Helene Cixous

Authorship, Autobiography and Love

Susan Sellers

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745612553
  9780745612546
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745668505
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book is a clear and accessible introduction to the writings of Helene Cixous, novelist, dramatist and critic, whose work has had a major impact on feminist theory and practice.

Susan Sellers, a major scholar on Cixous, provides a lucid account of Cixous's theoretical position, and in particular her distinctive theory of an 'écriture féminine'. She discusses the development of Cixous's literary oeuvre in the context of this theory, and analyses a selection of the works in detail to illustrate the different stages in Cixous's writing career.

Focusing on the key novels and plays, Sellers explores a range of issues and themes central to her work; the correlation between the death of Cixous's own father and her 'coming-into-being' as a writer; the psychological process of separation and individuation and the creation of a female authorial self; the discovery of the other and the dramatization of love; the delineation/depiction of an alternative form of relationship between self and other which would have a significance in a wider sphere than that of the merely personal.

This much-needed book will be welcomed by students in literature and literary theory, feminism and women's studies, English and French studies and philosophy.

1

The Early Texts

Ecrire? Mais si j’écrivais ‘JE’ qui serais-je? Je pouvais bien passer sous ‘JE’ dans le quotidien sans en savoir plus long, mais écrire sans savoir qui-je, comment l’aurais-je fait?

‘La Venue à l’écriture’, p. 39

Write? But if I wrote ‘I’, who would I be? I could pass for ‘I’ in daily life without knowing anything more about it, but write without knowing I-Who, how could I have done that?

‘Coming to Writing’, p. 29

My reading in this chapter will focus on Hélène Cixous’ Dedans¹ – Inside – as illustrative of her early writing, though reference will also be made to the other fictional texts written between 1967 and 1973. Inside was published in 1969, two years after the collection of stories Le Prénom de Dieu² (‘The First Name of God’) and in the same year as Cixous’ doctoral thesis L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement (The Exile of James Joyce).³ Inside concerns the nascent subject, in relation to the experiences of loss and death which I suggest mark this first period of Cixous’ writing, and it is the text Cixous herself singles out as exemplary in terms of her writing biography in her article ‘From the Scene of the Unconscious’.⁴ My reading of Inside will involve detailed analysis of the text in the light of Cixous’ account of her writing apprenticeship and delineations of écriture féminine,⁵ drawing, for its wider theoretical frame, on psychoanalytic descriptions of the self’s formation.

Inside is the story of the father’s death. As Cixous stresses in ‘From the Scene of the Unconscious’ it was the experience of her own father’s death that prompted her to write,⁶ a point she reiterates in ‘Coming to Writing’: ‘at first I really wrote to bar death. Because of a death’ (p. 5). Writing, Cixous suggests, was initially a means of postponing the work of mourning – ‘writing is always first a way of not being able to go through with mourning for death’ (p. 38) – but then became a medium in which it was possible to recreate – and hence move beyond – loss (p. 8).

It is this process that is the subject of Inside. In ‘Coming to Writing’ Cixous asserts that it was the ‘hell’ (p. 38) of abandonment and bereavement that provided the motivation for Inside: ‘its body,’ she writes, ‘is sobbing, stifled breath, blanks and crises’ (p. 53). ‘Hell’ is at once the chasm of primary loss, and the ongoing agony of the feminine subject’s struggle to locate herself within an alien order. Exploration of this ‘hell’ is both necessary and (necessarily) painful if the self is to succeed in emerging from it. As Cixous states in ‘From the Scene of the Unconscious’, it involves working through one’s own primal scene of separation and understanding how the issue of origin has been culturally determined:

first of all inside, the place where one makes acquaintance with mythologies, where one learns the secrets of narratives by way of dreams, where one collides with drives, which Freud called our Titans. One must go and see what is taking place deep down, what is repressed, what prevents us from living or from thinking and which is always on an epic scale, though these are unformed and dangerous epics. One must go back to the origins, work on the mystery of origins, for this is how one comes to work on the mysteries of the end. Going to work on the question of where, where from, in order to work next on next. (pp. 24–5)

Inside opens with an image of enclosure:

MY HOUSE IS SURROUNDED. IT IS ENCIRCLED BY THE IRON GRATING. INSIDE, we live. Outside, they are fifty thousand, they surround us. (p. 7)

The positioning of ‘inside’ in the block capitals used to reinforce the image of enclosure immediately alerts the reader to its paradoxical status within the text. ‘Inside’ is both safe and imprisoning. The ‘we’ of the opening lines gives place to ‘I’, as an imagined struggle between the ‘I’ and ‘the fifty thousand others’ brings death ‘inside’ the enclosure. ‘Inside’ is described as a place the I must – but also need never – leave:

I must go out. It isn’t a duty imposed on me by the others however. I could stay here without ever opening the gate, the house would make it easy. I could grow up, grow old, reach the very end without ever going out. (p. 8)

Inside can be read as a metaphor for the state prior to separation in which the distinction between self and other has still to be figured. Inside is both ‘inside’ the pre-Oedipal body in which there is, as yet, no division and ‘inside’ the primary loss caused by the father’s death.⁷

Language plays a vital role in the I’s emergence from this ‘inside’. The I reworks the proposition that ‘my father was dead, because he was the best’ by removing the conjunction and transposing the sentence into the present tense: ‘then I made some progress in the art of defending myself and declared: “my father is dead. He is the best”‘ (p. 8). The suppression of the ‘because’ and substitution of the present tense in the second part of the phrase now enunciated as a separate sentence bring the father (back) to life.

Language’s role as a medium in which it becomes possible to combat death is developed in the text. In the final section of Inside, language is imaged as providing the self with power over ‘life and death, love and law’ (p. 103). This function of language is also a theme of the short story collection Le Prénom de Dieu. In ‘L’Outre Vide’ (The Beyond Void’) the acquisition of language enables emergence from the womb of death (see p. 12); in ‘Le Lac’ (The Lake’) the father’s last letter orders the telling of our lives: ‘only what we tell ourselves is immortal’ (p. 153).

One of the questions raised by Inside in the light of Cixous’ depictions of écriture féminine is the extent to which the text moves beyond a personal exploration of loss and death. In her writing on Blanchot’s The Madness of the Day (see the Introduction above), Cixous suggests that Blanchot’s madness is refused a life of its own within the text as Blanchot struggles to comprehend and control his experience. A similar question is broached here.

In Inside, it is the father’s gift of language that provides the central focus (p. 19).⁸ To begin with it is the sound of the word that attracts – ‘first, I’d listen to the sound of the new word my father pronounced’ – while its meaning divides and organizes the world (p. 32).⁹ This division involves the severance of self and other. The body is no longer whole and co-extensive with its environment but identified as separate ‘inside’ an already determined order: ‘my fingers were chopped up into joints, my hand, which to me was beautiful and alive, was carved up, jointed, far away’ (p. 33).¹⁰

The father’s death coincides with separation from the mother (see, for example, p. 9).¹¹ The Oedipal triangle of father, mother and self is imaged as ‘three forces, three kinds of matter, three sorts of space’ (p. 17)¹² in which the self is the unknown: ‘in the center there was me and what I could see, I was alone, barely knowing myself (pp. 17–18). Division propels the I into language and the ‘real’ of time and history:

yesterday I was little. Today I was somewhere else and someone else. Yesterday time, world, History, life, all forms of knowledge were in my father’s head, and I was in his hands, and there was nothing I needed.... I heard the rumblings of the world that I would enter later on.... I had the right to rule in a world created for my pleasure, which was enough for me. What was real interested me not at all for it did not burden me. (p. 17)

The process of separation is also figured in the text through the image of a large, disembodied mouth (pp. 63–5). The mouth is speaking and the proximity of the lips makes them appear immense (p. 63). The mouth is both ‘inside’ – talking from as well as to the self – and outside: it is what the I sees. The words spoken by the mouth animate the self, a propulsion depicted in terms of heat and cold:

la fermeté du discours frotte, frotte, pétrit la pate, m’échauffe, je me creuse, pivote plus vite, vire, je me ramasse vers les commissures, elle m’aspire, je me gonfle en réponse, je brûle, ah! je me déchire, je m’ouvre, ah! je gèle au milieu là, fermons, resserrons, je préfère le chaud, la trace du trou au centre est un peu raide, mais j’en profite pour résister au froid: on me frappe du dehors, coups brefs, je laisse rentrer l’écho du bruit, pas plus, dehors le froid! (p. 98)

[the firmness of the speech rubbing, rubbing kneads my pasty mass, firing me up, I hollow myself out, going round faster and faster, turning round, I pick myself up and make for the corners of the mouth, it sucks me in, I swell up in reply, I’m burning, ah! I’m being torn apart, I’m opening up, ah! I’m freezing in the middle there, let’s close up, tighten up, I’d rather have the heat, the path made by the hole in the center is a little steep, but I’m using it to resist the cold: on the outside someone is knocking at me with quick short strokes, I let the echo of the noise come in, no more, out with the cold! (pp. 63– 4)]

This passage, in its endeavour to convey the experiences of the body by repeating key words and sounds, its use of punctuation and accumulation of short phrases within an open sentence structure, presents an interesting illustration of Cixous’ own feminine writing.

The pulsion towards the outside, towards birth of the self, which is at first resisted, is finally acceded to. The image of the mouth and lips, with the hole between, with its evocation of the female sex, underscores the self’s separation as a form of birth:

I concentrate myself around the lips. I am convinced, closed.... I pull myself together; it’s all done, I make a sign, the mouth says not one word more, we understand each other, but that makes my grief explode: I’m left so alone and black when it vanishes. (p. 64)

The mouth’s disappearance, its lack, is the necessary condition for birth. Evoking psychoanalytic accounts of the self’s formation in relation to the mother – who is ultimately perceived as separate since her comings and goings are recognized by the child as beyond its control – the fusion of mouth, language and self (see p. 64) divides and becomes a memory:

I am there, no doubt about it, but I miss it. Later on I miss the mouth and remember, I still miss it, I stay on reaching out toward the space that embraced it, maybe it will speak to me again, I start waiting for it, facing its absence, my smooth bearing, my taut substance, mesmerizing my fibers to the left, I stay on, so I’m the one who stays and it’s the mouth that comes and goes. (p. 64)

The emphasis on the feminine, unfortunately lost in the English translation, reinforces the link between mouth and mother (both mouth and mother take the feminine gender in French).

The mouth’s disappearance brings into focus a hand. This hand recalls the hand brought into being by language on page 33 of the text (cited above), the hand extended by the lover in Part Two (p. 109), and the I’s severing of her finger on pages 124–5 – an incident graphically depicting the I’s castration by the father-lover. Here, the mouth’s removal brings the hand into existence: ‘a blue hand stretches out palm down, on the left, below. The fingers appear’ (p. 64). The hand’s function is not, however, to replace the mouth, but to explore the newly perceived boundaries of the self:

the blue hand hesitates or rather floats, resting on the moving surface that is me, or rather slides over my congealed surface, but where is it going? how far? fine hand long blue fingers sliding up to where I am and then am no more, and suppose it were to go all the way to the edges? (p. 64)

This exploration is linked to the self’s desire for the lost mouth, in a passage which again employs a striking use of language:

la masse d’espoir se métallise, rivée à la cicatrice du trou sans cesse tac tapé toc à pe/toc-tits coups toc/de froid, toc, et hop, d’un bond se colle au creux de la paume et nous voilà partis vers les bords. (p. 99)

[the thickness of my hope turns to metal, riveted to the hole’s wound knocked over and over again tick tock knock by lit-le/knocks cold/knock, knock, and hop, my thickness clings to the hollow of the palm, and off we go in one leap toward the edges. (p. 65)]

The I’s desire marks a progression, since the self now exists ‘inside’ (an) order:

I a soft amorphous shape without even a center before there was a wound, I trembled, you could have said I barely existed. So there has been progress: I remember, I am extensible, and no doubt prehensible, I can distinguish between large and small, black and blue, form and myself.... Things fall into place, there is progress. (p. 65)

Progress involves ‘contradiction’, since the I now has boundaries distinguishing her from the infinity of the world (p. 65). She is ‘inside’ a body demarcated by physical limits: ‘skin I am inside that skin, stretched out between its lips and fingers’ (p. 65). This insistence on the physical limits of the body is present in an earlier episode in which the I discusses with her brother whether or not there is a ‘master’ beyond our fear (p. 24). The conversation ends with the recognition that our capacities – to dream, move beyond interdiction, ‘fly’ (p. 25) – are bound only by the limitations of the body. One is ‘inside’ the human body; ‘inside’ human mortality.¹³

The mother, taking over from the father, plays a vital role in the self’s construction:

I owe her... my discovery of social laws.... Shame upon shame, they put me together thus.

... Thus I learned that there was me and there was you, and that I could be one or the other. (p. 15)

The father is imaged retrospectively as the primary sym...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: Cixous and écriture féminine
• 1. The Early Texts
• 2. Creating a Feminine Subject
• 3. Writing with the Voice of the Other
• 4. Cixous and the Theatre
• 5. Recent Writings
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index