Abstract
This second chapter on Exiles argues that in Joyce’s terms “dedication,” understood structurally, is seen to bring about a necessary exposure to an other that remains, necessarily, unknowable and thus also threatening. Since unknowable, the other is free to betray that intimacy. Joyce’s examination of this act of exposure as best narrated, understood, and ultimately managed through the structures of betrayal models a wider concern with anxieties at the core of social existence. Exiles is seen to challenge a conception of jealousy as “sensational,” working consciously against the bodily preoccupations of Spinoza and of Shakespeare’s Othello to produce an account of the cuckold as potentially heroic.
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Notes
- 1.
This list is of course imperfect and open to some degree of interpretation. Entries that deal with both sets of issues have been counted twice.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Joyce’s pronounced and loaded concern with this technical (and, as a result of the church’s need to take a position on it, spiritual) definition in Ulysses begins in his notes for Exiles and in his construction of the act of betrayal in the play itself.
- 6.
Joyce quotes a shorter section of this piece in its original Latin—“pudenda et excrementis alterius jungere imaginem rei amatae”—which describes the lover’s association of the loved one with another’s “excreta”; I have provided the preceding comments to give Spinoza’s argument its basic context (Mays, 343).
- 7.
This letter, dated 8 August 1909, can be found in SL, 157–8 and is quoted in full in JJ, 279–80.
- 8.
This is my gloss on Aquinas’s argument, the bulk of which can be found in De Animabilus VIII.
- 9.
This, of course, refers to the anecdote regarding Joyce’s sister and the aborted draft of Stephen Hero. Whether rescuing part of this aborted novel was worth burnt hands remains up for debate.
- 10.
- 11.
Mahaffey, “Joyce’s Shorter Works,” 201.
- 12.
Robert is sentimental in the sense that Stephen suggests (misquoting George Meredith) in Ulysses: “The sentimentalist is he who would enjoy without incurring the immense debtorship for a thing done” (U, 9.550–1). Though he may not approve of my use of the word here, Jay Michael Dickson has much more to say on sentimentality in Joyce in: “Defining the Sentimentalist in Ulysses,” JJQ 44.1 (2006): 19–37.
- 13.
This echoes suggestively with “the word known to all men” in Ulysses, which, in the Gabler edition at least, is revealed to be “love.” The further association with the “big words that make us so unhappy” suggests the question contained in this earlier text: Is “love” worth all the pain and suffering it causes?
- 14.
As previously cited: “All these persons…are suffering during the action” (Mays, 343).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
I have coined the term “(significant) other” in order to provide some clear distinction between the many “others” we encounter. Otherness, being a property of our interaction with the world, does not alter from one other to another. But it is clearly necessary when discussing amatory betrayal to indicate the different stake one has in this other’s particular otherness. For Joyce (and this is made explicit in Exiles), the disciple is also a special kind of other. This is perhaps true also of the nation, language, and, particularly, the loving mother. All these things require a commitment founded on faith, the danger of which is represented, at least in my account, by the risk of betrayal. Faith is necessarily uncertain (certain things require no faith) and betrayal is Joyce’s master motif for exposing its nature.
- 19.
Not least in its indication that each man represents one of two distinct forms/manifestations of modernity: the mechanical and spiritual.
- 20.
Voelker, “The Beastly Incertitudes,” 504. (Voelker 1988)
- 21.
Tanner, Adultery, 40–1. (Tanner 1976)
- 22.
I discuss this in slightly greater detail in the final chapter of this book.
- 23.
That is to say, not conscious. No connection with Freud is implied.
- 24.
This is, as Tanner rightly points out, another of the defining characteristics of the literature of adultery. See, particularly: Tanner, Adultery, 41.
- 25.
Richard is talking about Bertha, but it may as well be any lover.
- 26.
Utell, James Joyce and the Revolt of Love, 28–9. (Utell 2010)
- 27.
The clearest account of Joyce’s awareness of the limitations of marriage is still probably Richard Brown’s James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) (Brown 1988), where, for example, he describes Joyce’s depiction of “the inadequacy of the matrimonial formulation of the sexual relationship” (35).
- 28.
I have other concerns with both Utell’s account and, in many similar respects, that of Christopher Devault in Joyce’s Love Stories (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) (Devault 2013). I will take up some specific examples later in this chapter and in my discussion of the Bloom’s marital life in the final chapter of this book.
- 29.
Brown, Joyce and Sexuality, 35. My italics.
- 30.
No word sits quite right here and, though “common” contains largely unhelpful class connotations, it avoids the heteronormative implications of “normal” and “regular.” The point being—and it is a point that is important to the dynamic of the play—that Bertha has an everyday, largely unremarkable understanding of love that is constantly challenged by Richard’s endless, anxious theorizing.
- 31.
I do not want to discuss this at any length here, as it is better suited to the discussion of “amor matris” I undertake in the next chapter. Suffice it to say that while the two mothers differ fundamentally—one “turns aside,” the other is turned aside from—the result is much the same: a sense of guilt that the love proffered could not be returned in kind.
- 32.
If I were to provide a psychoanalytical reading of Richard’s paranoia, I might suggest that his anxieties about love come from what he perceives to be his mother’s failure to love him. I would argue, perhaps, that Richard’s search for a love without conditions is an attempt to replace the unsatisfactory love provided by his mother. But while this is perfectly plausible as a reading of Exiles, it fails to account for this same concern in Joyce’s other fiction.
- 33.
Giuseppina Restivo, “From Exiles to Ulysses: The Influence of Three Italian Authors on Joyce—Giacosa, Praga, Oriani,” in Anglo-American Modernity and the Mediterranean: Milan, 29–30 September 2005, ed. Caroline Patey, Giovanni Cianci, and Francesco Cuojati (Milan: Cisalpino, 2006), 135. (Restivo 2006)
- 34.
I would say unattainable since, logically, it is. But Richard has experienced it, even if this was a form of happy delusion.
- 35.
Vicki Mahaffey provides an excellent gloss of the ways that each of the characters betray each of the others: Mahaffey, “Joyce’s Shorter Works,” 202–4. Mahaffey makes perceptive connections between this web of betrayal and Tristan & Isolde, which clearly provided a contributory model for Exiles. As critics like Mahaffey have ably demonstrated what I take to be a more or less self-evident aspect of the play—to the extent that anyone betrays anyone, everyone betrays everyone—I have not taken the time to go through this in this chapter.
- 36.
We might use this word “fool” in place of “common” or “naïve” as I have been using it, since Bertha appears to have understood that Richard is the only one to have set himself outside a relatively uniform perspective on love.
- 37.
Brown, Joyce and Sexuality, 18.
- 38.
For a brief account of Joyce’s understanding of this change in audience affection in the context of shifting social “possibilities,” see Richard Brown “Shifting Sexual Centres: Joyce and Flaubert,” in “Scribble” 2: Joyce et Flaubert, ed. Claude Jacquet and André Topia (Paris: Minard, 1990), 65–84 (Brown 1990). For an alternative account of this shift in the nineteenth-century English novel, see Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857–1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) (Leckie 1999). She suggests, summatively, that “[o]ne encounters fantasies of adulterous desire replaced by fantasies of spectacular surveillance as the novels in the English tradition, again and again, choose to approach adultery not from the perspective of a character involved in adultery, but rather from the perspective of the betrayed party” (9).
- 39.
Scarlett Baron, Strandentwining Cable: Joyce, Flaubert, and Intertextuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 124 (Baron 2012). Baron devotes a short chapter to the role of Flaubert in shaping Joyce’s descriptions of adultery: “Adultery and Sympathy in Ulysses and Exiles,” Strandentwining Cable, 107–32.
- 40.
- 41.
Voelker, “The Beastly Incertitudes.”
- 42.
MacNicholas similarly suggests that the play is “static” as a result of Joyce’s refusal to disclose certain information: “Exiles: An Argument for Doubt,” 38.
- 43.
For an account of the bourgeois operation of the literature of adultery and the type of resolution such texts generally provide, see Tanner, Adultery in the Novel.
- 44.
I take these two terms from Richard’s own discourse, but it is important to acknowledge that I use them here in the broadest sense. “Violence” does not mean merely physical violence, but emotional, epistemic, ontological, etc.; by “stealth” I mean that the action is taken with explicit provision that the betrayed is unaware of it. This is important, because in the example of “the faith of the master in the disciple who will betray him,” the betrayal remains a betrayal even though the master is seen to be fully cognizant of it in advance. The disciple’s bad faith, his stealth, is decisive.
- 45.
- 46.
James Joyce, “Ibsen’s New Drama,” OCPW, 45.
- 47.
As I have argued already, it scarcely matters in this sense whether we view Stephen as deluded in his sense of personal mission, since the Künstlerroman establishes a narrative teleology that justifies these delusions.
- 48.
Richard Ellmann discusses the role of Hume’s phenomenological scepticism to Stephen’s analyses in Ulysses. See: “Ulysses” on the Liffey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 90–101 (Ellmann 1972). Joyce, he says, “must…have welcomed [Hume’s] attitude towards his own scepticism” (96). If so, it is an attitude he did not gift to Richard.
- 49.
Voelker, “The Beastly Incertitudes,” 514.
- 50.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, 172–4. (Shakespeare 1994)
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Fraser, J.A. (2016). “Like thieves in the night”: Sexual Betrayal as Dispossession in Exiles . In: Joyce & Betrayal. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59588-1_5
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