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

Perhaps not all contemporary explorations of authors and exile in the twentieth century begin with Edward Said, but a quick perusal of the “genre” will prove that many do, including Michael Patrick Gillespie’s excellent work on James Joyce. Gillespie, who has also edited Foundational Essays in James Joyce Studies (2011) for the same series (The Florida James Joyce), follows other critics exploring the curious case of exile in the modern world by quoting Said (here, from “The Mind of Winter: Reflections of Life in Exile,” Harper’s, September 1984, 49–55) early on: “homes are always provisional. Borders and barriers, which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory, can also become prisons, and are often defended beyond reason or necessity. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience” (6). Gillespie is interested, predominantly, in two facets of the exilic experience: Joyce primarily, but also the modern (“post-Enlightenment era”) condition more generally. He seeks to understand “the parameters of the material world out of which these authors wrote and…the hardships of the world they felt forced to leave in order to continue to write” (9). Naturally, and as Gillespie understands, there are endless variables in play for any particular exiled individual. For Joyce, living in Ireland (from which exile is “an all too common experience…for at least fifteen hundred years” [16]), exile was all but inevitable.

Gillespie agrees with prominent Joyce biographer Richard Ellman and others that Joyce’s exile “was of his own volition” (20); even so, “Joyce felt, with absolutely no hesitation, that irremediable social, cultural [including religious, of course], and creative conditions compelled him to leave.” In chapter 1 Gillespie explores these conditions, from Joyce’s brother Stanislaus’s influence to the cultural and artistic milieu in which Dublin and Ireland existed in the beginning of the twentieth century. He is wise, however, to keep this exploration short, as it has been gone over already, instead focusing his inquiry into five subsequent chapters of close reading and discussion: “Dubliners: The First Glimpse of Ireland from Abroad”; “Stephen Dedalus’s Lifelong Exile”; “Re-Viewing Richard: Nostalgia and Rancor in Exiles”; “Ulysses: Exiles on Main Street”; and “Finnegans Wake and the Exile’s Return.”

We all know that Dubliners is Joyce’s first book-length published work, and yet it is not a novel (and, thus, perhaps, not the focus of this journal). But because of Ulysses, this little book (its publication so complicated and controversial in its own right) is often overlooked as something of a warm-up in the supposed lesser genre of the short story. I don’t share this impulse, and, thankfully, neither does Gillespie. He starts this chapter with that famous line from “The Dead”—“The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward” (35)—as a way of having a little fun, for Joyce left Ireland in 1904 and “went progressively farther east.” Gillespie argues that “[a] good deal of material in [Joyce’s] letters and in recollections of friends shows that the anger common to the exilic experience” exudes from the pages of Dubliners, which is, essentially, Gillespie’s thesis (36). He reads in Dubliners the exiled experience, even though its characters are not in physical exile. While consensus is often thought to be a positive thing, too much of it becomes something else. So when Gillespie “readily acknowledges that [his] reading runs counter to any number of previous interpretations…[because] [c]ritics have shown little interest in seeing the slightest duality in the story’s narrative voice” (41), he has finished his frame for this fine book, a book examining Joyce through an oft-used lens (exile), yet one which deliberately seeks to reinvigorate debate and discussion surrounding Joyce.

Gillespie views almost all of Joyce’s characters through the lens of the prototypical exile, from Portrait through Ulysses and the all-but-unreadable Finnegans Wake. “It is not important,” Gillespie argues, “to discern whether...