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conventional relations between life and art by detennining the habits
and patterns of Joyce's actual living. This notion is less remarkable than
Cixous's aggressively self-conscious tone suggests, and it can be applied
in some degree to writers other than Joyce, but there are occasions when
she has some interesting things to say about the evolution of Joyce's
work. Her book is immensely long, well over 700 pages, and despite a
series of elaborate titles and subtitles, seems badly disorganized.
Structuralism is clearly the dominant influence on
The Exile of
James Joyce,
but it seems an influence insufficiently assimilated and
understood. There is no hint in these labored pages of Roland Barthes's
explicit tentativeness, nor an awareness of the dangers inherent in the
attempt to study literary texts with analytic techniques devised by
anthropologists and linguists.
A secondary, but also damaging influence here seems to be the
Sartre of
Saint Genet
and the immensely extended meditation on Flau–
bert,
L'I
diot de La Famille
(portions of which were being published in
France as early as 1966), those remarkable and intimidating efforts by
Sartre to recreate his author-subjects according to his own needs as a
thinker and writer. That Sartre's Flaubert bears only a minimal re–
semblance to the author of
Madame Bovary
may not matter much, for
Sartre is entitled to make special claims on us. But that Cixous's Joyce
is so at odds with the real Joyce matters a great deal. One wishes she
had read her author more carefully and had been less ardent to estab–
lish her credentials as a critic
au courant.
In any event, the Joyce she offers us - a victim of "puritanical"
impulses who "could only see a Godless communion as possible in a
conte~t
of mutual degredation and befouling" -
is
mainly an invention,
a fantasy-Joyce surely incapable of the unembarrassed earthiness that
pervades
Ulysses.
Whether she is discussing Joyce and his circle, the fic–
tional characters, or Irish culture in general, Cixous's resources of con–
descension seem nearly limitless, and she is capable of judgments so
patronizing and reductive as to move one beyond mere disagreement
to a kind of melancholy awe: "The Irish husband of 1900 is a man with
very few chances of self-accomplishment outside his own horne. Con–
strained and oppressed since childhood by the system of confession, he
has no right to enjoy a private life."
Cixous rarely allows the recalcitrant facts to check her habit of
daring generalization, and there are occasions when one feels she is
wholly impervious to the text before her. At one }X)int, in a casual foot–
note meant to serve as a simple reminder of the obvious, Cixous tells
us that Joyce "wrote the eighteen episodes [of
Ulysses] in their Homeric
