Douglas A. Davis

Department of English
Haverford College
<D_Davis@Hvrford>

 

Cixous, Helene. “Coming to writing” and other essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Trans. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, Susan Sellers. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991.

 

We have learned from Freud (who found the lesson hard to keep in mind) that if one would read the unconscious, one must attend to silence as to sound. I come to be writing of Helene Cixous through her writing of “Dora,” the girl who so obsessed Freud in the months after his own writing of The Interpretation of Dreams that she called forth his most (in)famous (counter)transference and thereby enticed Sartre, Lacan, and H.C.–enough distinguished literary and psychoanalytic reinterpreters to fill a curriculum–to retell her-story. In all these re-visions of the young lady it is of course never Ida Bauer who speaks, but “Dora” who is overheard voicing another’s thoughts. Cixous’s take on the nuclear moment in Freud’s 1905 “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” opens with the good doctor pressing his adolescent patient for the details of the encounter by the lake, where her father’s mistress’s husband may have kissed her, where she may have desired him, may have felt his aroused body, may have slapped his face:

 

 
          Freud's voice (seated, seen from behind)
          "...these events project themselves like a shadow
          in dreams, they often become so clear that we feel
          we can grasp them, but yet they escape
          interpretation, and if we proceed without skill
          and special caution, we cannot know if such a
          scene really took place."

          DORA
          (a voice which rips through silence--half
          threatening and half begging--is heard)
            If you dare kiss me, I'll slap you!
                         (becoming more tenderly playful)
                         (all of a sudden, close to his ear)
          FREUD
            Yes, you will tell me in full detail.
                         (voice from afar)
          DORA
            If you want.
                         (voice awakens)
            If you [vous] want.  And after that?
          FREUD
            You will tell me about the incident by the lake,
            in full detail.
          DORA
            Why did I keep silent the first days after the
            incident by the lake?
          FREUD
            To whom do you think you should ask that
            question?
          DORA
            Why did I then suddenly tell my parents about
            it?
          FREUD
            Do you know why?
          DORA
                         (Does not answer but tells this
                          story in a dreamlike voice) 
            As father prepared to leave, I said that I would
          not stay there without him.  Why did I tell my
          mother about the incident so that she would repeat
          it to my father? (Cixous, 1983, 2-3)

 

Thus Freud, quintessential modern (and arguably the first post-modern) thinker, meets H.C. across the gaps, pauses, and ellipses of “Dora”‘s discourse. And in the glimpses of H.C.’s work of the past fifteen years collected in this slim volume, there are analogous puzzles aplenty for the reader who seeks a personage behind the texts, who would lead Cixous onto a stage and examine her about time, place and person: who did what, and with what, and to whom?

 

Freud is not present in this collection of six of Cixous’s essays spanning 1976-89, though we imagine him squirming at the “Requiemth Lecture on the Infeminitesimal,” in “Coming to Writing” (35), which parodies his masochistic Lecture 33, on “Femininity.” H.C. shares Freud’s problem in that infamous pseudolecture, viz., to discover by writing her “how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition” (Freud, 1933, 116); but she has also read his uneasymaking strange tribute to his daughter Anna, “A Child is Being Beaten” (“A Girl Is Being Killed,” 8), and she wants us to understand that the self- mother-loving woman who comes to her writing is

 

not the "beautiful woman" Uncle Freud speaks of, the beauty in the mirror, the beauty who loves herself so much that no one can ever love her enough, not the queen of beauty. (51)

 

The avuncular presence of “Coming to Writing” is rather a “capitalist-realist superuncle,” who annually attempts her critical domestication:

 

The unknown just doesn't sell. Our customers demand simplicity. You're always full of doubles, we can't count on you, there is otherness in your sameness. (33)

 

The six translations are bookended by fine interpretive pieces by Susan Rubin Suleiman (“Writing Past the Wall, or the Passion according to H.C.”) and Deborah Jensen (“Coming to Reading Helene Cixous”), the latter an effective Baedeker to the terrain covered by Cixous in the fourteen years represented by these pieces.

 

These essays all treat of love, of passion discovered, created by the act(s) of reading/writing. For Cixous this process is most thoroughly experienced in relation to the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, who occasions two of the pieces included. The second, “Clarice Lispector: The Approach: Letting Oneself (be) Read (by) Clarice Lispector: The Passion According to C.L.” articulates for H.C. the paradigmatic relationship with an author and her text:

 

How to "read" Clarice Lispector: In the passion according to C.L.: writing-a-woman. What will we call "reading," when a text overflows all books and comes to meet us, giving itself to be lived? Was heisst lesen? (What is called reading?) (58)

 

Without Lispector’s own text juxtaposed (H.C. sets a paragraph of C.L.’s Portuguese in her essay, and sprinkles quoted phrases throughout), it is the exuberant love-letter quality of this essay that is paramount, as Cixous is moved to verbigerative wordplay (much of it in German) with Lispector’s name and concepts. The textual courtship of Lispector suffuses the last three essays as well: “The Last Painting or the Portrait of God,” “By the Light of an Apple,” and “The Author in Truth.” Together, these constitute a powerful paean to self-discovery through literature, in which the ego takes on the imagined persona of the beloved writer as mentor. This time-honored process, Cixous show us by contrast, has traditionally been a matter between men, and within a dominant cultural-political context:

 

If Kafka had been a woman. If Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger had been able to stop being German, if he had written the Romance of the Earth. (132)

 

The other piece included is “Tancredi Continues,” H.C.’s response to Rossini’s opera, featuring Clorinda, “woman singing as a woman pretending to be a man,” of which Susan Rubin Suleiman asks/answers:

 

Is this poetry? Critical commentary? Autobiography? Ethical reflection? Feminist theory? Yes. (xi)

 

If this volume is one’s point of entry to Cixous’s writing, biographical questions will echo at each paragraph. H.C. locates her sense of otherness, of “Jewoman,” German-French self-consciousness, in her Algerian childhood. Yet despite a nod to the archangel who gave the Prophet dictation and the people of the Book a new religion (“The attack was imperious: ‘Write!’ Even though I was only a meager anonymous mouse, I knew vividly the awful jolt that galvanizes the prophet, wakened in mid-life by an order from above” [9-10]), no recognizable North African Arab appears on her mental stage, only a glimpse of what might be shadow, as little H.C. lures a remembered little French girl into a corner of Algiers’ Officers’ Park:

 

I beat up children. The Enemy's little ones. The little pedigreed French. . . . Not a trace of a beggar, not a shadow of a slave, of an Arab, of wretchedness. (CtW 19)

 

Not of, but in, French North Africa, and, later, France itself, is H.C., an outsider to Freud’s avuncular heterosexism, to the “Sacred Garden of French literature,” to patripolitics generally. She writes of Jerusalem, abode of peace contended by two passionate peoples–Arab and Jew, male and female, West and East –but without telegraphing her political wishes for it/them. Is the new Jerusalem for everyone? Is Cixous’s writing?

 

H.C.’s fluency in what Lacan pronounced the unconscious Discourse of the Other, the unconscious that speaks the conscious, resounds in these translations. Translating Cixous (like translating Freud) is a special challenge, because puns, cliched French and German usages, klang associations, and alliteration play such a role in her writing. Sarah Cornell, Deborah Jenson, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers seem to have met this challenge, giving us a text that often entices and seldom merely puzzles, inviting the reader to speculate over the sound and psychodynamics of H.C.’s original. The footnotes are indispensable, since “from the point of view of the soul’s eye: the eye of a womansoul” (4) is not “du point de vue de l’oeil d’ame. L’oeil dame” (197n). Yet the joyous, erotic, metonymic quality of Cixous’s words survives the change of sound.

 

Works Cited

 

• Cixous, Helene. “Portrait of Dora.” Diacritics (1983): 2-32.
• Freud, Sigmund (1905). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Ed. and trans. James J. Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud SE), vol 7. London: Hogarth.
• Freud, Sigmund (1919). “‘A child is being beaten’: A contribution to the study of the origin of sexual perversions.” SE, vol 17, 175-204.
• Freud, Sigmund (1933). “Femininity.” SE, vol 22, 112-135.
• Lacan, Jacques [1951]. “Intervention on transference.” Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Janet Rose. Feminine Sexuality. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul (1959/1984). The Freud scenario. Ed. J.-B Pontalis. Trans. Q. Hoare. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1985.