Joyce's Exiles

For Halloween, I thought it'd be fun to spend all October with just the "Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe."  But, my "Complete Poe" is a bit unwieldy to carry to work (curse you e-readers, you win this round!), so I'm also reading a series of slimmer volumes to read at lunch.  This seemed as good an excuse as any to finally check out James Joyce's sole play, "Exiles."

As more dates than I'm proud of have learned, I have sort of a man-crush on Joyce.  I'm a fan.  Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, even that lovable lunatic Finnegans Wake, they all make me happy.  It's not even a literary-snob thing, I genuinely love Joyce's books--it makes me honestly sad that the general public doesn't read him--I'm even sadder when fellow English majors merely respect him, as opposed to enjoying him, like he was meant to be, like I do!

And "Exiles" is standard Joyce--it features yet another Joyce stand-in with Richard, a prominent Irish writer returning to Dublin after 9 years abroad.  He finds his old friend Robert still has feelings for his wife Bertha...who may or may not reciprocate.  Robert is willing to risk him and Richard's friendship to find out...and Richard is willing to let him to find out to in the name of freedom...and Bertha is (understandably) pretty peeved with the behavior of both...I won't spoil the ending--though like all Joyce, the ending merely marks a termination of the text, not any sort of final resolution.

So how is it I've never gotten round to "Exiles?"  Probably cause what's enthralled me most about Joyce has been the music and precision of Joyce's prose, the stimulating complexity of his texts; Plays, by their very nature, cannot feature those elements. Hence, with so many other books to read, I'd never considered "Exiles" to be canon, required Joyce.

Yet though "Exiles" cannot portray Joyce's innovations, I'm grateful for the play, because by restricting itself only to dialogue, it throws into sharp relief another element of Joyce's fiction that often gets lost amidst all the erudition and theory--namely, the characters.  Joyce's characters, from Dubliners to Ulysses, all feel disconcertingly familiar, passionate, fleshed-out, real.  All the textual experimentation in the world wouldn't mean a thing, his books would all just be parlor tricks, forgetful high-wire acts, novelty for novelty's sake, flash-in-the-pan stunts, if it weren't for the desperate realism of his characters.

It's Joyce's characters that give his books their blood and guts, their strum und drang, their heart and soul.  They are too much like us you see, they are a highly-polished mirror held up to our own selves.  And it's in "Exiles" that one can no longer take refuge in over-literate-allusiveness and High-Modern-irony, oh no--what's left in "Exiles," stripped of all other pretentiousness, is the characters alone--people with hopes and dreams, depression and despondency, loves, passions, and genuine friendships that they wouldn't trade for the world, but maybe would for their own souls.

"Exiles" is a quick read, easy to miss between the much more demanding Portrait and Ulysses, but worth your attention, worth the cursory attention of an hour or two it asks for.  It is Joyce.