James Joyce and the Exilic Imagination by Michael Patrick Gillespie (review)

The subject of James Joyce's exile, or his largely self-willed extraction from an Ireland he famously characterized as parochial and insular, has been a staple of Joyce criticism at least since Richard Ellmann's influential biography of the author in 1959. Traditional notions of Joyce's exile tend to reaffirm an essentially linear narrative, one that sees Joyce's art, and especially his aesthetic innovations, as dependent on an increasingly critical distance from the quotidian mentalité of his homeland. Against this formulation, Gillespie's new study argues that exile—both in general and as Joyce acutely experienced it—is instead characterized by a cyclical vacillation between "nostalgia and rancor" or a constant shuttling between "feelings of esteem and ridicule for the country that has been left behind" (8). Gillespie uses attentive close readings to show how these simultaneous feelings of longing and censure become "embedded" in Joyce's writing (7), suffusing his characterizations of Irish life from the first stories of Dubliners onward.

Although the book begins with a chapter that examines some of the broader issues surrounding exile, such as the important distinctions between forced and elective exile, the different experiences of economic emigration and diaspora, and the long traditions of exile and diaspora in Irish history and literature, Gillespie's main objective is to show that Joyce's personal sense of himself as an exile was central to his "creative process," and that it resulted in a stylistic "equilibrium where rancor and nostalgia exist hypostatically in a both/and interpretative environment" (24, 38). This well-argued point—that almost everywhere in Joyce's work we find these contrasting sentiments embedded in the prose in equal measure and that it is therefore reductive to impose any interpretive model that prioritizes one over the other—is a significant contribution to Joyce scholarship.

In Chapter 2, "Dubliners: The First Glimpse of Ireland from Abroad," Gillespie demonstrates that components of the stories usually attributed to Joyce's critique of Irish provincialism—such as Little Chandler's Celtic Twilight aspirations and his inability to contend with Ignatius Gallaher's cosmopolitanism (in "A Little Cloud"), or the sentimental poem on Charles Stewart Parnell that Joe Hynes recites in "Ivy Day in the Committee Room"—are actually comprised of equal parts rejection and defense. Gallaher's internationalism is as much hedonistic and empty as it is a desirable contrast to Chandler's confinement, while Hynes's verse, albeit an example of the paralysis of patriotic sentiment, is also quoted at such length that it evokes genuine feeling, not to mention that it suggests Joyce's own early poetic defense of Parnell (the lost poem "Et tu Healy"). "The poem goes on for [eleven] stanzas," observes Gillespie, "taking the reader beyond satire to actual consideration of the work" (54). Something similar could be said of the Michael William Balfe aria sung by Maria in "Clay" or the harpist's rendition of "Silent, O Moyle" in "Two Gallants" (D 106, 54). The chapter concludes by arguing that Gabriel Conroy's belated nostalgia for Irish belonging—his famous desire for a "journey westward" (D 223)—is not just there to "counterbalance … the criticism for Ireland" dished out in the prior stories; rather, it is the final and most prominent example of Joyce's exilic tendency, throughout the collection, to infuse scenes with "bifurcated feelings" about national attachment (56, 59).

In his analysis of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Gillespie elaborates on this exilic double consciousness, not only with regard to Stephen's thoughts and impressions but also with regard to the structure and tone of the narrative itself. His thorough close readings reveal how Joyce's "attitudes, fluctuating between sentimentality and bitterness, are subtly manifested even in accounts of the most quotidian moments of Stephen Dedalus's childhood" (69). Importantly, these "contrary impulses" (62) call for "an interpretive methodology that accommodates rather than resolves ambiguity," and they also challenge "the...