Not Exactly Dramatic

A few weeks back I decided to stick James Joyce's play Exiles on a list of texts that were on my shelves, and which I had read, but felt, for one reason or another, to be honest not entirely clear, were deserving of a reread, and soon. In the case of the play the fact that it was short made a rereading attractive, plus the fact that I read it in my late teens and it didn't do anything for me, except puzzle me by its very ordinariness. Decades later, and having developed more than a passing acquaintance with Ibsen's dramas, he having been something of a literary model for the young Joyce, I wondered if I'd see Exiles in a radically different light from that shed on my first reading. Oh, and the fact that my only copy of the play is in my wonderfully battered The Essential James Joyce (edited by Harry Levin) meant I'd get to enjoy opening up that little trove again, confirming it as one of my best ever buys bookwise.

Despite its brevity it took me a full three days to read. And initially I was generally disappointed, feeling I was missing the point. But then I hit on a way of reading the text that managed to bring it to some kind of life for me. Initially I kept visualising the drama on stage and just couldn't see how it might work. Apart from anything else the potential for unintentional comedy, given the complete lack of any humour in this extremely emotionally intense play, was painfully obvious in any number of the exchanges on stage. When it occurred to me to read it as a drama for television, typical of 'serious' plays as done by the BBC in the 60s & 70s, something clicked. No inappropriate audience response to worry about. Just sensitive, serious reactions to a hyper-sensitive work.

I still don't rate Exiles as a work of literature. But I can now understand it as something Joyce had to write in order to distance himself from his oddly confused feelings centred around love, lust & betrayal. And it is possessed of a strange power in expressing those feelings, though I think fails in exploring them as the writer is too close to his other self, Richard Rowan.