"Freedom" Is Just Another Word

WHEN I FIRST READ Exiles in preparation for my Ph.D. comprehensives, my response was much like many of those quoted in this critical edition. I thought it considerably less compelling and not nearly as sophisticated as Joyce's works of fiction. Not long after reading Joyce's only extant play, I saw it performed in 1988 or 1989 at the University of West Florida where I had recently been hired. The part of Richard Rowan was performed by a Professor of Mathematics who was a friend of my husband's. It occurred to me that a math professor was perfectly suited to play the role of a man as calculating as Rowan. I did not care for the character then, and, after reading the play several more times and carefully considering each critique included in the present volume, I am still no fan of this particular exiled Dubliner.

That said, I admit to having reached a greater appreciation of the play's subtleties in terms of its form, themes, and characterizations after reading the introductory commentary as well as the various critical analyses collected here. One peculiarity of the play not mentioned by any of the critics, however, strikes me as a possible contributing factor to the feeling of exile or banishment the play conveys. Joyce has chosen only rarely to have his characters use contractions in their speeches. "Cannot" is never "can't." "Does not" is seldom "doesn't." "Could not" is rarely "couldn't," and so on. The resulting formality of speech has a distancing effect that tends to put off or "exile" the audience from the characters and the characters from one another. Perhaps this verbal strategy is one of the ways Joyce chose to involve—by distancing—his audience in his "complex exploration of the condition of exile," as the volume editors put it. Most of the contributors consider, to one degree or another, the implications of Joyce's titular theme as well as the nature of the freedom Richard Rowan so frequently proposes to Bertha, his common law wife.

In "A Note on Joyce's Notes for the Play," editors Fargnoli and Gillespie quote Joyce's own explanation of the title: "Why the title Exiles? A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her payable upon their return." By transposing this line into a speech of Richard Rowan's, Joyce lends credence to the idea that Rowan is a surrogate for the self-exiled Joyce himself. While the theme of exile pervades Joyce's play, the editors also argue that "the failure of unrestrained freedom to sustain friendship and love [represents a] more primal form of expulsion" and provides the controlling metaphor of Joyce's drama.

The first critique, originally published in 1919, takes the form of "A Discussion of Joyce's Play." One of the discussants, Samuel A. Tannenbaum, a Hungarian psychotherapist, associates Richard Rowan's exile with his apparent homosexuality and masochistic tendencies. In fact, Tannenbaum designates all the play's chief characters "neurotic exiles." John Rodker, a London poet and essayist concludes that the implications of the play require numerous examinations to be appreciated, while Israel Solon, an American avant-garde writer and critic, finds Joyce to be unaware of the "matter of his play." The last of the four discussants, Jane Heap, an editor of the Little Review and a champion of modernist literature, observes that although there is much talk of freedom in the play, "there is at no time any freedom for anyone."

In his 1955 essay, Hugh Kenner concludes that Joyce's "austere, ungarnished play" is a "repudiation" of Ibsen wherein Joyce "brings an Ibsen hero to nullity" in the character of Rowan. B. J. Tysdahl, also comparing Joyce to Ibsen in his 1968 essay, surmises that there may be a more basic theme to the play, that of "the ultimate loneliness and doubt that must possess the soul, the inevitable exile of man." Considering...