THE “GIACOMO JOYCE” CONNECTION: RICHARD AND BEATRICE

Joyce composed his one play, Exiles, after finishing the main body of the Giacomo Joyce notebook, but well before appending that frame, 45, which, as we have seen, has the retroactive effect of leavening and to a certain extent salvaging the whole. The chronological placement of the drama between the layers or variants of the palimpsestic sketchbook accords with what I take to be one of its more intriguing designs: refocusing, extending, and externalizing the situation secretly recorded in Giacomo Joyce and doing so from a vantage point attained in large part through that interlude. Joyce harvests individual motifs and even lines of dialogue from Giacomo in a methodical enough fashion that a reader conversant with the prior document and its context in Joyce's life can discern in Exiles a public translation of the hitherto private experience.

The crucial figure in marking the transition out of Giacomo, Beatrice Justice, is also the first to appear in Exiles.