Exiles by James Joyce

Abstract

Reviewed by: Exiles by James Joyce Valérie Bénéjam (bio) EXILES, by James Joyce, edited by Keri Walsh. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. lii + 128 pp. $49.90 cloth, $11.95 paper. From the first page of her introduction, it is clear that Keri Walsh does not believe spoilers can truly impair the reading experience. This is probably a healthy approach to Joyce's work in general, and to Exiles in particular. The opening of her presentation seems to unveil too much, and yet it raises a series of questions, which Walsh will deftly return to with more information as she guides us through biographical elements and through the many critical debates that have been raised by this hermeneutic quandary of a play. For of course, Walsh tells us all, tells us now, and cannot tell us anything really, since the core of the matter—the consummation of adultery between Bertha and Robert, which may, or may not, have taken place in the ellipsis between the second and the third act—has to remain a topic for "restless living wounding doubt" (97). As Joyce remarked in the Notes he wrote when composing the play, "[t]he 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."1 Indeed, the short exchange between the two potential lovers is rendered almost absurd due to their apparent incapacity to know themselves what they have done: robert [Catching her hands.] Bertha! What happened last night? What is the truth that I am to tell? [He gazes earnestly into her eyes.] Were you mine in that sacred night of love? Or have I dreamed it? bertha [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. (91) We get a good sample here of the serious, irony-free tone of the play, and of the reason why it has so many Joyceans cringe in embarrassment. That "Yes" is a long way from Molly's powerful combination of affirmation and abandonment. Two earlier plays written by Joyce have both been lost, but we know they were entitled A Brilliant Career and Dream Stuff,2 perhaps a sign that Joyce's own "brilliant career" as a dramatist was to remain "such stuff/As dreams are made on."3 In truth, the quality of Joyce's only extant play is debatable, and has been much debated. Exiles, however, is not just a pale imitation of Henrik Ibsen: it is much more modern, particularly in its playing with audience expectations of revelations, [End Page 349] and in its replacing the theme of the inevitable disclosure of truth with an ethics—a theology almost—of eternal doubt.4 However, for all the brilliant analyses of Exiles so many Joyceans have put forward—and Keri Walsh has done an equally brilliant synthesis and provided an excellent selected bibliography—the text itself remains as infuriating as it has always been. Its main character's sadistic confessor's tones are insufferable from beginning to end,5 and the submission of everyone else to his superior intellect smacks of Prospero's controlling obsessions without William Shakespeare's richness of plot or verbal inventiveness. Indeed, part of the problem with Exiles might be the reserved behavior and noble language of its main characters, and the lack of an equivalent to Caliban's rebellious "[y]ou taught me language, and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse. The red-plague rid you/For learning me your language!" (I.ii.363-64). Similarly, Richard's "[t]he isle is full of voices" (84) gives but a poor summary of Caliban's poetic flight: "the isle is full of noises,/Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not./Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments/Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices" (III.ii.135-38). In fact, the play's language might be the problem in the problem play that is Exiles. For all its autobiographical content and...