|
|
Focusing on her main creative
writings, Sellers’ analysis emphasises the exploration of our
subjective relation to the world and then finally involvement in
the endeavour to reform this relation which is mainly the
concern of Cixous’ fiction. In her seminal article From the
Scene of History: Pathway of Writing, Cixous uses events
from her life that become the impetus behind her creative
writing: the untimely death of her farther when she was merely
11, the multicultural ethos of France that she grew in and the
imperialist French adventure in Algeria are some of the
significant factors responsible for her involvement with the
question of cultural identity and the self. Violence and racism
of the Algeria of the 1930s where she was born as a French Jew
left her in a state of alienation: she was always the other for
both the French and the Arabs, thus feeling homeless in a world
that was heartlessly colonised. She grew up with a
constitutional antipathy for the coloniser and all that stands
for authoritarianism. Anger, disgust and tragedy filled her
adolescent years thereby bestowing on her the heart-rending
experience of colonial history that became an impetus behind her
involvement with literary and critical writings. It was in this
pursuit that she saw how enormous ‘possibilities of language
could open before her’ and how the dark side of human ‘ruthlessness’
could be explored and overcome.
Thus it is her
exile, her alien status, the war, ‘the phantom memory of
peace, mourning and pain’ which characterise her writings.
More than any factor, it is the death of her father which
brought the correlation between loss and self-definition which
becomes the ‘gesture of writing linked to the experience of
disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key to the
world’. Consequently, she moves from obsession with
self-identity in the earlier fiction to the increasing
affirmation in her later works. Through the literary text she
discovers the non-coercive and liberating strategies of
deconstructing oppressive structures of language and meaning.
She continuously identifies in language ‘apartheid’ and ‘totalitarianism’
drawing a link between the missing and thus symbolic father and
language. This world of the language is not solely associated
with the missing father. The mother too also occupies the domain
of language: ‘m’other, my other’ – familiar and already
other. Thus language becomes ‘both a compensation for and a
means of living – through inscribing – loss; everything is
lost except words. This is a child’s experience: words are our
doors to all the other worlds.’
Writing for Cixous
becomes an act of deliverance and emancipation, of safeguarding
life. For her ‘writing follows life like its shadow, extends
it, hears it, engraves it’. She began writing to prevail over
her personal loss. Her uneasiness expressed in her writing is a
move towards rest and towards the overcoming of the ‘demoniac
feeling of being nothing, controlling nothing’. The intention
was not to mourn the past and the personal hell, but to become
the ‘prophet of the present’. To achieve this feeling ‘continuous
and constant work is a must to realise that celebration of the
present also involves the remembrance of hell which for some is
nothing but the present’. The writer, therefore has to undergo
the act of remembering all those who abide in hell, but whose
experience is unknown to the writer. This unshared experience of
a living hell has to be recreated by the writer; this is the
experience of the other so vital to fictional writing.
Undoubtedly, this is ‘difficult comprehending’ particularly
if you are an outsider or belong to a different social group.
To overcome this problem of writing of the other, Cixous has
resorted to writing drama where apparently the ‘other’ is
made to speak for her/himself especially in a phallic and
hierarchical world peopled by men who are ridiculous because
they are so deeply ‘misogynist’. She believes that winning
political equality alone will not alter cultural beliefs about
the roles of the sexes and that feminists must take action
through their very language as well as through their literary
and critical work if they want to change those attitudes.
|
HELENE
Cixous’ play The Conquest of the School of Madhubai
is based on Phoolan Devi’s life for she was pained and
fascinated by her intense desire for vengeance. She has
collaborated with Mnouchkine, Ariane (1939– ), the French
theater director who founded the Théâtre du Soleil, on Sihanouk
(1985, a production about Cambodia) and L’indiade
(1987), a play about India’s struggle for Independence. Many
know France’s foremost poet and thinker Helene Cixous as
only a feminist critic and essayist, often ignoring the large
oeuvre of her fictional and dramatic writings. To set this
one-sidedness right, Susan Sellers’ unusually lucid and
scholarly book revives ‘another Cixous, Cixous the author,
to be reborn in her reading’.
