306
DAVID THORBURN
PORTRAITS OF THE ARTI ST
THE EXILE OF JAMES JOYCE. By Helene Cixous. Translated by Sally
A. J. Purcell. David Lewis. $15.00. ULYSSES ON THE LlFFEY. By Richard
Ellmann. Oxford University Press. $8.95.
Helene Cixous's pretentious doctoral thesis about joyce's life
and work, published four years ago in France and (if the jacket blurbs
are to be believed) excessively praised by reviewers in
Le Monde, L'Ex–
press, Nouvel Observateur,
and
Figaro Litteraire,
has now appeared in
English. The minimal virtues of the French original have been further
diminished by careless editing and incompetent translation. Inconsis–
tencies, typographical errors, and confusing reversions to the French dis–
figure the text, and the translator's patent ignorance of Joyce intro–
duces additional, ruinous mistakes in certain passages.
1
But the chief
defects of
The Exile of James Joyce
belong to the author herself.
The book belongs to a hybrid genre more common in France, espe–
cially recently, than in the United States but not entirely unknown
here - the academic exercise whose length and critical apparatus claim
the authority of scholarship; but whose tone and argument continually
assert the author's contempt for scholaring, his refusal to be con–
fined to the perspectives of an ordinary critic. The result of this uneasy
marriage of pedantry and daring is that
The Exile of James Joyce
at–
tains to the tedium of the dullest scholarship, yet without a compen–
sating rigor, and at the same time is very often as perversely unreliable
and tendentious as the work of a poet-critic, yet without the genuine
provocativeness and passionate conviction of such work.
The subtitle of the French original, suppressed in this translation,
is "l'art du remplacement," and it is intermittently clear that Cixous is
concerned especially to show how Joyce's art absorbs and transforms the
biographical facts, and particularly to describe the process whereby
Joyce's writing came to assert its full autonomy, finally reversing the
One dramatic, and irresistible, example: Analyzing a scene from the
"Sirens" episode of
Ulysses,
Cixous claims that Blazes Boylan's "sudden ar–
rival" at the bar "saddens Simon Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, the two bar–
maids...." After Boylan departs, she writes, the men at the bar "give
themselves up to an orgy of exciting memories in compensation, and end
by choosing a scapegoat to act as a symbolic cuckold for all [un bouc emis–
saire qui servira de coqu commun), feeling the necessity to identify with the
'cock' Boylan." Cixous's next sentence designates Bloom as the symbolic
scapegoat: "C'est Bloom qui va payer pour tous." But the translator, clearly
a stranger to Joyce, transforms a merely fanciful reading into an impossible
one, and rescues Bloom from the isolation he endures in Joyce's text, with
this comically literal rendering of Cixous's French: "Bloom buys drinks for
everyone."
