The focus of Cixous's discourse is écriture féminine
("feminine writing"), a project begun in the middle 1970s when
Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Catherine Clément, among others,
began reading texts in the particular contexts of women's experience. Their
general strategy, at odds with biologically based readings of Sigmund Freud,
reflected a notion of femininity and feminine writing based not on a
"given" essence of male and female characteristics but on culturally
achieved conventions, such as "openness" in feminine texts as a lack
of repressive patterning. This theorizing, pursued in the politicized French
atmosphere during deconstruction and cultural revolution, prompted questions
about how "writing" deploys power, how to read a feminine (non-patriarchal)
text, and, with even greater urgency, what the "feminine" is.
In
But it is in the apocalyptic scenario that she envisions as preparatory
to the venue à l'écriture of woman that Cixous makes her mark:
When the "repressed" of their culture and
their society returns, it's an explosive, utterly destructive,
staggering return, with a force never yet unleashed and equal to the most
forbidding of suppressions. For when the Phallic period comes to an end, women
will have been either annihilated or borne up to the highest and most violent
incandescence. ("Laugh" 886)
Cixous is aware of the difficulties of envisioning a writing practice
that cannot be theorized and whose existence is scanty. She notes how in
The "openness" of such writing is evident in Cixous's own
style both in fictional texts such as Souffles (1975) and Angst
(1977) and in "Laugh," as when she writes that "we the
precocious, we the repressed of culture, our lovely mouths gagged with pollen,
our wind knocked out of us, we the labyrinths, the ladders, the trampled
spaces, the bevies -- we are black and we are beautiful"
("Laugh" 878). In such language Cixous forces exposition into poetic
association and controls the excess of imagery through repetition and nonlinear
accretions. Virginia Woolf contrasts such writing to "male,"
"shadowed," or violently imposed writing. This is Kristeva's conception,
too, of jouissance, the poetic discourse "beyond" the
masculine text of reason and order. For Cixous, Woolf, and Kristeva, there is
the key assumption that the feminine economy of excess does not need
re-creation, to be made anew, because it persists in the margins and gaps (as
the repressed, the unconscious) of male-dominated culture. As a
characteristically deconstructive reader, she understands texts as built upon a
system of cultural contradictions, especially concerning values. In her reading
she strives to focus on those contradictions and then to find the channels of
"excess" and violation, accidents of meaning and perversities of
signification, through which texts inscribe a feminine writing that goes beyond
and escapes the masculine economy of texts.
Cixous's post-Lacanian discourse, however, has also been indicted for
supporting patriarchal and psychoanalytic norms. Ann Rosalind Jones and others
have charged that underlying Cixous's feminine economy, her sophistication in
articulating it notwithstanding, is the assumption of an "essential"
femininity in texts, the identifiable quality that allows feminine discourse to
be named as such in relation to Oedipus, the essential quality of openness that
allows a text to resist external control and the superimposition of closed
Oedipal patterns. More recently, however, other critics have come to her
rescue. Christiane Makward has emphasized Cixous's production as creative
writer and has argued that while most of her readers are determined to neglect
her creative work and to see "Laugh of the Medusa" as encapsulating
her thinking, Cixous's work continues to change: "Medusa has been
classified, petrified, sentenced, guilty of biologism, guilty of essentialism,
of utopianism….But she does not laugh, she is not listening, she just is not
there" (2). Anu Aneja has suggested that the case against écriture
féminine results from a desire "to locate l'écriture féminine
within a definite category, a desire to co-opt into a literary theory that
which always exceeds it" (195). Aneja's observations place Cixous's
discourse in relation to the Eastern doctrine of nonduality: "Cixous'
proposed depersonalization, like that of the ancient east, desires to put
something back into an incomplete and mechanical life, a life lived without passion
or intensity" (198-99). This view clarifies the trajectory of Cixous's
most recent work, which has moved away, as Cixous herself claims, from
"work on the ego" (Jardine and Menke 236).
Recently at work in the theatre, Cixous sees Portrait de Dora
(1976) as marking the beginnings of her theatrical career. Focusing on
"what Freud did not understand and all that Dora didn't know"
(Franke, "Interview" 173), this piece was not written as a play (like
Le Nom d'Oedipe: Chant du corps interdit [1978], which was a libretto
for an opera). She wrote about Dora in her novel Portrait du soleil in
1973 and in The Newly Born Woman (1975) and finally wrote the play for
staging at the Théâtre d'Orsay in
In the theatre Cixous has found a new freedom from her own voice and
from the self. She claims that the theatre allows her to "step out of
[her] own language, and borrow the poorest of languages" (166), to forget
Hélène Cixous, French intellectual, and become a peasant woman. Time is not
artificially elongated in the theatre as it is in fiction, she argues, and the theatre,
therefore, is better equipped to capture a precise moment in human destiny
(170) -- for Cixous, the theatre’s highest achievement over fiction. In her
plays she considers most poignant the pauses that she imposes on events, scenes
that stop history and become the moments, political and personal, when "we
interrogate ourselves and we say our fear and our indecision" (152).
Hélène Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" (trans. Annette
Kuhn, Signs 7 [1981]), "The Character of 'Character'" (trans.
Keith Cohen. New Literary History 5 [1974]), "Coming to
Writing" and Other Essays (ed. Deborah Jensen, trans. Sarah Cornell,
Deborah Jensen, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers, 1991), Illa (1980), Readings:
The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
(trans. Verena A. Conley, 1991), "Le Rire de
Anu Aneja, "The
Mystic Aspect of L'Écriture féminine: Hélène Cixous' Vivre l'Orange,"
Qui parle 3 (1989); Verena A. Conley, Hélène Cixous: Writing the
Feminine (1984), Hélène Cixous (1992); Robert Con Davis, "Woman
as Oppositional Reader: Cixous on Discourse," Gender in the Classroom:
Power and Pedagogy (ed. Susan L. Gabriel and Isaiah Smithson, 1990);
Jean-Joseph Goux, Freud, Marx: Economie et symbolique (1973); Elizabeth
A. Grosz, "Lacan and Feminism," Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction
(1990); Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity
(1985); Alice Jardine and Anne Menke, "The Politics of Tradition: Placing
Women in French Literature," Yale French Studies 75 (1988); Sarah
Kofman, L'Enfance de l'art: Une Interprétation de l'esthétique freudienne
(1970, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud's Aesthetics,
trans. Winifred Woodhull, 1988); Christiane Makward,
"Hélène Cixous and the Myth of 'Feminine Writing,' or 'Hélène in
Theoryland'" (1990); Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist
Literary Theory (1985); Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Feminist
Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (1985); Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987).
Excerpt taken from: The John Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism.
©1994 The