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A Reading of the Comic Elements in James Joyce's Exiles: the Bergsoni·An Clown in the Dionysian Vineyard

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A Reading of the Comic Elements in James Joyce's Exiles: the Bergsoni·An Clown in the Dionysian Vineyard A READING OF THE COMIC ELEMENTS IN JAMES JOYCE'S EXILES: THE BERGSONI·AN CLOWN IN THE DIONYSIAN VINEYARD By SANDRA MANOOGIAN PEARCE II Bachelor of Arts Colby College Waterville, Maine 1972 Master of Science University of Southern Maine Portland/Gorham, Maine 1975 Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate College of the Oklahoma State· University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY July, 1988 -rhes\s · l '1 ~ 8\::> ? "3 S"'i1'" ~O'f· ~ · .. ·.". A READING OF THE COMIC ELEMENTS IN JAr.ms JOYCE'S EXILES: THE BERGSONIAN CLOWN IN THE DIONYSIAN VINEYARD Thesis Approved: :t. d){)M_.Jt..-1 - ii 1322543 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Foremost, I wish to thank my dissertation chairman, Dr. Ed Walkiewicz. Despite the pressures of many pending student papers and a newborn son, Dr. Walkiewicz always found time for me. He returned my chapters with not only remarkable speed, but more importantly with precise and professional editing, contributing significantly to the content and readability of this study. His gentle tact and seemingly limitless expanse of knowledge made the nearly impossible an achievable task. A large portion of the success of this study is due to Dr. Walkiewicz's hand; the faults to my own. I also want to extend my sincere appreciation to the members of my examination committee for their helpful comments: Dr. Tom Warren for his continued sense of good humor and support, Dr. Mary Rohrberger for her willingness to join the committee at such a late date, and Dr. Ed Lawry for his insightful and kind comments as the outside member. Two other committee members encouraged me throughout the years but were unable to sit for the defense as scheduled: Dr. Paul Klemp accepted a position in another institution and Dr. Jeff Walker was in Norway as a Fulbright scholar. The enthusiastic and cheerful secretarial staff of the English iii Department have thoroughly spoiled me, and I will be lost without them next year. My efficient typist, Sandi Ireland, helped make my task a much simpler and pleasant one, and the librarians of the Special Collections at the University of Tulsa generously allowed me to peruse the James Joyce Archives. Thank you seems so inadequate for the friends who sustained me through these five years. Their willing and ready ear and hearty and irreverent laughter were essential to my completion of this program and to any hope of returning to mental stability. Thank you to Lisa Murray and to Dr. Mary Ruth Brown for helping me through those first few years and for their continued phone calls and uplifting visits; to my office mate Mary McLean for tirelessly listening to my James Joyce chatter; to David Major for teaching our Tuesday Bagel Shop seminars; and, of course, to Libby Young and Greg Garrett, dear comrades willing to journey to the ninth circle of the Inferno with me as they nearly did during comprehensive examinations. Before closing, I wish to extend my appreciation to the people who have always encouraged and supported me in every endeavor and without whose love I simply could not exist--my parents Angie and Ozzie Manoogian, my Aunt Liz, my children David and Elizabeth who were born with an above-average share of patience with a mother who always had school work to do before play, and my husband Dr. Thomas Pearce; though I cursed him for initially talking me into entering the Ph.D. iv program, I now bless him for knowing me better than I know myself. Tom's love and constant support, his enlightened understanding of the female psyche, and his professional savvy encouraged me at times when my own confidence failed me. In short, I thank the single most important influence in my life--my husband, Tom. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. "GIVE YOURSELF FREELY AND WHOLLY": AN INTRODUCTION TO EXILES AS DRESS REHEARSAL FOR ULYSSES AND FINNEGANS WAKE • • • • • • • • • • • 1 II. "THE PURE SENSE OF LIFE • • • THE COMIC RHYTHM": COMIC THEORY AND JOYCE •••• . 41 III. "LIKE A STONE": COMIC THEORY AND FEMALE APOTHEOSIS IN EXILES • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 73 IV. "NOT A SIXPENCE WORTH OF DAMAGE DONE": COMIC TECHNIQUE AND ROLES IN "CIRCE" • • • • 145 V. "ENTWINE OUR ARTS WITH LAUGHTER LOW!": COMIC TECHNIQUE AND ROLES IN "THE MIME OF MICK, NICK AND THE MAGGIES" • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • 200 VI. "THE WORLD ••• IN ITS SHIRT-TAILS": EXILES AS BRIDGE BETWEEN ISBEN AND PINTER • 252 WORKS CITED • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • . 266 vi CHAPTER I "GIVE YOURSELF FREELY AND WHOLLY": AN INTRODUCTION TO EXILES AS DRESS REHEARSAL FOR ULYSSES AND FINNEGANS WAKE In October 1902, at the self-assured age of twenty-one, James Joyce conversed with the thirty-seven-year old Yeats in a Dublin cafe. According to Richard Ellmann, Yeats remarked to friends about Joyce, "such a colossal self-conceit with such a Lilliputian literary genius I never saw combined in one person" (101). Despite this comment, Yeats must have been impressed with the young writer, for he invited Joyce to write a play for his new theater, The Abbey, and Joyce agreed to do so in five years (104). That five-year promise stretched to thirteen; the result was Joyce's only drama, Exiles, an enigmatic play of betrayal. Ironically enough when Joyce did present it to The Abbey in 1915, Yeats dismissed it as "too far from the folk drama; and just at present we do not even play the folk drama very well •• " (401). Dismissal has been the by-word for Exiles from its inception.1 Written from 1913-1915 between A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the first three chapters of Ulysses, Exiles is Joyce's only extant drama.2 Critics have maintained 1 2 that the play is eclipsed by these other two works. Those who do read the play appreciatively explain the play's complexity in a number of diverse, serious analyses, totally ignoring the play's comedy. Those who do mention the play's comic touches discuss the influence of Freud or Jung, totally ignoring the influence of Henri Bergson.3 The few exceptions include Bernard Benstock's 1969 article which investigates Joyce's toying with the Paradise Lost motif "in many small and often humorous ways" (753); R. A. Maher's 1972 work, labelling Exiles a "comedy of discontinuity;" John MacNicholas' 1973 article calling for a comic interpretation of Exiles; and Theo W. Dombrowski's 1978 article which admits that the play's positive ending marks it as a comedy. Exiles is, indeed, comic, to an extent, as even the most important of Joyce's critics asserts--Joyce himself. In the notes to Exiles, Joyce calls the play, "a comedy in three cat and mouse acts." Furthermore, an earlier draft of the play, the Cornell Fragments of 1913 now housed at SUNY Buffalo, presents a more overtly comic ending, a light-hearted, more demonstratively affectionate Richard. More than an experimental endeavor in a different genre or a dead end abandoned for other avenues, Exiles presents themes, characters, and literary motifs consonant with the rest of the Joycean canon. Exiles continues the theme of the artist's search for often conflicting interests--isolation, erotic love, and aesthetic fulfillment--launched in Chamber 3 Music, Giacomo Joyce, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; the themes of entrapment and exile, of national and domestic betrayal embarked upon in Dubliners; and the themes of substantiation (making the human bestial through exploitive sexuality), consubstantiation (making the human human through loving sexuality), and transaccidentation (making the human divine through a union of sexuality and art) carried through in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.4 Exiles takes its place in the development of characters throughout the canon. The searching, immature, egotistical artist of Chamber Music, Giacomo Joyce, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man becomes the mature but equally egotistical artist of Exiles, in turn foreshadowing the mature though humble Leopold Bloom of Ulysses who has "a touch of the artist in him" and the artist/ creator/devil Shem of Finnegans Wake who combines the divine and the diabolical, finding the divine in the lowest of human products--excrement. And in terms of imagery and literary motifs, Exiles aligns itself with the rest of the canon. Five motifs stand out: trees, stones, flowers/gardens, umbrellas/rain, and fire/light. In Exiles, these motifs operate comically, either as symbols of regeneration or as devices highlighting the mechanical or burlesque aspect of comedy. While this study refers occasionally to earlier works by Joyce, its main thrust is to look forward, demonstrating how the comic techniques and roles established in Exiles anticipate the same comic techniques and roles developed more extensively 4 in the later works. Thus, though complete in itself and taken very seriously by its author, Exiles becomes a dress rehearsal for the masterpieces of the Joycean canon--both of them examples of divine comedy. It is important to distinguish my use of divine comedy from Dante's. Dante views earthly life as a shadow of heavenly life; man constantly struggles to live a good life to achieve this goal, to reach the ideal, the divine. For Dante, if humanity accepts this truth, life is a divine comedy in that the ending is always happy--eternal salvation. For Joyce, the divine is already here on earth in each of us. We need to recognize the sacredness of all life; we need to embrace all of life, realizing that if we laugh and make love in a world-weary existence that will always fall short of any ideal for which we long, then life becomes a divine comedy. Adaline Glasheen explains Joyce's reaction against what he saw as the limitations of Dante's Catholicism: "Joyce did not forsake received religion and then enslave himself, as most rationalists do, to received history.
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