MY OEDIPUS COMPLEX: MYTHS OF EARLY LIFE AND AFTERLIFE IN IRELAND
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Of the two authors’ work, James Stephens’s is the more rambling. A Rhinoceros, Some Ladies, and a Horse is every bit as cohesive a story as its title implies. Essentially it’s an account by James (Mark Richard) of how he came to get and lose a job running errands for a theatrical agency. James is an eager-to-please teenager, but his feet are quicker than his wits. It’s these very characteristics that get James into trouble, as one complication leads to another, almost as if his life were a conspiracy to undo him. There’s no big gag or comic twist to the story; the humor is meant to reside in the way it’s told, using narrative digression for comic effect and milking the irony provided by James’s naive worldview. It’s a quaint piece, and about as funny as one of Norman Rockwell’s “humorous” paintings.
Stephens’s other contribution, The Threepenny Piece, is the tale of Brien O’Brien, who was never any good. When he dies he’s buried clutching a threepenny piece, which he loses on his way to Hell. Cuchulain, a seraph, finds the coin and pockets it. O’Brien insists it was stolen, and he raises such a racket that pretty soon the legions of the damned are chanting, “Who stole the threepenny piece?” and the business of Hell grinds to a halt. At this point, both O’Brien and Cuchulain are hauled up before the great Radamanthus and cast across the galaxy until they finally land, naked and penniless, by the side of a road. OK, so maybe it would be funnier if you knew something about Celtic mythology and ached to see it satirized. Anyhow, The Threepenny Piece, like the other Stephens story, is simply an imaginative spree, told more for the hell of it than for the sake of any profound insight.
Not to slight the readers. The principal readers, Mark Richard and Bob Goddard, are very good at what they do. Richard is the better actor/reader, in terms of physical personification, whereas Goddard’s talent is as a narrator, being more able to express the author’s attitude and intention. And all of the readers, for that matter, have pleasant voices capable of maintaining consistent, if patently fake, Irish accents.
