SOURCE: "James Joyce," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 15, No. 2, Spring, 1974, pp. 262-70.

In the following excerpt from a review in which he examines a number of books on the work of James Joyce, Boyle offers a negative assessment of The Exile of James Joyce. He states that while it reflects "intelligence and industry," this study is an "ugly failure and will appear more so as time reveals its flimsy biases and its prejudicial aims."

The most massive single volume of Joycean criticism of the last few years, recently translated [as The Exile of James Joyce], is Helene Cixous' publication of what was, I suppose, the logorrheic dissertation which helped to earn her Docteur dés Lettres in 1968, and which, according to the book jacket, "shows, and shows convincingly, that Joyce's consciousness was his biography and his biography wrote his books"—which book-jacket gibberish might make us fear that the...