Joyce's Exiles

 The scatological themes of the previous post reminded me of something I wanted to say at some point about Joyce's early play, Exiles. 

I grant that the psychoanalytic reading is perhaps the lowest form of literary criticism. But some authors simply cry out for it. Joyce etched his psycho-biography into every page. Not only does Exiles feature the same episode involving Joyce's mother than haunted the mature artist, and his fictional alter ego Stephen Dedalus—the one in which he refused to kneel by his mother's deathbed, because of his rebellion against the family religion—it also dwells in places on Joyce's other great Freudian obsessions: defecation and micturition. 

It has been said that Joyce chose the title for his first collection of poetry as an elaborate pee joke. It was called Chamber Music, supposedly, because a female acquaintance had gone behind a curtain to urinate into a chamber pot while he was reading from it—making a tinkling sound. Hence "chamber music." Joyce and his friend Gogarty joked that this was the first piece of criticism Joyce's work had received. (And even if this was not the true origin of the collection's name, the fact that Joyce later came up with this story to explain it is no less revealing.)

Joyce's fetishization of women's bodily functions comes up in his first and only play as well. In Exiles, the protagonist's friend Robert at one point observes that the things he finds most charming in a woman are the ones she "has in common" with other women: "I mean how her body develops heat when it is pressed, the movement of her blood, how quickly she changes by digestion what she eats into—what shall be nameless" (emphasis added). To which Richard responds: "Many ideas strike a man who has lived nine years with a woman."

There's something profoundly loathsome about this passage. It's not so much the scatology that's objectionable (nothing human is alien to me). It's the tee-heeing over it. It's the childish stifled titter implied in Richard's words—the hand over the mouth before the sight of "what shall be nameless." It's the prurient fascination that also wants to disavow itself. Followed by the sour boastfulness of Richard's response. 

One gets the sense that Joyce never quite got over the strange pride he took in the fact that, as a husband, he was privileged to see or hear a woman void her bowels—or piss into a pot. It's a toddler's view of marriage—one thoroughly revolting in a grown man. 

The play is charged with this same sort of misogynistic ambivalence—this obsession with women's purity and fascination with the thought of defiling it. Richard's fundamental plight in the play is that he feels his wife's goodness—the purity and single-mindedness of her devotion—as a kind of standing challenge to himself. He longs for her to degrade herself through having an affair, so that she is finally at his moral level, and they can love each other as equals. 

So his wife does so—at his urging. Then, of course, he feels wounded. He resents her for it. An impossible situation, from which his wife Bertha cannot escape. 

It's like the scene in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, in which Angel Clare confesses his own youthful discretions to his new wife Tess—in a manner that seems to invite mutual disclosure and forbearance. When she reciprocates, however, he suddenly disowns her. It's not—he claims—that he judges her for it, our that he cannot forgive her. It's simply that she has become irretrievably altered—contaminated—in his eyes. "You were one person; now you are another," he says. 

Except that where Hardy cried out in disgust and condemnation at the injustice of this situation—the unmitigated cruelty of the Victorian sexual double standard—Joyce's moral attitude to it appears at times to see it as a kind of tragic inevitability. Bertha is doomed to be resented for both her purity and her degradation—and there is to be no redemption for her, even if she should deliberately move from one to the other. The result in both cases is the same. She is damned in her husband's eyes either way. There is no way out of the double-bind of the virgin-whore archetype. 

What one gets in this early play is all Joyce, then—but in its least sublimated form. It is his psyche in the raw—all-too unprocessed, unquestioned, and unexamined. There is a further digestion of this psychic content that needed to occur, that is, before it could become the stuff of art—since we're on the topic of scatology.