Living Writing: The Poethics of Hélène Cixous

Adele Parker

Department of Comparative Literature
SUNY Binghamton
74613.1577@compuserve.com

 

Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Hélène Cixous, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing.Trans. Eric Prenowitz. London: Routledge, 1997.

 

Mireille Calle-Gruber laments that Cixous is primarily known in this country for her essays in feminist theory, when many readers who most appreciate her have come to her through her fiction. Rootprints is a look at the roots of Cixous’s writing process and the ways in which her fiction embodies the concerns of her theory: sexual difference, alterity and exchange, the unstable play of signifiers and the multiple subjectivities found within the human body. This book serves as a useful introduction to Cixous, but is also rewarding for those already familiar with her work.

 

A straightforward (auto)biography would never do; instead we have seven sections written by four people, befitting Cixous’s pluralistic project. In addition to interview-like pieces written by Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Derrida has written an essay, and Eric Prenowitz, Cixous’s translator, offers an afterword. While knowledge of French renders the lexical lability more pleasurable to the reader, Prenowitz’s meticulous annotated translation minimizes loss of meaning.

 

The meat of the book is in the first piece, “Inter Views,” a discussion between Calle-Gruber and Cixous that delves into many of her important themes: love, mourning, desire and jouissance, time and writing. Boxes of text placed throughout are windows onto Cixous’s notebooks. Cixous states that her best-known essays were deliberately didactic and meant only to mark a particular ideological moment, to clarify a position; to do that she “left her own ground,” sat down, stopped textual movement. Poetic imagination is her true ethical responsibility.

 

What is most true is poetic because it is not 
   stopped-stoppable.
All that is stopped, grasped, all that is 
   subjugated, easily transmitted,
easily picked up, all that comes under the word 
   concept, which is to say all that is taken, 
   caged, is less true. (4)

 

True reading and writing always move ahead, they do not sit and wait to be appropriated; she suggests this is why people often have difficulty engaging with her work. We desire to use language for closure, for exclusion and repression; to define and contain. This is not to say that Cixous is careless, passive in letting speech speak. One can only write in being “carried away on the back of these funny horses that are metaphor” (28); but she holds the reins. She trains the many shoots of her words to take different paths, like vines. Writing, like loving, is powerful, it dictates, but it is also an action, something that we do, that we risk, that is presence itself and yet never present, never known:

 

...the factor of instability, the factor of uncertainty, or what Derrida calls the undecidable, is indissociable from human life. This ought to oblige us to have an attitude that is at once rigorous and tolerant and doubly so on each side: all the more rigorous than open, all the more demanding since it must lead to openness, leave passage; all the more mobile and rapid as the ground will always give way, always. (52)

 

Writing for Cixous is indissociable from reading, from living, and from her body. She wants to write on her own insides, on her skin as Stendhal wrote on his waistband. Yet she does not write to know herself–although one can come to a re-cognition of self through writing–rather she writes to know a particular instant. Her passion for theater lies in the fact that a staged play is always in the moment. She tries to write the present, which is an impossibility; yet in the trying, writing is transformed.

 

Her writing always reconfigures intersubjectivity, with her “further-than-myself in myself” (56) and “myself as the first other” (90); “the other in all his or her forms gives me I” (13). We live always as various people, in a variety of times; life is lived in multiple registers. As breathing on a mirror blurs one’s own image, so the f/act of living prevents one from seeing oneself clearly. “It is the other who makes my portrait” (13). Yet writing begins not just with thinking closely but looking closely, a metaphor for which is Cixous’s own extreme nearsightedness (which gives her such a dreamy look in photographs): she does not see the world as it is “supposed” to be seen; she must concentrate on details and use her other senses fully.

 

At times in these essays, the remarks of interviewer and interviewee elicit appreciation from the other; at other times disagreement or confusion. The very linguistic opacity they are discussing is illustrated by this seemingly abrupt appearance of language at the moment of misunderstanding. At one point, Calle-Gruber describes the “shock of the other” as a break, a point of rupture, while Cixous experiences it as a membrane or a wound. For Cixous, the shock of the other is not a site of disconnection but an event: “either I die, or a kind of work takes place” (16). The scar is the story that results. Where Calle-Gruber perceives an irreparable breach, Cixous sees a “fruitful mishap.” They play out the encounter with the other. Calle-Gruber is as eloquent as Cixous; they flex and fashion language between them.

 

The section termed “Appendices” consists of two short pieces. The first is by Derrida on the dream of an ant that Cixous recounted to him over the phone, which leads him into a meditation on difference, fable and gift, and movements of separation and reparation, or séparéunion, in her work. Cixous and Derrida grew up near each other in Algeria, although they did not meet until 1962, and there are many similarities in their philosophical projects. As an example of how she uses the idiom to pick language apart Derrida looks at the phrase tous les deux–an idiom that means “both” but that literally translates as “all the twos.” Cixous elsewhere uses this phrase to take issue with the term bisexuality, which she used in the well-known essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Why only two, she asks, why not “all the twos”–all the dualities, all the oppositions, as well as the entredeux, the in-betweens. In the second piece in this section, Cixous speaks of her vision of Derrida and his writing with his body, dipping his pen in his own blood, and about Stendhal and growing older (turning 60) while attempting to see the color of one’s own mind with one’s own eyes.

 

There follow three essays by Calle-Gruber, grouped under the title “Portrait of the Writing,” on particular works of fiction and what is at stake in them. The first, “Writing-thinking” discusses FirstDays of the Year (Minnesota, 1997). Calle-Gruber discusses Cixous’s rule of uncertainty, of deferral of meaning, “and this, so that writing should return from afar, from nothing, from before the History of every story… in order that… it should strike us with the surprise of a book” (139). Calle-Gruber suggests that the Cixousian book is “mourning and gift” (140), mourning for all the unwritten books that this written book has displaced. Nothing is ever what we think it is; writing never begins or ends or succeeds in its attempts. Writing is an attempt itself, a matter of “weak force” (141), never mastery; the body and not the head.

 

Calle-Gruber’s essay “Cixous Genre Outlaw” poses the question of genre, which in French refers to gender and genus as well as genre, literary or otherwise. And of course “it’s all genres in Cixous’s works. And then some” (149). The adverbial pronoun “Y,” generally meaning “there,” is the sign her writing “attempts to compose-invent” (149). “Y” is neither one nor two. It has meaning but not in itself; it is a sign of a crossroads, of parting, of growth. Calle-Gruber looks at three works, Neutre, Déluge, and On ne part pas, on ne revient pas, to find the interplay of gender that is so pervasive and important in Cixous’s work. Switching masculine and feminine articles is not simply a game but a systematic opening of doors, of passages between the two. Changing a letter (un to une, la to le) or a colon changes meaning, and opens it up to infinity: “Loving not knowing. Loving: not knowing” (17).

 

The third essay, “Hélène Cixous’s Book of Hours, Book of Fortune,” looks at time and at the making of time by narrative, by the happening of meaning: the instant. It addresses the contradictions of being human, and of living to be a better human: open to, not closed to. It addresses language as un-naming and re-connection; it addresses art and fear and risk. Finally, it addresses love that is “the mainspring of writing… the secret of her art’s vitality” (174). Love is a scale Cixous plays in the constantly changing key of living and writing the moment. “To be in the depths of anguish, ready to die and to say to oneself: and what’s more, tomorrow I’m going to have puffy eyes, this is us” (20). Calle-Gruber seems to watch all this and then offer a view from the margin, wherever the margin is. The impossibility of knowing or speaking the other adds surplus to the already overflowing text.

 

Compelling memories and associations form the piece of lifewriting entitled “Albums and Legends,” wherein Cixous recounts details of her childhood and family, and includes photographs and a family tree that is haunted by many deaths in concentration camps. Speaking of a photo of her grandfather’s grave next to a photo of him in uniform, she tells us to read it as Hebrew, from right to left: first the soldier, then the grave. This passage enriches our knowledge of the very real roots of Cixous’s multiplicitous approach in the plural genealogies of family, neighborhood, city. Born in Oran to a Spanish/Arab father and a German mother (from Osnabrück), she lives with a strong Nordic presence within her Mediterranean body. Her own childhood was “accompanied and illustrated” (181) by the Northern childhood of her mother (a midwife), as well as of her grandmother Omi (anagram of moi). She lived masculine possibility as well, always close to her slightly younger brother, her other: “Hélène-and-Pierre” (208). The double of that relation is found in her own daughter and son. She felt when her father died that she had to become the father, for family survival and honor, a “mutilating mutation of identity”(197). A doctor with tuberculosis–illness inscribed in the healer himself, a “veiled death,”–he kept a physical distance from his beloved children while engaging in Joycean word play that set Cixous down in the midst of language at an early age. Having recounted her experiences of exclusion and exile, as foreign, as Jewish, as female, she states clearly what runs through all of her texts: “I adopted an imaginary nationality which is literary nationality” (204).

 

The chronology begins not with Cixous’s birth (5 June 1937) but with her father’s death (12 February 1948), the moment when she was thrown into writing (not daring actively to write until she was 27). She has explored/imagined a relationship with her father in depth in a recent text Or: les lettres de mon père (des Femmes, 1997), and in a shorter piece, “Job the Dog,” reveals the discrimination her family experienced in Algeria after his death and its terrible effects. Instances of her political activism are here–although she says the political comes last for her–including starting the first doctoral women’s studies program in Europe, which would have been a program in sexual difference if she had had her say. She has worked closely with Lacan–beginning in the early sixties when he wanted to learn about Joyce–and with many of her fellow leading intellectuals.

 

Not only her prolific output is documented in the bibliography, but the impressive range of her reading and knowledge: the dissertation on Joyce; her kinship with the work of Clarice Lispector; articles on Henry James, Iris Murdoch, Genet, Lewis Carroll, and many on theater, as well as those on politics and art. Numerous writers serve as constant reference points throughout her work: Shakespeare, Montaigne, Kleist, Dostoevsky, Tsvetaeva, among others. She has been translated into at least a dozen languages.

 

In “Aftermaths,” Eric Prenowitz approaches Cixous’s approach, follows her following the movement of writing. Her thinking and observation form a science, a “cixouscience,” though the observer and observed will always be called into question, “aware that the unknown is on both sides of the quest to know” (243). And we don’t know which side is which, or where the boundary is, we don’t know where the limits are. That there are limits somewhere is what allows hope: we fill them in with hope. At the limit is exchange itself, what passes continuously between differences, the passage between others, between two impossibilities. Rather than being an epicenter of displaced meaning, translation here is one more movement in the continuous textual activity of deferral and disruption. Prenowitz describes Rootprints as “opening a new trail through a remarkable archive of dated phenomena” (247).

 

Any woman writing “from the body” will be accused of essentialism, no matter that she points out examples of “écriture féminine” in the works of male authors. This is a concern many readers of Cixous have expressed over the years; does she propose a totalizing view of the body, demonstrate a lack of awareness of cultural, historical, economic impact on woman’s relation to her self? Does she over-emphasize the nurturing feminine, the maternal? Perhaps; at the same time she recognizes the body as a cliché like any other. Rootprints does not clear up these questions. What we can take away from it is another perspective from which to view Cixous’s immense capacity for life, as well as her rigorous writing-thinking process.

 

There are many gems to be found here. Cixous’s courage and generosity inform her words, and encourage those who have not yet tried (or have tried unsuccessfully) to tackle her longer texts.