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3. The Stage as Confessional: Exiles
- University of Michigan Press
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3 THE STAGEAS CONFESSIONAL: EXILES When Robert states, “We all confess to one another here” (E 117) in the second act of Exiles, he aptly describes the play whose plot and structure are motivated by confession to an experimental extent equaled by none of Joyce’s previous texts. Padraic Colum is thus correct in terming the structure of Exiles “a series of confessions.”1 The emergence of the play elucidates why the author selected the dramatic genre, in which the lack of a narrator as a go-between permits the closest possible approximation to confession. While Joyce himself claimed to have begun working on Exiles in the spring of 1914, John MacNicholas considers it very likely that most of the author’s notes along with a majority of the ‹rst act and fragments of dialogue were drafted as early as the autumn of 1913,2 and therefore at the same period of time as Joyce wrote the third chapter of A Portrait—and in particular the description of the retreat. Viewed against this background, the section of A Portrait in which Stephen is subjected to sacramental confession and Exiles’ focus on profane confession prove to be two stylistic variants, both of them criticism of the same practice of discourse. The Key to the Letters The beginning of Exiles discloses the intimate connection of language to eroticism and demonstrates, like a display of artillery, its powerful potential to obliterate life during the production of discourse. The fact that Richard is present from the very beginning of the play gives the impression that he could exist apart from his writing. But in fact all of his actions both feed on and return to writing. One small but nonetheless signi‹cant object encodes Richard’s demand to dominate the house in Merrion, its occupants , and their visitors with his writing. When Brigid, the housekeeper, wants to fetch the mail from the mailbox, Richard hands her his bunch of keys, which she must turn over to him again later. Richard controls the correspondence as well as the signs, and through this control function, the 70 text reveals Richard’s will in his realm to be the master of the letters—in the postal sense, and in the sense of writing. The most important letters in Exiles are those that forged a ‹gurative chain between Richard and Beatrice while he and Bertha were living in exile. The concrete form of the letters shows, however, that Bertha’s fear of their physically erotic purpose is unfounded. Richard’s distinction between the letters and his literary work—“I sent you from Rome the chapters of my book as I wrote them; and letters for nine long years” (E 21)—turns out to be a fallacious statement in view of his previous description : “Then our letters to each other about my book” (20). If Exiles relates the contents of these letters solely to Richard’s literary work, they become commentaries on his writing. To the extent to which the play denies concrete forms of his other texts, it determines their contents from this very parallelism with the letters: Richard’s control of the letters while he writes becomes his transcription of the letters into the book. This mirror cabinet, in‹nitely multiplying letters and book chapters, fails to root Richard’s successful writing in his imagination. Nor does it associate the letters with the bodies. Instead his writing revolves around writing itself. This point is underscored when Richard explains to Beatrice that he expresses himself “in those chapters and letters, and in my character and life as well” (E 22). When Richard not only draws a parallel between his writing and his life, but also ascribes to each of them the task of generating meanings, the two are united on a common ontological level. Thus he lives a life in exile that obeys the compulsion to put his life into speech, and he sends chapters to Beatrice that amount to nothing more than expressions of his confessed life. When Richard recounts having awakened Bertha at night in order to confess to her his desire for another woman (93),3 his confessional urge—which prohibits speaking nonnormatively of autobiographical writing—enters the plane of narrated action. From the ‹rst act until well into the second, the will to account for his own character in writing, to confess life, and to induce Beatrice to confess in letters largely constitutes Richard as the self-fashioned authority over the linguistic expression of...