Joyce's notes 1

RICHARD-- an automystic
ROBERT-- an automobile.

would JAJ have called himself an automystic?

is Shaun an automobile?
005.32 "autokinotons"
235.27 "Fyat-Fyat shall be our number on the autokinaton"
448.29 "privy-sealed orders to get me an increase of automoboil and footwear for these poor discalced"
483.25 "did I altermobile him to a flare"
614.30 "autokinatonetically preprovided"

293.19 "of specious aristmystic unsaid"
477.21 "thurrible mystagogue"

Richard writes about Beatrice, fails to pursue job
Robert tries to seduce Bertha and get Richard a job


The soul like the body may have a virginity. For the woman to yield it or for the man to take it is the act of love. Love (understood as the desire of good for another) is in fact so unnatural a phenomenon that it can scarcely repeat itself, the soul being unable to become virgin again and not having energy enough to cast itself out again into the ocean of another's soul. It is the repressed consciousness of this inability and lack of spiritual energy which explains Bertha's mental paralysis

mysticism? implies women should give themselves to one only

many counterexamples!

why should Bertha repress such consciousness?

Richard/Joyce allows himself to dally widely, but only once to love?


Her age: 28. Robert likens her to the moon because of her dress. Her age is the completion of a lunar rhythm. Cf. Oriani on menstrual flow-- la malattia sacra che in un ritmo lunare prepara la donna per il sacrificio.

'the sacred disease that in a lunar rhythm prepares women for the sacrifice' [ebook] 'Una malattia sacra sembra in un ritmo lunare prepararla al sacrificio' = A sacred disease appears in a lunar rhythm prepare for sacrifice

poetic numerology, cf FW's 28+1 rainbow girls

Joyce's notes 2

Robert wishes Richard to use against him the weapons which social conventions and morals put in the hands of the husband. Richard refuses. Bertha wishes Richard to use these weapons also in her defence. Richard refuses also and for the same reason. His defence of her soul and body is an invisible and imponderable sword.



As a contribution to the study of jealousy Shakespeare's Othello is incomplete. It and Spinoza's analysis are made from the sensational standpoint-- Spinoza speaks of pudendis et excrementis alterius jungere imaginem rei amatae.

cf Brandes [ebook]
PROPOSITIO XXXV
'but also because the image of a lover is forced to join the other parts and droppings'


Bertha has considered the passion in itself-- apart from hatred or baffled lust, the scholastic definition of jealousy as a passio irascibilis comes nearer-- its object being a difficult good. In this play Richard's jealousy is carried one step nearer to its own heart. Separated from hatred and having its baffled lust converted into an erotic stimulus and moreover holding in its own the power the hindrance, the difficulty which has excited it, it must reveal itself as the very immolation of the pleasure of possession on the altar of love. He is jealous, wills and knows his own dishonour and the dishonour of her, to be united with every phase of whose being is love's end, as to achieve that union in the region of the difficult, the void and the impossible is its necessary tendency.

Aquinas distinguishes concupiscent and irascible passions [more?]



It will be difficult to recommend Beatrice to the interest of the audience, every man of which is Robert and would like to be Richard-- in any case Bertha's. The note of compassion can be struck when she takes the spectacles from her pocket in order to read. Critics may say what they like, all these persons-- even Bertha-- are suffering during the action.



Why the title Exiles? A nation exacts a penance from those who dared to leave her payable on their return. The elder brother in the fable of the Prodigal Son is Robert Hand. The father took the side of the prodigal. This is probably not the way of the world-- certainly not in Ireland: but Jesus' Kingdom was not of this world nor was or is his wisdom.



Bertha's state when abandoned spiritually by Richard must be expressed by the actress by a suggestion of hypnosis. Her state is like that of Jesus in the garden of olives. It is the soul of woman left naked and alone that it may come to an understanding of its own nature. She must appear also to be carried forward to the last point consistent with her immunity by the current of the action and must show even a point of resentment against the man who will not hold out a hand to save her. Through these experiences she will suffuse her own reborn temperament with the wonder of her soul at its own solitude and at her beauty, formed and dissolving itself eternally amid the clouds of morality.



The secondary and lower phase of Robert's position is the suspicion that Richard is a cunning adventurer using Bertha's body as a bait to gain Robert's friendship and support. The corresponding phase in Richard's attitude is the suspicion that Robert's admiration and friendship for him is simulated in order to lull and stupefy the vigilance of his mind. Both these suspicions are borne in upon the characters from purely external evidence and do not in either case spring into existence spontaneously from the soils of their natures.



It is an irony of the play that while Robert not Richard is the apostle of beauty, beauty in its visible and invisible being is present under Richard's roof.

Joyce's notes 3

Since the publication of the lost pages of Madame Bovary the centre of sympathy appears to have been esthetically shifted from the lover or fancyman to the husband or cuckold. This displacement is also rendered more stable by the gradual growth of a collective practical realism due to changed economic conditions in the mass of the people who are called to hear and feel a work of art relating to their lives. This change is utilized in Exiles although the union of Richard and Bertha is irregular to the extent that the spiritual revolt of Richard which would be strange and ill-welcomed otherwise can enter into combat with Robert's decrepit prudence with some chance of fighting before the public a drawn battle. Praga in La Crisi and Giacosa in Tristi Amori have understood and profited by this change but have not used it, as is done here, as a technical shield for the protection of a delicate, strange, and highly sensitive conscience.



Robert is convinced of the non-existence, of the unreality of the spiritual facts which exist and are real for Richard, the action of the piece should however convince Robert of the existence and reality of Richard's mystical defence of his wife. If this defence be a reality how can those facts on which it is based be then unreal?



It would be interesting to make some sketches of Bertha if she had united her life for nine years to Robert-- not necessarily in the way of drama but rather impressionist sketches. For instance, Mrs Robert Hand (because he intended to do it decently) ordering carpets in Grafton Street, at Leopardstown races, provided with a seat on the platform at the unveiling of a statue, putting out the lights in the drawing room after a social evening in her husband's house, kneeling outside a confessional in the jesuit church.

Joyce's notes 4

Richard has fallen from a higher world and is indignant when he discovers baseness in men and women. Robert has risen from a lower world and so far is he from indignation that it surprises him that men and women are not baser and more ignoble.



ROBERT, nods: Yes, you won. I saw your triumph.

RICHARD, rising suddenly: Excuse me, I forgot. Will you have some whisky?

ROBERT: All things come to those who wait.

RICHARD goes to the sideboard and fills out a glass of whisky from the decanter and brings it with a small carafe of water to the table.

RICHARD, lolling back on the couch: Will you add the water yourself?

ROBERT, does so: And you?

RICHARD, shaking his head: Nothing.

ROBERT, holding his glass: I think of our wild nights long ago, our nights of revelry and talk and carousing.

RICHARD: In our house.

ROBERT, raising his glass: Prosit!



When Richard left the church he met many men of the same type as Robert.



Problem: Archie, Richard's son, is brought up on Robert's principles 



Beatrice has had an interview with her mother before she enters in the first act.



Bertha alludes to Beatrice as her ladyship.



N.(B.)- 12 Nov. 1913
Garter: precious, Prezioso, Bodkin, music, palegreen, bracelet, cream sweets, lily of the valley, convent garden (Galway), sea.
Rat: Sickness, disgust, poverty, cheese, woman's ear, (child's ear?)
Dagger: heart, death, soldier, war, band, judgment, king.



N.(B.)- 13 Nov. 1913
Moon: Shelley's grave in Rome. He is rising from it: blond she weeps for him. He has fought in vain for an ideal and died killed by the world. Yet he rises. Graveyard at Rahoon by moonlight where Bodkin's grave is. He lies in the grave. She sees his tomb (family vault) and weeps. The name is homely. Shelley's is strange and wild. He is dark, unrisen, killed by love and life, young. The earth holds him.
Bodkin died. Kearns died. In the convent they called her the man-killer: (woman-killer was one of her names for me). I live in soul and body.
She is the earth, dark, formless, mother, made beautiful by the moonlit night, darkly conscious of her instincts. Shelley whom she has held in her womb or grave rises: the part of Richard which neither love nor life can do away with; the part for which she loves him: the part she must try to kill, never be able to kill and rejoice at her impotence. Her tears are of worship, Magdalen seeing the arisen Lord in the garden where he had been laid in the tomb. Rome is the strange world and strange life to which Richard brings her. Rahoon her people. She weeps over Rahoon too, over him whom her love has killed, the dark boy whom, as the earth, she embraces in death and disintegration. He is her buried life, her past. His attendant images are the trinkets and toys of girlhood (bracelet, cream sweets, palegreen lily of the valley, the convent garden). His symbols are music and the sea, liquid formless earth, in which are buried the drowned soul and body. There are tears of commiseration. She is Magdalen who weeps remembering the loves she could not return.

Joyce's notes 5

If Robert really prepares the way for Richard's advance and hopes for it while he tries at the same time secretly to combat this advance by destroying at a blow Richard's confidence in himself the position is like that of Wotan who in willing the birth and growth of Siegfried longs for his own destruction. Every step advanced by humanity through Richard is a step backwards by the type which Robert stands for.



Richard fears the reaction inevitable in Robert's temperament: and not for Bertha's sake only, that is, not to feel that he by standing aside has allowed her to go her way through a passing love to neglect but to feel that a woman chosen by him has been set aside for another not chosen by him.



Beatrice's mind is an abandoned cold temple in which hymns have risen heavenward in a distant past but where now a doddering priest offers alone and hopelessly prayers to the Most High.



Richard having first understood the nature of innocence when it has been lost by him fears to believe that Bertha, to understand the chastity of her nature, must first lose it in adultery.



Blister - amber - silver - oranges - sugarstick - hair - spongecake - ivy - roses - ribbon.



The blister reminds her of the burning of her hand as a girl. She sees her own amber hair and her mother's silver hair. The silver is the crown of age but also the stigma of care and grief which she and her lover have laid upon it. This avenue of thought is shunned completely; and the other aspect, amber turned to silver by the years, her mother a prophecy of what she may one day be is hardly glanced at. Oranges, apples, sugarstick-- these take the place of the shunned thoughts and are herself as she was, being her girlish joys. Hair: the mind turning again to this without adverting to its colour, adverting only to a distinctive sexual mark and to its growth and mystery rather than to its mystery. The softly growing symbol of her girlhood. Spongecake; a weak flash again of joys which now begin to seem more those of a child than those of a girl. Ivy and roses: she gathered ivy often when out in the evening with girls. Roses grew then a sudden scarlet note in the memory which may be a dim suggestion of the roses of the body. The ivy and the roses carry on and up, out of the idea of growth, through a creeping vegetable life into ardent perfumed flower life the symbol of mysteriously growing girlhood, her hair. Ribbon for her hair. Its fitting ornament for the eyes of others, and lastly for his eyes. Girlhood becomes virginity and puts on 'the snood that is the sign of maidenhood'. A proud and shy instinct turns her mind away from the loosening of her bound-up hair-- however sweet or longed for or inevitable-- and she embraces that which is hers alone and not hers and his also-- happy distant dancing days, distant, gone forever, dead, or killed?



ROBERT: You have made her all that she is. A strange and wonderful personality.

RICHARD, darkly: Or I have killed her.

ROBERT: Killed her?

RICHARD: The virginity of her soul.



Richard must not appear as a champion of woman's rights. His language at times must be near to that of Schopenhauer against women and he must show at times a deep contempt for the long-haired, short-legged sex. He is in fact fighting for his own hand, for his own emotional dignity and the liberation in which Bertha, no less and no more than Beatrice or any other woman is coinvolved. He does not use the language of adoration and his character must seem a little unloving. But it is a fact that for nearly two thousand years the women of Christendom have prayed to and kissed the naked image of one who had neither wife nor mistress nor sister and would scarcely have been associated with his mother had it not been that the Italian church discovered, with its infallible practical instinct, the rich possibilities of the figure of the Madonna.

Joyce's notes 6

Snow:
frost, moon, pictures, holly and ivy, currant-cake, lemonade, Emily Lyons, piano, window sill,
tears:
ship, sunshine, garden, sadness, pinafore, buttoned boots, bread and butter, a big fire.



In the first the flow of ideas is tardy. It is Christmas in Galway, a moonlit Christmas eve with snow. She is carrying picture almanacs to her grandmother's house to be ornamented with holly and ivy. The evenings are spent in the house of a friend where they give her lemonade. Lemonade and currant cake are also her grandmother's Christmas fare for her. She thumps the piano and sits with her dark-complexioned gipsy-looking girl friend Emily Lyons on the window sill.



In the second the ideas are more rapid. It is the quay of Galway harbour on a bright morning. The emigrant ship is going away and Emily, her dark friend, stands on the deck going out to America. They kiss and cry bitterly. But she believes that some day her friend will come back as she promises. She cries for the pain of separation and for the dangers of the sea that threaten the girl who is going away. The girl is older than she and has no lover. She too has no lover. Her sadness is brief. She is alone, friendless in her grandmother's garden and can see the garden, lonely now, in which the day before she played with her friend. Her grandmother consoles her, gives her a new clean pinafore to wear and buttoned boots, a present from her uncle, and nice bread and butter to eat and a big fire to sit down to.



Homesickness and regret for dead girlish days are again strongly marked. A persistent and delicate sensuality (visual: pictures, adorned with holly and ivy; gustatious: currant cake, bread and butter, lemonade; tactual: sunshine in the garden, a big fire, the kisses of her friend and grandmother) runs through both series of images. A persistent and delicate vanity also, even in her grief; her pinafore and buttoned boots. No thought of a more recent admiration, which is strong even to the point of being fetichism and has been well observed by her, crosses her mind now. The boots suggest their giver, her uncle, and she feels vaguely the forgotten cares and affection among [which] she grew up. She thinks of them kindly, not because they were kind to her but because they were kind to her girlself which is gone and because they are part of it, hidden away even from herself in her memory. The note of regret is ever present and finds utterance at last in the tears which fill her eyes as she sees her friend go. A departure. A friend, her own youth going away. A faint glimmer of lesbianism irradiates this mind. This girl too is dark, even like a gipsy, and she too, like the dark lover who sleeps in Rahoon, is going away from her, the man-killer and perhaps also the love-killer, over the dark sea which is distance, the extinction of interest and death. They have no male lovers and are moved vaguely one towards the other, the friend is older, stronger, can travel alone, braver, a prophecy of a later dark male. The passiveness of her character to all that is not vital to its existence, and yet a passiveness which is suffused with tenderness. The assassin is alone and quiet amid the mild sunlight and the mild cares and ministrations of her grandmother, happy that fire is warm, toasting her toes.



What then is this tenderness and regard to give which is death, or discontent, or distance or the extinction of interest? She has no remorse for she [knows] what she can give when she reads desire in dark eyes. Have they not need of it since they long and ask? To refuse it, her heart tells her, would be to kill more cruelly and pitilessly those whom the waves or a disease or the passing of the years will bear surely away from her life towards distance, early death and that extinction of personality which is death in life.



In the incertitude of the two female characters Bertha has the advantage of her beauty-- a fact behind which even an evil woman's character can safely hide much less a character not morally evil.

Joyce's notes 7

Act II.



Bertha wishes for the spiritual union of Richard and Robert and believes (?) that union will be affected only through her body, and perpetuated thereby.



Richard accepts Robert's homage for Bertha as by so doing he robs it from Bertha's countrywomen and revenges himself and his forbidden love upon him.



The play is three cat and mouse acts.



The bodily possession of Bertha by Robert, repeated often, would certainly bring into almost carnal contact the two men. Do they desire this? To be united, that is carnally through the person and body of Bertha as they cannot, without dissatisfaction and degradation-- be united carnally man to man as man to woman?



Exiles-- also because at the end either Robert or Richard must go into exile. Perhaps the new Ireland cannot contain both. Robert will go. But her thoughts will they follow him into exile as those of her sister-in-love Isolde follow Tristan?



All believe that Bertha is Robert's mistress. The belief rubs against his own knowledge of what has been, but he accepts the belief as a bitter food.



Of Richard's friends Robert is the only one who has entered Richard's mind through the gate of Bertha's affection.



The play, a rough and tumble between the Marquis de Sade and Freiherr v. Sacher Masoch. Had not Robert better give Bertha a little bite when they kiss? Richard's Masochisim needs no example.



In the last act (or second) Robert can also suggest that he knew from the first that Richard was aware of his conduct and that he himself was being watched and that he persisted because he had to and because he wished to see to what length Richard's silent forbearance would go.



Bertha is reluctant to give the hospitality of her womb to Robert's seed. For this reason she would like more of a child of his by another woman than a child of him by her. Is this true? For him the question of child or no child is immaterial. Is her reluctance to yield even when the possibility of a child is removed this same reluctance or a survival of it or a survival of the fears (purely physical) of a virgin? It is certain that her instinct can distinguish between concessions and for her the supreme concession is what the fathers of the church call emissio seminis inter vas naturale. As for the accomplishment of the act otherwise externally, by friction, or in the mouth, the question needs to be scrutinized still more. Would she allow her lust to carry her so far as to receive his emission of seed in any other opening of the body where it could not be acted upon, when once emitted, by the forces of her secret flesh.



Bertha is fatigued and repelled by the restless curious energy of Richard's mind and her fatigue is soothed by Robert's placid politeness.



Her mind is a grey seamist amid which common objects-- hillsides, the masts of ships, and barren islands-- loom with strange and yet recognizable outlines.



The sadism in Robert's character-- his wish to inflict cruelty as a necessary part of sensual pleasure-- is apparent only or chiefly in his dealings with women towards whom he is unceasingly attractive because unceasingly aggressive. Towards men, however, he is meek and humble of heat.

Joyce's notes 8

Europe is weary even of the Scandinavian women (Hedda Gabler, Rebecca Rosmer, Asta Allmers) whom the poetic genius of Ibsen created when the Slav heroines of Dostoievsky and Turgenev were growing stale. On what woman will the light of the poet's mind now shine? Perhaps at last on the Celt. Vain question. Curl the hair how you will and undo it again as you will.



Richard, unfitted for the adulterous intercourse with the wives of his friends because it would involve a great deal of pretence on his part rather than because he is convinced of any dishonourableness in it wishes, it seems, to feel the thrill of adultery vicariously and to possess a bound woman Bertha through the organ of his friend.



Bertha at the highest pitch of excitement in Act III enforces her speech with the word 'Heavens'.



The doubt which clouds the end of the play must be conveyed to the audience not only through Richard's questions to both but also from the dialogue between Robert and Bertha.



All Celtic philosophers seemed to have inclined towards incertitude or scepticism-- Hume, Berkeley, Balfour, Bergson.



The dialogue notes prepared are altogether too diffuse. They must be sifted in the sieve of the action. Possibly the best way to do this is to draft off the next act (II) letting the characters express themselves. It is not necessary to bind them to the expressions in the notes.



The greatest danger in the writing of this play is tenderness of speech or of mood. In Richard's case it does not persuade and in the case of the other two it is equivocal.



During the second act as Beatrice is not on the stage, her figure must appear before the audience through the thoughts or speech of the others. This is by no means easy.



The character of Archie in the third act carries on the lightheartedness of Richard, which has been apparent at intervals in the first and second acts. However, as Richard's spiritual affection for his son (also his filial feelings towards his own father) has been adequately represented in the former acts to balance this, the love of Bertha for her child must be brought out as strongly and as simply and as early as possible in the third act. It must, of course, be accentuated by the position of sadness in which she finds herself.



Perhaps it would be well to make a separate sketch of the doings of each of the four chief persons during the night, including those whose actions are not revealed to the public in the dialogue, namely Beatrice and Richard.



Robert is glad to have in Richard a personality to whom he can pay the tribute of complete admiration, that is to say, one to whom it is not necessary to give always a qualified and half-hearted praise. This he mistakes for reverence.



A striking instance of the changed point of view of literature towards this subject is Paul de Kock-- a descendant surely of Rabelais, Molière and the old Souche Gauloise. Yet compare George Dandin or Le Cocu Imaginaire of Molière with Le Cocu of the later writer. Salacity, humour, indecency, liveliness were certainly not wanting in the writer yet he produces a long, hesitating, painful story-- written also in the first person. Evidently that spring is broken somewhere.



The relations between Mrs O'Shea and Parnell are not of vital significance for Ireland-- first, because Parnell was tongue-tied and secondly because she was an Englishwoman. They very points in his character which could have been of interest have been passed over in silence. Her manner of writing is not Irish-- nay, her manner of loving is not Irish. The character of O'Shea is much more typical of Ireland. The two greatest Irishmen of modern times-- Swift and Parnell-- broke their lives over women. And it was the adulterous wife of the King of Leinster who brought the first Saxon to the Irish coast.