Exile, Cunning, Silence: Trajectory of Art of Exile from Joyce’s Ulysses to Beckett’s Trilogy

Toward the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen proclaims his famous defensive formula for future (Irish) art: “silence, exile, and cunning” (247). Stephen’s resolution to exile himself from a forcible religious, nationalistic, and aesthetic identification initiated in Portrait is faithfully materialized by Stephen’s several attempts of literary creation in Ulysses. Forced to roam Dublin city on Bloomsday, the new hero Bloom is living his every moment in exile. Ulysses exemplifies Joyce’s (via Stephen’s) art of exile in featuring the two main male characters as ideologically exiled beings and in spelling out through their cunning characterization a (living and writing) style of exile. It is established that a father-son-like relationship exists between Joyce and Beckett. In spite of Beckett’s protest against critics’ comparing him to Joyce, the route of exile initiated by Stephen on Joyce’s behalf is decisively taken up again and developed thoroughly in Beckett’s major oeuvres, The Trilogy. While the act of exile involves more the physical distancing from the socio-political Dublin city setting as maneuvered by Stephen and Bloom in Ulysses, Beckett’s Trilogy carries out a thoroughgoing exile or abstraction from a specific geopolitical setting, be it a city (i.e. Dublin) or a country (i.e. Ireland). My paper aims at examining Beckett’s diverse interaction with and influence under this Stephen-Joyce legacy in each of his Trilogy stories, primarily focusing on how Stephen’s formula has been experimented to be de-politicized and re-politicized in Beckett’s three works. From verbal cunning to ultimate silence, the road of new Irish art has wandered far but has arrived at a destination spelling out new possibilities with regard to the “Irishness” in its art.