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  • “Exiles”: A Critical Edition ed. by A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie
  • Valérie Bénéjam (bio)
“EXILES”: A CRITICAL EDITION, edited by A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2016. 348xi+ pp. $74.95.

Ezra Pound predicted with eerie accuracy the fate of Exiles. When Joyce sent him the play in 1915, he responded: “When you are a recognized classic people will read it because you wrote it and be duly interested and duly instructed … but until then I’m hang’d if I see what’s to be done with it” (LettersII 366).1 Since then, the gist [End Page 135] of the criticism leveled against Exiles is often that it does not work in performance but only as an informative addition to the rest of Joyce’s superior writing—an acquired distaste reserved for Joyceans. The list is long of scholars who have voiced their doubts about the play and what they deemed its borrowings of Henrik Ibsen, its undistanced biographical character, its grandiloquent tone and disappointing lack of irony. Could Exiles be the proof that the greatest of modernist writers, he with such an ear for the nuances and subtleties of spoken language, perhaps was not a talented playwright? In 1970 and 1971, however, Harold Pinter’s acclaimed productions “lifted the lid [off] the coffin of one of the greatest plays of our time,” to quote a Village Voice reviewer; suddenly it seemed as if this outdated Ibsenite affair was, in fact, ground-breaking contemporary drama before its time.2 For the centenary of its composition, the Florida James Joyce Series renews our interest in this strange dramatic artifact, the last surviving play of Joyce’s, with a critical edition entrusted to A. Nicholas Fargnoli and Michael Patrick Gillespie. Given Joyce’s ardent endeavors as a dramatist and the dramatic genre’s influence over his writing in general, we cannot but heartily applaud an editorial project that encourages us to rethink our opinions about the play and its place in Joyce’s oeuvre.

This is a critical edition, not in the traditional academic sense of presenting variations and the selective process that led to the established text, but in the more commercial usage of an edited text followed by a series of essays representative of its critical heritage. Regarding the text of Exiles, the first thing to say about Fargnoli and Gillespie’s new edition is that it is excellent work, but it is not their work. It is rather that of John MacNicholas, who is well known for his study of the manuscripts of the play and who is explicitly mentioned in the general introduction as having prepared the text (1). His “Note on the Text” is based on his 1979 Textual Companion to “Exiles,” which would, in combination with the text here presented, constitute an actual critical edition in the traditional sense of the term.3 I have not solved the enigma of why his name does not appear on the cover of this edition.

These problematic credits do not affect the text. What may, however, affect our reception of it are the notes—and also the lack of notes. The “Editors’ Notes” do carry several blunders, the most obvious being the claim that Ranelagh—rather than Rathgar—was Joyce’s birthplace (177). The editors have also deemed it necessary to explain terms that one would have thought obvious or at least easily looked up by all readers, especially in this all-Googleable world—such as “sideboard,” “easy chair,” “letterbox,” “garter,” or “spectacles,” not to mention the translations provided for “Buon giorno,” “Avanti,” or “babbo” (177, 178, 181). There are notes to explain some of the most obvious allusions, such as making it explicit that “the nice name [people] give those children” (Bertha about her son born out of wedlock—E 100) is “bastard” [End Page 136] (181). On the other hand, specific Dublin or Irish references, which would be cryptic even to many confirmed Joyceans, get no elucidation, such as Robert’s joke about the division of Dublin statues between those that seem to be saying “[h]ow shall I get down?” and those...

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