(Programme note for Kondo Kojin's production of the play, Tokyo, 1989.)
When he wrote this play while completing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and beginning Ulysses Joyce was still young enough, and still close enough to Ibsen and Hauptmann, to imagine that his sexual fantasies and obsessions, honestly expressed and. earnestly discussed, could be of earth-shaking significance. The characters form an erotic quadrangle, each of them taking a sexual interest in all the others, in a way that recalls Goethe’s Elective Affinities and anticipates D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love which appeared soon after. (See Brian W. Shaffer, “Kindred by Choice: Joyce’s Exiles and Goethe’s Elective Affinities”, James Joyce Quarterly 26, 1989, pp. 199-212. For an unravelling of the complex relationships in the play, see Sheldon R. Brivic, “Structure and Meaning in Joyce’s Exiles”, James Joyce Quarterly 6, 1968, pp. 29-52. For the influence of Italian plays about complaisant cuckolds, see Dominic Manganiello, “The Italian Sources for Exiles: Giacosa, Praga, Oriani, and Joyce”, in Joseph Ronsley ed. Myth and Reality in Irish Literature, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 1977, pp. 227-37.)
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Joyce, like Lawrence, is attempting to work out a post-Nietzschean approach to sexual relations, toying with a higher freedom, which integrates the shameful and the sordid as it reaches beyond good and evil. Both authors pass beyond the stage of anarchic transgression (represented by Robert Hand) to reach a Blakean affirmation of wholeness (Richard Rowan’s vision), finally setting these postures at the service of monogamous love, in a recognition of the broken and non-ideal character of real life. In both works homosexual bonding and rivalry between the male characters is in the forefront, a relation mediated in Joyce’s case by the woman they share or dream of sharing (René Girard studies similar relationships in Dostoevsky in Deceit and Desire in the Modern Novel), while “a faint glimmer of lesbianism” is felt on the female side, as Joyce remarks in his notes to the play (see Exiles, intr. P. Colum, Jonathan Cape, 1974). Both works, like their Goethean prototype, are open-ended and deeply ambiguous creations, throwing out far more questions than they can pretend to answer.
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But it was not Joyce’s vocation to be a prophet of sexual wholeness like Lawrence. Whereas Women in Love communicates a rich and persuasive vision of the sexual life, the tentativeness of Exiles, its continual modulation between contrary emphases, produces a web so entangled that any clear vision is aborted. Joyce is indeed one of the most opaque writers on sex, for his characters are all always puzzled by it, beginning with the boy in “The Sisters” who is at once attracted and repelled by the dead priest’s aura of corruption. The sexual life never comes together for them into a unified vision. Eventually this puzzlement became one of the sources of a rich comic art, when Joyce had given up the attempt to solve it by sober analysis, lyrical prose poetry (the close of “The Dead”) or dramatic presentation. Joyce’s own sexuality, one surmises, was experienced in fragments, whether because of some psychological rift or repression, increased by the habits of analysis of a sin-conscious boyhood, or whether because his desire found its embodiment in isolated fetishes, obsessions, perversions, rather than converging powerfully in a single instinct. “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (“The Dead”). He could not bring together the lyrical and scatological dimensions of his eros (both suggested in the title of Chamber Music) – they are in constant tension in A Portrait.
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It is true that Nora alias Gretta alias Bertha alias Molly alias Anna Livia does bring the two poles together. She is the embodiment of unproblematic instinct. But this eternal-feminine always leaves her consort subtly unsatisfied. There is an irremediable gap between the strong serene woman and the nervous jealous obsessive masochistic humiliated male (Gabriel, Richard, Bloom, Earwicker). Never the twain shall meet.
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Such a fragmented sexuality, if one does insist on washing one’s dirty linen in public, can find its best expression in the medium of comedy – not in the brooding which weighs down A Portrait and Exiles. Leopold Bloom indulges all the fantasies of Richard Rowan, and many more, but he has never entertained Rowan’s heady Blakean or Nietzschean notions of liberation; his elaborate perversions are revealed to be simply dimensions of l’homme moyen sensuel. Bloom is a reader of the tales of Sacher Masoch but it never crosses his mind to treat them as a gospel. Rowan’s masochistic declarations, the emotional centre of gravity of the play, are unconsciously comic in their solemnity: “in the very core of my ignoble heart I longed to be betrayed by you and by her – in the dark, in the night”. But his project “to be forever a shameful creature and to build up my soul again out of the ruins of its shame” is the very one that Bloom will fulfil in the medium of comedy.
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Molly Bloom is fantasized as one of the Sacher-Masoch heroines in the “Circe” chapter of Ulysses, bringing lashings of Irish brogue to the role: “Let him look, the pishogue! Pimp! And scourge himself! I’ll write to a powerful prostitute or Bartholomona, the bearded woman, to raise weals out on him an inch thick and make him bring me back a signed and stamped receipt” (15.3778-81). What a contrast to the postures of Richard and Bertha in their final tableau, which recalls the archetypical figures of Amfortas and Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal. Molly and Bloom could never be subdued to such a pose of monumental paralysis.
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At the end of Exiles the characters are left where they began, in agonizing exile from one another. Their only development is that they have attained some acceptance of their problematic fate. The man can never possess the woman, can only adore her in an agony of doubt. The woman can never understand the man, can only call him back to a simple human bond which can fulfil only a part of his nature, the part where he is simply “Dick” and not the introspective and intellectual “Richard Rowan”: “You, Dick, O, my strange wild lover, come back to me again”. Neither can the cold love of Beatrice Justice – what a name! – satisfy him. In Ulysses, Bloom and Molly are related in an equally unsatisfactory way, and the relatively ethereal Martha and Gerty MacDowell provide equally unsatisfying lyric supplements to the earthy wife. But now this is all accepted in comic resignation.
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If Parsifal is a masochistic opera, endlessly exploring “the wound, which never can be closed”, there does come some relief at the end when Parsifal heals it with the lance of faith. Richard Rowan, on the contrary, grows from hollow professions of faith to a final embrace of doubt: “It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt”. Joyce, it is true, is a masterly explorer of masochism. In his notes he describes the play as “rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher Masoch” (p. 172). But he never convincingly portrays the sadism he attributes to Robert. His masochism fed an intense subjectivity, that of Gabriel Conroy or Stephen. Dedalus, but could not be objectified dramatically because of his failure to imagine convincingly a complementary sadistic other – there is no Iago for his Othello. In Ulysses, Bloom writhes in obsessive masochistic doubt, but he does not say “My wound tires me” (Richard’s last words). It truly does keep him restless and living; he has achieved the comic resolution which eluded Rowan.
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If Joyce had died in 1914 we would never suspect what a sense of humour he had. The joky moments in Exiles are a first tentative attempt to resolve the psychological and aesthetic incompleteness of his material by comic transmutation. Through humour Joyce became able to shake off the obsessions that preyed on him and to delight in the quirks of his nature in a way that opened up a vision of human nature in general, a vision not attained in the sultry hothouse of Exiles. In attempting to raise the world of Stephen Dedalus to the objectivity of the dramatic medium, Joyce discovered the narrowness and sterility of that world. Like the sexual themes, the struggle with the mother and the joy of paternity, still treated with heavy solemnity here, reemerge in more satisfying form in the broadly comic texture of Ulysses.
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Exiles is not a work of genius, yet it is the work of a genius, and throws precious light on the wellsprings of his art. To see it acted on the stage is to come close, almost embarrassingly so, to the things that made Joyce tick as a man and an artist.
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