My Book About Writing My Book About Writing My…
Published 7:00 am Monday, October 9, 2006
In FirstDays of the Year, a semi-autobiographical essay published in France eight years ago but only recently released in the United States, novelist and French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous restakes her claim as one of the most radically inventive narrators of the female writer’s experience. Composed of dream-like fragments that explore the connection between a woman’s body and her written work, FirstDays is Cixous’ book about writing Cixous’ book.
FirstDays of the Year
by Hélène Cixous, translated by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray (University of Minnesota Press, $16.95)
In keeping with the personal nature of the narrative, the text’s language and focus are deliberately ambiguous and frequently elusive, often maddeningly so. The first sentence of the book sets the stage for what follows: “Writing had returned, the stream, the slender silent stream with its singing arms, the blood flow in the veins between the bodies, the wordless dialogue from blood to blood, with no sense of distances, the magic flux full of silent words flowing from one community to the other, from one life to the other, the strange legend . . . the narrative weaving itself on high, who will decipher it . . .”
Who will decipher it? It’s a question we might ask about the book itself. One answer would be that we’re meant to admire, engage with, but never precisely understand the nature of the emotions, responses, and memories that Cixous draws from. Cixous’ writing style can be hypnotic, as the opening passage shows, but it can also frustrate and alienate its audience.
Cixous declares that literature suggests an “elsewhere”—a time and space outside now, where readers and authors alike may move effortlessly across spiritual and linguistic boundaries. The act of writing, she believes, provides a link between the body and a mystical space where boundaries and divisions between self and other no longer reign. FirstDays is her attempt to re-create this “elsewhere” and liberate reader and author from restrictions of gender, space, and time that prevent us from seeing “the truth.”
“In my land I will unveil you,” Cixous promises. “I will hold a mirror up before you. You will see your blindness with your own eyes.”
Who exactly is this “you”? As the book progresses, it becomes more apparent that this “you” might really be “I.” Cixous is interested in seeing her own blindness, not exposing much of what the reader needs to see. Whatever unveiling this book undertakes deals with stripping away conventions about the figure of the author as unknowable and secondary to the text he or she produces. Chapters such as those titled “My Womb’s Tombs” and “Tearing Down the Wall, a Work of Angels” seem to emerge from a stock of Cixous’ own artistic experiences and dreams.
Despite her pledge, the truth about Cixous’ experience is not unveiled. The narrative spins around the author’s own past, but it is a past that she delights in keeping inaccessible. A large chunk of the book, for instance, is devoted to meditations on the date of February 12. She declares: “Now I am going to tell you why this book’s story began the day after February twelfth”—but she never actually does. She does reveal that “February twelfth is the arrow that hit me in the beyond . . . when I will have been atoms for generations, somewhere at the foot of an Asian jasmine a February twelfth will produce a slight quivering of atoms.” February 12 might be a day of birth or death—Cixous does refer to the loss of her father—but the true meaning of the date eludes the reader. We only know that February 12 is one in a series of “FirstDays” during which Cixous experienced great joy, crippling pain, or some kind of artistic epiphany.
There are moments of great humor in FirstDays. In one section of the chapter “Night My Foreign Life,” Cixous writes: “And it could happen that I exit the battlefield carrying, plastered from my chest to the bottom of my pale dress, an enormous trail of sperm, like the insignia of the order of the gravely wounded. And now, quick, a faucet.”
Despite such moments it’s easy to find this book baffling, even if Cixous’ ambiguity is meant to be a central component of her style. You might find yourself more confused than bemused by the sperm jokes, and you might find yourself asking, “Yes, but what does that really mean?” This is apparently not a question that concerns Cixous, although the further I read into the book the more I wished it would. FirstDays of the Year is a rare and at times infuriating volume: a book written to be read by the author alone. It does not offer a blueprint for feminine creative practice, it is not a political manifesto. Those expecting the ideological and poetical force of “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous’ best-known feminist essay, will not find it here.
As Cixous explains near the beginning: “For thirty years I have been writing, borne by writing, this book, that book; and now, suddenly, I sense it: Among all these books is the book I haven’t ceased to write.” By the end of the book, the narrative feels like a companion to another narrative—Cixous’ life—that, if we had access to it, might fill in all the gaps in the story. Reading this book is like overhearing a passionate conversation on the bus—we are drawn in, but must supply our own context.
Lauren Stasiak is a writer in Seattle.
