James Joyce’s Romanic Exile

For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Ireland was a land of emigrants, disgorging one of the largest diasporas in the world.Millions of Irish nationals relocated in search of opportunity, which lay stillborn in their native land.Of this vast hope, James Joyce became one of the most famous in and for his transplantation.Ironically, he attained this species of notoriety despite, or rather because of, his refusal to designate himself an emigrant, preferring the title of self-exile.Whereas the figure of the emigrant, in its modern context, conjures forth a relatively anonymous, massified participation in large movements of human flight and debarkation, the figure of the exile, harkening back to earlier, less crowded, and less mobile social formations, evoked a more individualized, moralized, and thus Romantic plight, an effect of outlawry or rebellion rather than poverty and distress.The appeal to Joyce of the exilic over the migratory metaphor seems fairly obvious: it answers neatly to his "radical principal of aesthetic economy," the self-isolation of the author ( Joyce, Occasional 50).But if Joyce's preference in this regard is readily explained, the willingness of his reading public to give his self-description performative status-to allow its implicitly heroic claim to stand-relied consciously or unconsciously upon one of several narrative warrants.First, based in part on Joyce's semi-autobiographical fiction A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a consensus has developed that Joyce's absconding from Ireland was an act of ideological defiance rather than a matter of economic necessitousness.While his alter ego Stephen Dedalus registers an increasingly keen awareness of the squalor attending his inherited penury, he never gives dearth of funds or prospects as his rationale for quitting Ireland.Instead, he frames his leave-taking as a metaphorical flight of cultural resistance: "When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.