James Joyce
EXILES
Cottesloe Theatre
Jealousy is central to James Joyce’s Exiles, now playing at the Cottesloe Theatre in a brilliantly calm, quietly acted, subtly paced production, directed by James Macdonald. Without raising its voice, it does thorough justice to a bold, patient play that, for the most part, is written in a level, clear – and shocking – whisper. The understated acting matches Joyce’s muted tone, though at the centre of his play is a potentially melodramatic situation. Richard Rowan, a Joycean–Nietzschean writer at once morally courageous and morally narcissistic, wishes to overstep convention, to propose moral liberty for himself, his wife and his old friend, Robert Hand. Perhaps his wife would like to have an affair with Hand? If so, Rowan is prepared to face the truth of this path of action – its pain, the jealousy. Except, of course, that he isn’t prepared – being human and therefore jealous. As a thought-experiment, it blows up in his face.
In De l’amour, Stendhal famously compared love to the Milky Way – “a shining mass made of millions of little stars, many of them nebulae”. He proposed an astronomy of the heart, stating that, out of these millions, only “four or five hundred of the small successive feelings” that go to make up love had been identified – and those the obvious ones. He was against the idea of love as something single and simplified. You could therefore argue that he anticipates the modernist enquiry into feelings. Jealousy is an equally interesting subject for the modernists and their readers. Though it has left its indelible mark on all of us – like the mark left by the dead centipede on the dining-room wall in Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie – we know very little about it. Everyone has experienced it, no one properly understands it. Jealousy is something we suffer.
In Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour and Volpone, we have Kitely and Corvino – pathologies seen from the outside, though even here Jonson engineers a shift from ridicule to prurient morbidity. We pay attention when Corvino threatens to slit Celia’s nostrils “like a raw rochet [a fish]”. And Jonson is acute about the eternal reciprocity of jealousy. (Mosca: “they that use themselves most licence / Are still most jealous”.) With Othello, the internals of jealousy are swiftly, accurately set down: the noble Moor embodies the central paradox of jealousy – the oxymoronic spasm caused by the fusion of love and hatred, by the mind in contradiction, the nauseous mix of thwarted grandeur and gut reaction.
But there is more, much more to be said about jealousy and its cerebral operations. Jealousy is the emotion of magnification, of scholarly paranoia, of obsessive sifting of “evidence” – the footnotes of the sick soul. When Thomas Rymer mocked the role of the handkerchief in Othello, its weightless triviality as evidence, he failed to see that this was exactly Shakespeare’s point – that “trifles light as air / Are to the jealous, confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ”.
There is more authentic disgust perhaps, more actualité, in Leontes’s retching cry that he has “drunk, and seen the spider”. Robbe-Grillet’s novel teaches us that jealousy is a yearning for certainty, conclusiveness, for mathematical proof – hence those Euclidean sentences describing the architecture of the house and courtyard and veranda – sentences that leave us none the wiser for all their pained precision. Jealousy involves the policing of detail, unblinking alertness, a forensic search for clues, a sense that the very configuration of the furniture can provide clues to the secret thoughts of their sometime occupants. Consider how the unhappy but unsuspecting Isabel Archer suddenly sees the significance – the implied intimacy – of Gilbert Osmond sitting in an armchair while Madame Merle is standing.
Jealousy is the illusion of clairvoyance. Robbe-Grillet’s novel shares with Pinter’s drama the intimation that there is a weasel under the cocktail cabinet. Jealousy is a vigil and a rapt boredom – hence the repetition of detail in La Jalousie. Think of the jealous Sylvia Plath and her poem, “The Courage of Shutting-Up”, which offers the figure of a gramophone needle “tattooing over and over the same blue grievances”. Here is the “after” – justified jealousy, not merely suspicion. Patrick Marber’s Closer showed us the terrible need to know the details that pain us: who can forget Julia Roberts’s reply in the Mike Nichols film to her husband’s question about her lover’s semen? “IT TASTES LIKE YOU BUT SWEETER.” As Nina Raine’s play Rabbit tells us, sexual jealousy is pornographic: it is about who put what into which hole.
Tom Stoppard’s great play, The Real Thing, intelligently, shrewdly, offers a more familiar, temperate jealousy – less “dramatic” than Marber’s upper case, but just as unhappy and plausibly reticent. The playwright hero, Henry, ransacks Annie’s belongings off-stage. His guilty wife movingly comments: “This isn’t you, Hen”. Nor is it, and for the rest of the play he controls himself – like Maggie Verver in The Golden Bowl, like almost every betrayed person we know. We learn to live with pain. We wean ourselves off wailing and whining – and, finally, wincing. We get over ourselves, and it.
Joyce’s contributions to this topos in Exiles are several. He importantly shows us that jealousy is sometimes about as manageable as acute diarrhoea. Richard Rowan thinks himself morally rational, but is unable to deny the pain he has theoretically accepted. His final words are: “I have a deep, deep wound of doubt in my soul . . . . My wound tires me”. (Tires is a verb of genius – persuasive, modest, depleted, plausible.) Joyce also demonstrates, brilliantly, that jealousy is inflected by the whole envelope of circumstances. Jealousy uses all our insecurities, feeds off them. Exiles is a deceptive play. It feels simple only because its exposition, its build-up, is so steady, so gradual. This is a dramatic sleight. In fact, it is thick with absorbing complication.
It begins low-key with Brigid, the Rowans’ maid, exchanging banal information – pitch-perfect Irish lower class vernacular, realized by Áine Ní Mhuirí with marvellous accuracy – about this and that with Beatrice Justice.
“The mistress and Master Archie is at the bath . . . . Practise [the piano], how are you! Is it Master Archie? He is mad after the milkman’s horse now.”
It is as precise as Gretta Conroy’s dialect at the end of “The Dead”. And like the entire cast, she never sounds like an actor. This production is all naturalism of gesture and delivery. The actors do hardly anything and yet they achieve transparency. When Beatrice (stunningly played by Marcella Plunkett) opens her spectacle case and slides on her spectacles, it is an event in this epic of physical containment.
Soon, however, the unmarried Beatrice Justice and Richard Rowan are having an allusive conversation freighted with unresolved implication. At first, we think there is an amorous understanding between them. There is certainly intimacy of a kind. Rowan refers to a previous conversation: “Have you thought over what I told you when you were here last?”. As in a Neil LaBute play, the obvious narrative hook catches our attention. He has told her, we guess, that he loves her. “Very much”, she replies. Rowan continues: “You must have known it before. Did you? (She does not answer) Do you blame me?”. In point of fact, though, this means something else, it transpires: he has told her that he has been writing about her. He asks if she would like to see what he has written, even though some of it is cruel. At this point, when the intimacy between them seems largely aesthetic, Rowan suddenly becomes explicit if interrogatory:
“Then it is my mind that attracts you? . . . . Perhaps you feel that some new thing is gathering in my brain; perhaps you feel that you should know it. Is that the reason [you come to the house]?”
You feel he is repressing the reason he would like to hear her give. A great deal is “understood” in this Ibsenite exchange. And this wary young woman replies with candour that she comes to the house, not to give Archie his piano lesson, but because “Otherwise I could not see you”. It is an unambiguous, unexpected declaration which takes us back to the beginning of their conversation. With this difference – she, not he, has spoken in effect of love.
Almost immediately, Rowan’s wife, Bertha, is seen succumbing to the advances of Beatrice Justice’s cousin and ex-fiancé, Robert Hand, who also happens to be Rowan’s oldest friend. Hand is temperamentally different from Rowan. He is a romantic by temperament and Joyce mildly ironizes him – partly through Bertha’s contained, prosaic responses. While gifting him endearments Joyce himself used to his wife Nora – “Your face is a flower too – but more beautiful. A wild flower blooming in a hedge” – Hand is also undermined by overstatement. As he kisses Bertha, Hand invokes a Wagnerian Liebestod:
“To end it all – death. To fall from a great high cliff, down, right down into the sea . . . Listening to music and in the arms of the woman I love – the sea, music and death.”
We have heard Rowan, on the other hand, be cool, measured and unsentimental about his dying father:
“I was a boy of fourteen. He called me to his bedside. He knew I wanted to go to the theatre to hear Carmen. He told my mother to give me a shilling. I kissed him and went. When I came home he was dead. Those were his last thoughts as far as I know.”
He is also unsentimentally unforgiving about his dead mother: “How can my words hurt her poor body that rots in the grave? Do you think I do not pity her cold blighted love for me?”.
So: a conventional romantic makes conventional adulterous advances to a wife, while the intellectually tougher, more original husband, Rowan, seems to have a parallel understanding with Beatrice Justice. The plot, it appears, has some of the fearful symmetry we associate with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew. (There, you recall, Maisie brings together the estranged partners of her estranged parents.) At this juncture, however, Joyce springs his surprise, a twist worthy of LaBute. The wife, Bertha, is debriefed by Rowan, reporting to her husband every move in the little minuet of lust.
Richard Rowan’s reaction is to feel betrayed. Despite his tacit encouragement, he wants to denounce his old friend. In Act Two, however, the friends discuss the situation and Rowan is far from the aggrieved, deceived husband he initially seemed. His motives are clamorous and contradictory. He has been unfaithful to Bertha on many occasions and confessed because he believes they should live in truth. (Hand, the conventional romantic, is more cynical and pragmatic. Just as later, he proposes to Bertha a revenge fuck for Beatrice Justice.) This is an argument for sexual equality. He feels his initial erotic certitude – or illusion of certitude – is no longer there. If Hand feels more certain, he deserves Bertha, and Rowan would be prepared to cede her to him, to relinquish her. He wishes to grant his wife liberty – on principle. He also, less high-mindedly, wants to be betrayed by his wife and best friend – craftily, secretly, for shameful erotic reasons. He wants to approach intimacy with his best friend via that friend’s physical relationship with his wife. Additionally, Bertha suspects that Rowan is encouraging her so that he can feel free to betray her with Beatrice Justice.
Joyce does not insist on a hierarchy of motivation. All these motives play their part. It is also suggested by Joyce, I think, that Rowan’s refusal to flinch, from pursuing the “principles” he has worked out, is part of his own self-romanticizing – as the father of a bastard, the controversial writer who once eloped with his “wife”, as a figure of moral fearlessness, as a flouter of convention, as a kind of Nietzschean Ubermensch, who will think the unthinkable and act on it. Rowan has his own Romanticism, which is more dangerous than that of Hand. And it leaves him, by the end of the play, denying love like Birkin in Women in Love: “It is not in the darkness of belief that I desire you. But in restless living wounding doubt. To hold you by no bonds, even of love, to be united with you in body and soul in utter nakedness”. It sounds like Lawrence. It sounds like a writer – theorizing under torture, finding a form of words with which to contain and elevate the demeaning pain. We, the audience, like Rowan, cannot be certain that Bertha has not succumbed. She and Hand appear to agree a story – but it may be a true one. Rowan’s chafing, unresolved ignorance is also ours. That is Joyce’s final coup in Exiles.
