SOURCE: Brandabur, Edward. “Exiles: A Rough and Tumble Between de Sade and Sacher-Masoch.” In A Scrupulous Meanness: A Study of Joyce's Early Work, pp. 127–59. Urbana, Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1971.

In the following essay, Brandabur discusses the themes of Exiles.

“When you are a recognized classic people will read it because you wrote it and be duly interested and duly instructed, … but until then I'm hang'd if I see what's to be done with it.”

Ezra Pound to James Joyce, 6-12 September 1915, Pound/Joyce.

“Exiles is the final epiphany of the material organized epically in Dubliners.”

Hugh Kenner, “Joyce's Exiles.”

Critics see Joyce's play Exiles as his single failure, an opinion borne out by the infrequency of its performance. Aside from the apparent inability of Exiles to fulfill the conditions of its genre, the play remains an enigma which, writes Robert Adams, “has … regularly baffled and frustrated admirers...