Drama Criticism | Exiles, James Joyce - John MacNicholas (essay date 1981)

John MacNicholas (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: MacNicholas, John. “The Stage History of Exiles.” James Joyce Quarterly 19, no. 1 (fall 1981): 9–26.

[In the following essay, MacNicholas outlines the stage production history of Exiles.]

It is generally agreed, perhaps especially among Joyceans, that Exiles is a bad play, opaque to both reader and viewer. Various explanations have been proffered to account for this failure: Joyce was a narrative prose stylist whose talents were not suited to write realistic drama; Joyce did not sufficiently wean his play from Ibsen; Joyce could not prevent that crucial distance separating art and autobiography from collapsing; the relentlessly dianoetic method of Exiles annihilated its dramatic possibilities; or finally, Joyce wrote the play as something of an exercise to clear the slate as he finished A Portrait of the Artist and began Ulysses. Scholarship has conferred...

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