SOURCE: Kenner, Hugh. “Exiles.” In Dublin's Joyce, pp. 69–94. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956.

In the following essay, Kenner discusses the pseudo-liberation of Exiles.

Gabriel Conroy yearned for the snows. Exiles—an austere ungarnished play—inspects that pseudo-liberation; its Richard Rowan is a Gabriel Conroy liberated by Ibsen, the Ibsen with whom Joyce had been flirting for a dozen years. Having abolished Dedalus—rebellious superbia—as a point d'appui for art, Joyce now abolished him as an ethical theory.

Exiles is not an apologia for Richard Rowan; we should be prepared to find him suspended in a void, and that is exactly what we do find. Hence the bewilderment of readers who, traversing the canon chronologically, come to him fresh from the soaring close of the Portrait instead of from the final pages of Dubliners. The play's roots are in Joyce's first cycle, though it was written after the start...