter to G. Molyneux Palmer, "The central song is "XIV" after which the movement is all downwards until "XXXVI" which is vitally the end of the book. "XXXV" and "XXXVI" are tail-pieces just as "I" and "II" are preludes."

In the second stage (poems XIV-XXII) the conflict between love and creativity emerges in explicit form. The lover, and to some extent the maiden, develops an awareness of the limitations of the love-relationship. Here begins the divorce of spirit which is to culminate in the ascendancy of the male. His evolution to a superior position is foreshadowed in the nature of the disillusionments experienced. While the maiden sentimentalizes the loss of her virgin charms and laments the loss of her moral status, the voice of the lover enters the duo to complain that the exclusiveness of their relationship has destroyed the male companionships in which he found resources necessary for his growth (XIX-XVIII). Poem "XV," therefore, "From dewy dreams, my soul, arise / From love's deep slumber and from death," marks the turning point in his values: henceforth he is to argue for the Daedalian destiny of his soul and while admitting the fascination of his former "sweet imprisonment" he insists that "Love is aweary now." For the first time, the male clearly recognizes his confinement and forsees the spiritual masochism which a continuance of the relationships would demand:

Thus the impulse to retreat from "austerities," first expressed in lyric "VI," is here re-experienced, this time with a defeating self-consciousness lacking in the earlier episode.

In the concluding poems of the sequence (XXIII-XXXVI) the lover comes to rate the values of the passional experience as naive, impermanent—subordinate to the potential creativity of the immanent separate ways:

Since he is now capable of transcending his passion, the coy charms of his beloved are seen as "witchery," evil powers which threaten to enchant him and so destroy his impulse for freedom:

He urges that they enjoy the last moments of a failing love ("XXV") before the "rivers rushing forth/From the grey deserts of the north" overwhelm them with the full sense of their separate destinies ("XXVI"). Yet, though the sound of the rivers strikes fear into the heart of his beloved, the youth identifies it with the sound of Alph, the sacred river; and this he inevitably associates with a triumph of the poetic imagination. His lonely way is now definitely linked with the exile of the artist.

As the lovers wander in the "brown land" of the autumnal phase, their former passion now reduced to a mere friendship, he attempts to console his brooding partner: "The leaves—they do not sigh at all / When the year takes them in the fall." The closing of the love cycle, like the closing of the year, is not an occasion for grief but a time of harvest, presaging a future rich in promise: "Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything— / The year, the year is gathering."

Having achieved this somber triumph, the lover is to discover his naivete. He is now confronted with the loss of the innocent rest he had known ("XXXIV") and is haunted by the loneliness of the journey which lies before him:

In the last poem of the sequence the lover suffers all of the terrors of the fledgling exile. The host of triumphant forces which have been released into his being, now that he has escaped his "sweet imprisonment," rushes upon him as he enters the world. Determined, but terribly alone, the army of fears (actually benevolent enemies of love) assaults his dreams, and he cries out the tortuous ambivalence of his state:

My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?("XXXIV")

The "love" of the last line seems to be not so much the girl he has abandoned but the state of loving, the "sweet imprisonment" in which he can no longer rest.

This reading of the poems does not reduce the sequence to a juvenile apologue of the artist's escape from society, homeland, and church (a miniature Portrait of the Artist), as Kenner suggests. Actually, the milieu in which the tensions are awakened and resolved is quite abstract. Nor does it render the cloacal tones which Tindall ingeniously derives. The result of endowing Chamber Music with the irony and subtlety of the mature Joyce is simply to obscure the obvious thematic tie between verses and the later works.

"A Prayer" in Pomes Penyeach, for example, shows this characteristic duality. On the one hand there is a strong and almost sentimental commitment to the confining demands of passion; on the other, the will to freedom and exile. In a masochistic ecstasy the aroused and enthralled lover submits to the vampire-like powers of his lady:

Draw from me still
My slow life! Bend deeper on me, threatening head,
Proud by my downfall, remembering, pitying
Him who is, him who was!

Yet we have also a repetition of that ambivalent outcry in the last lines of Chamber Music, for in the midst of his appeal the suppliant maintains the tension and division of motives typical of Joyce's artist-lovers:

O have mercy, beloved enemy of my will!

And finally, this blatant outcry:

Subduer, do not leave me! Only joy, only anguish,
Take me, save me, soothe me, O spare me!

The "beloved enemy" is a figure who reappears in various guises throughout Joyce's work. She is the young initiate of Chamber Music and the prototype for the Joyceian female. In Dubliners she is Little Chandler's wife, Annie, representing (as she usually does) the paralyzing force of convention which has penetrated the soul of her husband, a minor poet in potential. In A Boarding House she is the girl and the mother who conspire to cage in marriage the young life of the seducer. In Portrait of the Artist she is the Emma who comes to symbolize for Stephen the several means of convention which are the enemies of his destiny. But in the Portrait, Dedalus, like his precursor in Chamber Music, is so caught up in the naive romanticism of rebellion that he manages to escape. The price he is to pay for his aloofness is seen in Ulysses where, still fearful of involvement, he is dependent upon the amusements afforded by prostitutes—a dependence which functions as a symbol of his fears and the sterility of his creative instinct.

At the opposite pole is Bloom. His utter failure to even attempt the extrication of his potentials from the web of convention is epitomized in the Circe episode. There his submerged will is humiliated by the "enemy" as she appears in several symbolic costumes. Culminating in Finnegans Wake, this pervasive feminine force is the Iseult of Earwicker's dream, a link with Chamber Music which Kenner has noted.

If we appraise these many love-relationships for their symbolic import, it becomes clear that Joyce conceived of creativity as a power whose maintenance depends upon an ideal balance between the slavish submission of Bloom and Earwicker, on the one side, and the sterile objectivity of Dedalus on the other. Looking, then, to the psychologic overtones of these tortured alliances, it is obvious that they go deeper than the chamber-pot reading of Chamber Music or the other works will allow. The theme of the "beloved enemy of my will" is operative in everything that Joyce wrote. Yet it remains to be explored thoroughly, and perhaps an even more challenging and delicate mission awaits future biographers.