Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing 1526140667, 9781526140661

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Hélène Cixous

Hélène Cixous Dreamer, realist, analyst, writing

Nicholas Royle

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Nicholas Royle 2020 The right of Nicholas Royle (b. 1957) to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4066 1 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover credit: Rembrandt, ‘An old woman reading’ (1655). The Buccleuch Collections Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Typeset in Minion Pro by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

For Jinan and In memory of Vanessa ‘forever child’ (1966–2018)

Natalia Gasson, Omnicisence.

Contents

List of illustrations Foreword: Forewarnings by Eric Prenowitz Acknowledgements A note on references

viii ix xiv xvii

  1   2   3   4   5   6  7   8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

1 19 35 53 62 78 89 100 104 117 128 145 152 183 207 230

Introduction: dreamer, realist, analyst, writing Cixous cuts: through everything Advertisement: the joys of literature and the return of the dead Cixous cuts: take time Dream in literature Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth Away Cixous cuts: the veil in me Portmanteau Cixous cuts: Lewis Carroll To awake, Shakespeare of the Night Dream treatment: on sitting down to read a letter from Freud Side thinking All wards Four words for Cixous The one time Hélène Cixous entered my garden

Index of works by Cixous General index

232 234

Illustrations

Frontispiece: Natalia Gasson, Omnicisence. Courtesy of the artist. www.NataliaGasson.rocks vi 1 Rembrandt van Rijn, The Beheading of John the Baptist. Courtesy of 12 Musée du Louvre, D.A.G. 2 Extract of a letter from Hélène Cixous, August 2017. Courtesy of 202 Hélène Cixous. 3 ‘Ornithophony’, a drawing by Hélène Cixous. Courtesy of Hélène Cixous. 215

Foreword: Forewarnings Eric Prenowitz

I feel a protective urge with regard to this book, a wish to shield it from the claws of a gross misreading, and I think it has to do with its relation to words. As if they’re put to some other use here. Because when we think about them at all we tend to think words are just the things we use to say and to write stuff. But it turns out that’s not the whole of it. I even want to say one can’t understand the book, one can’t make much meaningful sense of it, if one doesn’t understand what a word is­– ­for Nicholas Royle, for Hélène Cixous for Nicholas Royle. Nicholas Royle’s words are not what we think, in any case, and indeed the ones in this book are constantly shaking up our thinking, whether we know it or not, along with our relations to the world and each other. Words clearly whisper weird and wonderful things in Nicholas Royle’s ear, and he’s our guide here on an incredible voyage among them. This secret understanding with words comes to Royle no doubt from literature or poetry, that place where words are cherished in their own right and given free range, never pressed narrowly into service as the simple vehicles of a discourse. It comes to him from Jacques Derrida, who so frequently puts himself and his thinking at the service of a word. And it comes to him from Hélène Cixous, this being one of the primary things Nicholas Royle demonstrates in the book: the extraordinary cixousian world of words and how it speaks to and resonates with the royle word world. Maybe every true writer or poet has some fetish words, some lexical intimates they keep returning to or never leave. Theorists and philosophers also have fetish words, but the similarities stop there. Any ‘theorist’ worth his or her salt must invent, and claim rights to, a new concept. But then this concept must be identifiable, it must be labelled in order to enter the marketplace of ideas: the

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new concept needs a new word that will function as its name, its handle, its code. Naturally, this theory-word must not have a mind of its own: it is there only to fix the new concept, to identify it in a durable manner, so that property rights can be exercised over it. Or to put it more charitably, so that the concept in question can be used effectively, and shared, reappropriated­– ­often, it must be said, for a good cause. Commodifying ideas by means of word-markers is often a strategic necessity in political/theoretical debates and struggles. Now it is no secret Nicholas Royle has some special word affinities (telepathy, uncanny, mole, veering … to name a few that have appeared in his titles), so which side is he on? If I had to choose, I wouldn’t hesitate to put him with the poets, with certain wordy poets, but things are a bit more complicated: Royle is hard to place, and this difficulty is a key element of the book. He intentionally dissolves the lines between poetry and theory such that his multifaceted writing glints at times with enlightening critical, theoretical reflections and scintillates at others with poetic flashes and underground fibre-optical gleams. The irony, of course, is that it’s not the word-playing poets but the apparently more rational theorists who have a naïve relation to words: they assume they can domesticate words and take ownership of them, that it is within their power as theorists to fix a word to a concept, and that words fixed in this way will hold tight. Indeed, they often succumb to a form of magical thinking, and hang their coat with a sigh on the newly coined word as if the word in its concrete reality guaranteed the solidity of the new concept. Nicholas Royle is not a theorist of this ilk, even if he carefully leaves the door always ajar, never repudiating or abjuring theory. His relation to words, to his ‘fetish’ words in particular, is never anti- or un-theoretical, but they are always for him in the first and last instance a poet’s words: shifting, metamorphing, as-yet-unknown semi-living creatures that are constantly apt to throw up surprising new sounds, syllables, groans or cries, new friends or enemies, new ideas of course, new flights of fancy. Or old, it really comes down to the same thing in this terrain: etymology, as Royle manipulates it, is always something of the future, charting new, unexpected destinies. This intense, critical, playful relation to words places Nicholas Royle in good company, between Derrida and Cixous and a great genealogy of English-language writers, starting with Shakespeare, of whom, by the way, he offers a series of brilliant, often jaw-dropping readings here. Yet Royle has his own word theatre, his own plays, his own way of ‘playing’ (with) words: at times disarmingly unguarded, it is never gratuitous, or rather: it is free, and for free, but always reflecting, accompanying or anticipating a work of thinking. He plays words



Foreword: Forewarnings xi

out like a fixed set of possibilities in a closed system of rules (with a dictionary rulebook always at hand), but also like the line of a kite or a fishing rod, and yet this playing out, this unwinding of a yarn, is not opposed in Royle’s hands to its other, the winding in, the knotting or weaving, the ravelling of the writing. So if this book were a house or a garden or even a burrow with its galleries, here’s the warning I’d hang at the entrance: tread lightly here, do not assume you know in advance what any one word means or does, be ready to learn it anew, prepare to be unprepared, be sure to take things at face value, with its eyes, its ears, the back of its mind; any signs of innocence you may find here, in particular, are indeed innocent, but they are also something else: if not calculated or calculating, they are wise to some other thinking and linking, some other mode of transport between texts and words and ideas. This book is not only an excellent introduction to Hélène Cixous’s work and a brilliant exploration and analysis of its extraordinary powers and subtleties: it has tangled (itself) so inextricably with Cixous’s writing that it is a henceforth indispensable add-on to it, a new tendril or eddy of the oeuvre, an unforeseen branch on the other side: on the other side of the book or the page, on the other side of language, of the channel and the body, so different yet so intimately entangled that it’s hard at times to tell where the reading stops and the writing begins. But what is most striking, and ultimately inexplicable­– ­inexplicable in the way certain poetic effects can resist every critical onslaught­– ­is that this book enters into what I can only call a telepathic relation with Hélène Cixous’s writing: the book is all about reading, of course, it’s a performative runaway exposé on reading, but in the process it’s as if this happily unhinged free-wheeling meticulous reading, which operates necessarily from afar, somehow has a direct link into the heart of the text it is reading, from one mind to another, from one writer to another, from one writing to another and from one language to another. It’s a question of translation, but one that can take an antagonistic turn, for example in the great debate, to put it politely, between Birds and Cats. By approaching Cixous’s vast multifarious chimerical body of work from the point of view of a bird, Royle’s book charts an unusual, an unexpected trajectory­– ­at least if we are to judge by the most obvious, measurable surface of Hélène Cixous’s oeuvre (incalculably more fur than feathers) and its critical response (innumerable references to Cixous’s cats, particularly from Messie (1996) on, let’s say; relatively little about her birds). This already says something important about Nicholas Royle’s project: it opens a new reading-perspective on Cixous’s

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writing. But there’s more here than this. For one thing, to perch himself and his critical interpretative apparatus so resolutely among the birds is to take sides in what certainly appears like an irreconcilable dispute, not to say a battle to the death: it seems there is no sublation possible between cats and birds, and this is perhaps reflected in the fact that the one place in Cixous’s oeuvre where there is an explicit, carnal, deadly, perhaps death-defying cat–bird encounter, the short text ‘Shared at Dawn’, is only referred to in passing here, at the very end of the book (p. 218). You’re either on one side or the other, and Nicholas Royle has very decisively chosen the B side over the C. He has taken up his position on the ‘other’ side, in any case the side less well recognised in the reception thus far of Hélène Cixous’s work. Now it must be said that 1) there are lots of sides to Hélène Cixous: this is a constitutional fact that’s also a kind of paradox: many sides implies the necessity of taking sides, which is to say that there’s no happy synthesis of the one/many relation; and 2) Nicholas Royle demonstrates beyond any possible doubt that the B-side is fully one of Cixous’s sides, indeed that she writes about and with birds all the time. What’s more 3) it says something about Royle’s approach: not that he’s off to one side, as if there were some more ‘proper’ or ‘central’ angle on Cixous’s work, but there’s a way that he’s on his own here, that he does his own thing: rather than taking up a position within a pre-defined field of Cixous Studies, he builds his own nest before our eyes, twig by twig; 4) this is all, also, again, a question of translation… Because one of the most surprising, and ultimately uncanny things about this book is that it proposes a complex, intimate, passionate reading of Hélène Cixous in English translation. The book reflects on and even theorises this reading decision: indeed it turns this decision, which might seem to signal a weakness, into a remarkable advantage, a powerful argument in its own favour by reading Cixous from the point of view of English, and as a writer who is so forceful that her writing­– a­ lways in French, adoringly, uproariously­– h ­ as also, irreversibly, changed the English language. This is an extraordinary, strong and daring critical position, given that pretty much the first rule in the received initial conditions of critical engagement with the Cixous oeuvre is that it must be read ‘in French’, that it is so committed to and constituted by its engagement with French, so consubstantial with it, that translations can only be used as rough guides, and thus that one can only really tangle with it in the original French. Now it’s true that this book makes clear that Nicholas Royle reads French, reads Hélène Cixous in French (at one point he is described reading ‘painfully slowly’ with a ‘dictionary on the



Foreword: Forewarnings xiii

side’­– ­though the book also makes clear that he never reads or writes English without several dictionaries on the side!) and he often comments on and modifies the translations he uses. However, that’s rather to miss the point, that is, that he comes out publicly here with the blunt frontal claim to show how ‘Cixous in translation’ will transform both ‘literature in English’ and ‘English as a language’, and that he will ‘explore the inventiveness of her work through the rich and strange resources of English itself ’ (p. 2). This is completely new in Cixousology: it is a bold claim that Royle genuinely delivers on­– i­ n his own very singular way. The Cixous in this book is a particular Cixous, one seen not only through an English lens, but almost more importantly­– ­though in the end the two things are inseparable here­– ­through a Nicholas-Royle-autobiographical and -autofictional lens, weaving his account of her texts with his account of his encounters with her texts, and with his accounts of a great number of other (English) texts, and his ­ erson’­– ­and yet this Royle accounts of his encounters with Hélène Cixous ‘in p Cixous is beguilingly true, true to Cixous, truer to her writing and her life-force than any supposedly objective prosodic critical treatment could ever be. This book is required reading for anyone interested in Hélène Cixous, in the many things and texts and people that name names, the many species, even, for anyone interested in words or poetry or literature, in thinking and writing­– ­and in Nicholas Royle’s remarkable, original, illuminating and uplifting flight path through all these word-beings and more.

Acknowledgements

This book has been a while in the making. A few of the essays (such as ‘Away’, ‘Portmanteau’ and ‘To awake, Shakespeare of the Night’) date back to the noughties. Most were written a good deal more recently. Everything here, however, belongs to the period of time during which I have had the great happiness of knowing Hélène Cixous. Although I read her (specifically, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’) while I was an undergraduate at Oxford in around 1977, and although I first saw and heard her in 1997, at the ‘Autobiographical Animal’ conference at the Château at Cerisy in Normandy, I do not believe we actually spoke to one another until five years later, again at Cerisy, at the ‘Democracy to Come’ conference in 2002. The details of my initial encounter with her texts in 1977 I scarcely recall, but my ‘pre-meeting’ twenty years later is vivid in my memory. One warm evening in July 1997 there was an addition to the already intense and (for me at least) exhausting ten-day conference programme. We were informed that Hélène Cixous would be reading in le grenier, the attic of the château. In the baking heat of that crowded loft-space I watched and listened to Cixous speaking, reading from her work, for the first time. She spoke in French, of course, and my ability to follow French has always been quite feeble, but strangely that didn’t seem to matter. I was entirely taken by the songlike quality of her reading. I had never heard a woman speak and sound so much still a child. Only some years later did I encounter her simple observation, recorded in Rootprints: ‘Every morning I am a little girl.’ Her voice in the sweltering attic cut me. Its tenderness and beauty will always remain with me. It is to Hélène Cixous, first and foremost, I want to express my gratitude here. I have also been immeasurably fortunate in other ways. In particular I would like to thank Eric Prenowitz, Peggy Kamuf, Sarah Wood, Elissa Marder, Geoff Bennington and Michael Naas. Their friendship and conversation, and their



Acknowledgements xv

thinking and writing, have played an indispensable role in the elaboration of this project. My labours have been further stimulated and encouraged by the conversation and writings of Laurent Milesi, Marta Segarra, Timothy Clark, Peter Boxall, Keston Sutherland, Bethan Stevens, Jemma Deer, Camilla Bostock, Andrew Bennett, Sarah Jackson, Naomi Booth, Abi Curtis, Michael Syrotinski, Simon Wortham, Martin McQuillan, Robert Smith, David Wills, Tim Morton, Adam Phillips, Tom Dutoit, Maud Ellmann, Jonty Tiplady, Ginette Michaud, Roy Sellars, Tom Tomaszewski, Simon Stevenson, Ellie Cook, Susie Lingham, Jen Cooke, Sarah Dillon, Ulrika Maude, Chiara Alfano, Robin Bagon, Naomi Wynter-Vincent, Lynne Turner, Richard Wilson, Cary Wolfe, Howard Caygill, Gabriel Josipovici, Becky Worthy, Hanuei Min, Ashley Thompson, Mairéad Hanrahan, Paul Davies, Michael Jonik, Bill McEvoy, Mat Dimmock, Ian Maclachlan, Susan Sellers, Dawne McCance, Judith Still and Mark Dawson. None of these people is responsible for any misconstruals or errors in the pages ahead; but they have helped shape my thinking throughout, and I here tender my heartfelt thanks to all. Special acknowledgement here must also be made to Jacques Derrida, who died in 2004. His friendship and his incomparable example as a writer and thinker ‘about Cixous’ are elementary to this book. I could not have written these pages without the love of my family­– ­above all, Jinan (who makes possible everything and more); Sebastian, Alexi, Elena, William and Augustus; and Lucy and Saleh Joudeh. I am very grateful to the School of English at the University of Sussex for all its support, especially in granting research leave that helped sustain my work on this project. Colleagues and students at Sussex have been a constant source of intellectual energy and invigoration over the past twenty years. Finally, I would like to add a note of special thanks to my editor at Manchester University Press, Matthew Frost. His thoughtful reading, sharp advice, unstinting enthusiasm and inimitable humour have been, for a long time now, very precious to me. This is my third book with the press (following After Derrida in 1995 and The Uncanny in 2003), and I am only sorry it has taken me so long to get to this point. Earlier versions of some of the chapters have appeared elsewhere, as follows: ‘Portmanteau’, in Hélène Cixous: When the Word is a Stage, ed. Eric Prenowitz, special issue of New Literary History, 37:1 (2006), 237–47; ‘Away’, in Before the Book­– H ­ élène Cixous, ed. Eric Prenowitz, special issue of Parallax, 13:3 (2007), 94–103; ‘To awake, Shakespeare of the Night’, in Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis, ed. Mark Dawson, Mairéad Hanrahan and Eric Prenowitz, special issue of

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Acknowledgements

Paragraph, 36:2 (2013), 223–39; ‘Dream treatment: on sitting down to read a letter from Freud’, in Literature and Psychoanalysis: Open Questions, ed. Elissa Marder, special issue of Paragraph, 40:3 (2017), 399–405; and ‘All wards’, in Unidentifiable Literary Objects, ed. Camilla Bostock and Sarah Jackson, special issue of Parallax, 25:3 (2019), 248–68.

A note on references

References to the Oxford English Dictionary are to the online version at www. OED.com Unless otherwise stated, all references to Shakespeare’s plays and poems are to the RSC Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Ramussen (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2007).

It may be that the unconscious never sleeps at all. Sigmund Freud

Wherever I write it grows dark. I drill tunnels. Hélène Cixous

1

Introduction: dreamer, realist, analyst, writing

Hélène Cixous: the very name can be unnerving, at least to Anglophone ­speakers. The ‘H’ is silent; and then the surname is ‘pronounced “seek-soo” ’, as ­classroom-minded editors feel driven to say.1 Cixous’s œuvre in turn is intimidating and immense: she seems to have assimilated everything­– s­ he is as much at ease writing about Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze or Derrida, as about Shakespeare, Stendhal, Joyce or Lispector. She has written dozens of works of fiction, criticism, plays and innumerable other texts, as well as given many in-depth interviews. Her work stretches back decades­– ­and thus also provides a singular and illuminating point of reference for understanding ‘our time’ and ‘the history of our time’. Moreover, she is still producing work at a remarkable rate. What sort of work is it, anyway? How is the fiction to be distinguished from the criticism? Is it fiction, really, at all? Or is it poetry? Or autobiography? Or reverie? And where do you begin­– ­especially given that her own writing is often, in explicit fashion, preoccupied with the ambiguities and ironies of beginnings? For someone coming to read her work for the first time, all of this makes for a rather challenging prospect. This book is not a work of cultural or intellectual history, though it is propelled by a fascination with history, with thinking about the nature of time, memory, narrative and the past, as well as the present, the future and the future anterior (‘life will have been so short’). And this fascination, as we will see, is itself evident everywhere in Cixous’s work. We will not neglect questions of context: dates, places, the world, people and other life-forms. Most of all, however, the following pages seek to provide an account of her work in relation to literature. My primary focus, then, is on the nature of poetry and the poetic, play and performing, fiction and storytelling. In investigating the literary in Cixous, I also hope to establish a new historical perspective from which to read and appreciate her writings.

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Hélène Cixous

Cixous is a marvellously insightful and inventive reader as well as writer, and she has as much to say ‘about’ literature as ‘in’ it. I hope to elucidate the singular nature of her writing not only from a literary angle, but also in terms of how her critical work (which resides in her so-called fictional writings as well as in her essays) affects our understanding of ‘fiction’, ‘the novel’, ‘poetry’, ‘literature’, ‘creative writing’, ‘criticism’, ‘narrative theory’, ‘autobiography’, ‘life writing’ and so on. Cixous is not so much ‘a writer’s writer’, as a poetic thinker who compels us to develop new ways of approaching both creative and critical writing, both literature and literary criticism and theory. Historians, critics and theorists alike have tended to overlook the significance of the fact that Hélène Cixous’s own teaching and research, as well as her publications, have been grounded in ‘English literature’, from at least the early 1960s.2 The following pages are aimed primarily at readers encountering her work in English. Rather than seeing this as the recipe for a sort of diminished, second-hand experience, I hope to show how ‘Cixous in translation’ might transform a sense of English­– ­both literature in English and English as a language (‘soft-sounding Engluish’, in her nicely sticky formulation).3 I hope to explore the inventiveness of her work through the rich and strange resources of English itself. ‘Rich and strange’ is Shakespeare’s phrase, in The Tempest (Act 1, scene 2), for the ‘sea-change’ that happens to the bones of the dead; Cixous, as we will see, does rich and strange things with the language of Shakespeare, as well as with the bones of the dead.4 This book attempts to do something new, namely to provide readers with a way into Cixous’s work that does not presuppose an extensive familiarity with feminist theory, deconstruction or psychoanalysis. It aspires to be faithful to the thoughtfulness, complexity and singularity of her writing, at the same time as operating in the spirit of a new kind of critical commentary. Baulking at the very idea of a ‘comprehensive survey of the œuvre’, Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing takes a more selective, micrological approach. This entails an ‘art of cutting’, as she herself has called it. The various chapters tend to focus on a single text or small number of texts, attempting to give careful attention to specific passages. Sometimes the reading will home in on a particular word such as ‘away’, or a neologistic phrase such as ‘side thinking’, and develop an account of Cixous’s work out of this. Correspondingly, there is in her writing a consistent emphasis on the small, humble or humbling­– ­a seemingly mundane or insignificant everyday object, such as a cauliflower or a speck of dust, a fleeting image or remark. Like Thomas Hardy in his concern with what he called ‘the seeing of great things in little things, the whole in the part­– ­even



Introduction 3

the infinitesimal part’, Cixous is a great thinker of little things.5 Her work is about the kinds of ‘nanostructures’ and ‘nano-beings’ she finds in Dante and Samuel Beckett.6 And at the same time, her writing is constantly interested in what we can’t see coming. She is an uncanny devotee of the unforeseeable. As she formulates it in Mother Homer is Dead…: ‘No other law except the unforeseeable.’7 Cixous impels new ways of thinking about reading as well as writing. At issue here is what has been called creative reading: Creative reading has to do with ways of reading that are not only rigorous, careful, attentive to historical context, to the specific denotations, connotations and nuances of words, and so on, but also inventive, surprising, willing to take risks, to be experimental, to deform and transform. Creative reading is not about inventing things that are not in the text but about inventing new ways of thinking about things that are in the text, in relation to things beyond the text.8

Through creative readings of a specific word or passage, I seek to throw light both on Cixous’s writing and on its broader literary, philosophical, cultural and political context. * Four motifs run through this book, as the subtitle suggests: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing. With the caveat that they are not really separable but rather at every instant interwoven and interweaving, I will say a few words about each in turn.

Dreamer No other novelist has written as much about and out of her dreams. No other critic or theorist has written as much about the relationship between dreams and literature. As Jacques Derrida pithily observes: ‘she writes by dream’.9 She writes her dreams, she writes about dreams, she writes in and out of the in-between space of having been asleep and already putting pen to paper. She has devoted an entire book to the hypnagogically scribbled renditions of her dreams the moment she’s awake enough to grasp her pen (Dream I Tell You), but all of her books are dream books. As we will see in greater detail, her writing constantly follows its subject­– ­and the subject follows its writing­– ­along oneiric trajectories. More than any other writer in modern European history (more than the Surrealists, more than Joyce), her texts happen, stories come out, words dance and disappear with one another, in an extraordinary coupling of literature and dream. Her writing has something

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Hélène Cixous

of what Wordsworth evokes, in his ‘Intimations’ Ode, as the blind creativity of a four-year-old child: ‘See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, / Some fragment from his dream of human life, / Shaped by himself with newly-learned art.’10 For Cixous, as for the Wordsworthian child, creation (the little plan or chart or book) is like a fragment of a dream, and comes with the feeling of something excitingly new (‘newly-learned’). There is a remarkable sense of the persisting, resisting, surviving perception of the child in her writing. Except that, unlike Wordsworth’s example, the child in Cixous is female, acutely articulate, and doesn’t fall into the ‘vocation’ of ‘endless imitation’. And where Wordsworth laments the passing of a time that had ‘[t]he glory and the freshness of a dream’, Cixous is ready for it every time she goes to sleep and wakes up: she lives on it, it keeps (her) going. To recall a lapidary sentence from one of her more recent books: ‘Everything happens while we are asleep.’11 Most people go to bed because they are tired and need to switch off for the night. This is not how it is for Cixous. She observes: The ‘sleep’ part of the writing activity, the biggest, the nocturnal part, does half the work for me. I go to bed in order to dream. Carefully. And with hope and curiosity. While I sleep, the shooting (the film, the scenarios) takes place. In the morning I harvest. At night I sometimes half-wake to sleepdream the next part of my text. This is a very fruitful intermediary state. I can also jot down nocturnal ‘illuminations’­– ­phrases, key words, glitterings­– ­with broad strokes, in the dark.12

Dreaming is not a space calling for interpretation, as it might be in a classical psychoanalytic context. Going to bed is more like going to the cinema, not knowing what’s on or how it’s going to turn out. Cixous welcomes what comes, she relishes the unforeseen fruits. Her hypnagogic disposition (the half-waking and sleepdreaminess) is not something she’s inclined to interrupt, as a critic or philosopher or scientist might. Her ‘illuminations’ (a sort of dream-catch-aphrase) recall Blake and Rimbaud, but have a glittering character of their own. Her embrace of what is not (yet) conscious suggests a literal, radical affirmation of Prospero’s supposition that ‘We are such stuff / As dreams are made on’ (The Tempest, 4.1.169–70).

Realist All of which is not to suggest that Cixous is a writer merely preoccu-

pied with dreams, or concerned with dreams simply for their own sake. On the contrary, her books are passionately immersed in ‘the real’. The originality and value of her so-called fictional writings consist, perhaps first and foremost, in an



Introduction 5

unprecedented pressure on­– ­and transformation of­– ­what literary critics term ‘realism’. In an interview entitled ‘The Play of Fiction’ (1994), she observes: In my text everything remains stubbornly concrete. The material for any text of mine is the raw stuff of everyday life. There are cars and very specific makes of car, saucepans, jam jars, plane tickets­– ­all the accessories of life, both as common objects and as metaphors.13

Her writing takes an intense interest in everyday objects, seemingly ephemeral things that people say and do, stuff that happens. A cardboard box, a cat, a sofa, the street, being short-sighted, cotton socks, a theatre, cheese and radish sandwiches, a catheter, some snatch of children’s verse by Wilhelm Busch: all this is ‘the raw stuff ’ of the diurnal. The engagement with all these things that remain ‘stubbornly concrete’ is with what makes them singular and remarkable. But this engagement is also about the words­– ­including the sounds and visual ­ ith which we think and name them. These sounds appearances of the words­– w and visual appearances have a reality of their own which impinges constantly on the writing. Words are endlessly busy: they slip away or have us slip up even as we imagine that they do our bidding. Instead of ‘Freudian slip’ we might conceive of a ‘Cixous slip’, where all sorts of things slip between cup and lip and what is labial is labile and liable to be noted. Nothing is still or fixed in Cixous, everything (including the words) is in flux. Everything is speeding. Cars, saucepans, jam jars and so on are also always metaphors, ‘common objects’ already touched by rich and strange possibilities of metamorphosis. Her writing, in this respect, has something of what she elsewhere calls the ‘almost realistic simplicity’ of Ovid.14 The example of the car: we might think of the old Renault in Hemlock (2008) which the mother, now 95, can no longer drive: it’s been ‘hibernating for the past year in the garage’ (already there’s a suggestion of a hedgehog or some other kind of poetic animal machine), and the daughter, the Cixousian narrator, under mother’s orders, reinstalls the battery and gets it started, and no sooner have they set out than the car has become ‘an old dame’ whose elderliness and frailty meld with the mother’s: ‘The old girl jingles, wavers, reacts so lethargically I have to slow down: the brakes are on their last legs.’15 It is perhaps not by chance that the first example that springs to Cixous’s mind, in ‘The Play of Fiction’ interview, is something associated with speed (‘There are cars and very specific makes of car’). There is a speeding dreamlike quality to her handling and perception of all this ‘everyday life’. The unconscious is always

6

Hélène Cixous

faster than the ‘I’ can see. And what we might call Cixous’s dream-loyalty issues in forms of writing that seek to reckon with ‘psychical reality’ as much as ‘the raw stuff of everyday life’. In a later chapter I will suggest that an alternative subtitle for the present book might indeed be A Theory of Psychical Realism.16 One of the pleasures of reading Cixous lies in the sense that she doesn’t belong and cannot be placed. Discussion of how her work relates to other novelists, poets and playwrights can quickly come to feel comical or implausible. As she has commented: ‘[I am] off-line, without lineage, without relationship, without ties … I’m one of those eccentric, beyond-the-pale mixtures that set up camp at the gates to the City.’17 Many of her most obvious ‘literary relations’ are with English-language rather than French writers: in particular, Shakespeare, Poe, Lewis Carroll, Joyce and Beckett (the last of these primarily in ‘Engluish’ guise) will show up in the pages ahead. But Cixous’s eccentricity, off to the side, skew-whiff in terms of any fixed tradition or literary genealogy, also means that off-beat links and correspondences with other writers and literary canons can prove unexpectedly illuminating. So we might for example, in a veering way, sketch a sort of phantasmatic silhouette, a singular literary Anglo-tele-phone lineage, to do with reality, speed and hallucination. I picture a snapshot group of three writers­– ­Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Bowen and Hélène Cixous­– ­speaking together with great vivacity in a ‘back drawing-room’ of fiction.18 These writers have striking affinities in terms of their dealing with ‘everyday life’ and the ‘stubbornly concrete’. Their fiction is at the same time deeply infused in a thinking of the supernatural which (as we will see) has to do in turn with dreams and the unconscious. Cixous’s writing, in particular, enables us to see how literature is inseparable from magical thinking­ – ­telepathy, clairvoyance, second sight, déjà vu, foretelling and prophecy, others thinking our thoughts, sharing our feelings, etc. In all three writers, too, there is a remarkable sense of speed. This is something within what is happening­– n ­ ot just in the rapidity of narrative ‘developments’, but in the recounting as such. It is a speed of thinking and desire­– ­what Shakespeare calls ‘wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love’ (Hamlet, 1.5.29–30). It is in the writing­– ­in the syntax sudden brakes and shifters, words at full-tilt, rhetorical switches, rhetoric’s witches, the lexico-accelerations of words, phrases, sentences.19 And at the same time, in all of these writers, the doors of perception are permanently ajar to a sense of hallucination. As a character in Bowen’s wartime dream-story ‘Mysterious Kôr’ wonders, in a rhetorical question that lends a lunar tint or hint of lunacy to any supposition of ‘the real’ in a work of fiction: ‘A game’s a



Introduction 7

game, but what’s a hallucination?’20 Writing is not a game: for Brontë, Bowen and Cixous alike, it is about ‘raw stuff ’­– ­seen and felt, however, with the kind of hallucinatory intensity we associate with dreams or madness. Things described thus seem at once ghostly and, in Brontë’s resonant phrase, ‘as fresh as reality’.21 Beyond the familiar notion of ‘the raw stuff of everyday life’, then, I want to suggest that Cixous’s fiction is realist in rendering the experience of reading indissociable from a reckoning with the unconscious and the chance effects of writing. She describes this kind of experience in the context of Clarice Lispector’s extraordinary final book, The Hour of the Star (1977): Throughout the writing of the book everyone is terrified, the writer is terrified, the book is terrified; the text starts telling us something, then it gives up. We feel as if something terrible is going to happen and we readers are also frightened: we keep thinking that something that we don’t want to happen will happen, only it doesn’t happen. We go with misgivings from page to page. And suddenly it happens: the text strikes, the book is finished.22

Cixous is not talking about a thriller novel or a work of horror fiction. Nor is she talking about the sort of fateful matter-of-factness we find in Ernest Hemingway, or the calculated, downbeat menace we find in Raymond Carver. Rather, it’s about the experience of reading a book in which the mortality of the writer and reader are pushed up together, as if in an unfolding accident, where there is no feeling of assurance that the author any more than character or reader is in control of what is befalling. She calls this ‘the reality, the secret of writing’.23 As she provocatively suggests in ‘Coming to Writing’: ‘My unconscious is in touch with your unconscious.’24 A text that juggles the senses of the real and the dream, rushing by and unforeseeable, drawing you in at a palpably unconscious as well as conscious level: this is how it is, to read Brontë, Bowen, Lispector and Cixous. Cixous is a realist who deals with close encounters of a previously unheard-of kind. It is in this context that Jacques Derrida speaks of her hyperrealism: ‘Her fictional hyperrealism poses to the classification of modes and genres the most formidable, the most unheard-of, and the most interesting problems.’25 ‘Fictional hyperrealism’ is a double-edged, doubly edgy term: unlike ‘metafiction’ (which perhaps too readily leads into a thinking of artificial frames or structures, granting credence to a nonexistent border between fiction and fiction-about-fiction), ‘fictional hyperrealism’ is closer to a thinking of what Derrida and Cixous speak of as the ‘ULO’ or unidentifiable literary object.26 What makes Cixous’s books ULOs has to do with the notion of something at once fictive and hyperreal, even

8

Hélène Cixous

(in its mobilising of the unconscious or psychical reality) ‘all-too-real’. It is in writing but it is also too much for immediate perception, emanating from an unknown or unconscious place, not a site of cogitation on the writer’s part at the instant of inscription. The notion of ‘fictional hyperrealism’ demands that we attend both to novelistic discourse as fictional (as conforming, for example, to certain literary, narrative and rhetorical conventions), and to the ways in which what we call ‘the real’ is in turn construction and fantasy. At issue here is the kind of reverse-thrust that Bowen has in mind when she refers to ‘the rules of fiction with which life to be credible must comply’.27 It is what Cixous is getting at when she explains why we need theatre: ‘We need theatre … we always need the seat, the screen, the couch, as means of passage: the theatre serves precisely the function of demolishing that other cumbersome stage, that of the real.’28 ‘Realism’ remains a prominent point of reference for literary critics and narrative theorists, for writers, and for teachers and students of literature and creative writing. Cixous challenges us to think realism anew. Derrida claims that ‘in a way she owes nothing to Joyce’, but this is, I think, somewhat misleading.29 Her earliest and longest critical book, The Exile of James Joyce (published in French in 1968), is among other things an exhaustively probing and detailed meditation on the question: ‘How far and to what degree can one speak of “realism” in Joyce’s art?’30 This meditation goes off in compelling and labyrinthine directions, veering from the concern of poetic writing (whether Joyce’s or Cixous’s) with ‘a luminous penetration of reality’ to a fascination (which we will talk about in more detail later in this book) with the reality of birds and a kind of ornithomorphic realism.31 But she begins The Exile of James Joyce with an especially arresting formulation drawn in part from the work of Jean-Jacques Mayoux: ‘When Joyce writes A Portrait [of the Artist as a Young Man], he already possesses that “double consciousness of one watching himself live [conscience double, cette conscience du vivant qui se regarde vivre]”.’32 Realism, as I seek to elaborate it in this book, has to do with this living double-consciousness, this constitutively double ‘life-writing’ or ‘double-life’ writing, the necessary acknowledgement that authors are, from the beginning, beside themselves.

Analyst Cixous is an analyst. As its etymology (from the Greek verb ἀναλύειν)

intimates, ‘analysis’ is about untying, loosening, releasing. She is an analyst of the real and of dreams. Her writing is a kind of animal listening device that performs and provokes analyses. She exposes and investigates the ways in which our dreams and other forms and figures of the unconscious (slips or slides of the



Introduction 9

tongue or pen, forgetting things, the process of becoming fascinated, the wish to die, repressed fears, forbidden or unrealised desires, the sense of being double) infiltrate our experience. She is deeply attuned to the sense that ‘the dark part of ourselves­– w ­ here psychoanalysis has built its kingdom­– i­s there, all the time, behind our every action, every single day’.33 In a manner suggestive of something like Edgar Allan Poe Meets Alice in Wonderland, her writing explores how the unconscious ‘lifts the lid at the very moment when one no longer expects it’.34 But the workings of the unconscious are not only dramatic or traumatic in a dark way: they also give us laughter and what she calls ‘the sources of genius: the Mother unconscious’.35 There is immense tenderness and generosity in Cixous’s writing. At the same time there is a constant challenge to the reader to aspire to thinking what he or she has perhaps never previously thought. As she puts it, with fine concision: ‘Thought thinks only by becoming foreign to itself, by losing consciousness.’36 Cixous wants to loosen a sense of who or what we think we are. She wants, for example, to undo the supposition that there is such a thing as an ‘uncultivated reader’: ‘we are cultivated, whether we like it or not’.37 In her writings psychoanalysis is construed not in relation to some simple, irrefutable auto (the self, the auto-analysis to which Freud subjected himself in order to launch that remarkable thing he called psychoanalysis), but rather in terms of an openness to the other (forms of the hetero-). The interest of Freudian thinking lies in an elaboration of what she terms ‘auto-hetero-analysis’.38 Cixous is not on the inside of psychoanalysis in any conventional sense: she has never been ‘in analysis’. She inhabits psychoanalysis through what I will talk about, later in this book, as ‘side thinking’ (which is also an ‘aside-thinking’). At the same time, she is deeply, playfully, satirically, lovingly in touch with Freud. Freud is, as she puts it, ‘the greatest and most inspiring of puppets in my theatre’.39 This theatre is, notably, first of all Shakespearean. As she says of her early reading: ‘Shakespeare was my first Freud. Then I read Freud, but first I read Shakespeare-as-Freud.’40 For Cixous, Freud is first and foremost a writer, like herself. He is also (like herself) a lay analyst. ‘We are all lay-analysts,’ she remarks, we are all ‘para-practitioners’ of psychoanalysis.41 Cixous sees Freud as ‘the Shakespeare of the night’, an extraordinary explorer of dreams and also an amazing inventor of words, ideas and possibilities for thinking, writing and living.42 Thinking about Cixous’s relationship with psychoanalysis calls to mind a remark made by the British analyst and writer Adam Phillips: psychoanalysis,

10

Hélène Cixous

he suggests, is ‘too new for anyone to quite know what it is yet’.43 Cixous makes psychoanalysis afresh, she elaborates creative readings in which Freud is resurrected and shown to be saying things one might not have expected him to be saying. In this way, in turn, I want to suggest that the originality and importance of Cixous’s writing as an imaginative reckoning with psychoanalysis has still to be appreciated. In her critical and fictional explorations of dreams, as well as other aspects of Freud’s work (such as the ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, ‘The Uncanny’, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ and ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’), she constantly attends to what she calls ‘the question’, namely ‘the interest of psychoanalysis for the non-analyst’.44 In a more general way, she is driven by what she has called the ‘soothing effect of analysing human beings and giving form to chaos’.45 Cixous pursues a new kind of analytic writing­– ­profoundly indebted to Freud, but also embodying a new way of understanding and using that work.

Writing The final term in the subtitle manifestly plays over those that precede

it. The pages ahead will foreground Cixous’s writing practice and the singularity of the books she has published­– ­her engagement with Derrida’s ‘écriture’ and the development of écriture féminine, as well as her more recent kinds of text (compelling cases of what Edward Said might have called ‘late style’). One might expect this fourth term in the subtitle to be ‘Writer’. ‘Writing’ is a grammatical oddity. It allows, however, for productively different energies: as a present participle (‘Hélène Cixous writing’) it focuses attention on the enigma of the present, immediacy and the instant in her work, while as a noun (‘the writing of Cixous’) it enables a highlighting of how much, for her, ‘writing’ informs life itself, as well as how her work does without her (the writing lives beside, outlives its author). This final element in the subtitle, then, is also a sort of stand-alone­– ­writing as other. (It also gestures towards the importance of how she reads it, how she responds to the writings of others.) There is a spectral character to her writing­ – ­a preoccupation with and by ghostly figures (surviving death, the revenant, haunting memories, a haunted present)­– ­that once again suggests deep affinities with writers such as Brontë and Bowen, as well as Shakespeare and Poe. One of the most persistent and commanding figures in Cixous’s work is resurrection­– ­in the first instance the resurrection of her father, who died when she was ten. She observes: I had to cope with life through the magic of resurrection, since everything started for me with an end. It started with the end of my father, and the urgency to try and find modes of resurrection at which I exerted myself very earnestly. I thought



Introduction 11 in terms of resurrecting­– ­hurriedly­– ­my father before he disappeared … And I started to dream.46

Literature, for Cixous, is a place of ghosts. It is not so much where the dead come back in some ghoulish or macabre fashion, as where they go on living, listening and speaking. Cixous invites us to acknowledge and negotiate ‘the dark part of ourselves’, and there is much in her writing that is painful, disturbing, anguished. But the following pages are also concerned to try to do justice to two other crucial aspects of her work: play and humour. You can’t read Cixous unless you are willing to laugh­– ­laughing and dreaming go together. ‘The hidden twin of no-laughter’, she suggests, is ‘no-dreams’.47 Laughter is rolling around from the start. As she makes clear in ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975), it is about the mother within you (whether you are a man or woman) as ‘the rhythm that laughs you’.48 It’s about a kind of ‘feminine text’ (in the original French, androgynously ‘un texte féminin’) or writing (‘écriture féminine’) that aims ‘to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the “truth” with laughter’.49 In the decades since that essay was published, Cixous’s rhetoric may have altered, but the laughter remains. I hope to throw special light on this ­laughter­– ­from the mild to the wild and the upside down and back-to-front. I want to give particular emphasis to what is humorous and affirmative, ironic and playful about her writing. This is not to detract from the fact that she is also a major thinker of loss and traumatic experience: her work is, indeed, all about what I call ‘Cixous cuts’. It constantly seeks to bear witness to the sense that ‘wherever language lives, whatever hurts also helps’.50 Mourning is everywhere, but so is the affirmation of what is ‘stronger than death’.51 Cixous’s laughter and playfulness are integral to an understanding of her cultural and political importance. * Finally, the four words in the book’s subtitle furnish an acronym: DRAW. As a chance play of the letter, ‘draw’ also gets drawn into the proceedings. This book really came together in a flash, one evening in early June 2017. It was on the eve of her eightieth birthday. I had just arrived in Paris and was waiting for her in her apartment. We were going to have dinner at a local Lebanese restaurant. We were about to leave, everything seemed serene and happily in order, but then suddenly in a marvellous unexpected flurry she exclaimed that we needed paper

12

Hélène Cixous

1  Rembrandt van Rijn, The Beheading of John the Baptist.

and pens, do we have some? She literally scooped up several, and a pad of paper. She stuffed a couple of pens in my hand, a black Pilot V Signpen and a blue Trieste Ultrafine 04­– ­I know these details because the pens were still in my jacket pocket when I arrived back in England a couple of days later. In the lightning moment of gathering paper and pens we were children about to launch off on



Introduction 13

some unforeseeable art activity. It was as if she were exclaiming (but she didn’t say anything) Come on! Let’s write! Let’s draw! In the event, we didn’t write or draw anything while we were at the restaurant; still, that was the force of the fuse for the title of this book. Cixous is deeply interested in the relationship between writing and drawing, in writing as drawing.52 The essay ‘Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off ’ (first published in French in 1991), for example, is an intense meditation on the desire to draw and/or write.53 She focuses on what it is ‘to-be-in-the-process of writing or drawing’.54 This sense of being in the moment, in flux, is in the stammer of the title, it’s ‘Without End’, no, call it ‘State of Drawingness’, no, instead: ‘The Executioner’s Taking Off ’. The original French is ‘Sans Arrêt, non, Etat de Dessination, non, plutôt: Le Décollage du Bourreau’. Every title is a head, no, ghost, carrying the logic of decapitation under its arm. Jacques Derrida says that ‘a title is always a promise’, which is to say that it is also always a threat.55 Cixous’s French preserves more than a hint of decapitation (décollation: ‘beheading’), but décollage is take-off, lift-off, launch off. For and of the executioner. L’état c’est moi, Dessination. State not-I destination, do not state destination, or rather dessination: an invented word suggesting the stateless state of drawing. Head off, get away from thinking of destination, rather it’s all about speed and the birth of a work: draw! Cixous writes: ‘There is no end to writing or drawing. Being born doesn’t end. Drawing is being born.’56 Her essay offers a series of readings of da Vinci, Picasso and Rembrandt. In particular, there is a remarkable analysis of the temporality of a Rembrandt sketch of the beheading of John the Baptist in the context of what she calls ‘during the drawing’. Like a surreal cartoon sketch, Rembrandt shows the executioner in two simultaneous positions­– ­at once using or having used his sword and sliding it out or back into its sheath.57 On the ground lies the head severed from the body, its expression peaceful, with even the ghostly suggestion of a smile. The time of the drawing seems mad, as if one could draw living backwards. Cixous writes: At the moment of Beheading, suddenly, there’s been a change of heart. Or rather of life. Something unpredictable has happened between the two characters during the drawing. We were bending over the saint in horror, and at the moment we contemplated his body with curiosity, that is to say the two parts of his body, suddenly so contrary our entire attention was diverted and carried away in the opposite direction by the executioner. Because, at the moment the drawing wanted to draw the body’s pain

14

Hélène Cixous and the head’s mourning, there was a sudden rise of life in the executioner, which the drawing was unable to resist. The executioner’s joy burst out. This couldn’t have occurred before the drawing executed the saint. Because the saint had to have been properly beheaded in order for the executioner to have suddenly been transfigured, and become one, on the spot, body with sabre.58

Cixous’s interest in Rembrandt’s sketch has to do with the fascination of what is captured or evoked ‘during the drawing’. It’s a version of her lifelong involvement with the speed of life, the question of how to draw speed, how to write the instant. She observes: ‘The instant is a drama without a stage. I wanted to call this text: “For the Instant”, or “At the Instant”, but I changed my mind.’59 How can writing deal with the drama of living during the writing? How can we think about it without thinking of dying? Like the ‘so contrary’ jogged, in the passage just cited (to be or not to be aposiopesis?), and then: ‘our entire attention was diverted and carried away in the opposite direction by the executioner’. As she goes on to ask: ‘How to make the portrait of lightning? At what speed draw speed? We have all cried out stop! to the instant.’60 It’s about what she­– ­as a writer who is ‘religiously atheistic, but literarily deistic’­– c­ alls ‘God’: God is ‘the synonym of what goes beyond us, of our own projection towards the future, towards infinity’.61 So runs (into the uncertainty of three dots) the end of the implausibly named ‘Without end’: This is why we desire so often to die, when we write, in order to see everything in a flash, and at least once shatter the spine of time with only one pencil stroke. And with only one word draw God…62

The following pages, then, also seek to explore the instant, the speed, the religiously atheistic and the literarily deistic, the laughter, the desire to die, magic and resurrection. Through figures of, for instance, heading off and away, advertisement, dreaming in literature, the art of veering, cuts, the portmanteau, side thinking, all wards, and a few other neologisms besides, this book attempts a new kind of drawing of the dreamer, realist, analyst, writing: Hélène Cixous. Notes  1 See Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al., 3rd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 1866. As she herself observes (doubtless laughing as she does so), this name Cixous is ‘tumultuous’, ‘indocile’, ‘barbarous’, ‘bizarre’. See



Introduction 15

Hélène Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’ (1977), trans. Deborah Jenson, with Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers, in ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 25.   2 Her first teaching jobs, including her post at Bordeaux (1962–63), were grounded in English literature. Her early critical texts include book reviews that focus on the writings of Conrad Aiken, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, William Golding, Ezra Pound, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Saul Bellow and Muriel Spark, inter alia. In 1974 she became director of the doctoral programmes in both English Literature and Etudes Féminines at Université Paris 8. See the Chronicle (composed by Mireille Calle-Gruber) and Bibliography (compiled by M. Sandré and E. Prenowitz) in Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 207ff.   3 See Hélène Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett, trans. Laurent Milesi (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 44.   4 So, for example, in Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, I. Los, A Chapter, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) (hereafter Los, A Chapter)­– ­a book among other things about the poetry of William Blake, in particular his ‘Book of Los’ and his ‘Tyger’­– C ­ ixous writes: ‘I heard they excavated William Blake’s grave; all of a sudden the ground was re-landscaped, and nobody on the spot could say: Hold on! Let me gather up these bones. The crane snatched up all the letters, chewed up and spit out William Blake’s atoms, and scattered even the dots that form the poems’ letters’ (15).   5 Florence Hardy (and Thomas Hardy), The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962), 248.   6 See Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour, 18.   7 Hélène Cixous, Mother Homer is Dead…, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 9. ‘The Unforeseeable’ is also the title of an essay, originally given as a lecture at the University of Sussex, published in Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, ed. Eric Prenowitz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 221–40.   8 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, This Thing Called Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing (London: Routledge, 2015), 17.   9 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ants’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Reading Cixous Writing, ed. Martin McQuillan, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2002), 25. Cf. Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 75. 10 ‘Ode’, in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 299. 11 Cixous, Los, A Chapter, 14.

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Hélène Cixous

12 Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 123. 13 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, interview with Christa Stevens, trans. Suzanne Dow, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 9. 14 Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell (London: John Calder, 1976), 646. 15 Hélène Cixous, Hemlock, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 91–2. 16 See ‘Dream treatment: on sitting down to read a letter from Freud’, below. 17 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 108. 18 ‘The Back Drawing-Room’ is the title of a short story by Bowen, dating from 1926: see Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 199–210. I discuss this story in ‘Spooking Forms’, in The Blind Short Story, ed. Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 26 (2004), 155–72. 19 Cixous plays with ‘a switch of witch/which tongue’ in ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, in Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis, ed. Mark Dawson, Mairéad Hanrahan and Eric Prenowitz, special issue of Paragraph, 36:2 (2013), 161. 20 Bowen, Collected Stories, 738. 21 See Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale, Jr, and Richard J. Dunn, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1989), 84. I discuss this ‘fresh as reality’ in greater detail in ‘Jacques Derrida and the Future of the Novel’, in Derrida Now: Current Perspectives in Derrida Studies, ed. John W. P. Phillips (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 184–212. 22 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 18; Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986). 23 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 18. 24 Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’, 56. 25 Derrida, H.C. for Life, 29; see also 38. 26 See Hélène Cixous, ‘The Book I Don’t Write’, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, in Volleys of Humanity, 200–1; and cf. Derrida’s discussion in H.C. For Life, 147–8. 27 See Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), 140. 28 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Character of “Character” ’, in Volleys of Humanity, 58. 29 Derrida, H.C. For Life, 145. 30 Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, x; L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1968), 15. 31 See Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, 608; and ‘Four words for Cixous’, below. 32 Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, x; L’Exil de James Joyce, 15–16. Cixous is quoting Jean-Jacques Mayoux’s Joyce (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 44. Mayoux was ‘my dear thesis advisor’, as she notes in Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 30.



Introduction 17

33 Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, 4. 34 Hélène Cixous, ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark’, New Literary History, 13:2 (1982), 244. 35 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 102. 36 Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 13. 37 Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, 13. 38 See Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, 171. 39 Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, 174. 40 Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, 164. 41 See Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, 170, 161. 42 Cixous uses this phrase in Dream I Tell You, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 3; for a fuller discussion, see ‘Advertisement’ and ‘To awake, Shakespeare of the Night’, below. 43 Adam Phillips, In Writing: Essays on Literature (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2017), 264. 44 Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, 163, my emphasis. 45 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 122. 46 Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, 166. 47 Hélène Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 32. 48 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1:4 (1976), 875–93; here, 882. The French runs ‘le rythme qui te rit’: see ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (originally published in French in 1975), in Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 35–68; here, 49. 49 Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, 888; ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’, 59. I discuss the problematic rendering of ‘écriture féminine’ as ‘women’s writing’, rather than ‘feminine writing’, in more detail in ‘Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth’, below. 50 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 142. 51 The sense of ‘stronger than death’ is all over Cixous’s writing: for a specific instance of the formulation, however, see Cixous, Los, A Chapter, 9. 52 It would require a separate book to explore the scope of her critical and creative engagements with drawing and the visual arts more generally. This is especially true of more recent work: see, for example, Hélène Cixous, Entretien de la blessure: Sur Jean Genet. Accompagné de treize dessins originaux d’Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Paris: Galilée, 2011); Le Voyage de la racine alechinsky (Paris: Galilée, 2012); Luc Tuymans: Relevé de la Mort, 2 vols (Paris: Éditions de la différence, 2012); Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature, with Adel Abdessemed (Paris: Galilée, 2013); Insurrection de la poussière: Adel Abdessemed, Suivi de A. A. / H. C. Correspondance (Paris: Galilée, 2014);

18

53

54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Hélène Cixous Correspondence avec le Mur. Accompagné de cinq dessins à la pierre noire d’Adel Abdessemed (Paris: Galilée, 2017); and Les Sans Arche d’Adel Abdessemed et autres coups de balai (Paris: Gallimard, 2018). For an earlier selection of Cixous’s work in English in this context, see Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics, ed. Marta Segarra and Joana Masó (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off ’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 20–31. Originally published in French as ‘Sans Arrêt, non, Etat de Dessination, non, plutôt: Le Décollage du Bourreau’, in Repentirs (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991), 55–64. Cixous, ‘Without end’, 20. See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 115. Cixous, ‘Without end’, 20. See Cixous, ‘Without end’, 27, where the sketch is also reproduced (Figure 2.3). Cixous, ‘Without end’, 27–8. Cixous, ‘Without end’, 29. Cixous, ‘Without end’, 30. Hélène Cixous, ‘Guardian of Language’, interview with Kathleen O’Grady, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in White Ink, 82–3. Cixous, ‘Without end’, 31.

2

Cixous cuts: through everything

Hélène Cixous cuts. Her writing makes incisions, severs and divides. It wounds.

"

" Quick, she passes through. " More intensively than any other contemporary writer, she practises the art of

cutting. ‘When I write I do nothing on purpose, except stop. My only voluntary intervention is interruption. Breaking. Cutting. Letting go. Cutting is an art I have acquired.’1 Her books manifest the sound and fury of this art in the most visible fashion. Words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters can just stop in the midst of

# But if they are interrupted, like a boat-engine cutting out, this is never

simply for show or for its own sake. ‘The book is written only if it has an engine. A book that writes itself and carries you on board must have an engine even if you don’t know how it works.’2 The engine is linked to the figure of genius. Before acquiring its widespread modern sense of machine, contraption, mechanism, ‘engine’ was a synonym for ‘ingenuity’, ‘artfulness’, ‘cunning’, as well as ‘trap’, ‘plot’, ‘snare’. The author of a book is not its master or mistress, or even its chief engineer. The book engineers itself. If the engine cuts out, it’s a question of being patient. Patience, she suggests, is something ‘with or despite desire’, ‘something continually strange’.3 You’re aboard, perhaps uncertainly adrift, but things start up again.

20

Hélène Cixous

" Cixous works a sort of magical découpage on creative and critical writing, over all their surfaces­– ­and in the depths.

# There are supposedly clear and secure distinctions between ‘critical writing’

and ‘creative writing’. Each apparently has its own name, its own allotted space. Over recent decades they have also undergone notable retrenchments. This has been integrally bound up with the ongoing marketisation of the university. In the English-speaking world and beyond, so much has come to be governed by the machinery of ‘research excellence’, by ‘league tables’ and other criteria for ‘measuring success’ and ‘calibrating achievements’, such as ‘learning outcomes’ and ‘transferable skills’. Students have been transfigured (often to their own disgust) into customers or consumers. The imposed ethos, for university teachers as well as students, is of ‘training skills’ and ‘professionalisation’. Critical writing has followed in this path. The production of critical essays, for both students and teachers, fuels the academic machine. The norms and conventions of critical writing are an integral part of the orderly world of tenure-track or promotion-worthy publications, academic monographs and essays in peer-reviewed journals. At the same time ‘creative writing’ has mushroomed in higher education institutions across the English-speaking world and beyond. For academic publishers, this has generated a new kind of textbook market: hurry up, today, request your inspection copy of Creativity: A Reader for Writers; The Creative Writing Student’s Handbook; Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings; Creative ­ rom Think to Ink; and so on. For universities, too, creative writing has Writing­– F been a welcome way of bolstering revenue. In the UK, this has been especially crucial given that institutions, and the humanities in particular, have been tossed about by successive governments and senior university management without any overarching vision other than maximising income and profits. And so the ‘growth’ of creative writing courses has itself entailed a packaging up, a boxing in, fit for the purposes of the marketplace. What might once have signified a radical openness­– w ­ riting that is creative, an anarchic freedom of expression, a kind of experimentality perhaps entirely at odds with ‘academic writing’­– ­has become simply another university subject, just as grounded, hemmed in by conventions, and just as susceptible to the academic criteriology of grading and assessment, as biology or history. Moreover, creative writing appears to have flourished at the expense of, and even in marked resistance to, what is called ‘theory’. How far away the practice, the university subject, the business and culture of ‘creative writing’ can seem

Cixous cuts: through everything 21



from the radical affirmations and provocations of the 1960s and 1970s, from the imaginative insights of those thinkers and writers associated with ‘theory’ (Adorno, Barthes, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, Lyotard and so on). In any such ABC of ‘theorists’, the name ‘Cixous’ must be included. In the English-speaking world, she is still often labelled as a ‘feminist theorist’.4 But she is no more a ‘theorist’ than she is a ‘creative writer’. From the beginning (let’s say, since the appearance of that unidentifiable literary object, Prénom de Dieu, in 1967), Cixous’s writing has been at odds with anything disciplinary, with everything that amounts to a theory or programme.5 If we now see the production of literary fiction (in the US and elsewhere) in terms of what Mark McGurl has called the ‘program era’, Cixous’s writing has to do with the unprogrammable era.6 Her writing calls for a different thinking of all the disciplines and lines between them­– ­‘biology’ (the study of ‘life’) and ‘history’ (so many his and her and other creatures’ stories) as much as ‘literary studies’, ‘theory’, ‘fiction’, ‘autobiography’, ‘life writing’. She invites us to draw them all otherwise. Scholars, cultural historians and bibliographers may continue to classify early texts such as ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ (1972), ‘Sorties’ (1975) and ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) as ‘critical essays’, but the writing itself will always resist such framings. And at the same time its radical affirmations and provocations (political, sexual, imaginative, biological, historical, literary, etc.) remain as palpable and pressing as ever. ‘Critical essay’, ‘creative writing’, ‘theory’, ‘post-theory’­– ­so many terms meant to terminate, to enclose and fix. The poetic thinker Hélène Cixous, or the poetic thinking that is ‘Cixous writing’, practises strange forms of découpage on all these terms. Each of her texts entails a new and singular reading every time, readings that engage with the unprogrammable and the unforeseeable. How to read Cixous?

" cut clear   

cut out    see how she cuts Her response back in 1975 to the question ‘What remains of me at the university, within the university?’ is just as pertinent today: For me ideology is a kind of vast membrane enveloping everything. We have to know that this skin exists even if it encloses us like a net or like closed eyelids. We have to know that, to change the world, we must constantly try to scratch and tear it. We can never rip the whole thing off, but we must never let it stick or stop being suspicious of it. It grows back and you start again.7

22

Hélène Cixous

# ‘Critical writing’ and ‘creative writing’ have undergone notable retrench-

ments, I just suggested. ‘Retrenchment’: ‘A diminution, a lessening; reduction in extent, size, amount, or importance’ (OED, sense 1a). It’s from the Old French trenche, meaning ‘cut’. Cixous declares: ‘An etymological presentiment guides me. Call it a good nose. I smell the odour of origins on the most familiar words.’8 She invites us to keep a nose out, and ears and eyes and tongue and fingers, for the subtlest whiffs and traces of sense. She reads and writes with her body. Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation comes to mind: we should read ‘slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers’.9 Cixous is about touch-reading and what Sarah Jackson calls ‘tactile poetics’.10 She engages with ‘physiowriting’.11 As she has observed: ‘the exercise of writing is extremely physical, athletic sportive­– a­ nd requires being in perfect “shape,” as we say of athletes, that is, demands a perfect animal-like poise, balance, harmony of muscles nerves respiration brain’.12 To read with Cixous, in the spirit or ambience of Cixous, we should be feeling things out, experiencing our bodies, including the strangeness and histories of words in our bodies, down to the core. When we meet with a so-called common noun such as ‘engine’, for instance, we should be wary of a genie lurking, the jinn within. When we meet with ‘core’, we should think to hear the heart (the Latin cor)­– ­as Hamlet doubtless hopes his friend Horatio will do when he speaks of him as a man he can wear ‘In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart’ (3.2.73).

#As Judith Still has remarked: ‘Typically in Cixous, words … are sensual.’13 A

word can be lovely to mouth, to lick, to hear, to look at and turn around. What is sensual is never merely on the surface but has to do also with invitation, the appeal of what is concealed, suggested, held out. Any word might transpire to have a surprising engine or core, the promise of an inner world both seductive and liberating, as if to say: Come in! fly away! This is where Rembrandt can help clarify thinking about Cixous as ‘realist’. Rembrandt’s realism? At first sight that’s an improbable phrase, not least because it runs quite counter to how Cixous herself seems to talk about him. As she pointedly stresses in ‘Bathsheba or the interior Bible’ (with its poetic, telegrammatic cut-up form of 24 sections or ‘steps’), there is ‘no realism’ in Rembrandt.14 There is nothing of the ‘genial splendour of realism’ that we find in Holbein’s Erasmus (12–13). Of Rembrandt’s astonishing painting The Slaughtered Ox, Cixous pithily remarks: ‘Nothing less “realistic” ’ (17). (Note that the word has now been delicately placed in inverted commas­– ­as if to suggest that there is a question here, after all.) Likewise with



Cixous cuts: through everything 23

his Old Woman Reading, on the cover of the present volume: it’s not ‘realism’, not with the pages of the book she’s reading apparently lighting up her face like that; not with those implausibly large, rather uncanny hands (‘What big hands you have, Grandma!’). And yet, as Cixous makes wonderfully clear in her reflections on Rembrandt, his paintings take us inside, they take us down ‘into the flesh’, into a world ‘full of night’ and ‘golden stuff ’, they take us ‘down to the bottom of ourselves’ (6). He paints ‘the secret fire that emanates from the flesh’ (6). Thus what The Slaughtered Ox gives us, Cixous contends, is ‘the very man or the very woman’.15 As she suggests in FirstDays of the Year (1990), Rembrandt’s work ‘isn’t about painting, it’s about embarkation, it’s about freedom and prison, about the freedom inside the prison that is painting. And about the painter’s escape.’16 Come in! Fly away! There is a real, what I want to call a realism in Rembrandt, that has to do with the sense that, as Cixous comments in ‘Bathsheba or the interior Bible’, ‘he paints the secret’ (13). He paints ‘what escapes’ (13): the reality of thinking.17 ‘I myself,’ she says, ‘only paint in words.’18 Such is the sensual world of Cixous’s writing: you are invited to go down into her text as you would go down into a painting by Rembrandt.

#How far Cixous’s writing is from the retrenchments of ‘creative writing’ and

‘critical essay’. To read her you have to be willing to set aside the ‘anti-intellectual history’ of the past fifty years­– o ­ r at any rate, start to draw the lines differently. You have to let yourself be open to the unexpected and uncanny. The categories of ‘creative writing’ and ‘critical writing’ don’t apply to the sort of writing she produces. The professionals can tell you till they’re blue in the face that here, in this book, she is a creative writer (a novelist, a fiction-writer), whereas there, in that text, she is a critical writer (it’s an academic essay, look, it even has footnotes!), one or the other­– ­but she’s gone, she’s away.

# To read Cixous: cut off into another thinking of space and time and history.

Her writing is a new kind of science fiction or poetic science criticism. It has to do with nanoments, narratoids, omnicisence and ornithophony, with ‘literature’ as a land as much of the ancient past as of the unforeseeable future.19 In her books centuries collapse in a twinkling. A pair of scissors expands into a world.

# ‘Critical writing’ has to do with cutting. ‘Criticism’, ‘crisis’, ‘critical’­– ­all

these words come down, or up, from the ancient Greek verb krinein, to cut, to discern, judge, decide. Decision is a cut-word too: the scissors are in the ‘cide’

24

Hélène Cixous

or ‘cise’ action. It is in the nature of ‘Cixous cuts’ that her fictional and dramatic works are critical too. Take, for example, the huge but brief little book Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: 1. Los, A Chapter (published in French in 2013), which engages with a reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in and from its title onwards, along with William Blake, Emily Brontë, Büchner, Stendhal, John Donne and others, while trying to present a story of ‘Los’, in remembrance of cut-off time, the loss of lost, the love and lust, writing of her erstwhile lover Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012).20 It’s funny about Fuentes’s famous moustache. She still has his scissors. She writes, in English, in a phrase that resonates, that tells and tolls, addressed to time, space, death, you or me: don’t stick. She writes: ‘Don’t stick. I pick up his scissors [ses ciseaux] and I cut. I am cut.’21 That’s how this little book ends, in effect. She wrote down a dream but can’t find it again, but instead she finds his moustache scissors: … I can’t find the Dream. A fateful loss. As if I’d been condemned to repeat the test of losing Carlos. A perpetual loss. Lost: even the dreams. In place of the lost dream, where I thought I’d left it, on my table­– a­ nd it’s not under the cats either­– ­I find: the scissors. They took everything, death. Except for the pair of moustache scissors.22

She is all about critical scissors­– ­the cixous in ciseaux (it sees you, seeks you)­– ­ reaming, the reality of the pair of moustache scissors that belonged to Carlos, d analysis of the writing, hers and the others, cut up with love.

# And scissors, too, for the ‘creative’. This word (and its cognates: create, creation, creativity) secretes itself all over the place. To give a couple of examples, like a pair of blades, sliding together:

1) in ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’, she remarks that ‘an autobiographical narrative is at the same time a creation’.23 The formulation is deceptive, wobbling, perhaps treacherous. It recalls Augustine’s notion of confession as ‘making truth’. In case anyone thought that an autobiographical narrative could be characterised as factual, objective, disinterested and so on, she insists that it is fiction, fabrication, a making up, a creation. But this is not ‘creation’ as a God-like act. The opening line of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Negation’­– p ­ erhaps the funniest line he ever wrote­– ­springs to mind: ‘Hi! The creator too is blind.’24 An autobiographical narrative is something performative, to be made, an encounter with the unforeseeable. What you find yourself saying or how you find yourself coming out, coming over,



Cixous cuts: through everything 25

might surprise you in bizarre, life-changing ways. Everything Cixous writes is autobiographical, but this is autobiography-in-division, self-découpage, creative writing cuts. 2) In ‘Writing Blind’ she observes: My book writes itself. Creates itself. (In French: se crée.) Secret. With jubilation and play. With French. Within French, riding French. Afrenching itself from French. It turns back to see if I am (following) it. It makes a fool of me while creating itself. This too is its secret: the proof of creation is laughter.25

Writing is not the activity of a subject, it is not what an author masterfully, consciously, deliberately does. It’s more like what an author, without authority, lets happen or finds happening. It goes off by itself. It happens thanks to scissory loops and verbal scions, in secret. In an untranslatable play in the original French, the phrase se crée means ‘creates itself ’ but sounds identical to (the French pronunciation of the word) secret. The play is not Cixous’s, she need make no excuse. It’s like the ‘ciseaux’ in ‘Cixous’. She is excused in advance, without a word. Creation and creativity have to do with secrecy, with what is inscribed, incised and excised in the capacity of a word (secret) to be cut (se crée) and metamorphose. Writing blind in English would be writing cut loose, playing with English, fast and loose, within but alongside it. The secret crate I’ve to go after­– ­creative writing would be what, dreamily after some semblance of authorship, you uncontrollingly, unforeseeably turn out. It turns you out, like a cat. Cixous’s text plays on the fact that in French ‘I am’ and ‘I follow’ are the same: je suis. Follow that, if you Laugh: you have to be a fool, you have to open your mouth and see that ‘the proof of creation is laughter’. Cixous talks about laughter everywhere, from ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ (1975) onwards. She knows the jubilation of writing that makes her laugh. That’s the proof of the pudding that was baking without your even realising there was an oven: if it makes you laugh. Cixous laughs, she wants to laugh, she can’t help it. Laughter is more important than the Bible. That’s how she ends the remarkable text ‘Writing Blind’: so much in the Bible is ridiculous, she says. ‘The Fall’, for example, ‘is ridiculous. But in the Bible one does not laugh. The sense of sin keeps God from laughing.’ However, she adds: ‘In my Bible, one has a sense of the ridiculous.’26 She’s beside herself, she’s in stitches. Things happen, words come, all sorts of miraculous effects come into play.

26

Hélène Cixous

" Cixous cuts with her passion for words, everything has to be heard as if the

listener had been deaf and then out of the blue hearing is restored. That is the vitality and vibrancy she detects in great works of literature. But we are living in a world that seems increasingly deaf, dead to the world. Take Shakespeare for example: looking around, looking at the stage of the world, the media stage, the newspapers etc., I think that it is so aggressive, so meagre, so vile, spiritually, intellectually, in language, in feelings, it’s so miserable, that I don’t think they know that somebody called Shakespeare has ever lived. In some ways it is as if it were a shame or, as it were, ridiculous, for a writer to be so subtle and so light, not heavy at all, so funny, so elegant. But Shakespearean situations and predicaments are present everywhere around us. We need Shakespeare all the time, to read what is happening.27

All the echoes and snatches, memories and restagings of Shakespeare in her writings­– ­and these verbal revenants, especially from Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and Othello are everywhere­– ­join, joy in his work, and share in resisting the aggression, the vileness, the spiritual and intellectual feebleness of the ‘world-stage’ of today.

#Cixous’s writing bears wounds. She’s cut. The cuts inflicted on her mark her

words at every turn: starting from her childhood, the sufferings and losses, feelings of guilt and criminality, the deaths of loved ones, the enormities of cruelty, inequality and injustice in the world, past and present. ‘The only book that is worth writing is the one we don’t have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed.’28 And at the same time it is always written out of love. As she declares in ‘Coming to Writing’: ‘I write for, I write from, I start writing from: Love. I write out of love.’29

#Cixous’s art of cutting is inspired by Freud. Not the Freud you are told about

at school or (sadly, also, in most cases) at university and beyond, but the (divided) one you discover in actually reading his work. As Adam Phillips has succinctly phrased it: ‘Freud encourages us to read as we dream, according to our desire, surprised by what may strike us, and unable to predict what will haunt us.’30 Like Phillips, Cixous never reads Freud in a merely reverential or deferential way. Her Freud is not at all solemn and dictatorial. Her Freud is a fantastic cut-up, a poetic joy, ‘the greatest and most inspiring of puppets in my theatre’.31 Her



Cixous cuts: through everything 27

Freud has a rich sense of humour, even or especially if he himself may appear to have missed the joke. But he is also, for Cixous, an extraordinary writer and guide to thinking about desire and dreams, self and language, and all the cuts such thinking entails. Reading Freud helps us think about traumas or wounds, the infliction and suffering of cuts in terms of what he called Nachträglichkeit (in English: ‘afterwardsness’, ‘deferred meaning’, ‘after-effect’, ‘delayed sense’). You watch this space and

# Cixous’s art of cutting is inspired by Jacques Derrida. She reminisces about

first reading him­– ­his essay ‘Force and Signification’­– ­in 1962. In her mind’s eye she sees him ‘walking fast and sure along a mountain’s crest, from left to right’. Writing more than thirty years later, in 1994, she declares: ‘I had never seen someone from our century write like this, on the world’s cutting edge, the air had the air of a transparent door, so open one had to search for the stiles.’32 Derrida writes in such a way as to make all sense of a frame or context tremble. He shows how the stiles (the doorposts, the vertical bars that provide the frame) are out of joint. This image of writing ‘on the world’s cutting edge’ is a figure of deconstruction or what Derrida elsewhere calls ‘the opening of the future itself ’.33 To read Cixous is to teeter, still, on the world’s cutting edge.

# She cuts off with Freud and Derrida down into the labyrinth. There are at least three intersecting paths or threads to be picked up:

1) an acknowledgement of non-mastery (‘the ego is not master in its own house’, says Freud;34 ‘the master is nothing’, says Derrida);35 2) an acute attentiveness to the letter and to the play of words (‘an author’s words are deeds’, says Freud, and the talking cure is ‘a kind of magic’;36 words play, with us and without us, says Derrida, ‘there are aleatory or chance elements at work in every kind of message’;37 and 3) an immersion in the strangeness of dreams­– ­in what they promise, give, recall, cut. For Cixous, Freud is a figure of ‘extraordinary power’ as the ‘first and last cartographer of [the] strange continents [of dreams]’, while Derrida is ‘the dreamer philosopher, the only one’.38 A line of separation between Freud and Cixous, or at any rate between psychoanalysis and what happens in her writing: she cuts analysis, as one might cut classes, without ever having begun. She has never been ‘in analysis’ (a fact about

28

Hélène Cixous

which Jacques Lacan more than once expressed his incredulity), except perhaps with herself.39 As she has noted: ‘We are all lay-analysts, beginning with the first analyst who was a lay-analyst, since Freud was an analyst before analysis, the pre-analysed, pre-analytical analyst.’40 Cixous is interested in analysis, in words that heal, words for good, in writing as a kind of magic, but she submits without any couch or other listener. She is all about dreams, the unconscious, especially in relation to what she calls ‘the Mother unconscious’ and the ‘subject’s severance’: Cixous cuts an auto-hetero-analytic, even post-analytic figure.41 A line of separation between Derrida and Cixous: throughout his life Derrida claimed that he never knew how to tell a story, he resisted, he questioned, he held back from offering narrative accounts; Cixous in a sense never stops trying to tell a story, she sees it she seizes it as impossible and but, but and, the book tells it. There is a formidable commitment to narrative, to storytelling as an art of veering and as a cutting art: she insists on offering narrative accounts, no matter how mesmerisingly intricate, convolved, abyssed.

# Cixous’s art of cutting is inspired by literature­– ­by the Bible, Greek tragedy and comedy, epic poetry, Ovid, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Kleist, Stendhal, Poe, Rimbaud, Dostoevsky, Lewis Carroll, Kafka, Joyce, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, Faulkner, Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Clarice Lispector and so on and sew on and sow on. Literature is in dissemination­– ­thinking, dreaming, undergoing, letting go, mad weavings of sense, a ceding scattering of seeds. Literature is the strangely incontinent continent that never forgets, but keeps secret. ‘Literature is tragic, panicked by the necessity of pursuing the secret but in vain.’42 A secret implies some cut­– ­something cut off from view or knowledge, secreted, removed, separated. (‘Secret’ is from the Latin sēcernere, sēcrētum, from sē-, ‘apart’, cernere, ‘to separate’.) It is this desire and fear, this experience of an elusive secret that links literature and dreams: It is the feeling of secret we become acquainted with when we dream, that is what makes us both enjoy and at the same time fear dreaming. When you are possessed by a dream, when you are the inhabitant of a dream, you are driven by this, by a kind of heart beating: and the dream says something that is never said, that will never be said by anyone else and which you unknow; you possess the unknown secret. It is this, not the possibility of knowing the secret, that makes you both dream and write: the beating presence of it, its feeling.43



Cixous cuts: through everything 29

" Cixous cuts don’t belong to a single instant. They don’t happen when they

happen. As Cathy Caruth says of the wound we call trauma: ‘the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time’.44 Deferred effect is one name we give to what will have been going on. How does one write about what hurts while acknowledging the force of deferred effect? What sort of story should one tell? What kinds of narrative form might best respond to or countersign the nature of traumatic experience? Cixous sums up, in the afterwardly afterworldly Prologue (written in 2008) to the reissue of her 1973 book Tombe: ‘One thus goes back from scar to scar, along a ladder of lesions, towards a lost originary trauma.’45

# Cixous cuts­– ­across conventional distinctions between the human and non-human animal, one species and another, as well as between human and god, human and demon. The short but terrible, horrifying text entitled ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’ is about going back from scar to scar to her dog Fips and remembering, viscerally in the lost membership and dismembering of the body (his and hers, woman and dog), Fips’s ghastly demise, including the moment he bites her foot and hands. Cixous more than once cuts up and reverses the English words: ‘God is dog in the English mirror.’46 Fips is ‘the most miserable of the gods and the most divine of the miserable’.47 He is the one who reminds me of myself and who turns out to be the character the most secretly necessary and marking of the flesh of my soul, I see him, it is he … It is to him that I owe my scars… I have his teeth and his rage, painted on my left foot and on my hands, I never think about it, because the little mute lips of the wounds have travelled, what remains of them on my feet and my hands is only an insensible embossment, the marks of the cries are lodged on the sensitive very sensitive membranes of my brain. I have that dog in my skull, like an unrecognisable twin.48

# Cixous cuts­– ­through natural and supernatural. The word ‘supernatural’

might initially promote thoughts of mysticism or spiritualism, all the well-worn signs of the religious, eerie or spooky; but really it is just a matter of seeing how dreams infiltrate our perception. ‘We must pass through dreams in order to perceive the supernatural dimension of the natural.’49 What makes literature the ‘daughter of Dream’ is the familiarity they share with making strange.50 Again, Shakespeare is in play: ‘As in Shakespeare, everything ordinary is endowed with

Hélène Cixous

30

a supernatural quality.’51 This loops back into the dream and the secret: the feeling of something secret, the ambience of the supernatural in a dream.

# Cixous makes stabs at traumatic experience­– ­where the experience in the

telling tolls, as if at once once and one more time, and where the trauma can be joyful, as well as terrible. She never lets us forget what she calls ‘the heartbreaking pleasure of being able to feel’.52 But stabs sounds brutal. And there is violence in her writing. It can brutalise the reader, cut to the quick. It can shock, disturb, break through one’s defences, tear up one’s presuppositions, shred expectations, excise beliefs. Cixousian violence undoes assurances of what is inside and outside, mental and physical, literal and figurative, verbal and non-verbal. We might think here of her first recognised ‘novel’, the unidentifiable literary object called Inside (which won the Prix Médicis in 1969, when it was published in French as Dedans), where the violence in a sense begins and ends with the promises and threats opened up in that title-word.53 Love, intimacy and self-knowledge intercut with murder, vivisection and death. We might recall, as one example among so many, the description of a woman in a hotel: Death is always alive in the trees and bushes of the nervous system enveloped by sensitive tissue, which I somehow knew were there beneath the opaque skin. With my thousands of scanning eyes, sharp as needles, I penetrate the lady; she is a carrier and receptive, about to liquefy; all it would take is a slit in her skin about thirty centimetres long for everything to come out, pain, warmth, fears and worries; then I’d be able to see the face of her earliest childhood hiding in some cavity. Let’s wait…54

This reads in part like a sensuous revision of Bataille or an erotic reworking of Poe’s Monsieur Valdemar, but the slitting here is at the same time sheer Cixous.

#A ‘Cixous cut’ might also be the name for a piece of writing, akin to the oneoff of a sound recording, cutting a disc, or film.

# Quick now. Cut. Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 144.



Cixous cuts: through everything 31

  2 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 100.  3 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 58.   4 The designation ‘theorist’ with reference to a woman can also be an effective way of diminishing the ‘woman’. Asked if it is ‘more difficult for a woman to be taken as a writer than as a theoretician’, Cixous replies: ‘it is easier for a woman to be accepted as a theoretician, that is to say, as less woman’: see Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 7.   5 Hélène Cixous, Le Prénom de Dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1967).   6 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).   7 See ‘Exchange’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 145.   8 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 147.   9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, ed. Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 5. 10 Cixous refers, for instance, to reading her brother ‘by touch’ in Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 51; and see Sarah Jackson’s fine study, Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015). 11 See Hélène Cixous, ‘The Book I Don’t Write’, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, in Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, ed. Eric Prenowitz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 208. 12 Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 122. 13 Judith Still, Derrida and Hospitality: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 164. 14 Hélène Cixous, ‘Bathsheba or the interior Bible’ (first published in French in 1993), trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 3–19: here, 13. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 15 Hélène Cixous, ‘Paintings’, trans. Laurent Milesi, in Poetry in Painting: Writings on Contemporary Arts and Aesthetics, ed. Marta Segarra and Joana Masó (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 9. 16 Hélène Cixous, FirstDays of the Year, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 64. 17 Cixous’s observation that Rembrandt ‘paints thoughtfulness’ echoes back at least as far as Roger de Piles in 1699, who remarks: ‘He paints thoughts’ (see Cixous,

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‘Bathsheba or the interior Bible’, 8). Cf. also ‘the author’ in FirstDays of the Year, contemplating Rembrandt’s The Jewish Bride: ‘Rembrandt had painted the truth. She saw the hand that is. Nothing was symbolical, or allegorical, or biblical. It was about real people. What one could believe’ (FirstDays of the Year, 65). 18 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 90. 19 I offer a detailed account of nanoments, narratoids, omnicisence and ornithophony in ‘Four Words for Cixous’, below. 20 Hélène Cixous, Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du temps: I. Chapitre Los (Paris: Galilée, 2013); Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: I, Los, A Chapter, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) (hereafter Los, A Chapter). Further page references give (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash. Two related volumes in this context are Le Détrônement de la mort: Journal du Chapitre Los (Paris: Galilée, 2014), which has been published in English as Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), and Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du temps: II. Corollaires d’un vœu (Paris: Galilée, 2015). Cixous’s title is abstracted from Hamlet’s speech about the uncanny power of theatre and its actors: ‘they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you lived’ (2.2.463–5). 21 See Cixous, Los, A Chapter, 72/93. 22 Cixous, Los, A Chapter, 74. 23 Hélène Cixous, ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 183. 24 Wallace Stevens, ‘Negation’, in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 82. 25 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 141. 26 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 152. 27 Hélène Cixous, ‘Rites of Tenderness, Killing the Dead, Living On: Thoughts for the Times on Shakespeare and Death’, Oxford Literary Review, 38:2 (2016), 287–8. 28 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 32. 29 Hélène Cixous, ‘Coming to Writing’ (originally published in French in 1977), trans. Deborah Jenson, with Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers, in ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 42. 30 Introduction to The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006), xv. 31 Hélène Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, in Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis, ed. Mark Dawson, Mairéad Hanrahan and Eric Prenowitz, special issue of Paragraph, 36:2 (2013), 174; and cf. her description of Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’: ‘What unfolds without fail before the reader’s eyes is a kind of marionette theatre in which real dolls



Cixous cuts: through everything 33

and mock puppets, real life and false life, are manipulated by a sovereign but capricious machine operator.’ See Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans. Robert Denommé, rev. Eric Prenowitz, in Volleys of Humanity, 15. 32 Hélène Cixous, ‘What is it o’clock? Or The door (we never enter)’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 57. 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘Afterw.rds: or, at least, less than a letter about a letter less’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Afterwords, ed. Nicholas Royle (Tampere, Finland: Outside Books, 1992), 200. 34 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 17: 143. 35 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 23. 36 Sigmund Freud, ‘To Thomas Mann on his Sixtieth Birthday’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 22: 255; ‘The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversation with an Impartial Person’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 20: 187. I discuss ‘a kind of magic’ further in ‘To awake, Shakespeare of the Night’, below. 37 Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie V. McDonald (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 108. 38 Hélène Cixous, Dream I Tell You, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 3; and Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 39. 39 On Lacan’s incredulity, see Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 52. I have discussed this not-in-analysis elsewhere, apropos Cixous and also Derrida: see Nicholas Royle, ‘ “The Abnormal Day of This World”: Letter from Iceland’, Division Review: A Quarterly Psychoanalytic Forum, 15 (Fall 2016), 52–5. 40 Cixous, ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, 170. 41 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 102, 106. 42 ‘From the Word to Life, with Jacques Derrida: Interview with Aliette Annel’, trans. Ashley Thompson, in Hélène Cixous, White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 177. 43 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 85. 44 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 9. 45 Hélène Cixous, Prologue to Tomb(e), trans. Laurent Milesi (Chicago: Seagull Press, 2014), 11. 46 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 150.

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47 Cixous, ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’, 184. 48 Cixous, ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’, 185. 49 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 97. 50 Cixous, Dream I Tell You, 7. 51 Hélène Cixous, ‘In October 1991…’, trans. Keith Cohen, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 40. 52 Cixous, Dream I Tell You, 6. 53 Hélène Cixous, Inside, trans. Carol Barko (New York: Schocken Books, 1986); Dedans (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1969). 54 Cixous, Inside, 38.

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Advertisement: the joys of literature and the return of the dead (An essay in two acts)

Act 1 Hélène Cixous’s Dream I Tell You (Rêve je te dis) is unlike any other book.1 Is it a book? It divides. It is a sort of joke-book, a double-booking, doubled up in pain anguish terror dread and in laughter joy gusto happiness. First published in French in 2003, then in English (translated by Beverley Bie Brahic) in 2006, it ‘began as a joke’ (7), Cixous says. There are some eighty dreams, jotted or jetted over a number of years (going back to at least 1990) and reproduced in apparently haphazard, non-chronological form. Many but not all are dated. Some have titles, others do not. Some are short (just a paragraph), others stretch to four or five pages. These dream-transcriptions, or ‘limbo things [ces choses de limbes]’ (vii/9) as Cixous calls them, are set off, divided from, doubled by a sort of preface, in the plural, a few pages of ‘Avertissements’ or what the English translation calls ‘Forewarnings’ (1–11/11–21). ‘Avertissement’ means ‘warning’ but also ‘foreword’. The English word ‘advertisement’ comes from the French avertissement, and originally meant ‘an act of informing or notifying’, ‘calling the attention of someone’, an ‘admonition, warning, instruction’ (OED, sense 1). In another sense that goes back to the fifteenth century, ‘advertisement’ is ‘A (written) statement calling attention to anything; a notification; esp. a notice to readers in a book (typically, a preface)’ (OED, sense 2). And then with regard to its primary meaning today, as ‘The calling of general attention to something, public notification; (now esp.) the promotion of goods and services through a public medium’, the dictionary refers back to its early but now obsolete usage as the ‘announcement of something by the town crier’ (sense 3). Under this heading (sense 3) the OED cites Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, where Leonato exclaims (apropos the impossibility of

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someone not experiencing grief while giving advice or counsel to someone who is): ‘Therefore give me no counsel. / My griefs cry louder than advertisement’ (5.1.31–2). Actually Shakespeare’s ‘advertisement’ is at least double: Leonato’s phrasing plays on the sense of ‘precept’ or ‘instruction’ as well as the crying out of an announcement. But the OED is no dream-book, it has no time for detailing Shakespeare’s or anyone else’s double or more-than-double meanings.2 Advertisement: it is all about turning, as if in sleep, and what happens, what you make of it all, waking up. This word ‘advertisement’ can turn one’s head. It has to do with turning to, turning towards, and yet it is also a cautionary note, a writing plunged in warning. We might also hear in the word something of the adversary or adversarial, and adversity, a turning towards the enemy, an enemy made of this turn, and of the unfavourable or dangerous turn. ‘Advertisement’ is a veering word.3 We should listen with an ear for the multiple (French and) English resonances to be traced in it, including the force of James Joyce’s satirical allusion, in Ulysses, concerning ‘the infinite possibilities hitherto unexploited of the modern art of advertisement’.4 Cixous’s Avertissements at the start of her book are after-the-event, turning away from as much as towards the title: Dream I Tell You. This title-phrase already sounds a warning note. Try to read or face it­– ­this oneiric Janusian facebook of a phrase. On the face of it you have to dream, it’s an order. You have to dream: without dreaming we are nothing. On the face of it you have only to listen or at any rate pay attention, it’s a point of information. This is a dream, some dreams, some dream, even the dream, I tell you. To whom is this promise or threat of the title addressed? Is it me? Or you (i.e. anyone but me)? Or Cixous? Or the dream? Dream I tell you. The ‘tell’ is telling too. It’s a speech-act about speech. Whatever the dream may be, it comes down to the telling or saying (rêve je te dis). Some story, how ever dreamlike, is already underway. And the title is in a loop. Because for all the seeming haphazardness of the dream-writing contained in this book, the title-phrase is also the final phrase, the last words. The title is already a citation, then, taken from the dream dated 15 September 1997: ‘Reverberating the sentence wakes me. Who was it addressed to? Then it says (the sentence): “Dream I tell you” ’ (142). The ending of the book has thus already flown back into its opening, at the same time as collapsing distinctions between dreaming and waking, the dream-texts and the text about the dreamtexts. ‘Dream I tell you’: to whom are these words addressed? Oh! to whom? (Let us leave this question of address sleeping for now. We will return to it below, in ‘Dream in literature’.)



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‘Watch out! Dreams!’ (10), says the placard that Cixous wants to hold up in the opening pages of Dream I Tell You. They are marvellously enigmatic, these ‘forewarnings’ or ‘avertissements’ that declare a kind of absolute difference and distance from the dreams themselves. The dreams of Dream I Tell You are over there, at such a distance, so far away, like vents or ventions before any event or invention or convention, the dreams are televents, one might say, but now, coming to the beginning of the book, it is the dreamer’s turn, and ours, to read them. ‘My turn now!’ (À mon tour!) (2/12), she exclaims, already turned to them: ‘Now I contemplate their psychic faces at leisure, their long haunted bodies, and to be sure I discover their secrets. These secrets, in this volume, I don’t give them away [Ces secrets, dans ce volume, je ne les livre pas]. I never shall. They know too much’ (2/12). Cixous tells us she knows and the dreams know, but we do not, we never shall. She does not, or says she does not, give them away, liberate them, bring them to book. In ‘Fichus’, a text delivered in Frankfurt on the occasion of receiving the Adorno Prize on 22 September 2001, Jacques Derrida asks: What’s the difference between dreaming and thinking you’re dreaming? And first of all who has the right to ask that question? The dreamer deep in the experience of his night or the dreamer when he wakes up? And could a dreamer speak of his dream without waking himself up? Could he name the dream in general? Could he analyse the dream properly and even use the word dream deliberately without interrupting and betraying, yes, betraying sleep?5

Derrida proposes that there are two responses here: ‘The philosopher’s would be a firm “no”: one cannot have a serious and responsible line on dreams, no one could even recount a dream without waking up.’ This ‘no’, he observes, ‘perhaps defines the essence of philosophy’, linking the responsibility of the philosopher with ‘the rational imperative of wakefulness, the sovereign ego, and the vigilant consciousness’ (165). Derrida then goes on to suggest, however, that ‘there would be a quite different, but no less responsible, response from poets, writers, or essayists, from musicians, painters, playwrights, or scriptwriters. Or even from psychoanalysts. They wouldn’t say no, but yes, perhaps, sometimes’ (166, trans. modified). ‘Fichus’ pays homage to Theodor Adorno. Derrida admires Adorno because he ‘never stopped hesitating between the philosopher’s “no” and the “yes, sometimes, perhaps” ’, because he ‘did everything he could to take on the responsibility of this double legacy’ (166). Derrida delivers his speech at Frankfurt ‘with

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the ghostly or unheimlich, uncanny gestures of a sleepwalker’ (165), as he puts it: he speaks of addressing his audience (‘m’adressant à vous’: 11), as if dreaming as he does so: ‘So I am speaking to you in the night, as if in the beginning was the dream’ (167–8). He focuses on a motif in Adorno’s thinking that has to do with disappointment, with the way in which ‘the most beautiful dreams are spoiled, injured, mutilated, damaged (beschädigt), and hurt by a waking consciousness that lets us know that they are mere appearance (Schein) with regard to actual reality (Wirklichkeit)’ (166). There is a ‘wound of which the most beautiful dreams forever bear the scar’ (166). But even waking up in the middle of a nightmare, Derrida goes on to say, even being awoken from the worst dream, can be disappointing: ‘we would be disappointed to be awoken from it, for it will have shown us how to think [more literally, will have given us to think] the irreplaceable, a truth or a meaning that consciousness might hide from us on waking, even put back to sleep’ (167/18). It is in this context that Derrida comes to speculate on a thinking of dreaming as ‘a more vigilant state than being awake, the unconscious more thoughtful than consciousness, literature or the arts more philosophical, more critical, at any rate, than philosophy’ (167). He asks: ‘Could there be an ethics or politics of dreaming that did not yield to the imaginary or to the utopian, and was not an abandonment, irresponsible, evasive?’ It is a question of the possibility of the impossible (die Möglichkeit des Unmöglichken), a thought that he attributes to Adorno and then in turn to Walter Benjamin, that is to say ‘overcoming the dream without betraying it’ (168). To overcome without betraying, Derrida argues, is to wake up, to cultivate awakeness and vigilance, while remaining attentive to meaning, faithful to the lessons and the lucidity of a dream, caring for what the dream lets us think about, especially when what it lets us think about is the possibility of the impossible. (168)

Derrida calls this his ‘debt to Adorno’ (176). It is linked to their shared interest in ‘the question of literature’, especially ‘where it is indissociable from the question of language and its institutions’ (179). It is from ‘this possibility of the impossible’ that one would try to think differently, to think in the context of ‘an unconditionality without indivisible sovereignty’ (168/23), and to elaborate ‘ethical, juridical, and political consequences’, for example to do with ‘the idea of time, the gift, hospitality, forgiveness, the decision­– ­or the democracy to come’ (168). This other thinking, Derrida suggests, is concerned with deconstructing ‘both the onto-theologico-political fantasies of an indivisible sovereignty and



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pro-nation-state metaphysics’ (172). It ‘involves a deconstructive critique that is sober, wide awake, vigilant, and attentive to everything that solders the political to the metaphysical, to capitalist speculating, to the perversions of religious or nationalist feeling, or to the fantasy of sovereignty’ (179). This ‘possibility of the impossible’, Derrida says, ‘can only be dreamed’ (168); and this dream has more to do with literature, with poetry, music, painting, drama and even psychoanalysis, than with philosophy. However different from Cixous’s writing, I would like to suggest, ‘Fichus’ is Derrida’s dream-I-tell-you. While he doesn’t mention her in ‘Fichus’, it is hard not to feel the informing spirit of that incomparable ‘writing by dream’ with which he associates her work. No other contemporary writer more clearly embodies his interest in a thinking of dreaming as ‘a more vigilant state than being awake’ than Cixous, the poetic thinker of the dream par excellence. She haunts ‘Fichus’, too, with respect to the ghostly: Derrida’s discourse is ‘oneirophilic’, he remarks, because ‘dreaming is the element most receptive to mourning, to haunting, to the spectrality of all spirits and the return of all ghosts’ (173–4/36, trans. slightly modifed). (This dream-loving remark about revenance will help illuminate our discussion, in the second part of this chapter, of dreams of the dead who have come back to life or are alive as if they had never died.) In corresponding vein, as we read the ‘Avertissements’ to Dream I Tell You, it is hard not to feel the informing spirit of Derrida, whom Cixous elsewhere memorably describes as ‘the dreamer-philosopher, the only one, the martyr, the torn-between philosophy and naïveté’.6 In particular, ‘Avertissements’ resonates from the beginning with Derrida’s ‘To Speculate­– ­on “Freud” ’ in La Carte postale (1980), which starts with a section bearing the same title, ‘Avertissements’ (translated by Alan Bass as ‘Notices (Warnings)’).7 Cixous, then, invokes Derrida’s reading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle without naming him as such. Derrida’s ‘Avertissements’ is, among other things, about avoidance­– F ­ reud’s avoidance of philosophy, in general, and of Nietzsche, in particular. Cixous’s ‘Avertissements’ is about avoidance as well, especially apropos the claim that the second and larger part of Dream I Tell You (the dreams or dream-transcripts themselves) avoids ‘analysis and literature’ (9). She keeps them away, at a distance. Dream I Tell You, Cixous tells us, is a ‘book of dreams without interpretation’ (7). She might have tried to turn her ‘primitive tales’ into ‘butterflies’, but she has avoided doing so: the dreams remain ‘larva’, ‘unpolished’, ‘innocent’, limbo things in a ‘pre-analytic dawn’ (9). At the same time, Dream I Tell You opens as

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a confrontation with the dream itself as what cannot or should not be avoided: Cixous has ‘learned to block [her] attempts at escape’ (1). She wakes up, she’s been dreaming, and at first she tells herself: ‘this morning I won’t write, not that, it’s of no interest, I’ve got better things to do, jobs await me’ (1). But that’s when the dream tells her not to run away: right away the Dream says: you will do what you claim you don’t want to do this instant, write me, remember: never listen to your own voice. No arguing, no reason, follow the rule. You know your running away tricks. Do it before you think, before you read, before you are. You don’t seriously think, says the Dream, that I have come to watch you take to your heels! (1–2)

And so, Cixous recalls, ‘the hand in the dark writes as best it can’ (2). Like Derrida, Cixous invites a thinking of avoidance in terms of affirmation, the gift and the ghostly. He observes: ‘The avoidance never avoids the inevitable in whose grasp it already is.’8 Or again: ‘What is closest must be avoided, by virtue of its very proximity.’9 These propositions resonate in the ways in which both writers, in their singular manner, affirm­– ­while taking a distance from­– ­the dream. Just as we might speculate on Cixous’s ‘Avertissements’ as speculations on Derrida’s ‘Speculations’, so we might ponder Derrida’s ‘Fichus’ as ‘speculations on Cixous’. And, at the same time, any exploration of the ways in which these writers avoid or explicitly engage with one another (avoid and engage, engage by avoiding) would have to reckon with the ghostly logic of ­forget-reading. To read and forget at the same time: as Derrida suggests in H.C. for Life, oublire (a portmanteau of oublier, ‘to forget’, and lire, ‘to read’) is her word, her verbal invention, and he forget-reads her all the time.10 Critical reading and creative writing are about how we forget-read those closest to us. Dream I tell you: it has to do with the untranslatability of dreams and the experience of the impossible. As Cixous makes clear in the ‘Avertissements’ when, playing on words (adverting us to the ways in which dreams are endlessly playing on words, perhaps starting with the word ‘dream’ itself: recall Derrida’s simple but extraordinary question, can one ‘even use the word dream deliberately without interrupting and betraying, yes, betraying sleep?’, yes, the word dream, its turning about endlessly in and of itself, I am mad, it says, ma, and mar, this English word as if made with an ear for, made of an ear from the older word, the Old English drēam meaning joy, mirth, minstrelsy, music, sound, in dream you read the word ‘read’, and this demand to read, to dam, to dare, is turning in every dream, a mare, in a realm or ream of one’s own), she stops herself: ‘I’d



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better stop: I don’t want people to bristle at the thought of the philosophical and philosophicomical resources of the language’ (4). In that stretched, fetched-up, far-stretched portmanteau ‘philosophicomical’ Cixous signs the dream, signs what we might think about the dream after Freud. She does not speak here of Freud and humour, but they are invariably to be seen together in her work. Besides many other things, Freud is also a great thinker of the joke, and thus also of literary works, of how the literary work conforms to the structure and logic of a joke. His own joke-book, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), may make only passing references to literature (Sophocles, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Heinrich Heine and Jules Verne), but it is perhaps as illuminating as an account of the structures of literary narrative and the pervasive role of wordplay in literature, as it is as a theory of jokes and humour.11 Still, Cixous’s working with the ‘philosophicomical resources of language’ is very different from Freud or Derrida. ‘However black and bloody’ dreams may be, she says, ‘they are always also for the sake of laughter’ (7). At once despite and because of how authoritative, how stern and earnest he can be, how paternal and proprietorial, how full of phallocentric seriousness, Freud, we sense, always makes Cixous laugh. And it is in correspondingly affirmative spirit that she reads Derrida. As she has said of his writing: ‘No one has performed more learned yet more innocent pirouettes around words, letters, no one has ever managed to get French more joyously drunk, giving philosophy the full measure of its greatness once and for all, its tragic, comic spell. (I never read him without being appalled at my urge to laugh with enchantment.)’12 Cixous’s ‘Avertissements’ compresses Freud into a single, sprawling, wily, playful, wonderful sentence: I admire Freud’s extraordinary power, first and last cartographer of these strange continents, the Shakespeare of the Night: he saw the movements and cosmonautic calculations of the whole genesis and anthropozoology of this world, its wiles and passions, subterfuges and stratagems, intrigues and plots, games of genre and species. (2–3)

Freud was the first and last to map the world of dreams, we’ll never stop going back to him, starting with his extraordinary book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Dream I Tell You is a ‘book of dreams without interpretation’ (7), Cixous declares, and yet, and yet yes­– ­there is this splitting­– ­this doubling of the form of her book, with its strange pre-bookings, with its dreams second and ‘Forewarnings’ first. The turn to read and contemplate them comes first. She assures us that, as

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regards the texts of the dreams themselves, she has kept ‘­analysis and literature’ at a distance, ‘at arm’s length’ (9). But there is inevitably something curious, even unprecedented, about this idea of a ‘book of dreams without interpretation’. It is at once touching and funny, this denial of ‘interpretation’ in a preface that provides, as well as warns against, innumerable possibilities of interpretation. It recalls Freud’s remark at the beginning of his 1925 essay, ‘Negation’, when his patient says, ‘ “You ask who this person in the dream can be. It’s not my mother.” ’ To which Freud adds: ‘We emend this to: “So it is his mother”.’13 The point of negation is that no can always mean yes. The unconscious never says no. This is what Josh Cohen talks about as ‘the vantage point of psychical reality’, which doesn’t deal with ‘an “either-or”‘ but ‘knows only a “both-and” ’.14 Of course Cixous knows all this, it’s a starting point for thinking about what I referred to in the opening chapter of this book as psychical realism. When it comes to the world of dreams, as she remarks in ‘Forewarnings’, there is no ‘ “not true” ’; ‘it is all true during the dream’ (5). Traces and trajectories of analysis and literature (fiction and poetry, drama and wordplay) are everywhere in Cixous’s text. She plays fort/da with them nonstop, starting with the word ‘avertissements’ which is doubtless an instance of what Walter Benjamin calls a highwayman. Derrida cites Adorno citing this in ‘Fichus’: ‘citations [are] like highwaymen (wie Raüber am Wege), who suddenly descend on the reader to rob him of his convictions’.15 You cite a word or phrase from someone (it might even be yourself), confident that you know what it means or what you are going to do with it, but, as Derrida suggests in ‘Fichus’, the use of quotations can always prove ‘disturbing, disconcerting, even unheimlich’ (169). Freud is the Shakespeare of the Night. Cixous does not speak again of Shakespeare in ‘Forewarnings’: he turns up, only to vanish, in the darkness. Yet his writing haunts her work perhaps more than anyone else’s. As she has remarked elsewhere: ‘without Shakespeare (unbelievable hypothesis because the world comes from Shakespeare) I would never have written. Or, put differently: to the end, I will never have written without Shakespeare.’16 What is going on in this beautiful and provocative little epithet, ‘Shakespeare of the Night’? We will revisit it later in this book (in ‘To awake, Shakespeare of the Night’), but here I would like to wonder: who or what is this composite figure of daylight robbery? Where might this substitution or supplementation of ‘Shakespeare’ by ‘Freud’ leave Shakespeare? What of Shakespeare’s cartography of dreams?



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Act 2 Let us venture some reflections on a dream in Shakespeare that does not figure in Dream I Tell You but is nonetheless an important point of reference in Cixous’s work. Let us listen and try to read these few lines from Antony and Cleopatra (1606):17 Dolabella Most noble empress, you have heard of me? Cleopatra I cannot tell. Dolabella      Assuredly you know me. Cleopatra No matter, sir, what I have heard or known. You laugh when boys or women tell their dreams; Is’t not your trick? Dolabella          I understand not, madam. Cleopatra I dreamt there was an emperor Antony. O, such another sleep, that I might see But such another man! Dolabella          If it might please ye – Cleopatra His face was as the heav’ns, and therein stuck A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted The little O, the earth. Dolabella             Most sovereign creature – Cleopatra His legs bestrid the ocean; his reared arm Crested the world: his voice was propertied As all the tunèd spheres, and that to friends; But when he meant to quail and shake the orb, He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty, There was no winter in’t; an autumn ’twas That grew the more by reaping. His delights Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above The element they lived in. In his livery Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket. Dolabella                Cleopatra – Cleopatra Think you there was or might be such a man As this I dreamt of? Dolabella          Gentle madam, no. Cleopatra You lie up to the hearing of the gods. But if there be nor ever were one such, It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff

Hélène Cixous

44

To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine An Antony were Nature’s piece ’gainst fancy, Condemning shadows quite. (5.2.70–99)

Cleopatra cannot tell whether she has heard of her interlocutor, Caesar’s friend Dolabella. What she has heard or known is immaterial. It is as if she is dreaming. This is her dream-I-tell-you. She is going to tell it, even if it is Dolabella’s characteristic habit to laugh. If it’s his ‘trick’, she sees it, she seizes it in advance, she turns the laughter of men on its head, stops it before it could even begin. She is telling this dream and won’t be interrupted, nothing holds her back, she wants to hold on to it, to be there: yes, not just perhaps, sometimes, but right now, at this very instant. There was an Antony, she dreamt. Or rather, to give it in the language of the dream, she dreampt. In the First Folio (1623) it has a ‘p’ in it: dreampt. One might take pleasure in saying this word all day: dreampt. This wonderful spelling, silenced or suppressed in all modern editions of Shakespeare, keeps a sound or play of keeping and of sleep, a kind of sleepy spelling, spelling sleep. ‘O, such another sleep…’ For all the astonishing richness of Cleopatra’s evocation of this colossus, for all the exorbitance and monumental beauty of this figure of Antony, his face and limbs, the musical loveliness of his voice and also its commanding power, the erotic abundance of his generosity and dolphin-like delights, the strangeness of this dream is perhaps just as much to be noted in the little words and in the play of letters, for example in the ‘p’ that plays the ‘dreampt’ into sleeping and keeping, the anagram of ‘see’ in ‘sleep’ (‘O, such another sleep, that I might see…’), the soporific pick-up of assonance in Dolabella’s ‘please’ (‘sleep’, ‘see’, ‘please’) and rhyme in ‘ye’ (‘that I might see’, ‘If it might please ye’), the ‘O’ that becomes the world, over which the eyes (‘a sun and moon’) of Antony ‘kept their course’, and finally in the ‘an’ of ‘an Antony’ that seems at once to stammer and transplant him in an an-effect that manifests itself in so many of Cleopatra’s words. The ‘an’ is up to its strange anagrammatical antics, for instance, in ‘another’, in ‘hearing’, in ‘nature’ (with a mirror held up to it), in ‘wants’, in ‘strange’, in ‘fancy’, in ‘imagine’, in ‘’gainst’, and of course in ‘dreaming’. The an-effect announces itself, insinuates itself, in the manner of a subliminal advertisement. (We might see its persistence in play, too, in the ostensible compositor error of ‘an Antony’ for ‘an autumn’ at 5.2.85.) And it is there, naturally, in the ‘and’ (‘A sun and moon, which kept their course and lighted’, ‘and that to friends’, ‘to quail and shake’, ‘crowns



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and crownets’, ‘realms and islands’), an-effect in and between Antony and Cleopatra. Pausing to ask Dolabella if he thinks ‘there was or might be such a man / As this I dreamt of ’, and met with a commonsensical ‘no’ that is also the ‘no’ of the philosopher (‘Gentle madam, no’), Cleopatra accuses him of lying (as if to correct him by declaring: dream I tell you). How to construe the bizarre line, ‘But if there be nor ever were one such’? ‘Whether or not such a man ever existed’, suggests David Bevington (editor of the New Cambridge); ‘if there neither is nor ever was such a man’, suggests John Wilders (editor of the Arden Third Series).18 This is her final transport, an image or imagining whose singular exorbitance (‘past the size of dreaming’, neither simply ‘Nature’ nor ‘fancy’) seems to sow itself in this deranged, deranging scattering of the ‘an’: But if there be nor ever were one such, It’s past the size of dreaming. Nature wants stuff To vie strange forms with fancy; yet t’imagine An Antony were Nature’s piece ’gainst fancy, Condemning shadows quite.

Antony is dead. Cleopatra tells her dream. The ‘an-effect’ is an effect of mourning, an-effect in mourning. He has come back. He’s not a ghost. He’s there, she tells you, and ‘It’s past the size of dreaming’. It’s about something­– ­here in these words, this speech­– ­in excess of nature and imagination. It’s as if she were madly remembering (or madly citing, centuries in advance), joyously enfolding and bodying forth Philip Sidney’s defence of poetry: ‘Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature…’19 Cleopatra’s speech streams together the joys of literature and the return of the dead. Cleopatra’s dream of Antony, perhaps more piercingly than any other dream in literature, evokes the impossible real­– ­the experience of when (in Cixous’s words) ‘our beloved come back to us alive’. The return of the dead: this is perhaps the most moving aspect of Dream I Tell You. In both the ‘Avertissements’ and the dream-texts that follow, Cixous evokes the experience of some dead beloved suddenly, in a dream, simply or overwhelmingly, humbly or colossally, alive again, as living and real as he or she or they ever were. It’s impossible, this dream of revenance, and yet it can also feel more affecting, more powerful, more precious

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than anything in what we call ‘real life’. Most often it is Cixous’s father. On one occasion (a dream dated 6 November 1997), it is a matter of the strange poignancy and anguish of the dead loved one coming back and drawing the dreamer. He posthumes as he draws. Cixous is a drawing in the dream of her father’s voice. He is drawing her with his voice, there is just time for her to be sketched: my father was speaking, he was saying I had the shape of a statue, that classical form, which in those days people didn’t appreciate, and which later they did, and while his voice sketched me [tandis que sa voix me dessinait], I moved straight harmonious tall under his words with my beautiful, different shape. Once downstairs I paused. Someone was going along the corridor. My father is here, I say, he has come back. Already the thought of the end of the return entered into me, the great joy ripped apart, he had come for a mouthful of time, two weeks, he was going away again, I felt the need to say something to this any-old person, she didn’t listen, and he was going away, I was left with my anguish, telling myself the news: soon he is leaving again. He had just had time to sketch me [Il avait juste eu le temps de me dessiner], to dub with his glance my rare and elegant form. A sob would shatter my breast. (78/92)20

‘Avertissements’ stresses what Cixous calls ‘joys the diurnal world never gives’. These, she says, are the joys of love granted, exultations whose ecstasies only literature, daughter of Dream, allows us to feel at length. And the Return of the Dead. This way through night’s magic corridors where our beloved come back to us alive, right here and with no blood tax at the border. Here death becomes what it is: only an almost interminable separation, interrupted by these rare, brief but ecstatic meetings. (7)

Literature, chez Cixous, is indissociable from what belongs to the Night and to its magic corridors. Her work (whether we are responding to it as fiction or theory, poetic or theatrical, creative or critical, philosophical or philosophicomical) is about writing and reading as resurrecting. The secret of literature is asleep in this image of the ‘daughter of Dream’. Literature is feminine, the offspring of Dream. Is Dream the mother or the father? We are invited to conceive, as we are conceived, of mixed parentage, a doubling and multiplying of sexual beings and identities. Literature contains joys, exultations and ecstasies that ‘the diurnal world never gives. And the Return of the Dead.’ ‘Joys’ slide into ‘exultations’ into ‘ecstasies’ into ‘the Return of the Dead’ or, in the original French text, ‘Revenance’ (16). Cixous leaves it uncertain how Dream and Revenance relate: syntactical turbulence is integral to her poetic thinking. The fact that Revenance,



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like Dream, is capitalised, however, suggests that it too may have had a role to play in the birth of literature. But Dream I Tell You is not literature, even while it evokes and invokes literary works and figures. As I have been trying to suggest, it is not like any other book. It’s a kind of limbo work, a twilight thing. To recall the opening words of the ‘Avertissements’: ‘They tell me their stories in their language, in the twilight…’ (1).21 Literature, as Cixous says in an interview in 2005, ‘suspends death … It stops death with life. Similarly, when you’re dreaming, all pain is suspended. It’s waiting for you. Similarly, when you wake up from literature, the pain is waiting for you.’22 But she makes a clear distinction between Revenance as the return of the dead you have known and loved, and literature as a land of the still living. As she observes in Une autobiographie allemande (2016): Proust, Kafka, Montaigne etc., all my dearest elders and loved ones, are they revenants? I do not believe so. To me they are another species of beings: they are permanently living, I have not seen them die, I have not lost them, they have not come back, they arrived and we have never left one another, I have never wept for them, I have lived other lives with them, I have taken on their childhoods and their parents, I ‘see’ them more often, and they telephone or write to me more often than my own children. They are the inhabitants and hosts of the land of lands, literature land. They stay there and wait for me. Co-living and undying.23

Shakespeare is not dead: he is ‘co-living and undying’. And his Antony and Cleopatra­ – ­especially pivoting on what we might call Cleopatra’s dream of a Revenantony­– ­is an indispensable work for understanding Cixous’s way of analysing and writing about the real­– ­about life and the undying. In conclusion, I would like to highlight the vital and persisting importance of Antony and Cleopatra in Cixous’s work by looking at a couple of examples separated by some forty years. First, the play provides a focal point for her vision of a new politics of sexuality, as sketched in ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/ Ways Out/Forays’ (first published in French in 1975).24 The play is central to the final pages of ‘Sorties’ (122–30), where Cixous characterises Shakespeare as ‘neither man nor woman but a thousand persons’ (122). The play’s the thing in which love lives, passing beyond death and all the phallic fiddle-faddle of politics, kingdoms and empires. As in a play or novel, Cixous’s essay has characters. She peoples her critical, theoretical discourse with Shakespeare. In a passionate critical and literary mingling of commentary, paraphrase, quotation, translation

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and transformation, she affirms, through and with Antony and Cleopatra, the ‘victory of love in history’ (122). The demonstration begins with the dream of the return of the dead: ‘Cleopatra: I have dreamed of an emperor whose name was Antony. Oh! If only I could sleep again to see again his equal’ (122). Antony and Cleopatra ‘set themselves outside of ordinary human time’ (124). Their love is of the order of what Cixous elsewhere talks about as might­– ­the mightiness of a dream of love.25 She writes: Everything is yet to come, aspiration, vitality. The more you have, the more you give, the more you are, the more you give, the more you have. Life opens up and stretches to infinity. And Antony is not left behind … [He dares] to strip himself of power and glory and to love and admire a woman enough to take pride happily in rivalling with her in passion. (124)

Cleopatra is Cixous’s ultimate embodiment of the ‘newly born woman’ (La jeune née: the title of the book in which ‘Sorties’ was first published): She is life made woman. She is woman made Art: each moment of her story with Antony is created, at the same time ardently lived and immediately multiplied by incessant tensions, transformations, recreations that open and echo the thousands of scenes in which love can infinitely inscribe its need of no limit. (126)

In making herself a work of art, Cleopatra herself is ‘passing’, Cixous says, ‘like a dream’ (126). And the ‘an’ of Antony­– ­always ‘an Antony’, ‘another Antony’­– ­is crucial here. Like Cleopatra, he is a figure of ‘tensions’, ‘transformations’ and ‘recreations’, like the shape-shifting ‘cloud that’s dragonish’ or the ‘vapour’ that’s ‘like a bear or lion’ or ‘blue promontory / With trees’ that ‘mock our eyes with air’, as he tells Enobarbus he has become.26 Together Antony and Cleopatra go beyond what Cixous calls, earlier on in ‘Sorties’, ‘the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theatre’ (85), into the vision of another world.27 These fluidities and multiplicities of being (the being of Antony-and-Cleopatra) take us beyond ‘the rational imperative of wakefulness’ and ‘the sovereign ego’, as Derrida will later refer to them in ‘Fichus’. ‘Sorties’ concludes: ‘And far from kingdoms, from Caesars, from brawls, from the cravings [envies, also ‘envies’] of penis and sword, from the unnameable “goods” of this world, far from show and self-love, in harmony with each other, in accord, they live still [ils vivent encore]’ (130/197). If Shakespeare is ‘co-living and undying’, so are Antony and Cleopatra. Cixous ends with an oneirophilic vision that is (in Cleopatra’s words) ‘past the size of dreaming’. It’s a vision of



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dream-as-a-reality, the possibility of an impossible evoked in writing. On the one hand, it hearkens back to a remark, earlier in ‘Sorties’, that Cixous attributes to William Blake: ‘whatever is thinkable is real’ (78).28 On the other, it prefigures the force of Derrida’s contention, in ‘Fichus’, that ‘[a] dream is also a place that is hospitable to the demand for justice and to the most invincible of messianic hopes’ (174). Second example. Antony and Cleopatra bulks, somewhat discreet but still colossal, in Cixous’s recent writings around Los, such as Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: I. Los, A Chapter (2013) and the companion volume Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal (2014).29 The name or word or thing ‘Los’ is a colossus of dream-I-tell-you in itself: it refers perhaps primarily to a sort of living memory resurrection of Cixous’s former lover, the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012). And then it’s ‘loss’ in English, and also Blake’s ‘Los’: ‘Los is the self-creating prophetic imagination that broods in secret beyond good and male. In his mythology Los is himself the malefemale offspring of the author he is. Los is the name of the Eggchicken Blake created.’30 And then in German (Cixous’s mother’s mother tongue), los goes all over the place too: it’s ‘Go’, ‘Let’s go’, and (in the phrase Was ist los?) ‘What’s wrong?’, ‘What’s up?’, and (as a noun) it’s ‘destiny’, ‘fate’ and ‘luck’ (with a capital letter it’s a lottery or raffle ticket).31 Count your losses: loses. Colossal. Uncountable, unaccountable. The narrative of Death Shall Be Dethroned is explicitly figured as ‘the Antony Cleopatra love story’.32 The love affair between Cixous and Los happens in Shakespeare’s tongue: ‘We love each other in English’ (12). She describes Los as ‘emerg[ing] like a sea god sputtering from the waves, whipping them with his tail, escorted by a flotilla of dolphins, painters, poets, actors, ambassadors, squiggling shoals among whom he plays the role of a transsexual Cleopatra’ (9). In Los, A Chapter, too, Carlos is figured as a singular mix of boy and girl, ‘mascufeminine’: ‘In the case of Carlos, where one expects paws with powerful claws he has long slender phalanges, proof that his inner child hid a girl still play-acting Antony Cleopatra.’33 Elsewhere Los, A Chapter pictures a fantastical movie entitled (after Cleopatra’s phrase in Antony and Cleopatra [1.5.75]) My man of men: [Carlos] sees himself straddling the Atlantic Strait. Antony-seen-by-Cleopatra. With a few kingdoms he fashions her a throne. She changes Egypt into a nation of postal workers. No sooner does he read one letter than the next one turns up. They hold the world in their hands. As long as the film lasts the magnification keeps the spectator in an intoxicating state of levitation.34

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It’s Antony and Cleopatra above all that seems to inspire Cixous’s phantasmagoric vision. And it’s the uncanny substitutability of an Antony (and Cleopatra) into a Los that gives these recent texts their eerie losful magnificence.

Notes

 

1 Hélène Cixous, Dream I Tell You, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006); originally published in French as Rêve je te dis (Paris: Galilée, 2003). Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash.   2 The 1989 edition of the OED includes in its definition of ‘advertisement’: ‘The action of calling the attention of others; admonition, warning, precept, instruction. Obs.’ (sense 2). The most recent online OED definition (2011) omits the reference to ‘precept’. The Arden editor Claire McEachern glosses ‘advertisement’ as ‘precept’, ‘good advice’: see Much Ado About Nothing, ed. Claire McEachern, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 284.  3 For more on the veering in advertisement, see Nicholas Royle, ‘Advertisement’, in Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), viii–ix.   4 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1993), 636; cited in OED, ‘advertisement’, sense 3.   5 Jacques Derrida, ‘Fichus’, in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 164–81; here, 165. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash, as published in Fichus: Discours de Francfort (Paris: Galilée, 2002).   6 Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 39. For more on Derrida and dreams, see also Cixous’s ‘The Infinite Taste of Dreams’, in Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 121–68.   7 See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 259–91; La carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 277–311.  8 Derrida, The Post Card, 263.  9 Derrida, The Post Card, 263. 10 Jacques Derrida, H.C for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 23. 11 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, in The Standard Edition



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of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 8. 12 I am here citing her endorsement on the back cover of Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006). 13 Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 19: 235. 14 See Josh Cohen’s witty and lucid account of ‘the comical unconscious’, in his How to Read Freud (London: Granta, 2005), 50. 15 Theodor Adorno, ‘A Portrait of Walter Benjamin’, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (London: Neville Spearman, 1967), 239; qtd in Derrida, Fichus, 169. The standard English translation here runs: ‘Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction.’ See Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 95. 16 Hélène Cixous, in Hélène Cixous and Cécile Wajsbrot, Une autobiographie allemande (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2016), 58, my translation. 17 Quotations here are based on the New Cambridge Shakespeare Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 18 See Antony and Cleopatra, ed. Bevington, 244; and Antony and Cleopatra, ed. John Wilders (London: Thomson Learning, 1995), 283. 19 Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 100. 20 For further examples of dreams in which the father is alive (again), see Cixous, Dream I Tell You, 12–13, 58, 67–8. 21 The original French here for ‘in the twilight’ is ‘entre chat et loup’ (11), literally ‘between cat and wolf ’, a trope on the conventional idiom ‘entre chien et loup’ (‘between dog and wolf ’). I discuss this trope at greater length in ‘Interrogating Twilight’ (forthcoming). 22 Hélène Cixous, ‘Literature Suspends Death’, interview with René de Ceccatty, trans. Fabien Troivaux, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 28. 23 Cixous, Une autobiographie allemande, 56, my translation. 24 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996); ‘Sorties’, in Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 69–197. Further page references to the English translation are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash.

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25 For more on love and ‘might’ in Shakespeare and Cixous, see Nicholas Royle, ‘Miracle Play’, in Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy, ed. Jennifer Ann Bates and Richard Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 271–97. 26 See Antony and Cleopatra, 4.14.1–14, and Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 128–9. I have discussed this passage in detail in a chapter entitled ‘Nod’, in How to Read Shakespeare, new edn (London: Granta, 2014), 106–20. 27 I discuss this spurious or fake theatre in more detail in ‘Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth’, below. 28 Together with her comment that ‘all the poets know this’, this suggests that Cixous has in mind Blake’s ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ in which we read: ‘Every thing possible to be believ’d is an image of truth’; or again: ‘does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? … All poets believe that it does.’ See The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. edn (New York: Anchor Books, 1982), 37, 38. 29 Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: I. Los, A Chapter, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) (hereafter Los, A Chapter); Hélène Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016). See also Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du temps: II. Corollaires d’un vœu (Paris: Galilée, 2015). 30 Cixous, Los, A Chapter, 22. 31 On the German, in particular, see Cixous, Los, A Chapter, viii. 32 Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned, 12. Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 33 Cixous, Los, A Chapter, 37. 34 Cixous, Los, A Chapter, 52.

4

Cixous cuts: take time

Often people say that Cixous is difficult. Challenges to intelligibility come at the start. Here are four recent book-openings: This is not a dead object but an underground explosion whose seismic, personal, and literary consequences still continue to make themselves felt. (Manhattan)1 I was anointing my mother. ‘I am skinning Mummy’ I tell myself, doing her skin. (Hyperdream)2 I passed in front of Olivier de Serres which saddens me you say I try to recapture exact details in the flesh but I can’t picture the place remains the same you say. (Love Itself in the Letter Box)3 It is thus the New Life which I see. Its aged face where eternal youth shines. Right in front of me and caught up in a rush. I saw that I was seeing time fall This emotion (Eve Escapes)4

" These openings cut. Quite randomly selected, they nonetheless already sug-

gest a signature or idiom: the sense of something violent, in a rush, the frailty and vulnerability of the body and of memory, but also of the act or event of telling as such, an uncertain relation to time and uncertainties of voice. All of this has to do with ‘the violence of the strangeness’ that we call love.5 The beginning of the book cuts into the world of the reader. What is going on? What kind of writing is this? How am I supposed to work out a ‘reader position’? The writing seems alive, it’s ‘not a dead object’. It is intimate, tender and disorientating all at once. And the sense of something violent­– ­which might have to do with love­– ­is also a violence to language, syntax and grammar. For instance in the absence of punctuation in the opening of Love Itself in the

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Letter Box and the apparently conclusive comma where one might expect a full stop; or the omission of full stops after ‘I saw that I was seeing time fall’ and ‘This emotion’ in the opening of Eve Escapes. Cixous cuts include an affront to syntactic and grammatical conventions, the emphatic removal or refusal of the salves of punctuation, a constant reminder of the incisive possibilities of a strike or perforation in the punch of punctuation, the strange, deferred slowness of a ‘hidden explosion’ or uncertain blow. Despite and because of these kinds of violence, her cuts are on the side of life, affirmations of the good, loving and gentle. Benefictions of a previously unknown kind.

" Some people seem to resent Cixous, they object to the difficulty, they want to

classify her as self-indulgent, narcissistic, a writer endlessly writing about herself, reflecting on her own experiences, recounting them for her own and everyone else’s benefit. There is perhaps some truth in this, if we grant that her Narcissus has no known self. Cixous is constantly vigilant over the engines, snares and ruses of narcissism. As she observes in an interview: ‘We do not own ourselves. We do not know ourselves. We are not masters of ourselves … I do not know myself, I do not own my-self, I’m even the person who knows me the least well.’6 These remarks are in turn reflections on a phrase in Shakespeare, namely Olivia’s in Twelfth Night: ‘ourselves we do not owe [i.e. own]’) (Twelfth Night, 1.5.300). For Cixous, the book she is compelled to write is never mere submission to masochistic pleasure. At the same time she acknowledges that ‘[t]he only book that is worth writing is the one … that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed. It is a combat against ourselves, the author; one of us must be vanquished or die.’7 As ever­– ­knowing it is a sever, the severity of a severance that can never be known­– ­Cixous does not deny death: with writing, in writing, some kind of death-wish is never far away. There is, she suggests, an intimate, if forbidden or taboo connection between writing and dying. Writers ‘feel a strange desire for death. They feel like dying. But it is something they cannot say. I can’t say: “I feel like dying,” because it is forbidden, and yet it is really the only thing one should say.’8

" The author is a double. One is double, without knowing. And what is double

is always more than two. In ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’, Cixous’s great essay on Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, the classic cut of psychoanalysis (aka castration) is decomposed, rewritten, metamorphosed in innumerable directions, starting



Cixous cuts: take time 55

with the uncanny division of the author, Freud or Cixous, you or me, and with the ‘bifurcated reading’ she sketches in her opening sentence: Let us propose here a bifurcated reading, between literature and psychoanalysis, with double attention paid to what is produced and what escapes in the unfolding of a text, sometimes led by Freud and at other times bypassing him in this trajectory that strikes us as being less a discourse than a strange theoretical novel.9

We will return to ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ in more detail later in this book.10 For now let us simply dwell for a few moments on this opening sentence. Even as it proposes a split or ‘bifurcated reading’, Cixous’s text is already dividing and cutting off in multiple directions. This extraordinary first sentence makes a sort of labyrinth of itself. Has the reading that is proposed as ‘bifurcated’ already begun, or is it not yet underway? And then the sentence starts cutting itself up in an oddly visible fashion, with the comma after ‘bifurcated reading’. It might at first glance seem to be superfluous punctuation, but its effect is at least double: to mark a hesitation, however slight (and later in this same opening paragraph ‘Hesitation’, with a capital ‘H’, will be introduced precisely as the name of Freud’s double); and to give us an instance of amphibology, a characteristic Cixousian trope of grammar where the sense of a sentence is cut, cut up, by a phrase that might be read as referring back to what precedes it, or forward to what comes after it. ‘Let us propose a bifurcated reading, between literature and psychoanalysis, with double attention paid…’: is this reading (that has already begun or perhaps not yet begun) itself ‘between literature and psychoanalysis’ (both and neither)? Or is it a reading of something (Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’) as ‘between literature and psychoanalysis’? The feeling of a sentence with a Janusian character, looking in two directions at once, is then exacerbated, doubled or redoubled by the reference to a ‘double attention paid to what is produced and what escapes in the unfolding of the text…’ You cut the sentence, you pause its unfolding at this point, and you cannot be certain whether this curiously passive or anonymous ‘attention’ that is ‘paid’ has to do with the unfolding of Freud’s text or of the text you are reading. All sense of agency or authority starts to feel unhinged. Cixous’s analysis lovingly undoes the analyst. What we might initially have assumed to be a critical discourse (‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’) about critical discourse (Freud’s essay) has already led us, led us before the start, into the reading of ‘a strange theoretical novel’.

" Cixous cuts engage us with what a text does not say, what’s been excluded, ‘what escapes’, what cannot be said. She has written on many occasions about

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what she calls ‘the book I do not write’.11 These would be phantoms of fiction­ – ­and they are as evident in critical discourse as in literary or creative writing. ‘I sense that in each book words with roots hidden beneath the text come and go and carry out some other book between the lines. Suddenly I notice strange fruits in my garden. It is these verbal dwarfs who have made them grow.’12 Cixous cuts are not superficial. They go down, underneath, inside. Everywhere in her writing, underworlds: the undergrowth of roots and gardens, imps and other verbal strangers. Words ‘are our dwarfs, our gnomes, our minuscule workers in the mines of language. They perforate our deafness.’13 If we are willing to listen, words alter us. They can cut into, cut through what we refuse or have been unable to hear. Cixous cuts are also sites of sudden metamorphosis, like those in Ovid’s stories, such as turning a young man about to kill his mother into stars.14

" No cuts without ghosts. " ‘All great texts begin in [a] manner that breaks: they break with our thought

habits, with the world around us, in an extreme violence that is due to rapidity.’15 A grimly humorous poem by Sylvia Plath called ‘Cut’ begins: ‘What a thrill­– ­/ My thumb instead of an onion.’16 The speaker has sliced into her thumb while trying to prepare food. The event, the cut of the poem’s title, has already happened: the rapidity is of an event over before it’s begun. Something akin is going on with ­ elivered at the cuts of ‘Cixous cuts’. The phrase ‘Cixous cuts’ aims at speed­– d such speed it leaves you uncertain whether ‘Cixous’ is the name of a person or of the writings attributed to her, whether ‘cuts’ is noun or verb, whether the phrase is in fact a complete grammatical sentence or an aposiopesis (‘Cixous cuts…’: what does Cixous cut? Wait and let’s read…); whether ‘Cixous’ is subject or object (the one who cuts or the one to whom cuts happen)­– ­not to mention the skidding, shooting, and veering off in innumerable directions of how to read the word ‘cut’ or ‘cuts’ itself. To cut is also to dash, go quickly, run away, be off.

" As a character called The Letter declares, in her play The Blindfolded Fiancée

or Amelait (2004): ‘I’ll have had a short life, cut down in the flowering’.17 This is an insistent motif in what people call (with ever greater lack of assurance in doing so) contemporary life. It is the force and strangeness of the future anterior, corresponding with Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of the postmodern in 1979 as what ‘would have to be understood according to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo)’.18 It is Derrida’s consistent refrain: ‘Life will have



Cixous cuts: take time 57

been so short.’19 People may still say ‘life’s short’ and try to sound serious, but it’s a kind of philosophical joke. It’s a delusory fiction, a play at rounding up what no living speaker is in a position to round up. It’s like a sentence cut down in the flowering. The shadow of the future anterior has fallen across us as, perhaps, never before. This is Mark Currie’s argument in About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time: increasingly, he suggests, ‘the present is experienced in a mode of anticipation’. ‘This anticipatory mode of being’, he goes on to say, is ‘a characteristic of contemporary culture, the contemporary novel, and even of human being in general.’20 It manifests itself everywhere­– ­in the threats and realities of climate change, environmental destruction and mass species extinctions; in the traps and seductions of teletechnology in which we find ourselves increasingly programmed and inscribed. If the novel is a privileged place for the exploration of this strange vein of ‘what will have happened’, the fictions or double life writings or unidentifiable literary objects produced by Hélène Cixous are among the most richly illustrative and incisive. Above all on account of their speed­– ­a speed or speeds that cannot be accounted for. As Derrida remarks in The Beast and the Sovereign, apropos a sense of ‘going quicker than time’ and ‘taking time by speed’, where ‘what I live in the present, or even what I expect from the future, is already past, already memory’: ‘That’s what it means whenever I say: “Life will have been so short.” Incalculable, incommensurable precipitation or acceleration, ahead of itself­– ­and taking time by speed.’21

" ‘We live more quickly than ourselves, the pen doesn’t follow’, she says.22

This quickness is primarily about sentience, being embodied and alive, rather than about language or the ‘life of the mind’. It’s not a question of psychology. Here Cixous is especially close to Kafka: ‘Never again psychology!’23 She remarks: ‘Psychology is a bizarre invention, about which I understand nothing, a sort of verbal gadget. First of all we are sentient beings.’ What matters first and foremost is ‘the flood of extremely fine and subtle affects that take our body as a place for manifestation’.24 Again this is where literature and dream range and derange together. What Cixous admires in other writers­– ­in Kafka, Tsvetaeva, Lispector­ – ­is a sense of speed inseparable from the experience of dreams. Thus she speaks, for example, of Lispector’s ‘extraordinarily condensed writing, [which] reminds us of the condensation and rapidity of dreams’.25 Dreams, Cixous declares, ‘grant us what we don’t always have in life: speed’.26 ‘Language, bless it, has innumerable resources of acceleration, and this is

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Hélène Cixous

how it gets so close to the vital processes that go faster than lightning.’27 Cixous cuts off with this like no other living dreamer, realist, analyst, writing at a speed beyond observed speed limits that compels philosophers such as Deleuze and Derrida to come up with a new critical vocabulary or a twisting of existing language in order to talk about it. Deleuze names it ‘stroboscopic writing’: a writing akin to the disorientating optical effect of a flashing light that unsettles the sense of what is stationary and what is not. ‘Stroboscopic’ is from the ancient Greek στρόβος, a twisting or whirling around. Deleuze comments: ‘Cixous has invented a new, original kind of writing … a kind of stroboscopic writing, where the narrative comes alive, and the different themes interconnect, and the words form variable figures, according to the accelerated speeds.’28 Correspondingly, Derrida characterises her writing in terms of ‘an address’ (which he glosses as ‘her own way of doing things’) that manages ‘to go faster than speed itself, to outspeed speed’.29 It is ‘as if one had to invent a new grammar’, he says, in order to situate what he calls, after her, a ‘might’ (puisse), undecidably mixing without nixing what might be with the power of might, with what is mighty.30 This is the sort of might that haunts the closing lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65: ‘unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright.’31 It is the speed of what is dipped like a magic pen into what comes (without mastery, without the decelerating calculations or inhibiting energies of ‘the writer’ as active, conscious, controlling overseer) away in the possibilities of wordplay, the cross-fertilisations of words and meanings, immersed in the shifting movements of dreams, as if still dreaming. It is a speed ‘even before being, earlier than being anything identifiable whatsoever’, as Derrida puts it.32 Deleuze suggests we should read really fast: Cixous’s Neutre (1972), for example, ‘demands to be read “quickly” (although you may have to reread it, faster and faster)’; Derrida suggests that in order for us to develop a critical capacity and critical discourse for dealing with Cixous it will be necessary ‘to read very slowly’.33 It is not a matter of choosing between Deleuze and Derrida here: no doubt they are both right.34 What might we learn from the speed of Cixous’s writing? How might we think about ‘compositional practice’, ‘innovations in critical discourse’, ‘creative writing exercises’? Cixous cuts off, cuts loose, cuts clear, but it is not just a matter of speeding full-steam ahead full-tilt shut your eyes wherever it takes you, in the manner of automatic writing (surrealism) or free association (psychoanalysis). It’s more like a musical exercise with its own idiomatic slownesses: ‘One must play language quick and true like an honest musician, not leap over



Cixous cuts: take time 59

a single word-beat. Find the slowness inside the speed.’35 It’s more like the need, as she puts it in Mother Homer Is Dead…, to ‘run calmly at top speed, take time’.36

" Don’t stop. Cut. Keep cutting. Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), vii. In the original French text, Manhattan: Lettres de la préhistoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002), this sentence is at the beginning of the Prière d’insérer.   2 Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2009), vii. In the original French text, Hyperrêve (Paris: Galilée, 2006), this sentence is at the beginning of the Prière d’insérer.   3 Hélène Cixous, Love Itself in the Letterbox, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 1; L’Amour même dans la boîte aux lettres (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 9.   4 Hélène Cixous, Eve Escapes: Ruins and Life, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 1; Ève s’évade: La Ruine et la Vie (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 9.   5 Hélène Cixous, ‘Love of the Wolf ’, trans. Keith Cohen, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 85.   6 Hélène Cixous, ‘In the beginnings, there were many…’, interview with Mireille CalleGruber, trans. Amaleena Damlé, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 32–3.   7 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 32.  8 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 18.   9 Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans. Robert Denommé, rev. Eric Prenowitz, in Hélène Cixous, Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, ed. Eric Prenowitz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 15. 10 See in particular ‘Portmanteau’, below. 11 See, for instance, Hélène Cixous, ‘The Book I Don’t Write’, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, in Volleys of Humanity, 193–220. 12 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 147. 13 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 147. 14 Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books 1–8, trans. Frank Justus Miller, rev. G. P. Gould, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 2: 505–7.

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Hélène Cixous

15 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 59. 16 Sylvia Plath, ‘Cut’, in Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 235–6. 17 Hélène Cixous, The Blindfolded Fiancée or Amelait (2004), trans. Judith G. Miller, in The Portable Cixous, ed. Marta Segarra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 259. 18 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, trans. Régis Durand, in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 81. What Cixous calls ‘break[ing] with our thought habits’ has clear affinities with what Lyotard talks about, in the same essay, as ‘put[ting] forward the unpresentable in presentation itself ’ and a commitment ‘to impart a stronger sense of the unpresentable’ (81). 19 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, Cinders, trans. Ned Lukacher (Lincoln, NE: Nebraska University Press, 1991), 53; Aporias: Dying­– a­ waiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 49, 69; ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own: Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2001), 33. 20 Mark Currie, About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 5–6. 21 Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 2, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 51. Derrida is discussing a couple of lines from the first of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets: ‘I run to Death and Death meets me so fast / And all my Pleasures are like Yesterday.’ Quoted in The Beast and the Sovereign, 50; John Donne, ‘Divine Meditations’, I, in The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), 309. 22 Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off ’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Sigmata: Escaping Texts, 30. 23 See Aphorism no. 93 in Franz Kafka, The Collected Aphorisms, trans. Malcolm Pasley (New York: Syrens, 1994). 24 Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 18. 25 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 124–5. 26 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 81. 27 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 144. 28 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’, trans. Martin McQuillan, in Reading Cixous Writing, ed. Martin McQuillan, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2002), 204.



Cixous cuts: take time 61

29 Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 63. 30 Derrida, H.C. for Life, 70; H.C. pour la vie, c’est à dire… (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 64. 31 For a detailed discussion of this ‘might’ in Cixous and Shakespeare, see my essay ‘Miracle Play’, in Shakespeare and Continental Philosophy, ed. Jennifer Ann Bates and Richard Wilson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 271–97. 32 H.C. for Life, 73. 33 Deleuze, ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’, 204; Derrida, H.C. for Life, 71. 34 For further discussion of questions of speed in the context of Cixous, Deleuze and Derrida, see my ‘Quick Fiction: Some Remarks on Writing Today’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 47:1 (2014), 23–39. 35 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 144. 36 Hélène Cixous, Mother Homer is Dead…, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 55.

5

Dream in literature

What is this­– ­dream in literature? The phrase might be construed in at least three ways: 1) the role and importance of dreams in literary works (in a short story, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’; a poem, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Question’; a play, such as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; or a novel, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights); 2) the impulse or compulsion to dream, to fall into reverie, to lose oneself in a dream or dreamlike state while reading a work of literature, the experience of becoming fascinated, immersed or set adrift in a book; and 3) where ‘dream’ is a speech-act, an order, request, plea or desire: dream in literature as one might breathe in the night air, inhale a perfume or strange gas. The first of these might seem the simplest to isolate. A dream­– s­ ome reference to a dream or some description of a dream­– ­occurs in the course of a poem, story or play, and we can read it as if it is self-enclosed, clearly marked off within the text, something that the poet or narrator or character refers to or experiences. Here begins the dream, and here endeth the dream. But ‘dream in literature’ is not so simple. The frame of reference is trembling or already dissolving. Poe, Shelley, Shakespeare, Brontë­– ­all are wonderfully canny engineers of making poetry or fiction and dream break through or give way to the other. But it is Hélène Cixous who, I want to suggest, provides the richest and most compelling contemporary examples of such engineering work, in both critical and creative respects. The following pages will turn around her writing, in particular the slender but extraordinary volume entitled Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time:



Dream in literature 63

I. Los, A Chapter.1 Better than any other contemporary critic or novelist, poet or playwright, Cixous enables us to appreciate the profound relations between dreaming and literature that go back for centuries­– i­n other words, to see how much there is to dream in literature. Cixous encourages us to ‘write by dream’. This injunction or solicitation would concern the composition not only of poems or plays or works of fiction but also of critical essays. Critical discourse in the wake of Cixous would be differently attuned to the rhythms, irruptions and interruptions of dream: so, for example, the logic of condensation and displacement might, with new explicitness and surprising effects, organise the structure of a critical essay or chapter in a book of criticism. A reflection on Poe, for instance, might quite abruptly reassemble itself as a discussion of Shelley. A few lines of Shelley might turn into a passage of Virginia Woolf. Critical discourse in the spirit of Cixous might thus seek to work with two of the main guiding principles of her own dream-writing: metamorphosis and the unforeseeable. And so to Poe. His writing is constantly prone to dizziness as to where and when a dream starts or finishes. He impels us again and again to wonder at the sense of life itself as ‘a dream within a dream’.2 Dream is an imp of the perverse, not just as theme or content, but in structural and conceptual terms. Poe’s dreams, his narratorial dreaminess and dream-loving narratives, consistently push away, push through the limits of representation. And this is what makes Poe and Cixous so close, why reading his work is so illuminating of hers, and vice versa. They are both committed to what she calls, in an arresting phrase from Los, A Chapter, the ‘frankly fantastic’ (34). They are poetic thinkers who inhabit a different country from those novelists or other writers who merely ‘stick with representation’ as she puts it.3 And at the same time Poe, like Cixous, is deeply interested in the ways in which dreams are in touch with the supernatural and the impossible. Take, for instance, just two sentences from the penultimate paragraph of the extraordinary ‘Ligeia’: The hues of life flushed up with unwonted energy into the countenance­– ­the limbs relaxed­– a­ nd, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure, I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off, utterly, the fetters of Death. But if this idea was not, even then, altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer, when, arising from the bed, tottering, with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream, the

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Hélène Cixous thing that was enshrouded advanced boldly and palpably into the middle of the apartment.4

Poe is describing one of the most bizarre and impossible scenes in all his work­ – ­the return of a dead person (the narrator’s second wife, Rowena) in the form of the return of another dead person (his first wife, Ligeia). These sentences incorporate the language of dreaming on behalf of both narrator and character­ – ­I might have dreamed and with the manner of one bewildered in a dream­ – ­to generate a kind of oneirophilic, delirious plausibility. In what we might call revelirious writing, Poe allows us to feel the ecstasies of the return of the dead. States of reverie or dream are shared, in the writing and in the reading. One sense of ‘dream in literature’ gives way, gives sway to another. There’s a sentence in Cixous’s Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature (2013) that begins ‘When I read’, then abruptly quotes the opening paragraphs of ‘Ligeia’, then concludes: ‘I know that Literature has begun.’ After which she comments: ‘Already I no longer know who is writing. Who writes while trembling, who writes in the place of whom. Who in me writes to whom? Is it you [toi]? Or my father? Or my children?’5 Critical discourse (Cixous’s sentence here on the subject of Poe’s ‘Ligeia’) incorporates and is riven by the cry of literature. Her phantasmoneiric reflections­– ­‘Already I no longer know who writes…’­– ­are spillages of ‘Ligeia’. Poe’s text provokes Cixous to wonder to whom her writing in turn is addressed, whether the dead (‘my father’) or the living. She takes on Poe’s revelirium. These questions about who writes and to whom is a piece of writing addressed are at the heart of Shelley’s ‘The Question’ (1820), which begins: I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way, Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring, And gentle odours led my steps astray, Mixed with a sound of waters murmuring Along a shelving bank of turf, which lay Under a copse, and hardly dared to fling Its green arms round the bosom of the stream, But kissed it and then fled, as thou mightest in dream.6

The poem starts with an ‘I’ that is ostensibly outside the dream, telling it: ‘I dreamed that…’ But everything in Shelley’s language and syntax loosens or effaces what is dream and what is not. ‘I dreamed that, as I wandered by the way’: does the ‘as’ belong to the dream itself, or to the place in which the dream occurred? Is the wandering part of or apart from the dream? Sense itself wanders



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by the way, in the unnatural abruptness of seasonal transformation (‘Bare Winter suddenly was changed to Spring’); in the synaesthetic mingling of smell (‘gentle odours’) and sound (‘waters murmuring’); in the oneiric fluidity of the enjambment (‘murmuring’, ‘lay’, ‘fling’); and in the queer projections of the human on the non-human (the ‘green arms’ of a ‘bank of turf ’, the ‘bosom of the stream’, kissing and fleeing). And in closing ‘as thou mightest in dream’, the stanza replays and deepens the ambiguity of the earlier ‘as’ (‘as I wandered’). It invokes (as Cixous might) the strange mightiness of the might (‘mightest’), in which a person can kiss and flee ‘the bosom’ of a stream; and it further unsettles what is inside or outside the dream, starting with the identity of the dreamer (who is now, almost without being noticed perhaps, ‘thou’). How should we refer to the ‘I’ of Shelley’s poem? This is a simple but perhaps abyssal question. In a sense it is the question of ‘The Question’. We could say ‘the speaker in the poem’­– ­but this seems a kind of violence and oversimplification. It imposes a kind of formality and conventionalism that is misleading. Indeed there is nothing in the poem to corroborate a notion that the ‘I’ is speaking at all. In an eerie and understated manner, the ‘I’ itself seems ‘inaudible as dreams’ (to recall a phrase from Coleridge).7 We could refer to the ‘I’ as ‘the poet’­– ­but this would be differently inept. It too readily leads to the identification, certitude and fixity of a biographical subject (‘I’ = ‘P. B. Shelley’). Let us refer to the ‘I’ as dream-poet, a poet who is dreaming, dreaming of ‘wander[ing] by the way’ but also (as we’ll see more clearly in a moment) dreaming of being a poet. Should we refer to this dream-poet as ‘he’? Unless the text gives strong guidance otherwise (for instance, in the case of a dramatic monologue), it is critically conventional to refer to the ‘I’ of a poem by the gender-assignation of its author: thus the ‘I’ of an Emily Dickinson poem is ‘she’ and the ‘I’ of a Shakespeare sonnet ‘he’. There is no strict reason, however, why the ‘I’ of Shelley’s poem should be designated as a ‘he’. What is the sexual identity of the ‘I’ in a dream? Here again the work of Cixous is a powerfully illuminating point of reference. Everywhere in her writing about ‘men’s literature’ (the phrase itself seems edifyingly ridiculous), we encounter the force of écriture feminine, the sense of a ‘Mother unconscious’, the vitality of a proliferation of sexual identities and differences­– ­and an acknowledgement that it is in dreams and literature that all of these things are most manifest.8 The dream-poet goes on to describe the ubiquitous flowers: There grew pied wind-flowers and violets, Daisies, those pearled Arcturi of the earth,

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Hélène Cixous The constellated flower that never sets; Faint oxlips; tender bluebells, at whose birth The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets— Like a child, half in tenderness and mirth— Its mother’s face with Heaven’s collected tears, When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears. And in the warm hedge grew lush eglantine, Green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured may, And cherry-blossoms, and white cups, whose wine Was the bright dew, yet drained not by the day; And wild roses, and ivy serpentine, With its dark buds and leaves, wandering astray; And flowers azure, black, and streaked with gold, Fairer than any wakened eyes behold. And nearer to the river’s trembling edge There grew broad flag-flowers, purple pranked with white, And starry river buds among the sedge, And floating water-lilies, broad and bright, Which lit the oak that overhung the hedge With moonlight beams of their own watery light; And bulrushes, and reeds of such deep green As soothed the dazzled eye with sober sheen.

All sorts of crazy things are going on in this dream by now­– ­flowers are constellating, being born, becoming children, hearing voices, taking on the dream-­poet’s own ‘wandering’ … These stanzas have an overflowing, overflowering lyrical effusiveness all of their own; but the oxlips, violets and eglantine in particular link it with another dream-poem, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Oberon evokes   a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine. There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, Lull’d in these flowers…9

Shakespeare’s dream is in Shelley’s: it’s in the ‘bank’. It is inscribed in the eeriness of a ‘shelving bank’­– ­a phrase in which one might, as in a dream, hear the sound



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of a shelley sliding into the ‘bank’. Literature is a Dream Bank that never stops giving. But to whom? The final stanza of ‘The Question’ hastens to its conclusion: Methought that of these visionary flowers I made a nosegay, bound in such a way That the same hues, which in their natural bowers Were mingled or opposed, the like array Kept these imprisoned children of the Hours Within my hand,—and then, elate and gay, I hastened to the spot whence I had come, That I might there present it!—Oh! to whom?

When the dream-poet says ‘Methought’, it is perhaps first and most of all Shakespeare’s Bottom whom we hear: I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was­– ­there is no man can tell what. Methought I was­– ­and methought I had­ – ­but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 4.1.203–9)

‘Methought I was … Methought I was … methought I had …’ I tell you, says Bottom, this is not a dream I can tell you. This is a dream that ‘hath no bottom’ (4.1.215), as he goes on to remark. It’s a dream beyond knowledge, ‘past the wit of man’. In the dream bank of literature all sums are possible. Somnio ergo sum. Night’s summer. Shelley as/s Shakespeare. Here is a nosegay that knows no no’s.10 The fleeting evocation of Bottom’s dream in Shelley’s ‘The Question’ multiplies identities and pleasures: everything is in the dreamy strangeness of the ‘methought’. In an elation without relation, in an anachronistic jumble of childlike joy, the ‘I’ is the dreamer in ‘The Question’ and the dream-poet of ‘The Question’, and also Bottom the weaver, and an ass. The Literature Dream Bank I am sketching here is not of course a private company, limited to Shakespeare and Shelley. It’s open. It’s free. If it makes an ass of everyone who walks through its doors, it also makes them dream-poets.11 In somnambulistic conversation with Shakespeare, Shelley’s ‘The Question’ also metamorphoses, throws its voices more a hundred years forwards into Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves (1931). Here, the ‘Oh! to whom?’ forms a wave that keeps coming (back). Rhoda speaks of Shelley’s text as ‘a poem about a hedge’:

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Hélène Cixous I will wander down it and pick flowers, green cowbind and the moonlight-coloured May, wild roses and ivy serpentine. I will clasp them in my hands … I will bind flowers in one garland and clasp them and present them­– O ­ h! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed. I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilising, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them­– ­Oh! to whom? Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the seafront to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them­– ­Oh! to whom?12

Rhoda is disturbed by some ‘check in the flow of [her] being’, but then feels ‘unsealed’, ‘flooding free’. She feels her own ‘warm’ and ‘porous body’. She wants to give the garland of flowers to someone, she wants to ‘return to the world this beauty’: ‘Oh! to whom?’ The dream element of Shelley’s poem is transformed in Woolf ’s text: it’s as if dreaming were, for Rhoda, life itself. At the same time it’s a matter of acknowledging that Rhoda is citing Shelley’s poem in a novel. The Woolf passage, in other words, is no less about dreaming in literature, but because the question (‘Oh! to whom?’) comes at the end of Shelley’s poem it is easy to see how it’s a question not only about love and flowers and the desire to give, but also about writing itself. For whom does one write? To whom does one address­– ­or seek to give­– ­a piece of writing, a poem or play or fiction? To whom might a dream in a poem or a poem in a dream, the dream as poem and the poem as dream, be presented? Shelley’s poem implies that the question has to do with the gift. In ‘Ants’, a remarkable little essay about ‘the gift of a poem’, dreaming and sexual difference in Cixous­– ­an essay that is based on a dream that she described to him one day over the telephone­– ­Jacques Derrida provides a couple of succinct formulations in this context. First of all, wondering what it means ‘to give the word’ or ‘give a word’, and what it means to say that ‘words are things’, he observes: ‘If words are things, in any case they are not things like other things, and they cannot be given like other things. Either they are never given or they are the only things in the world that can truly be given.’13 There is something singular about the relation between words and giving that makes a poem different from any other kind of gift. And then, with regard to the relation between giving and dreaming, Derrida offers



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a memorable chiasmus: ‘if one can only give in dream, one can only dream of giving’.14 Cixous invites a different thinking of reading and writing. Instead of the familiar, rather dry figures of ‘allusion’ and ‘intertextuality’ (the flowers, say, in Shelley’s poem and Shakespeare’s play and Woolf ’s novel), there would be the osmotic drifts of verbal gifts, the might of methought, the imaginative possibilities and metamorphic fluidities of ‘dream in literature’. Instead of the anxious, masculine battling of poetic wills (Harold Bloom’s model of the ‘anxiety of influence’), there would be a space of giving and given in which conscious control and calculation no longer preside. Dreams make up what Cixous calls ‘a kingdom without death, without resentment’.15 In place of the Bloomian precursor or ephebe, there would be what she calls (after Stendhal) the dream and desire of a ‘friend in truth’.16 Cixous suggests that one writes for the unknown and unknowable, for the dead, but also for those not yet born. And the one who writes is never one. As Dream I Tell You makes clear, the writing and the dreaming ‘I’ are never the same, any more than the ‘I’ in the writing is the same as the ‘I’ who writes, or the ‘I’ in a dream is the same as the ‘I’ who dreams. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea who I am,’ she declares in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, ‘but at least I know I don’t know. I am not the other able to perceive me.’17 In a discussion with Mireille Calle-Gruber, Cixous veers between the kind of dream sketched by Shelley (a kind of giving-writing for no one, for no known or identifiable receiver) and a perhaps more conventional conception of the literary (a writing in honour of those one has read). ‘I do not think I have ever written for anyone at all’, she remarks, but ‘this does not mean that I scorn the reader; quite the contrary.’ This reader, Cixous stresses, is before and in front of the writing (Lui devant l’écrire): she dreams of a reader to come.18 And then, as she also says, ‘of course one writes for others; but the first other is oneself … One also writes for all the others one has read, that is to say in their honour.’19 At the end of Los, A Chapter, Cixous includes a page of acknowledgements (entitled ‘Thanks’) that runs, from one dash to another, without final full stop: ‘THANKS TO William Blake­– ­Emily Brontë­– ­Georg Büchner­– ­Hernán Cortés­ – ­John Donne­– ­Jakob Lenz­– ­Ovid­– ­Marcel Proust­– ­William Shakespeare­– ­Stendhal’ (77). In some respects this may seem rather mad­– ­as if one should or could list all the ‘friends in truth’ for or with whom one has written or by whom one has felt inspired. This page of ‘Thanks’ (or in the original French ‘Remerciements’: 99) is like a new genre of ‘abstracts and brief chronicles’

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s­ tarting over in the final words of her text. The preponderance here of writers in English (Blake, Brontë, Donne, Shakespeare) is striking. Let us pick out and elaborate a little on the work of just one: Emily Brontë. Her only novel, Wuthering Heights, has strong affinities with Cixous’s writing in terms of its extraordinary, precipitous speed; its preoccupation with what is ‘as fresh as reality’, with the hallucinatory and supernatural; and its fascination with the inscription of the instant.20 How quick is a dream? How quick! To write by dream, to dream in literature is a matter of responding, among other things, to a sense of that ‘timelessness’ which, as Freud saw, characterises the unconscious.21 But dreams also have a kind of crazy propensity for slowing things down or speeding them up, and shrinking hours, years, decades, centuries, millennia into the wink of an eye. ­ ictates the form and This staggering temporality­– i­n suspension and veering­– d rhythm of Cixous’s abstracts and brief chronicles: ‘No matter who you are your days are numbered. Three hundred million years in a wink. Who knows what “a long time” means? It changes all the time’ (59). The speed of Wuthering Heights­ – ­the rapidity of the action, the condensations and displacements of scenes, the shifts and layerings of narrators, the disorienting narrative arcs, the strange repetitions and reconstitutions­– i­nforms, haunts, hares across Los, A Chapter. Cixous’s book is about the resurrected, uncanny vitality and freshness of memories of beloved Carlos­– ­not ‘those wilted, mummified images one usually calls memories, but moments of life coming to life again’ (10). Thinking of him (back in 1968), she writes: ‘At night I replay my life in a minute’ (65). Cixous rushes at ‘the speed of life and death’, on the path of ‘the apocalyptic flight’ that she finds in Brontë’s novel and accordingly quotes: ‘In my flight through the kitchen I knocked over Hareton who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway … I bounded, leaped and flew down the steep road then shot direct across the moor rolling over banks and wading through marshes’ (73).22 She makes a few discreet elisions of Brontë’s phrases and alterations of punctuation to accentuate the kind of velocities she wants to identify with Carlos, the sense that ‘He went through life at a crazy speed’ (65) and ‘went through my life at a crazy speed’, a speed such that ‘you feel everything like gods’ and ‘think at the speed of light’ (66). In the preface to Los, A Chapter, entitled ‘To my readers’ (published in the original French as a supplementary insert or prière d’insérer entitled ‘À mes lisants’), Cixous dismisses the idea that the book is ‘a tale’, but acknowledges its intimacy with dream. The book, she says, is



Dream in literature 71 A symphonic instant: it happens here-and-now, at top speed. Because of its condensation, its leaps, its eternal youth, because it hurries, like memory’s revenant, one could take it for a dream. It is all true. (viii)

She doesn’t say one could take it for a dream but in that case one would be mistaken. The condensation and leap of syntax suggests rather that ‘it is all true’ and ‘one could take it for a dream’. It’s a ‘petal’ (viii), Cixous remarks­– ­as from a flower in the timeless bank. By convention the novel is a ‘window on the world’, but Cixous prompts us to see that it is just as much a window on the dream. Let us recall in this context the violent scene of Lockwood, locked in wood, dreaming at Wuthering Heights: [I] turned and dozed, and dreamt again … This time, I remembered I was lying in the oak closet, and I heard distinctly the gusty wind, and the driving of the snow; I heard, also, the fir-bough repeat its teasing sound [against the window] … it annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement. The hook was soldered into the staple, a circumstance observed by me when awake, but forgotten. ‘I must stop it, nevertheless!’ I muttered, knocking my knuckles through the glass, and stretching an arm out to seize the importunate branch: instead of which, my fingers closed on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand! The intense horror of nightmare came over me; I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand clung to it, and a most melancholy voice sobbed— ‘Let me in­– ­let me in!’ (20)

Everything about this passage seems organised to disorganise a reader’s sense of where dreaming has stopped or started.23 ‘This time, I remembered…’: Lockwood is telling his dream, but what is ‘this time’? Is the remembering in or after the dream? The sound of the fir-bough ‘teasing’ the window ‘annoyed me so much, that I resolved to silence it; and, I thought, I rose and endeavoured to unhasp the casement’: Lockwood’s ‘I thought’ is a ‘methought’ undecidably in and outside the dream. The casement cannot be opened, as he knows but doesn’t remember. Locked in wood he would recall the lock but dreams forgetting: this was ‘observed by me when awake, but forgotten’. His ‘nevertheless’ (‘I must stop it, nevertheless!’) at once belongs to and breaks through the language of the dream from the inside. He reports that ‘[t]he intense horror of nightmare came over me’, as if there were a new kind of internal dream-classification, thanks to some lucid interval in which the dreamer can recount, in the moment, when a dream becomes a nightmare, or as if he had not been dreaming at all until this instant.

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And the greatest horror is still to come. It’s when Lockwood sees ‘a child’s face looking through the window’ and proceeds to ‘[pull] its wrist on to the broken pane and [rub] it to and fro till the blood [runs] down and [soaks] the bed-clothes’ (20). Or again, it’s when Lockwood, now awake and dressed and surreptitiously standing outside the door, overhears Heathcliff as he ‘[gets] on to the bed and wrenche[s] open the lattice, bursting, as he pull[s] at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears. “Come in! come in!” he sob[s]. “Cathy, do come. Oh, do­– ­once more! Oh! my heart’s darling, hear me this time­– ­Catherine, at last!” ’ (23). As Heathcliff appears to respond to the dead girl in Lockwood’s dream (‘Let me in­– ­let me in!’), the terrifying reality of telepathy materialises. It is all true. We are in the telepathic reality generated out of dream in literature. Like many of Cixous’s literary life-writings, Los, A Chapter draws on telepathic energies: ‘Telepathy’s pressure is irresistible. Even sceptics bend under the mystical blast [La pression télépathique est irrésistible. Même les sceptiques se courbent sous la rafale mystique]’ (53/67). As Freud (one of the chief sceptics Cixous doubtless has in mind here) came to be unable not to feel, telepathic pressure bears on any analytical desire to interpret dreams. In a sense, mind or feeling or suffering (pathos) at a distance (tele-) is the very condition of dreaming and dream-analysis. Telepathy is in play whenever connections are construed between the ‘I’ in a dream and the ‘I’ who has dreamed. As Derrida has argued, it is difficult to imagine a theory of the unconscious without a theory of telepathy.24 As for literature, telepathy blows through it. The telepathy between Heathcliff and Lockwood or between Heathcliff and Cathy or between Cathy and Lockwood is in some respects simply a breaking out or breaking through of what makes literary fiction possible, namely the force by which one person can know what another person is secretly feeling or thinking. Realism is the name we conventionally give to this telepathic structure: the reader (like the author or the third-person narrator) is a party to what characters think and feel within the supposed secrecy or privacy of their own minds and bodies. Of course in a sense this is not ‘realist’ at all: it’s a mode of disavowal, a peculiar immersion in a make-believe of telepathic or magical thinking. Realism in a Cixousian context­ – ­‘realism’ in the neologistic sense that concerns me in this book­– ­entails the production of an uncanny real that ‘one could take for a dream’ and that is true. It is a realism that acknowledges the powers of language in taking us by surprise (as we read or write or think), in tracing or organising our thoughts and feelings (the stories we tell but also the stories in which we find ourselves inscribed), in



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composing our beliefs and infiltrating our perceptions (often without our being aware). Cixousian realism weaves in the unconscious with other elements of literary fiction, including a dreamlike appropriation of the supernatural (the ‘frankly fantastic’), forms of idealisation (in which lovers are deified and ‘you feel everything like gods’), and a sense of what she calls the ‘powerful mystery of messages that circulate by telepathic channels’.25 Let’s take a single instance from the book Hyperdream (published in French in 2006). It’s about the author’s mother, who is now very old. She has gone to get strawberries: One will see my mother coming back from the market where despite the increasing frailty of her body, fragility of her bones, loss of her independence and mobility, despite the loss of vigor and speed imposed upon her by the person who only accompanies her in order to try to keep her on her leash, but in vain, eyes sparkling, one will no longer see the wizened little face with its spotty crinkly tissues, only the superhuman brightness of the eyes in their glory enlarged, in a state of transfiguration in which I suddenly recognise, as if she’d come back to me in a dream, the essence and secret of her grandeur, the example not two metres away from me of the immensity of life for life’s sake, the radiant all-powerfulness of the principle of being and having what one is and what one has, without letting anything wound one. (Hyperdream 84–5/115, trans. slightly modified)

In this long voyaging sentence one might see and think so much. One is ‘one’ (on verra; ‘one will see…’), but who is that? Is it the narrator or the reader? Or perhaps someone not yet born? It’s a futural description of an old woman returning home from the market with strawberries. That one might there present it…! The metamorphic point in this remarkable sentence is the clause ‘but in vain [mais en vain]’, and then ‘eyes sparkling [les yeux étincelants]’. Cixousian parataxis creates ambiguity or double-vision in the ‘in vain’: on the one hand, the mother cannot be kept on a leash, she is different from a dog; and then, on the other, what ‘one will see’ (as the opening of the sentence intimates) is in vain, for one sees something quite different. ‘Eyes sparkling’: there is transformation. But are these the mother’s eyes or the narrator’s or the eyes of the ‘one’? The sentence blinds us (‘one will no longer see…’) in order to open on to this ‘superhuman brightness’, a ‘transfiguration’ into the marvellous radiance of the mother’s being. The reader is left with the strangeness of a moment of omnipotence (la toute-puissance radieuse; this ‘radiant all-powerfulness’) and radical innocence (sans rien laisser blesser; ‘without letting anything wound’). It’s a sentence about survival and the grandeur of being alive. It’s about the immeasurable nature of dignity and

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almighty otherness: it’s ‘as if she’d come back to me in a dream [comme si je la revoyais en rêve]’, as if I were seeing her again in dream. Where were we? At the window. On it, in it. Quick! Get back to the window! Telepathy is gusting through! It’s the window in the preface to Los, A Chapter. This book, Cixous suggests, is a chapter of ‘[the] book I call The-Book-I-Don’t-Write that I’ve been dreaming of for over thirty years’ (vi). She prompts us to dream, in turn, of all the books not written (by Poe, Shelley, Shakespeare, Woolf, Brontë, you or me…)­– ­books which, she suggests, can only come from ‘taking oneself apart and putting oneself back together, laughing all the while’ (vii). Of the arrival of Los, A Chapter she recalls: ‘This book presented itself, all of a sudden, “one fine morning”, all written, hovering just outside the window of my study, clearly constituted, like the at-term delivery of a dream from the head of a dream’ (viii). Wuthering like a dream-birth at the window, one has already let it in. Who decides? Not the writer, Cixous suggests, but rather, perhaps, ‘the gust [la rafale]’ of ‘telepathic pressure’ out of a dream in Wuthering Heights: as Lockwood reports, ‘I heard distinctly the gusty wind’ (20). Cixous’s Preface concludes: ‘My editor asks me if I already know what the next chapters [of The-Book-I-Don’t-Write] will be. I see some of them, through the window, I say. Several are almost loose. They are already living, I sense. A gust of wind, not me, will decide, soon’ (ix).

Postscript: on coming back, plain as day One last thing about ‘dream in literature’ that links Wuthering Heights with Cixous­– ­not just with Los, A Chapter but all of her so-called fictional or hyperfictional writings, her double life writings or unidentifiable literary objects: it is forgetability. When you’re reading a book by Cixous there is immersion, enthralment, enchantment, as well as puzzlement, mystery, shock, you’re adrift, you’re lost in it. She says extraordinary things, pulls off amazing turns, convinces you there is a sense and coherence to the whole thing, however fissured, cut up and disparate it also manifestly is. It is as if the whole thing was a dream. It’s forgettable in a strikingly similar way. Initially, as you finish reading (dreaming), you may feel dazzled by the richness and provocative thoughtfulness of it all, and there’s a vividness and crystalline character to the book (like a dream) that you reckon



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will stay with you for some time. But it doesn’t. It slinks away, draws back into the darkness. Brontë’s Wuthering Heights also does this, perhaps as powerfully as any novel in English. Indeed, as befits its attention to the hypnagogic (in Lockwood’s dream and elsewhere), it incorporates this forgetability in the very body of the narrative. So, for example, at the start of the antepenultimate chapter, after the action of the novel has effectively come to an end, Lockwood chances to find himself, back at the beginning (as it were), but a year later, just a few miles from where everything happened: 1802. — This September, I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend, in the North; and, on my journey to his abode, I unexpectedly came within fifteen miles of Gimmerton. The hostler at a roadside public-house was holding a pail of water to refresh my horses, when a cart of very green oats, newly reaped, passed by, and he remarked— ‘Yon’s frough Gimmerton, nah! They’re allas three wick’ after other folk wi’ ther harvest.’ ‘Gimmerton?’ I repeated­– m ­ y residence in that locality had already grown dim and dreamy. (231)

Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: I. Los, A Chapter, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) (hereafter Los, A Chapter), 34. Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash: Abstracts et Brèves Chroniques du temps: I. Chapitre Los (Paris: Galilée, 2013).   2 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Dream within a Dream’, in Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984), 97.   3 See Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Cathérine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 98.   4 Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Ligeia’, in Tales and Sketches, vol. 1, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 329 (my emphases).   5 See Hélène Cixous, ‘Ay yay! The Cry of Literature’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Ways of Re-Thinking Literature, ed. Tom Bishope and Donatien Grau (London: Routledge, 2018), 213; Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature (Paris: Galilée, 2013), 71–2.   6 P. B. Shelley, ‘The Question’, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, new edn, corrected by G. M. Matthews (London: Oxford University Press, 1970),  614–15. Further references are to this version of the text.

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  7 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Frost at Midnight’, in The Complete Poems, ed. William Keach (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 231.   8 On a ‘Mother unconscious’ in particular, see Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), where Cixous identifies this with ‘the sources of genius’ (102).  9 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks (London: Routledge, 1979), 2.1.249–54. Further references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 10 ‘Nosegay’ is another word that links ‘The Question’ with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It makes only two appearances in Shakespeare’s writings, one of them in the opening lines of this play when Egeus says:    Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung    With faining voice verses of feigning love,    And stol’n the impression of her fantasy    With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gauds, conceits,    Knacks, trifles, nosegays… (1.1.30–4) 11 A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains the first recorded instance of the idiom ‘to make an ass of me’: see 3.1.115. Wandering by another way of Shelley’s poem, we might pick up the presence of William Wordsworth. The flowers that are ‘imprisoned children of the Hours’ can be read as a condensed reworking of Wordsworth’s ‘Intimations’ ode in which ‘children are pulling, / On every side, / In a thousand vallies far and wide, / Fresh flowers’. Shelley’s figure of imprisonment (with an emphasis on the light or ‘same hues’ of these ‘visionary flowers’) echoes Wordsworth’s lines about the prison-house of growing up: ‘Shades of the prison-house begin to close / Upon the growing boy, / But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, / He sees it in his joy.’ See ‘Ode’, in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 298–9. 12 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London: Granada, 1977), 38–9; and cf. 139. 13 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ants’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Reading Cixous Writing, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2003), 17–42: here, 17. 14 Derrida, ‘Ants’, 20. 15 Hélène Cixous, Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the Journal, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 60. 16 See Hélène Cixous, in Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 100. 17 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 51. 18 Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 100. Regarding Lui devant l’écrire, Eric Prenowitz clarifies in a translator’s note: ‘Devant is both a preposition “in front of” and the present participle of the verb devoir meaning “to owe” (transitive) and “to



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have to” (auxiliary), which gives us: “He (the reader) in front of the writing”, “He having to write it”, “He owing the writing”, “(I) owing him writing” ’ (115). 19 Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 101. 20 Brontë’s startling attentiveness to the instant of inscription is evident in the very opening of the novel, where we encounter the words of Lockwood’s diary. Everything starts with the bizarre disjunction between the vague and general temporal designation of a period of 365 days (‘1801’) and the immediacy of the ‘just’ that succeeds it: ‘1801­– ­I have just returned from a visit to my landlord…’ See Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, ed. William M. Sale, Jr, and Richard J. Dunn, 3rd edn (New York: Norton, 1989), 3, my emphasis. Further page references to Brontë’s novel are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 21 As Freud notes in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: ‘The unconscious is quite timeless.’ See The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 6: 275n. Cf. the remark that ‘unconscious mental processes are in themselves “timeless”‘: see Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition, vol. 18: 28. 22 Cixous is quoting from Wuthering Heights, 140. I have discussed this passage of Brontë’s novel elsewhere in terms of ‘the speed of life and death’ and what I call ‘the wuthering heights of speed itself ’: see Nicholas Royle, Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 60. 23 For a more extended reading of the novel as ‘hypnagogics’, see Nicholas Royle, ‘Cryptaesthesia: The Case of Wuthering Heights’, in Telepathy and Literature, 28–62. 24 Jacques Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 237. I discuss this text further in ‘Side chunnel: telepathic afterword’, below. 25 Hélène Cixous, Mother Homer is Dead…, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 115.

6

Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth

To read ‘Cixous cuts’ you have to be ready for swerves between sentences, between one word and another, and even within a word, within the sound of a word. Or its silence.

/ She takes the ‘H’ of ‘Hélène’ as a cutting instrument, slicing off her name in the process. It cannot be heard: the ‘H’ is silent. The ‘combat against ourselves’ is already underway.1 The capital letter ‘H’ in its resemblance to a ladder forms the sight of the first rung, the opening words of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: H: you see the stylised outline of a ladder. This is the ladder that writing climbs; the one that is important to me … I write H, and I hear hache (axe). H is pronounced ash in French. This is already transporting for whosoever desires to write. In addition to this hache­– ­a cutting instrument, an axe to clear new paths­– ­the letter is granted uncommon favours in the French alphabet. If A is masculine, as is B, C, D, E, etc., only H is masculine, neuter, or feminine at will. How could I not be attached to H? (4)

What is a signature? It need not be in the form of a proper name, but the writer, the painter, the sculptor dreams of a style, a mark, a drawing or musical paraph in which the signature is given. The writer or artist dreams of climbing or descending the ladder into the nethermost forest, the starriest night. There is a moment in Glas when Jacques Derrida observes: ‘The signature is a wound and there is no other origin of the work of art.’2 But no sooner does he say it than he cuts his text and transfers the saying to Jean Genet: ‘There is no other origin for beauty than the wound­– ­singular, different for everyone, hidden or visible­– ­that



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every man keeps in himself [en soi], that he preserves and where he withdraws when he wishes to quit the world for a temporary but profound solitude.’3 We are dealing with multiple cuts, a tracery or hatching of cuts. When Cixous says she hears an axe in her name, she is thinking (but she hasn’t yet said so) of Kafka. It is as if Kafka gave her the axe. I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.4

Here is a tactic and tactfulness of reading, writing and quotation that Cixous shares with Derrida: the axe of the ‘H’ of ‘Hélène’ at the beginning of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing prefigures­– b ­ ut will also have been felled in advance by­ – ­Kafka’s axe. It is a kind of proleptic writing or hatch-work. Derrida and Cixous both do this. She does it to him, for example, in Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. He does it to her most markedly, most theatrically in HC for Life… he is saying something, about a certain word or bit of a word, about the ways, for example, in which ‘magic’ or ‘telepathy’, in the context of Cixous’s work, have to be understood differently, and you are wondering what grounds this observation or that digression and then he reveals, with an arresting quotation from her work, that this is what he has been writing about, this is what you have been reading about without realising. And so in the case of Cixous, too, she is saying something and it can seem (even more intensely than in Derrida) a bit mad, a writing delirium by which you might feel not just disarmed but alarmed, until she cuts to Kafka, say, or to Lispector, Tsvetaeva, Beckett, and you see where things have come from, if not where they are going. This is a salient feature of Cixous’s work, an aspect of her signature, leaping up the ladder. It is a writing of Forward slash

/ Like Kafka’s axe lodged in her head, lodged in mine and in yours too (for having encountered this axe, this image of something that might break up the frozen sea

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within us, how could we forget the fact of the blow, the cut?), Cixous knows that it is all about what the dead said, what they are still saying, the dead ahead. And the forward slash of writing is, in turn, ineluctably cut with death, with a sense of the posthumous. As she goes on to comment, in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: ‘I always read [Kafka] as dead. He was dead. The dead man’ (35). Or again: ‘Only when we are posthumous can we place the earth in question; make the earth tremble’ (52). Sl/ash. This axe, H, ‘is pronounced ash in French. This is already transporting for whosoever desires to write.’ One carries death in one’s name, one’s name is never one’s own. As Derrida says: ‘the only possibility of loving a name is that it not be yours’.5 Cixous loves her ‘H’, even if the desire which she finds ‘transporting’ is tinged by unspeakable deportations to ash. But books that are axes are rare. As she says in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: ‘very few books are axes, very few books hurt us, very few books break the frozen sea. Those books that do break the frozen sea and kill us are the books that give us joy’ (18). Such books are frightening, she suggests: ‘those who write the books that hurt us also suffer, also undergo a sort of suicide, also get lost in forests’ (18). She gives as an example the work of Clarice Lispector: ‘Her books try to be the axe’ (18). We might think of certain writings by others, such as Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky, Melville, Knut Hamsun, Lawrence, Conrad, Nella Larsen, Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, Toni Morrison­– ­or Hélène Cixous. She loves ‘H’ also because of its gender. Of all the letters in French, ‘only H is masculine, neuter, or feminine at will. How could I not be attached to H?’ Cixous’s name is perhaps best-known for ‘écriture féminine’, one of those phrases English has mostly registered, like ‘jouissance’ or ‘déjà vu’, as a sort of foreign body, untranslated, kept separate. Literally ‘feminine writing’ (the original French phrase already foregrounding the fact that ‘écriture’ is a feminine noun), écriture féminine was never the same as ‘women’s writing’ or the ‘writing of women’, it was never envisaged as any sort of separatism. The error that marred the celebrated opening sentence of the English publication of ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ rumbles on. So much misunderstanding was produced in the translators’ decision, in the mid-1970s, to render ‘Je parlerais de l’écriture ­féminine: de ce qu’elle fera’ as ‘I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do’, instead of ‘I shall speak about feminine writing: about what it will do’).6



Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth 81

It is one of the ways in which a resistance to Cixous’s work persists in showing up (a bit laughably, but also painfully). She has always affirmed écriture féminine as something to be found in the writing of men as well as women. If we speak here of a Cixous cut as a mark or nick or sign she wants to make, it would be about an affirmation of something different from the logic of the cut, specifically in so far as ‘man’ or ‘masculinity’ is predicated on the fear or possibility of castration. Instead of subscribing to the logic of this fear, she wonders: ‘Why does man fear being a woman?’7 This question is posed in ‘Sorties’ (in The Newly Born Woman) in 1975, but the fear lives on: ‘today, writing is woman’s [aujourd’hui l’écriture est aux femmes]. That is not a provocation, it means that woman admits there is an other’ (85/114). This is what makes women ‘derangers [les désordonnantes]’ (85/114). Writing is for the lone derangers. Now, a few decades later, while we continue to reckon with écriture féminine, we might also supplement and reinforce it with other figures: double life writing, night writing, submarine writing, dream children’s literature, the maiopic, ornithophony and so on.8 In ‘Sorties’ Cixous outlines a notion of bisexuality, a sense of being, feeling, thinking and writing that is not predicated on a logic of ‘warding off castration’: Therefore, I shall distinguish between two bisexualities, two opposite ways of imagining the possibility and practice of bisexuality: 1) Bisexuality as a fantasy of a complete being, which replaces the fear of castration and veils sexual difference insofar as this is perceived as the mark of a mythical separation­– ­the trace, therefore, of a dangerous and painful ability to be cut. Ovid’s Hermaphrodite, less bisexual than asexual, not made up of two genders but of two halves. Hence, a fantasy of unity. Two within one, and not even two wholes. 2) To this bisexuality that melts together and effaces, wishing to avert castration, I oppose the other bisexuality, the one with which every subject, who is not shut up inside the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theatre [le faux théâtre de la représentation phallocentrique], sets up his or her erotic universe. Bisexuality­– ­that is to say the location within oneself of the presence of both sexes, evident and insistent in different ways according to the individual, the nonexclusion of difference or of a sex, and starting with this ‘permission’ one gives oneself, the multiplications of the effects of desire’s inscription on every part of the body and the other body. (84–5/112–13)

All of this has to do with what was the case­– ­the repressive, anti-intellectual but also anti-body nature of ‘culture’ (in Europe and North America, first of all perhaps) in the 1970s. But the argument is as pressing as ever. We have not moved on from the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theatre, the fake

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theatre of phallocentric representation: it is all around us, in the street and in the classroom, online and in the workplace, in government leaders, in the rhetoric of education and the market, national sovereignty and the military. Cixous declares in ‘Sorties’: ‘at the present time it is woman who benefits from and opens up within this bisexuality beside itself, which does not annihilate differences but cheers them on, pursues them, adds more: in a certain way woman is bisexual­ – ­man having been trained to aim for the glorious phallic monosexuality’ (85). It is not just a matter of freeing up ‘the femininity of masculine sexuality’ (85), but of multiplying differences, deranging and multiplying identities, of ‘whole populations issuing from the unconscious’ (84). This is what Cixous finds in the writing of Jean Genet, ‘a text that divides itself, pulls itself to pieces, dismembers itself, regroups, remembers itself, [in] a proliferating, maternal femininity’ (84).

/ Does anyone think of Cixous as simple? Gilles Deleuze was perhaps the first to broach this idea, in his review of Neutre in 1972: The true originality of an author is only evident if one is able to adopt the point of view which the author has himself invented. From this point of view the author becomes easy to read and carries the reader along. This is the mystery: every truly new body of work is simple, easy, and joyous. See Kafka, see Beckett.9

Alongside the undeniable complexity and intricacy of her writing, there is also a marvellous simplicity. By way of illustration, we might turn to the Kingfisher First Dictionary which calls itself ‘the ideal first dictionary for children aged 5+’.10 Here is the definition of ‘male’ (accompanied, in the text, by a photograph of a smiling boy of about 6 standing next to a man who is wearing a suit and tie and is sitting on a wooden stool): ‘A male person or animal belongs to the sex that cannot have babies. Boys and men are male.’11 There is a flashing brilliance in this Kingfisher definition, inverting the phallocentric template according to which the male has something and the female lacks it. Other dictionaries are less bold, more assertive of male power. The OED has: ‘Designating the sex or (formerly) kind which can beget, but not bear, offspring’ (‘male’, adj, sense A 1a). ‘Begets (not bears) young’ is the line taken by Chambers Dictionary as well. There is a bit of subdued pathos, perhaps, in this alliterative ‘beget, not bear’. The entry in the Kingfisher dictionary, on the other hand, has a Cixousian simplicity.



Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth 83

/ Simply, it’s about giving birth. Of course Cixous is talking about being a woman when she speaks of her experience, but there is what she calls a ‘child state’ in writing and this takes us back to the H that is ‘masculine, neuter, or feminine at will’, bisexual, veering, admitting the other. What constitutes ‘creative writing’? It is simply writing that engenders dream children. In Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing she observes: The writing time … is accompanied by a child state, what [Marina] Tsvetaeva calls the ‘state of creation’. The unconscious tells us a book is a scene of childbirth, delivery, abortion, breast-feeding. The whole chronicle of childbearing is in play within the unconscious during the writing period. We will bring forth into the light of night innumerable children. (74)

With a nice irony, given that Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing has only ever seen the light of day as a work in English, Cixous appears to be playing on the French idiom for giving birth: donner le jour à…: to create, to bring somebody into the world, literally to give the day or daylight to somebody. But here it is shadowed and upturned into the nightlight of dreams: ‘We will bring forth into the light of night innumerable children.’ Writing, as she says elsewhere, is nighting: ‘What we call the day prevents me from seeing. Solar daylight blinds me to the visionary day … Night becomes a verb. I night. I write at night. I write: the Night.’12 It is perhaps helpful here to recall that Cixous’s mother Eve worked in Algiers as a midwife and that Hélène, when she was just fourteen, would go to the hospital with her mother and witness women giving birth.13 Sometimes Cixous writes about literal birth trauma, as in The Day I Wasn’t There (2000).14 But writing itself, the activity or passivity of writing as such, involves leaving everything behind. As she puts it in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: ‘A writer has no children. I have no children when I write. When I write I escape myself, I uproot myself, I am a virgin … The moment I pick up my pen­– ­magical gesture­– ­I forget all the people I love; an hour later they are not born and I have never known them’ (21). And then at the same time writing is giving birth, bringing into the light of night innumerable newcomers time after time. Cixous keeps paper and pen by her bed, and not yet awake, a birth is in the offing: ‘Sometimes the child is the size of a leaf and it crumbles to pieces. Sometimes it is just a small piece of paper you put on the bed that is suddenly lost. You do not know whether it is the child who faded or whether it is you who forgot the child’ (74).

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/ In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates refers to himself as ‘the son of a midwife, a fine buxom woman called Phaenarete’.15 He goes on to compare midwifery with philosophy: SOCRATES: [The performance of midwives] falls short of mine. It is not the way of women sometimes to bring forth real children, sometimes mere phantoms, such that it is hard to tell the one from the other. If it were so, the highest and noblest task of the midwife would be to discern the real from the unreal, would it not? THEAETETUS: I agree. SOCRATES: My art of midwifery is in general like theirs: the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth. And the highest point of my art is the power to prove by every test whether the offspring of a young man’s thought is a false phantom or instinct with life and truth. (150a-c)

Socrates’s work as a philosopher is an ‘art of midwifery’ or maieutics (ἡ μαιευτικὴ τέχνη, 150b). It’s a marvellously fertile but also strange, uncertain scene: philosophy involves giving birth and any manifest distinctions between man and woman are interweaved, in suspense. His mother being a midwife is the enigmatic spur to Socrates’s talking about his own work as midwifery. Socratic philosophical procedure has a mother in it. Socrates appears, on one level, to assume and even oppose the identity of ‘man’ and ‘woman’, ‘soul’ and ‘body’, but their intermixing oversees the logic of what he is saying. There’s a sort of maieutics beside itself, a blind maieutics.16 It’s about the status of one’s invisible autobiography (my mother in me), the shifting and uncertain distinctions between literal and figurative (who or what is a ‘midwife’?), and the being-promise of a promise (to heal your soul). What philosophy (or the ‘art of midwifery’) is or does or professes to be is irreducibly phantomatic. Socrates goes on, very much in the manner of an analyst who decides whether or not those who come to him can make progress: ‘In yet another way those who seek my company have the same experience as a woman with child: they suffer the pains of labour and, by night and day, are full of distress far greater than a woman’s, and my art has power to bring on these pangs or to allay them’ (151a).

/



Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth 85

We might speak of Hélène Cixous’s work, her way of writing, as maiopic. ‘Maiopic’ is a homophone of myopic: if you’re writing blind, like Cixous (in the dark, like a mole), you can’t tell the difference (myopic, maiopic). Picture a shuffling and cutting of test cards for optics and maieutics.

/ With maiopic writing there is a feeling of the miraculous and supernatural. It need only be a single word in order for a birth to happen. As she says in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: ‘Everyone has their own magic words. The moment you find your magic word­– ­it may be one word or it may be several­– ­then you have the key, you can start writing’ (90). The phrase ‘magic word’ recalls the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in particular their book The Wolf Man’s Magic Word and the idea of reading or analysing someone or some text that would engage with the logic of ‘words that hide’ and enable the analyst or critic to uncover the poetics of a ‘magic word’, a cryptic vocable (such as the Russian word tieret) whose discovery enables some uncanny deciphering of a person or text.17 Cixous’s notion of ‘magic word’ does not ignore the significance of what Abraham and Torok (and Derrida after them) talk about as ‘impossible’ or ‘refused mourning’, but a magic word in Cixous is not arcane or darkly forbidding or ever in fact final. It may be the simplest word, in front of your eyes, there at the beginning of the sentence­– ­‘it’, for instance, or ‘may’. To recall Wallace Stevens’s cryptic, apocalyptic formulation: ‘It may come tomorrow in the simplest word…’18 Any and every word has the potential to generate further secrets.

/ Still, giving birth­– ­and the analysis of giving birth­– ­is frightening, overpowering, a going under. As she puts it in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: What comes up when you start writing are all the scenes of impotence, terror, or vast power. The unconscious tells a tale of the supernatural possibility (it is always supernatural) of bringing a child to light, but the miracle in the dream is that you can have a child even when you cannot have a child. Even if you are too young or too old to have a child, even if you are eighty, you can still carry a child and give it birth and milk. (77–8)

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She writes this as a woman and so, she adds, ‘I don’t know how men dream when they start writing, though I do wonder about it. I can’t imagine they dream that they bear children. So it must be something else. I’d like to know what the equivalent or substitute is’ (78). If I might venture a very brief response, as a man who feels singularly maiopic, subterranean, deranger-identified: I dream of a writing freeing up ‘the femininity of masculine sexuality’ and ‘multiplying differences’; I believe only in writing against, beside, outside and beyond, in criticising but also in laughing at ‘the spurious Phallocentric Performing Theatre’. I have no womb, it’s incredible just to imagine, it’s a lack that makes me want to laugh and weep. The desire to phantasmother. Nonetheless, like Cixous in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, I think of the things I write as ‘dream children’ and experience them, also, as ‘total strangers’ (78). I abandon or am abandoned by them. The axe falls. Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 32. Further page references to this book are given in parentheses in the main body of the text.  2 Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr, and Richard Rand (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 184.   3 Quoted in Derrida, Glas, 184.   4 Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 16; qtd in Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 17.   5 Jacques Derrida, ‘As if I were dead: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, in Applying: To Derrida, ed. John Brannigan, Ruth Robbins and Julian Wolfreys (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 219.   6 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1:4 (1976), 875; ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ (originally published in French in 1975), in Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 37. For an excellent discussion of the history and effects of this error, see Elissa Marder, ‘Force of Love’, in Deconstruction and the Survival of Love, ed. Luke Donahue and Adam R. Rosenthal, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 40:2 (2018), 206–20.   7 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 63–132; here, 85; ‘Sorties’ (originally published in French in La Jeune née [Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1975]), reprinted in Le Rire de la Méduse et



Cixous cuts: from the axe to giving birth 87

autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 71–197; here, 114. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash.   8 For more on ‘ornithophony’ in particular, see ‘Four words for Cixous’, below.   9 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’, trans. Martin McQuillan, in Reading Cixous Writing, ed. Martin McQuillan, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2002). 203–5; here, 204. Deleuze’s text was originally published in Le Monde, 11 August 1972. 10 Kingfisher First Dictionary (London: Kingfisher Publications, 1995). 11 Kingfisher First Dictionary, 94. The corresponding definition of ‘female’ (accompanied by a photograph of a smiling girl of about 6 standing next to a woman wearing a jumper, black skirt and tights, sitting on that same wooden stool) runs: ‘A female person or animal belongs to the sex that can have babies. Women and girls are female’ (59). 12 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 139. 13 See Mireille Calle-Gruber, ‘Chronicle’, in Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 209. And cf. Cixous’s ‘Coming to Writing’, trans. Deborah Jenson, with Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers, in ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991): ‘It was in watching [women] giving birth (to themselves) that I learned to love women, to sense and desire the power and the resources of femininity’ (31). 14 I discuss this text further in ‘Four words for Cixous’, below. 15 Theaetetus, trans. F. M. Cornford, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 149a. Further page references are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 16 And perhaps, in a sense, deaf too. In order to elaborate on this at once real and fantastic conception of Socrates and the mother here, we might pick up on Hemlock (2009), in which the narrator’s attempt to engage with her elderly mother is watched over, Eve’s-dropped by ‘Cousin Deafness’:   – Do you know the death of Socrates? La mort de Socrate? I ask.­– ­Socrates’ mother? La mère de Socrate? shouts Deafness back. Know his mother? Of course not, my mother says. Here we are, sitting on the balcony, my mother in white trousers, me in paper. Cousin Deafness watches over us…



See Hélène Cixous, Hemlock: Old Women in Bloom, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 77. In the original French there are no italics, and so the hallucinatory mingling of what is said and not said, of who is present and who

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is absent, of speech and writing, is made more palpable: ‘– Tu connais la mort de Socrate? Dis-je.­– ­La mère de Socrate? crie la Surdité.­– ­La mère? Certainement pas, dit ma mère. Nous voilà assises sur le balcon, ma mère en pantalon blanc, moi en papier, la cousine Surdité veille…’ See Ciguë: Vieilles femmes en fleur (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 109. How could Eve Cixous be expected to have known Socrates’ mother? What would Cousin Deafness have to say about the difference between death (la mort) and the mother (la mère)? Amid the poignant but also very funny mishearings and misunderstandings, it is hard not to recall the intimate rapport between one midwife (Cixous’s mother) and another (Socrates’ mother). 17 See Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), including Jacques Derrida’s introduction, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson, xi–xlviii. 18 Wallace Stevens, The Auroras of Autumn, in his Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 362.

7

Away

Away, in a word, this is what I dream of, angloheterophonic mole that I am. Alone, in the burrow, burying myself with you. ‘And what if reason were mad?’ she wonders in Manhattan (2002): do I wake or sleep?1 Always, this vigilance. Attend to the truth that, as she has said, ‘there is no authority of the author’.2 Always ‘authors in the author’, other voices and ‘tones of voices’, reading away, secretaries of the apocalypse.3 I love this word ‘away’. It is perhaps among the most untranslatable words in English. In proposing it as a way of reading Hélène Cixous, and in particular of exploring what she calls ‘writing blind’ (in the extraordinary essay of that title, first published in 1996), I am no doubt doing violence to her work.4 But I am also finding it funny, already, the sense of a rapport that does away with words, this strange pleasure of losing myself, recognising how thoroughly she has already said everything, starting with the mole, burrowing away, and with laughter, the feelings evoked when she speaks, in the interview entitled ‘ “You race towards that secret, which escapes” ’, about the ‘extremely comical’ situation of finding, as a writer, that ‘you are immediately dispossessed of everything you write’.5 She is not denying or playing down the importance of questions of responsibility. On the contrary. But there is always a sense of the ridiculous to be picked up in the acknowledgement that, as she puts it in the same interview, ‘The writing is so much more powerful than the writer. It goes much further, much faster than the person (who is the secretary of the text) can ever go, or even measure. A text is always the disappropriation of the author.’6 This sense of the ridiculous is what she calls her ‘modern comic dimension’: it is what allows her to note, in ‘Writing Blind’, that ‘in the Bible one does not laugh’, but at the same time to affirm that ‘In my Bible, one has the sense of the ridiculous. It is a great liberty’

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(152, emphasis added). The Bible departs from itself. It was away from the start. It is a book beside itself, a BiBible. There is a very brief but hectic and magnificent text called ‘The Departure’, by Kafka. (I would like to say something, if only in passing, in a by-passage, about the ‘by’, another beautiful untranslatable word, letting it resonate here in Eric Prenowitz’s English rendering of Cixous affirming, in ‘Writing Blind’: ‘Each book is in a certain way a letter that wants to be received by you. But it is not for you that I write: it is by you, passing through you, because of you­– ­–­– ­And thanks to you each book takes every liberty. Crazy liberty, as you say. The liberty to not resemble, to not obey’ (150). The ‘force that makes [her] write’, she goes on, is ‘the always unexpected Messiah’, in other words ‘you’. It is ‘the returning spirit or the spirit of returning … You have always just left, you come from leaving: tu viens de partir. Leaving is the condition for returning’ (150–1). You will have been away. Away: it is by you.7) ‘The Departure’ then: I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. The servant did not understand my orders. So I went to the stables myself, saddled my horse, and mounted. In the distance I heard the sound of a trumpet, and I asked the servant what it meant. He knew nothing and had heard nothing. At the gate he stopped me and asked: ‘Where is the master going?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘just out of here, just out of here. Out of here, nothing else, it’s the only way I can reach my goal.’ ‘So you know your goal?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I’ve just told you. Out of here—that’s my goal.’8

Sometimes I think that it is more enlightening to ask someone if they find Kafka funny than to ask if they believe in God. Is ‘The Departure’ funny? It is full of apocalyptic trumpeting but what happens? We might recall the evocation, in ‘Writing Blind’, of a book that is ‘not a narrative, it is not a discourse, it is a poetic animal machine’ (150). Mounted on his horse, who or what is this ‘I’ that cannot be understood by the other? What is happening when one is apparently led away by non-knowledge and the inaudible? (‘He knew nothing and had heard nothing.’) Isn’t this crazy? How should we read the title, ‘The Departure’? What and when would the departure have been? The person who writes is a secretary not only in that writing always escapes the writer’s control (it was already off, away, ‘out of here’, to borrow Kafka’s phrase), but also in being immersed from the start in an experience of the secret, subject to, separate or away from the secret that makes the writer, makes herhim secretarial. The goal is always away, it’s ‘the only way’. For Cixous this is to be felt in painting as much as in writing. When writing, she says:



Away 91 It’s as if you were starting on a race, towards something that is far away, which is a secret. What you want to reach is a secret because you don’t know what it is, except that it emits signs that appeal to you in a way that is vital. So, you race toward that secret, which escapes.9

Away, ‘in a way that is vital’. This-a-way: the vital, the quick as lightning, the ‘living instant’, ‘right away’. As she observes in ‘Writing Blind’, ‘Without words as witnesses the instant (will not have been) is not’ (146). Writing. Awaywithwords. As she says at the start of that essay, ‘writing is first of all a departure, an embarkation, an expedition’ (139). Irreducibly multiple, growing and dying (‘But dying is not what we think’ [148]), every piece of writing is a sortie, a departure, a launch and release, a raid, an attack or counter-attack, a peculiar outburst, Cixous’s writing is off, it’s away Writing in ‘Sorties’ (1975) about Algeria, about her childhood and how she comes to writing, now in the away-present of writing, she evokes an imagined ‘elsewhere’: everyone knows that to go somewhere else there are routes, signs, ‘maps’­– ­for an exploration, a trip.­– ­That’s what books are. Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds. And that is where I go. I take books; I leave the real, colonial space; I go away.10

Away in reading, she goes on, ‘I don’t go and read just to read, to forget­– ­No! Not to shut myself up in some imaginary paradise. I am searching: somewhere there must be people who are like me in their rebellion and in their hope’ (72). Seeking Cixous. Seeking Cixous seeks no one. To seek Cixous, to write ‘on’ Cixous is first of all to forget all models or imitation. In Cixous’s away, there are ‘no models’. As ‘Writing Blind’ darkly declares: ‘there are [no models] where I go, the wild earth is still being invented’. But there are always other solitudes there, ‘that famous secret society, the Masonic Order of the Alert, the entirely diasporated people of border-jumpers, [none of whom] imitates another. But each one recognises that the other is also called … The solitude of each writing is always shared [partagée], partaken’ (148). ‘Away’: what an astonishing word. Is it one? It is necessary to have a nose for

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it. We are led into the garden of ‘verbal dwarfs’, as she calls them in ‘Writing Blind’, ‘minuscule workers in the mines of language’ (147). Words ‘perforate our deafness. They forethink … These little so ancient agents never stop joking and bringing us gifts in secret’ (147). These imps forethink Cixous, but there is a sense of presentiment in her too, telepathy in a way. ‘An etymological presentiment guides me’, she writes. ‘Call it a good nose. I smell the odour of origins on the most familiar words’ (147). ‘Away’­– ­‘in its origin a phrase’, the OED tells us, ‘ON preposition, and we, WAY’, i.e. on (his, one’s) way, ‘on’ (as in ‘move on’), and thus ‘from this (or that) place’. ‘Already in Old English’, says the OED, ‘away’ (‘a-we’) is a couple. It is (as the OED does not go on to say) a coupling, a mating, making love, having it together, having it away.11 ‘All strange away’, as Samuel Beckett might say.12 Away also, in what the publishers call his ‘final literary utterance’, ‘What is the word’: ‘what is the word­– ­/ there­– ­/ over there­– ­/ away over there­– ­/ afar­– ­/ afar away over there­– ­/ afaint­– ­/ afaint afar away over there what­– ­/ what­– ­/ what is the word –’.13 ‘Away’: what a gorgeous, mad couple­– ­what births in the offing, away and still to come. Come that-a-way, led by the nose, and this-a-way, to the sounds of Picasso’s blue guitar. Wallace Stevens writes: He held the world upon his nose And this-a-way he gave a fling. His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi— And that-a-way he twirled the thing. Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats Moved in the grass without a sound. They did not know the grass went round. The cats had cats and the grass turned gray And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way: The grass turned green and the grass turned gray. And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.14

It flies, it whirls, it twists and spins, stroboscopically as Gilles Deleuze would say.15 One should then perhaps read Stevens’s ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ in the way that Deleuze suggests we read Cixous, that is to say quickly, with an eye and ear and nose for new speeds and intensities. This would entail a new verb, to writeaway­ – w ­ hat Deleuze calls ‘writing in the instant [seconde], in the tenth of



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an instant’.16 Next instant, next stanza in Stevens: ‘A mountainous music always seemed / To be falling and to be passing away.’17 ‘Away’ requires no less than seventeen different categorisations of sense (nose-scents, no-sense), according to the OED, every one of them already in flight, given, spinning, turning and dying away, gone already (sense 13), still turning, apotropology of the tropological (‘(Turned) from this (or that) direction; in the other direction’: sense 9), ‘away’ always ‘in another place’ (sense 11a), once and away, once in a way (‘once, but not continuously’: sense 17), away as ‘straightway, forthwith, directly, without hesitation or delay’ (sense 8), and so on and away, seventeen ways of reading Cixous, a matter of what ‘Writing Blind’ calls ‘vital processes that go faster than lightning’ (144), at it again, this-a-way and that-a-way, coming away again. ‘Away’: always at least double, in itself. ‘Away! Away!’ So begins another of Cixous’s ‘escaping texts’, the essay on Clarice Lispector and James Joyce entitled ‘ “Mamãe, disse ele,” or Joyce’s second hand’.18 She is quoting from the final sentences of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, from Stephen Dedalus’s journal: ‘April 16. Away! Away!’19 The double ‘Away!’ is an example of what Cixous calls a ‘narrative anacolouthon’ (110). This is, I think, stroboscopically illuminating of the choreography of her own writing. She remarks: ‘suddenly the journal form irrupts into the book, the I irrupts into the story, and “the artist” goes from the status of character to the status of narrator’. Status away! ‘Away! Away!’, she says, as if no longer in Joycean voice now, all quotation marks put away: ‘Away! Away! is in the same movement of detachment and of interruption. Away! is the bursting out of voice. The narrator’s own voice operates an interrupting irruption, interruption-irruption’ (110). The word occurs once more on the last page of Joyce’s text, in the entry for April 26: ‘My mother … prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels.’20 ‘Away’, ‘away from home’, word of exile at the exit: ‘perfectly at home, nowhere’, as Cixous has it.21 The not-at-home, the ­distant-from-home is already inscribed in the ‘away’ (OED, sense 11a), uncanniness in ‘silence, exile, and cunning’.22 As ‘Writing Blind’ suggests, it’s a question of the telephone of course, a jouissance of what comes ‘from afars and from voices’, in the secrets and ‘mysteries of passage’ (141). It’s the difficulty of ‘the kingdom whose queen is poetic freedom’ (143). In my burrow, burrow of myopia and myoperatics, I am listening, wanting to trace this Joycean double ‘away’, hear it sing, wing, turn, make love, make away, dream in literature, in the voices of Keats and Shakespeare. Away! away!’

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calls out and back, most immediately but also enigmatically perhaps, to Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. This is the great English poem of ‘away’ and perhaps also of ‘writing blind’ or ‘night writing’.23 The word first appears at the end of stanza 2: it follows the verb ‘fade’ and thus exemplifies ‘away’ in what the OED gives as sense 5, ‘away’ in other words ‘[f]rom the actual state or condition; from existence; into extinction or termination (in most cases gradual); to death, to an end, to nothing’. This is where we should perhaps note the consonance with what ‘Writing Blind’ calls a ‘slowness inside the speed’: ‘In language I like and I practise the leap and the short-cut, ellipsis, amphibology, speed and slowness, asyndeton’ (144). ‘Away’ at once gradual and terminal, strange supplement: not simply ‘fade’ but ‘fade away’. O for a beaker full of the warm South,   Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,    With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,    And purple-stained mouth;   That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,    And with thee fade away into the forest dim:24

This is the end of the second stanza and yet, uniquely, as nowhere else in this poem or indeed in any of Keats’s so-called ‘great Odes’, the end of the stanza is not the end of the sentence, the sentence leaps, the border is jumped, the stanza and status of the stanza fades. Jack Stillinger’s edition has the stanza end with a colon, noting also that­– ­in the transcript versions by Woodhouse, Dilke and George Keats, as well as in the version published in Annals of the Fine Arts­ – ­the ‘away’ in this line does not appear. It is a supplementary supplement.   That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,    And with thee fade away into the forest dim: Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget   What thou among the leaves hast never known…

And then, breaking away from sentence and sense, comes the double ‘away!’ at the start of stanza 4, redoubling and dissolving the earlier instants with what Cixous specifies, in ‘ “Mamãe, disse ele,” or Joyce’s second hand’, as ‘the duplicity of the exclamation: Convocation! Revocation!’ (111): Away! away! for I will fly to thee,   Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards, But on the viewless wings of Poesy,



Away 95   Though the dull brain perplexes and retards: Already with thee! Tender is the night…

It is as if one has to order ‘away’ away, done away with in the speech-act that creates it. To whom or to what, on the viewless (invisible, but also unseeing or blind) wings of poetry, is this strangely encrypted ‘Away!’ addressed? It is not to be seen in the final stanza. But is it to be heard? Forlorn! The very word is like a bell   To toll me back from thee to my sole self! Adieu! The fancy cannot cheat so well   As she is fam’d to do, deceiving elf. Adieu! Adieu! Thy plaintive anthem fades   Past the near meadows, over the still stream,    Up the hill-side: and now ’tis buried deep     In the next valley-glades:   Was it a vision, or a waking dream?    Fled is that music:– Do I wake or sleep?

In a concise and fascinating reading of Keats’s poem, Paul de Man focuses in particular on the opening line of this final stanza (‘Forlorn! The very word is like a bell’). He writes: It is curious that such a thematically powerful and pathos-laden poem would suddenly interrupt, in an inopportune parabasis, the flow of its own pathos to point out a meaningless ‘play’ (as we say) of the signifier, the trivial fact that, in English (and only in English) forlorn can be said to sound (more or less) like a death knell or glas … But it is more curious still that this trivial observation has to serve as the thematically most important articulation or dramatic transition in a lyric poem, when it would have been so easy to have a fictional bell ring instead of the material, ‘very’ word. Finally, and most important of all, this moment in the text, and this moment alone, occurs as an actual present in the only material present of the ode, the actual moment of its inscription when Keats writes the word ‘forlorn’ and interrupts himself to reflect on its arbitrary sound. At that precise moment, is it possible to say whether Keats, in the present of that moment, is awake or asleep? Thematically speaking, it is the very moment at which the subject in the text states that it awakens; textually speaking, however, it is also the moment at which this same subject starts to dream­– ­for as we also all know since Freud, such plays of the letter are also the work of the dream, accessible to us only within a system in which the difference between waking and dreaming cannot be decided.25

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Very quickly I wonder if, for all its subtlety and incisiveness, there is not something left unattended to in de Man’s reading, visible or audible in a certain over-insistence in its tone. Is the interruption to which he refers really so ‘inopportune’? Might it not be experienced as partaking of the ‘pathos’? I wonder if it would really ‘have been so easy to have a fictional bell ring instead of the material, “very” word’. How might we imagine it? ‘O, there are the bells of Hampstead church!’­– ­a bathetic contemporary equivalent of ‘OMG, that’s my mobile ringing now!’ If the ‘plays of the letter [that are] the work of the dream’ open on to an undecidability concerning ‘waking and dreaming’, is this not also true of the sounds of the plays of the letter? More precisely, is ‘the actual moment of its inscription when Keats writes the word “forlorn” ’ not in fact already haunted, resonating with the striking repetitions of ‘away’ earlier in the poem? The earlier ‘Away! away!’ might indeed be picked up in the final stanza in the repetition not only of ‘forlorn’ but also of ‘adieu’. If there is dreaming in ‘away’, there is also an ‘away’ in ‘a waking’. There is something at once compelling and provoking but also perhaps insufficient about de Man’s insistence on seeing, on seeing the very words, in a poem about not seeing. ‘Away’ would be ‘unseen’, ‘viewless’, blind writing we might say. I would like to conclude with a few brief remarks about Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. I am not aware of anyone having remarked on it before, but I hear in Keats’s ode a kind of bell sounding out of Antony and Cleopatra.26 This is Shakespeare’s masterpiece of erotic ‘away’, telepathic or iteraphonic ‘away’.27 The exclamation ‘Away!’ is the concluding affirmation of Antony’s description of his relationship with Cleopatra:      Let us go. Come; Our separation so abides and flies That thou, residing here, goes yet with me, And I, hence fleeting, here remain with thee. Away! (1.3.102–6)

The opening lines of Act 1 scene 5 seem to telephone or telescope Keats’s desire ‘That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim.’ Cleopatra Charmian! Charmian Madam? Cleopatra Ha, ha! Give me to drink mandragora. Charmian Why, madam?

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Cleopatra

That I might sleep out this great gap of time My Antony is away. (1.5.1–6)

Cleopatra’s way of dealing with ‘Antony … away’ in turn seems to prefigure Keats’s ‘Away! away!’, in other words his decision to write (as if, in this mad scene, he were not already writing, ‘already with thee’). The scene ends with Cleopatra addressing this ‘away’ once more, deciding to write, to write as many love letters as there are messengers in Egypt:     But come, away, Get me ink and paper. He shall have every day a several greeting, Or I’ll unpeople Egypt. (1.5.78–81)

‘How love a woman without encountering death? … Without history’s making one feel its law of hatred?’ These are the questions that open on to one of the most dazzling Shakespearean passages in Cixous, the eight or nine pages on (or, might we say, ‘by’?) Antony and Cleopatra, which come at the end of ‘Sorties’ (122–30) and which we discussed earlier (in ‘Advertisement’). Here, as much as anywhere in her writing, we are ‘hard put to differentiate between creation and interpretation’: these pages give us extraordinary ­‘interpretation-evocation acts’.28 ‘To the frontiers!’ we read in ‘Sorties’: ‘Let’s keep going. The space of a kiss, eternity’s tongue between our lips … Let’s go … hunt and if you believe you see another land, I will open it for you under a sky still un-born!’ (125). The ‘miracle’ of Antony and Cleopatra is to be going away, going to die, by each other, ‘to have substituted forever for the unlivable absence an absolute embrace’ (129). They are away, finally, passed away, but ‘liv[ing] still’. ‘Even in death’ Cleopatra ‘nourishes, and nourishing is nourished by love’ (130). This is the sheer effect (interpretation-evocation) of what Cixous calls ‘the staggering display of Shakespeare’s language’ (129). She lets us hear how far ‘this Love unparalleled in History’ has to do with the voice and laughter, with Antony and Cleopatra ‘laughing at themselves, set[ting] out anew, beginning their story where most people finish it’ (124), and above all perhaps with the sound of Cleopatra’s voice, with ‘the queen with ten tongues’ whose voice (says Plutarch) ‘was like a musical instrument with several stops and several registers’ (123). As Cixous reminds us, as they fly to one another, ‘from / The world’s great snare uncaught’, only to fly away again, in the only avian apostrophe of its kind anywhere in Shakespeare’s writings, Antony addresses Cleopatra as ‘My nightingale’ (4.8.18).

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Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 32; Manhattan: Lettres de la préhistoire (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 49.   2 Hélène Cixous, ‘ “You race towards that secret, which escapes”: An Interview with Hélène Cixous’, in Reading Cixous Writing, ed. Martin McQuillan, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2002), 186.   3 Cixous, ‘ “You race towards that secret, which escapes” ’, 197.   4 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 139–52. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. Cixous’s essay first appeared in French as ‘Conversation avec l’âne. Écrire aveugle’, in L’amour du loup et autres remords (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 79–105.   5 Cixous, ‘ “You race towards that secret, which escapes” ’, 198.   6 Cixous, ‘ “You race towards that secret, which escapes” ’, 186.   7 For another discussion of the poetics of the ‘by’ (or ‘bi’ or ‘bye’), see Nicholas Royle, ‘Mollusc’, a reading of Les Murray’s poem of that title, in Fragmente, 6 (1995), 92–9.   8 Franz Kafka, ‘The Departure’, trans. Tania and James Stern, in The Complete Short Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer (London: Minerva, 1992), 449.   9 Cixous, ‘ “You race towards that secret, which escapes” ’, 193. She is in fact discussing the paintings of Monet at this point. 10 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 72. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 11 On writing as love making, see Cixous, ‘ “You race towards that secret, which escapes” ’, 186; cf. ‘Writing Blind’, 149; and ‘Coming to Writing’, trans. Deborah Jenson, with Ann Liddle and Susan Sellers, in ‘Coming to Writing’ and Other Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 42. 12 As he puts it: ‘imagination dead imagine all strange away’. See Samuel Beckett, ‘All Strange Away’, in As the Story Was Told: Uncollected and Late Prose (London: John Calder, 1990), 55. 13 See Beckett, As the Story Was Told, 10, 133. 14 Wallace Stevens, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1978), 178. 15 See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’, trans. Martin McQuillan, in Reading Cixous Writing, ed. Martin McQuillan, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2002): 203–5.



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16 Deleuze, ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’, 204. 17 Stevens, ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’, 179. 18 Hélène Cixous, ‘ “Mamãe, disse ele,” or Joyce’s second hand’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 100–28. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 19 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 252. 20 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 253. 21 Hélène Cixous, ‘My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive from Algeria’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 155 (Cixous’s emphasis). 22 Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 247. 23 I confess that I had not read Cixous’s marvellous ‘Writing Blind’, with its affirmation of ‘writ[ing] the Night’ (139), when I wrote an essay on the subject of ‘Night Writing’. See Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 112–32. 24 See John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, in The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), 369–72. 25 Paul de Man, ‘Murray Krieger: A Commentary’, in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 186. 26 Quotations here are based on the New Cambridge Shakespeare text of Antony and Cleopatra, ed. David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 27 On the iteraphonic, see Nicholas Royle, In Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 11, 19 n.41 and passim; and for an earlier discussion of Shakespeare and ‘dramaturgic telepathy’, see ‘Night Writing’ and ‘Mole’ in Royle, The Uncanny, 112–32, 241–55. 28 Cixous, Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory, 67–8.

8

Cixous cuts: the veil in me

Another cut, still a cut, cut again: Encore une coupure. This phrase appears towards the close of Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes (2000).1 It epitomises a book that practises a more or less continuous art of epitome. (‘Epitome’ is from the ancient Greek ἐπιτέμνειν, ‘to make an incision into’, ‘to abridge’.)2 Encore une coupure: it is a book of memories of childhood in Algeria cut, ‘up to the present’ (48), with images and figures of ‘amputation’, variously physical, emotional, conceptual and linguistic. I compute, therefore I am-pute. Cutting is everywhere­– ­in remembering amputating and dismembering (17, 67, 74), midwifery and cutting cords (33), ‘throat-cutting dreams’ (68), the ‘bizarre radical cut’ of anti-semitism (70), the ‘excision (ablation)’ of ‘the Algerian being’ (70/124), cutting the throat of a pigeon (79) and so on­– ­all in the voice of a narrator, a Cixous double, who tells us of her powerlessness: ‘I was cut off from my brother, our inner life cut into two outer lives, and cut off from myself ’ (80). Encore une coupure. Cixous holds back the most dreadful cut until almost the end. It is announced as the ‘tale of a girl who gets cut in two’. The paragraphs get sliced up­– ­a mere sentence per paragraph, no more to be borne. The narration appears to cut back to a so-called historic present:   The oldest of my oldest Algerian memories about the Plan to annihilate the Algerian being is a tale of a girl cut in two.   It is in Oran on the Place d’Armes, on one of those sorts of Ferris wheel rides.   I am seven, I’ve been Jewish for a few years they tell me. The wheel turns, the little carriages swing back and forth. In front of me a man leans over and hugs a girl in a veil. Suddenly like a lunatic on fire she jumps like a girl who has caught fire she jumps. She is all you can see. FrenchAlgeria leaves the stage. The veil gets caught in the slats of the ride. The girl is yanked after her veil her body is trapped like a piece of meat in a grinder, she can’t extract it. Her scream rings out right to the port, right



Cixous cuts: the veil in me 101 to the tip of the cathedral, if a scream could halt fate, everything would stop dead [tout s’arrêterait à l’instant]. But the wheel must turn, two more times rolling over the screaming body, a scream never before heard in the City of Oran. Everything stops now. The girl has finished screaming. Her body cut in two through its middle wrapped in the veil falls like a stone to the ground of the square to the relief of the spectators. A dreadful feeling of release runs through me [Un affreux sentiment de délivrance me perce]. My existence has been cut in two. It is from having seen and looked at the torture that no human being should have to see, that no human being should turn away from, riveted as we were in the little carriages, the one completely given over to death the other outside it is from having heard the most piercing human scream and what’s more feminine rising from the pit of time in a single uninterrupted gush [en un seul jet non coupé], as if I had heard life accusing death while spilling its blood to the very last drop. The fault grips me, here, in the little carriage. The fault, its terrible mystery. I did nothing. I was there. I am still there. (81/145–6)

The past is cut now, the cut caught up. The cut is still there. It is ‘the oldest’, perhaps most ‘primal’ of the ‘primal scenes’ of Cixous’s book. It is a terrifying terrified scene of looking, as Freud’s notion of primal scene might lead us to expect. And as in the Freudian version, too, it is a scene scored by deferred effect. But it is also singular and quite other. It is not obviously ‘sexual’ or straight­ forwardly ‘in the family’ (the classic Freudian case of a child watching and being traumatised by the violence of sexual intercourse between his or her parents). It is not uncannily private (a domestic scene that ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden’), but uncannily public (a spectacle which no human being should have to see).3 It concerns witnessing the horrific death of a complete stranger­– ­who is, however, like the narrator, a little girl. It brings together issues of ethnic, religious, racial, sexual difference, conflict and catastrophe at a certain moment in 1944, even as it asserts that ‘FrenchAlgeria leaves the stage [la scène]’ (81/145). The narrator is Jewish: ‘I am seven, I’ve been Jewish for a few years they tell me [J’ai sept ans, depuis quelques années je suis juive dit-on]’ (81/145). She is Jewish on account of being told she is, for some years. The oddity of the phrasing accentuates the absurdity of the labelling. The girl cut in two has no doubt been Muslim for some years too. There is no sense in pretending that the veil doesn’t play a part in killing her, it’s part of the awfulness, the ghastly irony that her body sliced in half is held together by the veil as it falls to the ground like a stone (comme une masse, ‘in a heap’: 81/145). Exit FrenchAlgeria: what is primal about the scene has to do with humans, with

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the sudden transformation of a child’s body into a piece of meat in a grinder, a sight no humans should have to see or (in a terrible imperative) turn away from. The wheel here is a horrifying version of what W. H. Auden, writing in The Age of Anxiety (1944–46), called ‘Fortune’s Ferris-wheel’.4 It is a terrible, grinding embodiment of the revolving and revolting. It cuts the girl in two but it also cuts the narrator in two. Again, quite differently from a Freudian scene, this traumatic event is just as much about sound as vision. It’s a human cry (un hurlement humain), a howling, a scream that rises from or to the pit, the depths, the heart of time (jusqu’au fond des temps)­– ­derangingly an ascent as much as a descent. It resonates with a J’accuse of life to death (‘as if I had heard life accusing death’), then ends. Still a cut. The cry is cut off like the smell of dead cats recalled earlier in the text: The dead cats, remember, I say. Every month the dead cat, the cat of the month. A sudden stink would wake us up. An explosion. But the neighbour rushed around burying the dead cat in the garden and as soon as the body was covered with our soil the smell stopped like a cry cut off [un cri coupé]. (39/69)

One cut-off cry might appear to come before the other, to prefigure or prelude it, but what comes later comes to resound in the first audition. Like a pendulum in the pit of time: one must always be prepared to pick up the scents of Poe in Cixous.5 The sentences that relate the ‘oldest’ memory move from inexorably tumbling, churning and turning (‘Suddenly like a lunatic on fire she jumps like a girl who has caught fire she jumps’) to a deadly static (‘I did nothing. I was there. I am still there’). The cessation of the scream is a ‘relief ’ to the spectators. A ‘dreadful feeling of release’ pierces the narrator, runs through her like a sword. How is this piercing related to the crowd’s relief? This remains as uncertain as the role and response of the man who leans over and hugs the girl, precipitating the tragedy in the first place, inextricably a part of the ‘terrible mystery’ of ‘the fault’. The narrator goes on: I saw. I lived it. I am not dead. There is a fault. And it is my fault somehow. I saw the crazed girl take fire veiled crazily attached to her veil leaping from the fire into the abyss. It is a tragedy that is also a City, a country, a history, the history of the one I am not, a veil keeps us apart and for this very reason I feel a veil alight a red mist on my head on my shoulders, terrified I fight it off but I don’t deny it, nothing could make me deny it nothing could make me put it on, and for this reason even in spite



Cixous cuts: the veil in me 103 of myself I am the bearer of a girl in a veil who is not me, I have within me a veiled girl cut in two the deadly veil the cut because I am a girl the victim’s witness, cut off from the victim. I go home. I do not run. I feel that that happened to me. Since that accident something inside me is veiled to me. (81–2)

The veil is an uncanny partition of not-me in me. There is something of the logic that Jacques Derrida proposes in ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’: ‘Finishing with the veil is finishing with self.’6 The survivor carries the other in a veil. A veil without avail. It’s the truth, this deadly veil, this cut. Notes 1 Hélène Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 80; Les rêveries de la femme sauvage: Scènes primitives (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 144. Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash. 2 OED, ‘epitome’, n. 3 On the primal scene as ‘in the family’, see, for example, Sigmund Freud, ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 8: 220–1; and on what ‘ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (a conception of the uncanny that Freud attributes to F. W. J. Schelling), see ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 17: 224, 225. 4 W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 408. 5 Regarding ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, for example, one might think of ‘the idea of revolution’ (Poe’s emphasis) and ‘the burr of a mill-wheel’ (681) at the beginning, ‘the bandage’ and ‘sweep of the fearful scimitar’ (691ff.) in the middle, and the ‘one loud, long, and final scream’ (697) at the end: see Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, in Tales and Sketches, Volume 1: 1831–1842, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 681–97. I invoke Poe’s tale here not to imply a conception of Reveries of the Wild Woman as latently or in part a work of fiction, but rather to suggest how ‘the real’ in Cixous’s writing assimilates and subsumes, lives through the literary. 6 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own: Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2001), 28.

9

Portmanteau

‘An intimacy rises up and takes the two characters in its arms. This scene is always under a cape … A strangeness separates the two from all humanity. Something that beats in their flesh, a blood perhaps, acts like a silent schibboleth.’ I take these words and put them down like a piece of luggage in a Chekhov play, on stage from the start, lure and gage. They come from the essay entitled ‘What is it o’clock?’1 Impossible portmanteau and incredible treasure chest: already more than double, folding unfolding enfolding, inside out in the writing event, reading Hélène Cixous reading Jacques Derrida reading each other reading themselves reading us.2 What is the point? ‘No point in writing’. In a chapter of her Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint entitled ‘Point of Honour/Point Donor [Point Donneur]’, with the subtitle ‘In which there is no mourning’, Cixous writes of Derrida: Now, the fundamental axiom of everything he says everywhere is the divisibility of the point. Everything he writes, everything he thinks is a protest against the point as indivisible. He writes, divided, in order to divide it, the point. He thinks, he lives, divisibility, he divives [divit]. His sense of urgency on this point exceeds even his own calculations, sometimes he makes a point of attacking the point, sometimes it is his unconscious or the possibilities of the French language that work against the point. He does not admit the indivisible. This refusal is his point of honour. Never does he put a point, a dot, a period, the word, the sign, without a shudder. The one he is, whoever it may be, is never idle, never a fixed point. The minute he sights a point he is on his mark, he is off, he is gone. In the opposite direction. In all the opposite directions.3



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In these fleeting sentences we have it all­– ­the divivacity of Derrida and Cixous, their strange intimacy and difference, marked in particular in the irony of the ‘fundamental axiom’, the shared affirmation of ‘the divisibility of the point’, the seriousness (‘point of honour’) but also the humour (point of donation, gift or give-laughter) that plays over the writing, the embrace of psychoanalysis (especially Freud) in complicating and estranging the concept of the author in order to reckon with his or her ‘unconscious’ (‘I feel like laughing’, Derrida says in ‘Telepathy’, ‘every time I write this word [“unconscious”], especially with a possessive mark’)4 as well as with the ‘possibilities of the French [or another] language’, the insistence on the incalculable or what ‘exceeds … calculations’, the absolute restlessness (‘never idle, never a fixed point’), the speed of thinking, living, writing, diviving, driving, destinerrancing derivitality, this ‘sense of urgency’ and the force of escape (‘he is off, he is gone. In the opposite direction. In all the opposite directions’). ‘No point in writing [ne point écrire]’ (64), Cixous declares, but she is already citing him writing on her in that blindly intimate text, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’, subtitled ‘Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil’ (Points de vue piqués sur l’autre voile, also therefore ‘no points of view at all’), a scene of reading in which he pursues a reading of her as precisely ‘the one in whom I read fore-­ seeing thought’.5 Blindly, Derrida seeks-you, seeks under (sous) this and that veil or sail, under a cape, in order to say that Cixous has foreseen it all. Affirming the divisibility of everything. There is no atom, as Derrida says.6 His work can be associated with what I have elsewhere called linguistic nanoterrorism.7 But here and now, with a thought of those Keatsian ‘viewless wings’ we were discussing a little earlier (in ‘Away’), I would like to evoke another view, the perversity or eccentricity of a different point of view, concerning the impact of the work of Hélène Cixous in the context of Anglophone culture and theory. The significance of her work has for several decades been construed there primarily, indeed massively, in terms of feminism and feminist theory, but for me it has from the beginning, and most abidingly, entailed the question, the question mark or point (point d’interrogation) of the uncanny, the troublingly strange or strangely familiar.8 Cixous’s essay ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’ was published in English in the same year as Of Grammatology (1976) and for me came before ‘The Double Session’, which appeared in Dissemination in English in 1981.9 In the twisted time of my anachronicity, Cixous’s essay would thus have foreseen the reading which appears to

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inspire it, and in particular the footnotes in ‘The Double Session’ to which she herself refers in a footnote, in ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’. Strange lateness is perhaps the law of reading, when it comes to Derrida and Cixous. He seems to read her, or at least write about her, only late. There are latenses of reading, one could say, in a portmanteau anagram, mixing tenses with what is latent. Her reference to ‘The Double Session’ itself appears only some pages into ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’, coming apropos an allusion to ‘thematism’ (linked to the ways in which the uncanny escapes any and every thematics).10 Yet it is clear that Derrida’s reading of Freud is in play, retrolexically, echoed but altered, when she declares on the second page of her text: Freud leads his investigation of the frightening thing which constitutes the nucleus of the Unheimliche in two different ways. We shall allow ourselves to be led along two reading paths, by and against Freud’s design, by what is certain and by what is hypothetical, between science and fiction, or between the ‘symbolised’ and the ‘symboliser’. We shall be guided by ambivalence and in conformity with the undecidable nature of all that touches the Unheimliche: life and fiction, life-as-fiction, the Oedipus myth, the castration complex and literary creation. (16)

Here already Cixous is reading Derrida, and Derrida Cixous. The longest and most celebrated footnote in ‘The Double Session’ on the subject of Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ appears at precisely the Cixousian point of the point with which we began, that is to say affirming the divisibility of the point. As Derrida writes in the main body of the text: ‘dissemination affirms the always already divided generation of meaning’ (268). And then the remarkable footnote in which he makes the jump, in a slide of rapid accumulations and additions (as if à la Cixous) pointing the way from dissemination to uncanniness: in ‘The Uncanny’, Derrida notes, Freud is ‘here more than ever attentive to undecidable ambivalence, to the play of the double, to the endless exchange between the fantastic and the real, the “symbolised” and the “symboliser”, to the process of interminable substitution.’ Derrida goes on to remark on the crucial place (or strange non-place) of literature in Freud’s essay: ‘It should not be forgotten that in “The Uncanny” (Das Unheimliche), after having borrowed all his material from literature, Freud strangely sets aside the case of literary fictions that include supplementary resources of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit).’ After citing some three or four moments in the essay where Freud specifically invokes literary fiction only to set it aside, Derrida then adds a parenthesis: ‘(To be continued)’ (268, n.67). But this is itself already a reference back to the parenthesis of an earlier footnote, in



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which he suggests that ‘The Double Session’ is, ‘in sum, proposing a rereading’ of Freud’s essay: ‘We find ourselves constantly being brought back to that text’, Derrida writes, ‘by the paradoxes of the double and of repetition, the blurring of the boundary lines between “imagination” and “reality”, between the “symbol” and the “thing it symbolises” … (to be continued)’ (220, n.32). ‘To be continued’ (à suivre): to follow or be followed, to pursue or be pursued­ – ­come, yes, follow this. The astonishing power of Derrida’s legacy is, perhaps, inscribed in these apparently simple words.11 If this ‘to be continued’ did not lead to the explicit fuller elaboration his footnotes appeared to promise, an extraordinary countersignature had already been engineered or, we might say, engenied.12 Cixous’s ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ remains the decisive text, I believe, for a reading of Derrida’s reading of Freud’s essay. It is also, I believe, one of the greatest short texts ever written on Freud. In its ghostly pursuit of Freud and Derrida, it articulates with relentless outofbreath beauty the peculiar passion of strangeness and familiarity, intimacy and foreignness, that is to be encountered everywhere in Cixous’s writing. ‘Closeness, without any familiarity’, as she says in ‘What is it o’clock?’ (81). A question of pursuit, then, and of escape, flight, getting away. The strangeness of escape is announced at the very start of ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’: ‘Let us propose here a bifurcated reading, between literature and psychoanalysis, with double attention paid to what is produced and what escapes in the unfolding of the text, sometimes led by Freud and at other times bypassing him’ (15). The word ‘escapes’ here is the translator’s way of dealing with ‘se dérobe’, what shies or slips or steals away, what conceals itself, but also with a playful eye on the ‘robe’ as gown or other clothing, on a strange undressing in ‘the unfolding of the text’. It is perhaps not by chance also that ‘robe’ is etymologically linked to ‘rob’: relating to plunder, ‘robe’ in French (as in English) originally meant ‘booty’. ‘We are faced with a text and its hesitating shadow, and their double escapade [un texte et son ombre hésitante, et leur double escapade]’ (14/13), Cixous writes. It is a matter of ‘the theatrical secret which the Freudian text brushes up against, mimics and still flees [encore fuit]’ (17/15). There is no escape from the uncanny, as it is, in a sense, nothing but what escapes: ‘Freud does not come out of the system of the Unheimliche’, she remarks, ‘because no one comes out of it’ (32). The only way, that of literature, fantasy and fiction, and therefore no way, immeasurably if imperceptibly away from a way, is to become your own double, for example to picture or theatricalise your own death, try to palm your death off on the reader: thus in the context of publishing in 1919, at the age of 63, a text

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in which he plays upon the deadly ominousness of the number 62, Cixous tells us, Freud has been ‘flee[ing] the announcement of his end [fuyant l’annonce de sa fin]’, having ‘foreseen … his own disappearance’ and become ‘in some way a ghost’ (31/30). The eeriness of escape comes back in the final paragraph of ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’: ‘If we experience uneasiness in reading Freud’s essay’, Cixous concludes, it is because the author is his double in a game that cannot be dissociated from the edge of his own text: he is there, he gets away [il s’en tire], at every turn of phrase. It is also and especially because the Unheimliche refers [renvoie] to no more profound secret than itself: every pursuit produces its own cancellation, every text dealing with death is a dead text which returns. (37/36)

This strange, spectral substantivised adjective, this quasi-concept of ‘the uncanny’ (das Unheimliche) which Freud in a sense invents (as Derrida and Cixous show, in their own singular and inventive ways) becomes, in Cixous’s reading, a kind of bottomless escape-clause, the flight-mode of itself: ‘the “uncanny” ’ refers, returns, sends back, ‘takes us back to no more profound secret than itself ’. If ‘uncanny’ is (in the formulation of Schelling to which Freud refers) ‘the name for everything that ought to have remained … secret and hidden but has come to light’,13 Derrida and Cixous elaborate on a disseminal thinking of the secret that would be foreign to the opposition of concealing/revealing, veil/nonveil. As Derrida says: ‘Dissemination affirms … endless substitution, it neither arrests nor controls play … [I]t is neither truth (adequation or unveiling) nor veil. It … can no longer be measured by the opposition veil/nonveil.’14 Illimitably rich minglings of ‘the secret’ in Derrida and Cixous­– ­treasuries of traces.15 ‘There is something secret’, says Derrida. ‘But it does not conceal itself.’16 Correspondingly, Cixous affirms that the word secret is itself ‘full of secrets’. There is, for example, ‘the secret about which I know nothing, so secret and secreted away that I have no trace of it, except maybe in the form of dreams’: this secret is, she suggests, ‘[the] gift which makes me who I am’. And then, too, ‘there is a secret that is something known and hidden, impossible to reveal because the revelation would bring about the destruction of the secret thing, and also of life’.17 Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’ is a crucial text for an understanding of the shared stress, everywhere in Derrida and Cixous, on strangeness and familiarity, the double, the point as always at least double and spectral, secret escaping. Double-writing, a perhaps familiar other name for deconstruction, would



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be a kind of portmanteau writing. Isn’t that, without point of conclusion, what Derrida’s and Cixous’s readings open up happening, the unforeseeable, duplicitous, bifid eventfulness of Freud’s essay despite its own apparent demonstrations that ‘every pursuit produces its own nullification’? ‘The final paragraph of “Fiction and Its Phantoms” ’, I said, but in the original French text there are in fact an additional couple of pages, specifically concerning translation. Uncanniness has always to do with translation, bearing betweenness and what cannot be borne, archaism of translatent escapade, feeling or experience losing itself in translation. In this passage, Cixous notes ‘the impossibility of “translating” the word Unheimliche into French’ (39). She provokingly links this also with the difficulty of imagining a French sense of humour (un ‘humour français’) (40/37)­– ­unless, I would like to propose, something like a new and disquietingly strange ‘French humour’ is indeed recognisable as one of the effects of how Derrida and Cixous read. It may be evident already that I have surreptitiously substituted the English word ‘uncanny’ in the course of the preceding pages, where Derrida and Cixous use the German (unheimlich, das Unheimliche). Likewise escape makes for a singular, recurring effect in English, less evident perhaps in the original French, where a range of different words are at work (se dérober, se tirer, fuir, échapper, escapade and so on). Plundered points, stolen, nicked. I conclude with some brief remarks about my title, ‘portmanteau’, apropos Lewis Carroll. With Cixous I will have been pursuing another language to partner Carroll’s or Humpty Dumpty’s ‘portmanteau’, a word that is itself thus of at least double authorship from the start (Dodgson/ Carroll and the fantastical theorist Humpty Dumpty himself), courting and caught in a wordweird web, seeing that virtually out of breath before I began everything is a matter of uncanny pursuit, portmanteau diviving, destinerring derivitality, a word as Humpty Dumpty says that is ‘like a portmanteau­– ­there are two meanings packed up into one word’, two senses or two sounds.18 What is a portmanteau? What is the point of a portmanteau? ‘Portmanteau’ is, of course, Carroll’s (and/or Humpty Dumpty’s) invention in this context, rather than (as current French might have it) a coat rack or hat stand (portemanteau) or indeed even (in the older sense in English) ‘a large travelling bag that folds back flat from the middle’ (Chambers Dictionary). As soon as one tries to unfold the ‘portmanteau’ there is no escaping its escape. When Derek Attridge seeks to describe what is distinctive about a portmanteau in what we might hesitantly call its traditional (Carrollian) sense, the figure of escape seems inescapably to impose. With the portmanteau, Attridge writes, ‘there is no escape from its

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insistence that meaning is an effect of language, not a presence within or behind language, and that the effect is unstable and uncontrollable’.19 I imagine dreamily watching, myself, by a quayside in Port Manteau, then taking off, into what Cixous, in ‘What is it o’clock?’, calls ‘the incalculable, deep, borderless, strangely marine instant’ (79). The portmanteau comes to designate the double logic of the ‘escaping text’ and what ‘escapes text’. As she proposes at the beginning of her essay on Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass and The Hunting of the Snark (published in French in 1971, in English in 1982), it is a question of ‘reading as one dreams’. One can only play, above all by ‘reading “as if” we didn’t know anything about preceding readings’, in order to ‘pursue what escapes between sense and nonsense and between nonsense and appearance’.20 ‘ “Vanishing” ’, she notes, in a cryptic aside, deploying the English noun-form of this word (‘le “Vanishing” ’), ‘is a favourite procedure of discreet suicide’ (239/22). How many cryptic asides are there to a portmanteau? Already I am embedding as much and as quickly as I can, in order to suggest that the question of the portmanteau is perhaps also that of the crypt. Cixous subjects the portmanteau to disquieting, even unbounded generalisation. The portmanteau will have turned (inside) out to be nowhere and everywhere. This is Alice’s situation. Cixous writes: in the same way as portmanteau words which are made up of embedded elements, [Alice] is subject to this outside of the inside of the outside, to this place where the language is situated between monologue, soliloquy, and dialogue, to this one in the other in the one, analogous to the portmanteau word: one cannot decide which of the words is the portmanteau. (239)21

All is Alice but Alice is not all. In this strange but necessary generalisation of the ‘portmanteau’, Cixous picks up on what seems to me one of the most remarkable and compelling characteristics of the Alice books, namely the strangeness of point of view, the fact (as always in Cixous’s work, and in her reading of Derrida) that ‘point of view’ is always also ‘no view’ (point de vue) and at the same time, by the same movement, always more than one point of view, already divided and more than double. Here we encounter the escape-artistry of literature as intrinsicately tied in its analytic force to the question of telepathy, of knowing what another is thinking or feeling or (in the case of the Red King) dreaming. Nowhere is the slipperiness of point of view in Carroll’s writing more striking, perhaps, than in that engenied effect by which quotation marks are made to surround speech and thought alike. For instance, in response to Tweedledum and



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Tweedledee’s claiming to know what the Red King is dreaming about, namely ‘about you!’: ‘ “I know they’re talking nonsense,” Alice thought to herself: “and it’s foolish to cry about it.” So she brushed away her tears, and went on, as cheerfully as she could [apparently no longer thinking to herself], “At any rate I’d better be getting out of the wood, for really it’s coming on very dark. Do you think it’s going to rain?” ’ (145–6). In the dream-time of deferred reading alone are we left to construe a given speech as thought, soliloquy or dialogue. But the slipperiness is there, even when we are told simply ‘he said’, ‘she said’. Cixous stresses, as ever, the importance, the importmanteaux of sound. It is necessary to go to the English text of Carroll, she says, in order that ‘the ear hears the beat or what makes the text beat’ (232), the mad beating of time, a question of reading such as one comes upon in the presence of the Hatter in the ‘mad tea-party’ in Alice in Wonderland, of a word or remark that ‘seemed to [Alice] to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English’ (56). The Hatter has a little earlier posed perhaps the most disturbing philosophical question of the nineteenth century, ‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’ (55), and has just been examining a ‘funny watch’ that ‘tells the day of the month, and doesn’t tell what o’clock it is’ (56). Alice ‘sigh[s] wearily’: ‘I think you might do something better with the time,’ she said, ‘than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers.’ ‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him.’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Alice. ‘Of course you don’t!’ the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. ‘I dare say you never even spoke to Time!’ ‘Perhaps not,’ Alice cautiously replied; ‘but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.’ ‘Ah! That accounts for it,’ said the Hatter. ‘He won’t stand beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d do almost anything you liked with the clock.’ (56)

Reading as one dreams, a portmanteau experience, lipping, slipping like speaking never ‘to time’, uncaney, the cane, the slipper, phantomatic flagellation, funny, even ‘sinister’ (as Cixous also says of Carroll’s writing), a mad hat stand, a mad hat-swapping head stand, head tossing sense, never simply from Alice’s point of view, nor from the Hatter’s, nor from the author’s, beating a retreat, out of time. What ‘escapes’, Cixous says, ‘between sense and nonsense and between nonsense and appearance’, what she finds in Carroll’s writing, is the experience of a

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question (‘Who reads? Who is there? Who dreams?’ [233]), a pursuit of sliding or skidding in which ‘the object of this pursuit is pursuit itself ’ (234). She suggests a link between reading Carroll and reading Derrida when she speaks, for example, of what happens ‘because of Lewis Carroll’s prophetic deconstruction [à cause du pressentiment déconstructeur de Lewis Carroll]’ (234/16). Carroll’s is a form of writing which doesn’t settle in one place any more than a bird or an operation, but skips, flutters, moves, ‘out of breath’, without trying to maintain sense or catch it, but moved by the curiosity­– ­in the etymological sense of the word­– ­which it feels about its own existence. (234)

‘Curiosity’ here seems to entail a sort of ‘anxiety to learn’, a version of Derrida’s spectral injunction ‘learn to live’,22 ‘curious’ deriving from the Latin cura, meaning ‘care’. Let us, then, be careful. Carroll’s is not a writing that ends up having gone nowhere, having said and done nothing. Something happens, declares Cixous: ‘Nobody wins, nobody keeps anything, but something happens and the text is produced: Carroll wasn’t an avant-garde theoretician but a scholar, worried by the fact that, in spite of himself, his knowledge was undermining institutions’ (234). It has to do with a spiral logic, not a static ‘curious’ but the disappearing effects of a ‘curiouser and curiouser’, with Cixous racing, as ever, like a rabbit, bird, cat, Cixous, towards this prophetic deconstruction, the secret that escapes. This is how she summarises Carroll’s text, proffering an alternative title: Alice Through the Looking-Glass Or The escape of a text. ‘Escape [Echapper] [Cixous goes on], from the popular French, from cappare, Latin: in its original meaning, to get out of the cape, leaving it in the hands of the pursuer’ (237/19). The ‘reader-pursuer’, however, never quite grasps, only ever ‘almost lays hands on the es-caped text’ (237). Portmanteau writing: the etymology of this word portmanteau, if it is a word, after all, does not conceal itself. It carries the carrying away of the cape or cloak, from porter, to carry; manteau, a cloak or cape. What is it o’clock? Vanishing point. I wanted to say more about the ‘cl’, the cl of the cloak and clock, as well as the candle (that Cixous so acutely pricks up her ears at in Through the Looking-Glass) and Carroll and Alice and Lacie (the



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anagram of Alice evoked in ‘A Mad Tea-Party’ [58]), and Claude in Derrida’s Glas and ‘Telepathy’. Too late­– ­I’m sorry. This is my last note, it’s suicidal­– ­to be or not to be. It has to do with ‘The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns’ (Hamlet, 3.1.85–6). It has to do with the impossibility of telling the time, of accounting for or counting on a countersignature. It is a question, in short, of the countersignature as suicidal portmanteau. Here is the passage. It comes from the end of an essay by Derrida on Jean Genet, by chance the first ‘posthumous text in English’ that I happened to read (but what is a posthumous text or indeed a posthumous reading, after Derrida, after Cixous? Out of breath: ‘I posthume as I breathe’23­– ­everything will have escaped in those five words): where there is an event, the performative must fail … the subject of a performative act by definition masters the event it produces, it is supposed to produce. Well, that very mastery neutralises the event it produces. Where there is mastery, there cannot be an event. Nothing happens. An event must happen or touch me unexpectedly, unanticipatably, that is, without horizon, with no horizon of waiting, like the other’s coming. When the other comes, there is no performative. The other’s coming outstrips any performative force or power. In this sense, the event, the other’s unexpected coming, never signs or countersigns. Thus the word countersignature can assume another meaning, neither that of authenticating confirmation, the performative ‘yes yes’ to a signature, mine or another’s; nor merely (or more) the dialectical opposition to the signature; but the very event that designates, countersigns in another sense the countersignature itself, that ‘suicides’ the signature, so to speak, carries it away, undoes it, exceeds it, effaces it, derides it. It is suicide itself … It must take place, if it takes place, unexpectedly, invisibly, secretly, wordlessly, without a patronymic or matronymic name…24

Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, ‘What is it o’clock?’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 78, translation slightly modified. The original French reads: ‘une intimité se lève et prend les deux personnages dans ses bras. Elle est toujours sous cape … cette scène. Une étrangeté sépare les deux de toute l’humanité. Quelque chose qui bat dans leur chair, un sang peut-être, agit comme un schibboleth silencieux.’ See ‘Quel heure est-il ou La porte (celle qu’on ne passé pas)’, in Le Passage des frontiers: Autour du travail de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 96. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text.   2 The present essay was originally written for a conference on ‘L’événement comme

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écriture: Cixous et Derrida se lisant’, at Aiguablava in June 2005. (The title of this conference is itself liable to generate a sort of readerly delirium: the event as writing, the event like writing: Cixous and Derrida reading one another and/or reading ­themselves…) The essay was published in French as ‘Mot-Valise’, trans. Thomas Godard, in L’événement comme écriture: Cixous et Derrida se lisant, ed. Marta Segarra (Paris: Campagne Première, 2007), 289–301.   3 Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 63. Further page references are given in parentheses in the main body of the text.   4 Jacques Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 239.   5 Jacques Derrida, ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own: Points of View Stitched on the Other Veil’, in Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2001), 37.   6 See, for example, Jacques Derrida, ‘Dialanguages’, in Points ... Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 137.   7 I am thinking here in particular of my ‘Nanotext’, Imprimatur: A Journal of Criticism & Theory, 2:1/2 (1996), 13–19.   8 In a French context, an attention to the importance of ‘uncanniness’ in Cixous is already evident, for example, in Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’, first published in Le Monde in 1972. See ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’, trans. Martin McQuillan, in Reading Cixous Writing, ed. Martin McQuillan, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2002), 205.   9 Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans. Robert Dennomé, New Literary History, 7:3 (1976), 525–48; published in a somewhat different form, revised by Eric Prenowitz, in Hélène Cixous, Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, ed. Eric Prenowitz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 14–40; first published in French as ‘La fiction et ses fantômes: Une lecture de l’Unheimliche de Freud’, in Prénoms de personne (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 13–38. Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Double Session’, in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), was first published in French in Tel Quel, 41/42 (1970). Further page references to the more recent version of Cixous’s essay (in Volleys of Humanity), to the original French version and to Dissemination are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 10 See ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’, 18 and 38 n.9. The Derrida footnote in question occurs in ‘The Double Session’, 248, n.52. Other footnote references to Freud’s essay occur on 220 and 268.



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11 At a conference at the University of Loughborough, in November 2001, I asked Derrida about this ‘to be continued’ and about the enigma of his not having published the supplementary text apparently promised. At the same time, I wondered, was it not also the case that he was always writing about the uncanny? He responded: ‘In a certain way, you’re right­– ­everything I have written since the footnote[s] on the uncanny that you mentioned could be inscribed under this title … in a certain way the only thing which interests me is the uncanny, which, as you know, is a translation, in this context, of das Unheimliche which in German means two opposite things, things which are in conflict: ‘the strangest’ and ‘the most familiar’. Freud starts with this apparent antinomy in the single word. But in the footnote that you mention I tried to show how Freud puts aside the question of literature; although all his examples come from literature, when he addresses the question of literature he avoids it in a certain way. So I tried to do exactly the opposite. You are right, therefore­– ­in an oblique way, everything I have written has to do with the uncanny, especially in relation to the question of spectrality, or ghosts.’ See ‘Following Theory: Jacques Derrida’, in life.after.theory, ed. Michael Payne and John Schad (London: Continuum, 2003), 33–4. 12 Derrida generates this portmanteau of ‘engineering’ and ‘genius’ when he speaks, in Spectres of Marx, of the masterpiece as ghost: ‘the masterpiece’, he says, is ‘a work of genius, a thing of the spirit which precisely seems to engineer itself [s’ingénier]’. See Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 18. 13 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 17: 224, 241. 14 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 86–7. 15 Derrida used the phrase ‘treasury of traces’ in conversation with Anne Berger, concerning what she refers to as ‘a desire to keep and an impossible keeping’: ‘The keeping is always confided to the other; one cannot keep oneself. When one writes one accumulates as much as possible a certain reserve, a treasury of traces, whatever they may be, whatever they’re worth; but for them to be more safely protected or guarded, one confides them to the other. If one writes them, if one puts them on tape or on paper, or simply in the memory of others, it’s because one cannot keep oneself.’ See Derrida, ‘Dialanguages’, 149. 16 Jacques Derrida, ‘Passions: “An Oblique Offering” ’, trans. David Wood, in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 21. 17 Hélène Cixous, ‘From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and

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Hélène Cixous’, trans. Ashley Thompson, in Hélène Cixous: When the Word is a Stage, ed. Eric Prenowitz, special issue of New Literary History, 37:1 (2006), 11. 18 For Humpty Dumpty’s use of the word ‘portmanteau’, see Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass in Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1992), 164. Further page references to Carroll are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 19 Derek Attridge, ‘Unpacking the Portmanteau, or Who’s Afraid of Finnegans Wake?’, in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 145. 20 Hélène Cixous, ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark’, trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History, 13:2 (1982), 231–51; here, 231. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, together (where appropriate) with quotations and page numbers from the original French text: ‘Introduction’, in Lewis Carroll, De l’autre côté du miroir et ce qu’Alice y trouva / La chasse au snark, trans. Henri Parisot (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1971). 21 Cf. Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s characterisation of ‘portmanteau coinages’ as ‘an instance of linguistic creativity, as they exploit potentialities allowed by the linguistic system’; but at the same time ‘they are also instances of otherness within language, being irregular linguistic monsters, which it is impossible to assimilate within the system’. See his Philosophy of Nonsense: The Intuitions of Victorian Nonsense Literature (London: Routledge, 1994), 48. 22 See, in particular, Derrida, Spectres of Marx, xvii–xviii. 23 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Circumfession’, in Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 26, and Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, 58–9. 24 Jacques Derrida, ‘Countersignature’, trans. Mairéad Hanrahan, Paragraph, 27:2 (2004), 7–42, special issue on Genet, ed. Mairéad Hanrahan; here, 39.

10

Cixous cuts: Lewis Carroll

" Cixous cuts also have to do with the desire for no cut. This is even what she

most aspires to, what she loves best: the experience of no-cut, the sense of a book ‘without transition’, a book that ‘begins inside, in the body’ and the desire that it might stay there.1 It is akin to the appeal of a dream­– ­not being transported to another world but rather: ‘you are already in the other world’.2 Following in the spirit of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty (inventor of the ‘portmanteau’), she proposes a neologism to encapsulate this special sense of being-inside: internity. When it comes to writing, she says, you can’t dilly-dally: Don’t waste time wiping your feet before entering. The first sentence takes off like an arrow and sticks in the heart of internity. It plants the earth of internity. Before it there was no earth. And already, right away, under its feet (the feet the hooves of the sentence) bursts forth the expanse of a land to discover.3

‘Internity’ is a portmanteau that combines ‘internal’ and ‘eternity’, and perhaps also serves to recall the original sense of ‘intern’ as ‘belonging to the mind or soul’, ‘of or situated on the inside’.4 It’s Cixous’s word but, as we will see, ‘internity’ is also an illuminating term for thinking about Lewis Carroll. Cixous cuts me. I don’t consider myself a more vulnerable reader than anyone else but, still, she cuts me up. In amazement and admiration, sometimes in bafflement.

"

" This is the implicit challenge made to any reader encountering Cixous’s

work: Draw! Where do you draw the lines? Where cut, why cut, how cut? Around what should you organise your response? How can one select, excise or extract without doing violence to the text under consideration? Every passage,

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every sentence, every word is linked with every other. It is mercurial writing that is peculiarly resistant to being neatly sliced up, separated, picked off. It is in this context that Jacques Derrida, trying to respond to the ‘flow’ of a Cixous text, speaks of all these ‘hackneyed, tired, and tiring words “passage”, “page”, or “sequence” ’ whereby we go about ‘cut[ting] out’ so-called ‘ “quotes” ’.5 It is also what Cixous finds in the writings of Clarice Lispector. For instance in The Stream of Life: Whenever I take an excerpt from The Stream of Life I always fail, I can’t manage to cut it­– ­it is always the page before instead of the page after that I would have liked to look at­– ­for the simple reason that The Stream of Life is a single stream, a single current. And each time I make the idiotic move of taking a knife to cut water.6

It’s like taking a knife to water. But still we must cut. How can we respond in an effective fashion to an author who has written dozens of books, hundreds of essays and many plays, who has also given dozens of interviews in which she says things that regularly arrest and provoke thinking just as much as her other writings? It can’t be done. We must cut and fail. A Cixous cut would seek to acknowledge the quickness and flux, the oceanic engulfment of her writing, while trying to take on board the slowness that a responsible, thoughtful reading of her work also calls for. It would not offer a critical exegesis or synthesis, even of a specific book or essay. Rather it would aspire to a kind of detailing (keeping a nose out for ‘detailing’ as literally a ‘cutting into pieces’) in response to something that might be very brief or tiny­– ­a single letter, syllable or word, or short passage in her writings. And it might even seek to do this (as I want to try to do in the next few pages) by attending to a word or figure in another writer (Lewis Carroll).

& I dream of providing some pedagogically useful short cut to reading Cixous

(a sort of fantasy, perhaps, of speed-teaching), but I know it’s impossible. Still, a ‘Cixous cut’ (like this one) can at least try to convey, in a selective and precise manner, the exhilarating and vertiginous experience of reading her. Vertigo: it’s about turning, whirling, veering. She’s endlessly generating moments that give you, like the governess in Henry James’s great ghost story, quite a turn­– i­ ndeed, all sorts of funny turns.7 Often, as I start to read a text by Cixous, I feel I have already stepped off the cliff and am after her words in the manner of a cartoon creature suspended, skedaddling in space, or falling, incapable of dying, hitting the ground running, forever trying to catch up



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& A Cixous cut inflicts a violence of its own. For a start, ‘cut’ is not a French

word. I write in English, in what is called, too easily or too hastily, ‘my language’. Cixous herself speaks an English that is not only fluent but richly literary. She has immersed her tongue in Shakespeare and Joyce as few non-English-speaking readers or writers have ever done. She can give interviews in English, she can speak books in English, without batting an eyelid. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, for example, despite the title-page specification of having been ‘translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers’, was in fact a series of improvised reflections in English, somewhat edited and revised after being delivered as the Wellek Library lectures at the University of Irvine, California, in May 1990. First and foremost she writes in French: her work is singular, resistant to translation or untranslatable ‘out of French’. But it can also cut across and into another language and change it. As dreamer, realist, analyst, writing, Hélène Cixous alters English. Her texts let us analyse and unleash differences. To invoke a conventional literary historical framework of modernism, we might say that she comes third in a line following Joyce and Beckett in English. Her writing provides inklips for a new English. But it’s a ‘black milk’, to recall her phrase for the reality of dreams.8 Black milk isn’t about order and chronology: it’s about timelessness and creative chaos. It’s what is at issue in Cixous’s evocation of a writing workshop­– ­not in the ‘creative writing class’ sense, but more the smithy of the soul she sees Joyce as finally getting back to in his writing: What was it that Joyce did if not find his way back to his own workshop in the end? He starts out from traditional literature, and then it takes him thirty years to get back to his own workshop and it’s there that he really breaks free, whereas he started out in chains. I want to see literature break freer still.9

The sense of what is ‘foreign’ and what is ‘one’s own’ is of course already cut, as people sometimes say of drugs: adulterated, mixed up, messed with. Like Freud, Cixous knows that ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’.10 Like Derrida, she knows that there is no language of ‘one’s own’: ‘Language is precisely what does not let itself be possessed … Language can be desired but not appropriated.’11 Cixous cuts French, she stakes, stokes, strokes, she interferes and intersects, tinkers and tampers, collapses, collages, disorganises, invents and reinvents French in practically every text she writes. Such cuts and alterations provoke corresponding movements within English. My concern here is to try to illuminate Cixous’s writing through English glasses­– t­ o elucidate how her work

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generates new ways of thinking about critical and creative writing, and about the nature of English in general.

& What’s important is not the line or lineage, the inevitably patriarchal (and

patricidal) thinking of literary inheritance and tradition. It is not a matter of looking at how Cixous follows Joyce or Beckett, for instance, any more than she follows Shakespeare or Kafka or Tsvetaeva or Lispector. Cixous snips the ‘anxiety of influence’. Certainly her work is made up from what she calls ‘the imprint of languages’, the forms of ‘sedimentation’ whereby ‘the linguistic inventions  of authors I’ve read … have left their mark on my language’; and a scholarly attention to such imprints, sedimentations and inventions is indispensable.12 But her writing is more about inhabiting a continent like the unconscious, mixing timelessness and magic, where hundreds of years can be condensed into an instant: Milton can come out with a phrase and three hundred years later Cixous replies to it.13 Her writing is about what she calls ‘literary nationality’.14 This literary nationality does not emerge from nowhere: it is the imaginary nationality she tells us she adopted in 1955, in response to all the deathly horrors of nationalism and colonialism (across Europe and into Algeria), all the vileness of anti-semitism and ‘the odour of misogyny’ she encountered in her early years.15 ‘Literary nationality’ is free to all. It has no borders. It breaks with all forms of nationalism while also reminding us that the word ‘nation’ comes from the Latin nāscī, to be born. ‘Literary nationality’ is about being born and giving birth. It affirms literary birth, writing and creation. The allegedly dead come back, in the black milk of dreams­– ­and in writing. Literature, for Cixous, is the as yet hardly discovered country in which Shakespeare, Lispector and others are all still alive and speaking.

& By way of exploring some of these ideas, let us try to sharpen the focus and

look in more detail at a single word (if it is one), the vocable ‘cut’ in English or, to be more precise, in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.16 ‘Precise’: from the Latin prae, ‘around’, caedere, ‘to cut’. As I hope to suggest, Lewis Carroll is a crucial writer for understanding Cixous’s work, at the same time as her writing allows us a new understanding of the vitality and importance of Carroll for ‘the history of literature in English’. Cixous talks about the cut here and there, in her ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and The Hunting of the Snark’ (1971), for example, and again at the end of her essay on ‘The Character of “Character” ’



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(1974).17 As we noted in the previous chapter, she sees Carroll as a ‘prophetic deconstructor’.18 The Alice books are great deconstructive works that pose the most pleasurable but also intimidating creative and philosophical challenge: where and how to cut? Perhaps more than any other English writer before Joyce, Carroll prefigures Cixous in writing by dream­– ­giving us a work or double-work that­– ­in all its shifts and veerings, in all its condensations and displacements­– ­might seem as seamless as a dream. For the Carrollian concern with the cut goes along with an interest in the non-cut: it’s where we can see what Lewis Carroll and Hélène Cixous share. And thus also where they cut off from one another.

& There seems to be a great deal of cutting, and a great deal made of cutting, in

Carroll’s work­– ­from the image of what it would be like ‘if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife’ (11) to the Hatter’s off-the-top-of-his-head but menacing first remark to Alice, ‘Your hair wants cutting’ (55); from the Carpenter’s repeated request ‘Cut us another slice [of bread]’ (143) to the business of cutting up ‘Looking-glass cakes’ (177). Above all­– l­iterally, headfirst­– t­here is decapitation: a demand that echoes and reverberates throughout the Alice books. As Cixous observes, decapitation is a figure of ‘the threat of castration’ (243). This is the logic that Freud sketches in a short text written in 1922, ‘Medusa’s Head’: ‘To decapitate = to castrate.’19 There is much that seems threatened and threatening in the Alice books, and yet­– ­we have seems without seams. For on another level, taking a different slice at the matter, it is all a dream-cutting, as harmless and more or less imperceptible as the ‘c-u-t’ in ‘execute’ or ‘executioner’. As Cixous observes, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (like the later book) is a ‘skidding’ work (233). It is, she says, ‘a text which just brushes, therefore a text which never stops’ (234). And its speed is of a cutting that cuts up speed itself, a speeding inside words and all over them before they have come to the page. Thus the Queen exclaims ‘Off with his head!’ with regard to the Cheshire-Cat, whose regard is already decapitated, a mere head, ahead of itself: ‘The executioner’s argument was, that you couldn’t cut off a head unless there was a body to cut it off from: that he had never had to do such a thing before, and he wasn’t going to begin at his time of life’ (68). It’s a double-headed comedy that acts out something of the two-timing of the Rembrandt sketch that we discussed in the Introduction, apropos Cixous’s ‘Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off ’.20 Carroll’s text affirms the impossibility of cutting off the head at the same time as it wants us to give credence and even sympathy to an executioner who is weary and unwilling ‘at his time of life’ to

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attempt this impossibility. Or again with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, when they are preparing to fight one another and the latter demands to have a bolster around his neck ‘to keep his head from being cut off ’: ‘You know,’ he added very gravely [to Alice], ‘it’s one of the most serious things that can possibly happen to one in a battle­– ­to get one’s head cut off.’ Alice laughed loud: but she managed to turn it into a cough, for fear of hurting his feelings. (147)

Alice has to laugh, and so does the reader. The laughter’s to do with uncertainty of distribution, the weight and wait, the speed of life, language and syntax racing together: it doesn’t matter that the grave wit (‘he added very gravely’) wouldn’t be audible to Alice, or that she couldn’t be expected to analyse and draw amusement from Tweedledee’s turn of phrase (decapitation is described as ‘one of the most serious things that can possibly happen’, as if there were others even more serious). Laughter at decapitation is always a bit ‘beside oneself ’. She ‘laughed loud’. You might have expected ‘laughed aloud’. The syncopation­– ­from ‘aloud’ to ‘loud’­– i­ s not allowed. It’s part of the text’s dodging, carrolling, auditory imaginary. Like the ‘n’, perhaps, in ‘cut’. ‘Loud’ is not really allowed either­– ­it’s no sooner out than turning into a cough. A laugh cut off, ‘cut off ’ become ‘cough’. Here syncopation’s cut has the sharpness and pleasure of the missing comma that Elizabeth Bowen evokes in Eva Trout (1968): ‘ “Charles the First walked and talked half an hour after his head was cut off.” You put in a comma somewhere, then that made sense but was not so interesting.’21 It’s a thrilling thought, to have one’s head cut off. It’s terrible, crazy, the promise and threat, the joy and dispossession of writing.

& Is it not what any serious writer aspires to be, headless?22 & The gentleness of not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings (the importance,

in this case, of taking seriously Tweedledee’s fear of getting his head cut off) is part and portmanteau parcel of the suppression of death in Lewis Carroll’s writing. No creature­– ­human or other mammal, no reptile, fish, insect, plant, or morph of one or more and others­– ­really dies: even the oysters that are eaten up in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’ are the inhabitants of a poem and can be brought back at a moment’s notice in poetic recitation or resurrection. Carroll cuts ‘death’. The word appears just once in Alice in Wonderland­ – ­and then only in very small print. It comes as the humorous sting in the tale of the mouse,



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as something empty-sounding, futural and in any case evidently unnoticed by Alice herself (25). The word does not appear in Through the Looking-Glass at all. Fittingly perhaps, the most persistent resonance of death comes in ‘dead silence’, a phrase that occurs three times in each of the books.

& Carroll’s ‘cut’: at once mortal and immortal. No one should be cut, especially

not someone you know. As the Red Queen remarks: ‘ “it isn’t etiquette to cut anyone you’ve been introduced to.” ’ The Queen says this because Alice is about to cut a leg of mutton, and the mutton has already ‘made a little bow to [her]; and Alice returned the bow’ (200). But everything is about to cut out, cut up, cut off. Through the Looking-Glass ends in the dream-ending sexual and erotic swappings and changings and crossings of this cutting room floor, with ‘a large plum-pudding’ (200) replacing the mutton and being introduced but getting cut anyway, with Alice’s ‘gasp’ and ‘dead silence’ as the pudding proposes cutting her in turn: ‘ “What impertinence!” said the Pudding’, tacitly alerting us to the ‘c-u-t’ in every creature: ‘ “I wonder how you’d like it, if I were to cut a slice out of you, you creature!” ’ (201). It ends or it tends, it dream ends or dream mends, it tenders an ending with ‘all the guests … drinking … very queerly’ (202), with Alice rising ‘several inches’ and having to hold on to the edge of the table and ‘pull herself down’, with the oneiric prescience of the screamed declaration that ‘ “Something’s going to happen!” ’, with phallic ‘candles all [growing] up to the ceiling’ ‘like a bed of rushes with fireworks at the top’, with bottles using plates as wings ‘fluttering about’ in the air ‘like birds’ (203), with the leg of mutton issuing ‘a hoarse laugh’, ‘sitting in the chair’ in place of the White Queen (204), with the soup ladle ‘walking up the table … beckoning … impatiently’, and Alice pulling the tablecloth with both hands till everything comes ‘crashing down … on the floor’, shaking the Red Queen now ‘the size of a little doll’ (204) into the cut of a last-gasp chapter (‘Shaking’)­– ­something ‘shorter—and fatter—and softer—and rounder—and—[cut mid-sentence to the final less-than-a-sentence-in-length chapter ‘Waking’]—it really was a kitten, after all’ (205–6).

& Carroll’s cut: the Alice books do something new in English fiction with this

seemingly seamless seme. These texts embody the literary in Cixous’s sense of a country or continent akin to dream, a place where death can be dethroned, where anything and everything might be affirmed (as Freud says, ‘we never discover a “no” in the unconscious’), and any word or bit of a word or phrase might get up to unexpected dreamlike activities, like turning in one’s sleep, in one’s leap

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given a new life and purpose, verbal gnomes incessantly metamorphosing or resurrected.23 But the Alice books also mark something else. ‘Cut’ comes to figure, finally, the uncanny deconstruction that Carroll enacts on literary narrative itself. It’s just a brief moment in the text, but as Cixous’s own fictions encourage us to see, the briefest moment, the merest phrase or fleetest vocable can fall upon us as a narratoid exploding and fissuring across the entire work, come from the beyond. It comes in ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (Chapter VII of Through the Looking-Glass), when the Lion is growling about the time it is taking Alice (or ‘the Monster’ as he calls her) to cut up a plum-cake. Alice had seated herself on the bank of a little brook, with the great dish on her knees, and was sawing away diligently with the knife. ‘It’s very provoking!’ she said, in reply to the Lion (she was getting quite used to being called ‘the Monster’). ‘I’ve cut several slices already, but they always join on again!’ ‘You don’t know how to manage Looking-glass cakes,’ the Unicorn remarked. ‘Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards.’ This sounded nonsense, but Alice very obediently got up, and carried the dish round, and the cake divided itself into three pieces as she did so. ‘Now cut it up,’ said the Lion, as she returned to her place with the empty dish. (177)

This is the moment that ‘reverberates so strongly’, as Cixous puts it in her essay on ‘The Character of “Character” ’: ‘effects precede their causes: first the piece of cake is eaten, then it is cut’.24 There is something ghostly about the cut: it is not clear when or how it happens (‘ “Now cut it up,” said the Lion, as she returned to her place with the empty dish’). But the logic announced is nonetheless devastating.

& On the one hand, Cixous shares with Lewis Carroll a fascination for not-­ cutting: the dreamlike character of their texts attests to this. Cuts don’t really exist. Death can be undone. Resurrection is the cut uncut. Literature never ends. The text wants to run on, fly free, while also staying (in accordance with the logic of internity) ‘inside, in the body’. On the other hand, she shares with him also a love and passion for the cutability of words, the capacity words have for cutting, as well as for being cut up and rearranged (the recurrence of particular syllables or bits of words, the anagram, the portmanteau).

& And then there is a magical third hand. The third hand is what they share

in terms of the cut and the form of writing. It has to do with what the White Queen refers to as ‘living backwards’. Alice is initially stunned by this phrase: ‘ “Living backwards!” Alice repeated in great astonishment. “I never heard of



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such a thing!” ’ It is perhaps the first time in the history of English literature that such a formulation occurs. The ‘great advantage’ of this phenomenon, as the White Queen goes on to say, is ‘that one’s memory works both ways’ (150). Of course it’s nonsense, in that we know (or think that we know) that time is not reversible. Still the phrase ‘living backwards’ does aptly describe something that a writer has to do when composing a novel or other work of narrative fiction. For all the temporal cutting and skipping and veering about that characterises the world of fiction, there is always the implicit presence of an author who has had the opportunity to review and rework the form of the writing from the point of view of having a memory that works both ways. The Alice books are, I would suggest, the first in history explicitly to invite the reader (as well as characters) to have a share in this strange transaction, to get a cut of this weird cake. The reverberations of ‘living backwards’ open up a vertiginous perspective on the Alice books: ‘it always makes one a little giddy at first’ (150), as the Queen puts it in a nice understatement. ‘Living backwards’ establishes new ways of thinking about the nature of the novel as a genre: it is the curious condition of literary narrative. Every work of fiction, in being ‘closed’ on itself, requires its author to have witnessed a ‘living backwards’ in order for it to be both ‘story’ and ‘discourse’.

& ‘Hand it round first, and cut it afterwards’ encapsulates this temporal reversal.

This reconstrual of cause and effect in the figure of the Carrollian ‘cut’ resonates in particularly suggestive ways for an understanding of trauma-writing. Writing about trauma involves a memory that works both ways: the trauma (or cut) has happened and is being recounted, while the writer also knows that the trauma is a thing in writing, to be put in words, still ahead. As Cixous notes, ‘writing for a long time about a disturbing experience is a disturbing experience for the person one is in “real life” ’; the writer is engaged with a ‘coming back’ in progress.25 The experience of reading Cixous’s fiction is an experience of being in this whirligig. She observes: ‘writing is a sort of turning back time, telling us that time can be disoriented, that it can go both ways’.26 Cixous Gâteau makes us giddy, but each piece is also peace. This is what she has called the ‘soothing effect’ of ‘giving form to chaos’: the steadying, tranquillising power of writing as living backwards.27

& Now, please, hand it round.

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Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 79, 82.  2 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 79.   3 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 146.  4 OED, ‘intern’, adj. A1 and 2.  5 Jacques Derrida, H.C for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 39.  6 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 133.   7 On James’s turns in The Turn of the Screw, see Nicholas Royle, ‘The Literary Turn’, in Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 105–7; on the funny-strange and ‘French humour’, see the note on ‘Translating the Unheimliche’ at the end of Cixous’s ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans. Robert Denommé, rev. Eric Prenowitz, in Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, ed. Eric Prenowitz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 39–40.  8 Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 134.   9 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, interview with Christa Stevens, trans. Suzanne Dow, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 9. 10 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 17: 221. 11 Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 101. 12 Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, 13. 13 Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, 13. 14 Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 204. 15 Cixous and Calle-Gruber, Rootprints, 204. 16 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1992). Further page references to the two ‘Alice’ books are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 17 Hélène Cixous, ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and



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The Hunting of the Snark’, trans. Marie Maclean, New Literary History, 13:2 (1982), 231–51; ‘The Character of “Character”‘, trans. Keith Cohen, in Volleys of Humanity, 41–60. 18 Cixous, ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’, 234. 19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 18: 273. 20 Hélène Cixous, ‘Without end, no, State of drawingness, no, rather: The Executioner’s taking off ’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 20–31. 21 Elizabeth Bowen, Eva Trout (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 193. Cf. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel: Still Lives (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 169–70. Bowen is another marvellously inventive writer whose work has profound affinities with Lewis Carroll. 22 Cf. Nicholas Royle, ‘On the Run’, Derrida Today, 10.2 (2017), 125–41, in which I discuss Derrida, decapitation and the ‘time of writing’, especially apropos his ‘ “Dead Man Running”: Salut, Salut’, in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 267–8. 23 Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 19: 239. 24 Cixous, ‘The Character of “Character” ’, 59. See also Cixous’s remark in her ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’: ‘The effect thus becomes the cause of the cause, the pain makes necessary the cut, the cake is only “cutable” once it is eaten’ (238). As the English translator points out, ‘cutable’ in the original French is coupable, which perhaps first of all (in the mode of a Cixousian hysteron proteron) means ‘guilty’. 25 Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 40. The JoyceanBeckettian ‘in progress’ appears in English in the original French text: see Rencontre terrestre: Arcachon, Roosevelt Island, Paris Montsouris, Manhattan, Cuernavaca (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 44. 26 Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 55. 27 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 122.

11

To awake, Shakespeare of the Night

To awake, Shakespeare of the Night you shake off the night, no, you night without shaking off anything unless the name, for which you search, or the name that is searching for you, you remain in that state I hesitate to call hypnopompic, first because that doesn’t seem especially consonant with how their psychoanalysis works or psychoanalysis works there, not consonant because in truth they don’t mess about, they’re off, already away as if with the fairies or with fairy, like being with child, their fairies there be, with everything that links fairy to enchantment and enchancement, fate and (in Freud’s phrase) ‘a kind of magic’, perhaps, and above all the fairy or demon of literary fiction.1 As Derrida comments, with respect to the fort-da movement of Beyond the Pleasure Principle: ‘ “literary fiction” … already watches over, like a fairy or demon [comme une fée ou un demon], the structure of the fort:da, its scene of writing or of inheritance in dissemination’.2 It watches over everything, it watches, it wakes, to awake: fairyground analysis. They’re not interested in resting inter or transitioning, in the middle or the process of negotiating what a beginning should be, you do it wherever you happen to be, in a text of course, where you believe yourself to be.3 And I hesitate also because of the trouble I have keeping in my head, at the best of times, which is the hypnopompic and which the hypnagogic, or rather from what place or perspective one would or should have been able to declare in advance that it was one or the other. The hypnopompic is allegedly about dispelling sleep, sending it away, while the hypnagogic is sleep-bringing, ushering it in. One is the drowsiness preceding, the other the drowsiness following, but they’re both about it, about abutting at bottom and who knows, to pool and loop your resources, if you just listen well, sending To awake, Shakespeare of the Night that time meaning just now, it is still. There is a small frog on your thigh and your legs reach down at least thirty feet in



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the bed and the frog is very beautiful, you want to cup it in your hands but you’re apprehensive about how graceless you are at this point of the morning or night and fear you might harm it in some way. And you know, too, you are already awake enough to know you mustn’t move, no turning no twisting no shaking, or at any rate as little as possible, if you want to keep the night, if you want to keep believing what’s happening. Even as you write the frog starts to speak, it’s in an Emily Dickinson voice and it’s singing, I’m nobody, who are you? And there is one of the sticky difficulties, as it sings to an admiring bog, this livelong June, I sing to myself, I sink, no quotation marks in sleep, how to awake, how to write and be faithful to the absence of quotation marks in sleep? Are you­– ­nobody too?4 To awake, Shakespeare of the Night: in that conversation with the donkey called ‘Writing Blind’ Cixous says she nights, she says: ‘There is no more genre. I become a thing with pricked-up ears. Night becomes a verb. I night. I write at night. I write: the Night.’5 Derrida doesn’t night like this, and yet his writings on Shakespeare are strikingly concerned with what might be called a night Shakespeare, with the night in which Romeo and Juliet speak and exchange vows, the theatre of the night and the night of the name as he calls it, and with the night in which the Ghost appears in Hamlet, in the book (Spectres of Marx) which he indeed calls his ‘essay in the night’.6 To awake, Shakespeare of the Night: I tell you, at bottom, this is what woke me or what I awoke to, in some hypnopompicnicking night that was calling me to provide a title, a heading, a sort of asinine heading for To awake, Shakespeare of the Night: I’ll stop saying it in a moment. But this is what I woke to, weeks ago now, it’s not so much like a gift as a find on loan, something alien in the garden, volcanic, meteoric, fallen or drifted in from ‘altogether elsewhere’ (in Auden’s phrase), a deposit, is it alive, is it good, should I eat it or, as Cleopatra says, will it eat me?7 Of course it is not mine, it’s theirs. It’s their psychoanalysis, their there, altogether elsewhere, in two phrases, a bit mysteriously separated and conjoined in a comma, call that my girlfriend in a comma, my ostrich, my donkey, my llama, here one second split the next. I woke up or thought I must have woken up and I don’t move: stillness reigns. I don’t know if it is day or night. It is as if I am suspended in a sort of web, twaining or twining. It’s like that little exchange, that twosome beloved of Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, especially in the mammoth section at the beginning, the hypnagogic dozens and dozens of pages of the First Chapter, entitled ‘The Scientific Literature Dealing with the Problems of Dreams’, concerned with establishing that there

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isn’t really any such ‘literature’, at least not truly ‘scientific’ or ‘scientific’ in his sense.8 But this is the nature of his written auto-analysis, at once so solemn and fantastic, you cannot take that egotism seriously, it just doesn’t hold together, and that is what everything comes to, in their psychoanalyses, in psychoanalysis there, according to me, self-analysis as a kind of auto-hetero-didactics that reckons with the question of literature and dream, dreaming literature, and with the consequences for responsibility, for ethics and politics, given the introduction of what Derrida calls ‘the idea of a divided, differentiated “subject”, who cannot be reduced to a conscious, egological intentionality’.9 It’s a matter of a kind of ‘thinking analysis’ (to recall Derrida’s phrase for Cixous’s writing) that takes analysis somewhere entirely elsewhere while preserving its revolutionary power, its irrefutable reasoning which also is, or always might be, its madness or magical strangeness.10 In the midst of his cascading pages on ‘The Scientific Literature Dealing with the Problems of Dreams’, so soporific but also of course with such lucid or bright intervals, Freud has a paragraph in which he cites Strümpell in 1877 describing how contrastingly different are ‘dream-compositions’ from the orderliness of the mind awake, how easily dreams are forgotten. You awake and your dreams are blown away: ‘dream-structures are, as it were, lifted above the floor of our mental life and float in psychical space like clouds in the sky, scattered by the first breath of wind’ (45). Freud evidently admires this description, but he cannot resist adding another, his own poetically nuanced transposition. This is his style of twosome, his two-step, his ‘two awake’. Thus he ends the paragraph with a beautiful sort of paraph, an arresting flourish of his own: ‘Dreams give way before the impressions of a new day just as the brilliance of the stars yields to the light of the sun’ (45). Both metaphorically reaching for the sky, Strümpell describes in one way what it is to awake, Freud in another. A Freudian twosome. Two awake. You cannot die at the same time as the other, but you can at least believe or make believe you wake up, two awake, togetherwake. For Cixous and Derrida, of course, it’s never only two, one plus one always equals at least three, that’s the abc of their psychoanalyses, and it’s also where the question of telepathy begins.11 ‘We must be several in order to write, and even to “perceive” ’, as he remarks in ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’.12 Suspended, I was saying, in these words that have enswirled ensnared ensworn me in the night: to awake Shakespeare of the Night, and already the comma is away, I’m not sure whether it is any longer at the end of ‘to awake’ or, now perhaps, after ‘Shakespeare’, like a tadpole, the comma pulses away, cuts away



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in the wake of awake, a baby watersnake. This is what remains, these six words that won’t stay still for a moment but wriggle and shake, each already several, irreducibly multiple, not themselves, bottomlessly. Not mine, as I was also trying to emphasise, but words or phrases (‘to awake’, ‘Shakespeare of the Night’) that I identify with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, with their psychoanalyses, their revolutionary transformations of psychoanalytic thinking, above all starting with how we read Freud. The phrase ‘Shakespeare of the Night’ [le Shakespeare de la nuit] is hers: it appears early on in the author’s note, the ‘Forewarnings’ at the beginning of Dream I Tell You.13 ‘Dream I tell you’: this isn’t the sort of thing you tell your analyst, if you have one, or the sort of thing you’d expect your analyst to tell you. Derrida and Cixous are not analysed. Recall his response to the question, at the end of Derrida the movie: ‘Have you ever been in psychoanalysis yourself?’ ‘No.’ ‘Would you ever consider it?’ ‘No. I absolutely exclude this.’14 But then, what is an analyst, after Derrida? As he said in an interview in March 2000: ‘I, too, deal with people who are suffering, and I think sometimes that I am more of an analyst than those who are paid to be one.’15 I’d be tempted to say that what goes for him here also goes for her. Derrida and Cixous: they’re so far from psychoanalysis, they undo distance, I tell you it’s like telepathy, telepathy as they each in their singular and extraordinary fashions evoke and open psychoanalysis to being thought otherwise, to awake a new thinking of telepathy in the wake of Freud. In her ‘Forewarnings’ Cixous refers to the way that, in waking, a whole night can be reread and experienced anew thanks to ‘the tapestry of signifiers’: ‘A whole night with Handel,’ she says, ‘and I never suspect that the majestic accents are those of the haine d’elle, the hate of her!’ (2/12–13, trans. slightly modified). Who is the king of awaking, if not the king away, beyond sovereignty? She alerts us here, as always, to the sounds, to other voices or other musics in the voice, unforeseen ‘majestic accents’, at least as much as to the visual, to the optical allure of the tapestry. And then there is the dense and beautiful sentence we talked about a bit earlier, in ‘Advertisement’, now returning, to be read afresh: I admire the unprecedented power [la puissance inouïe] of Freud, first and last cartographer of these strange continents, the Shakespeare of the Night: he saw the movements and cosmonautic calculations of the whole genesis and anthropozoology of this world, its wiles and passions, subterfuges and stratagems, intrigues and plots, games of genre and species. (2–3/13, trans. slightly modified)

To awake, shaking waking: the shortest chapters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 10 (‘Shaking’) and Chapter 11 (‘Waking’), that we

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were recalling just a few pages ago, between which the Red Queen is transformed by Alice’s shaking into a kitten, dissolve into the concluding chapter, with its simple yet bizarre question: ‘Which dreamed it?’16 This shaking and waking, wake and shake, I’m still trying to make it out, as if there were some theory of rhyme as yet unheard of, in the theory of dreams and in the name of dreams, from Shakespeare to Lewis Carroll and beyond. Of course it’s a rhyme that Shakespeare loves, or a rhyme that loves Shakespeare, for instance in Macbeth when Macduff is proclaiming the murder of the King, ‘Awake, awake’, he cries, ‘Malcolm awake, / Shake off this downy sleep, death’s counterfeit, / And look on death itself ’ (2.3.71, 73–5), or in the magical song of Ariel in The Tempest that leads to the waking and shaking of Gonzalo and Alonso: ‘If of life you keep a care, / Shake off slumber and beware. / Awake, awake’ (2.1.313–15). I have been wondering for what seems like years now, donkeys’ years: what is going on in this marvellous phrase ‘Shakespeare of the Night’? I feel as if I have known it all my life and yet it is still so unfamiliar. What is there to shake and awake, awake and shake out of it? In what tone, with what ear hear? Return of the Freudian twosome. The figure of ‘two awake’, of whether there really is anyone besides Freud awake to the true nature and therefore the theory of dreams, in the opening chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams, in those dozing dozens of pages about what everyone else in the history of the world has said about dreams and waking, eventually leads to the hilarious declaration, in a postscript added in 1909, that there is after all to be found (and this was Freud’s ‘chance discovery’) ‘a view of dreams which coincides entirely with the core of my own theory’: just one. First published in 1899, it cannot ‘have been influenced by my book’, Freud concedes, but likewise, we are to understand, it cannot have influenced the writing of The Interpretation. ‘I must therefore hail it’, declares Freud, ‘as the single discoverable instance in the literature of the subject of an independent thinker who is in agreement with the essence of my theory of dreams’ (94–5). Perhaps not insignificantly, the work of this other ‘independent thinker’ is a story, entitled ‘Dreaming like Waking’ (‘Traümen wie Wachen’). In acknowledging this work, from a book called Phantasies of a Realist (Phantasien eines Realisten) by ‘Lynkeus’ (Joseph Popper-Lynkeus), Freud thus registers the power of the fairy or the demon of literary fiction (or more precisely the ‘imaginative sketch’ as fictional dialogue, for this is the form of ‘Dreaming like Waking’) but, at the same time, not without a certain force of disavowal.17 As is clear from a later text, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, written in 1932 in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of his death, Freud merely



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concurs with ‘Dreaming like Waking’ insofar as it corroborates the notion of dream-distortion.18 Really, Popper-Lynkeus is saying the exact opposite of what Freud is saying. His story is about a character for whom dreams are like waking, a man whose dreams are not nonsense. ‘His dreams might be fantastic, like fairy tales,’ as Freud comments, ‘but they were not enough out of harmony with the waking world for it to be possible to say definitely that “they were impossible or absurd”.’19 Freud does not concern himself (as Cixous and Derrida might encourage us to do) with the literary force or dimensions of Popper-Lynkeus’s text, especially where it refers, in a fiction, to other fiction, in order to illuminate thinking about the nature of the real or ‘waking life’. As the fictional speaker of ‘Dreaming like Waking’ says: ‘Only think of fairy tales and of the many daring products of the imagination, which are full of meaning and of which only a man without intelligence could say: “This is nonsense, for it’s impossible.” ’20 ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’ goes on to quote another passage in which the fictional speaker declares: ‘Order and harmony reign both in my thoughts and in my feelings, nor do the two struggle with one another … I am one and undivided. Other people are divided and their two parts­– ­waking and dreaming­ – ­are almost perpetually at war with each other.’21 As Freud then stresses, there is no such man: ‘Science informs us that such a man, wholly without evil and falseness and devoid of all repressions, does not exist.’22 On the contrary, the mind ‘is no peacefully self-contained unity’; dreams are ‘the normal psychoses of human beings’.23 Freud’s contact (Berührung) with Popper-Lynkeus is of a textual or virtual kind: although they were both living in Vienna, they never met. Freud’s ‘innovations in psychology’, as he himself phrases it, ‘had estranged [him] from [his] contemporaries’. Despite ‘a special feeling of sympathy’ for Popper-Lynkeus on account of his ideals as ‘a kindly humanitarian’, a ‘simple-minded, great man’, as well as the shared ‘painful experience of the bitterness of the life of a Jew’, Freud says that he ‘put off calling upon him till it was too late and I could only salute his bust in the gardens in front of our Rathaus’.24 At the same time, he doesn’t and never could share Popper-Lynkeus’s views of what he refers to as ‘the processes of Nature [or] the aims of human society’.25 There is a note here of the pitilessness that Derrida finds so important in Freud. While Freud moves perhaps too hastily in and out of the question of literature, here specifically as regards what we might call ‘dreaming like waking in literature’, we can perhaps detect in this spectral salute to Popper-Lynkeus the trace of something absolutely crucial to Derrida concerning what he calls the ‘psychoanalytic revolution’, namely that

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this revolution is the only one ‘not to rest, not to seek refuge, in principle, in what I call a theological or humanist alibi.’26 ‘Shakespeare of the Night’: in Cixous’s extraordinary locution, ‘Freud’ appears to vanish, he and his name go into the dark. It is all about the name and time and being forgotten or wiped away, but also about the name as revenant, coming back in other words, in other names, and about the name as never purely proper, never one’s own, always in some sense the name of a stranger or ghost. This is what Derrida makes clear in ‘To Speculate­– ­On “Freud” ’, where Freud is described as ‘the great speculator’ who ‘declares himself ready to pay for science with his own, proper name’ (332). On 12 January 1920 Freud writes a letter to Ernest Jones on the subject of an essay by Havelock Ellis entitled ‘Psychoanalysis in Relation to Sex’, an essay which Freud describes as ‘the most refined and amiable form of resistance, calling me a great artist in order to injure the validity of our scientific claims’.27 Freud adds: ‘This is all wrong. I am sure in a few decades my name will be wiped away and our results will last.’ Jones, who cites this letter in the three-volume Life and Work, says Freud says ‘our results’. In his own account of this in ‘To Speculate’, Derrida says Freud says ‘our discoveries [nos découvertes]’ (332/353). Derrida’s version, then, however minimally, is already shifting Freud’s language away from the more earnestly scientific (‘our results will last’: so Ernest) towards something more dramatic, performative and strange (‘our discoveries will last’). Derrida’s reading eerily brings out the strangeness of the notion of Freud’s ‘science’: The classical institution of a science should have been able to do without the Freuds’ name [Sigmund, Ernst with his fort/da bobbin, et al.]. Or at least should have made of its forgetting the condition and proof of its transmission, its proper inheritance. This is what Freud believed or affected to believe, half believed, as in the classical model of science, the model which he at bottom [au fond] will have never renounced playing at for psychoanalysis. (332/352–3)

At bottom, without bottom. This playing, as Derrida goes on to suggest, is on Freud’s part ‘a calculation without foundation’, without bottom [sans fond] (332/353). For what is at stake in psychoanalysis is ‘a science which for once is essentially inseparable, as a science, from something like a proper name’ (332). Freud’s letter to Jones, rejecting the notion of being an artist or creative writer, was written just a fortnight before the death of his daughter Sophie, little Ernst’s mother. Fortnight: I write that without thinking. But what a word! It is a verbal collision at least a thousand years old, originally ‘fourteen nights’, for centuries



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now concertina’d into ‘fortnight’. It’s the time, the ghostly time of revels (and a long dreamy disquisition might be elaborated here on the relation between dreaming and rebellion, starting perhaps from the curious but fortuitous links, without etymological basis, between revery and revelry), as announced by Theseus at the end (which of course is not the end, for the fortnight remains to come) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Sweet friends, to bed. / A fortnight hold we this solemnity / In nightly revels and new jollity.’28 The fortnight of a midsummer night’s dream: such a strange ‘night’ in English, fort, da. Fourteen: that would be the number of chapters in Beyond the Pleasure Principle plus the number of chapters in ‘To Speculate­– ­on “Freud” ’.29 A writing fortnight, fortwritingnight. Apropos this question of a fortnight or two weeks, Derrida makes a tiny but intriguing error. He refers to this letter from Freud to Jones as having been written a fortnight after the death of Sophie (deux semaines après la mort de Sophie: 353), not two weeks before. What are we to make of this mistake? It is tempting to dub it a Derridean slip, or Freudian slip after Derrida. In particular, we might connect it with the more general argument of Derrida’s remarkable reading of Freud in ‘To Speculate’, as if the slip were remarking what’s remarkable, that is to say the enactment in writing of the disturbing logic of those ‘unheimlich repetitions of repetition’ (343) that he associates with the fairy or demon of literature, whereby autobiography and writing are entangled, you don’t know if Sophie dies before or after, before or after in Freud’s writing, or before or after in Derrida’s, she dies before and after, after is before, the latter is former, as Derrida says: ‘All speculation … implies the terrifying possibility of this hysteron proteron of the generations’ (333). ‘I am sure in a few decades my name will be wiped away’, Jones reports Freud as writing, in English. ‘Wiped away’: in Derrida’s original French this is given as oublié (‘forgotten’) (‘Spéculer’, 353). We don’t know what Freud’s original text said, it’s evidently been wiped away, but this phrase, as it comes through his writing into Jones’s, at least to my ear is Shakespeare’s, or more precisely Hamlet’s in response to the Ghost: ‘Remember thee? / Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records…’ (Hamlet, 1.5.103–5). Of course, when Cixous alludes to this cosmonautic cartographer as ‘the Shakespeare of the Night’, she is effectively wiping away not only Freud’s name, but also the artist formerly known as Shakespeare. Earlier in this book (in ‘Advertisement’) we reflected on this elision of Shakespeare as cartographer of dreams by turning to Antony and Cleopatra. How might we read A Midsummer Night’s Dream in this context? ‘Shakespeare of the Night’: it’s a strangely affecting hysteron proteron of sorts,

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Freud becoming Shakespeare, leaving Shakespeare as what or who? Which, one might wonder, dreamed it? Is there a Shakespeare of the day? The Shakespeare of an enlightenment to come? Got to stop. Speed up, or slow down, downy sleep. To awake…: to whom might that be addressed? As Derrida says apropos the dream-writings of Cixous: ‘The dream wakes up [Le rêve réveille].’30 The dream wakes, awakens (her). The dream is to awake. In the first of his Introductory Lectures on dreams, in the course of pondering the question ‘What is a dream?’, Freud notes a correspondence between waking and being born: ‘Every time we wake in the morning it is like a new birth … We speak, too, of being born as “first seeing the light of day”.’31 This correspondence, which is indeed inscribed in the earliest history of the word ‘wake’ (the Old English strong verb wacan means to come into being, to be born), is mobilised in unprecedented ways, each so singular and distinct, in the writings of Cixous and Derrida, above all in terms of the figure of inscription itself. As Derrida suggests in Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, all of Cixous’s work can be thought about in terms of a ‘writing on waking’, a writing that is formed of all sorts of threads tying the writing of her dreams to other writings, literary or not, ‘fictional, theatrical, didactic even’ (43). Of the entangling enchantment of her work he declares: Hymn addressed to waking, perhaps, but especially, which is something else entirely, and a completely other waking, the writing on waking marks an absolutely heterogeneous break. One can, if one likes, call this literary conscience [la conscience littéraire]. But it is a more conscious conscience [une conscience plus que consciente], whose heterogeneity consists also in being in a situation of heteronomous obedience to the Omnipotence-other of literature [la Toute-puissance-autre de la littérature]. Now the caesura of this other waking no longer falls [ne s’inscrit plus] between the time of the dream and the first moments of waking, but leaps in to make an interruption in the interruption that inaugurates the work of the vigilant writing, the diurnal time of the literary operation proper. (43–4/54, trans. modified)

It leaps in or makes a leap already there, like a frog. It has to come, to let come. Don’t scare away, in awaking, the comer or the coming [le Venant], as she would say.32 One could spend many days and nights, a dream fortnight, thinking and dreaming, dreamthinking about this passage in Derrida about, abutting on waking in Cixous, starting perhaps with this figure of interruption or ruptive force and how it relates to Derrida’s proposition (made more than twenty years



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earlier): ‘Telepathy is the interruption of the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis.’33 Writing marks waking from the start, interrupting the aposiopesis of reveries that opens Reveries of the Wild Woman: ‘The whole time I was living in Algeria I would dream of one day arriving in Algeria, I would have done anything to get there, I had written, I never made it to Algeria, it is right now that I must explain what I mean by this, how I longed for the door to open, now not later, I had scribbled, in the fever of the July night, for it is now, and probably for dozens or hundreds of reasons that a door has cracked open in the Oblivion Wing of my memory, and now for the first time I may be able to return to Algeria, therefore I must…’ I had written that in the middle of a July night and as sometimes happens when a book shows up, always in the middle of the night…34

I would love to weave a reading of these two passages (one from Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, the other from Reveries of the Wild Woman) into an immense tapestry, but feeling obscurely in this downy place the coming of the alarm, I will simply note, by way of drawing to a close, two threads to follow. First thread. Derrida’s description of Cixous here is also a way into reading his own work. As she says in her monkey-analytical portrait of him, from his earliest writings to the last, ‘he is the dreamer philosopher, the only one’.35 We might think back, for example, to Of Grammatology (1967), with its relentless dispelling of ‘self-presence’ as that which is forever ‘only dreamed of and always already split’, and with its closing series of questions: ‘The opposition of dream to wakefulness, is not that a representation of metaphysics as well? And what should dream or writing be if, as we know now, one may dream while writing? And if the scene of dream is always a scene of writing?’36 In this respect, ‘Fichus’, the extraordinary address at Frankfurt in September 2001, is of a piece, following the same dreaming wake. It is the question of the dream, a singular dream to awake. As we noted in ‘Advertisement’, it is for Derrida­– ­and also for Cixous­ – ­the question of a thinking of dreaming as ‘a more vigilant state than being awake,  the unconscious more thoughtful than consciousness, literature or the arts more philosophical, more critical at any rate, than philosophy’.37 It proceeds from the sense that ‘dreaming is the element most receptive to mourning, to haunting, to the spectrality of all spirits and the return of all ghosts’, but it is already plunged into the ‘to awake’, it entails, as Derrida puts it in ‘Fichus’, ‘a deconstructive critique that is sober, wide awake, vigilant, and attentive to

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e­ verything that solders the political to the metaphysical, to capitalist speculating, to the perversions of religious or nationalist feeling, or to the fantasy of sovereignty’.38 Derrida is awake in the street, this is the song of the new International: to awake. As he writes in Monolingualism of the Other: therefore invent in your language if you can or want to hear mine; invent if you can or want to give my language to be understood, as well as yours, where the event of its prosody only takes place once at home, in the very place where its ‘being home’ [son ‘chez elle’] disturbs the co-habitants, the fellow citizens, and the compatriots. Compatriots of every country, translator-poets, rebel against patriotism! Do you hear me! Each time I write a word, a word I love and want to write; in the time of this word, at the instant of a single syllable, the song of this new International awakens in me. I never resist it, I am in the street at its call, even if, apparently, I have been working silently since dawn at my table.39

Derrida affirms what he calls ‘the ineluctable necessity of the psychoanalytic revolution’, but this is a revolution that calls for invention, elaborations and transformations of what he calls ‘the most venturesome soundings’ in Freud’s thinking, moving beyond the vocabulary of the unconscious, the super-ego and so on.40 ‘Everything remains to be invented’, as he says in the discussion with Roudinesco.41 Second thread. It’s about magic and Shakespeare. It seems to me that there is still the question of reading Shakespeare: we have still to reckon with his writing in terms of the Omnipotence-other of literature. Derrida’s Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius opens up new ways of responding not only to Cixous but also to Shakespeare, in terms of what Derrida calls literary conscience or literary consciousness, more conscious or more conscientious than consciousness. It’s a matter of literary hyperconscience or hyperconsciousness, too awake, hyper­ realism and hyperdream. Let’s recall that marvellous turn in H.C., for Life, where Derrida is reading Freud’s account of art and magic in Totem and Taboo: What Freud seems strangely ignorant of, which comes down to misunderstanding non-representational art­– ­or nonconstative art, productive art, the poietic dimension of art­– ­is the knowledge and power of language in general, in the order of psychoanalysis in particular, on the side of the analyst and of the analysand, of theory, practice, and the analytic institution, where performative power acts and produces always according to ways that are at once rational, technical and magical. The effect, both affective and effective, of a performative is always magical



To awake, Shakespeare of the Night 139 in appearance. It always operates as if by an enchantment. In practice and in theory, in technique­– ­in particular, that of psychoanalysis. Who better than Freud himself at once showed it, illustrated it, and ignored it? I think that, on this point as well as on others, it is always by recalling him to himself that his niece [aka Hélène Cixous] could ruthlessly criticise and mock him. (111–12)

Recall him to himself, wake Nuncle up, while recalling also that ‘nuncle’ is Shakespeare’s word (in particular, perhaps, the Fool’s, in King Lear). To awake, at bottom. At Bottom, without bottom, awake. I conclude with that moment in A Midsummer Night’s Dream when Bottom the weaver awakes. ‘Bottom wakes’ runs the stage direction, and then: Bottom  When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is ‘Most fair Pyramus’. Heigh ho! Peter Quince? Flute the bellows-mender? Snout the tinker? Starveling? God’s my life! Stolen hence and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was­– ­there is no man can tell what. Methought I was­– ­and methought I had­– ­but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was! I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream; it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death. (4.1.197–211)

No longer­– o ­ r in the process of becoming no longer­– a­ n ass beloved of Titania, Queen of the Fairies, Bottom comes out of the magic. Apparently. This is perhaps the most simple or visible magic of the play, whereby (to recall Cixous’s phrasing from ‘Sorties’ regarding Shakespeare) ‘every place is either abyss or summit … man turns back into woman, woman into man’, man into donkey, donkey into man.42 As the cryptic figure of ‘the author’ says, in Cixous’s FirstDays of the Year: We play a part in a famous play every day, and in the end that is not at all the part we play, it is not Cleopatra, it is Brutus and it is another play, and often we are played in two or three plays that are being performed at the same time. The hero of our existence is obviously our father, we think, until the day when we think the exact opposite. Our father was hiding the true hero from us, our mother.43

Who is Bottom? Whose or what is Bottom’s dream? ‘I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.’ Bottom is alone on stage,

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it is a soliloquy and thus an instance of one of Shakespeare’s great magical inventions, namely the invention of a telepathic space in which we as audience or readers are able to discover what the speaker is thinking and feeling. But here everything also works in reverse and in multiple ways. Bottom has had a dream ‘past the wit of man to say what dream it was’, and yet we have ourselves witnessed it. We would be asses if we were to try saying anything about it by way of expounding it. Which of course we might always have become, in the anthropozoological world of Shakespeare. (It’s like the gift or the ghost of Bottom in Shelley’s poem ‘The Question’ that we discussed earlier, in ‘Dream in literature’, or of Antony and Cleopatra’s nightingale in Keats’s great ode that we alighted on, in ‘Away’.) Bottom’s speech eerily dramatises Derrida’s argument that there is no true testimony without the possibility of literature or fiction: the dreamer, that’s me, the other, man or ass. It’s writing, of course, and song: to be a ballad, and to be sung ‘in the latter end of a play’ (a play, like this one for example, Bottom’s dream-play, not the play). ‘Literary conscience’ here would be inextricably entangled with Shakespeare’s telepathic or magical thinking, with the way in which Bottom’s words are recalling, without his ever having heard them, the words used by Titania when Oberon, King of the Fairies, wakes her: ‘Now, my Titania, wake you, my sweet Queen!’ (4.1.72). Then Titania, ‘starting up’, sees him and exclaims: ‘My Oberon, what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamoured of an ass’ (4.1.73–4). Bottom’s ‘Methought I was’ is iteraphonic, a magical thinking with Titania, still with Titania, as if in a play, another play.44 And it would be a matter also of trying to think the magical might of ‘literary conscience’ (Omnipotence-other and impotence) on account of the extraordinary reading of the Bible and God’s secrets that Bottom renders, as if he were conducting the most thinking analysis (to recall Derrida’s phrase for Cixous’s writing). ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was!’ Bottom is synaesthetically rewriting 1 Corinthians 2.9–10. The Bishop’s Bible has: ‘The eye of man hath not seene, and the eare hath not heard, neither have entred into the heart of man, the things which God hath revealed them unto by his spirit; for the spirit searcheth all things, yea the deepe things of God!’45 Or as the Genevan Bible (1557) has it: ‘the Spirite searcheth the bottome of Goddes secretes’.46 The Bottom of God’s secrets. ‘It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream”, because it hath no bottom.’ This is one of the loveliest becauses in Shakespeare: ‘because’ of sublime madness, at bottom. ‘It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream”, because it hath no bottom.’ No bottom: no reality or foundation, but also unfathomably profound,



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‘unplumbable’ (as Freud says of the navel of a dream).47 A bottom is also a ball of thread, in other words, as Harold Brooks puts it: ‘ “No bottom”, for a weaver, is also no skein to weave from.’48 No bottom, fort-da. There is nothing I can say about it, because it’s already in the play, it’s what the text says, as if I were already ‘stolen hence’: Bottom’s first name, you will recall, is Nick. Notes   1 This chapter is a revised version of a paper that was first given at a conference entitled ‘Hélène Cixous, Jacques Derrida: Their Psychoanalyses’, at the University of Leeds, in June 2007. The phrase ‘a kind of magic’ comes initially from Freud’s ‘The Question of Lay Analysis: Conversations with an Impartial Person’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 20: 187; but it also furnished the title of Hélène Cixous’s lecture at Leeds, since published as ‘ “A Kind of Magic” ’, in Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis, ed. Mark Dawson, Mairéad Hanrahan and Eric Prenowitz, special issue of Paragraph, 36:2 (2013), 161–88.   2 Jacques Derrida, ‘To Speculate­– ­on “Freud” ’, in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 343; ‘Spéculer sur “Freud” ’, La carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 364. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash.   3 I refer here to Derrida’s contention that ‘we must begin wherever we are’, that is to say ‘in a text already where we believe ourselves to be’. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 162.   4 ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you?’ (poem 288), in The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 133.   5 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 139.  6 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 2, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 127–42; and Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. xviii.   7 W. H. Auden, ‘The Fall of Rome’, in Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber and Faber, 1976), 257–8; Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.309.

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  8 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Scientific Literature Dealing with the Problems of Dreams’, in The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vol. 4: 1–95. Further page references to this chapter are given in parentheses in the main body of the text.   9 Jacques Derrida, in Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow … A Dialogue, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 176. For more on auto-hetero-didactics, see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), esp. 61ff. 10 The original phrase here is ‘une analyse pensante’ (Derrida’s emphasis). See Jacques Derrida, H.C. pour la vie, c’est à dire… (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 90. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter translate this as ‘thoughtful analysis’. See H.C. for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 103. 11 ‘One plus one makes at least three’: see Derrida, Of Grammatology, 36, and for a fuller discussion of this logic, see my short text entitled ‘Bizarre’, in Reading ‘Of Grammatology’, ed. Sean Gaston and Ian Maclachlan (London: Continuum, 2011), 51–8. 12 Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 226. 13 Hélène Cixous, Dream I Tell You, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 3; Rêve je te dis (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 13. Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash. 14 See Derrida: Screenplay and Essays on the Film (dir. Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 107–9. 15 Jacques Derrida, quoted in Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 169. 16 See Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass in Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1992), 205–7. Further page references to the two ‘Alice’ books are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 17 Freud cites this text in another 1909 postscript to The Interpretation: see The Standard Edition, vol. 4: 308–9, n.2. Freud also discusses this topic in a brief text entitled ‘Joseph Popper-Lynkeus and the Theory of Dreams’ (1923), in The Standard Edition, vol. 19: 261–3. James Strachey describes the ‘phantasies’ of Lynkeus (the name under which they were published) as ‘short imaginative sketches’: see editorial note, 260. 18 See Sigmund Freud, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 22: 217–24. 19 Freud, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, 222–3. 20 Quoted in The Interpretation, vol. 4: 309n. Ironically, Freud redeploys phrases from ‘Waking like Dreaming’ (such as ‘love of truth’ and ‘moral serenity of nature’) to



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describe Popper in so-called propria persona, at the end of ‘Joseph Popper-Lynkeus and the Theory of Dreams’: see vol. 19: 263. 21 Freud, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, 223. Freud does not cite this passage in the 1909 postscript in The Interpretation or in ‘Joseph Popper-Lynkeus and the Theory of Dreams’. 22 Freud, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, 224. 23 Freud, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, 221. 24 Freud, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, 224. 25 Freud, ‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’, 224. 26 See Jacques Derrida, in Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 173. 27 Havelock Ellis, ‘Psychoanalysis in Relation to Sex’, Journal of Mental Science, LXIII (October 1917), 537–55; see Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 3: 22. 28 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. R. A. Foakes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5.1.346–8. Except where otherwise specified, further references are to this edition. 29 Derrida has a lot to say about the number seven, and its importance to Freud: see, for example, ‘To Speculate’, 329–31. For some further reflections on ‘seven’ in the context of Derrida’s work, see my essay ‘On the Run (Imagining Derrida)’, Derrida Today, 10.2 (2017), 125–41. 30 Jacques Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 40; and see, too, Brahic’s note: ‘ “Le rêve reveille” may be transitive or intransitive; that is, the dream itself wakes up or the dream wakes (her) up’ (95, n.23). Further page references to Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, including (where appropriate) reference to the original French: Genèses, généalogies, genres and le genie: Les secrets de l’archive (Paris: Galilée, 2003). 31 Sigmund Freud, ‘Difficulties and First Approaches (Lecture 5)’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 15: 88–9. 32 See Hélène Cixous, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage: Scènes primitives (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 9; Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 3. 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 260. 34 Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman, 3. 35 Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 39. 36 See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 112, 316.

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37 Jacques Derrida, ‘Fichus’, in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 167. This text was originally published in French as Fichus: Discours de Francfort (Paris: Galilée, 2002). 38 Derrida, ‘Fichus’, 173–4/36, translation modified, 179. 39 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 57. 40 See Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 172–3. 41 Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 125. 42 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 98. 43 Hélène Cixous, FirstDays of the Year, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 50. 44 For fuller discussion of the iteraphonic, especially in relation to Shakespeare and Freud, see my essay, ‘Fear of Freud (On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Literature)’, Oxford Literary Review, 30:1 (2008), 134ff. 45 Quoted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Foakes, 121. 46 Quoted by Harold F. Brooks, in William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. H. F. Brooks (London: Routledge, 1983), cxvii, n.3. 47 See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vol. 4: 111. 48 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Brooks, cxvii, n.3.

12

Dream treatment: on sitting down to read a letter from Freud

I wake up awash in the cries of herring gulls, not yet light, and am thinking what an extraordinary thing, in 2017, to have received a letter from Freud, fresh this morning, written in English. It’s the ever-odd of the hypnopompic, how much can be held, recalled, cradled before the great tsunami of oblivion called ‘everyday life’. I know that there were several sentences, already receding in a great silent sucking motion, passed all tensions, all tense past, but the only words that survive the experience of being hauled up out of the quicksands of sleep into the not-yet-day of gulls’ screeching, squawking, croaking, quacking, clucking rapidly all around the housetop amount to a single verbless sentence: ‘Probably not.’ These words initially instil a feeling of great calm, as if Freud is reassuring me: it might never happen. Probably not. You wonder if the world is coming to an end, on your phone last night you read in the newspaper online that the US has just ‘dropped the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat’ somewhere in Afghanistan, you put the phone to charge on a small table beside your desk (only now registering the association of this table with somewhere in the region of Afghanistan­– ­a beautifully carved, if rather battered and cracked little table you bought for five pounds at an auction in Cheam village with your mother one day in the 1970s­– ­and seeing that you actually put the phone down on top of a small volume containing Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Freud’s ‘Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva’,1 in such a way that it concealed the lower half of Freud’s face but left his piercing left eye still gazing out above it, his right eye in shadow, and only now puzzling over the fact that it is his face rather than Jensen’s that occupies the front cover), you recall pondering as you were leaving the bathroom to ascend the final flight of stairs into the attic what was the difference, what will have been the difference between ‘nuclear’ and ‘non-nuclear’ in this context, how long will it be before we hear that a nuclear device, perhaps the

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smallest ever used by the US in combat since 1945, was just dropped, dropped earlier today or in the night? What has the US president done now, since I went to sleep? That is the question on your mind these days, every morning when you wake up. Will the world soon come to witness, under the insanity or what other political leaders prefer to call the ‘unpredictability’ of Donald Trump, nuclear bombs regularly dropped here and there, or will everything remain at the level of dropping the occasional GBU-43/B or Mother Of All Bombs (MOABs)? All of that, including Freud’s eye merely unconsciously noted, at the time, keeping watch from the cover of Jensen’s Gradiva (only now, thinking of ‘Mountains Covered with Cats’, does it occur to me that Wallace Stevens’s idea­ – ­the dear ‘I’ and dear ‘eye’ of the idea­– ­that ‘Freud’s eye was the microscope of potency’,2 must have been inspired by a photograph, perhaps this one), plus so much more, stockpiled anxiety in sleep, exploding in a missive directly from Freud. Like a tweet from Donald Trump. This was another ingredient of the Daily Residue: I had been reading an essay by Howard Jacobson about Trump’s tweets. He recalls Hugh Laurie’s tweeted query about Trump’s language, the tweet messages full of clichéd nouns and adjectives: ‘Will there be a separate news conference for the verbs?’ Jacobson writes: Language has its own power to lead the mind out of smallness. There is a fibrous, organic subtlety in words. They grow connotations. They educate the user of them to want and employ more. They are not the merely outward signs of what we have already made our minds up about; they are the means by which our minds learn to know themselves and discover what else they might come to know. This is what makes the circularity of Trump’s speech patterns so telling: the walls he wants to build to keep out unwanted migrants are identical to those that wall him in linguistically. Nothing strange to him is allowed entry.3

Imagine Freud’s tweets, gathered up from his vast oeuvre, from all the letters as well as essays. Among them might be: ‘An author’s words are deeds.’4 Can we expect to see The Selected Tweets of Sigmund Freud anytime soon? Probably not. Trump tweets, Freud treats. I am treated to a letter, treated by a letter from Freud. I now see, as never before, how the thought of the dream as a treat, as a kind of gift, as something ‘given without expense to the recipient’ (in the rather niggardly phrasing of the OED: see treat n1, sense I, 4a), might connect, precisely in the element of dreaming, with ‘treat’ as ‘The action or an act of treating, or discussing terms; parley, negotiation; agreement; treaty’ (sense I, 1), with ‘treat’ in the obsolete sense of ‘trace’ (sense II, 9), and finally with the notion



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of psychoanalytic treatment. The dream treats the dreamer. Writing, it seems to me, as well as any other so-called clinical or therapeutic activity, enables the critical and productive encounter of two of the most radical aspects of psychoanalysis: ‘free association’ and ‘deferred effect’. Psychoanalysis begins with the free association to which Freud subjects himself in analysing his own dreams in The Interpretation of Dreams, and it ends with the uncanny, inexhaustible demands of acknowledging the workings of Nachträglichkeit (deferred meaning, afterwardsness, delayed effect, after-sense and so on). Just as he himself returns, several years later, in his Preface to the Second Edition of The Interpretation in 1908, to observe that this book has a further subjective significance for me personally­– ­a significance which I only grasped after I had completed it. It was, I found, a portion of my own self-analysis, my reaction to my father’s death­– ­that is to say, to the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man’s life.5

The dream is a gift, but there is always mourning too, even in the case of dreaming of someone you love but never knew ‘in person’, could never have known ‘in waking life’. As Jacques Derrida says in ‘Fichus’ (also in the context of recalling the death of his father, his dying father): dreaming is the element most receptive to mourning, to haunting, to the spectrality of all spirits and the return of the ghosts … The dream is also a place that is hospitable to the demand for justice and to the most invincible of messianic hopes.6

You receive the dream like a letter from the beyond. ‘Dreams await us in a country we can’t get tickets to’, remarks Hélène Cixous.7 She stresses what so few notice, the might of the future in relation to dreaming. They wait for us, they are up ahead. There is no bus or taxi, no passport or other document enabling entry. And then the dream country lovingly releases you, without your ever having had a proper chance to get your bearings. The dream feels like a treat, but always with some feeling of the unknown and the supernatural. To receive a letter from Freud­– ­it’s ‘too good to be true’, as he might have said.8 And for this to be 2017, to be the recipient of a letter written nearly eighty years after his death­– i­ ncredible, it’s ‘post-truth’! And then, also, it is in English: I still feel, as I did in the dream, a strangely intense gratitude, that he should have been so kind, so generous and courteous as to write the letter in English, knowing that I do not speak German. I am sitting at my desk and don’t know what to do. I already failed to do

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what I meant to do, what I should have done, namely write the dream down the moment I woke up, but I couldn’t because I had no paper or pen or other means of writing by my bedside. I phone Hélène because I’d promised to do so, and we talk about this and that, mostly books, and I mention that I’ve had this dream, I received a letter from Freud but cannot recall anything of it except: ‘Probably not.’ She laughs at the other end of the line in Paris, she laughs with that warm, high, childlike laugh I love, a salve, a sleepy oneiric laughter for good, and I remark on the washed-out remains, as if microscopic, just that single sentential trace: Probably not. Still there is a feeling of elation of having for the first time in my life received a letter from him. She laughs and says: ‘You keep receiving letters from him but you just don’t recognise them.’ Then she tells me that she has been writing about his essay on Dostoevsky and has been struck by Freud’s lack of laughter there, a sense that one man’s envy for another man gets in the way. Of course she is right, Freud is treating me, treating all of us all the time, and we listen to this and learn, but the dream treatment is something else. As she says in her account of ‘The School of Dreams’ in 1990: Like plants, dreams have enemies, plant lice that devour them. The dream’s enemy is interpretation. I used to read The Interpretation of Dreams with passion, but, though it is a marvelous book, it is a true dream-killer since it interprets. It wants to make the dream cough up. The dreams interpreted by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams are all alike: although there is a difference in content, a different nucleus, the writing is the same. The dreams are written by Freud, both his own and those of other people. The flesh of the dream is no longer there. This is the great danger. We must know how to treat the dream as a dream, to leave it free, and to distrust all the exterior and interior demons that destroy dreams.9

How to treat the dream as a dream: is it possible? Probably not. But this is the driving desire. To treat a dream as dream, to allow ourselves to be treated by the dream: this has to do with freedom (‘leave it free’) and a sense of justice (‘the demand for justice’, in Derrida’s phrase). The dream continues to recede as the day advances and I sit at my desk. I reread­ – ­for the first time in nearly thirty years­– ­Freud’s ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’ (1912), a text that he originally wrote in English and that was first published in a special issue of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in London.10 This calls me back to the fact that, when I tried to write about this text in 1989, it was in the form of a letter (‘A Letter on Poetry’), a kind of telepathic letter about literature, dreaming, the hypnopompic and the hypnagogic, which



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treated Freud’s ‘Note on the Unconscious’ as a letter to the SPR­– ­to which no one, until then, had troubled to respond.11 What was going on, I wanted to know, and I still ask this question, what is Freud up to in this text when he deploys the word ‘foreconscious’ instead of ‘preconscious’, and ‘psychical’ instead of ‘mental’?12 As I reread ‘A Note on the Unconscious’ I am struck anew by the clarity of his writing, here perhaps especially given that he is writing it in English. And I see, as so often when rereading Freud, things I didn’t see or don’t remember from last time I read it. Besides the peculiarities of the ‘psychical’ and ‘foreconscious’, for example, there is the intriguing and repeated use of the word ‘repulsion’ instead of ‘defence’ or ‘fending off ’ (see 264, n.1). Is there, I find myself wondering, a ‘probably not’ that I have forgotten, a sort of inversion of the ‘lapsus linguae’ (263) of which he speaks? Probably not. But the search for this ghostly phrase (the only words the dead man has ever addressed directly to me) leads to a reflection on that sort of classic Freudian metadiscursive turn, when he stops and says: ‘Before continuing my exposition I will refer to two objections which are likely to be raised at this point’ (262–3). He outlines the first: instead of subscribing to the hypothesis of unconscious ideas of which we know nothing, we had better assume that consciousness can be split up, so that certain ideas or other psychical acts may constitute a consciousness apart, which has become detached and estranged from the bulk of conscious psychical activity. (263)

It is difficult not to admire the way in which Freud splits himself up in this gesture, assuming the assumption of another. He goes on to dismiss this imagined objection with brio: We have no right to extend the meaning of this word [‘conscious’] so far as to make it include a consciousness of which its owner himself is not aware. If philosophers find difficulty in accepting the existence of unconscious ideas, the existence of an unconscious consciousness seems to me even more objectionable. (263)

Freud then observes: ‘The other objection that may probably be raised would be that we apply to normal psychology conclusions which are drawn chiefly from the study of pathological conditions’ (263). The play of the likely (‘objections which are likely to be raised’) and the probably (‘The other objection that may probably be raised’) takes on a new strangeness for me. His ‘likely’ is ‘Not likely!’; his ‘probably’ a resounding ‘Probably not.’ They are part of Freud’s rhetoric, his lucidity and ingenuity in anticipating counter-arguments, but they are also part of the literary character of his writing, his introduction of other

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voices, his ­proliferation of possible or, in his terms, probable subject-positions. Psychoanalytic verisimilitude and the laws of probability. Still to be written: Psychoanalysis and Literature: A Theory of Psychical Realism. Or is that an alternative, possible title for the present book? Against the insanity of Donald Trump (and a few others), Freud offers an insanity far more imaginatively interesting, subtle and promising: ‘There is one psychical product to be met with in the most normal persons, which yet presents a very striking analogy to the wildest productions of insanity, and was no more intelligible to philosophers than insanity itself. I refer to dreams. Psychoanalysis is founded upon the analysis of dreams…’ (‘A Note on the Unconscious’, 264–5). Analysis: untying, literally. And now it has receded so far, grown so dim already, that no longer able to see at all I hear, for the first time, the irrepressible homophone that English gives: Probably knot. Everything about psychoanalysis seems to insist on memory and the past, but really it is about the future. Apropos Freud’s celebrated remark that every dream has a navel, a ‘spot where it reaches down into the unknown’,13 Derrida declares: ‘What forever exceeds the analysis of the dream is indeed a knot that cannot be untied.’14 Probably knot: I hear it, washing back once again into the muttering, squabbling, mewing, passionate strains of the cries of seagulls. Seaford, East Sussex Good Friday 2017 Notes  1 Wilhelm Jensen, ‘Gradiva’, Sigmund Freud, ‘Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s “Gradiva” ’, trans. Helen M. Downey (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003).   2 Wallace Stevens, ‘Mountains Covered with Cats’, in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 319.   3 Howard Jacobson, ‘Point of View’, The Guardian, 8 April 2017, 13.   4 Sigmund Freud, ‘To Thomas Mann On His Sixtieth Birthday’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 22: 255.   5 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vol. 4: xxvi.   6 Jacques Derrida, ‘Fichus’, in Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 173–4.   7 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 58.



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  8 See Sigmund Freud, ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis: An Open Letter to Romain Rolland on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 22: 242.   9 Hélène Cixous, ‘The School of Dreams’, in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 107. 10 See Sigmund Freud, ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’, in The Standard Edition, vol. 12: 255–66. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 11 Nicholas Royle, ‘A Letter on Poetry’, in Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 121–41. 12 See Royle, ‘A Letter on Poetry’, 134. 13 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in The Standard Edition, vol. 5: 525. 14 Jacques Derrida, ‘Resistances’, in Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 11.

13

Side thinking

                    / At last: that’s

how to begin. She says it, in a letter, apropos an essay about George Eliot that starts: ‘At last comes the revelation, seeing into the mind of the other.’ On 3 July 2004 she writes: ‘I do enjoy so much your beginning with “at last”.’1

                     / She tells us, better than anyone, how to begin: to write, above all perhaps, but also to

dream, to hyperdream, to think. Shakespeare is tops and Montaigne is glorious in this way, and Browne for example on dreams, hydriotaphia and quincuncial gardens, and Keats in his letters, but she has the initiative, the initial place belongs to her, a play and a teaching, a genuine pure fully guaranteed special-delivery ‘document in madness’, on the instant.               / In ­‘par­e­n­thesis arms [bras de parenthèse]’, as she calls them in FirstDays of the Year (Catherine MacGillivray’s translation of Jours de l’an (1990), a title inviting all the madness of a day or year reflecting on ‘days of the year’ or ‘new year’s days’ or ‘first days of the year’ or ‘every day a new year’s day’), I’m immersed in another thinking of paraphrase, embracing fallen into the possibilities of a text which begins ‘Writing had returned, the stream, the slender silent stream with its singing arms [bras chantants], the blood flow in the veins between the bodies’, and which goes on, still on its opening page, to present us with the instant-delivery italicised unreadable words: ‘thought the author’ (pensait l’auteur).2 This book stirs up so many parawords, the paragram (‘a play in which (esp. initial) letters are changed’) paragraph parataxis parallax, parable paraglossa (‘either of two appendages of the ligula in insects’) and paragogue (‘an addition to the end of a word, such as t in against, amidst, amongst, whilst’: that’s part of the st-effect, side thinking, from the start),3 all to be thought otherwise in the paraccusatory



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parallel new verse of a veering that takes me under the sea, her marinological beauties being well-known, glitteringly clear, I sigh, yes                        / At last­ – ­however many years after the fantasies of Napoleon Bonaparte and Margaret Thatcher coming true­– ­in early March 2007, like meeting the dark side of the moon, I travelled for the first time through the Channel Tunnel, and realised anew that ‘all the stories would have to be told differently’. This was the epigraph from ‘Sorties’ to an old mole essay that concluded not with endnotes, but ‘side-tunnels’.4 But now I understood it again differently. This was my dream, shooting through the dark, under the sea, a mere twenty minutes or so in which an hour is lost or gained, depending on your direction, what is the time of the Channel Tunnel, from what angle or perspective and at what speed is one to think in the blackness at the bottom of the sea? I was going to see my friend Tom Dutoit to talk about veering, but where did it begin? How could one know, in this suspended propulsion zooming along blind in submarine time, if one wasn’t about to shoot off down a side-tunnel or might not be in one already? And sitting on the train at the bottom of the sea I thought of her words to me, in another letter, about my inability to speak French: ‘Your only limit is your lack of French!!! (I’m very unfortunate: in feeling that you will not come on my French shores!)’5 Impossible to stay in the tunnel but how to come to her French shores? To be or not to be sures. What happens to the French side or English when one is in the tunnel? There is this strange feeling of being sidetracked, even though we are travelling very fast, even faster than time. I love and laugh at this word ‘sidetrack’, it is an invention of the railway of course, off course, dating from 1828 (according to the OED), its first so-called metaphorical use in the 1890s. In just a few decades of the nineteenth century people have become (in best estuary English) trainsmogrified. What does it mean, to sidetrack, to be sidetracked, to turn or be turned into a train? It’s no good. I’m lost. Lost in English, before any chance of lost in translation. I have left myself, still, in the tunnel, in the sidetracks or side-tunnels of the tunnel. I am sitting beside myself, with you. So all the stories would have to be told differently, the future would be incalculable, the historical forces would, will, change hands, bodies, another thinking as yet not thinkable, will transform the functioning of all society. We are living through precisely this period where the conceptual foundation of an ancient culture is in the process of being undermined by millions of a species of mole never recognised before. [Or nous vivons justement cette époque où l’assise conceptuelle d’une culture millénaire est en train d’être sapée par des millions d’une espèce de taupe encore jamais reconnue.]6

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In the process of being undermined: en train, as she says in French. Like Derrida, I find she was there already, as in an experience of déjà vu, beside oneself, seeing double in the mental field, diplopia underwater, I’m still trying to catch or hold my breath, unclear whether she is a fish or a submarine, a mole or a telephone. And it’s all to do with the way in which she is, as Derrida says, ‘beside herself, on her own side but sitting, like another, sitting beside herself ’.7                          / Impossible par­a­keet in the paradise that is you, such dangerous waters beside the para-, so much disturbance, one can never be sure of the shore, parablepisis, parachronism, paracme, paracusis, paraesthesia, paralalia, paralexia, paralogia, paranoia, paraparesis, paraphasia, paraphimosis, pararthria, all not good, mostly really quite nasty, unwished for, best put to one side. No one in their right mind, or what’s left of their right mind, or right of their left mind, could want to be a paramour of such paraphernalia and yet, can one not be a little touched, as if by the sight of twins, these two meanings of para beside one another, that is to say ‘para-’, as a prefix denoting, on the one hand, ‘beside’; and on the other hand, ‘faulty; disordered; abnormal; false’? Parapara: me pap, me pah, me parapet. Strange derailway parages (really! at your age!), she paralanguages, she makes language work in terms of ‘elements of communication other than words’, she paralanguages language, she sends it and us veering, such is her love of what she calls ‘versatilities’, such is the magical agility, the wish-wending8

                    / We were on the telephone (28 January 2007), she was telling me about the book she

had just been writing, on Beckett. ‘I had a side-thought for you all the time’, she said. At last, I saw what I had to write about. She had given me my subject and there was no question of trying to do anything else: to write about side thinking, on her side and mine, and above all apropos Beckett. Simple task. Without any knowledge of what she had written in her book, I would write from my side, on the side, for myself, hers and his. This was before the letterbox rattled and fell apart and a white jiffybag crashed on to my doormat from across the Channel, with a postmark of 6 March. It had departed on the same day that I had left France, returning to England: we travelled together, separately and alone, the jiffybag and I, in the dark. In the meanwhile I had been at work on my essay. I’d begun by a bit deliriously haphazardly looking at Happy Days (1961), thinking about the side, looking a bit squintingly for a new side of Beckett perhaps, as if hoping for some strange revelation of a new back and front, new back and sides, a haircut of a story like that marvellous one at once recounted and performed



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by the barber in Ring Lardner. All the hair and lack of hair, for instance, in that work, happy days of the year, Willie’s bald head but hairy forearm, Winnie’s hair and the hairbrush, the question leading to Willie’s finest most finicky filamentary verbal contribution to the play, that is to say the word ‘it’, a Beck-it: WINNIE: …Them? [Pause.] Or it? [Pause.] Brush and comb it? [Pause.] Sounds somehow improper. [Pause. Turning a little towards WILLIE.] What would you say, Willie? [Pause. Turning a little further.] What would you say, Willie, speaking of your hair, them or it? [Pause.] The hair on your head, I mean. [Pause. Turning a little further.] The hair on your head, Willie, what would you say speaking of the hair on your head, them or it? [Long pause.] WILLIE: It. WINNIE: [Turning back front, joyful.] Oh you are going to talk to me today, this is going to be a happy day!9

So strangely signifying, the brush, the hair and the bristles (in Latin, setae), to put it baldly. I was getting sidetracked. No matter.               /  All the sides in Beckett: imagine the Complete Dramatic Works without right and left, without wings, without aside. Another way, perhaps, of corroborating the notion that the centre is death. And what to do with ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’ in his work? It’s terrible. Or rather it was. As Waiting for Godot (1956) has it: ‘What is terrible is to have thought.’10 Thinking, for Beckett, if there is any, is a subject of terror. Recall that panicking gem of a sentence in The Unnamable (1959): ‘I only think, if that is the name for this vertiginous panic as of hornets smoked out of their nest, once a certain degree of terror has been exceeded.’11               / Turning back front, feeling a bit immobilised if not yet quite cataplectic, I started thinking about her and dreaming. Everything she says might be traced here, I thought. She is all about side thinking. As she remarks at the beginning of Rootprints, in relation to the thought that we ‘are always prey to otherness’: ‘We respond straight ahead and think sideways.’12 Side thinking has always already crossed boundaries, moving into foreign terrain: ‘Thought thinks only by becoming foreign to itself, by losing consciousness.’13 Side thinking has an analytical sharpness and lucidity, but it’s less determinedly philosophical, more to do with drifting and dreaming. She is happy to drift, as she says in an interview in 1994, ‘[I] set myself adrift … I don’t stick to the side of conceptual reasoning.’14 What is the side, not the nodal point but the side, in or of or to a dream? To what other side or sides does dreaming

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deliver us? And what to make of the dream of the other side in her writing, and correspondingly in Beckett’s? WINNIE: [Turns back front laboriously, rubs neck.] Crick in my neck admiring you. [Rubs neck.] But it’s worth it, well worth it. [Turning slightly towards him.] Do you know what I dream sometimes? [Pause.] What I dream sometimes, Willie. [Pause.] That you’ll come round and live this side where I could see you. [Pause. Back front.] I’d be a different woman. [Pause.] Unrecognisable. [Turning slightly towards him.] Or just now and then, come round this side just every now and then and let me feast on you. [Back front.] But you can’t, I know. [Head down.] I know. [Pause. Head up.] Well anyway­– ­[looks at toothbrush in her hand]­– ­can’t be long now­ – ­[looks at brush]­– ­until the bell. [Top back of WILLIE’s head appears above slope. WINNIE looks closer at brush.] Fully guaranteed … [head up] … what’s this it was? [WILLIE’s hand appears with handkerchief, spreads it on skull, disappears.] Genuine pure … fully guaranteed … [WILLIE’s hand appears with boater, settles it on head, rakish angle, disappears] … genuine pure … ah! Hog’s setae. [Pause.]15

   / Veering wildly, no matter, never live this side, I had my title, ‘Side thinking’, I was reading and rereading her, especially FirstDays of the Year, I was raising a small army of references concerning the figure of the side in Beckett, I was working my way through Derrida’s dazzling engagement with her, in his H.C. for Life, not least trying to get to grips with his innumerable readings of the figure of the side (‘What is a side?’ is perhaps the question of H.C. for Life, though at no point, it seems to me, does he formulate a notion of ‘side thinking’ as such),16 additionally stimulated and provoked by Ginette Michaud who has already said a good deal on this topic, and with such subtlety and finesse, in her ‘Derrida & Cixous: Between and Beyond, or “what to the letter has happened”.’17 Things were coming together in my mind, the looming silhouette of a mighty vision, a network of thoughts, express or late arriving, gleaned from here and there going off into the unknown. I would discuss Waiting for Godot and Happy Days, as well as Endgame (1958) and Embers (1959). I would recount a dream I’d had about Derrida, Cixous and Beckett. And, finally, I would write about FirstDays of the Year, about ‘The Ideal Story’ at the end of that book, about the figure of the author and the question of telepathy. I was gathering up my resources, preparing to start, and then my house was invaded, not even from a side entrance but straight through the front door, a white jiffybag flip clomp on the doormat, along with the brass letterbox flap that had been brought down with it, and it is this exquisite little Galilée book from her: Le Voisin de zéro: Sam Beckett.18



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                  / What do I do?

Do I open it, cut the pages (as befits the slenderer volumes from this publisher) and begin to read, painfully slowly, stutterread with my dictionary on the side, slower than a tortoise, or more accurately perhaps a tortoise upside down? Or do I disavow, pretend not to have received this gift, but rather stay in the tunnel, head in shell, as if still in the submarine dark, not yet born, under the sea, over the moon, who knows what the ostrich sees? Can I put it to one side, proceed as if this beautiful foreign body were not in my home, leave the leaves uncut, no matter what side of the page be visible, go nowhere near it, even if it is lying right in front of me on my desk, but of course I have begun, it’s cut already, voisin, neighbouring, in the vicinity of, bordering on, akin to, next to, beside, she has already announced side thinking in her title, around zero, impossible not to think her title alone has left me a round zero. What does she say about it all and why ‘Sam’? I was already on my way, with next to nothing to say.                            / ‘Thinking is not what we think’, she declares, in an extraordinary section (but everything is extraordinary and everything is section, that’s where the madness begins, trying to respond to this writing: ‘what on earth is this … new type of raving and sublime autobiography?’ (147), as Derrida asks in H.C. for Life, saving one of his first impressions till last, the enduring impression from 1966 of the first thing of hers that he read, Le Prénom de Dieu, yes, everything outside the ordinary, or turning it inside out, her writing cuts through the extra and does so, above all, in sectioning, omnicisently, ‘in sectioning’ not only a book, a chapter, or a series of lines or paragraphs followed by the cut of blank space, a skipped line, but down to the letter, between letters, the insect-life in sectioning, significants crawling all over, sectioning in, everything is in sectioning, meaning, first and foremost, forenaming and for life, a work of beside oneself or side thinking that might seem enough to get you locked up, to be sectioned as one says in British English, but also and at the same time, on the other hand, it is the writing that is sectioning, the power is also or even more on the other side, the power of writing to section, for sectioning is also above all or ‘at last’, the practice of a spectral writing, as she once said ‘the moment you cut you have a ghost’19 or again as she writes in ‘Writing Blind’ (so I’m sidetracked again, stopped on the subject of being sidetracked, and sidetracked on the spot): When I write I do nothing on purpose, except stop. My only voluntary intervention is interruption. Breaking. Cutting. Letting go. Cutting is an art I have acquired. Nothing is more natural and more necessary. All living beings, mammals

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or ­vegetable, know that one must cut and trim to relaunch life. Nip the quick. Harm to help.20

And then she cuts and begins a new paragraph: I’ll come back to it in a moment, I promise, unless I get cut off            / Hold on, I add, in case of misunderstanding: we’re not talking here about a train of thought: side thinking would be the deregulation derailment and decommissioning of the train, of all trains that run on ‘stream of consciousness’ or on automatic, the stream is different, a completely other stream or dream train           / No, not lateral thinking either, if by that phrase is understood ‘a way of thinking which seeks the solution to intractable problems through unorthodox methods, or elements which would normally be ignored by logical thinking’ (OED). Side thinking has to do, on the contrary, with what from the beginning resists, exceeds, falls short of teleology, it is not a matter of solving a problem or developing methods, the sort of thing proposed by Edward de Bono in 1966. Nor is side thinking about taking a side, following a cause. It’s about being off to the side. As she says in an interview on ‘the novel today’: I absolutely do not believe in an engagement with writing in the service of a cause. It’s true that, at a given moment, in a political space, I will feel closer to a certain movement, or a certain formation, or a certain group, but my writing which continues to do its work, is definitely either in front or behind or to the side of what one might call a ‘cause’.21

Side thinking might, however, seem a possible name for what was going on elsewhere at the time and is still being elaborated, another thinking of language which if it is to be described as ‘linguistic turn’ is a veering also into the body, of the body, and entails just as much new ways of construing what is beyond language, a new thinking of psychoanalysis, of a Freud beside himself (what she writes about so hauntingly, for instance, in ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ in 1974).22 It’s a new thinking of ‘femininity’s side’ (as she calls it in ‘Sorties’, hence the unrecognisable species of mole) and of God’s side too, indeed of a certain ‘Side’ as the name or surname of God.23 In short, side thinking is concerned with the  emergence of previously unrecognised ways of thinking centre and margin, the explicitation of a logic of the side and side-effects, supplement and parergon, the effects of a thinking that operates on structures by a certain sideswiping or sidelining within.24            / In an extraordinary section, I was saying,



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of Firstdays of the Year: ‘Thinking is not what we think’, she says. Or rather, this is what the title says: the heading, ‘Thinking is not what we think’, is the instant of decapitation. In the original French it appears on a separate page: Penser n’est pas ce que nous pensons (51).25 In sectioning the section, ‘thinking’ goes caput. There’s the section title, in which we lose track of thinking, and then the drop, into the blank, and the crystal basket of her writing begins: Death is not what we think. Thinking is not what we think. Our thoughts are strangers. They come to us in whimsical shapes that resemble them. We do not recognise them. Because during our story’s most interesting circumstances, we do not recognise ourselves. Living is: advancing straight toward the unknown to the point of getting lost. (35)

We begin not with thinking but death: what comes last comes first, unless thinking is not what we think. It is impossible to imagine our own deaths, as Freud observed, but what are we to think of this strange parallelism, this ghostly identification of ‘death’ and ‘thinking’?26 Thus her writing madly proceeds, veering. We start by wanting. ‘We want. That’s how it always starts’ (36), she says (and it is this insistence on desire, on wanting or wishing, on the mightiness of what ‘might’ might be, that Derrida inscribes so ringingly at the heart of his reading of her). At last, to begin, to begin at last to write, everything must be in place, everything duly assembled. ‘It is really us’, she says: ‘It is really us, this powerful ensemble that we constitute when we­– ­my blood, my body, my writing, my goal­– ­are duly assembled, and the author that we are isn’t missing a thing, not a breath, not a nerve ending, not an article of clothing, starting with our socks’ (37).   / Fitted in the instant: such is the ‘document in madness’, Laertes’s words, looking on aghast at his demented sister who seems to misremember him, perhaps taking him for Hamlet, as she hands out flowers: ‘There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.’ At which her brother exclaims: ‘A document in madness­– ­thoughts and remembrance fitted’ (4.4.180–2). The lesson in madness is a fitting. Laertes tries to capture it in an instant already shattered.                     / Draw! As she suggests in ‘Writing Blind’, ‘have on hand a notebook, a bit of paper, and capture the rapid traces of the instant. That the past which arrives at full speed will engulf in a few minutes … [It is] a combat with bereavement.’27 ‘Thoughts and

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r­ emembrance fitted’: this ‘fitted’ is not just a putting together or duly assembling, as Shakespeare’s editors all seem content to note; but also, at the same time, on the spot, paroxysm, shattering, ‘forced as by fits’ (to quote Onions’s paraphrase of the ‘fitted’ deployed by Shakespeare in Sonnet 119: ‘How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted / In the distraction of this madding fever?’)28 Shakespeare shakes spheres. Homonymy fitted: such is side thinking. ‘You want to write the book of the dead’, she says, or rather: ‘This is the author’s awful hope’ (38), in FirstDays of the Year. I’m trying to juxtapose, let things fit together, with the goal of thinking alongside her, without knowing what a side is, as she writes in her socks, in the instant of pansies (pensées) that are always strangers, in this section or chapter or railway cutting or ‘spinach-green road’ (38), this impossible backseat-driving called ‘Thinking is not what we think.’ We start by wanting but we run aground, she says, we are swirled around, we veer, we founder: Thinking is not what we think. We try to believe we can think sitting in an office, in a car, in a plane, with us in the cockpit, our hands on the steering wheel, the steering wheel in our hands, but it’s not like that at all, not at all, thoughts arrive unleashed, impassioned, from all over, under all shapes and forms, and as we do not have enough strength, energy, electricity, clues, hands, seconds, to receive them, they pounce on us, stone, bombard, daze, transport, fleece us­– ­us, puny seeds, mere ninny grains, intelligent but minuscule­– ­in a dazzling tempest, and with our fingers with our lips our eyelids, greedy tortured, we try to catch hold of all we can, we cling frenetically to the flaps, the folds, the fringes of these genial giants. (36)

       / So clinging frenetically, I sit at my desk and at

the bottom of the sea in the tunnel in parenthetic arms I hand myself over to my new neighbour, as calmly as possible, amidst the vertiginous panic, and cast my eyes over a few pages, just three or four, to box myself in, a few sides of this uncanny arrival from Galilée. Appalled. Yes, whenever I say this word I hear it in at least two voices, my mother’s and Vladimir’s. It’s at the beginning, a country road, a tree, evening, an encrypted reference to that tree in the form of one of Beckett’s favourite sorts of cut, namely the aposiopesis. Estragon upbraids: ‘You always wait till the last moment.’ Then Vladimir: ‘[Musingly.] The last moment … [He meditates.] Hope deferred maketh the something sick, who said that?’ Estragon is still trying to get his boot off, as he was at the beginning, as if to get down to his socks, if he has any. Ignoring his companion’s question, Estragon



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says: ‘Why don’t you help me?’29 Hope deferred maketh the something sick. With Beckett behind him, Vladimir’s question is also: ‘Who wrote the Bible?’ Who said ‘something sick’? Until now, of course, no one said ‘something’. Vladimir is hazily recalling Proverbs, chapter 13, verse 12: ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.’ A characteristic pruning or suppression of the heart, thought and feeling: stop the heart, silence it, heart be cut! Beckett cuts, so differently from Cixous. Beckett Be-cut, be-thou-cut. Precisely as if following the advice of Hamlet regarding the text of the play within the play: ‘It shall to th’ barber’s, with your beard’ (2.2.441). That’s where it goes, to the great Phantom Barber: keep cutting, from Godot to Embers to Rockaby and beyond. For her affirmation of ‘almighty letters’ or ‘letters of omnipotence’, for her archaic essays in what Derrida, in H.C. for Life, calls ‘the mighty power of the “might” ’ (107), in other words her experiments with ‘the magic of what, by a stroke of writing, does the impossible’ (94), Beckett offers a quite different brew: omnipittance of thought.30 And the Christian dimensions of this pittance, like the ‘tree of life’ at once beckoned or requested and silenced in Godot, are everywhere in Barber Beckett, even and especially in terms of their absence: the bastard, he doesn’t exist!31 But then Beckett is so funny, he’s side-splitting. And that is perhaps most of all where I envisage them, in my mind, coming round to the same side. As she says at the end of ‘Writing Blind’: ‘In my Bible, one has the sense of the ridiculous. It is a great liberty.’32 Vladimir takes no notice of Estragon’s ‘Why don’t you help me?’ but simply goes on: ‘Sometimes I feel it coming all the same. Then I go all queer … How shall I say? Relieved and at the same time … [He searches for the word.] … appalled. [With emphasis.] AP-PALLED.’33 Can one feel relieved and at the same time appalled? Is it possible, at least without a sort of side thinking?    / Where was I? Imagine Jacques Derrida writing about Kant or Hegel or Freud and stopping to ask: ‘Where was I?’ But her writing does this to him, to me too, indeed to anyone I suspect willing to try to respond, to think with or alongside her. Her writing keeps veering, keeps us veering, it’s so quick, it’s the lift-off, the speed of what Derrida, in H.C. for Life, calls ‘the quasi-infinite acceleration inside the “might” ’ (72), a speed of ‘displacement in writing’ (73), where everything will have begun with displacement and substitution, the speed of a telephony that is ‘thought itself ’ (100), thought beside itself, thinking as side thinking. At least twice in the course of H.C. for Life, Derrida stops to ask, finds himself stopped with this question, this query or queering of self: ‘Where was I?’ (96, 147).

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   / The cut, in ‘Writing Blind’, I remember now, I said I’d return to it, ‘Nip the quick’, she writes, ‘Harm to help’. Then she skips a line and away we wend again: In language I like and I practise the leap and the short-cut, ellipsis, amphibology, speed and slowness, asyndeton. Speed is a means of defending oneself against dishonesty. An actor who plays too slowly (lies) [lentement]. But of course an actor who plays too fast, in a single tone, swallowing the words, also lies. One must play language quick and true like an honest musician, not leap over a single word-beat. Find the slowness inside the speed.34

At what speed pass on from these sentences and in what direction, even sidling up to a single word?       /‘Amphibology’: try that. The OED records its first usage in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: ‘For goddes speken in amphibologies, / And for o soth they tellen twenty lyes.’35 Stop for sooth! Write a book here on Gods Lying, Cixous and Amphibology, and be sure to write it ‘treweliche’, as Chaucer, or rather Chaucer’s narrator, goes on to say in the context of his own writing, a few lines later.36 Amphibology without fibbing. Amphibology has dictionaries not knowing which way to turn. The OED seeks, in a curiously anachronistic or amphibological fashion, to track it through ‘amphiboly’ (a word more recent than the Chaucerian prototype), and defines it first as, simply, ‘ambiguous discourse’, and then as ‘A figure of speech: Ambiguity arising from the uncertain construction of a sentence or clause, of which the individual words are unequivocal: thus distinguished by logicians from equivocation, though in popular use the two are confused’ (sense 2). This apparent calmness concerning the unequivocal within the equivocal is in all the definitions, like a sort of dictionarcosis. For instance, in Chambers Dictionary too, ‘amphibology’ is ‘a phrase or sentence ambiguous not in its individual words but in its construction’. Everything seems to be set up to ensure that the word ‘amphibology’ is a sort of microcosm of itself, an amphibology. But is amphibology amphibology? What is amphibology? This question would be another way of asking, as Derrida does throughout H.C. for Life: what is a side? Amphibology already in two, it is amphi and ballein, literally, throwing or hitting on both sides. But from where? And who or what throws or hits, is thrown or hit? As Cixous writes to Frédéric-Yves Jeannet from Arcachon in August 2002, on the subject of her singular mode of punctuation: part of it does indeed come from the blood and the air’s circulation, from the apnee of the heart’s contraction, but another part is thinking thought refusal of



Side thinking 163 the yoke and the need to allow amphibology to play to get close to thought at its inception, when it has not yet finished unfurling and has no full stops and above all no commas.37

         / No commas above all beneath                    / No chance of

f­ollowing her amphibologies without going underwater, without what she calls ‘the incalculable, deep, borderless, strangely marine instant’,38 in other words amphibious feeling, the sort of feeling traced in the final lines of ‘Thinking Is Not What We Think’ in which ‘we descend like a troubled fish [un poisson inquiet]’, in which the car that has ‘no one in front and the author in the backseat by mistake’ ‘heads downstream’, in ‘the time of the fish, equivocal time’ (39/59, trans. slightly modified).39 For amphibology also has an invisible, secret ‘i’ within: it passes into amphibiology. Life on both sides, living on. This is another of the meanings of ‘amphibium’, that is to say not only ‘A being that lives either in water or on land, or is equally at home in either element’ (OED, ‘amphibia’, sense 1), but also ‘fig. a being of ambiguous or doubtful position’ (OED, sense 2). By way of illustration the OED quotes a line from Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Unfortunate Lover’, a phrase to marvel at: ‘Th’amphibium of Life and Death’.40

                 /  Amphibology and amphibiology. Where was I? It is all about the question that is Derrida’s, but

also everyone else’s, of how to come up with a countersigning reading, of how to write alongside her. How can one possibly keep up with her, beside her, she who is already beside herself? Twenty or so pages into his book, apropos some lines in FirstDays of the Year and the question of what is going on in a text in which the author appears to distinguish herself from the author, in other words an author or a fictional speaker or voice who speaks of ‘[a] difference between the author and me’ (102), Derrida makes a confession: ‘I confess that I am neither on her side nor on mine and that I no longer know where to put myself, nor where to place my voice’ (24/27, trans. slightly modified). His text accordingly proceeds, by tricks and turns, through forgetreadings and rememberreadings, in a singular and spectacular sliding movement, whereby he tracks and scans, jets across, mines and meticulously analyses her writings in one beginning after another while nonetheless immersing her, himself and us in a reading that will, as always, have encapsulated his perennial message: ‘always, always, “venture beyond the beginning” ’.41 He says, after about fifty pages, ‘I have not begun yet’, or again, ‘with her, one always has to begin and begin again’ (51), but his readings

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of beginnings in Cixous take us a long way, so far, so long, as distant as telepathy and magically close.       /To read her, Derrida says, is like being in a gold mine or under the sea. He figures what he does in H.C. for Life as ‘a reading at the bottom of the elemental sea: the exploratory movement of a diving submarine’ (29). Reading her you have to submit to a submarine mode while keeping a sharp eye on her shores. You need a coastal map (la carte côtière): With the shores in sight [En vue des côtes], one would adjust a periscope from afar in order to have a commanding view of the coastline while watching out for the floating minefield [au champ de mines flottantes], or even the volcanic subsoil, in any case for the magnetic seabed above which one tries to orient oneself: as if unconscious, with the vigilance of a submarine subconscious. (29/31)

Derrida imagines himself as a sort of marine-machine-animal in turn: ‘At the bottom of this underwater mine … I scan, skim over, and satellise at full tilt’ (40). To read her you have to be aware, ‘at every moment, at every quotation, at every word … that [all of her books are] magnetised, held in high-tension vibration, by the power of a magnetic subsoil at once actual and virtual, a bedrock that recharges each verbal unit with the memory and the projection of all the others’ (29). A word can stay ‘floating underwater’, like a whale or submarine, ‘waiting patiently from one end of the work to the other, for thirty-five years’ (41). Her work, at the level of the phrase or sentence, but also the book or entire oeuvre, calls for amphibological reading.           / ‘Mighty fish are born from the net in which they are caught [Les puissants poissons sont nés du filet, du net dans lesquels ils sont pris]’ (97/86), says Derrida, in a filleting, a textual weaving that is also a catch. Apropos her ‘shimmering fish’, her way of ‘doing things with words’, he calls and recalls an act of naming of his own: ‘That is what I call the poetics of the event. It produces magically, miraculously, and quasi-mystically the very thing it nominates. It brings about what it catches’ (97). This net of hers, he goes on, is not just made of words, it is ‘a net of telephone wires’ (98), where the telephone (first of all, perhaps, as auto-affection or ‘mental telephony’) is ‘the condition of reading as much as of writing’ (84).42            / Not a sound now. Under the sea. As Ada says in Embers, on the subject of the sound of the sea: ‘It’s only on the surface, you know. Underneath all is as quiet as the grave. Not a sound. All day, all night, not a sound.’43 It is as if I am still at the bottom of the sea, on ‘the wrong side’.



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Imagine a submarine version of Endgame, the stage a railway-carriage at the bottom of the sea. CLOV: [He goes towards window left.] Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right mind. Then it passes over and I’m as lucid as before. [He gets up on ladder, looks out of window.] Christ, she’s under water! [He looks.] How can that be? [He pokes forward his head, his hand above his eyes.] It hasn’t rained. [He wipes the pane, looks. Pause.] Ah what a mug I am! I’m on the wrong side! [He gets down, takes a few steps towards window right.] Under water! [He goes back for ladder.] What a mug I am! [He carries ladder towards window right.] Sometimes I wonder if I’m in my right senses. Then it passes off and I’m as intelligent as ever. [He sets down ladder under window right, gets up on it, looks out of window…].44

Things can appear to be going along so easily, everything is running along at a rapid, regular rhythm, the mission or the message that ‘we carry likewise carries us’ (37), as she says in that same derailing section of FirstDays of the Year called ‘Thinking Is Not What We Think’. But then, like a moment out of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, we reach, ‘without transition’, what she calls ‘the Impassable Stairway’. One has to go through to ‘the other side’ (this phrase, ‘the other side’, occurs again and again in FirstDays of the Year)45 via the wrong side; ‘one must turn the moon upside down, walk on one’s own head’ (38). This stairway presents a quite different sort of ‘slowness within speed’ from the one we observed earlier (in her ‘Writing Blind’): It is always the same repellent Stairway, the rising stairway, the stairway, the stairway that presents every difficulty, we have to climb it like an insect, with our back wavering over the void­– ­for the front of the stairway is concealed from us, we must crawl up it from behind, each movement takes an hour, a thick, heavy hour… (37)

On my side, or at least from the side of dream, I recall here another stairway, a stairway that is perhaps not a way at all. On the night of 8 October 2005, what I believe was my first dream of Jacques Derrida ‘restored to life’. It is a basement café. I am with an old friend I haven’t seen in years, a child psychotherapist. Jacques comes over, very airy, puppet-like, I don’t know if he is alive or not, but at the same time everyone knows that he is dying, and that he is working on his last book. My friend asks is it true that it’s about Waiting for Godot? And he laughs and laughs, falls on his face, literally, as in a puppet-show, down he goes, laughing, then up again­– ­Yes, on Godot, he is happy to say. At another table there are three men discussing optical devices and brain implants. One of them, with a kind of ‘evil eye’, holds up some box-shaped little gadget that he claims

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JD has in his head and that, he says, explains why JD is as he is. My friend and I are now joined by Hélène and we begin to converse. Meanwhile Jacques is demonstrating, with a fluctuating impression of hilarity and deadly seriousness, how he can make his voice, just like this, completely, tilting his head very slightly to one side, disappear. Then while we are talking he vanishes, as if in a puff of smoke or flounce of blue silks, blowing about the exit, up a spiral staircase in the corner.    / Always the other and another side, and yes, the other side that is not a side, that has no side. As he says in H.C. for Life, ‘death is not a side, it is a nonside’ (36). But at the same time this nonside can be on his side. To recall the words from the epilogue, almost the last words of his book: ‘Between her and me, it is as if it were a question of life and death. Death would be on my side and life on hers’ (158). The figuring of death as ‘the other side’, and vice versa: that would require another volume, a book-length treatment. I can even imagine a title: Lethe’s Wharf. Or: Behind the Slaughtered Ox. As with the logic of the supplement, perhaps, there will always be another side, and another. I wonder about the fictive posthumous side of FirstDays of the Year, a side that Derrida does not address directly, it seems to me, in his writings on her. There is what one might venture to call a Gothic side to Cixous that Derrida seems inclined to leave to one side and that, in my view, makes for one of the most bizarre and unsettling aspects of her work. It’s what connects her work so strongly with Emily Brontë and Edgar Allan Poe. In the case of FirstDays of the Year it has to do with the doubling and ‘fitting’ of genres, between the main part of the book and the ‘Ideal Story’ with which it concludes. The ‘I’, ‘I’ who is and is not the author, writes: The extraordinary liberty that the dead give us, that only the dead give us, is not given to us by the living with whom we live … And if we could conduct ourselves among ourselves like the dead, it would be Paradise anew. This is what the characters in The Ideal Story attempt to do. And this attempt is one of the reasons why the author has a hard time writing: the characters live as though after death. (106)

And then in the ‘ideal story’ itself, a fiction that she has thus commented on in the work while also being part of the work, we are set adrift. It has to do with Clarice Lispector, who is sometimes the narrator or fictionalised author and sometimes a character in the third person. She is said to have been ‘born to give [Isaac] … the great lunar freedom that only the friends who are still faithful to us in death give us: so he can feel assured of judgment and condemna-



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tion, and on the other hand [d’un autre côté] assured of pardon and protection’ (151/225).    / Appalled, I said I felt, on first looking into Cixous’s Homer, the text entitled Le Voisin de zéro.46 It has landed in my lap, like a fish or a jewel, but underwater, I dip, and the first three sides that meet my gaze are these: side 23, where she writes of Beckett’s word cutting the word, cutting speech or language, the little ‘o’ of ‘parole’, missing out an ‘o’ in the vicinity of zero (‘La parole parle. Le parole se coupe la parole’), and where she declares Beckett a ‘champion of parauditory deconstruction’ (champion de la déconstruction parauditive) and thereby says all that might be said, in a word, about the deconstructive para-, about Beckett and the cut, and Beckett beside himself, listening to the impossible ‘congener’ as he evokes it in The Unnamable, or in the company of Company, listening beside itself, a parley of the parergon, parable of the parakeet and déjà vu; and then side 40 (and I’m already feeling exhausted, exhilarausted in the way only she can make me feel) where she talks about Beckett’s animal exhaustiveness, and his exhausting of the reader (Crever l’animal. Éreinter le lecteur), specifically in terms of Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘The Exhausted’ (‘L’Épuisé’), she excises a passage that I had previously settled on, having decided to cite it for its focus on the importance of the figure of the side, above all the quadrilateral in Quad, the play (as Deleuze notes) ‘without words, without voice’, a play ‘close to a ballet’ that is all about the way in which the centre is avoided, about the gesture, like a ‘syncope’ or ‘little jump’, whereby each of the four characters sidesteps to avoid each other and avoid the centre.47 Deleuze writes: ‘The bodies avoid each other respectively, but they avoid the centre absolutely. They sidestep each other at the centre in order to avoid each other, but each of them also sidesteps in solo in order to avoid the centre.’48 Beckett’s sidesteps: a classically controlled veering. She doesn’t quote all of this, she stops short, just before Deleuze starts zooming in on the sidestep, as if to leave this open, for side thinking: should I feel relieved? Yes, but also more than relief, there is this enchanting strangeness, an ‘oceanic mood’ (97) as Derrida calls it in H.C. for Life, a madness, beside myself, you   and then at last, side 70, where I fall upon the words: ‘Qui à côté de moi aujourd’hui?’ She quotes a passage from Cendres or (as the English has it) Embers­ – ­and I see, turning back, she makes a point about this, about this lovely English word that is and was from the beginning the remainder or rest of ‘remembers’: ‘Embers était déjà le reste de Remembers’ (68). (Already, you see, I’m turning from one side to another, dazed and dreamy, as if slipping away, before this

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little text that traces and races at characteristic supersonic speed, hyper-revving up around Beckett’s oeuvre, minesweeper to his roadsweeper, such absolutely different weepers Beckett and Cixous, producing the sort of stroboscopic writing that Deleuze attributes to her and seeks in turn to do, himself, it seems to me, above all perhaps in his writing on cinema.)49 Embers glow, she stresses: they are live charcoal, not ashes (68). I see the section is called ‘À côté de moi’ (68). Beside me. She has introduced Henry, at the opening of Beckett’s play, as an instance of ‘the last man’. It’s by the sea, I say, I see, with a glance sidewise at a sure-fire play in English unavailable in French: H.C. has the ladder or ax of her aitch but she also has the sea. That’s how it is (comment c’est). The initial stage directions for this ‘piece for radio’ (as it is subtitled): ‘Sea scarcely audible. HENRY’s boots on shingle. He halts. Sea a little louder.’ And then the piece begins (written in English though she cites it in French), in the voice of Henry: On. [Sea. Voice louder.] On! [He moves on. Boots on shingle. As he goes.] Stop. [Boots on shingle. As he goes. Louder.] Stop! [He halts. Sea a little louder.] Down. [Sea. Voice louder.] Down! [Slither of shingle as he sits. Sea, still faint, audible throughout what follows whenever pause indicated.] Who is beside me now? [Pause.] An old man, blind and foolish. [Pause.] My father, back from the dead, to be with me. [Pause.] As if he hadn’t died. [Pause.] No, simply back from the dead, to be with me, in this strange place. [Pause.] Can he hear me? [Pause.] Yes, he must hear me. [Pause.] To answer me? [Pause.] No, he doesn’t answer me. [Pause.] Just be with me. [Pause.] That sound you hear is the sea, we are sitting on the strand. [Pause.] I mention it because the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn’t see what it was you wouldn’t know what it was.50

So: you see the sea, this crazy homophone, you hear it? Like Hamlet, Embers is about the death of the father, or rather presumed death, since the time is not known and (as Henry goes on to say) ‘We never found your body, you know.’51    / Deranged text, not just for its manifestations of being haunted or needing to be, talking to the dead, and having the dead one by one’s side, in the dark, in the absolute dark of a radio (as if at the bottom of the sea), but also for its cracked relation to character, to living characterisation, and to the figure of ‘you’, you as living dead addressee. Reading her I start by translating, from one side to the other, from Beckett’s French to an English not his, for the phrase about which she writes here, ‘Qui à côté de moi aujourd’hui?’, is perhaps less odd in Beckett’s original. It is only in the French version that the verb has gone missing. ‘Who is beside me now?’ asks Henry, in English, literally, litorally. I am set on tuning



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in to ancient marine English. As one always must, to read Beckett, Brontë, Poe, Shakespeare and Co. Paradiophonic seaside sounds and silence. ‘Qui à côté de moi aujourd’hui?’ As she then notes: Who beside me now? Subject without verb to be. Nominal sentence. Who, without name, without sound, without being or ‘to be’, in another play, would be another H, Hamlet (Qui à côté de moi aujourd’hui? Sujet sans verbe être. Phrase nominale. Qui, sans nom, sans bruit, sans être, dans une autre pièce, serait un autre H, Hamlet.) (70)

    / Who’s there? She goes on to discuss the producer or author

technician of this ‘mental theatre’ as god-like (tout comme Dieu) and ‘omnipotent’ (tout-puissant) (70–1): Beckett has invented what she calls an ‘autoaffective radiotelephony’ (72). Too much. I’m seizing up. ‘Just be with me’: À côté de moi pas plus.52 How to be beside the dead, just have him be with me, especially given that, as Cixous hauntingly suggests, ‘no dead person has ever said their last word’.53 Just be with me: in what tone, in whose voice should that be heard, from what side? Just to read these few pages, about H. on the shore, hearing voices, amidst or against the sounds of the sea and horses’ hooves, seeing or being as he is on the other side, the side his father would never come to (‘You would never live this side of the bay’, says Henry), just to read what she says and what might be said about this little text Cendres or Embers, would take me the rest of my life, every last ember.54 To my dearest last and only ember. Sigh. I am approaching the end, concerning the essay I did not write.               / I cease, unsure where outside happens or if the text is inside, inside outside or if the text is itself outside, or if outside is in the text. This is what happens when one writes what happens. I’m quoting of course, from her, in the radiotelephonic dark, writing blind55

                       / Sea sighed. It’s a discombobulating thing, when Derrida talks about the centuries

that would be required in order to read her.56 As if you could come back from the dead, just be with him, her, the other, who, a who or what that might be, still reading, for centuries, beside or under the sea.                / To sigh. Stop short of sign. Without signing.      / A curious variant in early texts of Hamlet, apparently of limited interest to editors, perhaps because it seems to leave so little to be said: ‘The rest is silence’ (5.2.307) are traditionally taken to be Hamlet’s last words; but

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in the first Folio there is a further sentence, comprising four spaced-out letters, the same single letter repeated, ‘O, o, o, o’. This is then followed by the stage direction: ‘Dyes’. O cipher! O zero! ‘Forever’, as she says in the final sentence of her Beckett book, ‘signifying nothing’ (‘À jamais signifying nothing’) (79). The ‘O’ would be the last recorded syllable of Hamlet’s time. She chooses to inscribe Sam Beckett’s end, to give him his send-off, within the playing of Shakespeare, a strutting and fretting come to nothing. Le Voisin de zéro opens with an epigraph from Macbeth, namely the lines in which Macbeth responds to hearing that his wife is dead. This is the death Macbeth O’s, how he owes it: ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow…’ These thrice times three O’s call up the attention she gives to the ghOsting O’s of Hamlet in her essay ‘Shakespeare and Jacques Derrida: The Gift of the Ghost, or The Beaver and the Mole’.57 The epigraph to Le Voisin de zéro takes Macbeth’s speech to its conclusion: ‘It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing’ (5.5.26–8). The O (‘signifying nothing’) with which Le Voisin de zéro begins and ends traces a movement that is characteristic of Cixous’s writings: as she has observed, ‘the time of a work is not linear but circular or spherical [circulaire ou sphérique]’.58 Hamlet is, for her, ‘the sighing tragedy’, a play full of O’s and sighs, but she rounds off Beckett with Macbeth.59 To enclose Beckett on the stage of such a slaughterous-thinking, sleepless, supernatural, mostly loveless play: so much ill said unsaid, to be or not to be said.     / How to sound, hear or read Hamlet’s terminal ‘O’? The Oxford editor G. R. Hibbard regards the ‘O, o, o, o’ as ‘the object of unjustified derision’ among critics, and ‘translates’ it (this is his word, ‘translating’ in quotation marks) into a stage direction: ‘He gives a long sigh and dies.’60 Sighed-thinking: this improbable homophone would take its inspiration from Shakespeare (that which, in Cleopatra’s phrase, is ‘past the size of dreaming’ (Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.117)) and from what Derrida says about the sigh, above all perhaps apropos the poetic in Celan, in the sigh or verdict or expiration of the words ‘The world is gone, I must carry you [Die Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen].’61 And then, beside this, in the same instant, in what we might call the amphibium of a sigh, in H.C. for Life, when he characterises ‘the strange tense of [the] puisse [might] or puissiez-vous [would that you might]’ in terms of something which, he says, ‘I have addressed to you like a kind of fervent or sighing plea [comme une sorte de prière fervente ou soupirante]’ (60/57). ‘Oh,’ he sighs: ‘if only you could read!’ (60).



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*

Side chunnel: telepathic afterword Postscript, 20 February–5 March 2019. It is not usual for literary criticism to date itself. But this is one of the ways in which Cixous’s work invites us to think, read and write differently. Her texts often specify dates, including the date of writing. History and autobiography are on stage, it’s a poetic drama­– ­or a drama adrift, on the way towards poetry.62 ‘Dates delight me, always,’ she says in August 2002, ‘I don’t take them literally but as a phantasm, a wonderful and totally fictional punctuation of time, as a sign of humanity swimming in time, and attempting to stitch up the sea [coudre la mer].’63 As Derrida has said, ‘Cixous is a great ­thinker-writer about time and the hour [un grand penseur écrivain de l’heure]’.64 On the one hand, reading her is bound up with a thinking of ‘centuries to come’.65 Thus FirstDays of the Year, for example, includes wondering ‘Where ­ y atoms, my palpitations­– i­ n 2989, where my vaporous thoughts?’ will we be­– m (76). Side thinking goes with ecological thinking. You can’t engage with deep time, deep ecology, a ‘climate change imaginary’, ‘the interconnectedness of all living and non-living things’, ‘Anthropocene disorder’ and ‘scalar literacy’ without side thinking.66 On the other hand, Cixous’s work is also passionately about the instant and about years not long gone. Such is the dreamlike but catastrophic evocation of time that comes with the title of her most recent book to fall lovingly through my letter box: 1938, nuits.67 In the years since I initially drafted the preceding pages about Cixous and Beckett, Laurent Milesi’s translation of Cixous’s book has appeared: Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett.68 A further essay would be required in order to explore this little book­– ­not just Milesi’s remarkably inventive translation, but also his succinct, richly provoking ‘intra-duction’ and the indispensable translator’s notes at the end. Zero’s Neighbour reminds us of the fact that translations can and do change languages. Milesi’s is, in its own way, a kind of poetic rioting. At the same time, it is necessary to register the manifestly altered ‘state of the world’ in the years since Le Voisin de zéro dropped through my door: ‘climate change’ has become ‘climate emergency’; we appear to be (in case this much wasn’t already evident) in a period of mass species extinction; the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008 continues, with increasing inequality, poverty and despair across the world; wars and conflicts of religion or over national sovereignty multiply; the rise of populism and the rise of fascism appear ­frighteningly

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intertwined; universities seem more than ever places inhospitable to creative and critical thinking, or to the principle of teaching and research ‘without condition’.69 As I write, the UK (closer to disintegration than at any point in its history) remains physically connected to France by the strange quasi-invisible reality of the Channel tunnel, even if the deadliness of fantasies of nationalism and national sovereignty (according to which people in the UK are implicitly charged to forget, or at any rate not think about, the fundamental indebtedness of ‘Brexit’ to the nonsensical portmanteau-making of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty)70 seems set to make the kinds of translational, translanational, transliterational, transgenic, telephonic might of ‘side thinking’ appear more irrelevant than ever.71 But in the same breath, the same sigh, we might also suggest that now­– ­more than ever­– ­side thinking is needed. This postscript, seeking to return us to the beginning ‘at last’, offers another O, a side chunnel. If Beckett is all about the endgame, Cixous is beginningame. In this neologism I sense an aim, the amiable in a name, and a singular âme (the beginningame bird that therefore I am), as well as an acronym of Ancient Marine English. I imagine more than one Channel tunnel­– ­in mole-like fashion, for now, I picture at least a dozen, none straight, all queer, including a particularly long and winding one running between Seaford and Arcachon. Being in a side chunnel is linked to what Cixous calls ‘the bottomless well beneath sleep’.72 It corresponds with how she talks about writing (in) Jours de l’an: ‘I write underground, like an animal, burrowing in the silence of my chest.’73 In this oneiric side chunnel I reiterate what every page of the present book seeks to affirm: that is to say, more than language, more than one language; lovingness and friendship (aimance) shared between, off to the side, suffering distance, incommensurable distance-feelings; forms of dreaming, realism, analysis and writing that veer off, away, far beyond the deathly futurelessness of nationalistic fervour.74 No side thinking without telepathy. Tele-pathy is irreducibly about the ‘pathos’ (mind or feeling, suffering), as well as about the enigmas and paradoxes of what is or seems ‘tele-’ (distant, at a distance). Telepathy is, among other things, a question of the Channel. As Derrida remarks in ‘Telepathy’ (1981), a fragment that forms a bizarre supplement to his ‘Envois’ in The Post Card, and focuses on Freud’s surprisingly numerous writings about telepathy and on the place of telepathy in the history of psychoanalysis: ‘our entire story of Freud also writes itself in English, it happens crossing the Channel [elle se passe à passer la Manche], and the Channel knows how to keep quiet’.75 Derrida evokes a sense



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of the Channel (la Manche) as having tricks up its sleeve, for example when he recounts how Freud’s letters to Wilhelm Fliess (a ‘packet of 284 extremely private letters’, as Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones describes them) came to be bought by Marie Bonaparte: she acquired the letters in Paris and managed to keep them out of Freud’s as well as Nazi hands until the end of the war when (in Jones’s words) they ‘braved … the mines in the English Channel and so reached London in safety’.76 Derrida’s ‘mine-sown Channel [la Manche entre les mines]’ (232/243) prefigures his description in H.C. for Life of reading Cixous in terms of a ‘floating minefield’ (29).77 His ‘Telepathy’ is itself a minefield. I have been reading and rereading it for decades: like the figure of ‘the big bang’ that, ‘at the origin of the universe’, ‘produced a noise that one can consider as still not having reached us’ (230–1), or like ‘the reserves of a volcano’ (239), it’s a text that seems to hold itself in reserve, while also continuing to surprise, throwing and blowing up new things. For instance, now, I see that it is sown with references to the side, in a manner that seems strangely in anticipation of, or in correspondence with, ‘the side’ in H.C. for Life. Drawing in particular on anecdotes and discussions provided by Ernest Jones, especially in the ‘Occultism’ chapter of his biography of Freud, Derrida emphasises ‘the side of … the England of Freud in the second half of the [nineteenth] century’ (233).78 This is a side (though Derrida does not put it in this way) going back, via the writings of Arthur Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy and others, to the invention of the word ‘telepathy’ (by F. W. H. Myers) in London in 1882 and, beyond that, to George Eliot and her weird and compelling text of 1859, The Lifted Veil. Derrida explores the idea that telepathy is a foreign body in psychoanalytic theory. Telepathy interferes with a thinking of the unconscious: it is ‘difficult to imagine a theory of [the] unconscious without a theory of telepathy’ (237). It throws up crucial questions about what’s ‘beyond the pleasure principle’: why is telepathy, for Freud, so consistently connected with death? How does ‘belief in telepathy’ relate to­– ­and indeed at moments seem to embody­– ­‘the death drive’? And it invites us to feel the insistent, even uncanny significance of writing: so much of Freud’s investigation of telepathy has to do with ‘letters, postcards, telegrams, visiting cards’ (241); it is, Derrida suggests, ‘epistolary through and through’ (247). Telepathy brings in the thought of another thinking, others thinking. On the side. To put analysis in analysis, it is a question of ‘looking for the foreign body on the side of the doctor [le corps étranger côté docteur]’ (260/270).

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Derrida’s text works with proliferating possibilities of what we might construe as telepathic. It’s not that there is some single, special sense to ‘telepathy’ (a spiritualist or occult meaning) and that it’s a matter of whether or not a person (you or I, Derrida or Freud, for example) believes in this. ‘The ultimate naïveté would be to allow oneself to think that Telepathy guarantees a destination that “posts and telecommunications” fail to assure’ (239). Derrida encourages us to think of telepathy as irreducibly multiple and shifting, even or perhaps especially when he (or the ‘I’ of the text) stresses the feminine form of the French noun (as a quasi-proper name, Télépathie) and talks about ‘get[ting] in touch with Telepathy in person [or rather] allow[ing] ourselves to be touched by her’ (236/247). But for all the richness and diversity of Derrida’s attention to telepathy and psychoanalysis, and related notions of telecommunications and ‘telepoetics’ (228), ‘teleanalysis’ (232) and ‘telethings’ (236), it is not until almost ten years later, when he is writing about Cixous in the essay ‘Ants’, dated 20 October 1990, and then more fully in H.C. for Life (originally delivered as a lecture at Cerisy in 1998), that he elaborates a more general account of telepathy in terms of literature, love, friendship and faith. H.C. for Life is remarkable for the way in which it describes­– ­and in turn enables us to feel­– ­the miraculous strangeness of Cixous’s writing-effects. As Derrida observes, very close to the end of the book: ‘Still, the feeling of magical telepathy remains intact. And supernatural’ (155). In the dream-drawn scene of Cixous’s writing (which is, above all perhaps, a criss-crossing, sea-sewing, channelling and interlinking of multiple voices), we find ourselves immersed in a sort of marine underworld, at once ancient and new-born. Feelings of magical telepathy and the supernatural can occur to us in dreams, they pass over or through us and we accept them without thinking. These are the dream-waters that Cixous taps. To recall a comment she makes in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing: ‘We must pass through dreams in order to perceive the supernatural dimension of the natural.’79 Derrida employs the language of miracle, magic and telepathy in his readings of Cixous, in order to foreground the workings of chance and writing itself as ‘more mighty than we are’.80 H.C. for Life sees Cixous’s work in terms of ‘a new logic of the phantasm’, a new ‘poetics of the event’ that entails ‘a mighty power of making-say as making-happen or arrive [une puissance du faire-dire comme faire-arriver]’ (76–7/ 9).81 There is telepathy, a ‘telepathic wire’ (81), there are instants of ‘telepathic telephony’ or ‘telepathic phone call’ (83); but Derrida stresses that this has nothing to do with ‘any morbid witchcraft, any obscurantist or occult thaumaturgy, [or] irrational bewitchment’ (120). Rather, ‘telepathy’



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in Cixous’s work comprises an uncanny merging of writing and telephony, the might and love of life.82 Love and friendship, in turn, entail telepathic faith. Thus he ends his 1990 essay on Cixous with an affirmation of the ‘most faithful telepathy’.83 This faith or fidelity has to do with shared feelings of incommensurable distance and disparity. As he puts it, earlier in ‘Ants’: One cannot love separately and one cannot love but separately, in the separation or the disparity of the pair. At an infinite distance, because incommensurable: I will never be at the same distance­– ­from you, as you, as you from me. No common measure, no symmetry. Infinite separation in the couple itself and in the parity of the pair.84

Derrida is thus led to wonder about a faith that operates in love (my love for you, for example) and in the ‘as if ’ (that we would perhaps more readily associate with literature, fiction and the ‘might’): is there a difference between saying ‘I love’ and ‘if I loved’, ‘I love you’ and ‘if I loved you’, ‘as if I loved you’, ‘as if I loved’, the ‘as’ separating-repairing love, ­disjoining-adjoining, se-reparation, re-separation of love in what conjoins it, conjugates or conjugalises it to itself? The suspensive modality of the possible, which seems to cause the ‘epochè’ of a declaration of love, signifies maybe that love can belong only to the order of faith or testimony, not at all to that of proof or certainty.85

This faith is already evident in Derrida’s ‘Telepathy’, not only in its multiple explorations of the notion of ‘belief in telepathy’, but also in its explicitly fictive or literary dimension, which becomes most marked when, halfway though the text, he takes up the voice and body of Freud: ‘Imagine that I am walking like him, to his rhythm…’ (243). Just be with me. Telepathy, for nuncle Freud (as Cixous likes to call him, mixing affection and Shakespearean clownishness), is a foreign body in psychoanalysis: it’s Freud’s side thinking. ‘That’s how I want to appear: not to take sides’ (245), declares Derrida, writing as Freud. But everyone has sides, even if it involves appearing not to take sides. And the very writing of ‘Telepathy’ (in which Derrida incorporates the identity of Freud, thinks as Freud), like the ‘thought the author’ of Cixous’s FirstDays of the Year, entails a telepathic structure and affectivity. Side thinking: it’s up to you­– ­that is to say, the others in you. As Derrida tells his beloved addressee: ‘Pick out and link up what you can on your side [ton côté]’ (255/264).

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Notes   1 Hélène Cixous, letter of 3 July 2004, citing Nicholas Royle, ‘On Second Sight: George Eliot’, in Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 84.   2 Hélène Cixous, FirstDays of the Year, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Jours de l’an (Paris: Des femmes, 1990). Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash. Here citing 163/243 and 3/5 respectively.   3 I borrow these definitions from Chambers Dictionary, 12th edn (London: Chambers Harrap, 2011).  4 See Nicholas Royle, ‘Mole’, in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 241, citing Hélène Cixous, Sorties, first published in French in 1975 (quoted more fully below).   5 Hélène Cixous, letter of 29 August 2004.   6 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 65, translation modified; ‘Sorties’, in Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 119.  7 Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 38; H.C. pour la vie, c’est à dire… (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 38. Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash.   8 Definitional phrases here are from Chambers Dictionary; for ‘versatility’, see Hélène Cixous, ‘The Unforeseeable’, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, in Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, ed. Eric Prenowitz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 221–40, in particular: ‘[versatility] is a word which rings pleasingly in my ears and mind. I could write a book on versatility. Naturally I would call it Versatilities. Those I love the most are versatile’ (235).   9 Samuel Beckett, Happy Days, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 146. 10 See Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 58–9. 11 Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder and Boyars, 1959), 353. 12 Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Rootprints: Memory and Life Writing, trans. Eric Prenowitz (London: Routledge, 1997), 9.



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13 Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 13. 14 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, interview with Christa Stevens, trans. Suzanne Dow, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 9. 15 Beckett, Happy Days, 158–9. 16 See Derrida, H.C. for Life, xiii–xiv, 20–2, 27–9, 36–7, for example. In the pages that follow I will detail some of the many other references that Derrida’s text makes to one ‘side’ or another. 17 Ginette Michaud, ‘Derrida & Cixous: Between and Beyond, or “what to the letter has happened” ’, trans. Sarah-Anaïs Crevier Goulet, New Literary History, 37 (2006), 85–106. 18 Hélène Cixous, Le Voisin de zéro: Sam Beckett (Paris: Galilée, 2007). 19 Cixous made this remark in a discussion at the ‘Secret Passages: Hélène Cixous­– ­On the Frontiers of Literature’ conference, at University College London, on 15 November 2003. 20 Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), 144. 21 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Novel Today’ (1984), interview with Henri Quéré, trans. Amaleena Damlé, in White Ink, 22. 22 Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, trans. Robert Denommé, rev. Eric Prenowitz, in Volleys of Humanity, 14–40. For a somewhat different account of this veering into and of the body and beyond language, see my essay ‘Lingophobia’, in French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK, ed. Irving Goh (London: Routledge, 2020), 32–45. 23 See Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 82. On ‘le prénom ou le surnom de Dieu: le Côté’, see Derrida, H.C. for Life, 54/52. Derrida also speaks of the play of ‘side’ and ‘rib’ (both côté in French), the mother’s and the father’s (especially Adam’s), in H.C. for Life, 146–7. 24 On the sideswipe or sidelining within, cf. Derrida’s remarks in ‘The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing’: ‘The movements of deconstruction do not put pressure on structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it’: Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 24, translation modified; De la grammatologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1967), 39. 25 For another reading of FirstDays of the Year in this context, see Mairéad Hanrahan’s admirable essay ‘Where Thinking Is Not What We Think’, New Literary History, 37:1 (2006), 179–95.

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26 As Freud declares in relation to the idea of thinking of something as though it were our death: ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators.’ See ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 14: 289. 27 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 146. 28 See C. T. Onions, A Shakespeare Glossary, enlarged and revised throughout by Robert D. Eagleson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 104. 29 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 11. 30 For ‘letters of omnipotence [les lettres de toute-puissance]’, see Hélène Cixous, OR: les lettres de mon père (Paris: Des femmes, 1997), 187. It is in this context that Derrida speaks of her work in terms of ‘omnipotence as impotence, the experience of the impossible’ (HC for Life, 133). See, too, his Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius: The Secrets of the Archive, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), on Cixous and ‘the Omnipotence-other of literature’ (44, 55ff). 31 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 119. 32 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 152. 33 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 11. Another Beck-it: the way Vladimir goes on here leaves unclear what the ‘it’, the beckoned it is. Is ‘it’ the heart, or desire, or hope? ‘Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.’ 34 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 144. 35 Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV, 1406–7, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 36 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, Book IV, 1415. 37 Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 145. Originally published in Rencontre terrestre: Arcachon, Roosevelt Island, Paris Montsouris, Manhattan, Cuernavaca (Paris: Galilée, 2005), 136. One might have expected a comma between ‘thinking thought’ and ‘refusal’, but any such absence would after all be part of the point… (My particular thanks to Eric Prenowitz for thinking this thought.) 38 See Hélène Cixous, ‘What is it o’clock? or The door (we never enter)’, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 79. I explore this ‘marine instant’ from a rather different perspective in ‘Portmanteau’ (above). 39 There are numerous other amphibious moments in FirstDays of the Year: when the narrator of ‘An Ideal Story’ describes herself, for example, as ‘a fish in a space suit’ (161), or as someone who knows ‘how to swim between the clouds’ (179).



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40 Andrew Marvell, ‘The Unfortunate Lover’, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Edinburgh: Pearson, 2007), 90. 41 Jacques Derrida, ‘Reading “beyond the beginning”; or, On the Venom in Letters: Postscript and “Literary Supplement” ’, in Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 108. 42 For more on ‘mental telephony’ in this context, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce’, trans. Tina Kendall and Shari Benstock, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 270–2. 43 Samuel Beckett, Embers, in The Complete Dramatic Works, 261. 44 Beckett, Endgame, 128. 45 See, for example, 38, 53, 61, 76, 97, 106, 112–3, 116, 119, 123–4, 128, 132–3, 153. 46 I would note here that I wrote these words, echoing Keats’s poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ (‘Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold…’), some years before Cixous wrote her Homère est morte… (Paris: Galilée, 2014). For Keats’s poem, see The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (London: Heinemann, 1978), 64. 47 See Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 162–3. 48 Deleuze, ‘The Exhausted’, 163. 49 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Hélène Cixous or Stroboscopic Writing’ (1972), trans. Martin McQuillan, in Reading Cixous Writing, ed. Martin McQuillan, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2002), 203–5. 50 Beckett, Embers, 253. 51 Beckett, Embers, 253–4. 52 See Beckett, Embers, 253. The French ‘À côté de moi pas plus’ (cited in Cixous, 70) stands in for the English ‘Just be with me’. 53 OR: les lettres de mon père, 25; quoted by Derrida, H.C. for Life, 124. 54 Beckett, Embers, 253. 55 Recall (because you cannot see) Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 145. 56 At one moment in H.C. for Life, for example, Derrida refers to extracts from Cixous’s work that ‘would merit centuries of reading’ (39). 57 Cixous’s text was originally delivered as a lecture at Cardiff University in September 2007. The first part of the essay has been published, in a translation by Laurent Milesi, as ‘Shakespeare Ghosting Derrida’, in Shakespeare and Derrida, ed. Nicholas Royle, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 34:1 (2012), 1–24. For the discussion of O-effects in Hamlet, see in particular 13–16. 58 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 137; Rencontre terrestre, 129. 59 Cixous, ‘Shakespeare Ghosting Derrida’, 14. 60 Hamlet, ed. G. R. Hibbard (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1987), 352n. 61 See Antony and Cleopatra, 5.2.120; Jacques Derrida, ‘Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue­

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– ­Between Two Infinities, the Poem’, trans. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski, in Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 158; cf. also 141, 150. 62 For an extended meditation on poetry and dates, and the poem as ‘a dating’, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Shibboleth: For Paul Celan’, trans. Joshua Wilner, in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 3–71. Like Cixous, Derrida often explicitly dates his texts, including ‘Shibboleth’ (originally given as a lecture at the University of Washington, Seattle, on 14 October 1984). 63 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 145; Rencontre terrestre, 136. Cixous is talking here, in particular, about OR: Les Lettres de mon père. 64 Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 74, translation slightly modified; Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie: Les secrets de l’archive (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 86. 65 See Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, where Derrida links her archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France with a ‘readership for centuries to come’ (75). 66 On the ‘climate change imaginary’, I am thinking in particular of the work of Claire Colebrook and Sarah Wood; on the interconnectedness of ‘the mesh’, see Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 28 and passim; on ‘Anthropocene disorder’, see Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), especially 139–57; on ‘scalar literacy’, see Timothy Clark, The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 38–56. 67 Hélène Cixous, 1938, nuits (Paris: Galilée, 2019). 68 Hélène Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett, trans. Laurent Milesi (Cambridge: Polity, 2010). An earlier version of the first part of ‘Side Thinking’ was originally given as a lecture at ‘Hélène Cixous: Written Initials­– ­Ultimate Plays’, an international symposium at the University of Albany, New York, on 23 April 2007. 69 On freedom in university teaching and research, see Jacques Derrida, ‘The University Without Condition’, in Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 202–37. 70 Cf. Nicholas Royle, ‘The Future of Literary Thinking: Ten Aphorisms’, Textual Practice, 30:7 (2016), 1160. 71 On the ‘transgenic’ in Cixous, see Derrida, H.C. for Life, 119; and for a discussion of transgenic art in relation to ‘the ecological thought’, see Morton, The Ecological Thought, 36–7. 72 Hélène Cixous, Mother Homer is Dead…, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 69. 73 See the back cover of Jours de l’an: ‘J’écris sous terre, comme une bête, enfouissant dans le silence de ma poitrine’. See too Cixous, FirstDays of the Year, 101.



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74 On ‘aimance’ (‘lovingness’ or ‘lovence’), see Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 7 and passim. Derrida attributes the invention of this neologistic aimance to his friend Abdelkebir Khatibi: see 24–5, n.5. 75 Jacques Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 226–61; here, 231; ‘Télépathie’, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, new rev. edn (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 237–70; here, 242. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text, with (where appropriate) the original French reference following a slash. 76 Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), vol. 1: 316–17. Derrida suggestively thickens the plot by parenthetically recalling Marie Bonaparte’s work on Edgar Allan Poe and her place in the debate between Derrida and Lacan around whether a letter can reach its destination, or what the destination of a letter might be: ‘yes, she of “The Purloined Letter” and “The Purveyor of Truth”’ (231). 77 I note here the coincidence of my having earlier referred to Cixous as ‘minesweeper to Beckett’s roadsweeper’­– ­without having at that time read her wonderful lines about Beckett as ‘balayeur’ (Cixous, Le Voisin de zéro, 76). It’s all about that omnipittance and Omnipotence-other (see note 30, above). In Milesi’s translation: ‘Beckett the sweeper: he sweeps words away from his own texts and he needs ten years per page, to sweep Texts for Nothing 13 till Not I 1950 till 1973 twenty-three years he needs to sweep away remains of I from Old Voice till Mouth… etc’ (Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour, 61). 78 Ernest Jones, ‘Occultism’, in Sigmund Freud: Life and Work (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), vol. 3: 402–36. 79 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 97. 80 I borrow this formulation from Derrida, Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, 49. 81 For a recent discussion of these issues from a more technologically inflected perspective, see Michael Haworth’s lucid and thought-provoking study, Neurotechnology and the End of Finitude (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), especially ch. 4, ‘Techno-Telepathy and the Otherness of the Other’, 127–68. 82 This is encapsulated at one moment of dreamlike exhortation in H.C. for Life, in the imaginary tele-poly-phonic but intimate exclamation: ‘would that you might live [puisses-tu vivre]’ (77/70). 83 Jacques Derrida, ‘Ants’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Reading Cixous Writing, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 24 (2003), 17–42; here, 39. Elsewhere, for example in a letter of 15 September 1990, Derrida speaks of ‘telepathic friendship’: see ‘Afterw.rds:

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or, at least, less than a letter about a letter less’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, in Afterwords, ed. Nicholas Royle (Tampere, Finland: Outside Books, 1992), 202. 84 Derrida, ‘Ants’, 27. 85 Derrida, ‘Ants’, 27.

14

All wards

I was finishing a book about Hélène Cixous. There is a time when you’re no longer writing, you’re finishing, it’s the end. But how is it possible, when you regularly wake up, first thing in the morning or middle of the night, with a phrase or image that provides, you believe, a crucial additional portal and you pick up your pen and you’re opening, O pen, another chapter of The Book I Do Not Finish? Or you go to see, you go to the sea of the screen at your laptop before you’re properly awake, and stumble over some word that throws you overkeyboard anew, like stumble? The sleepy word or phrase draws circles round what you were previously saying, draws out new perspectives on what you thought you thought, draws up new lines of engagement with all the questions that preoccupy you: love and the unforeseeable, literature and the real, dreaming and writing, how to keep. *    *    *    *    * Overkeyboard: this is the sort of a word that might bring cardiac arrest, the effect of a word that you’re looking for­– ­in accordance with that motif so well known, from the ‘word within a word’ that T. S. Eliot resurrects in ‘Gerontion’ from Lancelot Andrewes, to Samuel Beckett’s subatomically fevered ‘what is the word’, to Derrida’s telepathy: ‘I felt, from a distance and confusedly, that I was searching for a word, perhaps a proper name…’1 It is the fate of a character in An English Guide to Birdwatching: ‘The sentence he was writing as he hovered over his keyboard, staring at the screen, pursuing the pulsing vertical of the cursor as it left in its wake a new letter, then word, punctuation, space, till the final full-stop, gave Stephen Osmer such an access of pleasure that he died.’2 *    *    *    *    * Beyond sovereignty: the thrownness of every throne.

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*    *    *    *    * Overkeyboard thrown for example years ago at stumble when Hélène Cixous telephoned and asked would I read Clarence’s dream from Richard III on the radio, for France Culture.3 In French? I asked, incredulous. No, darling (she laughed), in English:          As we paced along Upon the giddy footing of the hatches, Methought that Gloucester stumbled, and in stumbling Struck me, that sought to stay him, overboard Into the tumbling billows of the main. Lord, lord, methought what pain it was to drown: What dreadful noise of waters in my ears, What ugly sights of death within my eyes! Methought I saw a thousand fearful wrecks, Ten thousand men that fishes gnawed upon, Wedges of gold, great anchors, heaps of pearl, Inestimable stones, unvalued jewels. Some lay in dead men’s skulls, and in those holes Where eyes did once inhabit there were crept, As ’twere in scorn of eyes, reflecting gems, Which wooed the slimy bottom of the deep, And mocked the dead bones that lay scattered by.4

Methought that Gloucester stumbled and in stumbling the listener is drawn down with Clarence with Shakespeare’s stumbling as it tumbles into the tumbling billows of the main in which we hear no doubt the sea, the main, the main meaning of ‘the main’, but also the hand maintaining the stumble tumbling as it writes. Did Shakespeare realise that he was writing about the ray in Quilt?5 Or that in ‘woo[ing] the slimy bottom of the deep’ he was giving a habitation for Cixous as a ‘creature of the bottom’?6 What does ‘realise’ mean here? I would like to link it to le vivier du vivement, the fishpond or life-pool of liveance or livingness that Derrida finds in Cixous’s writing; but let’s leave this subaqueous scene for now, we will come back to it.7 *    *    *    *    * To begin with, the title. What to call a book? Usually for me a title comes first. In the case of Quilt it came at the end, after the end. The thing was done, everything



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apart from the title. I met with my publishers one morning, we sat with coffee around a huge bowl of blueberries and discussed a list of twenty-four possibilities: the earlier working title had been Overlooked; one of the editors favoured These Things Happen From Time to Time. Two further contenders came from Clarence’s dream: The Tumbling Billows and Where Eyes Did Once Inhabit. None of these seemed right, but how alternative titles can haunt a book!8 This conversation with the publishers had the overdetermined strangeness of an encounter with the Fates­– ­Vicky Blunden, Candida Lacey and Corinne Pearlman, wonderful editors, and none of them, so far as I know, passionate about threadwork in a so-called literal sense, but still we ended up with a quilt. Jacques Derrida says that ‘a title is always a promise’.9 To think of the title is thus to think of the being-promise of a promise. That is, perhaps most memorably, his phrase for construing the failure of Marxism in the twentieth century, its failing to respect ‘the being-promise of a promise’.10 How do you keep the being-promise of a title? At issue here is what he calls ‘a traditional gesture of deconstruction’, namely the act of ‘interrogating, so as to put them back into play, titles in general: the title of the title, the justification and authority of the title. And to do so by marking a multi-referentiality … The reference of the title, that to which it refers, the thing in play becomes at once multiple, different, and deferred.’11 *    *    *    *    * I was finishing a book about Hélène Cixous. It had taken me years. Not a big book but a lengthy gestation, a long-drawn-out labour of loves, lost and saved. Many titles suggested themselves, but again it was only at the end that a title came, in that hypnagogic daze before days start­– ­Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing. I wrote to her about this, to see if she was happy with the idea. Various objections could be made. Why these nouns or names for her? Surely the last thing you’d call Cixous is a ‘realist’? She hates realism, she’s said so. For instance, in an interview entitled ‘Language is the Only Refuge’: ‘I’ve always tried to distance reality,’ she says, ‘because I’ve never wanted to enter into realism which I hate.’12 And Cixous an ‘analyst’? She hasn’t even been ‘in analysis’. I was travelling, ‘away from my desk’ at a foreign desk, my letter to her in July 2017 from Seattle was brief, but it included a pencil drawing of a herring gull, as I recall, and said a little about the acronym of the subtitle­– ­‘d’ is for ‘dreamer’, ‘r’ is for ‘realist’, ‘a’ is for ‘analyst’, ‘w’ is for ‘writing’: draw. For this book, I came to see as I was finishing it, was among other things about the relationship

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between writing and drawing, about Cixous’s interest in drawing, and about the fascination and provocation of the English word draw. She was at another desk too, in the other place, at Arcachon, she replied: ‘I see that we have­– a­ gain­– a­ s usual­– ­telepathised: I was­– ­you were writing about The Title (that will maybe be the title of our next books) over oceans … I love DRAW (and Ward too, that is all wards).’13 In the same letter she spoke of An English Guide to Birdwatching: ‘Meanwhile,’ she wrote, ‘I am using the peace and bird-singing time here to re-read your English guide­– ­It does make me work, dream and realistize [sic].’ The ‘sic’ is hers, sic Cixous: Cixous sic. So, since then, along with her ‘ward’ and ‘all wards’, I have been pondering this sic word ‘realistize’. Sic’s homophone is sick: in contemporary English it’s become a primal word, meaning both ‘unwell’, ‘diseased’, ‘gruesome’, and ‘really good’, ‘awesome’, ‘cool’. But in its Latin form, ‘sic’ (meaning ‘so’ or ‘thus’) is a parenthetical insertion, as the OED puts it, ‘to guard against the supposition of misquotation’. Ward off the possibility of misreading, with a sic. So many of Cixous’s words and sentences might merit this parenthetical insertion. Isn’t that what it’s like to read her? You come to a word or turn of phrase, a piece of punctuation or space on the page and wonder: is that how it is? Is that really what I’m supposed to be reading? The OED gives as the earliest instance of ‘sic’ in this sense Henry Sweet’s prefatorial note to the second edition of his Anglo-Saxon Reader in 1887. He writes: ‘A prefixed star calls attention to an erroneous or anomalous form, being thus equivalent to “sic”.’ It’s funny, isn’t it, that the first recorded example of ‘sic’ is in fact for a replacement or substitute of ‘sic’. A star or asterisk might thus stand in for a sic: *. Imagine a page of Cixous covered with asterisks, a sheet of little stars, aster and disaster risks, night writing. Try to draw this at home.

******************** ****** *** * *** ******** ** ** ******** *************** ****** *** *********** * ** **** **** * ******* **************** ********************* ***** ***** **** **** ** ******** **** ** * ** ***** ** ** *********** ** *** *********** ** ** ***** ********* * ** *********** * ********* ** ********** ******** *** ******** ******** ** *********** ** **** ********* ***************** * * * * ****** ***** * **** ** **** *** ** ***** **************** *** ** ***** ******** ***** ***** ** ** **** ** *********** ********* ******************* *** * ** ****** ***** ****** ****** ** * ***** * * ***** ******* ****** ***** ****** ** ******* ***** ** * * ** * ********* ** * * ** ********* ******* * ** * **** **************** ***** ****** ** *** *** *** ********* ************* ***** * ***** ******** ***** ***** ** ********** ** ** ** ***** *** ******** * ** * ** ***** * * * ** ******* * ***** * ************** ****** ***** ******* ***************** ******** **** ***** ************** * ** ****** ***************** ***** * ** ********** * ** * ** ** ******* ****** ** *** **** ** ********* ************** *** ********** ************* **************** ** ** **** * * **** *** **** ***** ********* ***** * * ** ****** **** ********* ** * *** *** ***** * **** * **** ***** * ** * * ******** * ********** ************ ********** ************** *** ******** ******************** ******************* ********** ********* ** * ** ******** ** *** ******* ** ***** * ** * ****************** ****** * * * * ** *** ********* **** ******** ** ****** ** ** **** ********** ****** ** *** ******* ************** *** ******** ** ** * ** ******** ******* ** *** *** ** * ****************** **** ******** ******* ********* ***** **** ***** ******* ****** ********** ******** ******************************** ******* ** *** *********** ** ** ** *** ********* *** ****************** *************************** ************** ******** ******** ** ************* ** ******* ************ **** **** *** ******* *** ** *** ******** ** ** ***** ****** ***** ********************** ********** *************** ***************** ********** ***** ******* ********* ***** * *********** ****** * ** ************* ************* ******************************************* ** ** ******************* ************ ***** * ****************** ********** ****** ** *** ******* ***************** *** ********

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Draw: all wards. The dreamer, realist, analyst, writing follow one another forwards and backwards, onwards and upwards, afterwards, offwards, inwards, outwards, downwards, Lethe-wards, toward, untoward, weird and weyward, all wards. With this seemingly random, almost invisible acronym I wanted to draw attention, draw to, draw on, draw up, draw out, draw in, draw-ing, just draw it, the instant of the strangeness of inscription, the play of the letter and sense-making of chance, the substitutions and substitutability of letters, the ghost of voice where apparently there is silence, the scatter-effects of sound, in the crazy inexhaustible beauty of the English word draw. There is the draw of ‘draw’, as when Robert Rowland Smith, in his book AutoBioPhilosophy, recalls his experience as an undergraduate studying English at Oxford in the early 1980s and his excitement in encountering the work of the ‘Parisian intellectuals’ at that time (Foucault, Kristeva, Cixous, Barthes, Lyotard, Deleuze, Irigaray…) and he says that, of them all, ‘it was Jacques Derrida, to whom I felt the greatest draw’.14 And when Cixous reverses the initialism (D.R.A.W.) and turns everything upside down and back to front, as she does all the time in order to get a different measure, other perspectives, initiations and initiatives, whether it’s a word or a memory, a story or a dream, an everyday snippet of conversation or a traumatic event, she makes a ward of the draw, what it is to draw, she gives it a new sic award, a Cixous music award, she spins it around like a ‘JD’ backwards in order to stress the importance of keeping, protecting, guarding, saving, this ward and that ward, all wards. Such is the speed of life and death, the desire and need to keep memory, not only because, for everyone of us, memory is, in Lady Macbeth’s phrase, ‘the warder of the brain’ (1.7.65), but also because it is the essential ward-duty of what Derrida calls ‘culture and social memory’ to attend to, to take care of, to take on symbolically every death, each time unique.15 Such is the going of the instant and the desire and need to draw it, make a note: as Cixous says in Mother Homer Is Dead…, ‘I note it down quickly before nothingness cancels it forever.’16 The Cixous call is all wards. Not just worstward ho, or hearseward wo, but all wards. For ‘ward’ as the ‘action of watching or guarding’, ‘look-out’, ‘watch’, ‘guard’, ‘surveillance’ (OED, ‘ward’, n2, sense I, 1), or ‘a minor under the control of a guardian’ (sense II, 6a), or ‘one who is under the protection or control of another’ (sense II, 6b), or ‘a place for guarding’ (sense V), such as, ‘in a fortress’, ‘the (inner or outer) circuit of the walls of a castle; the ground between two encircling walls’ (sense V, 14), or a division or section of a prison, hospital or lunatic asylum (sense V, 17 and 18)­– ­none of these is the same as the ‘ward’ (or ‘wards’)



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as a suffix, where the sense is of moving in a particular direction (from the Old English weard, connected with Latin vertere, to turn): ‘ward’ is a veerer. What is the matter that you read? Wards, wards, wards. James Joyce and Hélène Cixous: he war, she ward [sic].17 What a word the ward and ward the word! *    *    *    *    * Another figure that shimmies up out of the blue: lingophobia. Lick it and see. I don’t mean lingophobia so much in the sense of ‘fear of licking’­– ­a word already so obscure that I can find no reference to it in the Oxford English Dictionary or even in my copy of The Encyclopaedia of Unusual Sex Practices, compiled by someone with the implausible name of Brenda Love­– ­though doubtless the tongue and the experience or fantasy of licking is in play (no literature without lingophilia). No, rather I am thinking of lingophobia as ‘fear of language’.18 Isn’t this one of the great unspoken dimensions of our time, this ‘age of atrophied verbal instincts’, as Garrett Stewart has recently called it?19 The lingophobic manifests itself in the widespread and more or less constant use, across government, business, science and education institutions, including universities, of the acronym. This abject proliferation of acronyms (APA) is suggestive of a defence formation, symptomatic of so many resistances to thinking about language that are also registrations of what it does to us, the ways it inscribes us, leaves its trails upon and in us. This morning for instance, as I write, all faculty at the University of Sussex receive an email from the Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research: Dear colleague, As you will all be aware, GDPR soon comes in to effect and in this video I have addressed some of the key changes that we will all need to comply with. It will be particularly important in areas like Research and the GDPR project team have set up some tailored training sessions to discuss the changes in more detail.20

I am still pondering the grammatical incoherence of this address, the singular, quasi-personal touch (‘Dear colleague’) followed by the ‘all’ (‘As you will all be aware’): who or what is this singular subject that is supposed to know, to be an ‘all’ subject? An ‘all-wards subject’? If ‘all’ are aware, why write on the topic? But these are not questions for a Pro-Vice Chancellor of Research, who has more pressing matters to deal with, first and foremost the GDPR and the video about it and the GDPR project team with the training sessions that they have tailored, no doubt in bespoke and suiting fashion, knowing already that all is aware of what GDPR is, not to mention what it means ‘in areas like Research’ (areas like

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research, one wonders, what other areas are there that are ‘like Research’? is the Pro-Vice Chancellor alluding to areas that all is aware of, or might there be areas ‘like Research’ that are as yet unspecified, such as, for example, Unidentifiable Literary Object Studies?) How would General Data Protection Regulation deal with an unidentifiable literary object? I note that one of the exemptions from the regulation is ‘Processing of personal data by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity.’21 What is ‘personal data’? According to who or what authority? Who or what is ‘a natural person’? What are the parameters of ‘a purely personal or household activity’? Would it, could it, ever be known? *    *    *    *    * Like ‘draw’ or ‘ward’, ‘ULO’ is a kind of acronymic witticism quite different from the deathly proliferation that narrows thinking and desire, and strait-jackets the discourse of contemporary life. ‘ULO’ plays on the nature of acronyms, it draws attention to itself as imaginative or fictive, it invites us to think about all sorts of new relations and space oddities, unknown or unknowable. It invites us to think in a critical and analytical manner about lingophobia and lingophilia. Recall what Cixous says in ‘The Book I Don’t Write’ (written in 2003) about when she showed Derrida the manuscript of what was to become Le Prénom de Dieu (1967): And what did he say. According to him: ‘But what have we got here? A ULO (unidentifiable literary object)? What’s this I’ve got? Who’ll ever be able to read a thing like this? All of which he doesn’t say but he thought it and he remembers it. But what is this this? Just what I was thinking. We were having coffee. For me it was: what’s this woman done? At least if it wasn’t a ULO, I mean it wasn’t a crime, maybe not something shameful. What I meant to say is that as a successor I wasn’t a precursor, a scout of frontlines, nor a denizen of ivory towers, museums, castles, but a creature of the bottom. What happens on the ‘bottom’? A kind of meltdown, metamorphoses by collusion, confusion, osmosis and other dissociative phenomena. Beginning with Dieu (God in English) who began by being, by being Di and all of a sudden from one syllable to the next puts his eyes out turns himself into Diable (the devil himself).22

From yeux to yes, from Dieu to God. Go! Pass go. God agog. Gotta go. A god ago. Tell a story­– D ­ errida often says he has never known how to do so­– b ­ ut there he is, close to the end of H.C. for Life: ‘I’ll begin again’, he says. ‘Here is at last my last beginning. It takes the narration of my story back to the time and place that I had



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planned to take as my starting point, namely the first book, Le Prénom de Dieu’ (144). He goes on to reaffirm his inability to deal with ‘the intimidating vastness of her work’ (144). Here where he is supposed to be moving towards a conclusion, he’s moving all wards once again. And at the same time he speaks of ‘warding it off ’ (147), that’s part of it all (‘all wards’ also just is the logic of autoimmunity), warding off whatever it is, the effects of this ‘raving and sublime autobiography’ (147), this ‘new unclassifiable species of literary animal or poetic prose’ (148). And then, too, there is something that draws him, beyond his control. As he puts it: ‘the feeling of magical telepathy remains intact. And supernatural’ (155). In her deconstructive reconstruction of his evocation of an unidentifiable literary object she tells us what he thought without saying so and what thinking she shared (‘just what I was thinking’, she says), she brings up the feeling of telepathy, it’s inseparable, for her, from the ULO. She is ‘a creature of the bottom’, down there among the inestimable jewels and heaps of pearls and jawdropping anchors, wooing the bottom, where eyes did once inhabit, she tells us what the bottom means, it’s priceless: ‘What happens on the “bottom”? A kind of meltdown, metamorphoses by collusion, confusion, osmosis and other dissociative phenomena.’ *    *    *    *    * ‘You have characters’, she says. I am not sure where or when she says this, at some point in 2017 after she has read An English Guide. It might have been on the telephone, as everything we say is on the telephone, belongs to the telephony of creatures on the bottom, but I believe it is when we meet in Paris in June just around her eightieth birthday. In any event what I think is, ‘I do?’­– ­but what I say is: ‘Yes.’ Or perhaps I say ‘I do?’ and I think: ‘Yes.’ But I think I simply say yes, the exchange is funny but also frankly fantastic and at the same time rather terrifying, like something in Henry James. ‘You have characters’, she says, I say ‘Yes’ (or I say ‘I do?’), and then nothing. A pause, a silence as rich and strange as any that has come along in my life, sliding down to the bottom, fit for meltdown and metamorphosis. ‘You have cancer’, she might have been saying. Or: ‘You have cancers’, plural: ‘You’re sick [sic].’ There was an inclination for me to hear it in that way, for in a sense what could be worse, wasn’t it the worst thing she could say to me: ‘You have characters.’ A bit like the dread she claims to feel at the idea of being called a novelist. As she says: ‘ “Novelist” is a word I have always dreaded­– I­ have no use for it, I don’t know what to do with it.’23 But I also heard her remark as a musing. Her amusing musing and invitation to say more. I could

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have said a thousand things but I only said Yes. Unless I wondered aloud, in vaguely rhetorical fashion: I do? ‘Books are characters in books’, she declares at the start of a text (first published in 2002) entitled ‘The Book as One of Its Own Characters’.24 And this is also a way of saying that, in a ULO, there are always ULOs (plural). It is less the book than the bottom, the flights, the ghosts of letters. So when she observes, seemingly apropos nothing, ‘You have characters’, I hear it first and foremost as a question and loving provocation from the author of ‘The Character of “Character” ’, the remarkable essay (first published in 1974), which I want to call up or recall here for several reasons, not least for the way in which it invokes the unidentifiable. This is how the essay begins: What exactly is ‘character’? How is it possible at present to think of the ‘concept’ of ‘character’­– ­if it is a concept? Assuming that this concept has a history, how far are we along now in this history or in the examination of this history? What does ‘character’ name? These questions are, on the one hand, involved in a whole system of critical presuppositions and crop up from traditional discussions about literature, within a conception of literary creation that is today outmoded. But, on the other hand, these same questions, having cropped up out of a disintegrating system, allow, through displacement, for the emergence of new, prying questions opening out on to the unknown of a text rather than its recognisable development; onto life, the incessant agitation of literary practice rather than its theses and its stability; onto its indescribable, unidentifiable aspects rather than its rules and means of being classified.25

‘Traditional discussions’ of ‘character’ belonged to ‘a disintegrating system’, to ‘a conception of literary creation’ that, in 1974, was already ‘outmoded’. This early Cixous essay arguably draws more on Lacan than on Derrida to make a point about what Mark McGurl, several decades later, would call the ‘program era’.26 ‘Character’ is ‘a cog in the literary machinery’, Cixous suggests, it enables ‘the identification circuit with the reader’ (42). The deployment of characters in books is crucial to establishing the ‘value’ of literature as a marketable form: The marketable form of literature … is closely related to that familiar, decipherable human sign that ‘character’ claims to be … [Thus] the ‘character’ represents a set of externals. He has referents (real causes that are anterior and exterior to the text: he could be the portrait of a real person) to which he alludes, while he fixes his essential traits so as to preserve them in the book … This is all accomplished in the name of some reality principle (‘life’, ‘truth’, ‘biography’, ‘sense’) to which the text is subordinated. (43)



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Since Cixous wrote this in 1974, film and video, TV and the internet, gaming and e-sports have massively reinforced the market for ‘character’. The domain of ‘character’ has extended beyond books altogether, into new forms of merchandising and commodification, even if literature remains, I believe, the most powerful weapon of its mass deconstruction. ‘The Character of “Character” ’ sketches out the challenges and exhilaration of what is at stake in the question of literature. I don’t think she was wrong to speak of a ‘disintegrating system’: the increased marketisation of literature has nothing to do with the desires or trajectories of the ULO; ‘marketable form’ is perhaps only more visible than ever for what it is­– ­a programme, a hoax, a subterfuge. And at the same time the ‘agitation’ of literature remains, as she suggests, ‘incessant’. Or as she has put it more recently, in Mother Homer Is Dead…: ‘I believe one must defend Literature, the land of turbulences and of the perpetual disqualification of states of mind.’27 One must defend it, all wards. Cixous’s essay on the character of ‘character’ remains a precious document for anyone seriously interested in reading or thinking about literature. In particular she stresses the role of the unconscious: ‘character’ can all too easily figure as the purveyor of untruth, as if ‘the unconscious could be cancelled out’ (42). On the contrary, she declares, we have to reckon with ‘the fact that the “subject” is an effect of the unconscious and … it never stops producing the unconscious­– ­which is unanalysable, uncharacterisable’ (45). (Parenthetically we might note a diremption of Cixous and Lacan implied here: her pronouncement that ‘the “subject” is an effect of the unconscious’ is followed by a discreet affirmation of the ‘unanalysable’.) To take one’s giddy footing about the tumbling billows of the main, to become immersed in language that works and dreams: this, she suggests, is what literature has always done. It is not a matter of ‘mak[ing] the [human] subject disappear, but [of] bring[ing] it back to its divisibility’ (47). It is a question of moving away from the ‘outmoded conception’, from all the clutter of ‘traditional discussions’, to enable a slide or displacement into what she calls ‘the unknown of a text’, the ‘indescribable’ and ‘unidentifiable’. *    *    *    *    * ‘Work, dream, and realistize’, she says. I don’t know whether this acronym or initialism (W.D.A.R.) was conscious or unconscious or neither. It doesn’t matter. It wards. It has to do with letters, haunting, and how, as Derrida says, ‘chance makes sense’.28 No ULO, I would like to suggest, without working, dreaming and ‘realistizing’. What is this thing that Cixous names? ‘Realistize’ may seem a

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clunky, even rather awful word, almost as bad as the phrase ‘reality literature’.29 ‘Realistize’ has a guarded or drawn look, suggestive of artifice but also a sort of anti-aesthetic. It’s ugly and funny and wayward. I don’t imagine that anyone else is ever going to use the word. It’s a nuncle nonce. It keeps ties with the ‘realist’, but still something of the ‘realist’ dies, in ‘realistize’. To ‘realistize’ is manifestly at odds with what the 1974 essay calls ‘some reality principle (“life”, “truth”, “biography”, “sense”) to which the text is subordinated’ (43). To realistize involves reckoning with all the counterforces that the writings of Cixous and Derrida unleash, in relation to the conventional, dominant conception of ‘realism’. In particular it is a question of the irreducible but foundational strangeness of what he calls her ‘fictional hyperrealism’; the experience of the real as indissociably bound up with the experience of the impossible; and the ways that certain aspects of the real (one’s own spectralisation, the ‘character’ of writing as restance or living on) exceed anything any writer can control or even begin to comprehend.30 Realistizing would concern itself with the apparently banal and diurnal: as Cixous describes it, ‘In my text everything remains stubbornly concrete. The material for any text of mine is the raw stuff of everyday life.’31 And at the same time it would have to do with the mother unconscious, speed and the chance effects of writing, dreaming, ghosts and the unidentifiable. *    *    *    *    * How does Derrida’s writing in particular encourage us to think about a ULO, all wards? Here are seven aspects or ingredients: 1) an affirmation as well as a warding off of the ‘unidentifiable’ (it wards: when it comes to the question of an author or character, I would be inclined to link this with the logic of that ‘an-identity’ Derrida talks about regarding the es spukt, a stranger within, at once ‘singular and anonymous’, ‘more intimate with one than one is oneself ’);32 2) the double or joint ward of keeping and keeping off the literary as such, where literature would be (in his double-facing proposition) not just ‘the most interesting thing in the world’ but also, treacherously, even terrifyingly, ‘maybe more interesting than the world’;33 3) an affirmation and warding off of the object as such, a palpable, even tactile relation with the thing (the ULO for him, we may recall, is ‘a sort of miracle’ for which he feels ‘the desire to both recognise/reconnoitre by getting near it and flee from by warding it off ’);34



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4) the haunting of the acronym ‘ULO’ by the figure of flight, the word ‘flying’ apparently suppressed in this acronym, whether machine or bird, the ghost of a word in phantasmoneiric flight, a flying sorcery; 5) a sense of something startlingly quick, fleeting as a ghost or flaming meteoroid: this is why I speak about the narratoid­– ­a term that picks up Wallace Stevens’s suggestion that ‘A poem is a meteor’,35 seeing this aphorism as an instance of ‘poetic thinking’ (the phrase, let us recall, by which Derrida on numerous occasions characterises the work of Cixous) and transposing it into the analysis of literary narrative; a narratoid is a single word or phrase or space or piece of punctuation that has the potential to open up, explode, enfold, at any rate set alight new and alien readings of the text in question;36 6) an engagement with ‘what remains stubbornly concrete’, the rapport between the literary thing and ‘the raw stuff of everyday life’, on condition of recognising that this is to let writing and reading be unhinged, working in the unforeseeable and unprogrammable, the dream and the hypnagogic, the unconscious and chance (the trajectory into or across one’s being of something mighty strange, akin to what Derrida called ‘the mighty power of truth of the phantasm’);37 and finally 7) madness, it draws: in reading, in writing, in following it, it’s like the ghost that might, as Horatio warns Hamlet, ‘draw you into madness’ (1.4.74). *    *    *    *    * I promised to say something more about the life-pool (le vivier)­– ­about the apparently crazy supposition that the life-pool of vivement, the liveance or livingness of a passage of Shakespeare, such as Clarence’s dream, might be said to ‘realise’ future writing. We may recall in this context Derrida’s desire, in H.C. for Life, to ‘imagine a reading at the bottom of the elemental sea’ (29). This would be another aspect of what it is to ‘work, dream and realistize’, namely to submit to a law of reading in keeping with what Cixous evokes in Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: I. Los, A Chapter: All beings without exception circulate in the form of atoms of dreams, giblets of signifiers, swirls of syntax, in the wings of the greatest play in the world dreamed by the dreams of dozens of artists disturbed in the construction of their major oeuvre, and urgently mobilised to weave a sort of wounded Babel in holograph gauze.38

This sentence sketches perhaps the finest definition of ‘intertextuality’ I have ever encountered. The life-pool of the ULO is a literary life-loop underwater

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skywriting in which Shakespeare and all other beings are whirled in the wings of the greatest play. *    *    *    *    * ‘You have characters’, she says. Yes, An English Guide to Birdwatching has them. Or at least Part 1 (‘The Undertaking’) does. I leave aside Part 2 (‘The Hides’), where perhaps the nearest thing to a character would be the anonymous, furtive, mourning woman (in Hide 11) who loves Hélène Cixous, and especially her ostrich.39 A birdlike, ornithomorphising anti-character, she would or might have a name such as Penelope Menace, or Penny Menace, or Pen Menace Inc, if this hideaway were in a novel; but she is not in a novel, she is a singular, cryptic incorporation, in a hide. The Hides mix sexual identities and seek to be as responsive to birds as to humans. Part 1 has characters, such as Silas and Ethel Woodlock, Stephen Osmer and Lily Lynch, and two people called Nicholas Royle. It is a book about characters in deconstruction. It is also about the reality of what Sarah Wood and others have called the climate change imaginary.40 This is announced on the first page where the setting (as people used to call it), the season, the meteorological context in which what is happening takes place, is described as having failed any test of being ‘remotely realistic’ (3). And it’s about worldwide social justice and the politics of sexual difference and the financial systems that have kept capitalism running us all toxically into the toxic ground. It’s about the end, the end of foundations and habitation and the end of houses, the end of inheritance and the end of the line. These are the opening words: ‘Silas Woodlock was the end of the line, so far as he was concerned…’ (3). To realistize would start from the thought that there is no ‘realism’, no ‘free indirect discourse’, no third person or ‘omniscient’ narration without telepathy.41 If we wanted to disavow the telepathic dimension of the literary, and insist on outmoded conceptions, we would say that the opening words (‘the end of the line, so far as he was concerned…’) are ‘focalised through’ or presented from the ‘point of view’ of Woodlock. But farewell to all that. It’s the end of the line. It’s over the end of the line. Where there is telepathy something unidentifiable is in play. Silas is also, at the same time, ‘on the same page’ as his wife Ethel. ‘On the same page’, as they both say, in isolation, together, at different moments (e.g. 163, 221, 222). The Woodlocks are lingophilic embodiments of what Freud says of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth: they are ‘like two disunited parts of a single psychical individuality’.42 Telepathy always lets go. It lets go all wards. Characters are wards: the writer is responsible for them, even if this entails



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the death of the author­– ­the death of a character who writes fiction and literary theory called Nicholas Royle­– ­at the hands of a character, Silas Woodlock, retired undertaker. Characters are all wards­– ­even or especially if he or she or they arise out of the hypnagogic weirdness of seagulls in one’s sleep becoming real. Silas gives birth to the tiny piece of fiction called ‘Gulls’ before he himself is assigned a name: he is born of the cries and screeches and coupling of herring gulls. Ethel, too, on the same page, is born of ‘Gulls’. Cixous’s essay on ‘The Character of “Character” ’ only mentions in passing the importance of ‘question[ing] the value of the proper Name’ (46): along with affirming the divisibility of the subject, the dislocation of a man-powered death drive, the deconstruction of phallogocentrism and the proper, the limits and egregious follies of anthropocentrism, there is much to say about lingophilia and the deconstructive play of language in the names of characters. Things stare you in the face without you seeing­– ­this is, in part, the logic of what Derrida calls the ‘visor effect’.43 Birdwatching is also bird watching. I never thought of the name ‘Silas’ as comprising the first syllable of my dead brother’s forename and last syllable of my own, until someone else made the connection.44 Words play, splay and display without us. This is what the name ‘Woodlock’ is about­– ­as is perhaps already intimated in the scritchy screed called ‘Gulls’ (160–5), and as becomes explicit in the Hides, especially in the jazz-loving undertaker’s appearance as a woodcock (Scolopax minor) in Hide 14, and the elaboration of the hides themselves as forms of ‘phantomatic audiobooth’ (308). ‘Woodlock’ is on some kind of phantasmoneiric journey with Lockwood in Wuthering Heights, but besides the inevitable suggestion of an undertaker’s undertaking (a casket or woodlock) and its ornithomorphing into a ‘woodcock’ (154ff.), the name also opens and locks up, beyond any authorial control, a thinking of the would and the woo’t, the ‘wooed’ (as in ‘the slimy bottom of the deep’) and the ward.45 *    *    *    *    * Again it is Shakespeare who has already written of all these possibilities. For example, the ‘ward’ and ‘lock’: he works with ‘ward’ in the sense of ‘Each of the ridges projecting from the inside plate of a lock, serving to prevent the passage of any key the bit of which is not provided with incisions of corresponding form and size’ (OED, ‘ward’, n2, sense 24a). It’s all there already, in the early poem The Rape of Lucrece (1593–94). Shakespeare slips into the character of rapist, making his way, as Tarquin, towards Lucrece in her bedroom: ‘The locks between her chamber and his will, / Each one by him enforced retires his ward’ (The Rape

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of Lucrece, ll. 302–3). There is a curious kind of zeugma in operation, between ‘chamber’ and ‘will’. ‘Will’ refers to both carnal lust and what is desired (and that’s, at least nominally, without talking about the name ‘Will’ itself). The locks are ‘enforced’ or broken open. Tarquin ‘retires his ward’, in other words he draws back or withdraws the ward of each lock. The line withdraws through the ‘ward’ in at least three directions: ward as ‘act of guarding’, ward as ‘garrison’, and ward as that which ‘accepts only the key made for that lock’.46 ‘Ward’ encrypts. I leave you to carry out an inspection of all the other wards in Shakespeare, from Hamlet’s caustic description of the world as ‘A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons’ (2.2.243–5) to the scene in King Lear that gives us a sort of twisted precursor to Wordsworth’s ‘The child is father to the man’, when Edmund, falsely but with catastrophic effectiveness, informs Gloucester that Edmund’s brother and Gloucester’s so-called legitimate son Edgar has often said that ‘the father should be as ward to the son and the son manage his revenue’ (1.2.62–3). Shakespeare throws the keys into the writing. Different doors keep opening and closing, not necessarily in a sequential manner. His writing draws us into the space of a reading ward, neither hospital nor prison nor madhouse, yet gathering up all of them. All wards. *    *    *    *    * I wanted to end with Agatha Christie­– ­not perhaps the first authorial name to spring to mind for an unidentifiable literary object. The seven aspects of the ULO that I sketched a few moments ago are in play, I would suggest, in a couple of sentences near the beginning of An English Guide to Birdwatching: Silas, on the other hand, at first was slow to react at all, caught up, apparently, in an Agatha Christie, Peril at End House it happened to be, and he must have read it at least three times before. What’s the flaming point, [Ethel] wanted to ask him (but had stopped doing so years ago), reading a whodunnit when you know full well who? (11)

A female visitor has just arrived. Silas seems not to notice. His reality is presented through some narrative voice that includes Ethel’s but is not reducible to that. It is a question of ‘the flaming point’­– ­this phrase, in particular the word ‘flaming’, travels across the night and day and twilight of the book, from Ethel’s nonce exclamation ‘flaming heck and pyjamas’ (8) to the ‘flaming world’ (213) of the ending, and the ‘flaming retribution’ of ‘the holocaust of the bankers’ (210) inscribed in its cryptic future.



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Peril at End House (1932): I decided to have Woodlock reading a book I had never read.47 I was drawn by the title. ‘Peril’ (without definite or indefinite article) might be the name of a person. What is the time of this ‘peril’? Does it refer to some dangerous moment or event that happened before the action of the novel or one that happens at some point during the novel? Or is it a more diffuse, more frightening peril that never stops happening? And then there is ‘End House’ (without definite article). This enables the ‘end’ to become a verb (as if it were starting up a silent conversation with, say, Iain Reid’s intriguing recent novel I’m Thinking of Ending Things­– ­Agatha Christie’s book might have a few things to tell Iain Reid about how to end things and how not to end things, about endings that work and endings that don’t), but it also sets up the transegmental joinery of ‘attend’. This contributes, perhaps, to the ghostly air of conjuration in the title: Peril, Attend House! Peril at End House is about telepathy. As the narrator Hastings remarks of something said early on: ‘This was so exactly what I was feeling that I was somewhat disconcerted to find it put into words’ (12). Or as the detective, Poirot, reports of observing another character: ‘I can see the thoughts passing through her mind’ (19). Or as Hastings seeks confirmation from Poirot at a later moment: ‘ “You felt that too?” I asked, startled’ (45). At other times there is no need for the two to communicate by speech at all­– ­as when ‘[Poirot] nodded in answer to my unspoken thought’ (199). And then the novel culminates in a séance­– ­in order, as Poirot puts it, ‘[t]o get through a message from the other world’ (214). But none of this is surprising: as we may have picked up long ago, detective fiction is exemplary of novelistic form more generally as a telepathic network.48 The author, the narrator and/or another character (the detective, the killer)­– ­all know whodunnit. Reading a detective novel is a transparent case of ‘the pleasure of the text’ as an activity of reading people’s minds. The novel has telepathic knowledge and we as readers will come, we are already coming to share it. What’s the flaming point of that, especially reading a text for the fourth or fifth time, as Silas does? The flaming point or points fly past. I wanted Silas Woodlock to be immersed in a book about which I knew nothing. Recently, for the first time, I read Peril at End House: it made a strange impression. I read it, naturally, as Silas Woodlock. Or more precisely, I read it as myself, a character in An English Guide, after my death, and as Silas Woodlock, after his death. I could not not have been ‘caught up’ in this telepathic mesh. The character Silas Woodlock (and perhaps also Ethel, since she too evidently knows whodunnit and indeed there’s a ‘whodunnock’, perhaps, sounding in her very

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penchant for that term)49 knew more than I knew: he’d read the book previously at least three times. But what would he have known? And what might he have thought or imagined if (like me) he had had the chance to read (or reread) Peril at End House, before the flaming point of death, when he and Nicholas Royle, aboard the ride-on mower, tumble off the cliff, ‘[crash] into the rocky shore and [explode] in flames’ (183)? In other words, if he were reading in the time of An English Guide? No longer merely the time of a whodunnit as a fixed, linear expanse with an obituarial perspective, but rather the sort of vertigo evoked by Cixous when she remarks, regarding the movements of time in her work: ‘the time of a work is not linear but circular or spherical, and all the little asters [astres] or disasters are equidistant from the heart’.50 *    *    *    *    * ‘I never dreamt, when we retired to this old house by the sea, what trouble there’d be with the gulls’ (160). These are the first words Woodlock writes, at the start of ‘Gulls’, the contested authorship of which is at the heart of the novel. (Did Woodlock write it? Did Royle forge his signature and publish the text as his own?) This ‘old house by the sea’ is Woodlock’s ‘end house’, of course. He is already reading this whodunnit completely differently. Christie’s novel gives him much to ponder anew: ‘There’s a queer feeling in that house’ (148), he reads­ – ­something ‘strange’, ‘something all wrong about that house’ (169), as various characters remark. The narrator observes: ‘It looks rather eerie and imposing standing there by itself far from anything’ (8). End House perches ‘at a point where the cliff shelved directly down to the sea’ (8). Woodlock is spooked by the sense that End House is located where he meets his end. End House is at the top of what Agatha Christie refers to as a ‘zig-zag path up the cliff ’ (130). Woodlock is especially suspicious to discover that, when Hastings and Poirot make their way up this path, they find they ‘have come out on [a] strip of lawn by the house, [where] a man was driving a mowing machine. He had a long, stupid face and lack-lustre eyes’ (130). Woodlock doesn’t know what to make of the narrator, who at one moment is ordered by ‘Moosior Poirot’ (174) to ‘resemble closely an undertaker’ (187). He is disturbed to discover that the plot turns around the death of a ‘mad millionaire who ran bird sanctuaries’ (76). But he is even more perplexed to be reminded that the owner of End House is called Nick (a woman) and the previous owner was likewise Nicholas (Nick’s father) (133). He is grimly reassured to see that he and the detective share one particular antipathy: Poirot’s ‘minor peculiarities’ include ‘his objection to golf as a game “shapeless and hap-



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hazard” ’ (145). He is more troubled by the fact that the plot of the whodunnit is, like Part 1 of An English Guide to Birdwatching, about two people with the same name (Magdala Buckley [234]) and about a forged signature (182). He picks up things he never noticed on earlier readings, such as the chapter called ‘Nick’s Secret’ (107–17), the hypothesis that a character can know something ‘that she herself is unaware of’ (101) and the state of mind and body in which the narrator (like the character called Nicholas Royle) can say: ‘It all felt like a dream. I could see myself from outside­– ­behaving just as usual. It was queer somehow’ (118). The ‘flaming point’­– ­that was Ethel’s phrase. Silas gets it now: it’s a narratoid. Peril at End House would lock for Woodlock, like the surging sounds of his gulls in the ‘dark milky nothing’ (163) before dawn, into the experience of an unidentifiable literary object. *    *    *    *    *

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2  Extract of a letter from Hélène Cixous, August 2017.



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Notes   1 Jacques Derrida, ‘Telepathy’, trans. Nicholas Royle, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 226.  2 Nicholas Royle, An English Guide to Birdwatching (Oxford: Myriad, 2017), 12, emphasis added. Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text.  3 Ceci est un exercise de rêve: Création radiophonique d’Hélène Cixous et Jean-Jacques Lemêtre, France Culture, broadcast 8 November 2005.  4 The Tragedy of King Richard III, ed. John Jowett (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000), 1.4.15–31. Further references are to this edition.   5 See Nicholas Royle, Quilt (Brighton: Myriad, 2010), 85.   6 See Hélène Cixous, ‘The Book I Don’t Write’, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic, in Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, ed. Eric Prenowitz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 200.  7 Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 150. Further page references to this work are given in parentheses in the main body of the text.   8 See, for example, Cixous’s discussion of the fifteen alternative or supplementary titles for Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star, in Reading with Clarice Lispector, ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 145–6; and cf. her remarks about the titles of her own books in Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2013): ‘The title(s)­– ­an enormous mystery, I agonise over them … I’m forever trying to extract myself from the title, to undermine it, to subtitle it, make it oscillate. This one-for-the-unpindownable-whole bothers me. I’m better with titles that spill over’ (93).  9 See Jacques Derrida, Mémoires: for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler and Eduardo Cadava (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 115; and cf. 101. 10 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 105. 11 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, in Deconstruction is/in America: A New Sense of the Political, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 24. 12 Hélène Cixous, ‘Language is the Only Refuge’, interview with Bertrand Leclair, trans. Carol Gilogley, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 129.

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13 Letter dated 8 August 2017. The telepathy had to do with ‘the title’, she said, and I didn’t know what she meant until she wrote later in the summer about the title she had in mind for her new book: Défions l’augure (Paris: Galilée, 2018). We defy augury, as Hamlet says. Let us defy augury. 14 Robert Rowland Smith, AutoBioPhilosophy: An Intimate Story of What It Means to be Human (London: 4th Estate, 2018), 78. 15 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’, trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 403, translation modified; Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, new rev. edn (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 411. 16 Hélène Cixous, Mother Homer is Dead…, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 26. 17 Jacques Derrida writes at length about the ‘he war’ in Finnegans Wake, in ‘Two words for Joyce’, trans. Geoff Bennington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, ed. Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 145–59. 18 For more on fear and love of language, specifically in relation to the work of Cixous and Derrida and the history of deconstruction, see my essay ‘Lingophobia’, in French Thought and Literary Theory in the UK, ed. Irving Goh (London: Routledge, 2019). 19 Garrett Stewart, The Value of Style in Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 6. 20 Personal email, received 11 May 2018. 21 See the so-called ‘recital’ (music to one’s ears) at https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-18/ (accessed 18 January 2019). 22 Cixous, ‘The Book I Don’t Write’, 200–1. Beverley Bie Brahic translates the ‘U’ of ULO as ‘unidentified’ rather than as ‘unidentifiable’, doubtless to stay close to the acronym it parodies, the ‘unidentified flying object’. 23 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 130. 24 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Book as One of Its Own Characters’, trans. Catherine Porter, in Volleys of Humanity, 125–59. 25 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Character of “Character” ’, trans. Keith Cohen, in Volleys of Humanity, 41–60: here, 41. Further page references to this essay are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 26 Mark McGurl, Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 27 Cixous, Mother Homer Is Dead…, 42. 28 Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On’, trans. James Hulbert, in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), 76.



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29 I humbly refer here to ‘Afterword: Reality Literature’, in Royle, Quilt, 151–9. 30 On ‘fictional hyperrealism’ in particular, see Derrida, H.C. for Life, 29 (cf. 38, and passim); on ‘restance’, see Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc, trans. Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988); on ‘living on’, see the text of that title in Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism, 75–176. 31 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, interview with Christa Stevens, trans. Suzanne Dow, in White Ink, 9. 32 See Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 172. 33 Jacques Derrida, ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 1992), 47. 34 See Derrida, H.C. for Life, 147. 35 Wallace Stevens, ‘Adagia’, in Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 901. 36 For more on the narratoid, see Nicholas Royle, ‘Even the Title: On the State of Narrative Theory Today’, Narrative, 22:1 (2014), 1–16; and see also ‘Four words for Cixous’, below. 37 Derrida, H.C. for Life, 148. 38 Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, I. Los, A Chapter, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 62. 39 The Guide here alludes, in particular, to those extraordinary pages in ‘Dedication to the Ostrich’, at the beginning of Hélène Cixous, Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 1–21. 40 See Sarah Wood, Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 6 and passim. 41 In these respects, An English Guide to Birdwatching offers a supplement to my Telepathy and Literature: Essays on the Reading Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), in particular to the chapters on Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare and Raymond Chandler. 42 Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Character-Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, and editorial assistant Angela Richards (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 14: 324. 43 See Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 7 and passim. 44 I record my indebtedness for this realisation or realisticisation to my old friend Nick Smith, author of the ingenious novel Drowned Hogg Day (Oxford: Justin Roseland Books, 2016).

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45 Cf. D. H. Lawrence’s working with ‘wood’ and ‘would’ in Sons and Lovers, discussed in Nicholas Royle, Veering: A Theory of Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 195–6; and Shakespeare’s ‘woo’t’ in Hamlet and Antony and Cleopatra, discussed in Nicholas Royle, In Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 66–88. 46 John Roe, editor’s note, in The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover’s Complaint, updated edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166–7. See too Colin Burrow’s note in The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2002), 260. Cf. the Duke’s ‘O, your desert speaks loud, and I should wrong it / To lock it in the wards of covert bosom’ (Measure for Measure, 5.1.10–11); and ‘Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward’ (Sonnet 133, l.9). 47 Agatha Christie, Peril at End House (London: Harper Collins, 2015). Further page references to this edition are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. 48 See, especially, the chapters on Jane Austen’s Emma and Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister in Royle, Telepathy and Literature. 49 Ethel Woodlock, née Dunnock. Silas, in acknowledgement, at least once in the course of the novel calls her his ‘sparrer’. 50 Cixous and Jeannet, Encounters, 137.

15

Four words for Cixous

Four words to end­– ­forwards, for the mighty force of Cixous! All the homophones herded together, heard together, alone and otherwise. Oh all to wend. Four words for her work, for reading her now, off to the side and all wards, for years to come. Four falling or flying words for the love of her writing, for her love for writing. ‘Four’ that can sound a forewarning, as in the dangerously wayward striking of a golf ball: Fore! ‘Four’ that might also meow or snuffle, in French: fors (with a silent ‘s’). ‘Fors’ is Jacques Derrida’s ingenious construction of a crypt-word, entailing what is to be kept safe, saved, in an inner safe that mixes up singular and plural, inside and outside. Fors as a preposition means ‘save’, ‘except for’, but can also be a plural form of for (as in le for intérior, ‘in the inner heart’, or en mon for intérior, ‘in my heart of hearts’) as well as playing, like the hinges of a door, on the Latin foris, ‘door’, and thus ‘outside’, ‘out of doors’ (hence the English word foreign).1 As I have tried to suggest in the preceding pages, Cixous’s books are full of cryptwords, words that won’t let themselves be confined, but fly off, preserving a love, proliferating cases, of the secret. Words are endlessly secretive and secreting. As she says in an interview, ‘literature owes its life to the secret’. Cixous’s writing is forced forward by the sense that ‘there is [a] secret about which I know nothing, so secret and secreted away that I have no trace of it, except maybe in the form of dreams’. But then, ‘as soon as one writes to exhume, one secretes secrets’.2 These four words, then, are also forewords: each offers a sort of new entry point for reading Cixous, another beginning or beginningame (to recall a neologism from the previous chapter).

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1 Nanoment Nanoment is a portmanteau of ‘nano’ and ‘moment’. As we have seen, Cixous loves portmanteau words: she scarcely ever travels without them.3 Whether in a literary context (such as Lewis Carroll) or a real-life context (such as a motel or Brexit), the portmanteau draws attention to itself as a fiction or linguistic artifice. Whether dark or funny (or uncertainly both), it does something new with language. It unsettles. It holds the promise or threat of something transformational, even as it foregrounds its own peculiar form of dissociation from referentiality. Motor cars don’t sleep in hotels, any more than Britain is a person who could exit from somewhere or something. ‘Nanoment’ is not Cixous’s coinage. It’s a neologism I am proposing for thinking about contemporary writing, and especially Cixous’s ‘unidentifiable literary objects’ or ‘double life writings’ or ‘poetic fictions’. The nanoment is about what her texts do with the experience and recounting of time. More narrowly, it refers to something perhaps shockingly, even inconceivably short, an abrupt, fleeting, interruptive, unforeseen moment that nonetheless has strange power of illumination or expansion. It enables a different understanding of prehistory and after-effects. It offers opportunities to think life, the world, ourselves and others anew. It is in this context that we might see Cixous as a writer of the Anthropocene: the nanoment is, among other things, all about radical shifts, anachronies and tipping effects. The nanoment embodies the kind of temporality that recent ecocriticism has particularly focused on, whereby ‘what is significant or insignificant in the past can change, however, even drastically’.4 While the nanoment has certain correspondences with Romantic and post-Romantic figures of privileged moments­– ­‘spots of time’ (Wordsworth), the ‘good minute’ (Browning), ‘moments of vision’ (Hardy), ‘madeleine’ (Proust), ‘epiphany’ (Joyce) and ‘moments of being’ (Woolf)­– ­it also has a specific kind of resonance and efficacy today. The ‘nano’ has to do with the very small: it comes from the Ancient Greek nanos, meaning ‘dwarf ’. While the prefix nano- is most commonly associated with science­– ­for instance with ‘nanostructures’ and ‘nanotechnology’ (concerned with the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules)­– ­it is also used to describe life forms, such as ‘nanoplankton’.5 The nanoment might be something felt or seen or said. As I have suggested elsewhere, it entails ‘the literary slowing down of the moment in order to be faithful to its quickness, a written testimony to what might be called the quick fiction of every moment’.6 Cixous’s texts are packed with nanoments.



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There is an air, perhaps, of dissolving or dissolved monument. Tentative, tender, tiny. The nanoment is a moment that is already divided, scattering, fragmentary. It will have interrupted time. The nanoment is not a nano-moment: it doesn’t have the completeness or unitariness of time that ‘moment’ might imply. It is atomically split, haunted, still underway, unfinished. In a nanoment ‘atoms telephone atoms’.7 It entails urgency and emergency. It doesn’t add up to a moment, it doesn’t have the self-containment or punctuality of a moment: in more than one sense, it doesn’t have a moment to lose. And this is because its force lies in how it tilts or turns everything­– ­which is to say the rest of one’s life, a sense of the world and beyond, the nature of time and what is happening. The nanoment offers a critical point of illumination for what Timothy Morton has named ‘the mesh’­– ­the fact that everything (living or not) is interdependent, enmeshed, in threaded as well as holey fashion, to everything else.8 Cixous’s writing is in the mesh, it’s talking about the mesh from the beginning. She may not be the first writer who comes to mind in the context of ecology or ecocriticism, but her ULOs are­– ­as forcefully as any cli-fi novel or work of ecotheory­– ­about ‘the uninterruptedness of life, from the mineral to the so-called “human” ’, and about our position as ‘the guardians, the keepers of the environment’.9 The nanoment presupposes a humbleness, a respect for and closeness to the earth. It is thus engaged with what Cixous calls ‘the humility of writing’.10 The nanoment is bound up with what we might call the unthinkably small ‘logic of the trace’, with a sense of what is not only human, with the industrious, unseen and unforeseeable energies of ‘verbal dwarfs’.11 A nanoment may appear to figure as a moment that is traumatic, humiliating, catastrophic, ecstatic, sublime, enchanting. It is marked by an acknowledgement of the brevity of life, the precarity of the human, and the vulnerability of the planet on which we breathe. It is ghostly, shattering, but also susceptible to becoming uncontrollably expansive. ‘Life will have been so short’ is the projected, future anterior speech-act of a nanoment. All of this involves a thinking that can be linked to Wordsworthian, Proustian and earlier literary and philosophical figurations of momentary visions or revelations or eureka-effects, but the work and play of the nanoment as a contemporary idea might be understood in relation to four other factors: 1) the science and culture of the imperceptibly, even inconceivably small (including everything from nanoplankton, nano-machines and nano-­engineering to nanotexts and nanothinking);12 2) the legacies (which are also new emergences and inventions) of psychoa-

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nalysis and deconstruction, in particular with regard to how they are both concerned with long-term, transgenerational, deferred effects, as well as with ‘blowing up’ the moment, in order to see it in its tiniest, most telling or illuminating details;13 3) the proliferation of technologies of cutting and editing, expanding and minimising, slow motion, pause and replay (photography, film, television, music, telephones, word processing and the internet); 4) climate change and the need for what Timothy Clark has called a new ‘scalar literacy’, due to the derangements of scale whereby the most apparently insignificant action (turning on a light, using a plastic bag, driving a car) can have incalculable implications or consequences, and no stable interpretation or significance can be granted to a past moment or historical event any more than to a current or future moment.14

2 Narratoid ‘Narratoid’ is a portmanteau of ‘narration’ and ‘meteoroid’. It refers, in particular, to the notion of the ULO (‘unidentifiable literary object’), to the found (as if falling from the heavens) quality of certain words and phrases in Cixous, and to the way in which a single word, image or sense can explode and impact across a text. The first segment of the term alerts us to the importance of telling (narration), told (narrative) and teller (narrator). A narratoid is a word or phrase that proves to have singular force and significance in the reading of a narrative. The word or phrase is not necessarily obvious. The title of a text never provides a narratoid. The narratoid has to do with the unexpected. It sneaks up on the reader (and perhaps the writer too). Many novels and short stories lack narratoids altogether. The narratoid offers a way of elaborating on Cixous’s storytelling­– ­on her love of language and her fascination with the nature of narrative. The term ‘narratoid’ is not her invention. It’s best thought of as nobody’s in fact, and thus as pertaining to the meteoroid with which it half-rhymes and compacts: it seems to come from nowhere and indeed it may not (yet have) arrive(d). A meteoroid, after all, is a meteor that has not yet reached the earth, though it might. We may recall that a meteor is how Jacques Derrida described encountering Cixous’s first book Le Prénom de Dieu: ‘It arrived like a meteor in my garden. The cultural or socioeditorial field, the “readership” of the time was not ready, it seemed to me […], to receive and measure what was beginning there.’15 If the narratoid has something of the flash and otherness of a meteoroid,



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however, it is not a natural thing or natural force.16 Like ‘nanoment’, narratoid is manifestly a linguistic construction: it does not seek to conceal its fictional status but rather points towards the complexity and self-reflexivity of Cixous’s storytelling. It is not a question of reading a work of fiction and playing ‘Spot the Narratoid’. The identification of a narratoid is to be made in the experience of reading. It might be a recurrent word, such as ‘cut’ or ‘side’; or, in the case for example of Mother Homer is Dead…, it might be a word that occurs only once, such as ‘membrane’.17 The narratoid selected for analysis in a reading might entirely surprise the author of the text in which that narratoid appears; but it might surprise the reader, too, from one reading to another. (This morning, for example, as I was re-reading Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang, it was ‘moth’. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the book, the narrator­– ­a double or one of the doubles of Hélène Cixous­– ­is suddenly struck by this English word, a cryptic word-thing: ‘A moth, I say to myself in English. I bat the moth-thing away.’18 But the moth has not really appeared from nowhere: its sense and effects flutter back across, forward and around the text, returning to­– ­then emerging anew from­– ­earlier references in the book to larva and larvae, alighting and enlightening, landing anywhere and everywhere.)19 What is at issue is the reader’s sense that a certain word or phrase is particularly intriguing or mysterious, cryptic or secret-laden, promising or threatening. It turns out to have a compelling role in our response to a narrative. The narratoid offers itself as a kind of pivot or veerer. As its name suggests, it has to do with narrative, and is therefore most immediately relevant to the reading of fictions, plays, biographies or autobiographies; but it might also be a means of launching or assembling a response to a critical text, especially regarding the workings of narrative within critical prose. The narratoid, in other words, can provide a way of illuminating Cixous’s more ‘critical’ as well as her more ‘fictional’, storytelling texts.20 The word or phrase may seem to have popped out of a dream. It might crop up as if unforeseen, out of the blue (like the moth in Double Oblivion), or it might appear to carry an impressive weight of premeditation, leaving us to suppose that the author must have wended, wandered and wondered around it at some length before its emergence on the page. Talking about works in terms of narratoids can also be a useful strategy for generating a critical response that (like Cixous’s own writing) engages with the unforeseeable, with side-effects and chance-effects. You can never tell quite what’s hit: there is a sense of the impact of something moving, painful and incomprehensible. Despite its somewhat dark

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or sombre-sounding name, a narratoid in Cixous is always a love-thing: its story is about the love of language and the real, affirming the mother unconscious, the immeasurable dignity of the human, and ‘what [one makes] of love, as a human and animal being’.21

3 Omnicisence Internet searches may assume you are making a mistake and take you to ‘omniscience’, or to places where the word ‘omniscience’ appears in misspelt form. But omnicisence is something else. Of course, it is not unconnected with its anagram (‘omniscience’). As anagram, omnicisence does what it’s about: it cuts up everything, including itself. It lovingly interrupts, overturns, plays with the fiction of omniscience. It’s omnicisent. Omnicisence is a word for what Cixous calls ‘the divisibility of the point’. In Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint she declares: ‘The point is the absolute unity, without dimension, says mathematical discourse. The point is the true atom. The indivisible unity.’ For Derrida (and for herself), she goes on to make clear, this point does not exist: ‘Now, the fundamental axiom of everything he says everywhere is the divisibility of the point.’22 I have talked about Cixous’s ‘art of cutting’ in an explicit fashion on numerous occasions in this book, but really it’s everywhere, it’s a matter of omnicisence. In an interview entitled ‘Cinema and its Ghosts’ (first published in French in 2000), Derrida talks about the links between writing and cinema: writing­– o ­ r let us say discursivity­– a­ nd cinema are drawn into the same technical and thus aesthetic evolution, that of the increasingly refined, rapid, accelerated possibilities offered by technological renewal (computers, Internet, synthetic images). There now exists, in a certain way, an unequalled offer or demand for deconstruction, in writing as well as in film. The thing is to know what to do with it. Cutting and pasting, recomposition of texts, the accelerating insertion of quotations, everything you can do with a computer, all this brings writing closer and closer to cinematic montage, and vice versa. The result is that, at a moment when ‘technicity’ increases more and more, film is paradoxically becoming more ‘literary’ and vice versa: it is obvious that writing, for some time now, has shared somewhat a certain cinematographic vision of the world. Deconstruction or not, a writer is always an editor [monteur, ‘film editor’, also ‘fitter’, ‘cutter’]. Today he or she is that even more so.23

Derrida is not naming Cixous’s work as an example of what he is talking about, but (as so often in his writing on the literary) it is hard not to think of her work



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as exemplary. Cut-cut-cut. It’s the very form of her texts­– ­the acceleration of possibilities, the cising up of words and thoughts and feelings, places, events, memories, the clipping force of her narratives (the sigh, the ‘slowness inside the speed’,24 but also the speed inside the slowness), the sectionings of her texts, the skipped full stops and commas, the opening or unclosing of parentheses, the snippety gaps, blanks, dehiscences and scissorings within and between the words, the splitting bifurcations of amphibology, the decisive cut-up of a portmanteau or some other neologism, the slicing of a dash – ‘Omniscient narration’: this is one of the strangest little bits of mind-­control imposed on readers of literature since the form of magical thinking called ‘soliloquy’ (starting up, without being named as such, in Shakespeare) got transposed and metamorphosed into the novel as ‘free indirect discourse’. Somehow­ – ­though in no small part thanks to the Masterfulness of Henry James and the admiring Percy Lubbock who first uses such language in The Craft of Fiction in 1921­– ­students and scholars alike have been expected, without laughing, to talk about omniscient narratives, omniscient narrators and even omniscient authors.25 Originally it was the Judeo-Christian God who was the Omniscient one. In the eighteenth century the epithet was occasionally deployed in terms of extremely knowledgeable individuals. James Boswell and Samuel Johnson discussed the appropriateness of the term to refer to the London barrister Richard Jackson (‘omniscient Jackson’ as he was called): it was deemed to be, strictly speaking, ‘a verbum solenne, appropriated to the Supreme Being’.26 Somehow the ironic, playful, figurative nature of the ‘omniscient’ got lost in the labyrinth of the long nineteenth century. Cixous’s writings engage with religious and ideological fantasies of omniscience, quietly but implacably dedicated to displacing and dismantling them by demonstrating the constant play of the unknown, the unforeseeable and the unconscious. Omnicisence is what is real: this would be another way of getting at what I have been referring to, in the preceding pages, as Cixous’s realism. If omniscience is cut up, taken to pieces in her work, there are still affirmations of a God who, for her, has to do with laughter and the joy of writing and dreams. As she says at the end of ‘Writing Blind’, apropos the fact that ‘in the Bible one does not laugh’: ‘It is only in dreams that we are strong and generous enough to look God in the face while he bursts out laughing. That creation, really! It takes some doing! And I also laugh to have caught God doing what he has never done elsewhere.’27 This is not a God that would be readily identified with any recognised monotheism. It is about the biblical house of God conceived anew as a

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Cixousian ‘house of dreams’.28 It is about the miraculous joy of the unforeseeable (God caught doing what he has never done before or anywhere else). Cixous is intent on multiplying figurations of God and laughing as she goes. God has to do with ‘the feeling that you have escaped. It’s a moment of blessing when you realise that somebody who might have died hasn’t died.’29 As she says in relation to all of her writing, going back to her first collection of short fictions, Le Prénom de Dieu [‘The First Name or Forename or Pre-name of God’] (1967), ‘I have always played with God’: it is in this context that she speaks of ‘God-as-Writing’ and declares herself to be ‘religiously atheistic, but literarily theistic’.30 Omnicisent narrative: in its literary tracings and enactments of the sorts of cuts associated with condensation and displacement in dream, Cixous’s storytelling loves to chop about. One does not need to know why her books begin where they do, or indeed, especially on a first reading, how to make sense of the changes of subject, breaks of tone and switches of scene, in other words the cinematographic instants of ‘cut!’ that are implicit everywhere.31 This suspension or non-knowledge is essential to the religiously atheistic humility of her work. And for these forms of omnicisent writing there is no model: they are different with every book. Cixous invites, envisages, works and plays with omnicisence, right down to ‘the disaggregation of atoms’.32 But she is constantly oriented, too, by a desire to give form to chaos, to affirm enlightenment in the analytic, accretive work of writing.

4 Ornithophony Like the other three words evoked here, ornithophony is not in the dictionary. In the final stages of completing this book-which-I-can-never-think-completed (for how could one conclude a book about the work of Hélène Cixous? I’ve hardly started­– t­ here are countless areas and aspects of her writing I have not discussed, so many of her books I have not even mentioned), I wrote to her asking if she might be willing to make me a little drawing of some kind. In an envelope postmarked 12 November 2018, she sent me a pencil sketch of birds, with (on the left side) Arcachon (or AR CACHON), two cats at the foot of a tall tree with a squirrel at the top, and in the background a sailboat at sea, and seagulls overhead; and (on the right) Seaford (or SEAFORD with the ‘s’ partially growing out of­– ­or becoming­– ­a bird), with six further gulls in the sky above, and a closer, and therefore larger bird flying down, bearing a letter which appears in turn to be (like a thought-bubble or thought-kite) coming out of the ear, some way below

3  ‘Ornithophony’, a drawing by Hélène Cixous.

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it, of a house-like bust of Shakespeare (or William SHAK ESP EAR E). On the left side of the page she has inscribed the word ORNITHOPHONY.33 I do not know where her portmanteau flew in from. An English guide to Ornithophony might run or fly to many pages: I must confine myself to hazarding just a few thoughts and possibilities. Ornithophony is a strange, perhaps previously unheard of species of ornithomorphism, specifically to do with voice. The ‘-phony’ is suggestive of telephony while, in the thoph in the middle, in the passing from ‘ornitho’ into ‘-phony’, there’s at least a hint of ‘Thoth’.34 Ornithophony has to do with what is perhaps the most fundamental subject of Cixous’s writing: metamorphosis. It’s about the non-human voice or voices in the human. It provides another way of attending to what we call ‘literary’ and, more especially, ‘poetic’. It is perhaps inseparable from this calling­– ­from what and how we call it. An obvious example of ornithophony would be Wallace Stevens’s great late poem ‘Of Mere Being’, in which ‘A gold-feathered bird / Sings in the palm, without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign song.’35 Another example would be Yeats’s great late poem ‘Cuchulain Comforted’, in which certain shrouds gather around a mortally wounded man: ‘They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words, / Though all was done in common as before; / / They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.’36 Stevens and Yeats suggest that poetry, finally, is ornithophonic. A very different but also obvious and haunting example in Cixous’s work would be the ‘Chorus of Battery-Reared Chickens’ in The Day I Wasn’t There (Beverley Bie Brahic’s remarkable translation of Le jour où je n’étais pas là, published in French in 2000): O all of us the daily specials We are the most neglected of all animals Our number innumerable as the stars in the sky And the sand in the sea No one cares about us, no one takes pity We’re of no account in the world’s philosophy We are mothers stripped of our carcasses No one can bear to look at us No wonder no wonder no wonder Mile after mile of wire cages we are crushed together Behind the barbed wire we are jailbirds in stripes This is the reality…37



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In linking battery-farming with Nazi concentration camps (‘behind the barbed wire’), this chorus or choir of hens (Chœur des Poules en Batterie) is in tune with Jacques Derrida’s remarks, in The Animal That Therefore I Am, about keeping animals in ‘conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous’ – [a]s if, for example, instead of throwing a people into ovens and gas chambers (let’s say Nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organise the overproduction and overgeneration of Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being continually more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell.38

Cixous gives sighing foreign voice to these birds, even or especially if they are not listened to: ‘We are full of sighs our sighs don’t interest you [Nous sommes plein de soupirs étrangers à vos affaires]’ (57/104). The chorus begins with such a sigh: ‘O…’39 Brahic inventively offers the image of the chickens in this opening line as ‘daily specials’ (‘O all of us the daily specials’), but the original French is darker, indeed day-denied, day-eliminating: Ô nous sommes les éliminées du jour. The faint suggestion of ‘plat du jour’ (what American English might render as ‘daily special’) is transformed into what has been eliminated or discarded of the day. Cixous thus invites us to hear the birds singing of their own ‘day I wasn’t there’. Phantom singing, phantom sighing. Day after day, the day I wasn’t there. (We will come back later to The Day I Wasn’t There.) In an interview in June 2011, Cixous talks at some length about telephones.40 She is in Paris speaking over the phone to me and a seminar room full of graduate students at the University of Sussex. The telephone is ‘sightless’, she remarks near the outset. ‘We are on board the ship Telephone’, she says: Telephone, the telephone, he or she, is one of the main characters in my life … The telephone is connected or is exchangeable, in my imaginary kingdom, with the theme of metamorphosis, because it keeps changing. The telephone is … very animal … [It can be] a butterfly … a telephant … He, or she, or it, is structurally mythological.

I ask her if she also considers the telephone as in some respects deadly, a figure of death. She replies: For me [the telephone] is life itself. It’s never death, it’s non-death … Telephone is our ally against death … It’s like a huge thread of life … The first call in our memories (at least in our ‘Western’ memories) is that of God in Eden, calling Adam on the telephone. And the first hello, I’m here, it’s Adam’s answer.

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At this moment comes the sound, from the seminar room in Sussex, of a bird. ‘Who’s calling there?’ asks Cixous. ‘That’s a seagull’, I tell her. ‘Oh that’s wonderful’, she says. ‘It’s a mother seagull’, I explain (for, like others in the room, I have been aware of this creature from before the start of our telephone conversation, just outside the window of the Medical School, attending to a recently born chick). ‘Isn’t that wonderful? She’s phoning’, Cixous exclaims. ‘And can you imagine that I get her call? And what I would say, in answer to the seagull, is: Yes, I’m here.’ She goes on to observe that it is the same when her mother (Ève) calls her on the phone: ‘Yes, I’m here.’ I have no idea whether Cixous had this uncanny, alternative ‘interior Bible’ narrative-on-the-telephone in mind when she coined the word ‘ornithophony’. I would like to imagine it had a part to play. But in truth ornithophony is everywhere in her writing­– ­in every one of her unidentifiable literary objects, first of all insofar as it keeps the memory of the ‘flying’ (UFO) for which the ‘literary’ (ULO) is a substitute. Every Cixous text is a ‘flying manuscript’.41 As she says in The Book of Promethea (1983): ‘Writing is miraculous and terrifying like the flight of a bird who has no wings but flings itself out and only gets wings by flying.’42 Ornithophony is, of course, not just about flying: before anything else it’s about voice. To hear Cixous speak or read aloud clarifies this in a flash. Peggy Kamuf describes beautifully the experience of listening to her read ‘The Flying Manuscript’ (in French) in Barcelona in June 2005: Her voice soft, firm, setting each word down carefully, but without emphasis or dramatisation, then letting them go on their way like fledglings out of the nest. They take flight and she reads on. The pages fly by swiftly, and like swifts they dip and spiral from one side to the other in complex patterns of many-voiced speech, dialogues external, internal, and maternal, telephonic, helenophonic, teleidiomatic, derridiomatic, telepathic, telegraphic.43

As Kamuf ’s account of Cixous’s ‘many-voiced speech’ suggests, the words and sentences themselves have an ornithomorphic dimension. Ornithophony is a giving space and time to birds, letting come the songs, the calls, the cries but also the silences of birds. Ornithophony is the enchantment her texts draw­– ­drawing on the wing, cry, call, song, gesture, movement, all the activities and passivities, silences and stillnesses of birds, including the apparently dead bird (‘being alive playing dead’) in her short but piercing, ghostly text ‘Shared at Dawn’,44 and the



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flightless magnificent ostrich who presides over Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas (first published in French in 1988): Ultimately it is to the ostrich bird that I would like to dedicate this book, The ostrich is the most discreetly tragic living being of all prehistoric creation. The ostrich is a bird that is not a bird. It is the greatest bird in the world.45

When is a bird (not) a bird? Where is a bird not to be heard, seen or felt in Cixous’s writing, in the very voice of the writing? Correspondingly, ornithophony is what she invites us to hear, see and feel in the writings of others. Manna itself starts not with the ostrich to which the book is dedicated, nor indeed with ‘the airy earth … all traversed by birds’, with the starling, the cranes, the swallows, the doves and other ‘species of tender gracious birds’ that occupy its opening two pages, but rather with an epigraph from Dante’s Paradiso: E come augelli surti di rivera, quasi congratulando a lor pasture, fanno di sé or tonda or altra schiera, sì dentro ai lumi sante creature   volitando cantavano, e faciensi  or D, or I, or L in sue figure. (And as birds, risen from the shore, as if rejoicing together at their pasture, make of themselves now a round flock, now some other shape, so within the lights holy creatures were singing as they flew, and in their figures made of themselves now D, now I, now L.)46

Out of Dante’s angelic, ornithophonic singing-writing Cixous’s scurries, streams, takes flight. Cixous’s attentiveness to the avian and ornithophonic in other writers goes back, at the very least, to her immense early work on Joyce, The Exile of James Joyce (published in French in 1968), with its pervasive concern with the bird-god of writing, Thoth.47 The Exile provides many finely detailed readings apropos Joyce’s birds, of which we may here recall just three brief examples: 1) Cixous lets us hear the cuckoo, starting with the ‘baby tuckoo’ (‘bébé-coucou’) that opens A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and sounds out again in Ulysses, in its repeated ‘Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.’48 It is that ornithophonic ‘word of fear, / Unpleasing to a married ear’ as Shakespeare sings, or has it

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sung, in Love’s Labour’s Lost (5.2.898–99, 907–8), mixing madness and cuckoldry. Joyce’s quasi-infantile ‘baby tuckoo’ in A Portrait or the ‘Cuckoo’ that is ‘clucked lewdly’ by Mulligan in Ulysses is as far (or as distinct) a cry from Shakespeare’s song as it is from Cixous’s ‘cuckoocareering’ in Reveries of the Wild Woman.49 Everyone has their own relation to ornithophony; indeed, we might suppose, every book has an ornithophony of its own. 2) She draws on Joyce’s use of Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia and Swedenborg’s Arcana Coelestia, especially in the context of the crane and the epiphany of the bird-girl in A Portrait: ‘A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea. She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird.’50 Cixous contends that ‘When the bird-girl appears, the emblems and the metaphors of the one feminine image suggest both Thoth and Our Lady [la Vierge].’51 One might then hear an ornithophonic element in the ensuing cry of Stephen’s soul: ‘— Heavenly God! cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy.’52 3) Cixous discusses ‘the abolition of the function of differentiation between the self and the world’ in the context of Leopold Bloom’s closely sympathetic relation to ‘the animal kingdom’.53 She offers as examples his singular kind of ‘communion’ with the seagulls and the cat.54 While she mentions the gulls, it is only the cat she goes on to explore in detail. Still there are ornithophonic pick-up lines in Bloom’s poetic reflections, as he walks by the Liffey, regarding these birds flapping strongly, wheeling between the gaunt quay walls … [t]he day I threw that stale cake out of the Erin’s King picked it up in the wake fifty yards astern. Live by their wits. They wheeled, flapping: The hungry famished gull, Flaps o’er the waters dull. That is how poets write, the similar sounds…55

Wheeling and flapping in this thought of ‘similar sounds’, Bloom’s improvised couplet further metamorphoses a few pages later: ‘The dreamy cloudy gull / Waves o’er the waters dull’.56 It is tempting to put this figure of a dreamy gull in touch (as if by ornithophone) with a moment in Cixous’s writing such as the ‘etching’ at the end of Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas: Sea gulls rejoicing in their pasture were fluttering and diving, etching the water with pale lips and sparkling signs. And nothing will have been lost.57



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‘I have always been a bird’, Cixous declares in ‘Sorties’­– a­ bit vulture, a bit eagle, a bit phoenix.58 Ornithophony has to do with the link between ‘feminine writing’ (écriture féminine) and ‘voice’: ‘I sense femininity in writing by: a privilege of voice: writing and voice are entwined and interwoven and writing’s continuity/ voice’s rhythm take each other’s breath away through interchanging, make the text gasp or form it out of suspenses and silences, make it lose its voice or rend it with cries.’59 It is the feeling or ‘visitation’, she suggests, of a ‘first love without name’ that ‘sings’ in us, that is ‘before the law’ (avant la loi), that relates to childhood, and to the mother as nameless ‘source of goods’ (source des biens).60 Ornithophonic writing is not exclusive to women, of course, just as écriture féminine, for Cixous, is readily associated with Shakespeare, Kleist, Genet and others. A section of Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing entitled ‘Birds, Women, and Writing’ speaks of the idea of the ‘He-Bible’­– ­a phrase to be heard ornithophonically, in the voice of Clarice Lispector as much as Hélène Cixous.61 In particular Cixous focuses on the Book of Leviticus, and its declaration of what is ‘an abomination’: the eagle, the osprey, the vulture, the kite, the raven, the night hawk, the cuckow, the little owl, the cormorant, the swan, the pelican, the gier eagle, the stork, the heron, the lapwing and so on (Leviticus 11:13–20). She writes: ‘Those who belong to the birds and their kind (those may include some men), to writings and their kind: they are all to be found­– a­ nd a fair company it is­– ­outside; in a place that is called by [the He-Bible] abominable. Elsewhere, outside, birds, women, and writing gather.’62 Ornithophony indeed would be another way of construing écriture féminine, without having to negotiate what Elissa Marder has drily referred to as ‘the many misunderstandings and misreadings of [Cixous’s work] in the Anglophone context … due to the translation of “l’écriture féminine” as “women’s writing”.’63

p Finally, in fading, in fading out or fading into the dim, a note on or for The Day I Wasn’t There. This is the opening of the penultimate section, entitled ‘The Fading’ (‘L’effacement’): My mother having taken the beans and gone off without a glance as if she had received an urgent call, I was left in the kitchen with her sentences. I listened to them again. Simple sentences but the more I listened the more they darkened, gathering clouds, detaching themselves from my mother and rising to the ceiling. ‘What-do-you-want-me-to-tell-you’, that one for example I’d let pass without paying attention, now it came back new, invented, abrupt, even it addressed itself

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to me in a sharp tone of voice, authoritarian, it struck my ear all of a sudden with a trenchant little flip of its wing, the room was traversed in all directions by flights of veering sentences, I suddenly caught sight of a black tail, a white belly, a flash, I saw that I had seen nothing, I had kept to the gray areas, a mist without angles and the orange note of my mother’s cap to lure me away.64

What sentences­– ­and what sentences about sentences! They cut away, omnicisently, ‘in all directions’. It’s a nanoment. It’s all to do with how one hears, if one hears, the tone. The tones in a tone, sin and atone, inner tone. As the narrator remarks elsewhere in The Day I Wasn’t There: ‘The essential is in the intonation’ (78). This is Cixous’s realism, a hyperreal mundanity: the mother has just taken the green beans and left the room. It’s as if the other, the mother, ‘had received an urgent call’, but really this estranging, ghostly call is for the narrator. The Day I Wasn’t There is the searing, unbearable book about Cixous’s firstborn son, a poorly Down’s syndrome baby who doesn’t live beyond infancy. The reader is led to infer from the title of the book that, on the day of his death, his mother, the narrator, wasn’t there. From more or less the beginning of his life Georges (named after Cixous’s father) is looked after by her midwife mother in Algeria. Gradually it becomes evident, however, that the title-phrase is in fact ‘first’ to be heard in the voice of the mother’s mother. It is the narrator’s mother who wasn’t there the day the infant died: ‘This child, when did he go? The only day I leave the house. For one year I don’t go out. One day, I go out. And he goes. Without me. The day I am not there’ (51). But of course the sound and vision of this title-phrase haunts everything and everyone in the text, including the chickens, as we have seen, and above all the narrator. At the beginning of the book these words appear: ‘You are warding off the dim nestling, the nestled dimling, I told myself, and I opened my eyes’ (5). The book is the story of this abandoned ward, this warding off, all wards: ‘the dim nestling, the nestled dimling’ is Beverley Bie Brahic’s poignant rendering of ‘le niais’ (11). In a note she explains: ‘le niais means “simpleton”; also nyas or eyas, “an unfledged hawk”. A homophone, le nié, means “one who is denied” ’ (101). This single word for the narrator’s baby reverberates the ornithophony. It has taken the narrator decades to arrive at the moment at which she feels she can and must write, give voice or voices to the life of this dim nestling. She is giving voice to the ‘feather-headed fossil of an unfledged child [fossile de faucon niais] … [as] it rustles softly without violence the way a spectre gropes for the latch that’s been changed in the meantime, rubbing itself against the door, never suspecting it’s been denied [sans se douter nié]’ (6/12).



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The narrator declares, near the start: ‘Everything in this world and in the others depends on how we read it’ (8). But this reading is most of all a question of voice, intonation, listening. The opening of ‘The Fading’ is about listening to sentences like birds. The mother is stringing green beans and for the first time in her life, for the first time in all these decades, the narrator asks her about the practical details of the fledgling’s burial. In the narrator’s voice in the mother’s (voice nestling within voice) we are told: Children got put in the cemetery in cubbyholes. There was a wall filled with pigeonholes [cases] for all the little children. One puts them in a box. And the box in a niche [une niche] which is closed and that’s it. (83/155)

The word niche in French means ‘recess’ but also suggests the verb nicher, ‘to nest’. ‘What do you want me to tell you?’ (Qu’est-ce que tu veux que je te dise?) (49/90). This is the question nestling at the heart of the book. The mother puts it to the narrator for the first time more or less exactly in the middle of the book, but it resounds, is still sounding, side thinking, summoning otherwise, near the end: ‘ “What-do-you-want-me-to-tell-you” (“Qu’est-ce-que-tu-veux-que-je-te-dise”)’ (87/163). ‘I was left in the kitchen with [my mother’s] sentences. I listened to them again. Simple sentences but the more I listened the more they darkened…’ The place fills with birds: ‘the room was traversed in all directions by flights of veering sentences’. Just as powerfully as, for example, ‘nestling’ (niais/nié) or ‘niche’, the ‘ “What-do-you-want-me-to-tell-you” ’ becomes a narratoid. In its intimate form (‘tu’, ‘te’), ‘ “What-do-you-want-me-to-tell-you” ’ is a rhetorical, abyssal question addressed to the intimacy of every you, every reader. In here nestles the secret of narrative. Come, read, it invites us. The visual memory of the mother’s presence in the kitchen a few moments earlier (‘the orange note of my mother’s cap [that] lure[s] me away’) is synaesthetically mixed with the striking sound and swallowed up colours of this sentence that ‘struck my ear all of a sudden with a trenchant little flip of its wing … I suddenly caught sight of a black tail, a white belly, a flash.’ It’s a fly-by swallowing of lure and entrapment. A little earlier, the narrator sums up this temporal logic, the flight time of being: ‘Things don’t happen on the days they occur, neither the events, nor the people. My son didn’t happen to me when he first arrived neither he to me nor I to him, he happened to me but later, already later. The day I wasn’t there’ (85). Ornithophony doesn’t happen when it happens. It’s a stranger to all our affairs. It’s a foreign song. In life. In love. In the throat. Keep listening.

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Notes   1 See Jacques Derrida, ‘Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’, trans. Barbara Johnson, in Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi–xlviii, and in particular Johnson’s note on the title word, xi– xii. Mairéad Hanrahan offers some thought-provoking remarks on Cixous’s early work Inside (Dedans) in the context of Abraham and Torok, especially vis-à-vis the anasemic (what is ‘before’ or this side of meaning): see her Cixous’s Semi-Fictions: Thinking at the Borders of Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 29–30.   2 ‘From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’, trans. Ashley Thompson, in Hélène Cixous: When the Word is a Stage, ed. Eric Prenowitz, special issue of New Literary History, 37:1 (2006), 11–12.   3 For a fuller discussion of this, see in particular ‘Portmanteau’ and ‘Cixous cuts: Lewis Carroll’, above.   4 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 52.   5 Nanoplankton are ‘[v]ery small unicellular plankton, at the limits of resolution of light microscopy’ (OED).  6 See Nicholas Royle, ‘Even the Title: On the State of Narrative Theory Today’, Narrative, 22:1 (2014), 1–16: here, 6. This essay also includes some reflections on the writings of Elizabeth Bowen, David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo in terms of the nanoment, as well as a somewhat differently oriented account of the narratoid (in the context of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’) and omnicisence (in the context of Jon McGregor’s Even the Dogs).   7 Hélène Cixous, FirstDays of the Year, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 60.   8 See Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 30–8.   9 Hélène Cixous, ‘We must hand our inheritance on’, interview with Susan Sellers, in White Ink: Interviews on Sex, Text and Politics, ed. Susan Sellers (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 151. 10 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Play of Fiction’, interview with Christa Stevens, trans. Suzanne Dow, in White Ink, 3. 11 On Derrida’s ‘logic of the trace’ in relation to the nano-, see Nicholas Royle, ‘Nanotext’, Imprimatur, 2:1 (1996), 13–19; ‘verbal dwarfs’ are the stuff of Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind: Conversation with the Donkey’, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts (London: Routledge, 1998), esp. 147. 12 On the ‘nanotext’, see my essay of that title; and on nanothinking, see Nicholas Royle, Quilt (Brighton: Myriad, 2010), 82, 120.



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13 On the psychoanalytic and deconstructive strategy of ‘blowing up’ details, see Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 37:1–2 (2015), 38–9. 14 On ‘scalar literacy’, see Timothy Clark, The Value of Ecocriticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 38–56; and his ‘Derangements of Scale’, in Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, vol. 1, ed. Tom Cohen, available at https://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/10539563.0001.001/1:8/--telemorphosis-­ theory-in-the-era-of-climate-change-vol-1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext (accessed 26 February 2020). 15 Jacques Derrida, ‘From the Word to Life: A Dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous’, trans. Ashley Thompson, in Hélène Cixous: When the Word is a Stage, ed. Eric Prenowitz, special issue of New Literary History, 37:1 (2006), 3. 16 Derrida, too, makes clear his wariness of ‘the language of “natural” force’. In H.C. for Life he talks about being tempted to compare the effect of reading Cixous to a ‘volcano, torrent, tidal surge, storm, the frenzy of that which sweeps everything away’, but pulls back, seeing such brutal naturalism as ‘a denial, a refusal to understand and read’. See Jacques Derrida, H.C. for Life, That is to Say…, trans. Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 147. 17 See Hélène Cixous, Mother Homer is Dead…, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 111; Homère est morte… (Paris: Galilée, 2014), 199. 18 Hélène Cixous, Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang, trans. Suzanne Dow, with the collaboration of Lucy Garnier (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 128. The original French here reads: ‘A moth, me dis-je, une mite. J’écarte la chose-mite’: see Double Oubli de l’Orang-Outang (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 166. ‘Mite’ in French is specifically a clothesmoth and is, of course, not pronounced in the same way as the English word ‘mite’ (or its homophone, ‘might’); but in Cixous’s motioning across, mixing and nixing tongues, one might always trace the mightiness of a mite more. 19 For larva and larvae, see in particular Cixous, Double Oblivion, 25, 72; Double Oubli, 39, 100. 20 We might consider, for example, the sudden appearance of the word ‘recet’ in Insister of Jacques Derrida: recet might look like a dreamy mix of story or account (récit) and receipt or recipe (recette), to be cooked up in multiple ways, but it is also an old French word for the burrow of an animal or a military hideout (in which to catch one’s breath). As Cixous exclaims: ‘Recet, do you know it? Refuge, burial, catch one’s breath. What a word.’ See Hélène Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 137. See the entry for ‘recette’ in Robert Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, ed. Alain Rey (Paris: Robert,

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1992): ‘L’ancien français a eu le substantif recet n.m. (1080) “habitation”, refuge, lieu où l’on se retire, spécialement “repaire d’un animal”, “enterrement”, emprunté au latin receptus substantivé et désignant un refuge, une retraite militaire et l’action de reprendre son souffle.’ My thanks to Peggy Kamuf for alerting me to this entry in Rey. 21 Hélène Cixous, ‘Literature Suspends Death’, interview with René de Ceccatty, trans. Fabien Troivaux, in White Ink, 26. 22 Hélène Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 63. 23 Jacques Derrida, in Antoine de Baecque and Thierry Jousse, ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts: An Interview with Jacques Derrida’, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 37:1–2 (2015), 33. 24 See Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 144. 25 Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London: Jonathan Cape, 1921). I discuss James, Lubbock and the question of omniscience in more detail in ‘The “telepathy effect”: notes toward a reconsideration of narrative fiction’, in The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 256–76. 26 See James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, Including a Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, a new edition, with numerous additions and notes by John Wilson Croker (London: John Murray, 1831), vol. 3: 383. Jackson died in 1786. The OED also cites Thomas Ken’s epic poem Edmund (1711): ‘Happy the Prince… / Who is omniscient in his Royal sphere, / By a diffus’d intelligencing Ear.’ 27 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 152. 28 Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, 152. The phrase ‘house of God’ first appears in the Bible in Genesis 28:17, in the wake of Jacob’s ladder dream. 29 Hélène Cixous, ‘We must hand our inheritance on’, interview with Susan Sellers, in White Ink, 153. Elsewhere she speaks of God in terms of a kind of pregnant ‘man’ born(e) out of the death of her father: ‘I want this pregnant, immersive presence of God, mine, not the God of Abraham nor of religions but somebody I call God to help me excuse and bear the miraculous and thus threatening side of life. God has been very “man” for me, since he was born to me, he’s a god who was born to me [qui m’est né] (I hear hymenée) upon the death of my father.’ See Hélène Cixous and Frédéric-Yves Jeannet, Encounters: Conversations on Life and Writing, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 2. 30 Hélène Cixous, ‘Guardian of Language’ (1996), interview with Kathleen O’Grady, trans. Eric Prenowitz, in White Ink, 82–3. 31 For the ‘cut!’ in this explicit form, see, for example, Hélène Cixous, Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time, I. Los, A Chapter, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 30, 33, 41.



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32 Hélène Cixous, FirstDays of the Year, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 65. 33 On a little square piece of paper in the same envelope, she writes:   my dear o dear co dreamer   I can’t draw better, my gull keeper   I suggest you throw it to the sea Naturally, I have not followed this Kafkaesque advice. 34 In the drawing, as if to accentuate this suggestion of ‘Thoth’, there is also an additional single vertical stroke in the ‘N’, creating the appearance of an ‘H’ within or alongside it. 35 Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 476–7. For an excellent reading of ‘Of Mere Being’ and other related poems, see Cary Wolfe, ‘Wallace Stevens’s Birds, or, Derrida and Ecological Poetics’, in EcoDeconstruction: Derrida and Environmental Philosophy, ed. Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes and David Wood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 317–38. 36 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950), 395–6. 37 See Hélène Cixous, The Day I Wasn’t There, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 56–7; Le jour où je n’étais pas là (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 103–4. The original French for ‘the world’s philosophy’ is ‘la pensée du monde’ (more literally, ‘the thought of the world’); ‘we are jailbirds in stripes / This is the reality’ is ‘poules sur poules rayées / De la réalité’ (which might more literally be rendered ‘chickens upon chickens struck off / From reality’). Further page references to this English translation and to the original French version are given in parentheses in the main body of the text. As Cixous notes at the beginning of an essay that focuses on the writings of Clarice Lispector but also draws on Joyce, Poe, Kafka and Blanchot, among others: ‘Chickens play an important role in many literary works.’ See ‘ “The Egg and the Chicken”: Love Is Not Having’, in Reading with Clarice Lispector, ed. and trans. Verena Andermatt Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 98–122. 38 Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 26. Derrida’s text was originally given as a lecture at Cerisy in 1997. Cixous’s ‘chorus’ goes on to suggest Christian parallels too: ‘We are the crucified miles / No one wants to contemplate our calvary’ (Cixous, The Day I Wasn’t There, 57). Regarding the cryptic song of the battery-hens, we might recall a remark Cixous makes in ‘ “The Egg and the Chicken”: Love Is Not Having’. Having noted that Kafka’s texts, like Lispector’s, are ‘not narratives’, but rather ‘they contain a secret, a lesson’ (98), she goes on to observe: ‘Kafka said somewhere in his Conversations that we live in a period that is so possessed by demons that soon it will no longer be possible to do anything good and just, except

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under the seal of secrecy, as if it were a question of illegality. I would like to surround this message with chicken feathers’ (116). 39 The ‘O’ is no doubt also an egg, as it is in Clarice Lispector’s ‘The Egg and the Chicken’ (O ovo e a galinha): see Complete Stories, trans. Katrina Dodson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2015), 276–86. For Cixous’s attentiveness to the ‘O’-egg in Lispector, see ‘ “The Egg and the Chicken”: Love Is Not Having’, esp. 101 and 105. 40 http://www.sussex.ac.uk/video/schools/english/HeleneCixousOnTheTelephone. mp3 (accessed 26 February 2020). 41 Hélène Cixous, ‘The Flying Manuscript’, in Insister of Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 53–120; ‘Le manuscrit volant’, in Insister, à Jacques Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 45–80. ‘Volant’ (from voler) means ‘flying’, but also ‘stealing’ (suggesting, among other things, a trope on­– ­or purloining of­– ­Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’). 42 Hélène Cixous, The Book of Promethea, trans. Betsy Wing (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 27. 43 Peggy Kamuf, ‘Afterburn: An Afterword to “The Flying Manuscript” ’, in Hélène Cixous: When the Word is a Stage, ed. Eric Prenowitz, special issue of New Literary History, 37:1 (2006), 47. 44 Hélène Cixous, ‘Shared at Dawn’, trans. Keith Cohen, in Stigmata: Escaping Texts, 175–80; here, 179. 45 Hélène Cixous, Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas, trans. Catherine A. F. MacGillivray (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press, 1994), 3. 46 See Cixous, Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas, 1–2; Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso, canto XVIII, 73–8, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 202–3. 47 Hélène Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, trans. Sally A. J. Purcell (London: John Calder, 1976); L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1968). Thoth is everywhere in this book, but see, especially, ‘Thoth and the Written Word’ (737–45). 48 See Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, 649 (L’Exil de James Joyce, 735) and 729; James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), 7; and James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 204, 364–5. 49 For the clucking of ‘Cuck Mulligan’, see Joyce, Ulysses, 204. Early on in Cixous’s Reveries the narrator recalls an incident involving herself, her brother Pierre, their German grandmother and a bike: ‘My brother yells: she insulted me! She’s killed me again! My brother grabs the iron rod. I cry: Stay! My grandmother calls very loud in German Solch ein Kukuch nochmal! It’s her sharpest cry of indignation. She calls us cuckoos or rather Koukous, Pierre me the bike Koukous. We koukareer off [Nous



Four words for Cixous 229

kourons], with the Bike that follows us or accompanies us I don’t know how, we koukareer [nous koukourons] to our end no doubt about that.’ See Hélène Cixous, Reveries of the Wild Woman: Primal Scenes, trans. Beverley Bie Brahic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 15; Les rêveries de la femme sauvage: Scènes primitives (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 31–2. 50 Joyce, A Portrait, 171; quoted in Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, 652. 51 Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, 651; L’Exil de James Joyce, 737. 52 See Joyce, A Portrait, 172. 53 Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, 677, translation modified; L’Exil de James Joyce, 766. 54 See Cixous, The Exile of James Joyce, 676–7, referring to Joyce, Ulysses, 145–6, 53–4. For an example of the Cixousian narrator comparing herself to a seagull, see The Book of Promethea, 100. Cats, of course, prowl, watch, play and sleep everywhere in Cixous’s work. 55 Joyce, Ulysses, 145–6. 56 Joyce, Ulysses, 158. 57 Cixous, Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas, 254. 58 Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays’, in Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 99. 59 Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 92. 60 See Cixous, ‘Sorties’, 93; and in the original French, Hélène Cixous, ‘Sorties’, in Le Rire de la Méduse et autres ironies (Paris: Galilée, 2010), 128. 61 Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 111–20. 62 Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 113. 63 See Elissa Marder, ‘Force of Love’, in Deconstruction and the Survival of Love, ed. Luke Donahue and Adam R. Rosenthal, special issue of Oxford Literary Review, 40:2 (2018), 206–20; here, 210. Marder offers an incisive account in particular of the reception (or non-reception) of Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ in the Anglophone world, thanks to what she calls ‘the well-meaning, but nonetheless highly problematic, English translation of this one remarkable work’ (207). 64 Cixous, The Day I Wasn’t There, 87; Le jour où je n’étais pas là, 163–4.

16

The one time Hélène Cixous entered my garden

at Seaford around her birthday in June 2008 she walked straight as an arrow stooped like a hawk to something on the ground a sail a quill a salt white pristine primary wing feather of an adult herring gull and stowed it about her person I don’t know where.

Index of works by Cixous

1938, Nuits 171 Une autobiographie allemande 47 Ayaï! Le cri de la littérature (Ay yay! The Cry of Literature) 64 ‘Bathsheba, or the Interior Bible’ 22–3 The Blindfolded Fiancée 56 ‘The Book as One of Its Own Characters’ 192 ‘The Book I Don’t Write’ 184–90 The Book of Promethea 218, 229 n.54 ‘The Character of “Character”’ 8, 120, 124–5, 192–3, 197 ‘Cixous on the Telephone’ 217–18 ‘Coming to Writing’ 7, 26, 87 n.13 The Day I Wasn’t There (Le jour où je n’étais pas là) 83, 126–7, 216–17, 221–3 Death Shall Be Dethroned 49 Défions l’augure 204 n.13 Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang 211, 225 n.18 Dream I Tell You (Rêve je te dis) 3, 30, 35–50, 69, 131 Encounters (Rencontre terrestre) 4, 125, 162–3, 171, 191, 200, 203 n.8, 226 n.29 Eve Escapes 53–4 The Exile of James Joyce 8, 219–20 ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms’ 21, 32–3 n.31, 54–5, 105–9, 158–60 FirstDays of the Year (Jours de l’an) 23, 32 n.17, 152, 156–7, 159–60, 163, 165, 171, 172, 175, 214

‘The Flying Manuscript’ (‘Le manuscrit volant’) 218 ‘From the Word to Life’ 28, 207 ‘Guardian of Language’ 214 Hemlock (Ciguë) 5, 87–8 n.16 Hyperdream 53–4, 73–4 ‘In the beginnings there were many…’ 54 Inside (Dédans) 30 Insister of Jacques Derrida 155, 225 n.20 ‘Introduction to Lewis Carroll’ 110–13 ‘“A Kind of Magic”’ 9–11 ‘Language is the Only Refuge’ 185 ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ 11, 21, 25, 80–1 ‘Literature Suspends Death’ 47, 212 Los, A Chapter 4, 24, 49–50, 62–4, 69–74, 195–6, 214 Love Itself in the Letterbox 53–4 ‘Love of the Wolf’ 53 ‘“Mamãe disse ele”, or Joyce’s second hand’ 93–4 Manhattan 53, 89 Manna for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas 205 n.39, 219, 220 Mother Homer is Dead… 3, 188, 193, 211 Neutre 58 The Newly Born Woman 21, 48 ‘The Novel Today’ 158 OR: les lettres de mon père 178 n.30, 269



Index of works by Cixous 233

‘The Play of Fiction’ 5, 119, 155, 209 Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint 79, 104–5, 125, 212 Le Prénom de Dieu 157, 190–1, 210

Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing 19, 26, 28, 54, 69, 78–80, 83, 85–6, 117, 118, 147–8, 174 Tombe 29

Reading with Clarice Lispector 227 n.37, 227 n.38 Reveries of the Wild Woman (Les rêveries de la femme sauvage) 100–3, 136–7, 228–9 n.49 ‘Rites of Tenderness, Killing the Dead, Living On’ 26 Rootprints 31 n.4, 69, 120, 155

‘The Unforeseeable’ 176 n.8

‘Shakespeare Ghosting Derrida’ 170, 179 n.57 ‘Shared at Dawn’ 218 ‘Sorties’ 21, 47–9, 81–2, 91, 97, 139, 153, 158, 221 ‘Stigmata, or Job the Dog’ 24, 29

‘We Must Hand Our Inheritance On’ 209 ‘What is it o’clock?’ 104, 107, 110 ‘Without end’ 13–14, 212 ‘Writing Blind’ 19, 22, 25, 56, 83, 89–93, 117, 129, 157n8, 159, 162, 165, 213–14 ‘You race towards that secret, which escapes’ 89, 91 Zero’s Neighbour (Le voisin de zéro) 154, 156–7, 170

General index

Abraham, Nicolas, and Maria Torok 85 Adorno, Theodor 21, 37–8, 42 Agrippa, Heinrich Cornelius 220 Aiken, Conrad 15 n.2 Andrewes, Lancelot 183 Attridge, Derek 109–10 Auden, W. H. 102, 129 Augustine 24 Barthes, Roland 21 Beckett, Samuel 3, 6, 92, 120, 153–7, 160–9, 172, 181 n.77, 183 Bellow, Saul 15 n.2 Benjamin, Walter 42 Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle 3, 127 n.21 Berger, Anne 115 n.15 Bevington, David 45 Blake, William 4, 15 n.4, 24, 49, 52 n.28 Blanchot, Maurice 21, 226 n.37 Bloom, Harold 69 Blunden, Vicky 185 Bonaparte, Marie 173, 181 n.76 Bonaparte, Napoleon 153 Boswell, James 213 Bowen, Elizabeth 6–8, 10, 80, 122, 127 n.21, 223 n.6 Brahic, Beverley Bie 143 n.30, 216–17, 222 Brontë, Emily 6–7, 10, 24, 62, 70–5, 77 n.20, 80, 166, 197 Brooks, Harold 141 Browne, Thomas 152 Browning, Robert 208 Büchner, Karl Georg 24 Busch, Wilhelm 5

Carroll, Lewis 6, 9, 28, 109–13, 117–25, 131–2, 172, 208 Caruth, Cathy 29 Carver, Raymond 7 Celan, Paul 170 Cervantes, Miguel de 41 Chaucer, Geoffrey 162 Chekhov, Anton 104 Christie, Agatha 198–201 Clark, Timothy 180 n.66, 208, 210 Cohen, Josh 42 Colebrook, Claire 180 n.66 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 65 Compton-Burnett, Ivy 15 n.2 Conrad, Joseph 80, 223 n.6 Cornell, Sarah 119 Currie, Mark 57 Dante Alighieri 3, 219 da Vinci, Leonardo 13 de Bono, Edward 158 Deleuze, Gilles 1, 21, 58, 82, 92–3, 167, 168 DeLillo, Don 223 n.6 de Man, Paul 95–6 Derrida, Jacques 1, 13, 21, 27–8, 56–9, 85, 104–13, 115 n.11, 115 n.12, 115 n.15, 159, 165–6, 188, 210 The Animal That Therefore I Am 217 ‘Ants’ 3, 68–9, 174, 175 The Beast and the Sovereign (vol. 2) 57 ‘Cinema and Its Ghosts’ 212 ‘Countersignature’ 113 ‘The Double Session’ 105 ‘Fichus’ 37–9, 42, 48–9, 137–8, 147 For What Tomorrow 130, 131, 133–4, 138 ‘Force and Signification’ 27



General index 235

Derrida, Jacques (cont.) ‘Fors’ 207 ‘Freud and the Scene of Writing’ 130 Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius 41, 136–7, 138, 171 Glas 78–9 H. C. for Life, That Is to Say… 7, 8, 40, 79, 118, 130, 138–9, 154, 156, 157, 161–4, 166, 167, 170, 173, 174, 178 n.30, 184, 190–1, 194, 195, 225 n.16 ‘Living On: Border Lines’ 193 Monolingualism of the Other 27, 138 Of Grammatology 137, 177 n.24 ‘Rams’ 170 ‘Resistances’ 150 ‘Shibboleth’ 180 n.62 ‘A Silkworm of One’s Own’ 103, 105 Sovereignties in Question 119 Spectres of Marx 129, 185, 194, 197 ‘Telepathy’ 72, 105, 137, 172–5, 183 ‘This Strange Institution Called Literature’ 194 ‘The Time is Out of Joint’ 185 ‘To Speculate – On “Freud”’ 39–40, 128, 134–5 Dickinson, Emily 65, 129 Donne, John 24, 60 n.21 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 28, 80, 148 Doyle, Arthur Conan 173 Duras, Marguerite 28 Dutoit, Thomas 153 Eliot, George 152, 173 Eliot, T. S. 183 Ellis, Havelock 134 Faulkner, William 28, 80 Fliess, Wilhelm 173 Foucault, Michel 1, 21 Freud, Sigmund 9–10, 26–8, 70, 72, 101, 123, 134–6, 145–50, 172–5, 178 n.26, 196 ‘Difficulties and First Approaches’ 136 ‘A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis’ 27 ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’ 147 The Interpretation of Dreams 41–2, 129–30, 132, 147 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious 4, 41 ‘Medusa’s Head’ 121

‘My Contact with Joseph Popper-Lynkeus’ 132–3 ‘Negation’ 42 ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’ 148–50 ‘The Question of Lay Analysis’ 27, 128 ‘To Thomas Mann on his Sixtieth Birthday’ 27 ‘The Uncanny’ 54–5, 106–7, 119 Fuentes, Carlos 24, 49–50 Genet, Jean 28, 78–9, 82, 103, 221 Golding, William 15 n.2 Haggard, Henry Rider 173 Hamsun, Knut 80 Hanrahan, Mairéad 177 n.25, 224 n.1 Hardy, Thomas 2–3, 173, 208 Haworth, Michael 181 n.81 Heine, Heinrich 41 Hemingway, Ernest 7 Hibbard, G. R. 170 Holbein, Hans 22 Irigaray, Luce 21 Jackson, Richard 213 Jackson, Sarah 22 Jacobson, Howard 146 James, Henry 118, 165, 191, 213 Jensen, Wilhelm 145–6 Johnson, Samuel 213 Jones, Ernest 134–5 Joyce, James 1, 3, 6, 15 n.2, 28, 120, 189, 208 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 8, 93, 219–20 Ulysses 36, 219–20 Kafka, Franz 28, 47, 57, 79–80, 90, 120, 227–8 n.38 Kamuf, Peggy 218, 226 n.20 Keats, John 94–7, 140, 152 Kipling, Rudyard 15 n.2 Kleist, Heinrich von 28, 221 Kristeva, Julia 21 Lacan, Jacques 1, 21, 28, 192 Lacey, Candida 185 Lardner, Ring 155 Larsen, Nella 80 Laurie, Hugh 146

236

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Lawrence, D. H. 80, 206 n.45 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 116 n.21 Lispector, Clarice 1, 7, 28, 57, 80, 118, 120, 166–7, 221, 228 n.39 Love, Brenda 189 Lubbock, Percy 213 Lyotard, Jean-François 21, 56, 60 n.18 Mandelstam, Osip 28 Marder, Elissa 86 n.6, 221, 229 n.63 Marvell, Andrew 163 Mayoux, Jean-Jacques 8, 15 n.32 McEachern, Claire 50 n.2 McGregor, Jon 223 n.6 McGurl, Mark 21, 192 Melville, Herman 80 Meyers, F. W. H. 173 Michaud, Ginette 156 Milesi, Laurent 171 Milton, John 120 Montaigne, Michel de 28, 47, 152 Morrison, Toni 80 Morton, Timothy 180 n.66, 209 Murray, Les 98 n.7 Nietzsche, Friedrich 22, 39 Ovid 5, 28, 56, 81 Pearlman, Corinne 185 Phillips, Adam 9–10, 26 Picasso, Pablo 13, 92 Piles, Roger de 31 n.17 Plath, Sylvia 56 Plato 84–5 Poe, Edgar Allan 6, 9, 10, 28, 30, 62–4, 102, 103 n.5, 166 Popper-Lynkeus, Joseph 132–3 Pound, Ezra 15 n.2 Prenowitz, Eric 76–7 n.18, 178 n.37 Proust, Marcel 47, 207, 208 Reid, Iain 199 Rembrandt van Rijn 12–14, 22–3 Rimbaud, Arthur 4, 28 Roe, John 198 Sellers, Susan 119 Shakespeare, William 1, 6, 9, 10, 26, 28

Antony and Cleopatra 26, 43–50, 96–7, 129, 142, 170, 206 n.45 As You Like It 26 Hamlet 6, 22, 26, 113, 135, 159–60, 161, 168, 169–70, 195, 198, 206 n.45 King Lear 26, 139, 198 Love’s Labour’s Lost 219–20 Macbeth 26, 132, 170, 188, 196 Measure for Measure 206 n.46 A Midsummer Night’s Dream 26, 62, 66–7, 76 n.10, 76 n.11, 135–6, 139–41 Much Ado About Nothing 35–6 Othello 26 The Rape of Lucrece 197–8 Richard III 184–5, 195 Romeo and Juliet 29–30, 41, 42, 65, 120, 128–9, 213, 216, 221 Sonnets 58, 160, 206 n.46 The Tempest 2, 4, 132 Twelfth Night 54 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 62, 63, 140 Sidney, Philip 45 Smith, Nick 105 n.44 Smith, Robert Rowland 188 Sophocles 41 Spark, Muriel 15 n.2 Stendhal 1, 24, 28, 69 Stevens, Wallace 24, 85, 92–3, 146, 195, 216 Stewart, Garrett 189 Still, Judith 22 Strachey, James 142 n.17 Swedenborg, Emanuel 220 Sweet, Henry 186 Thatcher, Margaret 153 Torok, Maria, and Nicolas Abraham 85 Trump, Donald 146, 150 Tsvetaeva, Marina 28, 57, 83, 120 Verne, Jules 41 Wilders, John 45 Wolfe, Cary 227 n.35 Wood, Sarah 180 n.66, 196 Woolf, Virginia 63, 67–9, 208 Wordsworth, William 4, 67 n.11, 198, 208 Yeats, W. B. 216