Exiles in Never too Late to Read Classics

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Nov 14, 2012 Yair Ben-Zvi rated it liked it · review of another edition

I was going to start this with a 'Joyce is to English and world literature what x is to y...' but, I'll go one better and just say that Joyce just IS literature. The man embodied so much of what's great and horrible about writers, about the craft, about the simplicity of telling a story versus the herculean nonsense that is the extracting of meaning, new, old, completely invented or absolute truth, from that writing. Joyce was brilliant and revolutionary. He completely shifted the course of Engl I was going to start this with a 'Joyce is to English and world literature what x is to y...' but, I'll go one better and just say that Joyce just IS literature. The man embodied so much of what's great and horrible about writers, about the craft, about the simplicity of telling a story versus the herculean nonsense that is the extracting of meaning, new, old, completely invented or absolute truth, from that writing. Joyce was brilliant and revolutionary. He completely shifted the course of English and, by extension, world literature with his high modernist works daring the world to unravel or cut the Gordian knots he was presenting. The only author I can compare him to based on the scope of his achievement would be Shakespeare. But he also, from what I've been able to glean, may have been an insufferably pompous and even self-hating possibly self-torturing ass. He was as great as he was greatly flawed. He was, in short, a man.

I picked this up in a used bookshop in Tel Aviv along with Faulkner's Light in August from a bookseller anxious to close. It was not long before I left Israel and the title and the presumed content and my own life history all coalesced into me picking up the book with a mixture of melancholy and slight, god help me, exaltation.

Going into this play I had a host of expectations based on what I've read from and about Joyce in the past. I wasn't expecting the magnitude of Ulysses or the internal maze wandering that was Portrait of the Artist, not having read too many plays recently (save Faust a year ago and Ibsen a little before that). Maybe something more along the lines of Dubliners but, to be honest, I had in my mind this image of a play about an Irish expatriate returning to 'the homeland' after an extended stay abroad, only to be confronted by everything that has happened while he was gone; this confrontation would be epitomized by the returnee facing his opposite, the Irishman who stayed behind that, while denying himself the riches and despair of knowing the rest of the world, would set himself up as the moral superior to the returnee and, attempt, to shame the returnee about his absence and possibly attempt to shift him to his own way of thinking. The conclusion to this in my mind would be, from what little I've shaped together resembling assumptions regarding Joyce, both characters secure in their choices yet internally destroyed by the confrontation.

This isn't what I read. And I'm glad because what's there is good. But I'm a bit disappointed at wasn't there or just barely alluded to. The play itself is a good story with wonderful details and visual clues suffused throughout but, with my edition, it was the author's copious notes and elaborations on his characters and general story that really disconcert with those three dreadful words: what could've been. In the end I'm reminded of what Charles Bukowski once said about Truman Capote, that the latter never actually wrote, only ice-skated on the surface of things, never good enough, smart enough, perhaps writer enough to go deeper.

More than worth it for the Joyce completionists out there, and certainly the work is loaded down with his talent, but not quite enough. Read it as a promise of the paradigm shifting to come, the moment between the cannon being lit and the wall coming down. ...more

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Aug 09, 2020 Alexandra Madigan marked it as to-read

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Mar 09, 2022 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: plays, author-irish

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