I was going to commence this with a 'Joyce is to English and world literature what x is to y...' but, I'll do one better and simply state that Joyce just IS literature.

The man encapsulated so much of what is magnificent and abhorrent about writers, about the craft, about the simplicity of narrating a story as opposed to the Herculean absurdity that is the extraction of meaning, new, old, completely fabricated or absolute truth, from that writing. Joyce was brilliant and revolutionary. He entirely altered the course of English and, by extension, world literature with his high modernist works challenging the world to untangle or cut the Gordian knots he was presenting.

The only author I can liken him to based on the magnitude of his achievement would be Shakespeare. But he also, from what I've managed to gather, might have been an insufferably pompous and perhaps even self-hating, possibly self-torturing individual. He was as great as he was greatly flawed. He was, in short, a man.

I purchased this in a used bookshop in Tel Aviv along with Faulkner's Light in August from a bookseller eager to close. It wasn't long before I left Israel and the title, the presumed content, and my own life history all converged, leading me to pick up the book with a blend of melancholy and a slight, God help me, exaltation.

Entering this play, I had a plethora of expectations based on what I've read from and about Joyce in the past. I wasn't anticipating the enormity of Ulysses or the internal maze exploration that was Portrait of the Artist, not having read too many plays recently (except for 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 occurred while he was away; this confrontation would be exemplified by the returnee facing his opposite, the Irishman who remained behind, who, while denying himself the riches and despair of knowing the rest of the world, would position himself as the moral superior to the returnee and attempt to shame the returnee about his absence and possibly try to sway him to his own way of thinking. The conclusion to this in my mind would be, from what little I've pieced together resembling assumptions regarding Joyce, both characters secure in their choices yet internally shattered 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 what wasn't there or just barely hinted at. The play itself is a good story with wonderful details and visual cues pervading 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 skated on the surface of things, never good enough, smart enough, perhaps writer enough to delve deeper.

More than worthwhile for the Joyce completionists out there, and certainly the work is laden with his talent, but not quite sufficient. Read it as a promise of the paradigm shift to come, the moment between the cannon being ignited and the wall coming down.

The statement "Worst JJ book is better than everybody else's best!" is quite a bold one. It implies that even the least impressive work by JJ is of a higher quality than the very best efforts of others. However, upon further reflection, it might not hold true in all aspects.

While it could be that JJ has a certain charm or style that makes their books stand out, it's also possible that some of their works are indeed forgettable. The edit mentions that on second thought, the book in question is good but not particularly memorable. It may be enjoyable for die-hard JJ fans, who are likely to appreciate any new offering from their favorite author.

Nevertheless, it's important to consider that different people have different tastes and preferences when it comes to literature. What one person considers the worst JJ book might be someone else's favorite. And while JJ may have a loyal following, it doesn't mean that their books are objectively better than everyone else's.

In conclusion, while the initial statement makes a strong claim, it's important to approach it with a degree of skepticism and consider the individual merits of each book.

This piece subtly explores the relationships that one can have with jealousy, love, and especially rivalry. All of this within a finely described love triangle.

I also found that Richard embodies in my eyes the profile of the idealistic and dreamy lover. He seems to be the kind of person who chases after love with all his heart and soul, not caring about the practical aspects or the consequences. His love is pure and passionate, yet also vulnerable and easily hurt.

The story unfolds in a way that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat, wondering what will happen next. Will Richard be able to win the heart of the woman he loves? Or will his rival succeed in stealing her away? The author does a great job of creating tension and drama, making this a truly engaging read.

Overall, I really enjoyed this piece and would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in stories about love, jealousy, and rivalry. It is a beautifully written and thought-provoking work that will stay with you long after you have finished reading it.

**Title: The Complexities of Life in James Joyce's Work**

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, better known as James Joyce, was born on February 2 (13th of January in the Gregorian calendar) 1882 in Dublin, the capital of Ireland. He passed away on January 13, 1941, suffering from eye pain, poverty, and illness, in Zurich.

The plot of the play involves Richard, who has gone into exile and fled from Dublin, his motherland, to France due to the problems in his country. After some time, he returns to Dublin with his wife Bertha, who is from a lower-class family, because of his mother's death. Meanwhile, Richard's friend Robert, who has had a failed romance with Beatrice, expresses his love for Richard's wife. Bertha shows her acceptance of Robert's love through her actions and discusses this with her husband Richard, as they have promised each other not to hide anything in life. Richard, who is introverted and quiet, does not oppose his wife's behavior and tells her that if she wants, she can give a positive response to Robert's love. Meanwhile, Richard also has a secret relationship with someone. Bertha, who loves Richard deeply in her heart and also has a son named Archie, starts to oppose and believes that they should not give so much freedom to each other. But Richard believes that if they are interested in each other, nothing and no one should stop them. Bertha wants to arouse Richard's sense of loss so that he can prove to himself that she is still valuable to Richard, but Richard does not show his sense of loss. Until one night when Bertha has a meeting with Robert, due to Bertha's insistence, Richard is also present there, and they start to explain and confess all their hardships and sorrows. Of course, in my opinion, it is in the form of a monologue. Robert steps back, and in an instant, his relationship with all of Dublin disappears, so he decides to leave the country and go into exile. He asks Richard to stay in Dublin because they need him very much.

The background shows that Joyce is very close to the character of Richard. If we don't get lost, it exactly represents his own married life. Because Joyce, like Richard, also married a woman who had a big gap with him in terms of cultural or perhaps social status. I once read that when Joyce lost most of his eyesight in his forties, he asked his wife to read his books to him, and his wife, who didn't understand his works at all, asked him why he didn't write something that everyone could understand. That is, do people read this kind of thing?

Joyce, because of his great interest in Ibsen's works, creates this play. If we are familiar with Ibsen, this play is very similar to his works and his view of life, especially the play "A Doll's House" by Henrik Ibsen.

Joyce, like Richard, also physically exiles and experiences wandering in many places such as Italy and Germany.

Unlike many plays that force the audience or reader to think along the same lines, Joyce's play does not do this. Because the play of Joyce and the reader are moving on two parallel lines that will never meet each other, unless we look at these two lines from a distance, which is also only an imaginary and illusory meeting. These two lines will never touch each other in the real world.

The conclusion is that life is already full of enough restrictions and bonds that there is no need to add another knot to its already knotty path. The closest relationships will not be easy unless in the shadow of trust and freedom. None of us want to be bound by something or someone. Everyone should grow in their own vision and achieve their results and beliefs alone. Of course, this does not mean not learning from others.

This kind of life is very difficult, but if we touch a corner of its warmth (which will only happen by reading, seeing, and touching the realities of our lives), we will never be able to stay away from it again.

The first piece I read by Joyce was truly an eye-opener.

I’ll likely read a few other of his works before or if I decide to take on the challenge of reading Ulysses.

From this play, I can clearly understand his appeal.

Even when the characters in the play are generating conflict, one can still empathize with their motives, which makes them seem more human and relatable.

I really liked the absence of extensive exposition.

Filling in the blanks through small snippets of dialogue gave the impression that there was a play unfolding in the present, along with an entirely different drama that had occurred years before.

I can't wait to explore more of his works.

(I have since discovered that this play is considered the "least-Joyce" of all his works and is even disregarded by some die-hard Joyce fans.

However, I don't really mind as I still thought it was a great play.

I will soon be reading The Dead to get a better sense of what his "more Joyce" writing style is like.)

It still astonishes me that Joyce's work outside of his fiction was of such mediocrity. There are indeed some pleasant snippets of dialog within it. However, when considering the whole, it becomes evident that this would have been more effectively presented as a short story. I find it quite challenging to envision actors actually uttering this dialog with authenticity and conviction.

The lackluster nature of Joyce's non-fiction work stands in stark contrast to the brilliance of his fictional creations. While the dialog may have had its moments, it fails to come together in a way that would engage and captivate an audience in a more substantial form. As a short story, the精华 of the dialog could have been distilled and presented in a more concise and impactful manner.

Perhaps Joyce was simply more at home in the realm of fiction, where he could let his imagination run wild and create complex and vivid worlds. In this non-fiction work, it seems as though he was somewhat constrained, and the result is a piece that falls short of his usual high standards.

Painfully honest, I find myself standing here with my hands empty, completely revealing.

There is a sense of vulnerability that comes with this honesty, as if all my defenses have been stripped away.

But in this state of openness, I also feel a strange kind of liberation.

No longer do I have to hide behind false facades or pretend to have something that I don't.

I can face the world as I truly am, flaws and all.

It's not an easy path, but it's one that I feel compelled to take.

Maybe through this painful honesty, I can learn to accept myself and find a deeper connection with others.

After all, it is in our vulnerability that we often find the most genuine and meaningful relationships.

So, I embrace this state of being hands empty and revealing, ready to face whatever comes my way.

The story was extremely - extremely - dramatic.

It began with a seemingly ordinary day, but little did anyone know that chaos was about to unfold.

The characters in the story were faced with impossible choices and had to make decisions that would change their lives forever.

The plot twists and turns, keeping the reader on the edge of their seat.

There were moments of intense suspense, followed by heart-wrenching revelations.

The drama built and built until it reached a climactic finale that left the reader breathless.

Overall, it was a truly unforgettable and very - very - dramatic tale.

You may then know in soul and body, a hundred forms, and ever restlessly, what some old theologian, Duns Scotus, I think, called a death of the spirit.

There is a rather muddy dip of uncertainty that surrounds this particular piece. I have been completely addled by overwork for more than a month. A few weeks ago, having come across this paperback, I decided to keep it in reserve. The circumstances where portability is rewarding have become quite common these days. My expectations for "Exiles" were that it would be like a bridge, offering another route to "Ulysses" and "Finnegans Wake". The opening act seemed to anticipate precisely such a Bloom/Molly dynamic. However, things then took a rather haywire turn. There was an akimbo drift into a fencing of manners where perhaps Heidegger held the key. I found this rather uncanny as I had recently watched Kazan's "Baby Doll" and discovered that the introduction of Eli Wallach's character was a perfect foil to a tale of Southern decline. In "Exiles", the betrayed character refuses to condemn or employ violence. Such matters are simply beyond him, as if the epistemological limits prevent him from taking a definite stand. Is this perhaps a ruse, maybe to condone his own infidelity? Is there hope or despair lurking in his heart? The closest literary equivalent that I considered was Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. The questions of identity and propriety within a relationship are ultimately extrapolated into the duty to one's land and one's faith. Any scurrying outside of such boundaries brings ambiguity and relativism to bear. For all the play's emotive combustion, Joyce manages to yield a worthy lesson in understatement.

James Joyce's only play, "Exiles," is a rather lackluster affair. If I died this moment, I am yours. The play is filled with four characters who all seem to blend together in their anguished, neurotic, conflicted, and over-wrought states. I have wounded my soul for you — a deep wound of doubt that can never be healed. The four main characters struggle with overlapping attractions and bouts of indifference. What might have seemed modern in 1916 now comes across as dealing with concepts like open marriage, polyamorous inclinations, and "swinging," but without the proper language to discuss them openly at the time. Jealousy and monogamy are the dominant emotions, and nothing else seems to exist. The ideas are in their infancy, struggling to emerge, and the process is both cryptic and painful, ultimately leading to nothing but pain. I have rarely been so dreadfully bored, which is why it only earns two stars.

I’ve not delved into Joyce’s works for a few years now. However, his literary masterpieces always remain the epitome of great literature in my mind. He was the very first author whose writings compelled me to reevaluate what literature could truly signify, what the act of reading could entail, and just how profoundly transformative these works could be for me.

Some of those familiar themes, which I’ve never erased from my memory, whether from Ulysses or Finnegans Wake, resurface here once more. Joyce’s preoccupations with liberty, adultery, and his simultaneously pessimistic and optimistic perspective on long-term love once again come to the forefront of my thoughts, as vivid as the day I first perused the resolute final chapters of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The similar subplots about how we are constantly broken down, yet always manage to rise again thanks to those around us, whose presence we’re unlikely to escape, return to my consciousness.

Perhaps my expression is a bit clumsy, as I’m typing this at the computer after a tiring day of work (and it’s a Thursday no less, when the workweek has already drained so much of my energy). But I firmly believe that this is a sentiment that any Joyce reader can hopefully identify with. I’ve always regarded it as my favorite idiosyncrasy of Joyce’s literature, the one I’ve empathized with the most. Like Robert Rowan in Exiles, buried beneath all my doubts, obsessions, and ideas, I can sometimes feel quite despondent, or perhaps find myself in a different mindset, simply desiring for others to live their lives freely, without my interference, and to make the right choices.

I deliberately use the ambiguous term “the right choices” because when we sit and think in this manner, we surely don’t have a concrete vision of what the world, in all its magnificent glory, should look like. Yet, we know the feeling of joy and satisfaction, and so we hope for such to arrive and not be perturbed by what occurs. However, we’re often wrong, and life seems cruel. Although we’re not perfect beings ourselves, just as Rowan is a rather lousy husband and is depicted as a self-obsessed, neglectful father.

But can things be so dire that we may not be loved? Even after our brutishness has been revealed, which we strive so hard to conceal (since our truly free, brutish selves are anything but the most flattering images), we’re not excluded from the clutches of love and forgiveness. And it can be seen as a terrible thing to love and be loved simply because we become deeply ashamed of ourselves for allowing others to believe in our good nature when we consider ourselves rather unworthy. But such conflicting views, between the self-loathing and the accepting, nurturing lover, are the very essence of truth. And they seem to form the adult’s love life. And it is a beautiful thing to love and be loved, as much as it is shameful and challenging, for none of these aspects are necessarily mutually exclusive. And this is the crux of my experience with Exiles.

Disliked for its awkward dialogue, convoluted philosophical fixations, and shoddy portrayal of characters, this work seems much more interesting to me than I'd been led to expect. It would seem that it suffers unfairly by comparison to its antecedents and successors. While Joyce put out Dubliners and Portrait in '14 and '16 respectively, the former was completed nearly a decade prior and the latter was merely a reshaping of even earlier sketches. This leaves Exiles as the first real expression of the older, maturer Joyce that begins Ulysses.

No surprise, then, that family life, private ennui, and psychopyrotechnics about cuckoldry are the main points. Given that Ulysses would take years more to complete, it's even less a surprise that his conclusions are much foggier, improfound, and dubious. Being something written after his initial success, after years of resigning himself to hopelessness and failure, there may be something of an cockiness leading him to the over-confident assertions in this small play. Consequently, in his network, Ezra Pound wrote article after article trying and failing to find something he liked in it, while Yeats simply said that nobody would want to watch it.

Anyways, the plot is a bizarre-o love square about parallel infidelities (one real, one spiritual), presented with detached and hyper-analytical characters that resemble the soulless hypermoderns in Goethe's Elective Affinities more than anything. It ends on the expected note of material felicity but psychological resignation. His method seems to be following the Ibsenite formula, where a group of fully realized characters are shown at a 'breaking point' in their lives which allows for their speeches and acts to become prophet-like and monstrously symbolic. And indeed, Joyce tries to give them small mannerisms, little vanities, and fallacious beliefs, to further instill the realism that his Dubliners all had. This much isn't really successful, since the characters are either fully unreal, or sufficiently alienated that their resemblance to normal people is entirely defunct.

This gets irritating for a moment, but Joyce's aim here pans out to be less of a regional portrait or psycho-mythological adventure as his previous two books had been, and instead a sort of existential geometry about the characters as they're presented. The characters argue their incredibly parapraxis-ridden justifications of their (either initiating, or permitting) infidelity in terms of a Schoepenhauerian philosophy that, taken on its own, is entirely laughable and seems like something Joyce would have given to one of his parodies of bad writers. But something here seems to me to connect, not on a prima-facie basis but rather on the basis of detachment from the stage. The irrational conclusions (because I have allowed you to cheat on me, I have given you freedom, which consequently binds you permanently to me) appear as phantom deductions from within a fever dream of romantic claustrophobia. The success of this Will-oriented philosophy of human relations seems to be less a serious assertion on Joyce's part and more a taken-up framework whereby he can set his characters into an intricate game against one another for apparently little sake other than to study what we feel about the conclusion. And while his self-insert wins the 'chess match', it's unclear to the reader what this victory signifies, and the weight of that ambiguity seems to me to bear a non-trivial resemblance to the dark conclusions of the Dubliner tales.

Of course, that this all works out to a summary of "this is proxy therapy for an insecure and unhappy Joyce" makes the enjoyability of Exiles pretty variable for the reader, depending on their level of investment on Joyce biography or their disposition to entertaining psycho-fantasies of this kind. As a first step towards the degree of symbolic significance that cuckoldry and its consequences would take on in Ulysses, this is definitely a productive scholarly consultation. It's also incidentally interesting that Joyce, having decided on cuckoldry as his central theme after a false-alarm scare with Nora Barnacle, decided to give his self-insert a spiritual mistress of his own to compensate for the cuckoldry Richard Rowan receives here. Some years later down the road, while writing the chapter 'Nausicaa' in which Bloom imagines an infidelity of his own, Joyce made several attempts to commit infidelity purely for research purposes, but could never bring himself to actually consummate any of these brief (and awkward) affairs. The closest he got was with a Jewish girl who, upon finally getting her alone and lusty with him in a bedroom, suddenly declared that they could only be Platonic friends and also would only communicate by mail, and achieved a sort of spiritual infidelity via letters for solely literary-inspirational purposes, which turns out to be almost exactly the same dynamic Richard achieves with his piano-playing lady friend.