Joyce, Wagner, and the Wandering Jew

Abstract

AMES JOYCE'S creative imagination remained in Ireland after he left, essentially for good, in 1904, and the problem of exile, of separation from home and family, was never absent from his writing. In Joyce's earlier works, particularly A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Exiles, exile is the result of artistic alienation and a necessary condition of artistic independence. We know that Stephen will defend his aesthetic and moral integrity with silence, exile, and cunning and that Richard Rowan will head for the Continent in his wake. In Scylla and Charybdis we learn that Shakespeare's major tragedies were written in absence from Stratford and in estrangement from his wife. Indeed, the case of Shakespeare illustrates the way in which the Joycean theme of exile begins to expand beyond its original connection with artistic alienation and to include the more general issue of separation -marital, social, political. Proteus, for example, devotes considerable attention not only to Stephen's recent artistic exile in Paris but also to the political exile of the contemporary wild goose Kevin Egan: They have forgotten Kevin Egan, not he them. Remembering thee, O Sion (Ulysses 44). Two figures in particular helped Joyce represent the cost of separation and the pain of estrangement: the wandering sailor-D. B. Murphy in Eumaeus, Odysseus throughout Ulysses, the Norwegian Captain in the Wake, to cite just a few examples--and the Wandering Jew, embodied in Joyce's most celebrated creation, Leopold Bloom. In searching for literary precedents for his exiles and outcasts, how-