The Early Joyce and the Writing of “Exiles,” (review)

Few scholars have devoted attention either to Joyce’s earliest work or to the often criticized play Exiles. In this respect, Nick De Marco’s latest book, The Early Joyce and the Writing of “Exiles,” addresses an area full of scholarly potential. While he presents readers with a biographical overview of Joyce’s life, which he connects quite clearly to the artist’s essays, reviews, and poems, as well as to the longer, more polished work evident in Dubliners, Stephen Hero, and A Portrait of the Artist, De Marco’s book does not contribute as much as one might hope to the extant criticism. Its assertions reiterate many of those already noted by Richard Ellmann in his biography of Joyce, and much of the book relies on a fairly rudimentary close reading of Joyce’s texts in order to illuminate the recurring themes of youth, betrayal, and exile. The resulting study brings much-needed attention to the selections but without offering many new insights.

At its core, the book suggests that looking at the early body of Joyce’s work will lead readers to improve their understanding of his artistic theories, writings, and role as an artist. In order to accomplish this goal, De Marco looks fairly exhaustively at the early works, including essays, reviews, poems, correspondence, drafts, and notes. This comprehensive approach helps readers understand the nuances of the artist’s development more thoroughly and enables a systematic tracing of that development through the various remaining texts. Much of what we read and study of Joyce’s work has easily identifiable origins in these early works, and, De Marco argues, understanding the path of the artist’s development further illuminates the reader’s cognizance of the more popular texts. De Marco acknowledges that his focus on “origins” parallels Joyce’s own “quasi-obsession with infancy, adolescence and youth,” an approach which he claims is in line with Joyce’s “academic point of view” and thus fittingly culminates in a study with a seemingly built-in endorsement from the artist (9).

De Marco’s interpretation of Joyce’s texts, in fact, rests almost entirely upon biographical connections, to the extent that he asserts, “Joyce’s biographical background is deemed as important as his intellectual growth, or more precisely, shapes and defines this intellectual growth” (10). In order to achieve this reading, the book focuses on Joyce’s education and his interactions with other individuals, such as Nora and his immediate family, as well as his public reception. These observations often lead to a better understanding of the oppositional forces that plagued Joyce in his youth. Navigating between the lofty world of his educated peers and the impoverished world of his father’s house often led to conflicts that Joyce repeatedly attempts to work out in his literature.

De Marco organizes his book into four parts: “The Artist as Seer,” “The Artist as Observer,” “The Artist as Jealous Egomaniac,” and “The Artist as Dramatist.” Part 1 focuses primarily on Joyce’s educational experiences, emphasizing the literary and philosophical influences that ultimately contributed to his aesthetic theories and, according to De Marco, helped frame much of Dubliners and A Portrait. Another of his goals, the identification of the major influences on Joyce’s work, serves as the focus for both parts 1 and 2. De Marco lists the usual sources of inspiration: Henrik Ibsen, Dante Alighieri, Aristotle, Daniel Defoe, and William Blake. His observations here are again essentially a review of the familiar for Joycean scholars. Those new to Joyce, however, will find the connections illuminating, especially since De Marco attempts to link these various writers and their theories to Joyce’s own concept of art and the artist. In fact, as De Marco outlines Joyce’s burgeoning ideas about these two concepts in part 2, he offers perhaps his most compelling assessment of Joyce’s work. He writes, for example, that “the problem Joyce was at pains to resolve here concerns the opposition between...