Écriture des origines, origines de l'écriture by Kathleen Gyssels and Christa Stevens

Abstract

Reviewed by: Écriture des origines, origines de l'écriture by Kathleen Gyssels and Christa Stevens Eilene Hoft-March Gyssels, Kathleen and Christa Stevens, dirs. Écriture des origines, origines de l'écriture. Brill-Rodopi, 2019. Pp. 158. ISBN 978-90-04-41732-8. € 77 (hardcover). Where does Hélène Cixous's writing originate? In what rich soil does she ground her prolific, idiosyncratic work? This is the guiding inquiry of a volume of eight essays on her work, produced in honor of the writer's eightieth birthday and prefaced by a previously unpublished essay by Cixous herself. The editors have organized the volume with a bow to biblio-biographical chronology, although the unity of this collection comes from Cixous's anguished but enriching returns to her beginnings: the "native" land, the father's words, the mother's culture, the poet-philosopher's conversations. Gyssel's and Stevens's introduction provides a lovely, concise orientation: the cixousian return to origins can only occur in writing. Although this collection represents works primarily spanning the 90s to 2017, references to origins have appeared in her earliest texts in the 70s and 80s. Cixous's own text, "Le legs empoisonné," complicates the notion of origins as a straightforward transfer of [End Page 190] legacies through humans over time. Knowing that loss and betrayal are inevitable inheritances imposed on us by our (beloved) predecessors, Cixous's self-scrutinizing writing reads, muses, equivocates, grieves, regrets, self-blames, and loves. From there, Christa Stevens's essay explores the ambivalent trope of the garden as primal scene connoting paradise and hell, innocence and violence, desire and imprisonment—a double bind nevertheless productive of Cixous's poetic and politicized writing. The trope also permits a return to the original couple in the garden of the writer and her father, resurrected as beloved brother, dog, lover, or poet. Kathleen Gyssels makes an incisive comparison between Cixous's and Albert Memmi's narrations of key childhood events that confirmed the alterity of both authors in relationship to their "native" French colonial Maghreb. Both authors feature a totemic animal (a dog, for Cixous; a scorpion for Memmi) through which each reclaims their excluded status and confirms their suspicions of a "unified" identity. Maxime Decout's chapter homes in on Cixous's culturally and religiously unmoored "judéité," evident in her shifting and paranomastic language. Her Jewish heritage is undecipherable but also an inevitable guilt to be borne. Certain of these originary ambiguities become incarnate: the writer's expiatory Down's syndrome son or her literal descent from deported relatives. Catherine Phillips attributes Cixous's recent intensification of contested, deferred, unsuccessful yet repeated returns to origins as informing her poetics. Cixous figures her returns "autrement," through literature and dreams, to those places (Algeria, Osnabruck, Jerusalem) that in turn implicate other places, other promises, other books—a movement consistent with Cixous's original formulation of écriture feminine. Hervé Sanson gives a meticulous reading of Si près (about Cixous's return to Algeria) that posits the impossibility of transmuting the experience of return into a literary project. The mere attempt, however, richly disseminates "le legs de l'humus algérien," revealing the writer's "éthique pour la vie" (110). Focusing on Chapitre Los and Homère est morte, texts to either side of the mother Eve's death, Metka Zupančič analyzes the frenetic engendering of writing in response to loss, ever compounded by previous disappearances. Zupančič, like Cixous, chooses to focus on what literature can repair of mortality and disappearance: for instance, a death-defying laugh from Isaac, biblical wrestler of angels. Annelies Schulte Nordholt interprets the dialogue of Cécile Wajsbrot and Cixous about exile, loss, and mourning, teasing out their respective attachments to the German language that, while neither their native tongue nor that of their writing, is for both highly affective, rich in memory (or post-memory). The correspondents also entwine commentary about their fraught but warm relationships to a German city, Osnabrück for Cixous and Berlin for Wajsbrot. Oriane Pettini follows Cixous's reading of Claire Lispector, the latter having modeled a "mnesic" process that traces back to the source of meanings. Both authors reject "oculocentrism," which...