Angst Hélène Cixous Review

Hélène Cixous is best known in the Anglophone world for her 1976 essay The Laugh of the Medusa (Le Rire de la Méduse) — published in English one year later — in which she laid out a roadmap for a new kind of women’s writing (écriture feminine): a writing that springs from the female body and sexuality, unbound by the ‘phallocentric’ worldview which has shaped the Western canon. Écriture féminine is a form of individual expression and to some extent must be different for every writer, but it would generally be expected to eschew accepted literary norms: it might be circular rather than linear, use a stream-of-consciousness narrative, leave lacunae in the reader’s path, coin its own words and phrases, or all of these at the same time. Angst was published two years after The Laugh of the Medusa and demonstrates the same commitment to breaking convention in language, structure and narrative.

Throughout her long career, Cixous has been many things: philosopher, academic, writer of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, playwright, a co-founder both of post-structuralist feminism and of the radical University of Vincennes in 1968, where she created one of the first departments of women’s studies. Cixous’ written output is so prolific, and her writing so steeped in philosophical theories, double meanings, cryptic imagery and references to other works of literature – hers and others’ – that starting anywhere can be rather daunting. Psychoanalyst and author Jamieson Webster’s thought-provoking foreword – an excerpt can be read in The Paris Review – which draws on Lacan to give a psychoanalytical reading, demonstrates one of the influences on Cixous’ writing and one of the multiple lenses through which it may be read. Hats off to Sophie Lewis for taking on the exceptionally difficult task of translating Cixous into English and making it seem effortless.

Plotted or Plotless?

The blurb on the back of this new edition of Angst, published by Silver Press, reads as follows:

A woman replays her abandonment by her mother, who is sometimes addressed as a male mother-god. She is also abandoned by her lover, to whom she is in thrall. She tries repeatedly to make or receive phone calls with the beloved figures, without success. She waits for their letters and imagines their contents. In a dream-like, torrid sequence, suffering, fear, fatigue and imperfection are apostrophised. Forgetting is examined and toyed with from every angle. Mythical hybrid creatures are invoked: a snake-headed lion, wolf-snakes, a wolf-peacock. How did this come to be? In a cunningly, wittily wrought rush, the unique, unpredictable voice of the narrator speaks from multiple perspectives to express powerful anguish and, ultimately, catharsis.

This is a heroic effort to summarise a book that resists reduction into a blurb. The original French edition takes the traditional Gallic way out by using a quote from the text on the back cover instead. I usually find this irritating, but in this case the publisher can be forgiven. There is very little plot, in the traditional sense, in the first half of the book.

The Great Suffering

This first half is the site of what the narrator calls ‘The Great Suffering’, a time after the disaster has occurred – a disaster brought on by ‘The Fault’, which is, inevitably, both a fault in the sense of a sin and a fault in the sense of a fissure, either in the world or in the body. Everything is chaos and pain: there is a great deal of lying in bed and despairing, waiting for death or having already died; running through the streets being unable to find the thing you’re searching for; endless images of the ‘mythical hybrid creatures’ from the blurb stalking through the streets and of bodily destruction and desecration – guts ripped out, slugs crawling over you, blood and excrement.

The body is lying belly-down, flat out on a breadboard, while the breadknife goes back and forth, starting with the ankles. What makes it bearable is the rhythm, the regularity of the slices, all the same thickness.

There is suffering in the reading as well as in the writing, despite the artistry in the writing and the translation (can’t you hear the rhythm of that breadknife?). This half of the book is where a degree in philosophy or psychology, or else having read the rest of Cixous’ back catalogue and all the academic work written about it, would come in useful. Without some interpretations to cling onto, a useful framework to work from, there is a constant sense of having missed something, of having not understood. What is the disaster that has led the narrator (who is, in an autofictional kind of way, Cixous herself) to the depths of despair and madness? It’s hard to tell. The narrator is in a great soup of pain in which everything gets mixed up together: missed calls and letters and meetings, unanswered calls and letters, betrayal on both sides, the lover’s abandonment and the mother’s abandonment, the mother and the lover, the lover and God, the mother and God . . . He (or she) is “the man who is her mother”, the “Great Breast” which has rotted and dried up, the “judge”, the “Great Holy” who can save or condemn her. Times and places, genders, memories and dreams, past and present are mixed in a cacophony of suffering.

Reading in Circles

Thank goodness, then, for the second half of the book. This is where the blurb’s question, “How did this come to be?”, is answered, and the narrator gives a relatively straightforward account of her love affair. She meets a man who says he is dying, and who wants to pass on all his knowledge to her, wants to live for her. Although she is initially repelled by his presence, she finds herself fascinated by his cryptic words, drawn inexorably to him as he is to her:

I suspected him of wanting to weave a story. In which to net me. I felt I might be becoming his fly. His food supply. A tale to slow down and take undivided pleasure in. But he was himself convulsing while buzzing in the net.

As she becomes trapped in his web, his tales in “an irresistible language, a language which you know a little but which knows you perfectly”, religious metaphors begin to permeate the text once again: she is Jonah, trying to hide in Tarshish but being forced in the end to Nineveh; he is an all-knowing God and she his fallible servant. She willingly cuts off all connection to family, friends and work (“Strip bare, shed the false belongings and break the contracts, if the world puts its hand on you, find the courage to cut it off”), severing herself from the “outside” which has become dangerous and threatening compared to the series of hotel rooms and bedrooms where she goes to meet her lover, her “soul in safety, like a child inside its mother”. In the end, she is cast out – out of the womb, out of Paradise, out of the belly of the whale. Her lover has had an operation to remove something in his chest, part of the unnamed illness which is killing him. When they are asleep together afterwards, she does what she is forbidden to do: her hands stray to the surgical scar (which is perhaps only a streak of paint, a fiction), and he accuses her of trying to rip it open and kill him. Unable to protest her innocence (“When God pretends, doesn’t his fiction count as truth?”) she runs or is thrown out.

And now the first half of Angst makes more sense. With the final page, we arrive back at the ‘Great Suffering’ of the start. Here is the explanation for the early passage in which the narrator describes a fissure opening in the ground: “While I was examining the earth, it was my flesh that cracked. In a flash, belly laid open, a vast wound”. Here is why the narrator writes a letter in the opening pages asking, “Why did you give me this need for inside when I still knew how to go outside, if now I must stay nowhere?”. Only now can we measure what ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ mean. Cixous has written a circular book, not a linear one; a book whose ending is not an end, but a signpost pointing you back to the beginning.

Writing About Writing; Writing About Memory

In the middle of Angst, just before the tipping point from chaos to coherence, Cixous writes:

If I’d read the book of my life, I would surely have found proof that it must have been written after my death, rewinding the story, from pain to passing and all the way back to the first disappointment.

This view of life running backwards is echoed in the structure of the novel, but also mirrored by another timeline running chronologically: the process of developing raw feeling into literature. The Suffering of rejection and separation leaves the narrator with no memories, with no past or future, and above all with no words. In the ‘inside’ of obsessive love, the ‘Great Solitude’, “ordinary language wasn’t spoken . . . nothing can be explained . . . The decisions were made in our flesh, without a word”. How, then, to write it? It takes Cixous a decade to put everything into order: “I did the job a thousand times. I took all the first steps. I began the scene every day for ten years, my body is worn out with reliving it. But everything always stopped, by the bed, as if writing were ashamed of its infirmities”.

These ten years of searching, running through blind corridors, returning again and again to the bedroom, the letters, the wound, are all laid out in the confusion of the first half of the book. Cixous demonstrates to us that it is only with hindsight, the narrator’s and the reader’s, that things finally fall into place: “every action was repeated, far behind me, after the separation, nostalgic life was reliving itself, I saw myself from the angle of eternity, as soon as all was lost”. This is the journey she takes the reader on, to relive her experience alongside her. And, at the same time, the writer Cixous, a decade in the future, takes on the role of her lover-tormentor. While she understands everything about the reader’s experience, we understand nothing about hers. We do not yet speak her language. She has trapped us outside the story, refusing us entry, until the final catharsis makes everything that preceded it clear, and we see it with new eyes.