The souls in Dante's afterlife can see the future. In Paradiso
Cacciaguida tells Dante that he will be banished from the
great city-state of his birth and forced into an itinerant
existence, wandering about northern Italy in search of
shelter, protection, and patronage. Florentines put little
salt in their breads, so even his daily bread will discomfit
him:
You will leave behind every delightful thing
You most love; and this is the arrow
That the bow of exile first shoots.
You will discover how full of salt
Is the bread of another, and how hard the way
Going down and up another’s stairs.
(17.55-60, my translation)
Dante's response to the uncomprehending hostility directed
against him, Cacciaguida says, must be to make "a party of
yourself alone"––i.e., to leave behind the wars of Guelphs and
Ghibellines and become a party of one.
Stephen, who has been going up and (just now) down the stairs
of Mulligan’s tower, contemplates handing over the key and
becoming homeless: “Give him the key too. All.” At about this
time in Joyce's own life (1900-1904), he was beginning to
think of himself as a writer-in-exile. Ellmann notes that
Henrik Ibsen's warm acknowledgement of the essay "Ibsen's New
Drama" that Joyce published in the Fortnightly Review
in 1900 encouraged the young man to think of himself as
standing "aloof" from his peers (74). "Before Ibsen's letter
Joyce was an Irishman," Ellmann observes; "after it he was a
European" (75). He read all the late nineteenth century
European literature he could get his hands on, and much else
besides; "He continued his study of Dante, so that it was easy
for Oliver Gogarty to dub him a little later the Dante of
Dublin" (75).
In December 1902 Joyce departed from Kingstown pier for his
first exile on the Continent. In October 1904 he left again,
with Nora, this time for good. Of the first departure Ellmann
remarks, "He was not yet using the word 'exile,' but there are
hints of it in his letter to Lady Gregory. Joyce needed exile
as a reproach to others and a justification of himself. His
feeling of ostracism from Dublin lacked, as he was well aware,
the moral decisiveness of his hero Dante's exile from
Florence, in that he kept the keys to the gate. He was neither
bidden to leave nor forbidden to return, and after this first
departure he was in fact to go back five times. But, like
other revolutionaries, he fattened on opposition and grew thin
and pale when treated with indulgence" (109). In part 5 of A
Portrait Stephen tells Cranly
that "I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art
as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my
defence the only arms I allow myself to use––silence,
exile, and cunning." In the final pages he prepares to
head off for Paris, declaring the Irish "A race of
clodhoppers!"
[2022] The Stephen seen in Ulysses has returned from
Paris, a failure for now, but he clings no less strongly to
the cause of artistic exile inspired by Dante. The novel gives
him a potential surrogate father in Leopold Bloom, who feels
similarly alienated from family, religion, and nation. In Ithaca,
in a passage rich in echoes of
Dante, the two men leave Bloom's house conducting a mock
ceremony that celebrates the ancient Hebrews' departure from
Egypt to wander in exile in the Sinai peninsula.
