Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing
Julia Dobson
Peter Lang
Hélène Cixous and the Theatre
Modern French Identities Edited by Peter Collier
Volume 11
PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien
Julia Dobson
Hélène Cixous and the Theatre The Scene of Writing
PETER LANG Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt a.M. • New York • Wien
Die Deutsche Bibliothek – CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Dobson, Julia: Hélène Cixous and the theatre : the scene of writing / Julia Dobson. – Oxford ; Bern ; Berlin ; Bruxelles ; Frankfurt a.M. ; New York ; Wien : Lang, 2002 (Modern French Identities ; Vol. 11) ISBN 3-906766-20-9 British Library and Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library, Great Britain, and from The Library of Congress, USA
ISSN 1422-9005 ISBN 3-906766-20-9 US-ISBN 0-8204-5322-6
© Peter Lang AG, European Academic Publishers, Bern 2002 Jupiterstr. 15, Postfach, 3000 Bern 15, Switzerland
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Table of Contents
Introduction .............................................................................................. 7 Chapter 1 Making a Scene: The Early Plays ........................................................... 15 Chapter 2 Writing on Theatre / Writing as Theatre................................................. 45 Chapter 3 History and the Scene of the Other......................................................... 71 Chapter 4 The Poet in the Play.............................................................................. 115 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 141 Bibliography ......................................................................................... 149 Index ..................................................................................................... 165
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Introduction
Hélène Cixous is one of the most influential authors and philosophers writing in France today. Her work and its influence have spread far beyond national borders, and continue to bear considerable influence in disciplinary fields as disparate as feminist aesthetics, translation theory and the practice of many contemporary artists. Cixous has published ten plays, the majority of which have been performed in France, many in collaboration with prestigious theatres and directors. Her most recent play Drums on the Dyke (Tambours sur la digue)1, performed in Paris by the Théâtre du Soleil and directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, played to full houses, won widespread critical acclaim and was awarded three Molière awards in 1999.2 Yet, despite a prolific writing career spanning over thirty years, and despite her explicit and evolving engagement with the theatre throughout this time, the representation of Cixous’s œuvre, and the international reception of her work continues even now to be dominated by her theoretical work of the 1970s. The enormous international impact of Cixous’s work of the seventies, in particular her polemical essays included in The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune née)3 which quickly became established as seminal texts of contemporary philosophy, critical theory and feminism, remains the main representation of Cixous’s work within the broad field of cultural studies. Cixous’s work, articulated in these poetic and polemical texts, strove to redefine the relationship between female subjectivity and language, through a reclamation of writing, a writing that was inextricably linked to the libidinal economy of the writing subject. These works, and the debates that they provoked which centred around concepts of ‘writing the body’, clearly constitute important and radical interventions in twentieth century cultural
1 2 3
Hélène Cixous, Tambours sur la digue (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1999). The awards were for best dramatic creation, best director and best set. The Théâtre du Soleil declined to collect the awards on the grounds that French television was happy to show the glamorous theatre awards ceremony, but rarely broadcasts plays. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née (Paris: Union Générale des Editions 10/18, 1975).
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discourse,4 however, their dominance within Cixous’s œuvre has arguably had a reductive effect both on the representation of Cixous as a writer, and on the reception of her published work since that time. Cixous’s work is often still identified with generalised constructs of ‘French feminism’ and she is identified, alongside Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, as a member of its defining triumvirate (a move which has had similarly reductive implications for the reception of the work of all three writers). This selective and unevolving representation of Cixous’s writing has perhaps been particularly characteristic of the reception of her work in anglophone academic communities, and the lack of published translations of many of her most recent texts has clearly been a major contributing factor to this situation. It is interesting to note in this context that while her theoretical work maintains a high profile on many university syllabi of English and Gender Studies courses, her recent ‘fictions’ do not form part of the canon of contemporary (women’s) writing courses within French departments, nor are her plays generally included in studies of contemporary French theatre. The lack of widespread engagement with Cixous’s ‘fictions’ and with her theatre that has prevailed over the last ten years can be seen as an indirect consequence of the extremely high profile and interdisciplinary employment of her theoretical writing. That appreciation of Cixous’s work in the theatre seems to have suffered a particularly marked lack of critical attention should be recognised as a consequence of several specific contexts. The lack of publication of her plays in translation is indicative of the general difficulty experienced by contemporary playwrights in finding publishing outlets for their work (this situation persists in France, the USA and throughout Europe). The wider context of a lack of awareness of Cixous’s theatre must also be acknowledged as her plays are very rarely performed in professional productions outside of France5 and, as a result of the highly collaborative nature of many of her projects for the theatre, 4
5
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There is not space here to consider the political and historical contexts of this writing. The best account of the tensions and differences within feminist writing in France at this time remains Claire Duchen’s Feminism in France. From May ‘68 to Mitterrand (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). See particularly pp. 67-102. An exception to this is the Red Shift production of Black Sail, White Sail (Voile noire, voile blanche) which toured the U.K in 1994. This play has not, however, been performed in France.
remain intrinsically associated with specific high-profile directors and theatrical companies. On another level, the comparative reluctance of anglophone countries to acknowledge Cixous’s theatre and to recognise her as a playwright, may be seen as symptomatic of a more general tendency of contemporary culture, identified by David Bradby, which resists acknowledgement of a writer’s prowess in more than one form, preferring to categorise them more rigidly. Bradby indeed likens Cixous to writers such as Cocteau and Camus who were universally accepted as writers of equal stature in both prose and drama.6 Much critical engagement with the work of Hélène Cixous has tended to foreground her early writings and the discourses of écriture féminine, whilst overlooking the importance of theatre to the development of her aesthetics. This continued focus has contributed to a perception of her work as divided into distinct, chronologically or generically defined sets and has consequently hampered the exploration of common threads and evolving representations of issues central to her work. A clear exception to this pattern is Morag Shiach’s work on Cixous in which she directly expresses the need for a more holistic approach to Cixous’ œuvre.7 Other important work has situated Cixous in the context of other women writing for the theatre in France today,8 and the profile of her theatre is now growing rapidly as excerpts from recent plays have been included in anthologies of her translated works,9 and individual plays have attracted increased critical attention.10 This book was conceived as a response to the apparent gaps and blind spots in accounts of Cixous’s œuvre which result from the predominantly partial accounts of her work in the theatre. The main aim of this book therefore is to attempt to begin to redress the balance through a presentation of Cixous’s theatre as a coherent and important body of 6 7 8 9 10
See David Bradby, Modern French Drama 1940-1990, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 260. See Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing, (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). For example Judith Graves Miller ‘Contemporary Women’s Voices in French Theatre’ Modern Drama 32 (1989), pp. 5-23. See Susan Sellers (ed) The Hélène Cixous Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). Many of these pieces have been published in collections of essays on Cixous’s work and, whilst raising the profile of her theatre in this context, do not address a wider constituency of readership nor encourage the wider contextualisation of her theatre.
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work, and to assert her status as one of the most important playwrights working in France today. This study aims to identify consistent concerns which inform Cixous’s strategic use of the theatrical form, the desire to construct and project representations of poetic identity, a theme which, I will argue, has become increasingly explicit in her plays, and which is essential to an understanding of the status of theatre within Cixous’s aesthetics. It would be foolish, however, to embark upon an exploration of Cixous’s theatre which approaches her plays in glorious isolation from her theoretical writings, works of fiction and teaching projects. Indeed many of the most fascinating, frustrating and fertile elements of Cixous’s theatre are created by the tension between the widespread employment of the theatre as metaphor in her aesthetics, and her adoption of the theatre as specific generic site and practice. This study charts Cixous’s evolving relationship with the theatre, from her early plays which challenged the founding concepts of dramatic representation to her recent plays which reveal an exuberant identification with the conventions and structures of traditional theatres. It remains important, however, to recognise that the theatre played a central role in Cixous’s work which preceded and anticipated her direct engagement with the theatrical form. The explicit explorations of the writing process which remain so central to Cixous’s project of enabling the female subject to reclaim language, and which were articulated through her nonreductive projections of what form such a writing, an écriture féminine, might take, evoke the imagery of the theatre. Her references to ‘the scene of writing (la scène de l’écriture)’,11 and ‘the drama of the subject (le drame du sujet)’,12 reveal an inherent link between the spatial and temporal features of this ideal mode of writing and the nature of theatre. These metaphors prefigure Cixous’s embrace of the theatrical form in the 1980s and form an essential link between two areas of her work which have often been examined in restricting isolation. The theatre clearly constitutes a supremely apposite site for critical engagement and performative practice around questions of the textuality of the body and the corporeality of the text. However, whilst much of the 11 12
10
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née, p. 140. ibid., p. 144. In the context of Cixous’s play A Portrait of Dora, this phrase also evokes the possible interpretation of the figure of the hysteric as inherently dramatic, through the projecting and mimicing of others’ desires.
important work which has been undertaken in the encounters between post-structuralist feminist theories and performance theory finds extraordinary resonances in Cixous’s early theatre, I have resisted the temptation to employ her plays as illustrations of theoretical models of this kind. The plays themselves remain the starting point and the main focus of this study which aims to assert both the generic specificity of these plays as theatre, and their importance to an understanding of the aesthetic concerns, and ethical imperatives of the whole of Cixous’s œuvre. The first chapter is devoted to a discussion of the formal and thematic radicality of Cixous’s early theatre, specifically her two plays Portrait of Dora (Portrait de Dora) and The Name of Oedipus. Song of the Forbidden Body (Le Nom d’Oedipe. Chant du corps interdit). The combination of a dense intertextuality and an audacious disruption of theatrical conventions creates multi-layered plays which articulate Cixous’s first, hostile approaches to the theatre. A contextualisation of these plays within Cixous’s employment of the figure of the hysteric, and her engagement with the discourse of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, is necessary to an understanding of Cixous’s motivations in dramatising these two metanarratives of patriarchal definitions of female subjectivity; the myth of Oedipus and Freud’s first published case history, that of a young female hysteric, Dora. Cixous engineers a remapping of these two narratives, so creating a dramatic focus which falls on the struggle of the female protagonists to articulate themselves, and their desires, in language. In the second chapter, I turn to examine the pivotal status of the theatre within Cixous’s aesthetics through an exploration of her descriptions of the space and time of the theatre and their relation to the temporal and spatial projections of the process of writing (theatre). The search for new modes of representation which would enable a reconfiguration of intersubjective relationships, and which would break with the traditional dialectical entrapment of self and other, is central to Cixous’s œuvre, and evident throughout her work, from her early writings on the repression of female subjectivity, to recent work on the representation of Algeria.13 Theatre becomes, for Cixous, a scene (both of writing and performance) in which a new relationship between self and other can be represented most fruitfully and articulated most successfully. 13
See Hélène Cixous, Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Paris: Galilée, 2000).
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The chapter charts Cixous’s adoption of the theatrical form, and reveals how the theatre comes to occupy a utopian site within Cixous’s aesthetics, as a process of writing and a space which is capable of representing presence (of the other) and an absolute present (of performance). The practice of theatre, in rehearsal and performance, provides Cixous with tropes of writing that are apparently inspired by models of the changes experienced by the self when involved with theatre as both actor and spectator. The process of writing for the theatre is described by Cixous as a series of liberations, as new freedoms which allow the writer to displace the self, to engage with history, and to create different (even differently sexed) characters. The inextricable links between these essays and the plays, alongside which they are commonly published, can lead to clear over-determination of the play’s themes and conclusions. In addition to this, Cixous’s writing on the theatre repeatedly mobilises images and metaphors drawn from the subject matter of the plays (for example the partition of India, the distribution of infected blood) in order to articulate abstract concepts of selfhood and alterity. Such poetic appropriations can sit rather uneasily beside the apparent political intention of the plays to give voice to those forgotten or repressed by conventional world history. Chapter Two is thus underwritten by the tension between Cixous’s embrace of the form and practice of theatre, and her widespread use of the theatre as metaphor for constructions of self and the process of writing. In Chapter Three I examine the plays which are most closely associated with Cixous’s embrace of the theatrical form in the 1980s and which witness an apparent change of focus and scale in her theatre which can be charted as moving from self to other, from solitude to multitude, from personal narrative to world history. It is equally important, however, to emphasise the continuities that exist between these epic plays and her earlier theatre and to assess the influence of others on the evolution of her theatre. The central influence on Cixous’s perception of the relationship between theatre and history, the site of her initiation into the detailed workings of rehearsals and the source of her knowledge of Eastern traditions of theatre is her collaborative experiences with the Théâtre du Soleil, and its director, Ariane Mnouchkine. Such a fruitful and enduring collaboration is unique in contemporary European theatre and has had an enormous impact both on Cixous’s vision of theatre and on the working practices of the company.
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It is during this period that Cixous’s ambitious attempts to combine a historical narrative with more abstract concerns about the consequences of representations of difference come to dominate her theatre. The plays’ appropriation of historical figures, such as Gandhi and Sihanouk, and the adoption of historical narratives of the partition of India and the struggle for power in Cambodia, as symbols and metaphors for other concerns generates an often uneasy alliance between Cixous’s desire to dramatise forgotten histories and her search for a means of articulating the political and ethical imperatives of rethinking difference on a far wider scene. The encounters between historical narrative and poetic discourse which persist in these plays serve as a fascinating example of the inevitable tensions between embrace and appropriation of the other and the other’s history, and this is considered in this chapter in the context of post-colonial theory. Cixous’s employment of the theatre as a site in which the role of the poet can be articulated and projected is also apposite to a discussion of these plays as the central poetic trope of Cixousian aesthetics, that of exile, is revealed as a major theme and element of characterisation in her theatre. Chapter Four focuses on this vitally important aspect of Cixous’s theatre to reveal the explicit representatives of poetic identity, selected from a wide variety of national cultures and historical periods, that dominate Cixous’s recent plays, written since 1990. These figures include the Greek dramatist Aeschylus (The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes (La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes)) the Russian writers Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelshtam (Black Sail, White Sail (Voile noire, voile blanche)) and the writer of Icelandic sagas and eddas, Snorri Sturlusson (The Story (that we will never know (L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais)). The chapter examines the evolution of the construction of poetic identity in Cixous’s plays before culminating in a reading of The Story (that we will never know) (L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais)) as a dramatisation of the scene of writing itself. Many of Cixous’s fictions are self-reflexive explorations and meditations on the process of writing which foreground the writing of the text, and which actively engage the reader in the construction of meaning generated in and through the text.14 It is therefore unsurprising that her theatre should begin to address these same sets of 14
See for example Hélène Cixous, Jours de l’an (Paris: des femmes, 1990) and Or, les lettres de mon père, (Paris: des femmes, 1997).
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relationships between writer and text, text and reader, actor and spectator. Yet what remains specific to her most recent plays is the implicit comparisons sought between the process of writing and the experience of performance, the tension between theatre and text which is present in all her work on and in the theatre. This book does not aim to provide an exhaustive study of Cixous’s theatre, indeed some plays will receive relatively little attention in the following chapters. It is intended however to generate an increased interest and a more comprehensive picture of Cixous’s complex and productive engagement with the theatre and to assert her status as one of the major playwrights working in France today. I have included the original French text alongside my translations as it remains impossible to capture the linguistic subtleties and poetic fireworks of Cixous’s use of wordplay, extended metaphors and neologisms in another language.
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CHAPTER ONE
Making a Scene: The Early Plays
Cixous’s early work in the theatre is formally and thematically complex, relying heavily on the divergent intertexts of classical antiquity, psychoanalytic theory and her own theoretical texts of the 1970s. The plays discussed in this chapter, Portrait of Dora (Portrait de Dora)1 and The Name of Oedipus. Song of the Forbidden Body (Le Nom d’Oedipe. Chant du corps interdit)2, constitute attempts to reclaim the theatre in order to undermine what Cixous regarded as the inherently patriarchal structure of conventional theatre and the metanarratives of patriarchal culture itself. The specific examples in question here are Freud’s first published case history, that of the hysteric Dora, and the Oedipus myth. Such critiques focus on reconfigurations of the relationship between language and the feminine3 and rely heavily on the context of psychoanalytic discourse with specific reference to Lacanian theory. This chapter will identify the major consistent strands in Cixous’s work of this period, and provide a wider context to a detailed reading of the plays, aiming to evaluate both their success in subverting the conventional frames of theatre, and their positing of alternative structures which would allow the articulation of different feminine identities. The theatre, as metaphor and practice, comes to the fore of Cixous’s writing in the mid 1980s, yet the strong relationship between the theatrical form and Cixous’s aesthetics can be traced clearly in her theoretical work of the 1970s. The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune née),4 written with Catherine Clément, remains a seminal text, and constitutes a 1 2 3
4
Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora, (Paris: des femmes, 1976). Hélène Cixous, Le Nom d’Oedipe. Chant du corps interdit, (Paris: des femmes, 1978). Translation of the French ‘féminin’ remains problematic as ‘feminine’ in English retains restrictive gender connotations, yet the use of ‘female’ would be equally problematic in its elision of notions of cultural construction. The usage of Woman and women is difficult to negotiate in Cixous’s writing of this period and thus use of these terms to translate ‘féminin’ would be unsatisfactory also. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née (Paris: Union Générale des Editions 10/18, 1975).
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dynamic and lyrical contestation of the myths and narratives of patriarchal culture through its examination of the dominant tropes of female subjectivity that feature within it. Employing an innovative and exuberant use of language, the text reflects its own concern with the dismantling of conventional linguistic and cultural norms, to provide a channel for different articulations of female subjectivities. Women are urged to ‘come to writing’ in order to redefine their relationship to language and create the resources for liberating projections of female identity. Of further importance, in this context, are the spatial metaphors which underpin the poetic polemics of the The Newly Born Woman, and which prefigure Cixous’s explicit engagement with the theatre. The form of writing imagined in the text, a writing which would enable women to express themselves more successfully, is envisaged as setting a new scene, founding a time and space which would be free from the exchange mechanisms of patriarchal capitalist culture. This mode of writing is inscribed as a spatial, and even dramatic, potentiality: ‘I am searching therefore... for a scene (stage) where a different type of exchange could be produced.. (Je cherche donc… une scène où se produirait un type d’échange qui sera différent…).’5 The theatre is thus present as a metaphor for the potential utopian spaces of writing in Cixous’s early essays, yet, as I shall now discuss, her first explicit discussion of the theatre constitutes a fierce attack on the structures and narratives of conventional theatre. This attack is articulated primarily in the article ‘To Go to the Sea / Mother’ (Aller à la mer), published in 1977,6 which is vehement in its condemnation of the specific functions allotted to female characters in traditional patriarchal drama, and questions the status and response of the female spectator: As women, how can we go to the theatre? Except to find ourselves complicit with the sadism to which women are subjected there. To see ourselves invited to take the place of the victim in the patriarchal family structure which the theatre reproduces ad infinitum.7 (Comment, femme, peut on aller au théâtre? Sauf à s’y trouver en complicité avec le sadisme dont les femmes y sont l’objet. A se voir invitée à prendre dans la
5 6 7
16
ibid., p. 54. Hélène Cixous, ‘Aller à la mer’ Le Monde (28 April 1977), p. 19. ibid., p. 19.
structure familiale-patriarchale, que le théâtre reproduit à l’infini, la place de la victime.)
Cixous’s rejection of the theatre entails a rejection of the theatrical form itself as dominated by the structures of voyeurism and exhibitionism, structures which she identifies with patriarchal discourse and masculine economies, and which inevitably exclude positive representations of the female subject. Her essay selects female characters from Classical and Shakespearean drama as illustrative examples of the limited roles permitted women within these reductive structures, arguing that they are often present only to fulfill one of two dramatic and narrative functions in their provision of either passive support to central male protagonists, or as symbolic punitive sacrifice. Cixous decries such repression of the female subject: Who is she? Always daddy’s girl, his object to sacrifice, guardian of the phallus and support for the narcissistic fantasy which enables the father to ward off the threat of castration ... In order for the play to start a woman must always have died. The curtain can only reveal her disappearance: for her the place of the repressed, tomb, asylum, oblivion, silence. We can only find her lost, excluded or in a waiting room. She is only loved when absent, ruined. A ghost or a fascinating hole...This is why I no longer went to the theatre: in order not to witness my own burial: because it offers no place for a living woman...8 (Qui est-elle? Toujours la fille-du-père, son objet à sacrifier, gardienne du phallus et support du fantasme narcissique à l’aide duquel le père pare à la menace de castration … Il faut toujours qu’une femme soit morte pour que la pièce commence. Le rideau ne se lève que sur sa disparition; à elle la place du refoulé, tombeau, asile, oubli, silence. On ne la trouve que perdue, en exclusion ou dans une salle d’attente. Elle n’est aimée qu’absente, abimée. Fantôme ou trou fascinant… Voilà pourquoi je n’allais plus au théâtre: pour ne pas assister à mon propre enterrement: parce qu’il ne donne pas lieu à une femme vivante… )
Cixous’s attack on the theatrical form is limited in its scope of reference. Indeed it is noticeable throughout her writing on the theatre that her texts engage readily with Classical Greek theatre and Shakespearean drama (indeed these plays often provide important intertexts for her own plays) 8
ibid., p. 19.
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but do not discuss contemporary theatre nor enter into dialogue with contemporary dramatic theories. Within the scope of her article, the restricted function and marginalisation of female characters that Cixous identifies in Classical drama lead her to posit a female spectator who is either forced to identify with a female subjectivity at best repressed, and often denied entirely, or to reject the theatre as a feasible form of expression. Such claims are clearly an extension of her work in The Newly Born Woman on the representation of female protagonists in Greek myth and, whilst they form coherent critiques of the narratives concerned, they do not always consider the full potential of the more dynamic encounter between spectator and play, nor the potential for different productions to reveal and contest such structures as part of the theatrical experience itself. Having discussed the function of female characters prevalent in Classical drama, Cixous extends her critique to the traditional theatrical form: Because this Old Game is still that of the Role, the old order of representation, of the specular; privileged site of a double perversion, both voyeurist and exhibitionist, of a division of labour and of jouissance (who “makes” theatre, the theatre, who works, who is exploited by whom?), of a reinforcement of the opposition between the real and the imaginary which benefits those who have vested interests in the simulacrum. Schema of all circuses, courts and other social scenes where men go to be visible and to be in full view...9 (Parce que ce Vieux Jeu est encore celui du Rôle, ancien régime de la représentation, du spéculaire; lieu privilégié d’une double perversion voyeuristeexhibitionniste, d’une division du travail et de la jouissance (qui “fait” du – le théâtre, qui travaille, qui est exploité par qui?), d’un renforcement de l’opposition réel / imaginaire qui profite à ceux qui ont intérêt au simulacre. Figure de tous les cirques, tribunaux et autres scènes du social où les hommes vont se faire voir et s’en mettre plein la vue…)
This rejection of the theatrical form is clearly limited as it does not engage with modes of theatre which are not dominated by mimetic structures or conventional modes of spectatorship. Indeed, Cixous’s early writing on the theatre could be seen, paradoxically, to fail to address generic specificity, and to serve primarily as a convincing extension of her work in The Newly Born Woman on the repression and
9
18
ibid., p. 19.
denial of female subjectivity in the metanarratives of Classical Greek myth. In a parallel movement to the cry articulated in The Newly Born Woman for women to rediscover their true identities and to reinstate more potent feminine economies through writing, Cixous’s article culminates in a call to action, a demand for a different mode of theatre in which female subjectivity could be expressed: To go to the theatre now, I must do it politically, with the intention, together with other women, of changing its modes of production and expression. It is time at last for women to restore to the theatre its chance, its raison d’être, its difference: so that it becomes capable of showing a real, speaking body...10 (Aller au théâtre maintenant, il me faut le faire politiquement, dans le dessin de changer, ensemble avec des femmes, ses modes de production et d’expression. Temps enfin que les femmes rendent au théâtre sa chance, sa raison d’être, sa différence: qu’il y soit possible de faire passer du corps, réel, parlant…)
The collective will of women to engage with the theatre is here seen as a necessary precursor to radical change. Cixous goes on to suggest that the physical presence of the actors can work to undermine the dominance of role and traditional character construction, thus establishing complex and dynamic relationships between character and spectator. yet this would need to be accompanied by a refocalisation of narratives to enable the expression of female subjectivities. Cixous argues that the foregrounding of women’s voices and the disruption of voyeuristic structures would bring about a profound change in the nature of theatre itself: If the stage is to become woman, it should do so in order to detheatricalise this space. She will want to be a bodily presence: it is a matter therefore of working to undermine everything that creates a “spectacle”, to overrun the footlights, to undo the dominance of the visual and to insist upon the aural; learning to prick up all of our ears, especially those which know how to capture the fluttering of the unconscious, to hear silences and beyond. No “alienation”, on the contrary, this staged body will not hesitate to approach, to approach the danger, but the danger of life.11 (Si la scène est femme, ce sera pour déthéâtraliser cet espace. Elle voudra être corps-presence; il s’agit donc de travailler à faire sauter tout ce qui fait “spectacle”, à déborder la rampe-barre; à défaire le primat du visuel et insister sur l’auditif; apprendre à aguiser toutes nos oreilles, surtout celles qui savent saisir les 10 11
ibid., p. 19. ibid., p. 19.
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battements de l’inconscient, entendre les silences et au-delà. Pas de “distantiation”, au contraire, cette scène-corps n’hésitera pas à approcher, approcher à se mettre en danger, mais de vie.)
This suggestion of woman’s physical and vocal presence is seen as capable of frustrating voyeuristic consumption. The refusal of the naturalistic creation of theatrical illusion, and the subverting of the conventional physical barriers between actor and spectator, would further work towards a subversion of the scopophilic power structures that Cixous identifies with the theatre at this point. The mode of theatre envisaged is powerful indeed: This will be a text, a body that decodes itself, calls itself... song of women’s coming into the world; of the infinite patience of a woman waiting for Woman. All it takes is one woman who holds herself beyond censorship, who lives her plurality. A collection of those women she has been, those she could have been, those she wants to be...12 (Ce sera un texte, un corps qui se déchiffre, s’appelle… chant de la mise au monde des femmes; de l’infinie patience d’une femme en attente de Femme. Il suffit d’une femme qui se tienne au-delà de l’interdit, se vivant nombreuse. Ensemble de celles qu’elle a été, qu’elle aurait pu être, qu’elle voudra être… )
Cixous insists that a female subject represented in the theatre as plural and in process could not be reduced to a fixed and marginalised symbol of alterity. The use of the theatre as potential space for the creation of a female Imaginary, would allow women to see and be seen, to listen and to be heard, not to be alienated from the representation or text that is displayed as Woman. This argument remains powerful, yet the essay does posit (as did contemporary seminal work on the position and construction of the female film spectator) a somewhat homogenised, female spectatorial subject. The polemical concerns and calls to action expressed in ‘To Go to the Sea / Mother’ do not remain in the foreground of Cixous’s later writing on the theatre, yet they should not be considered in isolation from Cixous’s writing for the theatre. The central issues with which she engages inform the subjects and the aesthetics of her early plays in their attempt at a radical rehabilitation of the theatrical form. Indeed it is important to note that Portrait of Dora was in production before ‘To Go to the Sea / Mother’ was published and is referred to specifically in the 12
20
ibid., p. 19.
essay: “Portrait of Dora”, was for me the first move of a long project: an urgent move to ensure that first of all a feminine voice is heard. (Le Portrait de Dora, c’était pour moi le premier geste d’un long travail: geste d’urgence pour que soit d’abord entendue une voix féminine).’13 This radical approach to the theatre is clear in its call for subversive innovation both within the space of the stage and the auditorium, as the relationship between female spectator and theatrical narrative must be reconfigured. The rejection of conventional theatrical form and representation is explicit, yet the available alternatives are far less clearly defined. This deliberate lack of prescription, as in Cixous’s writing on écriture féminine, would allow women to find their own voices and spaces within the theatre, and leads us to consider the possible connections between Cixous’s intense belief in the positive consequences of encouraging women to ‘come to writing’, and her interest in the theatre. Ecriture féminine, a mode of writing open to both sexes, which would better inscribe and reflect feminine subjectivity, is presented as consciously non-prescriptive: It is impossible as present to define a feminine practice of writing, an impossibility which will remain as we can never theorise this practice, enclose it, encode it, which does not mean that it does not exist. But it will always exceed the discourse that rules the phallocentric system; it takes place and will take place outside of the territories that are subordinated to philosophical-theoretical domination. It will only allow itself to be thought by those subjects prepared to smash automatic responses, those who inhabit the margins and whom no authority will ever put down.14 (Impossible à présent de définir une pratique féminine de l’Ecriture, d’une impossibilité qui se maintiendra car on ne pourra jamais théoriser cette pratique, l’enfermer, la coder, ce qui ne signifie pas qu’elle n’existe pas. Mais elle excèdera toujours le discours qui régit le système phallocentrique; elle a et aura lieu ailleurs que dans les territoires subordonnés à la domination philosophique-théorique. Elle ne se laissera penser que par les sujets casseurs des automatismes, les coureurs de bords qu’aucune autorité ne subjugue jamais.)
However, Cixous does go on to identify certain aspects of language which may represent a closeness to écriture féminine. These include a proximity to the rhythms of spoken language, an acknowledgement of
13
14
ibid., p. 19. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née, pp. 169-170.
21
the presence of the body and breath, and the role of silence.15 The excessive quality of such a form of writing, which contains both disruptive and creative movements is best illustrated in Cixous’s own metaphor: ‘voler c’est le geste de la femme, voler dans la langue, la faire voler’.16 The double meaning of the French verb ‘voler’, to steal and to fly, creates an image of écriture féminine as both subversive and transcendent Thus for Cixous, the strategy for undoing the inflexible patriarchal definitions of female identity lies within language and writing. The utopian images of the female subject’s recreation through language, offered in The Newly Born Woman, remain potent. However, slippage between the use of the term Woman and women as social subjects, and the lack of specific definitions of écriture féminine remain frustrating and hinder detailed analysis of the potential for such a writing in the theatre. Cixous regards theatre as the ideal site for explorations of the relationship between writing, identity and the other, but few links have been forged between her theories of a feminine writing and her work in the theatre. Cynthia Running-Johnson has suggested a potential correlation between écriture féminine and the theorisation of performance,17 yet this work points to the difficulties of transposing such ambiguous terms onto other forms. Nonetheless, several general affinities can be acknowledged. Theatre necessarily articulates the relationship between body, voice and text: revealing the potential of expressing the corporeality of a text and the textuality of the body. The theatrical space offers the female speaking, desiring subject a stage on which to defy reified representations of gender, and to undermine the masculine scopic economy. Cixous’s descripton of écriture féminine, and her later espousal of the theatre, provide a striking parallel in their adoption of the spoken word and voice as central elements. In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous refers to the importance of ‘giving voice’: ‘In a certain way feminine writing continues to resound with the struggle which is for woman the seizing of the spoken word. (D’une certaine manière
15 16 17
22
ibid., p. 170. ibid., p. 178. Cynthia Running-Johnson, ‘Feminine Writing and its Theatrical Other’, in Themes in Drama, XI, James Redmond (ed), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 177-184.
l’écriture féminine ne cesse de résonner du déchirement qui est pour la femme la prise de la parole orale…).’18 In a later essay she asserts: In the theatre we hear something ring out which remains silent in reality and in literary texts: the Spoken Word. There is nothing more oral, nothing more bare than this language. Spoken Words. 19 (Au théâtre résonne ce qui reste silencieux dans la réalité et dans l’écriture livresque: La Parole. Rien de plus oral, rien de plus nu que cette langue. Des Paroles).
Cixous’s early plays, written in the 1970s, are clearly engaged with the dual project of the search for an alternative representation of the female subject, which demands an accompanying subversion of the conventional structure of theatre. These twin aims are realised through the potent refocusing of primary cultural metanarratives, those of Freud’s first published case study and the Greek Oedipal myth. Cixous’s first play has not been performed and was published in 1972. La Pupille20 announces her consistent use of the theatre as space in which to engage with contemporary world events through the evocation of classical tragedy and myth. The play’s structure is episodic, and the two main characters, the Fool and the Subject, encounter a series of violent scenes on their journey, which encompasses depictions of oppression in contemporary Vietnam, Brazil and nineteenth-century Paris. A dramatic adaptation of extracts from Cixous’s novel La was performed at the Avignon festival in 1977. The play foregrounds the representation of a multiple feminine subjectivity that dominated the narrative structure of the written text. In the play, this plurality was both visualised and vocalised through the presence of six actresses who played the central character and were on stage simultaneously. Elements of choreography were also foregrounded in order to evoke the restrictive cultural discourses at play. It remains however, Cixous’s engagement with the story of Dora, and the discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis, that proved to be her most successful early intervention in theatrical practice. 18 19 20
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née, p. 170. Hélène Cixous, ‘L’Incarnation’ in L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves’ (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1984), p. 261. Hélène Cixous, La Pupille (Paris: Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, 1972).
23
Portrait of Dora: Disruption and Disunity Portrait of Dora was first produced as a radio play. This constitutes a fascinating move in itself as radio remains a medium which permits the mobility of voice that is clearly one of the main formal concerns of the play, and denies the voyeurism of visual representation challenged by Cixous in ‘To Go To The Sea / Mother’. The thematic focus of the play is the representation and repression of female subjectivity as it attempts an alternative reading of Freud’s first case history, that of the hysteric Dora. The figure of the hysteric had already been established, in Cixous’s work, as an alternative site of rebellion. However, the choice of such a central protagonist in the context of new modes of theatre proves fascinating. The hysteric could be regarded as emblematic of Cixous’s descriptions of the repressed female subject, yet such a figure is also inherently theatrical, her voice silenced and her body acting out the projected fantasies of others. There is clearly a history of association between hysteria and performance, dating from the famous lithographs of Charcot’s clinics at the Salpêtrière which feature female hysterics in constructed and eroticised, melodramatic poses. Indeed, in a later essay, as Cixous describes her first attempt at writing for the theatre, she reveals explicit connections between the hysteric and the structure of the theatre: Because she made a scene for Freud. When we make a scene, we are, without realising, creating theatre. I can see now that the scene which Dora made for Freud brings together a certain number of elements which are the hidden mechanisms of theatre: blindness, misunderstanding, ambivalence, indecision, trial of strength, tragic irony...21 (Parce qu’elle a fait une scène à Freud. Quand nous faisons une scène, nous faisons, sans le savoir, du Théâtre. La scène que fit Dora à Freud réunit, je le vois maintenant, un certain nombre d’éléments qui sont les ressorts cachés du théâtre: aveuglement, malentendu, ambivalence, indécision, rapport de forces, ironie tragique… )
Dora’s story has received much critical attention due both to its status as Freud’s first published case study, and to feminist responses to its 21
24
Hélène Cixous ‘Théâtre enfoui’, Europe 726 (1989), pp. 72-77, p. 72.
construction of female sexuality The case study justifies Clare Kahane’s description of it as: …a paradigmatic text of patriarchal assumptions about female desire that still carry cultural authority and a vivid record of the construction of those assumptions as they emerge from the desire of the interpreter.22
Portrait of Dora draws heavily on Freud’s first published case study, ‘Dora: A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’23 and attempts to formulate a response to Freud’s narrative framing of the case, and to reinstate Dora’s voice and subjectivity. A fundamental aspect of these changes in narrative emphasis is the radical intervention in theatrical convention undertaken in the written text and the theatrical production, both with the aim of displacing the dominant discursive structure identified by Savona: In Freud’s text, two subjects may be perceived, a demiurgic male subject whose analytic eye is ubiquitous and centralizing, and a secondary female subject who speaks often but whose desire is expressed only through the mediating narration of the primary male subject.24
The eighteen-year old Dora25 was brought to see Freud by her father, on the recommendation of Herr K, a family friend and an existing acquaintance of Freud’s. The symptoms that she was exhibiting included disruptive behaviour, bouts of aphonia, severe coughing fits and depression and, whilst her father pleaded ignorance as to the cause of her distress, Dora claimed that Herr K had attempted to seduce her during a holiday that the two families had spent together. Her father insists that 22 23 24 25
Claire Kahane, ‘Introduction: Part Two’ in In Dora’s Case. Freud Hysteria Feminism, Charles Bernheimer and Clare Kahane (eds) (London: Virago, 1985), pp. 24-25. Sigmund Freud, ‘Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria’ in Case Histories I The Penguin Freud Library, VIII, (1925; rpt. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 35-166. Jeanette Laillou Savona, ‘French Feminism and the Theatre: An Introduction, Modern Drama, 27 (1984), pp. 540-545, p. 543. The name is fictitious and it has been suggested that the re-namimg of Ida Bauer as Dora constituted a written revenge on Freud’s part for Dora’s dismissal of him. Dora was the name that his sister had given her maid-servant. See Toril Moi, ‘Representations of Patriarchy: Sexuality and Epistemology in Freud’s Dora’ in Charles Bernheimer and Clare Kahane (eds) In Dora’s Case. Freud Hysteria Feminism, pp. 181-199, p. 197.
25
this is a fantasy fuelled by her supposedly unhealthy interest in erotic literature. Freud’s study reveals the unspoken system of exchange operating between Dora’s father and Herr K, in which Dora is offered as sexual consolation for her father’s affair with Frau K. The analysis, however, proves unsuccessful and, to Freud’s evident frustration, Dora brings her treatment to an premature end. Freud’s analysis of Dora’s case privileges the Oedipal framework, according to which Dora’s assumed repressed desire for her father has been transferred onto Herr K and thus constitutes the cause of her hysterical symptoms. Dora’s evident fascination and affection for Frau K is only addressed by Freud in footnotes to the text, although he later acknowledged his neglect of this aspect of the case. Freud’s analysis of this case remains prominent and is now seen as the principal illustration of several blindspots that inflect his original reading of the case. Lacan’s seminal essay on the case26 reveals Freud’s unconscious overidentification with Herr K as a fixed relation which jams the ultimately dialectical process of transference and countertransference between analyst and patient. Freud’s refusal to acknowledge the importance of Dora’s homosexual desire for Frau K. as idealised feminine, illustrated through her association with the Madonna in Dora’s dream, has also been highlighted as a pivotal factor in the failure of this analysis. These errors have been further linked to the general cultural construction of female sexuality as passive, and the marginalisation of relationships between women (particularly those between mothers and daughters) in Freudian psychoanalysis. Portrait of Dora reframes the narrative in order to foreground the patriarchal assumptions about Dora’s familial relationships that Cixous considered central to Freud’s interpretation of the case. She selects elements which are extant in his written text and, by configuring them within a different set of narrative priorities, reveals an alternative reading of the case study. Dora’s awareness of her implication in the social and sexual systems of exchange is explicit in the play as she openly states: ‘Daddy profits from the opportunities offered him by Monsieur K. Monsieur K. profits from the opportunities offered to him by daddy. Everyone knows how to get by. (Papa profite des occasions que lui laisse 26
26
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, I , (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 215-226. Translated in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (ed) (New York: Norton, 1983).
Monsieur K. Monsieur K profite des occasions que lui laisse papa. Tout le monde sait s’arranger.)’27. This pernicious substitution of one woman for another permeates Cixous’s play, and is revealed through the repetition of key sections of dialogue. Dora registers her disgust at Monsieur K’s words: ‘You know that my wife means nothing to me (Vous savez que ma femme n’est rien pour moi)’28 and Monsieur B (her father) repeats the phrase to Freud, further implicating Dora in his view: ‘The relationship between my wife and my daughter is not at all close. My wife does not mean much to me. (Les rapports entre ma femme et ma fille sont très peu affectueux. Ma femme n’est pas grande chose pour moi)’29 Monsieur B further suggests that Dora could replace Madame K in the latter’s accepted familial function as mother, presumably in order to free Madame K from such a role. Attention is given in the play to comments made in the case study on the roles of the governesses employed by both families, figures whom Cixous considers to be emblematic of the patriarchal view of women as sexually available and easily replaceable. In the case study, Freud suggests that Dora’s decision to cut short her analysis, announcing that she had decided two weeks ago that this would be her last visit, is analogous to the notice given by a governess of her departure, and thus, in Freud’s view, symptomatic of Dora’s identification with a former governess who had accepted Herr K’s advances only to be later dismissed.30 This would seem to affirm Dora in her role as servant (a position reinforced by Freud’s naming of the patient ‘Dora’ apparently after his sister’s maid), yet Cixous’s play stresses Freud’s frustration and rejection, indeed suggesting that his is the role of the paid servant who is being dismissed. Portrait of Dora engages equally with Freud’s prioritisation of heterosexual desire in his original analysis of Dora’s hysteria. In the case study, although aware of Dora’s father’s vested interest in ‘obtaining a cure’ for his daughter, Freud does not question the intentions of Herr K in his sexual advances to the then fourteen year-old Dora. Indeed Freud’s ultimate identification with Herr K necessitates his view of the latter’s behaviour as normal, thus rendering Dora’s appalled reaction as 27 28 29 30
Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora, p. 67. ibid., p. 16. ibid., p. 20. Sigmund Freud, Case Histories I, p. 148.
27
abnormal, as necessarily masking a repressed desire which has resulted in neurosis. Freud’s consequent neglect of the relationship between Dora and Frau K. (which he acknowledged in a postscript to the case study)31 is similarly foregrounded, as the Freud of Cixous’s play is permitted no retrospective analysis and his discourse remains inflexible in its exclusion of homosexual desire. Cixous’s text and Benmussa’s production counter this exclusion by reinstating Dora’s desire in the striking visualisation of her dream in which she stands transfixed before a painting of the Madonna. Cixous’s Dora addresses this vision directly: Dora: let me give you this love. Her body, of a ravishing whiteness. The small breasts, the so smooth skin of the stomach... . This is an intelligent woman, superior to the men who surround her, and of an adorable beauty!…how white your back is! Like your skin! How I love you! You can’t imagine how much I love you: if I were a man, I would marry you, I would carry you off and I would marry you, I would know how to please you.32 (Laissez-moi vous donner cet amour. Son corps, d’une blancheur ravissante. Des seins tout petits, la peau du ventre très lisse... . C’est une femme intelligente, supérieure aux hommes qui l’entourent, et d’une adorable beauté!…comme votre dos est blanc! Comme votre peau! Comme je vous aime! Vous ne pouvez pas imaginer comme je vous aime: si j’étais un homme, je vous épouserais, je vous emporterais et je vous épouserais, je saurais vous plaire.
The poetic tone of these passages is markedly different from the dialogue of the rest of the play as they reinstate the desire that Freud had consigned to the footnotes of his study and demonstrate that Dora, as female subject, is able to articulate an active sexual desire. The impact of these scenes is an important counter to the oppressive relationships which dominate the play, as Jane Gallop comments: …the more I have to say is about the beauty, the eroticism, the affirmative quality of that love, a side brought out particularly by Cixous’ Portrait. And somehow
31 32
28
ibid., p. 162. Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora, p. 38.
beauty and affirmation, sexuality as pleasure and joy rather than as murderous assimilation.33
Cixous’s play foregrounds issues of articulation and silence and engages with both the position of Dora as female subject within the case study, and Freud’s representation of the case. Cixous’s interest in the figure of the hysteric suggests it as an intriguing site and symbol of the repression and alienation of the female subject within patriarchal discourse. The power and potential liberation of such a position resides for Cixous in language: And this girl – like all hysterics, deprived of the possibility of saying directly what she perceived… still had the power to make it known. It is the nuclear example of women’s power to protest. It happened in 1899; it happens today wherever women have not been able to speak differently from Dora, but it is so powerful that it explodes and leaves the family in pieces. 34 (Et cette fille qui, comme toutes les hystériques, était privée de la possibilité de dire ce qu’elle percevait en direct… a eu quand même la force de le faire savoir. C’est l’exemple nucléaire de la force contestatoire des femmes. Ca c’est passé en 1899, ça se passe aujourd’hui là où les femmes n’ont pas pu parler autrement que comme Dora, mais ça a une efficacité telle que ça fait voler la famille en éclats.)
Cixous’s text contains many directions for the tone of voice, the articulation of the dialogue. Dora’ s voice is described at different points as: ‘childlike, weary, mistrusting, abrupt, hesitant, a voice which falls on Freud from afar and from very high.’ Her first speech in the play is performed in a voice that: ‘tears apart a silence – a tone between a threat and a question – listens to itself (une voix qui déchire un silence – ton entre la menace et la demande – s’écoute)’35 Such attention to the voice demonstrates a displacement of attention from the visual to the auditory, a move that was anticipated in ‘To Go To The Sea / Mother.’ Cixous’s work in the theatre is marked by the close collaborative relationships that she has formed with prominent directors who have, over the past twenty five years, both responded to her texts, and exerted considerable influence upon her approach to the theatre. Portrait of Dora was produced by Simone Benmussa, and drew on her parallel concerns 33 34 35
Jane Gallop, ‘Keys to Dora’ in Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (eds)In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, pp. 200-220, p. 217. Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née, pp. 282-283. Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora, p. 9.
29
in rethinking the theatrical form in order to enable the representation of a more fluid and plural subjectivity. Through her view of the stage as a potentially non-realistic space for the dramatisation of desires and dreams, Benmussa articulates a strikingly similar approach to the theatre to that of Cixous at this time. This includes a mutual interest in the construction of parallels between the structures of conventional theatre and those of psychoanalysis.36 Benmussa’s comparison is explicit: In ‘stage work’, just as in dream work, a situation, or desire, is projected into space by a word or a gesture: stage work produces images. The stage is the reflecting surface of a dream, of a deferred dream.37
The temporal and spatial boundaries of conventional theatre are disrupted in Portrait of Dora, a disruption which Benmussa’s inventive production emphasized further. The stage was divided into separate but interacting areas and the use of other forms, namely dance and film, further highlighted the simultaneous presence of the different spatial and temporal zones. As Benmussa explained: The play may be broken up into four different levels, which must always remain ‘readable’: the levels of memory, of the real, of the dream, and of fantasy. Then why should we not use different styles of ‘writing’: theatrical, novelistic, cinematographic and choreographic?38
The juxtaposition of these zones was accompanied by the simultaneous multiple representation of the main protagonists. The dream sequences (filmed by Marguerite Duras) were projected on an overhead screen whilst the characters concerned were also on stage, thus encouraging the audience to explore the split between the main scene and the film sequence, the seen and the spoken. Dance sequences were employed to articulate the repetition and ritual of the patriarchal exchange mechanisms at the heart of the narrative, and a series of slides provided a striking visual illustration of the ease of substitution of the women in the narrative. These persistent doublings of characters result in serious disruption of the illusion of a unified subject, whilst the resulting disjunctures of image and voice and contradictory representations of the 36 37 38
30
Further analysis of these links can be found in R.S.Koppen ‘The Furtive Event: Theorizing Feminist Spectatorship’ Modern Drama, 35 (3) (1992), pp. 378-394. Simone Benmussa, Benmussa Directs, (London: John Calder, 1979), p. 9. ibid., p. 12.
same events, also serve to frustrate both the spectators’ voyeuristic investment in the narrative and their identification with any of the characters. The combination of Cixous’s explicit thematic concern with the status of the female subject in patriarchal discourse (here, those of Freudian psychoanalysis and of the theatre), and Benmussa’s radical production aroused much critical interest in the play. As is amply demonstrated in the exchanges between Catherine Clément and Cixous at the end of The Newly Born Woman, the figure of Dora remains extremely ambiguous as feminist heroine. However Portrait of Dora was welcomed by some critics as a model for a new practice of feminist theatre, as: ‘a bold feminist venture aimed at arousing in the audience a new way of looking which is rooted neither in voyeurism nor in fetishism derived from the male fear of castration.’39 In the context of the development of the major and recurrent themes of Cixous’s theatre, it is perhaps surprising that the subject of writing does not play a more prominent role in these plays, yet it can be identified as part of Dora’s potential in the form of her dream. The struggle between Freud and Dora is represented as a struggle between different discourses of power and identity; Freud’s will to define Dora as object of his study and sexual object, and her desire to resist such classification and construct her own identity. In addition to the play’s more explicit focus on the power of articulation and the impact of the spoken word it also contains fleeting yet powerful evocations of the scene of writing. Freud’s concern for the coherence of his narrative is palpable and the disruption caused by Dora’s premature termination of her treatment is described by him as violence: Freud: ‘You have left me no chance of expressing myself fully!… I have never felt such violence40 (Vous ne m’avez pas laissé la possibilité de m’exprimer jusqu’au bout!…Jamais je n’ai senti telle violence’). Of particular interest in this context is Dora’s account of a dream (which Cixous invents and which does not feature in Freud’s case study). In this dream Dora defends herself physically against a man who appears to be threatening her. The mode of her reaction is related graphically: 39 40
J.L. Savona, ‘In Search of a Feminist Theatre: “Portrait de Dora”’, in Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, Enoch Brater (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 97-98. Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora, p. 99.
31
For a long time afterwards I could still feel the resistance of the throat. As if I were still performing it I can feel the intensity of that resistance. I used my left hand, and I moved it like a stroke from left to right.41 (Longtemps après je sens encore la résistance de la gorge. Comme si je le faisais encore je sens la densité de cette résistance. Je me servis de ma main gauche, et je tirai comme un trait de gauche à droite.)
This stylised violence could clearly be read as a castration metaphor, but Cixous’s insistence on the direction of the cut points rather towards a reading of the dream as revealing the potential of writing as both inscription and defense. As Jeanette Laillou Savona points out, it also provides an alternative to masculinist allegories of writing: ..it seems to point to the beginning of a possible writing and the desire for creativity... Here we have a reversal of the conventional metaphor of masculine writing which functions through the mutilation of the feminine body. 42 (…il semble indiquer le début d’une écriture possible et l’aspiration à la créativité… On a ici une inversion de la métaphore habituelle de l’écriture masculine qui passe par la mutilation du corps féminin.)
Freud’s response to Dora’s startling image of writing denies these possibilities and his subsequent line of questioning ensures that writing remains linked to forms of conventional communication which posits either himself or Herr K as recipient. He refers insistently to postcards that Dora had sent him and letters that she had sent to Herr K. In a further embellishment on the case study, the play’s final scene sees Freud asking the departing Dora to write to him: Freud: Send me my news (he makes a slip in such a way that it might not be noticed). Write to me. Dora: Write?…That’s not my business.43 (Freud: Donnez moi de mes nouvelles (il fait un lapsus de telle manière qu’on peut ne pas le remarquer). Ecrivez-moi. Dora: Ecrire?…ce n’est pas mon affaire.)
41 42
43
32
ibid., p. 27. Jeanette Laillou Savona, ‘“Portrait de Dora” d’Hélène Cixous. A la recherche d’un théâtre fémininste,’ in Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, pp. 161-175, p. 166. Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora, p. 103.
Freud’s verbal slip is vital here to the context of the discursive battle for identity. He asks for his own news, implying thereby that Dora’s sole function is as illustrative assurance of his own discourse, here, the case study. Dora’s reply constitutes a further rejection, she is leaving treatment and refusing further communication and seems to suggest an intrinsic alienation from writing altogether. The elsewhere that Cixous posits in The Newly Born Woman as a potential mode of writing in which both women and men could express their subjectivities more fully, remains starkly absent from the ending of the play. The play thus dramatises the ‘scene’ of psychoanalysis as Dora is suggested as a site of potential rebellion. However, as discussed, Dora is unable to make the radical leap from textual disruption to textual production. She fails to articulate her desire in language and rejects writing as an acceptable or accessible mode of expression. The adoption of the figure of the hysteric as ‘everywoman’ (toutefemme), as an emblematically ‘feminine’ figure must be seen as a dangerous move, given that for centuries the label of the hysteric has been loosely but consistently employed to define women as emotionally and mentally unstable. In an exchange published at the end of The Newly Born Woman, Cixous and Clément disagree over the radical potential of the figure of the hysteric, Clément clearly regarding Dora’s rebellion as of a strictly individual and limited nature.44 Cixous’s adoption of the hysteric’s situation as symbolic of that of all women risks restricting expressions of female subjectivity to pathological behaviour. Ultimately, it is also arguable whether Cixous’s selective use of the case study can be seen to give Dora a voice, or whether it rather simply employs Dora as a symbolic device which allows the dramatisation of more general structures of patriarchal oppression. The impact of the play is undeniably achieved through Dora’s discursive and emotional force, which contests Freud’s analysis, and with it the assumptions of the patriarchal culture that he represents. The physical fragmentation of the stage, and the formal obstacles to audience identification with individual characters, implemented through temporal and spatial splitting and doubling, underline the wider implications of Cixous’s play. Cixous’s employment of the case study in Portrait of Dora to engage with the general status of women in patriarchal culture, is explicitly evoked on the cover of the play text through the 44
ibid., p. 289.
33
juxtaposition of the title, author and publishing house ‘Portrait de Dora de Hélène Cixous des femmes’, which can be read as ‘Portrait of Dora of Hélène Cixous of women.’ Yet, in the context of the positive changes demanded in Cixous’s essay ‘To Go to the Sea / Mother’, the female spectator of Portrait of Dora does not find a viable alternative to the ultimate silencing of the female subject which Cixous so fiercely criticised in conventional theatre.
The Name of Oedipus: Language, Exclusion and Silence Cixous’s next play, The Name of Oedipus. Song of the Forbidden Body (Le Nom d’Oedipe. Chant du corps interdit), is an operatic text which witnesses Cixous’s continued dual exploration of the metanarratives of classical Greek theatre and psychoanalysis. However, in this play, the devices that serve to emphasize the fluidity and plurality of the subject are primarily textual. The play maintains the strategic undermining of unified subjectivity as each character is played by two performers; an actor for the spoken text and a singer for the musical passages. This proliferation of figures also serves to underline an interpretation of the play as emblematic of the universal impossibility of a radical reappraisal of difference within a patriarchal framework. The inscription of female identity in writing is reiterated as an essential theme of Cixous’s early theatre. The context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and the attention it directs towards the role of language in identity formation, is clearly invoked in The Name of Oedipus... . The development of the gendered subject in Lacanian theory begins from the same basic trajectory as that prescribed in Freud’s Oedipal narrative, yet here the attainment of social identity is inextricably linked to the acquisition of language. Language is presented as analogous to the unconscious in that its function as a signifying system relies on absence, on the substitution of the sign or word for the object. The child in its preoedipal stage, referred to by Lacan as the Imaginary, enjoys an unindividuated identification with the mother. The child then begins to distinguish itself from the mother through the intervention of the father, who represents both the phallus and social and linguistic identity, the realm of the Symbolic. In Lacanian terms, the female child cannot form 34
such an identification with the phallus, and consequently suffers a disadvantaged relationship to the Symbolic, this in turn determines her in a marginal position, unable to realise fully the status of social or linguistic subject, thus remaining other.45 Feminist engagement with Lacanian theory constitutes an immensely rich and varied corpus,46 and the tropes of silence and giving voice remain central to both Irigaray and Cixous’s projects. In the following discussion of Cixous’s theatre in this context, I will draw principally on Irigaray’s work on the status of the Imaginary, specifically her exploration of the potential creation of a female Imaginary which would be capable of articulating a female subjectivity that is not defined as other.47 Irigaray asserts that two preconditions would be necessary for the emergence of such an Imaginary; firstly the cultural revalorisation of the mother-daughter relationship,48 and secondly the reconstruction of links between women. Such emphasis on the provision of a female Imaginary has been criticised as essentialist and of presenting the realm of the Imaginary as inherently feminine, yet, as Margaret Whitford argues consistently, the function of this aspect for Irigaray is that of a powerful catalyst which would combat the silence imposed upon the female subject, and allow different representations and discourses of female subjectivity to emerge. Irigaray’s work on the relationship between female subjectivity and language forms an important and illuminating context to The Name of Oedipus... , in which Cixous negotiates the cultural metanarrative of Oedipus in order to foreground the linguistic and social repression of female desires and the difficulty of speaking as a female subject. In this play the main dramatic focus becomes Jocasta’s struggle against the silence imposed upon her desire, a struggle which, Cixous argues, is undertaken by all women: 45 46 47 48
There is not room here for detailed discussion of these terms. See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, I (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1966), pp. 80-109, in particular ‘Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du je’, pp. 89-97. For examples of these debates see: Teresa Brennan (ed) Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). See Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), pp. 140-145. In Le Corps à corps avec la mère, (Montreal: Editions de la pleine lune, 1981) Irigaray engages with the matricide she considers inherent in Freudian psychoanalysis.
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Jocasta, Oedipus are simply the occasional names of everywoman never woman and of everyman always a son…Let the woman be relegated to the place of the mother…All women, forbidden from the body, from language, forbidden from being a woman, are Jocasta.49 (Jocaste, Oedipe ne sont jamais que les prénoms occasionnels de toutefemme jamais femme de touthomme toujours fils… Que la femme soit reléguée à la place de la mère…Toutes les femmes, interdites de corps, de langue, interdites d’être femme, sont Jocaste)
This quotation provides a striking summary of the multiple alienations and repressions represented in the play: alienation from the body, the repression of female subjectivity and the reduction of women to a maternal function as (m)other figure. Cixous’s central thematic and dramatic device is the reframing of the narrative to focus on Jocasta’s plight. Such repositioning of the audience’s response to this well-known narrative is achieved through the disruption of the linear chronology, a chronology which conventionally follows Oedipus’s quest for his origins. The dramatic tension is not centred on Oedipus’s discovery of his identity, but rather on his subsequent acceptance or rejection of an identity defined entirely by his relation to social law (represented here by the city) and indeed to his name, to the status of ‘Oedipus’. The play’s title, with its emphasis on Oedipus’s name, points both to issues of identity and the wider cultural resonances of this name at the same time as it evokes, through the homophones ‘nom’ and ‘non’, the rejection of Jocasta’s status and subjectivity. The play’s disruption of linear chronology challenges the tenets of the classical unities which imply the construction of a unified subject and foreground a juxtaposition of the Lacanian realms of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. As Le Nom d’Oedipe... opens, Oedipus is already fully aware of his identity, yet the play is punctuated by flashbacks which represent a time in which mutual identification between the lovers was still possible. The temporal mode of the flashback can be read as the realm of the Pre-Oedipal or Imaginary, and thus the dramatic alternation of scenes between the two periods (before and after the revelation of Oedipus’s identity) emphasizes Jocasta’s plight as she tries to prevent Oedipus assuming his name and fulfilling duties to the City. Such an undertaking on his part constitutes an entrance into the Symbolic, a 49
36
Hélène Cixous, Le Nom d’Oedipe… , Backcover notes.
progression which would ensure her abandonment and denial of their love. In the flashback scenes, Jocasta and Oedipus address each other through an all-embracing range of names and social roles: Oedipus: Promise me you will have no other lover than me. Me your only force, your child, me your father if you like, myself, your husband mother, your lover Promise me you will never have another king. Jocasta: You, my life, my day, my light, I promise you, No, I don’t promise you. I want you to ask me Again, again and each time, tell me that you Are mine.50 (Oedipe: Promets-moi jamais d’autre amant que moi. Moi seul ta force, ton enfant, moi ton père si tu veux, moi-même ton époux mère, ton amant Promets-moi jamais d’autre roi. Jocaste: Toi, ma vie, mon jour, ma lumière, je te promets, Non, je ne te promets pas. Je veux que tu me demandes encore, encore et chaque fois, dis-moi que tu es pour moi.)
These fluid roles include those of mother and son and, whilst Cixous does not foreground the ultimately incestuous nature of their relationship, (her interest lies rather in its metaphorical parallels with all relationships between men and women) the presence of these terms of address is both ironic (they do not yet know their identities) and subversive. The apparent interchangeability of these terms of address empties them of their cultural significance, allowing them to become as freely attributable as abstract terms such as ‘dance, spirit and force’. This defiance of the social realm of the Symbolic is achieved through language. The free articulation of this poetic array of signifiers is contrasted with the pressure on Oedipus to define himself entirely through his familial relationships and thus, by means of his acceptance of criminality and guilt, free the city from its curse. Such an adoption, demanded by the forces of social law and articulated by the Oracle, insists that 50
Hélène Cixous, Le Nom d’Oedipe… , p. 67.
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Oedipus construct a fixed identity through language and the law, and so enter the realm of the Symbolic. Oedipus’s identity is therefore not perceived as the object of a quest, a horror to be revealed, but rather as the site of a struggle that reflects and ultimately critiques the place of woman in both patriarchal culture and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Oedipus’s transition from his unindividuated symbiosis with the mother, the Imaginary, to the realm of social and fixed linguistic identity, the Symbolic, is clearly evoked here. Importantly for Cixous, this transition is seen to require the rejection of the mother. Jocasta fights this separation and challenges her role as objectivised other by attempting to maintain her idyllic pre-Symbolic existence with Oedipus. The role of language in this is made explicitly clear: Jocasta: I would have liked to free him from names. All the names that present themselves as gods, By cunning, by fraud, ask to be worshipped. Obeyed. Accepted as pure beings: Father, mother, truth, living, killing, mistake, debt, wife, truth, Husband, king, origin, what man can say which he is? It is the names that rule. I wanted to free him.51 (Jocaste: J’aurais voulu le délivrer des noms. Tous les noms qui se font prendre pour des dieux, Par feinte, par fraude, se font adorer. Obéir. Passer pour des êtres purs: Père, mère, vérité, vivre, tuer, faute, dette, épouse, vérité, Mari, roi, origine, quel homme peut dire lequel il est? Ce sont les noms qui gouvernent. Je voulais le libérer.)
The Chorus echoes her pleas, developing her resistance to a more rigid code of signifiers and focusing on terms of possession and family relationships.52 This is the struggle that becomes the central dynamic of the play as the force of Jocasta’s plight is strengthened by the audience’s knowledge of the narrative. The inevitability of Oedipus’s accession into the Symbolic and his consequent abandonment of Jocasta seal her fate, a fate no less terrible than his:
51 52
38
ibid., p. 57. ibid., p. 57.
Jocasta: You can kill me With a word, you can Separate us, rob us Of life, of death, With a single word, you could Keep us, you Decide Alone, as if you were a god And as if I had ceased to be You.53 (Jocaste: Tu peux me tuer Avec un mot, tu peux Nous séparer, nous ravir La vie, la mort, D’un seul mot, tu pourrais Nous garder, tu Décides Seul, comme si tu étais dieu. Et que j’avais cessé d’être Toi.)
The last phrase of this speech demonstrates with utmost simplicity the centrality of identity and separation to the tragic dénouement of Cixous’s play. Oedipus’s responses bear witness to his gradual acceptance of the Symbolic and his increasingly inflexible and oppositional mode of discourse: Everything is dark now! I have such a need for light!…(Tout est noir maintenant! J’ai si grand besoin de lumière!)’54 His integration into the Symbolic is reported by the chorus who present his association with the City, his absorption into the crowd, and his undertaking of a new social role as a betrayal of Jocasta, positing the city as a rival female through their ambiguous use of the pronoun ‘elle’.55 In the context of the play’s evident engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Jocasta’s abandonment can be read as analogous to the Irigayan notion of ‘déréliction.’ Her enforced solitude is accompanied by a loss of subjectivity, and silence, rather than delirious and liberating communication becomes the main metaphor of her speeches: her death is described in terms of an enforced silence, a final loss of language:
53 54 55
ibid., p. 38. ibid., p. 39. ibid., p. 76.
39
Jocasta: Alone I descend time … There is no place for me On high … Alone To descend silence By degrees To enter, go further By silenced phrases, Word by word lose Throught, In the interior silence Until the very last word.56 (Jocaste: Seule Je descends le temps … Il n’y a pas de place pour moi En haut … Seule Descendre le silence Par degrés Entrer, s’enfoncer Par phrases tues, Mot à mot perdre La pensée Dans le silence intérieur Jusqu’à la dernière parole.)
The last scenes of the play, which portray Jocasta’s isolation and death, are crucial to a reading of the play which centres on the relationship between the female subject and language. Some have criticised the play’s representation of Jocasta’s apparent desire to die, her submission to Oedipus’s will, and acceptance of patriarchal exclusion.57 Jocasta’s death does, however, suggest a refuge from patriarchal exclusion. Oedipus has now entered the Symbolic, thus enacting his separation 56 57
40
ibid., p. 76. See for example Mieke Kolk, ‘La Vengeance d’Oedipe’ in Françoise van RossumGuyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, pp. 177-186.
from Jocasta as she is left in the pre-Symbolic or the Imaginary. This reading is supported by the details of Jocasta’s death and relies upon an association of the imaginary with the mother and music. Although much of the text is sung throughout the play, the only explicit reference to song within it is in the final scenes as Jocasta asks Tiresias to sing to her. In Cixousian aesthetics, song is linked closely with the mother and Jocasta’s desire for song represents a reaffirmation of the role of the mother. Jocasta: Sing me a song. Would you please? A childhood song, Like when I was a child. My mother’s deep voice. I would turn towards the wall. The wall became the Sea. Waves rocked my bed. I was happy.58 (Jocaste: Chante-moi une chanson. Tu veux bien? Une chanson d’enfance. Comme quand j’étais petite. La voix grave de ma mère. Je me tournais vers le mur. Le mur devenait la Mer. Des vagues soulevaient mon lit. J’étais bien.)
It remains extremely difficult to read Jocasta’s retreat from the world as a celebratory return to the mother – she is indeed about to die. In Lacanian discourse, a return to the Imaginary, to the illusion of symbiosis with the mother, constitutes a regression of the subject and the refusal to leave this realm behind would result in psychosis. Cixous is not suggesting the Imaginary as specifically ‘feminine’ space, yet Jocasta’s refusal of the Symbolic remains absolute and can be seen to point towards an as yet unrepresentable female Imaginary. The text suggests that this song is in German so heightening the association with the mother (Cixous’s mother), yet ultimately Tiresias’s ‘song of the enigma (chanson de l’enigme)’ represents the song of the forbidden body of the play’s title. Tiresias appears in the role of prophet in traditional renditions of the Oedipus myth, yet his presence at this point in Cixous’s play is important as, having lived as both man and woman, he represents a transgressive libidinal plurality.59 His is the forbidden body over which 58 59
Hélène Cixous, Le Nom d’Oedipe... , p. 80. Tiresias became a woman after separating two fighting serpents only to become a man again years later after separating two mating serpents on the same spot. See
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the conventional structures of gender formation can hold no sway. Jocasta is soothed by this song, yet it neither saves her from death nor provides a coherent counterpoint to the loss of her own voice. Her last words are addressed to a mysterious comforting maternal being who is coming to find her and who importantly remains nameless. This scene dominates the end of the play despite the existence of a further scene in which Oedipus returns to reclaim his links with Jocasta. He claims to have liberated his identity from the tyranny of his name and returned ‘From amongst words. From amongst the dead (D’entre les mots. D’entre les morts)’60 and rails against the silence imposed by Jocasta’s death: Oedipus: No, not dead Just voiceless. Mute, my love. Will you speak to me again? Tell me? Will you no longer speak to me? We haven’t said anything yet! Listen! The old names are buried Everything can start anew. Whenever you like Nothing has been named. Speak to me. Don’t leave me nameless. Who am I, if you don’t say to me: be there.61 (Oedipe: Non, pas morte Seulement sans voix. Muette mon amour. Tu me parleras encore? Dis-moi? Tu ne me parleras plus? Nous n’avons encore rien dit! Ecoute! Les anciens noms sont enterrés Tout est à commencer. Quand tu voudras Rien n’a été nommé. Parle-moi. Ne me laisse pas sans nom Qui suis-je, si tu ne me dis pas: sois là.)
This speech demonstrates the ultimate futility of Oedipus’s plaint. Whilst claiming that the old names have been discarded, he insists upon the importance to his identity of being named by Jocasta, an identification which will have unavoidable consequences for her own subjectivity.
60
61
42
Pierre Grimal, The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), pp. 439-440. Hélène Cixous, Le Nom d’Oedipe... , p. 81. ibid., p. 82.
This ultimate perpetuation of the naming of the feminine as other is no more positive than the retreat from language and from the Symbolic represented in Jocasta’s death. Oedipus remains alive on stage as linguistic and social subject. Thus the movement of The Name of Oedipus... follows the project of The Newly Born Woman in its denunciation of patriarchal culture. However, the response to this that is found in The Newly Born Woman, the utopian evocation of writing as the means to creation of a female Imaginary, and the reconciliation of the female subject with her body through language, is not present in the play. Whilst Dora and Jocasta are presented by Cixous as ‘everywoman’ in the nature of their oppression by patriarchal culture, their function remains limited and their potential reinterpretations of their fates remain unrealised: The hysteric is, to my eyes, the typical woman in all her force. It is a force that is turned back against Dora, but, if the scene changes and if woman begins to speak in other ways, it would be a force capable of demolishing those structures.62
These two plays are clearly closely linked to the major concerns of Cixous’s theoretical writing of the 1970s, in their dramatisation of the repressive structures of patriarchal culture and ontology which can only provide impoverished representation of the female subject. The Newly Born Woman, follows its damning indictment of patriarchal discourse with a combative and poetic vision of women reclaiming their subjectivity through writing: It is in writing, from woman and toward woman, and in accepting the challenge of the discourse controlled by the phallus, that woman will affirm woman somewhere other than in silence, the place reserved for her in and through the Symbolic. May she get out of the trap of silence! And not have the margin or the harem forced upon her as her only realms.63 (C’est en écrivant depuis et vers la femme, et en relevant le défi du discours gouverné par le phallus, que la femme affirmera la femme autrement qu’à la place réservée dans et par le symbolique, c’est-à-dire le silence. Qu’elle sorte du silence piégé. Qu’elle ne se laisse pas refiler pour domaine la marge ou le harem.)
62
63
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née, p. 154. ibid., pp. 171-172.
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However, this utopian movement, and gesture towards a more positive future, is noticeably absent from the plays as Dora and Jocasta are both marginalised and silenced. They choose to leave the scene of their immediate repression (Freud’s consulting room, the city) yet can only give tantalising and enigmatic clues as to their destinations. This lack of prescriptive detailing of a female Imaginary is entirely consistent with Cixous’s theoretical writing, yet the fate of the female characters in these early plays may seem to be partly in conflict with her aspirations for a relationship between female characters, spectators and the theatre, as articulated in ‘To Go To The Sea / Mother’. The assertions of silence, enacted by both Dora and Jocasta, achieve undoubted dramatic impact yet it is perhaps questionable whether their function as sites of rebellion or resistance is clear to the audience in the face of the dominant trope of martyrdom on which these plays close. Portrait of Dora and The Name of Oedipus... are remarkable explorations of the nature of repression of the female subject in conventional theatre. They serve as illustrations of the complexities of Cixous’s first approaches to theatre, and as markers of how different her relationship to the practice of theatre is today. From this point on, Cixous’s espousal of the theatre becomes far more wide-reaching, and her writing on the theatre articulates a different relationship to the interface of theatre, gender and writing, as the question of the representation of the female subject recedes and the employment of theatre as utopian site for the exploration of other differences and the projection of poetic identity grows in prominence.
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CHAPTER TWO
Writing on Theatre / Writing as Theatre
Cixous’s writing for the theatre has been accompanied consistently by examples of her writing on the theatre, the latter taking mainly the form of essays which have been presented alongside the written texts of her plays and published at the time of their first performances. This physical and temporal juxtaposition endows them with a clearly privileged and dominant influence on both critical interpretation of her plays and later productions of them. Whilst acknowledging the evident association of some of these essays with particular plays and, more specifically, with the collaborative preparations for specific productions of those plays, I want to discuss them here separately in an attempt to draw out an overview of the development of Cixous’s approach to the theatre, and the place of theatre in her aesthetics. The tension between the practice and performance of theatre and the employment of theatre, within Cixous’s wider aesthetics, as a metaphor for writing persists. This is reinforced through Cixous’s espousal of the theatre as a projected site of newly configured models of intersubjective relations. The search for modes of expression that would permit the articulation of a different and liberating relationship between self and other, between self and world remains a pivotal element of Cixous’s œuvre and is consistently evident across the wide generic and formal range of her writing. The theatre and writing for the theatre (in parallel with the structures of theatrical production) are adopted by Cixous as performative sites through which the other can be accommodated fully and represented positively. It is these tensions that will be addressed in this chapter. Cixous’s close personal involvement in both the publication and production of her plays has had an undeniably great influence on the reception afforded her work by spectators, directors, actors and readers. Her engagement has perhaps a more telling function when seen as an indicator of the fundamental importance of the theatrical form to her aesthetics. In much the same way that Cixous’s choice of writers for her seminar programmes may be seen to reflect wider concerns linked to her 45
own personal creative identity (for example the choice of writers from multilingual backgrounds and those who have experienced exile) the emphasis on the theatre forms part of a broader aesthetic move. As Morag Shiach points out: …Cixous’s writing on the theatre, as on other things, is always strategic. She uses the theatrical as a space in which to develop her critique of the forms of subjectivity and representation that dominate contemporary life.1
The early 1980s witnessed a change in Cixous’s approach to the theatre, as the focus of both her plays and of her writing on the theatre, shifted from the desire to subvert theatrical forms and conventions, to a reassessment of the relationship between writer and theatre, and a subsequent exploration of the specificity of writing for the theatre. This change in approach can be attributed in part to several elements, although foremost amongst these is undoubtedly the developing relationship between Cixous’s theoretical work on the representation of alterity, and her encounter with the work of Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil. As discussed in the previous chapter, Cixous’s first published engagement with the theatre, her essay ‘To Go to the Sea / Mother’ constitutes an attack on the dominant forms and narratives of conventional theatre. This critique leads to an expressed desire that the radical potential of theatre (or more specifically its role in providing liberating representations of the female subject) be reclaimed. Cixous’s two plays of this period, Portrait of Dora and The Name of Oedipus… combine radical interventions in their respective source narratives with ambitious formal innovation to produce plays which share the preoccupations of the very different dramatic œuvres of Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute and their reframings of female subjectivity. It remains striking that the interrogation of the theatrical form, which is so insistently pursued in these first plays, remains absent from Cixous’s later writing on the theatre, and from her plays in production. A concern with the particular relationship between the theatre and the representation of female subjectivity is also not maintained, although more general associations between theatre and the feminine are suggested. Indeed, the focus is no longer on the representations of 1
46
Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous. A Politics of Writing. (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 109.
gender disseminated by the repressive structure and limited female roles of conventional theatre, but rather on the utopian possibilities offered by the theatre through the experiences of writing, performing and watching plays in performance. Cixous presents these possibilities as apparently accessible to all and the theatre becomes established firmly in Cixous’s œuvre as a utopian site, analogous to the function of the site of writing in The Newly Born Woman, a space and process through which the representation of difference can be rethought and reconfigured. The shift in Cixous’s approach to the theatre, which can be witnessed in her writing of the mid-1980s, is matched by the significant change in subject matter and scale of her plays. These changes can be mapped variously as implementing a move from the personal to the historical, from inner space to outer world, from definitions of difference within the subject, to examinations of political and ethnic alterities. However, despite these evident changes in scale and perspective, many central concerns remain; primarily the search for new modes of writing and the representation of the new images of subjectivity that might emerge from this. I will address these persistent concerns in terms of their relation to either the space or time of theatre.
The Space of Others Cixous’s plays which were published during the 1980s, are accompanied by several pieces on the theatre, by texts which articulate and reiterate many of the images and claims for theatre that continue to dominate Cixous’s approach to the theatre today. They share the same dominant mode of discourse and can be considered together at this point. They include;‘The Path of Legend (Le Chemin de légende)’,2 ‘The Place of Crime, the Place of Forgiveness (Le lieu du Crime, le lieu du Pardon)’,3 ‘Incarnation (L`Incarnation)’4 and an article which summarises many of the main themes of the preceding essays ‘From the Scene of the 2 3 4
Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Chemin de légende’ in Théâtre (Paris: des femmes, 1986). Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Lieu du Crime, le lieu du Pardon’ in L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves, (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987), pp. 253-259. Hélène Cixous, ‘L’Incarnation’ Ibid., pp. 260-266.
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Unconscious to the Scene of History: the Path of a Writing (De la Scène de l’inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire: chemin d’une écriture).’5 This body of work serves as an introduction to an aspect of Cixous’s theatre which has remained central to her descriptions of her role as writer and spectator of theatre, namely that of theatre’s potential to break down conventional dialectic binaries of self and other. The major concerns of the plays alongside which these essays are published; The Taking of the School at Madhubaï (La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï), The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge) and The Indiade or the India of Their Dreams (L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves) are examined in detail in the following chapter, yet a common characteristic that should be foregrounded in the context of this discussion is the plays’ consistent positing of non-Western cultures and locations as utopian sites of the potential (or endangered) embrace of difference. Cixous’s emphasis, in these essays, on the specificities of writing for the theatre and the distinction she makes between writing for the theatre and writing in other forms brings a concern with genre which is otherwise absent in her work,: ‘I was not born a playwright…There is a certain road which must be travelled (Je ne suis pas née écrivain de théâtre…Il y a un certain chemin à faire)’.6 Cixous’s writing in other genres had worked towards a recognition and assertion of the self, culminating in its inscription in writing, an act which, she argued, encourages a more open relationship to discourse and to the world. Cixous’s personal experience of writing plays, however, seems to reframe such activities as a necessary apprenticeship, as a preparation for writing for the theatre which constitutes an explicit and distinct historical development of her own aesthetics: I had to write a few texts to put my house in order and to appease my self. Once peace has been won, in work as in life, one can hope that the self will fall silent, leave space for the rest of the world. Reduced, grown, let the self go off into the distance until it disappears, and the huge empty beach on which it performed its
5 6
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Hélène Cixous, ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient à la Scène de l’Histoire’ in Françoise van Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous, Chemins d’une écriture, pp. 15-34. ibid., p. 24.
noisy exercises can finally be occupied by strange hosts, by the non-me, passersby, humanity. Let the Others in! I have the honour of being the stage of the other.7 (J’ai dû écrire quelques textes pour ordonner les chambres et apaiser le moi. Une fois la paix obtenue, dans l’œuvre comme dans la vie, on peut espérer que le moi va faire silence, laisser le terrain au monde. Amoindri, grandi, qu’il s’éloigne jusqu’à l’effacement, et l’immense plage nue sur laquelle il faisait ses bruyants exercices revient encore aux hôtes étrangers, aux non-moi, aux passants, à l’humanité. Entrent alors les Autres! J’ai l’honneur d’être la scène de l’autre.)
This celebratory effacement of the self is described by Cixous as a démoïsation, a complex neologism that would seem to signal a removal or loss, but which also importantly evokes fluidity (démoisir) and harvest (moisson), the archetypal celebration of abundance. This fluid and fertile displacement is intended to undermine dialectical structures of difference which rely upon the binary opposition of self and other, a movement which Cixous suggests is a necessary realignment before writing for the theatre. Such apparent generic boundaries are grounded in Cixous’s descriptions of her own creative practices, and are not reflected in any definitions of formal differences between theatre and other texts. However, such descriptions should not lead in turn to the simplistic opposition of Cixous’s fictions, as projections of the authorial self, to her theatre, as generous and transparent window onto the world. The central role of the theatre in Cixousian aesthetics is its status as the site par excellence of alterity, a textual and physical space in which writer, actor and spectator can enjoy a remodelled and unproblematic relationship to the other. The spatial imagery of the path of writing and the uncharted territories of writing for the theatre clearly reflect the geographical specificities of the narratives of India and Cambodia on which Cixous was working at this time. The examples of other lives and subject positions that become accessible to the writer of theatre are also taken from such settings. Cixous describes her journey of initiation: To write for the theatre: you have to move away from yourself, to leave, to travel for a long time in the dark, until you no longer know where you are, who you are, it’s very difficult, until you feel that the space becomes a very foreign country, until you become afraid, until you arrive lost in a region that you don’t recognise, until I awake, transformed into someone that I have never met, a beggarwoman, a naïve god, a wise old man.8 7 8
Hélène Cixous, ‘L’Incarnation’, p. 260. Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Chemin de légende’, p. 7.
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(Ecrire pour le théâtre: il faut s’éloigner de soi, partir, voyager longtemps dans l’obscurité, jusqu’à ne plus savoir où l’on est, qui l’on est, c’est très difficile, jusqu’à sentir l’espace devenir un pays tellement étranger, jusquà devenir affrayé, jusqu’à arriver perdu dans une région que je ne reconnais pas, jusqu’à se réveiller, métamorphosé en quelqu’un que je n’ai jamais rencontré, en mendiante, en divinité naîve, en vieillard avisé).
This passage suggests that the withdrawal of the self is complete, creating an absence which allows the writer to travel light through other spaces and new experiences. The transformation of the self into someone else, a character in a play, is presented here as an immediate and unproblematic transposition which posits a neutral subjective space and a direct line of communication with the other. Yet the implicit politics of these transformations are neither clearly acknowledged nor explored in Cixous’s writing on the theatre. To imagine oneself as a subject of different cultural, economic, social and sexual discourses may indeed work to disturb concepts of difference, hierarchy and the relationship between the individual and the world, yet the motivations behind such transformations and its representation must remain decisive factors in the type of construction that is achieved. The political imperatives of the discursive contexts in which these figures exist, and the narrow margin between the deconstruction of differences and the appropriation of them as illustrations of the metaphorical capacity of the writer, provide a central tension that persists throughout Cixous’s writing on the theatre. Cixous’s choice of the theatre as the site of such a recasting of the relationship between author and character seems arbitrary (surely the construction of characters in a fictional work might adopt the same model) yet it is rooted entirely in the dynamics of theatrical production and performance. She describes the loss of self, that she claims to experience when writing for the theatre, as finding a parallel in the experiences of both actor and spectator. Her descriptions of rehearsals and of the actors’ art concentrates on the sacrificial: Like acrobats, the actors leap over the vacuum left by the self. Such a detachment from the self in order to join the other to whom you lend yourself completely, in this there is a form of saintliness. The actor is always part saint, part woman: he has to give life whilst drawing back.. In fact everything in the theatre is woman: the director, who brings the characters into the world and the actors.9 9
50
Hélène Cixous, ‘L’Incarnation’, p. 265.
(Acrobates, les comédiens sautent par dessus le vide laissé par le moi. Un tel détachement de soi pour rejoindre l’autre auquel on se prête tout entier, c’est l`a une forme de sainteté. L’acteur est toujours un peu saint, un peu femme: il lui faut donner la vie en se retirant. D’ailleurs tout est femme au théâtre: femme le metteur en scène qui donne le monde aux personnages et des comédiens.)
This passage is striking in its spiritual imagery but, through its assertion of gendered characteristics, it also functions as an illustration of the very different discourse which Cixous’s writing on the theatre has now adopted. Her approach has moved from an insistence that the theatre provide more palatable representations of the female subject to the evocation of tropes of nurturing and giving birth to emphasis a characterisation of the theatre itself as inherently female. The apparent generosity and selflessness of the creative process of writing for the theatre coexist with imagery of passivity and possession on the part of the writer. Cixous compares the position of the writer of a play to that of the spectator: To ‘write’ a play, I ‘go’ to the theatre by going behind thought. I close my eyes, and seated at the core of my body, I watch the characters living, I become restless, I cry out alone facing my sheet of paper, I shed tears. It’s because this is already the theatre and I am not alone.10 (Pour “écrire” une pièce de théâtre, je “vais” au théâtre en passant derrière la pensée. Je ferme les yeux, et assise au fond de mon corps, je regarde vivre les personnages, je m’agite, je pousse des exclamations seule devant mon papier, je verse des larmes. C’est donc que c’est déjà le théâtre et je ne suis pas seule.)
The implied directness of impact that Cixous celebrates in the relationship between writer and text, between spectator and play, is foregrounded in her assertion of the theatre as the repository of the spoken word. Throughout her work the importance of ‘donner la parole’ of giving voice to subjectivity and of giving voice to others, has been of paramount aesthetic and political importance. This concern recurs as one of the prominent qualities that, for Cixous, constitute theatre as an ideal mode of writing and site of the other. Theatre is again contrasted with other ‘fictions’:
10
ibid., p. 261.
51
In the theatre that which remains silent in reality and in the literary text resounds: the spoken word. There is nothing more oral, nothing more naked than this language. Spoken words. I have to write as the impassioned body speaks: the words delivered to the character by the author must be the very words that living, thinking lips mould and breathe into life. You must fire the spoken word straight at the audience’s hearts.11 (Au théâtre résonne ce qui reste silencieux dans la réalité et dans l’écriture livresque: La parole. Rien de plus oral, rien de plus nu que cette langue. Des paroles. Il me faut écrire comme parle le corps brûlant: il faut que les paroles livrées par l’auteur au personnage soient les paroles mêmes que les lèvres vivantes et pensantes pétrissent et insufflent. Il faut tirer la parole droit au cœur du public.)
This description of the violent impact of spoken language in the theatre recalls Artaudian emphasis on the impact of the spoken word and the verbal gesture, yet Cixous’s statements do not lead to similar conclusions. Artaud argued for a diminishment of the status of the written text in theatre and for an emphasis on language as dramatic element which was to be achieved through the employment of song, incantation and rhythm.12 The role of the spoken word in Cixous’s theatre leads not to a more radical form of spectatorship in the theatre, but to an extensive revision of the writer’s creative experience in writing for the theatre: ‘I write by hearing: my ear listening for the music of the heart. It hums in there. There are passions, impulses. (J’écris à l’oreille: l’oreille tendue vers les musiques du cœur. Cela bout là-dedans. Ce sont les passions, les pulsions.)’13 If the processes undertaken by the writer and actor are ultimately comparable, and result in a new openness to difference, then what of the effect of the theatrical performance on the spectator? Cixous concludes that the same structure operates within this relationship: The theatre is the palace of other people. It lives off the desire of the other, of all others. And of the desire for the desire of others: of the audience, of the actors... At the theatre we reassure each other: our hearts are still beating and this is a joy to us. We do after all still have tears and blessed they are! The tears of my neighbour fall on my soul like a blessing! In these days we are still human after all!14
11 12 13 14
52
ibid., p. 261. See Antonin Artaud, ‘Le Théâtre de la cruauté (premier manifeste) in Le Théâtre et son double (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), pp. 135-152, p. 138. Hélène Cixous, ‘L’Incarnation’, p. 262. ibid., p. 260.
(Le théâtre est le palais d’autrui. Il vit du désir de l’autre, de tous les autres. Et du désir du désir des autres: du public, des comédiens... Au théâtre nous nous rassurons les uns les autres: le cœur bat encore, et c’est un ravissemeent. Nous avons donc encore des larmes, bénies soient elles! Les larmes de mon voisin sur mon âme comme une bénédiction! De nos jours nous sommes encore humains.)
The theatre is thus presented as an arena in which the spectator can shrug off contemporary social conventions and individual repressions to rediscover their capacity for empathy and catharsis. Theatre in these essays becomes a utopian site in which the writer, actor and spectator can experience the diversity of humanity whilst simultaneously asserting their own place within a communal whole. For Cixous, the beneficially transformative power of theatre for the writing self, for the actor, or for the spectator is perceived as an assertive marker of a common humanity: Afterwards, the overwhelming feeling that, if I can displace myself, me or my soul, to a place as far away as India, and as far as other strange beings, this means that we are not, we human beings, so separate and so insensitive as all that. We are sparks from the same fire.15 (Après coup, le sentiment bouleversant que, si je puis me déplacer, mon âme ou moi, jusqu’en Inde, et jusque dans des êtres étranges, cela signifie que nous ne sommes pas, nous les êtres humains, si séparés et si imperméables que cela. Nous sommes les etincelles du même feu.)
It must be acknowledged, however, that the apparently boundless embrace of difference that is articulated in Cixous’s description of writing and experiencing theatre, risks the erasure of specific differences which are seen to be transcended with equal ease by all members of an apparently homogenous spectatorship. The assertion of a common humanity is clearly an important utopian goal, yet significant tension remains between the readiness of the writer to adopt another identity and the capacity of the writer to acknowledge and articulate the important differences which must be negotiated when espousing such a transformation. Cixous’s exploration of the specificities of writing for the theatre does however address the overcoming of one particular barrier involving difference, that of the creation of male characters in her work. This identity is presented as impossible to achieve in her ‘fictions’ because of 15
Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Chemin de légende’, p. 7.
53
the inherent links that she posits between authorial libidinal economy and the process of writing: I never dared create a real male character in my works of fiction. Why not? Because I write with the body and I am a woman, and a man is a man and I do not know anything about his jouissance. And a man with no body and no jouissance, I could not create that.16 (Je n’ai jamais osé créer dans mes textes de fiction un vrai personnage d’homme. Pourquoi? Parce que j’écris avec le corps et que je suis une femme et un homme est un homme et de sa jouissance je ne sais rien. Et un homme sans corps et sans jouissance, je ne peux pas faire cela.)
The different relationship between the writing self and the text experienced by the writer of theatre is, however, apparently capable of overcoming this conflict. Cixous describes theatre as the place of the heart, a universal heart which functions as common indicator of humanity and thus would seem to transcend categories of sexual difference. Cixous has no hesitation in building a generic argument from a specific textual reference: The theatre is not the scene of sexual jouissance. Romeo and Juliet love each other but they do not make love. They sing it. In the theatre, it is the heart that sings, the chest opens, you can see the heart tearing itself apart. The human heart has no sex.17 (Le théâtre n’est pas la scène de la jouissance sexuelle. Romeo et Juliette s’aiment mais ne font pas l’amour. Ils le chantent. Au théâtre c’est le cœur qui chante, la poitrine s’ouvre, on voit le cœur se déchirer. Le cœur humain n’a pas de sexe.)
This seemingly arbitrary reference to the portrayal of love in Shakespeare’s play remains an unconvincing general argument for theatre as a space free from representations of physical sexual love or from complex representations of sexual difference. Indeed, Cixous’s explanation of her greater authorial freedom in creating male characters in the theatre rapidly develops into an assertion of the impact of the actors’ physical presence : No, our creatures do not lack anything, not a penis, nor breasts, nor a belly. But I do not have to write all of that. The actor, or actress gives us a whole body that we 16 17
54
Hélène Cixous, ‘L’Incarnation’, p. 265. Hélène Cixous, ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient…’, p. 31.
do not need to invent. And everything is experienced and everything is real. This is the gift that the theatre offers to the author: incarnation. For the male author it permits the creation of women who are not fakes, and it gives the woman writer the opportunity to create perfectly constituted men!18 (Non, nos créatures ne manquent de rien, ni de pénis, ni de seins, ni de reins, ni de ventre. Mais cela je n’ai pas à l’écrire. Le comédien, la comédienne nous donnent tout le corps que nous n’avons pas à inventer. Et tout est vécu et tout est vrai. C’est le cadeau que le théâtre fait à l’auteur: l’incarnation. A l’auteur homme, il permet de créer des femmes qui ne seront pas feintes, et à l’auteur femme il accorde la chance de créer des hommes parfaitement constitués.)
This passage reinforces the central function of performance in providing Cixous with an aesthetics of writing for the theatre. The libidinal economy of the author, so vital to Cixous’s work on écriture féminine, withdraws, to be replaced seemingly by the physical realia of the actors’ bodies on stage. The implications of the positing of such basic guarantees of difference are widespread. Would a reliance upon the actors’ bodies to inscribe difference be limited to a consideration of sexual difference or would differences of race and age be similarly reliant upon the choice of appropriate actor? Such suggestions are clearly an overliteral interpretation of Cixous’s premise and, indeed productions of her plays by the Théâtre du Soleil have often cast women in male roles and relied heavily upon make-up, mask and costume to construct characterisations which necessarily obliterate, to some extent, the physical specificity of the individual actor. This ‘incarnation’, which relies upon the supposedly authentic marker of sexual difference found in the actor’s anatomy, enacts one of a series of effacements of difference which appear in Cixous’s writing on the theatre of this period. This reveals a paradoxical move which persists as, whilst the theatre functions as a mode of writing which is supremely open to difference and to the presence of the other, certain specific differences that had been central to Cixous’s conceptions of self are effaced or transcended both in performance and by her aesthetics of theatre. Indeed the gender-specific approach to theatre which was so prominent in ‘To Go to the Sea / Mother’, and which challenged the visual emphasis of theatre, the conventional narrative functions of female characters, and the politics of spectatorship is conspicuously absent from her essays on the theatre which were written after 1982. 18
ibid., p. 31.
55
Writing the Present The different relationship that Cixous perceives as operating between writer and text when writing for the theatre are thus inextricably linked to the spatial relationships of displacement and identification that she associates with the rehearsal and performance of theatre. The specificity accorded to writing for the theatre in Cixous’s aesthetics adopts a similar attitude to the temporal aspects of writing: When I write a literary text in my own way, it’s a tapestry, I weave calmly, horizontally and it is the words, the phrases that guide me. There, it’s the opposite. The theatre is up on its feet, vertically, immediately. The characters enter... I have thirty seconds to make the public understand what is at stake in this scene...You must therefore try to write like an arrow, an arrow which goes straight to the heart of the character. Really the complete opposite to my books which are made with and of slowness. Everything must be sharp, tense, I have had to enrol myself in the school of theatre.19 (Quand j’écris un texte littéraire à ma façon, c’est une tapisserie, je tisse tranquillement à l’horizontale et ce sont les mots, les phrases qui me conduisent. Là c’est le contraire. Le théâtre c’est debout, verticalement, tout de suite. Entrent les personnages...J’ai trente secondes pour que le public ait compris les enjeux de cette scène...Il faut donc essayer d’écrire comme une flèche, et droit au coeur du personnage. Vraiment tout le contraire de mes livres qui sont faits de lenteur. Tout doit être aigu, tendu, j’ai dû me mettre à l’école du théâtre.)
Writing for the theatre is described by Cixous as a more immediate, a more temporally direct activity than writing in other forms:`What time is it. This is the key question of theatre. (Quelle heure est-il. C’est la question clé du théâtre)’.20 Theatre’s conventional suspension of the audience in intradiegetic time and space, and the immediate response of the audience to the performance, and so to the text, is presented by Cixous as having an anticipatory impact on the writing process and thus providing a model for an ideal ‘writing in the present’:
19 20
56
Hélène Cixous, ‘Interview’ Théâtre/Public 68 (1986), pp. 22-25, p. 25. Hélène Cixous, unpublished seminar archive 4/3/1989.
The ability to exist in the absolute present is the charm and the necessity of the theatre. Writing the absolute present in the poetic text is an acrobatic feat. 21 (Arriver à être au présent absolu, c’est le charme du théâtre et sa nécessité. Ecrire le présent dans le texte poétique, c’est acrobatique).
The recurrent references to writing theatre as ‘writing in the present’ constitute a counterpart to the insistence throughout Cixous’s œuvre on the power and role of writing as a ‘combat with bereavement’, as a struggle to inscribe the past and to ensure the preservation of personal and cultural memory. For Cixous, theatre is the form in which humankind might articulate a different relationship to death and, in her writing on the theatre, questions of mortality persist: And the magic ingredient of theatre: Time. Real time, with all its seconds (no, there is no time in fiction, and so no terrified suspense) the feeling that “it’s going to happen”, that “there’s still time!”, that “it still might not happen”; and always the light step of approaching death, imminence – and then the final blow!22 (Et la substance magique du théâtre: le Temps. Du vrai temps, avec toutes les secondes (non, il n’y a pas de temps dans la fiction, donc pas de suspens terrifié), la sensation de “ça va arriver!”, du “il est encore temps!”, du “ça pourrait encore ne pas arriver”; et toujours le pas léger de la mort qui approche, l’imminence, – et puis: le coup!)
The writer and the spectator of theatre are obliged to reflect upon the present moment, a dramatic recognition which Cixous perceives as constituting a positive disruption of the dominant modes of mass culture. The individual’s sharing of the present of the performance with the actors and with the other spectators contributes to Cixous’s vision of the theatre as healing social practice: The theatre is (in the) Present. Must always be in the present. That’s its chance. At each moment the present explodes. The present is a shining blackness. We step forwards, our hearts pounding from not knowing what is about to happen. And this unknown which holds us spellbound, lifts us up, transports us beyond ourselves, is life itself. In the theatre the public know no more than the character about himself.
21 22
Françoise van Rossum-Guyon, ‘A Propos de “Manne”: Entretien avec Hélène Cixous’, in Françoise van Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, pp. 213-234, p. 227. Hélène Cixous, ‘A Quoi bon le théâtre?’ Théâtre Ouvert: Vingt Ans (1991), pp. 17-18, p. 17.
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No-one is ahead. Together we don’t understand. Together we hesitate. This creates a dark and thrilling archaic complicity between us all.23 (Le théâtre est (au) Présent. Doit toujours être au présent. C’est sa chance. A chaque moment le présent éclate. Le présent est d’un noir brillant. On avance le cœur battant de ne pas savoir ce qui va arriver. Et cet imprévisible qui nous tient en haleine, nous soulève, nous transporte au-dessus de nous-mêmes, c’est la vie même. Au théâtre le public n’en sait pas plus que le personnage sur lui-même. Personne ne précède. Ensemble on ne comprend pas. Ensemble, on hésite. Cela crée entre tous l’obscure et frémissante complicité archaïque.)
Such statements could perhaps be anticipated in the context of Cixous’s earlier criticism of conventional theatre’s reliance upon concepts of role and fixed identity and her desire to reveal more radical modes of representing the subject in process, as fluid in space and time. However emphasis has shifted from the radical interventions in theatrical time and space that we witness in her early plays to an essentially conventional focus on the power of the theatre to suspend the audience in an unquestioned intradiegetic time and the encouragement of a common catharsis. The theatre is thus identified by Cixous as the form and site in which the inevitability of temporal movement is most keenly experienced, yet this movement is countered in her avowed motivation in writing plays as revealed in recent statements: ‘Why do I write theatre? Because I am haunted, by those who return, who rise up ... for the joy of being the scene of their return.’24 For Cixous, the theatre is also implicated in this project as ‘the manifestation of memory in the present (la manifestation au présent de la mémoire)’25 and in the ethical imperatives which must inform this. The theatre is therefore expected to assert an absolute present, as experienced both by the audience within the timespan of the play (eight hours over two consecutive evenings in the case of The City of Perjury... (La Ville parjure...)) and by the writer performing the theatrical text, whilst the narratives of Cixous’s plays foreground the importance of inscribing the past in the present. This dual concern constitutes one of the central themes of Cixous’s dramatic œuvre and generates a fascinating tension in her plays as her theatre searches for temporal solutions which would accommodate both the 23 24 25
58
Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Chemin de légende’, p. 10. Hélène Cixous, Roundtable on theatre, Cerisy la salle, July 1998. ibid.
impact of the present theatrical moment and the use of the theatre to witness and re-enact the past, allowing them to enjoy an equal coexistence. The desire to share an untold story, to convey to the audience the importance of maintaining the past in the present, through both writing and performance, must find a harmonious simultaneity with the need to emphasise both the liberating potential of the absolute present of the performance and the audience’s communal time of catharsis. A concern with such temporal acrobatics has endowed several of Cixous’s plays with a sense of timelessness, or of being beyond time. This is manifested in the positing of undefined time zones which, it can be argued, may indeed hinder engagement with the central ethical and political intentions of those plays which portray historical figures and events. The clear concern that emerges in Cixous’s writing on the theatre of this period (the concern to find a mode of writing in which the representation of other characters and other times is possible) is inextricably linked to her identification of the theatre as the site through which she is able to engage with both narrative and History. She specifies this need through praise of the conventional narratives that were criticised in her attack on the theatre in 1977: I need a particular Theatre, whose first name was Shakespeare or Verdi, or Schonberg or Sophocles or Rossini. I need this theatre to tell me stories, and to tell them as only it can tell them: as legends, but with honesty.26 (J’ai besoin d’un certain Théâtre, dont le prénom était Shakespeare ou Verdi, ou Schönberg ou Sophocle ou Rossini. J’ai besoin que ce théâtre me raconte des histoires, et qu’il me les raconte comme lui seul peut les raconter: légendairement et cependant droit dans les yeux.)
Theatre’s capacity for representation of the other and the tradition, which Cixous somewhat selectively identifies, of telling stories effectively leads her to assert the theatre as not only the site of ‘histoires’ (stories) but of ‘l’Histoire’ (History): And History? A terrible question which has constantly haunted me. For a long time it rang out for me like the echo of a mistake... My shame which I formulated and
26
Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Lieu du crime, le lieu du pardon’, p. 253.
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then dismissed: you write while others are dying… Which History is mine? Which History do I witness? How can one combine History and text?27 (Et l’Histoire? Question terrible qui m’a hantée sans cesse. Longtemps elle a résonné pour moi comme l’écho de la faute... Ma honte, je la formulais et puis je la renvoyais: tu écris quand on meurt... Quelle Histoire est la mienne? De quelle Histoire suis-je le témoin? Comment unir Histoire et texte?)’
Whilst the questions with which this passage ends would seem to reflect more on the construction of the writer’s personal identity than on any possible remappings of history, Cixous is clearly relieved to find a form in which she is able to articulate a personal relationship to history. Cixous claims that the theatre is the only place in which history can be portrayed poetically, in the form of the epic or legend: The Theatre has kept the secret of History that Homer had proclaimed: History is made up of stories of husbands, lovers, fathers, daughters, mothers, sons, of jealousy, of pride, of desire. And there are faces that launch fleets of a thousand ships and destroy cities.28 (Le Théâtre a gardé le secret de l’Histoire que Homère avait chanté: l’histoire est faite d’histoires de maris, d’amants, de pères, de filles, de mères, de fils, de jalousie, d’orgueil, de désir. Et il y a des visages qui lancent des flottes de mille voiles et détruisent les villes.)
Cixous’s claim does not assert a more inclusive vision of history as a record of the lives of the ordianry populace, but rather presents history as a narrative which, through its association with legend and myth, can serve to articulate the eternal veracity of common values and emotions: To be a theatre of History, is without doubt theatre’s most noble ambition, if not it’s vocation…The theatre should be a telescope turned on the human heart…The joy of a writer after all, would be to succeed in allying poetry and history.’29
This recovery of history, and an alliance between the poetic and the historical that can be found in the theatre, is fundamental to Cixous’s view of the theatre as a humanising force which survives in opposition to contemporary forms of mass media. The essay in which this emphasis is first articulated was published alongside the play The Taking of the 27 28 29
60
Hélène Cixous, ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient…’, p. 26. Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Lieu du crime, le lieu du pardon’, p. 255. Hélène Cixous, Interview, Théâtre/Public, 68 (1986), pp. 21-25, p. 25.
School at Madhubaï (La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï) is set in India and Cixous’s eulogy to the rediscovery of human emotions through the theatre is linked problematically throughout the essay to the setting of the play: A curtain, a plateau, a caravan, high plateaus. And just arriving: destinies. Destinies!? We who only have existences! And we forget that we have the right to a destiny. But the theatre can and must remind us that by becoming “indians” once again, we could again lay claim to our personal kingdoms, to our individual treasures, to our fortunes. To be the hero of our stories.30 (Un rideau, un plateau, une caravane, des hauts plateaus. Arrivent: des destins. Des destins?! Nous qui n’avons que des existences! Et nous oublions que nous avons le droit au destin. Mais le théâtre peut et doit nous rappeler qu’en redevenant “indiens”, nous pourrions à nouveau prétendre à nos royaumes personnels, à nos trésors individuels, à nos chances. A être le héros de nos histoires.)
The problematic positing of an essentialised Indian subjectivity and a poeticised Indian identity remains present in the essays which accompany The Indiade or the India of their Dreams (L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves) in which Cixous employs metaphors of a mythologised India in order to evoke what she considers to be the utopian generic space of theatre.31 Cixous expresses no concern as to the possible pitfalls of the representations that we might communally witness, nor does she contest the positing of a homogenous body of spectators who remain free from elements of divisive difference, such as gender, race, class or sexuality, that might impact upon their experiences of the play. For Cixous, theatre’s disregard for the everyday banality of our lives and its rediscovery of some lost essence of humanity can but trasncend all such differences: There [in the theatre] we regain that which, through being harnessed so docilely to our miserable everyday banality, we had lost: firstly the basic right to our hopes; and firstly the hope that the things that we take for History and existence, and which are so implacably programmed by immense social machines, will free themselves from all expectations; and be given over to chance, to the human.32
30 31 32
Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Chemin de légende’, p.10. Such metaphorical use of other spaces and historical events will be discussed in further detail in Chapter Three. ibid., p. 9.
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(Nous y regagnons ce que, à être si docilement attelés dans notre avare banalité quotidienne, nous avons perdu: d’abord les droits primitifs aux espoirs; et d’abord l’espoir que les choses, qui nous servent d’Histoire et d’existence, et qui sont si implacablement programmés par les grandes machines sociales, échappent à toute prévision; et s’offrent à la chance, à l’humain.)
Cixous links this challenge to the routine and repetitious nature of mass culture to the fact that two performances of a play can never be the same. The theatre is again posited as genre of authenticity. The suspension of disbelief referred to above as symptomatic of all theatre relies heavily upon a model of linear chronology and is clearly not applicable to all theatre, least of all to Cixous’s plays Portrait of Dora and The Name of Oedipus... whose temporal and spatial disruptions of audience identification were discussed in the previous chapter. The theatre is lauded as enabling us to rediscover communal will and a common humanity which may even lead to an impact on the world outside: To begin with, let’s take the theatre seriously. I mean: it is good to go there seriously, like children. Because you can pretend to go and listen to an opera. And then nothing happens. But if you take part in Woyzzeck or King Lear with a simplified, open heart, and if by chance you shed some tears, then perhaps somewhere in this world a woman will be saved, a prisoner will be freed... .33 (Pour commencer, prenons le Théâtre au sérieux.. Je veux dire: il est bon d’y aller sérieusement, comme des enfants. Parce qu’on peut faire semblant d’aller écouter un opéra. Et alors rien ne se passe. Mais si l’on participe à Woyzzeck ou au Roi Lear, avec le cœur simplifié, découvert, et si par chance on verse des larmes, alors peut-être que sur la terre une femme sera sauvée, un prisonnier sera libéré...)
This passage would seem to introduce an unspecified distinction between opera and theatre, yet this resides not in the formal construction of these modes of performance, but is dependent upon our attitude as spectators. Cixous’s presentation of an undifferentiated humanity and the associated utopian assertions of the power of theatre to realise and reformulate intersubjective relationships is far removed from the genderspecific criticism which accompanied her first plays. The apparent homogenisation of the spectator and the representation of their relationship to the play and the characters as unmarked by their individual histories, status and representation seems very distant from 33
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Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Lieu du crime. Le lieu du pardon’, p. 259.
Cixous’s earlier concerns. The criticism contained in ‘To Go to the sea / mother’ which were founded upon an acute awareness of the political and ethical implications of marginalised representation of the other seem to have been transcended by a humanist belief in the social ritual of theatre. The state of ‘selflessness’ which Cixous presents as a positive aspect of the theatrical experience of author, actor and spectator may perhaps only be embraced through a certain loss of political agency and specificity. Cixous’s essays on the theatre do not refer to contemporary practitioners, theorists or other contexts of her work in this field, yet references are made which might direct us towards possible influences on her theatre. Cixous’s assertion of the theatre as a regenerative, humanitarian experience clearly evokes the work of Antonin Artaud. His engagement with the theatre, which began in the 1930s, yet was not critically recognised until the 1960s, presents theatre as a challenging, revolutionary, communal experience: A real work of theatre shakes up the dormant senses, frees the repressed unconscious, encourages a type of virtual revolt, one which nonetheless cannot maintain its full value unless it remains virtual, and imposes a difficult and heroic attitude on the assembled masses.34 (Une vraie piece de théâtre bouscule le repos des sens, libère l’inconscient comprimé, pousse à une sorte de revolte virtuelle et qui d’ailleurs ne peut avoir tout son prix que si elle demeure virtuelle, impose aux collectivités rassemblées une attitude héroique et difficile.)
Artaud believed that this ‘heroic’ theatre constituted a mobilising force towards spiritual and social change through collective experience and inspiration. Cixous’s evocation of the theatre as cruel must also be seen as an explicit reference to Artaud: Cruelty: the theatre is always cruelly magnificent or cruel, extreme. It gives us the opportunity to encounter cruelty, which is a part of existence. It takes courage to watch it.35 (Cruauté; le théâtre est toujours cruellement magnifique ou cruel, paroxystique. Il nous donne la chance de rencontrer la cruauté, qui est une partie de l’existence. Il faut du courage pour le voir.) 34 35
Antonin Artaud, Le Théatre et son Double, p. 39. Hélène Cixous, ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient…’, p. 30.
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It is however difficult to establish close links between Cixous’s fleeting use of the term cruelty and Artaud’s detailed conception of the ‘theatre of cruelty’ as prescribed in his 1932 manifesto.36 The presence of Artaudian discourse in Cixous’s writing on the theatre, and the equally striking lack of detailed engagement with it that ensues, can perhaps be seen as symptomatic of Cixous’s writing on the theatre. Critics have referred to Derrida’s work on Artaud37 as a possible context for Cixous’s writing on the theatre, but clear responses or references remain difficult to establish.38 Cixous’s contact with dramatic theory has been mediated consistently by the work of others and it is through this pattern that the very important influence of Ariane Mnouchkine becomes apparent. Indeed a meeting between their approaches to the theatre seems to have been almost overdetermined. An image often used by Cixous, that of the sun which she associates, traditionally, with life forces and primal energy, is also used by Artaud to describe the very element of theatre: ‘...a strange sun, an unusually intense light under which it appears that the difficult and the impossible…become our normal element (une sorte d’étrange soleil, une lumière d’une intensité anormale ou il semble que le difficile est possible...deviennent notre élément normal)’. It remains a striking coincidence that this image is maintained in the name of the company with whom Cixous has enjoyed an extensive collaboration in the productions of most of her plays, the Théâtre du Soleil.
36 37 38
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Antonin Artaud, ‘Le Théâtre de la cruauté’ in Le Théâtre et son double, pp. 135152. Jacques Derrida, ‘La Parole soufflée’ in L’Ecriture et la différance (Paris: Seuil, 1967), pp. 253-292. See Jennifer Birkett, ‘The Limits of Language: The Theatre of Hélène Cixous’ in Voices in the Air: French Dramatists and the Resources of Language, ed, John Dunkley and Bill Kirton, (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992), pp. 171-186 and Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous: A Politics of Writing, p. 108.
The Théâtre du Soleil The principle of collaboration recurs throughout Cixous’s œuvre. The Newly Born Woman was written with Cathérine Clément and the recent Rootprints (Photos de racines)39 is a collaborative text written with Mireille Calle-Gruber. The level of collaboration between Cixous, Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil is remarkable and finds few comparisons in contemporary French or European theatre. The texts of many of Cixous’s plays are not published until the piece is ready to go into production, a timing which emphasises the dynamic between the methods of the company and the writing process undertaken by Cixous when writing for the theatre. She describes her experience of writing for the Théâtre du Soleil: Firstly the author acknowledges their own limits: they are not God they are but a half-god. This means that they write a half-work. The author writes something and then waits for their other like a soul which waits for its body…The author’s instinct of ownership is restricted and this is for the good. On the other hand the instinct of friendship is developed.40 (D’abord l’auteur rencontre sa limite; il n’est pas Dieu il n’est qu’un demi-dieu. Cela veut dire qu’il écrit une demie-œuvre. Il écrit quelque chose et puis il attend son autre comme une âme qui attend son corps... L’instinct de propriété de l’auteur est inhibé et c’est une bonne chose. Par contre, l’instinct d’amitié est développé.)
Mnouchkine’s extensive influence on Cixous’s plays can be witnessed in both the thematic range of work and in her writing on the theatre. In a period when directors in France have been awarded a status and profile far above that of playwrights or even of actors, Mnouchkine remains one of the most prominent and successful theatre directors working in the country today. Mnouchkine remains the only prominent woman director amongst their number and, as critics have suggested, the disproportionate attention paid by the media to Mnouchkine’s role as enigmatic leader, and its concomitant lack of consideration of the particular working methods of the company itself, often reveal a crude level of
39 40
Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber Photos de racines (Paris: des femmes, 1994). Hélène Cixous, ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient…’, p. 32.
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gender stereotyping.41 The company’s origins situated them very much at the margins of French theatre. They established their base, outside of central Paris, in a deserted munitions factory, ‘La Cartoucherie’ in Vincennes and, as a group of students in 1964, started out with neither a clear funding structure nor a benevolent founding patron. From its very inception, the company’s distinctive status in French theatre has been underpinned by its consistent espousal and emphasis on the social and political principles that inform both the organisation of the company and the aesthetics of its performances. The company still functions as a cooperative and maintains many of its original organisational structures. All working members of the company receive a set and equal payment and the actors are expected to undertake work on set construction, serve in the café and bar, and ensure general maintenance of the theatre buildings. The company continues to occupy a unique status in France and enjoys a reputation for innovation and contestation as ‘it has repeatedly called everything into question: the status of the play text, the role of the various theatre workers, the shape of the performance space and the actor-audience relationship’.42 The company’s work can be considered in the broad contexts of Artaud’s militant opposition to naturalism and the dominance of psychological drama in the theatre. It combines the didactic motivations of Brechtian theatre and the social aims of the Théâtre Populaire. The communal will of the members of the company aims to project and awaken a sense of social and political solidarity in the audience: ‘We desire a theatre in direct contact with social reality, one which presents not just a statement but an incitement to changing the conditions in which we live.’43 The company’s central methodology, that of the ‘création collective,’ starts from the basis of a skeletal script or idea, in response to which the actors begin extensive improvised experimentation with different roles. Although the company had moved away from the collaborative text in its work with Shakespeare’s history plays, Mnouchkine’s commissioning of Cixous’s The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, the furnishing of a 41 42 43
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See Adrian Kiernander, ‘The Role of Ariane Mnouchkine at the Théâtre du Soleil’, Modern Drama, 34 (1990), pp. 322-332, p. 323. David Bradby, Modern French Drama 1940-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 191. Le Théâtre du Soleil, L’Age d’Or (Paris: Stock, 1975), p. 14.
complete text from a living writer working outside the company, disturbed some of the central aims of their working methods. The extraordinarily close and productive relationship between Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil has emerged gradually and has been nourished by the striking coincidences between the company’s evolving interests and Cixous’s increasing aesthetic investment in the form and potential of theatre. Their common goals include the exploration of nonWestern traditions of theatre and their different representations of subjectivity, the portrayal of contemporary historical events and the role of the theatre in encouraging a sense of common humanity and potential political and ethical agency within its audiences. The traces of Mnouchkine’s continuing interest in Asian theatres, which have been inspired and supported by her own extensive travels, can also be witnessed in Cixous’s writing on the theatre. She refers to the principles of Noh theatre, cites the work of Zeami44 and discusses the role of masks,45 yet these brief references do not explore the specific differences or influences of Asian theatre on her plays. Such references constitute part of a problematic discourse in Cixous’s theatre of the late 80s which centres around an adoption of India and Asia as utopian sites, sites which form a parallel to the utopian space of the theatre itself in their apparent enabling of different intersubjective relationships. In 1982, the Théâtre du Soleil’s further explorations into dramatic representations of the relationship between the individual and the narratives of history had led them to work on productions of Shakespeare’s history plays. These contexts are extremely evident in the text and production of Cixous’s play, The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge) which was commissioned by Mnouchkine, and performed by the company in 1984, and equally in Cixous’s writing on the theatre in this period. In contrast to her earlier employment of Shakespearean characters as illustrations of the restricted narrative function of female characters in classical patriarchal theatre, Shakespeare now appears as a pivotal influence on Cixous’s work in this form: ‘...and at the beginning and the end there is Shakespeare, who is my land, my father, my mother, and my first garden
44 45
Zeami (1363-1443) is arguably the most well known dramatist of Noh theatre. Hélène Cixous, ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient…’, p. 33.
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of words.’46 The past fifteen years have seen Mnouchkine and Cixous’s interests develop in tandem, effecting changes in their respective aesthetics and methodologies. Following the production of The Indiade..., Mnouchkine and the company returned to work on classical Greek theatre in order to search for a means of portraying the scale of contemporary tragedies. This change in direction is reflected in Cixous’s play The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes (La Ville parjure ou le reveil des erinyes), performed by the Théâtre du Soleil in 1994. The influence of Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil can clearly be seen in Cixous’s choice of subject matter for her plays and her embrace of the theatrical form. The influence of her writing on the company has seen adjustments to the dynamics of collective creativity and a change in approach to the representation of history. Cixous’s approach to the theatre can be seen to be inextricably linked to her search for a mode of writing, and consequently of representation, which entails a more open and non-excluding relationship to the other and to difference. Her theatre is also, clearly, intrinsically connected with, and influenced by, the directors with whom she has worked. Benmussa’s coinciding interest in achieving radical representations of subjectivity in the theatre and of disrupting conventional audience identifications coincide with the main projects of Cixous’s plays of the mid 1970s. Cixous’s search for a mode of engaging with history and the writing process find startling coincidences with the evolving directions taken by the Théâtre du Soleil in the mid 1980s and 1990s. The influence on Cixous’s theatre can be seen in the thematic content of her plays (whether commissioned or not), and equally in the striking re-evaluation of her approach to the form of theatre. Generic specificity and generic erasure continue to maintain an uneasy coexistence in many of Cixous’s statements on theatre as, whilst the importance of the experience of dramatic production as source for a model of writing, is asserted, the central performance, in terms of form and thematic content, seems to remain that of the theatricalized writing of the text – the scene of writing rather than the scene of the theatre. The generic difference described by Cixous between the theatre and other forms originates in the author’s experience of the creative process involved, of writing for the theatre. The common desire to find 46
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Hélène Cixous, ‘Interview’ La Quinzaine Littéraire, 532, (16 mai 1989), pp. 22-25, p. 23.
new ways of representing subjectivity and of exploring identity are both founding principles in Cixous’s engagement with the theatre and recurrent central themes of her plays. The association of theatre with particular modes of creativity and poetic identity is therefore at the very core of Cixous’s relationship with the theatre and, as I will discuss in the following chapters, this leads to an increasingly prominent concern with the role of the writer and with projections of poetic identity in her plays.
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CHAPTER THREE
History and the Scene of the Other
Much has been made of the shift in Cixous’s theatre that occurs at this point in her œuvre, a shift that has been variously presented as involving a movement from the personal to the political, from the self to the world, from West to East, and indeed the scale, style and references of her theatre do undergo considerable change in the 1980s. However, it is important to recognise that there is much in her theatre that remains constant throughout these transpositions of scale and subject. Her plays’ persistent central concern continues to address the representation of alterity, and the search for new ways of thinking and portraying difference. Indeed it is the projection of this theme onto historical events and figures, and the weaving of historical narrative and allegory around specific visions of otherness, that renders her theatre of this period as problematic as it is fascinating. This chapter will focus on the development of Cixous’s theatre in the Eighties as an evolution that maintains central themes and concerns. Cixous’s play The Taking of the School at Madhubaï1 serves as a bridge between periods of Cixous’s work which are usually examined either in isolation from each other, or simply contrasted as oppositional modes of theatre. The play dramatises the story of an Indian woman who, having been abused by family and society, becomes an outlaw and avenges successfully many of the crimes committed against her and against the poorest sectors of the population. The play presents her ultimate dilemma as she is faced with the choice between a life lived constantly on the run, or the negotiation of her surrender on her own terms. The Taking of the School at Madhubaï combines the focus in Cixous’s earlier plays which present the difficulties of constructing a female subjectivity, with her espousal of non-Western cultural settings as sites in which new models of difference can be constructed. Through the figures of Dora and Jocasta, Cixous dramatises the exile of the female subject within 1
Hélène Cixous, La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï (Paris: des femmes, 1986). The play was directed by Michelle Marquais and performed at the Petit Odéon in December 1983 under the auspices of the Théâtre de l’Europe.
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dominant cultural discourses, whilst the plays discussed later in this chapter portray narratives of real historical and political exile. The Taking of the School at Madhubaï provides an interesting link between these themes as the central concern of the play is clearly the relationship between the female subject and patriarchal society, yet the inherent exile of the female subject is combined with a pre-existing narrative of exile (albeit mythical not historical), set in a non-Western location. This play clearly dramatises the specific exile of an individual woman and not an entire people, yet the wider political resonance of the play is clear as it presents the choice between separatism and compromise, conflict and negotiation. Based on Indian legend, the play centres on the relationship between two women, Sakundeva and Pandala. Sakundeva, the leader of a guerilla group, is in hiding from government forces, and has been in enforced exile from her home for many years. The play presents her return to her village and to Pandala, her aunt and prophet figure, as this is the setting in which she has chosen to meet a government minister and discuss the surrender of her freedom (her terms include the provision of a school for girls in the region). As the play ends the outcome of her impending decision remains unclear. Although there are no formal divisions within the text, the play is structured in two clear parts. The first half of the play supplies the audience with a picture of Sakundeva, portrayed initially in an indirect manner through Pandala’s premonitions of her imminent arrival, and then, once Sakundeva appears, through the dynamics of the relationship between the two women. Maternal imagery predominates as Pandala likens her anticipation to that of awaiting the birth of a child and Sakundeva later claims that she has come to seek a spiritual rebirth. This scene has a predominantly poetic and mystical tone as Pandala refers to her second sight, her ‘secret eye’ and describes Sakundeva variously as ‘rebel queen’ and ‘the goddess of Mistrust’. Sakundeva’s life story is revealed gradually to the audience through her conversations with Pandala, and constitutes a series of exclusions and losses inflicted by patriarchal society. As a female child, she was excluded from formal education and served as a slave to her father who abused her. She was then sold to an elderly relative who assaulted her and survived a gang rape before escaping to become an outlaw, contesting the regime from the margins, yet remaining isolated from other aspects of life. Her guerilla existence and violent exploits, including the revenge killing of the men who raped her, are also described indirectly as she seeks 72
legitimisation for her actions through Pandala’s responses. References to Sakundeva’s illegal activities and her discourse of violence are punctuated by Sakundeva’s recounting of her dreams and Pandala’s visions and premonitions which serve as spiritual and moral justification for this violent existence. Sakundeva’s close relationship with Pandala is clearly intended to represent an alternative idyllic realm, free from law, censure and persecution. This relationship, founded on absolute trust and equality, is disturbed by the arrival of the Minister, who chooses to disguise himself as his own secretary. After the abandonment of this deception, and Pandala’s pacification of the initial hostility between the outlaw and this somewhat ambiguous representative of the law, the latter part of the play is dominated by the negotiation of the conditions for Sakundeva’s surrender. These conditions rely entirely on structures of exchange and comparison as both Sakundeva and the Minister demonstrate political cunning and media awareness in their discussion of the price on her head, the appropriate budget for celebration of her public appearance, and the cost of building the village school that she demands as part of her conditions of surrender. This discussion provides an arena for bureaucracy, contingency and economics that contrasts sharply with Pandala’s mystical evocation of Sakundeva as avenging goddess in the earlier passages of the play. The open ending allows Sakundeva to remain a potent symbolic figure and leaves the audience to compare the poetic and political efficacy of the contrasting discourses articulated in the play. The Taking of the School at Madhubaï thus foregrounds contrasting economies which are identified here as gender-specific. Pandala and Sakundeva enjoy a close relationship which is free from structures of exchange, debt or duty – the link between them is presented as natural, intense and mystical. In stark contrast to this, Sakundeva’s unhappy existence within the social regime (past or potential) is governed by structures of hierarchy, exchange and objectification. The Minister presents his offer of negotiated surrender as a means of transcending Sakundeva’s choice between the constant vigilance and hardship of life as an outlaw and the humiliation and fatal consequences of capture. However, the Minister’s confession to the audience of the self-interested nature of his motives, claiming that he wants to use Sakundeva as a symbol to ‘sew the seeds of a new kind of politics’ and to ensure his own entrance into the immortality afforded by history 73
textbooks, undermines an interpretation of the character as offering a viable ‘third way’.2 Despite the suspense provided by the Minister’s deception and the uncertainty surrounding Sakundeva’s pending decision, the play is at times static and hesitant. The characters are clearly fixed in their functions as contrasting forces and, consequently, their exchanges can seem repetitive and predictable. The play’s heavy reliance upon indirect description of dramatic events undermines the coherency of the characters and is indicative of a general lack of exploration of their status and their relationships to the wider social environment. As Morag Shiach points out: The social relations of the rural village and the power structures of the urban ruling classes are likewise absent from the stage. The play thus sits in a somewhat unsatisfactory space between history and metaphor, seeming to offer as social critique a text that functions more as allegory.3
As discussed in Chapter Two, the essays which accompany the published text of this play witness Cixous’s adoption of a somewhat essentialising discourse towards India. These ideas associate the cultural setting with the adoption of an inherently poetic and heroic nature, enabling it to serve further as a metaphor for the recuperation of a sense of common humanity through the recognition of non-excluding tropes of difference. The tension between the realities of life in the non-Western settings chosen by Cixous, and the employment of such settings as utopian environments which permit more positive attitudes to difference, is tempered here by the fact that The Taking of the School at Madhubaï uses a mythical text as its source. However, when the sources are historical this tension becomes more palpable and increasingly problematic.
2 3
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Hélène Cixous, La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï, p. 64. Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous, A Politics of Writing. (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 122.
The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia Cixous’s return to the theatrical form in the mid-Eighties was motivated, to a great extent, by a desire to engage with history and, ultimately, to find a satisfactory medium in which to represent contemporary historical events. As she claimed: ‘To be a Theatre of History, is undoubtedly theatre’s noblest aim, if not perhaps its vocation (Etre un Théâtre de l’Histoire, c’est sans doute l’ambition la plus noble du théâtre, sinon peut-être sa vocation).’4 Her two main projects in the theatre in this period are lengthy, complex dramas which portray recent Cambodian history5 and the partition of India.6 They were commissioned by the Théâtre du Soleil and, as such, reflect the significant influence of the company’s search for a theatre that would be able to communicate contemporary history in an epic mode. Mnouchkine’s interest in the further exploration of Eastern traditions of theatre constitutes an additional element of this emerging dynamic: Oriental theatre is the art of the actor. … The writing of theatre strikes me as Western – the Greeks, Shakespeare – but the art of the stage, the art of the actor is Oriental…It is oriental actors who know how to embody a feeling, that is to say how to transform a state of mind into physical symptoms.7 (Le théâtre oriental c’est l’art de l’acteur. ...La dramaturgie me parait être occidentale – les Grecs, Shakespeare – mais l’art de la scène, l’art de l’acteur est oriental...Ce sont les acteurs orientaux qui savent mettre en chair un sentiment, c’est à dire transformer un état en symptômes physiques.)
The study of non-Western traditions of theatre has since been central to the company’s performances, examples of which include productions of Shakespeare which were heavily influenced by Noh theatre and, the use of the movements and costumes of Kathakali theatre in their critically acclaimed 1990 production of The Atreids. The development of these 4 5 6 7
Hélène Cixous, ‘Interview’ Théâtre / Public, 68 (1986), pp. 19-24, p. 24. Hélène Cixous, L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge, (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987). Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987). Maria Shevtsova, ‘Interview with Ariane Mnouchkine’, Alternatives théâtrales 48 (1995), pp. 69-73, p. 72.
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aspects of the company’s work is, however, mainly posterior to the conception and production of the plays that portray actual non-Western settings. The productions discussed in this chapter were informed more extensively by the company’s work on historical drama. The Théâtre du Soleil’s project of revitalising the portrayal of history, a project which began in the 1970s, was original and powerful in its focus on the roles of entire participant communities rather than the actions of great solitary figures. 1789, the company’s hugely successful staging of the events leading up to the French Revolution, which was first performed in 1970, implemented a radical reworking of the actoraudience relationship in order to stage the desires of the population and their role in events.8 This inclusive attitude towards the narratives of history was accompanied by the achievement of a more dynamic relationship between audience and performance that was established through a reconfiguration of the theatre space. A series of platforms, around which the audience were free to move, were erected in the theatre and different characters, positioned amongst the audience on these platforms, related their roles or described events, so embodying the audience’s relationship to history as one of proximity and participation. However, I would argue that, rather than providing a continuation of such ambitious attempts by the Théâtre du Soleil to rethink the way in which historical events are portrayed and experienced, The Terrible but Unfinished Story… and The Indiade... exhibit far stronger traces of the striking, coincident interest of Cixous and Mnouchkine in Shakespearean history plays. As a response to her visits to Cambodia in the 1970s, Mnouchkine had long wanted to stage a play on this subject.9 Indeed, the Théâtre du Soleil had been working on productions of Shakespeare’s history plays as a preparative move towards the portrayal of other contemporary histories. Mnouchkine’s enthusiasm for the Shakespearean mode of dramatising historical events, a world shaped by the deeds of great men and feudal kings, is surprising in the context of the company’s earlier plays which strive to dismantle this view and to involve wider 8 9
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For further details of this production see David Bradby, Modern French Drama, 1940-1990, pp. 197-205. However, as Shiach notes, the play does not address the specific colonial relationship between Cambodia and France, nor the relationship between the French Left and many members of the Khmer Rouge. See Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous. A Politics of Writing, pp. 126-7.
populations (including the audience) in the making of history. This paradox was to prove of decisive importance to the conception and production of these two plays. The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia (L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge) deals with the turbulent period in Cambodian history between 1955 and 1979. The play describes the struggle between the monarchy and the Khmer Rouge for control of the country, and places it within the explicit context of the self-interested interventions of the United States and the Soviet Union. In the play, Sihanouk attempts to defend the independence and security of Cambodia’s population and culture, initially against the Americans who are keen to gain strategic investments so close to Vietnam, and then against the Khmer Rouge. Cixous described her main motivation for choosing this subject as one of preservation: ‘Why Cambodia? Out of anxiety for that which is in danger’.10 (Pourquoi le cambodge? Par souci pour ce qui est précaire).This desire to increase a broader awareness of Cambodia’s recent political history and to ensure that this story is told to a Western audience, reflects her enduring belief in the role of writing and theatre in resisting effacement: Writing is an ambivalent gesture. Writing separates, isolates, withdraws. But there is also the necessity of inscription in order to resist death, effacement, silence…It is a question of imposing a limit on forgetting. We must not write to forget, but to remind ourselves to remember.11
This belief in the beneficial impact of the process of writing is supplemented by the belief that the play in itself may do something to ensure the survival of Cambodian culture. However, a sense of the play’s combination of the historical and the metaphorical is already apparent in its dedication to the Cambodian people who are; ‘…facing death and under fire, in exile, masterpieces of lightness and fidelity (… devant la mort et sous les canons, dans l’exil, des chefs-d’œuvres de légèreté et fidelité.).’12
10 11 12
Hélène Cixous, ‘From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of Writing’, p. 33 Hélène Cixous, ‘Poesie e(s)t politique?’ Des Femmes en mouvement, (1979), pp. 29-33, p. 30. Hélène Cixous, L’Histoire terrible… p. 34.’
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The plays of this period are marked by their often problematic attempts to marry the exposition of complex historical events and figures with the projection of more abstract concerns. The subjective view of Cambodian history and of the figure of Prince Sihanouk that emerges is influenced by both the model of Shakespearean princes and Cixous’s interest in the figure of the exile as a vital representative of creative identity.13 Indeed it is possible to distinguish two major concerns of Cixous’s text; firstly, the construction of Sihanouk as exile (a poetic exile which links him implicitly with creativity) and secondly the portrayal of an alternative economy of difference, represented by the heterogeneous, but mutually supportive, group of women who dominate the last scenes of the play. The play’s action is divided between these two elements.
Exile and writing In addition to the metaphorisation of cultural difference, Cixous’s dramatic treatment of the histories of Cambodia and India should be approached in the context of other metaphorical uses of geographical sites in her work, a process by which geographical exile becomes a necessary condition for writing and a crucial metaphor for the creative process itself. This aspect of her construction of poetic identity constitutes a more productive model than that of the trope of poet as outcast, common to much post-Romantic European literature. The pain of exile, the loss of origins, and the trope of the border, together with glimpses and projections of unattainable and abstract “elsewheres”, are fundamental to an understanding of Cixous’s œuvre. Exile remains a fundamental structure and theme in her writing, from its explicit evocation in her doctoral thesis The Exile of James Joyce or the Art of
13
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For a detailed discussion of the similarities between characters in this play and identified Shakespearean types, see Liliana Alexandrescu, ‘Norodom Sihanouk: l’inachevé comme lecture Shakespearienne de l’histoire contemporaine’ in Françoise van Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, pp. 187-204.
Replacement14 to her poetic juxtaposition, in Manne aux Mandelshtams aux Mandelas,15 of the respective personal separations and exiles of Winnie and Nelson Mandela and Nadezhda and Osip Mandelshtam. Indeed, constructions of poetic identity in her work are often founded upon spatial constructions of identity in which the individual ‘inhabits one place and remembers or projects the reality of another.’16 Cixous portrays her own subjectivity as deeply marked by her relationship to Algeria, which is presented as a form of exile in her writing. She was born in Oran, Algeria in 1937 and her family left in 1955 upon the outset of the Algerian war. Her parents’ Jewish identities (her mother of Austro-German descent and her father, French) ensured a difficult relationship to concepts of national belonging, yet Cixous’s use of the trope of exile to portray her relationship to Algeria is equally complex as it negotiates between the discourses of dispossession, alienation and decolonisation. In reference to the representation of Algeria in The Newly Born Woman, Sue Thomas, criticises what she perceives as Cixous’s failure to engage with the political reality of Algeria, describing this blindspot as an ‘ideologically interested foreclosure’17 which represses the negotiation of Algeria as a historical and cultural site. Such an interpretation is reductive in its assumptions about the potential combinations of political and poetic discourse in Cixous’s œuvre, yet it remains striking that Algeria functions predominantly within Cixous’s work as a metaphor for other losses (primarily for the death of her father when she was eleven) and as a myth of origin. This original site is characterised by its multilingual nature, which is credited as an introduction to the play of language, and by its starkly divided population, a model which came to epitomise the violent oppression of difference in Cixous’s writing. The relationship between coloniser and colonised is not explored in her work in specific relation to Algeria, and
14 15 16 17
Hélène Cixous, L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement, (Paris: Grasset, 1968). Hélène Cixous, Manne aux Mandelshtams aux Mandelas (Paris: des femmes, 1988). Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile: A Semantic and Historical Study (London: Harrap, 1972), p. 19. Sue Thomas, ‘Difference, Intersubjectivity and Agency in the Colonial and Decolonizing Spaces of Hélène Cixous’s “Sorties”’, Hypatia, 9 (1994), pp. 53-69, p. 66.
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Algeria functions rather as the symbolic site of the birth of her writing.18 In Cixous’s aesthetics, exile is transformed into a positive experience that, far from resulting in an enforced silence, enables the writer to find an alternative space from which to speak, and an alternative relation to difference. Writing provides a resistance to loss and allows the inscription of memory, indeed Cixous suggests that loss and grief constitute the necessary foundations of all writing: I believe that we can only begin to move forwards along the path to the discovery of writing or of anything else, if we start out from grief with the intention of healing that grief. In its origins the act of writing is linked to the experience of disappearance, to the feeling of having lost the key to the world, of being thrown out.19 (Je crois que l’on ne peut commencer à avancer dans le chemin de la découverte, de la découverte d’écriture ou d’autre chose, qu’à partir du deuil et dans la réparation d’un deuil. A l’origine le geste d’écrire est lié à l’expérience de la disparition, au sentiment d’avoir perdu la clé du monde, d’avoir été jeté dehors.)
In the Théâtre du Soleil’s 1987 production of The Terrible but Unfinished Story… , Sihanouk, as played by Georges Bigot, was a tragi-comic figure of enormous presence, whose physical characterisation swung between dictatorial swagger and Chaplinesque vulnerability. The character spends much of the play in exile, travelling from one country to another in a desperate and muddled search for political and economic allies. He consistently presents his mission as the protection of his people and of their culture and, although he is portrayed as childish and misguided, the strong paternalism of his role as monarch is not questioned: Sihanouk: Oh my people. Oh my children! Ah! But where are my people?
18
19
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An example of this can be seen in her wordplay on the name of the town in which she was born: ORAN-HORS-EN ORAN JE’,18 which encompasses connotations of subjectivity (je), exclusion (hors), inclusion (en) and the creative fruit of these combinations (orange) which is writing. These associations provide the departure point for Cixous’s text Vivre l’Orange (Paris: des femmes, 1979) which focuses on the role of writing in constructions of subjectivity. See also Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber, Photos de racines (Paris: des femmes, 1994). Hélène Cixous, ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’écriture’, p. 19.
Where are my people going? And me, where am I going? When will I find them again?…20 (O mon peuple. O mes enfants! Ah! Mais où est mon peuple? Où va mon peuple? Et moi, où vais-je? Quand le retrouveria-je?... )
Sihanouk’s personal identity is seen to coincide with that of the Cambodian nation. Indeed he laments his exile in terms of their loss: ‘Oh my Cambodia, we are separated, I am taken from you. You are exiled from me, we are being treated as slaves. (O mon Cambodge, on nous sépare, on m’enlève à toi, On t’exile de moi, on nous traite comme des esclaves)’.21 Sihanouk becomes a complex amalgam of the actual historical figure, the image of the Shakespearean prince and a projection of the author as exile. When asked how he will occupy himself in exile, he asserts: ‘I will write the history/story of my country. First episode: Paradise Lost (J’écrirai l’histoire de mon pays. Premier épisode: Paradise Lost).22 The literary marker is given in English, and this clear reference to Milton’s text can be read, in the context of Cixous’s aesthetics of exile, as suggesting a positive outcome to this separation through a healing and inscription of the self in writing. Sihanouk is again identified as a poet-figure. The construction of his character remains ambitiously complex and non-reductive as his desires and disappointments are portrayed on a grand scale. However, the play’s apparently unquestioning echo of the character’s paternalistic tone, and the portrayal of this historical character as a holy fool, diminishes our considearation of the consequences of his actions for the Cambodian population. The characterisation of Sihanouk as poet-exile has clear implications for the portrayal of Cambodia. The Théâtre du Soleil’s mise en scène is consistently aware of the need to achieve a balance between the demands of spectacle and a more thoughtful acknowledgement of the cultural differences between its immediate environment and the setting of these plays. In order to immerse the audience into the location of the play, and in an attempt to disturb the spectators’ sense of belonging and identification, the space of the Cartoucherie was transformed into a physical evocation of Cambodia. Huge richly-coloured silks served as 20 21 22
Hélène Cixous, L’Histoire terrible…’, p. 158. ibid., p. 170. ibid., p. 384.
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backdrops and covered the entrances onto the stage, the foyers and entrances were decorated with Eastern script and imagery, and Cambodian food was served in the bar by actors in costume. The dilemma of finding an effective mode through which to portray the scale of tragedy of events in Cambodia to acknowledge the absent murdered masses was resolved through the positioning of hundreds of dolls on the walls and upper reaches of the building surrounding the stage. Their silent witness of the events unfolding on the stage, and the impact of their implacable gaze fixed on the audience was extremely moving and, to some extent, counteracted the play’s dominant focus on Sihanouk’s personal tragedy. The horrors of the mass exodus from Phnom Penh, the internment of the population in camps and the violent disintegration of their community are all related to the audience by single characters. The music and lighting served to convey the terror and extent of the innumerable murders and betrayals, the lighting became progressively dimmer as events darken and spotlights maintained the mute witness of the Cambodian dolls which lined the auditorium. The stage itself remained sparse with the employment of a few chairs and the occasional use of everyday objects, such as bicycles and umbrellas, to project some level of realism. The acting style was denaturalised, combining the simplified and exaggerated gestures of a Brechtian characterisation with intoned speeches that emphasised the poetic nature of the text. However, despite the considerable success of the mise en scène in challenging the dominant objectification of the East in Western discourse, the imagery and structures evoked within the dialogue risk the undermining of this displacement. Sihanouk’s speeches transform Cambodia into an abstract, eternal land, a site which serves primarily as a contrast to the war-mongering, exploitative, highly politicised nations with which it comes into contact during the course of the play. Sihanouk’s central description of his country emphasises this abstraction: But I am there, Sihanouk is there, Cambodia exists! We are there, on the tip of central Asia! Can you see? There! The spearhead of neutrality, the standard is white, not blue, nor red; the glorious haven of all pride, this other Eden, this demiparadise, it is us, this happy breed of men, this little world, this blessed plot, this
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fortress built by Nature for herself itself against the infection of the world and the hand of war…23 (Mais je suis là, Sihanouk est là, le Cambodge existe! Nous sommes là, à la pointe de la grande Asie! Vous voyez? Là! Le fer de lance de la neutralité, l'étendard blanc, ni bleu, ni rouge; le glorieux havre de toutes les fiertés, this other Eden, this demi-paradise, c’est nous, this happy breed of men, this little world, this blessed plot, cette forteresse qui s’est bâtie la Nature contre la contagion du monde et le bras de la guerre…)
The quotations, given in English from Shakespeare’s Richard II,24 foreground both Sihanouk’s abstraction of Cambodia and his literary pretentions. The adoption of such a literary style seems at times clichéd and comic, yet it serves to distinguish Sihanouk’s speech from that of the cynical politicians who manipulate Cambodia for their own national and personal interests. However, as he resorts to quotations and images from Western literature and persistent, explicit references to Shakespearean characters25 in order to portray his relationship with Cambodia, the audience are reminded of his Western education and essentially paternalistic identification with the Cambodian people. Cixous does not accord the Cambodian people, evicted from their towns and villages into the Khmer camps, the luxury of inscribing their loss in writing. Indeed their internal exile and suffering seems to be secondary in scale to that of their ruler. Such a poeticisation of Sihanouk’s status can be seen to enact an identification between Cixous and Sihanouk, united in the necessary exile that fuels creativity, yet risks the dangerous employment of a real exile as a metaphor for creative projects. Thus Sihanouk, through his conferred status as intradiegetic author, explores the same problematic allegorisation of contemporary history that critics have identified in The Terrible but Unfinished Story...26 23 24 25 26
ibid., p. 57. Richard II, Act II, Scene I. The lines are not spoken by the king but by his uncle, John of Gaunt. For example, Sihanouk compares his enemies to Iago and Macbeth. L’Histoire terrible... , p. 196. See Jennifer Birkett, ‘The Limits of Language: the Theatre of Hélène Cixous’ in Voices in the Air: French Dramatists and the Resources of Language, Dunkley and Kirton, (eds) (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992), pp. 171-186, and Anne-Marie Picard ‘L’Indiade: Ariane’s and Hélène’s Conjugate Dreams’ Modern Drama, 32 (1988), pp. 24-38.
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Cixous’s consistent play on the double meaning of the French ‘histoire’, as both narrative and History, exacerbates the tension in this allegory between the representation of highly controversial historical events and figures, and the desire to articulate new representations of poetic identity. The combination of Mnouchkine’s considerable romanticisation of many of the protagonists of this narrative, and Cixous’s ambitious attempt to adopt the central figures as markers of poetic identity results in a neglect of the detail of political events: …in the last analysis, it is Cixous herself who determines the final fate of Cambodia – the version that her audience carries away from the theatre. What she authorises is an account unified and closed… an account reduced for the Parisian stage and fatally over-simplified.27
The Preservation of Difference The Terrible but Unfinished Story… is divided into two parts, representing two eras. The first part portrays the political machinations that surround Sihanouk’s search for military and financial support from other nations, and maintains a contrast between such corrupted and transient alliances and what are portrayed as Sihanouk’s spiritual bonds with his homeland. The second section focuses on the consequences for the general population of the political allegiances that he forges and their attempts to discern and preserve a Cambodian identity amidst the suffocating climate of violence and death. It is in this second part of the play that Cixous’s interest in the East as metaphorical site for the rethinking of difference (an interest discussed earlier in relation to The Taking of the School at Madhubaï) comes to the fore. A significant proportion of the second part of the play is dedicated to the portrayal of a group of women from disparate backgrounds. The group of four women; Queen Kossomak (Sihanouk’s mother), Madame Mom Savay (the Queen’s companion and her husband’s former mistress), Madame Khieu Samnol (a shopkeeper and mother of Khieu Samphan, member of the Khmer Rouge) and Madame Lamné (a 27
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Jennifer Birkett, ‘The Limits of Language: The Theatre of Hélène Cixous’, p. 182.
Vietnamese woman) includes differences of class, politics, nationality, religion and language. Several episodes in which these characters feature include verbal humour and physical clowning and provide a measure of light relief from the patterns of confrontation and inconsistency which dominate the political dialogues of the play. This aspect of the women’s function clearly mirrors the use of lower-class and peasant figures in Shakespearean history plays and, in Mnouchkine’s production, arguably overshadows the central function of the group in Cixous’s text which remains the constitution of an exemplary microcosm of open and nonhierarchical approaches to difference. The women accept and overcome the differences between them, supporting each other through hope and fear, whilst insisting upon their role in ensuring the survival of memory and of the threatened Cambodian culture. The solidarity of the four women affirms life in the face of the surrounding horrors and, whilst their losses are far from abstractions, they too describe Cambodia in idyllic terms. Nevertheless, in stark contrast to their own group economy, their hopes for the future remain pinned on a paternalistic mode of leadership. The second part of the play opens with Khieu Samnol and Madame Lamné, yet their presence serves mainly to assert the status of the monarchy as Khieu Samnol apparently summons Sihanouk’s deceased father, Suramarit, back to the world of the living.28 The numerous characters in Cixous’s theatre who return from the dead to participate further in events, encapsulate an emphatic refusal to be forgotten, a challenge which reflects Cixous’s wish to ensure that these stories are told, to ‘wrest one’s prey from forgetfulness’.29 If Cixous’s project of writing can be interpreted in part as having originated in an intensely personal urge to ‘weave time’ in response to her father’s death,30 then it is the character of Suramarit who first performs this reincarnation in her theatre. Suramarit borrows a bicycle and prepares to undertake a fantastic journey to Peking to contact his son and so deliver the country.31 The women’s farewell reveals their submissive role: 28 29 30 31
At the time of the events portrayed, Sihanouk’s father was still alive. Cixous’s recasting of Suramarit as a member of the spirit world suggests that he represents an eternal Cambodian spirit. Hélène Cixous, ‘Writing Blind’, in Triquarterly 97 (1996), pp. 7-20, p. 13. ibid., p. 16. The voyage is clearly unrealistic, but in addition to its surreal nature it unfortunately fetishises the ‘Orient’ through the image of the bicycle which carries
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Khieu Samnol: Don’t worry about us, Your Majesty, our Uncle. We know that you will pray for us and that we will see you again somewhere.’32 (Ne vous inquiètez pas pour nous, Votre Oncle Majesté. Nous savons que vous prierez pour nous et que nous vous reverrons ici où là).
The women’s deference to established structures of power enables the Prince and the dead King to maintain a strong presence during the second part of the play, but this same deference diminishes the agency and the power of the vision of alternative social structures glimpsed through their inclusive group. The play ends with a conversation amongst the women (some of whom are now also dead) and Suramarit which focuses on their grief for the displacement and dislocation of the population: ‘’Now is the time of the Great Exile. The gentle land of Cambodia is no longer the country of the Khmers.33 (Voici l’heure du Grand Exil. La douce terre du Cambodge n’est plus le pays des Khmers).’ Mourning the loss of their home and culture, the women suggest that a refuge might be found in language, in ‘our origin, our freedom, our sublime country, our survival, our memory and our pride (notre source, notre liberté, notre terre sublime, note survie, notre mémoire et notre fierté).’34 Whilst the specificity of their plea for the survival of a threatened culture and language is powerful, and will not be lost on the audience, the ultimate suggestion that language provides a refuge for the exiled foregrounds Cixous’s construction of poetic identity, rather than an engagement with the specific details of the future facing Cambodia. This future remains unresolved at the end of the play (this is, after all, an unfinished story) yet, in the final scenes, this story and History remain abstract and strangely removed from the political arena. The hope for the future that is articulated in the last scene is associated not with political development and resolution in Cambodia, but seems to coincide rather with the perpetuation of an eternal, immutable vision of Cambodia, as expressed by Suramarit:
32 33 34
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Suramarit faithfully to Peking despite the presence of American tanks and the patrols of the Khmer Rouge. L’Histoire terrible…, p. 195. ibid., p. 385. ibid., p. 387.
And when at last, one day, a slender crack appears in the high wall of exile, then our descendants will rush towards the eternal Cambodia, where we will be waiting for them.35 (Et lorsqu’un jour enfin une mince ouverture se fera dans la haute paroi de l’exil, alors nos descendants s’élanceront vers l’éternel Cambodge, où nous les attendrons).
The dead and the living then go their separate ways, the dead to remain in an abstract, eternal Cambodia, and the living members of the group to exile in Thailand. The space of Cambodia is thus paradoxically and powerfully absent from this final scene. Cambodia and India are represented as eternal sites through which a dual reading of ‘histoire’, the representation of both national History and personal narrative might be possible. The increasing numbers of ghostly presences on the stage serves to underline the scale of loss suffered by the Cambodian people, whilst also offering hope in their ability to resist the forced erasure of cultural memory, a resistance continued by Cixous’s play itself. The difficulties of dramatising historical events are foregrounded in the Prologue to the second part of the play in Cixous’s text: These times are torn apart, this nation is in pieces The theatre has a mission to put them back together Can this be done without forgetting a fragment of it. When all is unfaithfulness, Is is so difficult for a tale to remain faithful.36 (Cette époque est déchiquetée, cette nation est mise en pièces. Le théâtre a mission de les rassembler. Puissé-je ne pas en oublier un fragment. Quand tout est infidelité, Comme il est difficile à un récit d’être fidèle.)
Yet, as is the case for several scenes in the published text, this section does not appear in the production. Its prominent position,37 and its explicit acknowledgement of the difficulties encountered when attempt35 36 37
ibid., p. 388. ibid., p. 184. Due to the length of the play, the two sections were performed on consecutive evenings. This prologue would have formed the opening scene of the second evening.
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ing to portray the time and space of History, could add a further dimension to the performed play, and would introduce a vital sense of distance from the central protagonists. However, it remains absent from this production and so cannot alleviate the tension created by the unproblematised weaving of the historical and the metaphorical.
The Indiad or the India of Their Dreams: Identity and Orientalism The Théâtre du Soleil’s production of The Terrible but Unfinished Story… was swiftly followed by another collaboration between Cixous and the company. The Indiade or the India of their Dreams (L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves) sees the continuation of many of the central concerns of The Terrible but Unfinished Story… . The company’s search for a mode in which to represent recent historical events, and their interest in Eastern theatrical traditions and philosophies, are again combined with Cixous’s exploration of different structures and representations of difference, and her enthusiasm for the theatre as a site through which loss and disappearance can be resisted. The production of The Indiade… followed the extraordinary impact on European theatre of Peter Brook’s adaptation of the Indian epic, Mahabharata, which was first performed in France in 1985.38 Major elements of Brook’s aesthetic (his universalism, and belief that the inherent structures and dynamics of theatrical performance can transcend social barriers) and his working practices (the use of improvisation and an internationally diverse troupe) are clearly compatible with those of the Théâtre du Soleil. It should be noted that his production has also met with similar criticisms which claim that one of the ultimate consequences of such epic and stylised representations of India is the trivialisation of Indian culture.39 38 39
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Brook’s company was established in 1974 at the Bouffes du Nord and performs dramatic adaptations of world literature. Its work is characterised by the combination of different national cultural traditions. See Rustom Barucha Theatre and the World (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
The Indiad… portrays the partition of India, beginning with the liberation from British colonial rule in 1937, focusing on the negotiations which led to partition and to the creation of Pakistan, and closing with Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. The function of this narrative of separation at the core of the play remains resolutely metaphorical as the main protagonists and the Indian setting are endowed with symbolic resonances that create considerable tensions between the portrayal of actual historical figures and events, and the construction of an allegory of difference. Anne-Marie Picard identifies three strands in The Indiad...: a historiographic dimension, in which we relive historic events; a theological aspect, as we are invited to speculate on elements of the divine within humanity, and an ontographical element, which reveals structures of identity formation and self-image.40 Picard presents these strands as competing for the spectator’s attention throughout the play, yet I would suggest that the third aspect dominates the play, and all but obliterates the other concerns of the narrative. As discussed in Chapter Two, the essays which accompany the published text of The Indiad… demarcate the context in which Cixous desires the play to be understood. India and its population are increasingly employed as a positive model for an attitude to life that the West has lost: ‘…every Indian is an individual spokesperson for humanity…the Indians, whether they are honest or boastful, have a marvellous sincerity.’41 (…tout indien est interlocuteur personnel de l’humanité… les indiens, qu’ils soient probes ou hâbleurs, sont d’une merveilleuse franchise). However the play’s strategic use of India as metaphor is at times hard to accept and such constructions of an essentialised Indian self could be perceived as barely distinguishable from conventional colonial discourse. Cixous’s appropriation of India as metaphor is extended as she builds connections between her subjective vision of India and the theatre, claiming that; ‘The whole of India is a theatre (L’Inde entière est un théâtre)’.42 The intention may be to suggest that the Indian population perceive a different relation to the self, or that they are engaged and fully participant in their own History, yet the lingering connotation is that of 40 41 42
Anne-Marie Picard, ‘L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves’, Dalhousie French Studies, 17 (1989), pp. 17-26. Hélène Cixous, ‘Qui es-tu?’ in L’Indiade …, pp. 267-278, p. 276. ibid., p. 277.
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India as a fascinating spectacle for more distant observers. India undergoes a further transformation: ‘The theatre can give us back our true size, our depths, our heights, our Interior Indies’43 (Le théâtre peut nous rendre notre vraie dimension, nos profondeurs, nos hauteurs, nos Indes intérieures) and is appropriated as metaphor for a rediscovered sense of our personal potential. As India seems in danger of becoming a metaphorical panacea in Cixous’s writing on the theatre, its centrality to this play reveals further tensions between the metaphorical function of the setting and the representation of historical figures and events. Cixous’s ‘Introduction’ to the text, a text which was reproduced in the programme for Mnouchkine’s production, affirms the symbolic function of India and the broader messages of the play: This play was born of India. It is not India, but only an Indian molecule, a footprint. It is a play about what it means to be human, about the hero and the dust, about the struggle between the angel and the beast in all of us.44 (Cette pièce est née de l’Inde. Ce n’est pas l’Inde, elle est seulement une molécule indienne, une empreinte de pas. C’est une piéce sur l’être humain, sur le héros et la poussière, sur le combat de l’ange et de la bête en chacun de nous.)
The main protagonists of the play; Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah, clearly represent their historical counterparts and replicate their roles in the partition of India yet, as with the characters of The Terrible but Unfinished Story…, their specific political roles are eclipsed by their functions as representatives of different attitudes to difference, attitudes which are dependent on the respective character’s capacity for loving others. In the ‘Introduction’ to The Indiad… Cixous presents the play as a treatise on humanity and love: The story that carries the fatal name of Partition is in truth a huge love story... . Can one talk about love today, in public, out loud, in public or political circles? Can one talk about love lovingly and without derision in the television-age?… Let us love each other, what head of State would allow themselves to say that? Well the Indians, right up to the head of State, have not stopped talking about love for thirty years. The glorious entry of love into the public realm in the middle of
43 44
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Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Chemin de légende’ in La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï, pp. 7-11. p. 9. Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade…, p. 16.
the twentieth century, such is the gift that, through Gandhi, India makes to the universe. 45 (L’ histoire qui porte le nom fatal de Partition est en vérité une immense histoire d’amour. … Peut-on parler de l’amour aujourd’hui, publiquement, haut, dans les sphères publiques, politiques? Peut-on parler d’amour avec amour et sans dérision à l’époque-télévision?…Aimons nous les uns les autres, quel chef d’Etat peut-il se permettre de dire cela? Eh bien les Indiens n’ont pas cessé de parler d’amour pendant trente ans et jusqu’au sommet de l’Etat. L’entrée glorieuse de l’amour dans la chose publique en plein 20e siècle, tel est le cadeau qu’à travers Gandhi l’Inde fait à l’univers.)
The complex and protracted negotiations for independence and, ultimately, for partition dominate the play, with many scenes structured around confrontation and the formation and dispersal of serial allegiances. Yet it is neither political expediency nor the global context that is foregrounded as the central catalyst of narrative progression, but rather the influence of the central characters’ capacity for love, and their ability to embrace difference, that is seen to seal a nation’s fate. Gandhi and Nehru’s resistance to partition is seen as indicative of a more positive worldview in which non-hierarchical and non-excluding structures of difference can be configured. Gandhi does not dominate the play to the same extent that Sihanouk’s persona prevails over Cambodia in The Terrible but Unfinished Story…, and his function as tragic hero within the play is less politically provocative than the previous adoption of Sihanouk. Gandhi is portrayed as a saintly figure who attempts, against all odds, to reconcile Hindu and Muslim leaders and thus avert the partition of India. He is distinguished from all the other politicians through his contact with ordinary people, and his rejection of personal ambition and political gain. He is shown seeking spiritual refuge in the mountains, fasting for peace and taking up residence in a ghetto of ‘untouchables’ in order better to understand the fears and desires of the unrepresented populations. The spiritual nature of his speeches and his simple dress provide further contrast with other characters. Mountbatten describes him as an: …ancient deity without teeth, an old mother without breasts, the last proof of the existence of the gods and of their powerlessness to get their prophets accepted into this political century.46 45 46
Hélène Cixous, ‘Introduction’ in L’Indiade... , pp. 13-14. Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade… , p. 148.
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(…antique déïté sans dents, vieille mère sans mamelles, dernière preuve de l’existence des dieux et de leur impuissance à faire admettre leurs prophètes dans notre siècle politique…)
Mountbatten’s characterisation of Gandhi as a spiritual anachronism is clearly informed by his status as a main representative of colonial power, yet his view is not challenged, nor thrown into relief by other discourses and so appears wholly integrated into the play’s general characterisation of this historical figure. Such simplified portrayals, as witnessed in The Terrible but Unfinished Story…, are perhaps inevitable, yet they become increasingly problematic when they seem to articulate the terms of colonial discourse that the plays very carefully and clearly set out to refute. Gandhi repeats Cixous’s claim that love will determine his country’s fate: Love, that is the cure. Let us love each other. This is everything. It’s the door, the lock, the key, glasses! Do we love each other? Do the Hindus and Muslims love each other?47 (L’amour voilà le remède. Aimons-nous les uns les autres. Tout est là. C’est la porte, la serrure, la clef, les lunettes! Nous aimons nous? Les hindous et les musulmans s’aiment-ils les uns les autres?)
This question is rebuffed by Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, with a resounding ‘No’, as his lack of love, and preoccupation with death form a stark contrast to Gandhi’s apparently boundless capacity for love. Jinnah is characterised as inflexible and ambitious, motivated purely by his own gain, and as having become bitter and loveless since the death of his wife.48 His unhealthy isolation from his own past is exemplified in his prejudiced condemnation of his daughter’s love for a Parsee, despite the fact that his was a mixed marriage. This double denial of the inscription of difference and memory is replicated in his vision of the Pakistan he wants to create as: ‘…a country free from all memory (…un pays vierge de toute mémoire).’49 The play is structured around the two opposing attitudes to difference which are condensed into a recurring metaphor. Gandhi 47 48 49
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ibid., p. 81. ibid., p. 73. ibid., p. 120.
articulates his image of India: ‘There is a tree, no two leaves are the same, but they dance in the same breeze: it is the tree of humankind. (Il y a un arbre, deux feuilles ne sont pas identiques mais elles dansent sur la même brise: c’est l’arbre humain)’.50 This imagery meets with Jinnah’s immediate rejection: Don’t tell me about your dreams! Men do not love each other. They will never love each other. The India of your dreams does not exist anywhere. Open your eyes Monsieur Gandhi. The leaves on your strange tree are wilted and fallen. See you are naked. And alone. We all fall, separately.51 (Ne me racontez pas vos rêves! Les hommes ne s’aiment pas. Ils ne s’aimeront jamais. L’Inde de vos rêves n’existe nulle part. Ouvrez les yeux Monsieur Gandhi. Tombent les feuilles caduques de votre arbre inconnu. Voyez vous êtes nu. Et seul. Tous nous tombons, séparément.)
Jinnah represents an oppressive regime of difference which insists upon hierarchy and separation, and is prepared to accept the suffering or disappearance of the other if this is deemed necessary to the survival of their own inflexible identity. Gandhi’s unerring spiritual generosity and his lack of self-concern are epitomised in his final attempt to avert partition when, evoking the Song of Solomon’s depiction of the mother who gives away her child rather than see it harmed, he offers to renounce all claims on India rather than see her torn apart.52 Whilst the play’s action is dominated by a small group of political leaders, further sections of the population are represented by individual characters. Haridasi is a nomadic, uneducated, Bengali woman. She performs a dual function, firstly as a chorus, providing a distanced commentary on the negotiations of the powerful, and secondly as a symbol of India itself as is clearly established in her first speech which opens the play: Me? I am Haridasi My village: the whole of India. All men are my brothers. All women are my sisters. What am I doing here? I am here wondering how India began 50 51 52
ibid., p. 82. ibid., p. 83. ibid., p. 162.
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When there was neither English nor Hindu nor Muslim nor masculine nor feminine Where does this country come from, I wonder.53 (Moi? Moi je suis Haridasi. Mon village: L’Inde entière. Tout homme est mon frère. Toute femme est ma soeur. Qu’est ce que je fais içi? Je suis içi en me demandant comment l’Inde a commencé, Quand il n’y avait ni Anglais ni hindou ni musulman ni masculin ni féminin. D’où vient ce pays, je me le demande.)
Haridasi’s lack of territorial allegiance aligns her with a more spiritual concept of belonging, and thus with Gandhi, rather than with the geographical obsessions and political intransigence of her leaders. Her undermining of all binary oppositions, which compares the decisive religious differences at work in the history of India to those of gender, clearly posits a mythic India as pre-Oedipal utopian space. The poet, Sarojini Naïdu, represents the investment of the middle classes in the struggle for independence, yet she is also an important representative of creativity in the play as she has suspended her writing in order to support political change. The bear-handler, Bahadur, and his charge, Moona Baloo, also perform a symbolic function, but their meaning remains more ambiguous. Bahadur and Moona feature in several scenes and the bear’s convincing physical presence of the bear (played by an actor) on stage remains extraordinarily potent. As Moona overhears Jinnah’s threats of force, she becomes distressed and refuses to remian with him, she prefers to accompany Gandhi as he walks around the ghetto of the untouchables. Later, disturbed by the violence that she has witnessed between men, she kills Ganga Singh and Bahadur’s confidant the Guardian of the tomb, only to be killed by her handler in turn. Cixous has suggested several interpretations of the bear as ‘Love, our mystery…a force of life, a force of death’54 and infers that the bear and handler may represent masculine and feminine energies, and that the handler’s action reveal the repression and ultimate extinguishing of a valuable part of his own subjectivity. Shiach reveals traces of Kleist’s
53 54
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ibid., p. 19. ‘L’Ourse, la tombe, les étoiles’ in L’Indiade.. , p. 249.
employment of the bear as a symbol of humanity’s loss of innocence,55 and this remains a convincing interpretation here. This range of characters and their personal investments in the struggles around partition fulfil symbolic functions as representatives of varying attitudes to difference. However, the actual profound differences that persist between characters are often underplayed in order to privilege an dramatic allegorisation of difference that remains problematic. As Anne-Marie Picard notes an: …avoidance of the burning question of alterity; a sexed, raced, social and economic alterity which is diffused into pretty clouds during the escape to the “platonic” skies of light blue pantheism…Differences are made but mere phenomena, incidents due to chance, variable forms animated by the divine will.56
The centrality of difference to an understanding of the allegorical import of the play remains somewhat at odds with a sustained engagement with the sources of real difference, of which the audience must clearly be aware.
India as utopian site The construction of a distant country as an utopian site indicates a heavy reliance upon the theme of exile which, whilst remaining central to this play, finds a more flexible articulation than is evident in The Terrible but Unfinished Story… as it encompasses different separatiions for different characters. The poet, Mohammed Iqbal, expresses his pain at the loss of a past India in which all were equal, and it is this sense of internal exile and exclusion which ultimately fuels his desire for a separate Muslim state. He articulates an ‘authentic’ Indian identity which is romantic and maternal:
55 56
Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous, A Politics of Writing, p. 133. Anne-Marie Picard, ‘L’Indiade: Ariane’s and Hélène’s Conjugate Dreams’ Modern Drama, 31 (1989), pp. 24-38, p. 34.
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I believed that I was Indian before I knew, When, cloaked in a gown of magic dusts, I rode on the clouds and cried with joy as I travelled, like the wild geese, from the snow-covered Khyber pass to the beaches of Orissa. I was happy, the children sang my songs When I still believed that this country was my mother. Where then is my country of birth? They say that it ‘s here. I think I see my mother sweeping softly towards me. I run. A stranger’s eyes reject my affection. My mother is not my mother. My home is not my home.57 (Je croyais que j’étais Indien quand je ne savais pas encore, Quand, revêtu de poussières magiques, je montais les nuages et j’allais en criant de joie comme l’oie sauvage de la passe enneigée de Khyber aux plages de l’Orissa. J’étais heureux, les enfants chantaient mes chansons. Quand je croyais que ce pays était ma mère. Où donc est mon pays natal? On me dit que c’est içi. Je crois voir ma mère glisser doucement vers moi. Je cours. Des yeux étrangers repoussent mon affection. Ma mère n’est pas ma mère. Ma maison n’est pas ma maison.)
This rejection has physical and cultural consequences: ‘Exile is penetrating. It has got into my language, my taste, my clothes. Here I am outside, me and my poems…’58 (L’exil est pénétrant. Il imprègne ma langue, mon goût, mes vêtements. Me voilà dehors, moi et mes poèmes…). Iqbal’s response to this sense of alienation is to support the creation of a separatist state which is founded on difference but which ultimately denies its positive force. His exile has not led to a positive reconsideration of difference but to an inflexible rejection of the other. In a similar strategy to that adopted for the evocation of the Cambodian setting in the production of The Terrible but Unfinished Story..., the constructed visual space of India extended beyond the stage into the foyer and bar areas of the Cartoucherie, and Indian food was served in the bar by actors in costume. The entrance to the theatre was dominated by a huge map of India, which drew the audience’s attention to both the geographical scale of the country, and to the artificial nature of its partition. The empty white stage, and the use of only minimal props, helped to create a sense of scale and space, yet also served to 57 58
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Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade…, p. 32. ibid., p. 33.
focus attention upon the poetic nature of the text and its wider abstract import. The acting style that was so significant in The Terrible but Unfinished Story…, the construction of character through repeated and exaggerated physical gestures and the delivery of intoned speeches to the audience from the front of the stage, serves here to reinforce the ambiguous status of the space of India as noted in Cixous’s essays and interviews of the time and which is emphasised in the very title of the play. The will, which is clearly evident in both Cixous’s text and Mnouchkine’s production, to assert the difference of India as a positive force and a cultural strength, suffers from the apparent underestimation of the intransigent power of many tropes of colonial discourse and the inevitable danger that attempts to reclaim them will backfire. Thus the metaphorical discourse, which remains so prominent throughout the play, finds itself in uncomfortable proximity to the tropes of Orientalism, in its suggestion of the Western viewpoint as the self-reflexive origin of knowledge, and its vision of other cultures as eternal and immutable.59 The complexity of engaging with such discourses is exemplified in Cixous’s ‘Introduction’ to The Indiade…: The incredible aspect of this story, is that in the middle of the twentieth century there were, living close to us, beings who belonged to spiritual eras which are hundreds and thousands of years in our past. Men like Gandhi and Abdul Ghaffar Khan are biblical and comparable to Abraham, they consult equally with men and their Gods. And because in their existence on earth they live by divine law, they are sometimes as incomprehensible as the stars… Oh golden age of loyalty and of respect!60 (Le trait inouï de cette histoire, c’est qu’en plein 20ème siècle ont vécu près de nous des êtres qui appartenaient à des époques spirituelles révolues pour nous depuis siècles et millénaires. Bibliques et comparables à Abraham sont des hommes comme Gandhi et Abdul Ghaffar Khan, qui ont pout interlocuteurs également les hommes et leurs Dieux. Et comme ils se conforment dans leur vie
59
60
Edward Said’s major works on this subject include: Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), The World, The Text and the Critic (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1983), and Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993). See also Gayatri Chakarvorty Spivak, ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’ in Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram, (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989) pp. 412-420. Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade…, pp. 14-15.
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terrestre à la loi céleste, ils sont parfois aussi incompréhensibles que les étoiles… O âge d’or de la loyauté et du respect!)
This passage reinforces differences common to conventional perceptions of East and West and, whilst the intention is undoubtedly to assert the status of the main protagonists, the ultimate consequence of such comparisons with biblical figures is to isolate them from their political contexts and historical specificity. The assertion of non-Western figures as belonging to another age is one which has been employed to support colonial ideology throughout history. The poetic speeches of Mountbatten serve to further foreground an allegorical view of events and suggest a Western omniscience which reinforces colonial tropes, presenting India as lost without the guidance of its colonial masters: Oh India, full of storms and wonders, You await the blow, trembling Like an animal that knows and does not know its fate Allow me to spend my last night of innocence with you Tomorrow I shall be merciless It is on such nights in Shakespeare’s plays that doomed lovers embrace. It is on such nights that kings sense their defeat, that queens sense the approach of death. … Just now I saw a snake swallow a snake. A buffalo turned on another buffalo and seized it by the throat like a dog, like a dog.61 (O India, grosse de tempêtes et de merveilles. Tu attends le coup en tremblant, Comme une bête qui sait et ne sait pas son sort. Permets-moi de passer me dernière nuit d’innocence avec toi. Demain je serai impitoyable. C’est par de telles nuits que dans les pièces de Shakespeare s’embrassaient les amours condamnées C’est par de telles nuits que les rois devinaient la défaite, les reines sentaient venir la mort. Tout à l’heure j’ai vu un serpent gober un serpent. Un buffle s’est retourné contre un buffle et l’a pris à la gorge comme un chien, comme un chien.)
Mountbatten’s images of savage menageries and unfettered nature impose a familiarly reductive image of India, as his knowledge of the political processes is contrasted with the posited innocent ignorance of 61
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Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade… p. 147.
the population. This discourse could, clearly, be extremely effective if employed explicitly in order to display the discourse of the colonial powers, yet it remians difficult to construct ironic distance between these speeches and the rest of the play, as such images fit seamlessly with those used by other characters and employed in the ‘Introduction’. Indeed, Mnouchkine’s comment on the origins of the two plays relies upon a strikingly similar mode of discourse: India, is so vast that our aim was never more than to translate a fragment of India, magnificent and terrible. Cambodia, was a sparrow crushed between two hippopotami. Here [in The Indiad…], it’s a herd of furious, gentle, royal, wretched animals, whose dreams we understand.62 (L’Inde c’est si vaste que notre prétention n’est jamais que de traduire une parcelle de l’Inde, magnifique et terrible. Le Cambodge, c’était un moineau broyé entre deux hippopotames. Là, c’est un troupeau d’animaux, furieux, doux, royaux, miserables, dont nous comprenons les rêves.)
Such imagery reinforces a major discursive element of the play. The allegorisation of historical events to explore structures of difference might thus be seen, paradoxically, to reinforce a movement associated with colonial discourse, one which places the Western intellectual’s (and audience’s) crisis of self-reflexivity in opposition to an uncomplicated other identity: As Spivak comments: …the theoretical problems relate only to the person who knows. The person who knows has all of the problems of selfhood. The person who is known, somehow seems not to have a problematic self… only the dominant self can be problematic; the self of the other is authentic, without a problem…This is very frightening.63
Paradoxically, Cixous’s positing of poetic identity as rooted in the acceptance of the other is undermined by the representation of the other in these two plays, as they fix essentialised and immutable Cambodian and Indian identities. Shiach suggests a valuable reading which privileges the allegorical:
62 63
Ariane Mnouchkine, ‘L’Indiade: un troupeau d’animaux furieux’, Le Matin, 28 September 1987, p. 18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Sneja Gunew, ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’ in Women’s writing in Exile ed. Mary Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 412-420, p. 420.
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The claim that the dreams explored in this play are those of the Indian people, however, still seems open to question. Perhaps this text is best understood as a text about our dreams: the versions of otherness we need in order to sustain political and cultural struggle, and the possibility of an identity based on the recognition of difference.64
This valid suggestion that such an interpretation leads to a better understanding of the play should not, however, exclude the necessity of engaging with other important consequences of such employment of historical narratives. Indeed the versions of alterity that dominate the play are of a romanticised and eternal Indian nature, a vision which is necessary to sustain extremely conventional western discourses of the East and which, as the tensions in these plays reveal, are not easily recuperable within a more radical discourse. In a wider discussion of the ethics of ownership of cultural artefacts and narratives, Shevtsova warns against cultural protectionism, maintaining that: ‘…the spiritual dimension of the event does not exclude the social dimension of the production.’65 Indeed it would be foolish to suggest that Indian legend or history should only be produced and performed in India by Indian companies. However, the apparent underestimation by Cixous and the Théâtre du Soleil of the enduring cultural legacy of the pernicious tropes of colonial discourse remains surprising and an important aspect of the audience’s reception of The Indiad… The tragedy of Cambodian genocide and the partition of India are thus employed by Cixous as narratives through which she is able to dramatise the most central and far-reaching theme of her œuvre. The real national tragedies serve here as warnings of the perniciousness of reductive attitudes which refuse to embrace difference, and which perpetuate the violent dialectic of self and other that is consistently challenged in Cixous’s work. Thus a central tension remains between the important and ambitious aim of the plays to bring recent history to public attention and the undermining of the political and ethical complexity of the historical events, which is an inevitable consequence of the metaphorical function of much of the narrative. Indeed the combination 64 65
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Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous, A Politics of Writing, p. 135. Maria Shevtsova ‘Interculturalism, Aestheticism, Orientalism: Starting from Brook’s “Mahabharata”’. Theatre Research International, 22 (1997), pp. 98-104, p. 102.
of the simplification of events, the subjective portrayal of central protagonists, and the use of extremely poetic language serve to blur the boundaries between history and legend. As Conley remarks: These plays take place in spheres of a historical sublime and not in those of socalled realism. The desire to turn quotidian historical struggle into the sublime has been criticised as naïve idealism. Cixous does aestheticise poverty and misery in the name of impoverishment as real riches, or of spiritual wealth as true wealth…the poetic picture of Asia that disengages itself is mostly couched in a resonantly Western voice.66
Such representations were evidently not intentional, yet they remain striking. Mnouchkine has strongly refuted any suggestion of cultural imperialism in the plays: But this is the opposite of cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism would be to go and impose our culture over there! It’s not letting yourself be influenced by their culture…I have not the slightest impression of pillaging oriental theatre; on the other hand, I do know that I owe an awful lot to oriental theatre.67 (Mais ici c’est le contraire de l’impérialisme culturel. L’impérialisme culturel, c’est aller imposer notre culture là-bas! Ce n’est pas se laisser influencer par leur culture ...je n’ai pas du tout l’impression de piller le théâtre oriental; par contre, je sais que je dois énormément au théâtre oriental.)
The considerable influence of non-Western theatre on Mnouchkine’s theatrical practice is not in question, yet the themes and imagery that persist in these texts, and which are reinforced to some extent by the productions under discussion here, constitute a marker of both the extraordinarily ambitious aims of these plays and the blindspots that such intense and successful collaborations may produce. Throughout her work, Cixous has actively challenged the representation of relationships between self and other as dominated by the Hegelian dialectic, and has sought to undermine constructions of identity which rely on fixed notions of sexual difference and national origins. In The Newly Born Woman she condemns the binary construction of difference which predicates that: ‘The other is there simply to be 66 67
Verena Aldermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous, (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) p. 98. Maria Shevtsova ‘Interculturalism, Aestheticism, Orientalism: Starting from Brook’s “Mahabharata”’, p. 102.
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re-appropriated, retaken, destroyed as other. (L’autre n’est là que pour être réapproprié, repris, détruit en tant qu’autre.)’.68 Yet her ambitious attempts to combine history and metaphor, to assert the scale of tragedy of contemporary historical events by aligning them with narratives of myth and legend have created, to some extent, visions of India and Cambodia that are romanticised and which employ many of the structures of Orientalist discourse. Whilst Spivak has moved towards a positive reconsideration of Cixous’s work, she reserves criticism for the classical European romanticism of these plays: When she [Cixous] writes her Indian and Indonesian plays, her take on the complexity and hybridity of so-called post-colonial nations is shaky…her work with the Theatre of the Sun can unfortunately be seen as perpetuating a kind of inspired, too admiring ethnography.69
Several elements of the productions can be seen to reinforce this tone. The Théâtre du Soleil’s evocation of the spaces of Cambodia and India beyond the confines of the stage is clearly designed to establish Asia as the dominant space, thus enacting an apparent reversal of Orientalism.70 However, such a reading plays down the inequality of cultural status of the two discourses, and fails to avoid the presentation of the orient as spectacle simply by extending its boundaries. As Shiach points out, such strategies tread a fine line between recognition and strangeness: ‘a dual response characteristic not just of the uncanny, but also of the cultural legacies of colonialism’.71 The temporal scene replicates this model as the peoples of India and Cambodia are portrayed as experiencing different relationships to time and indeed to mortality, thus the trope of resistance becomes somewhat undermined by the sense of an eternal otherness which somehow transcends History. Cixous’s motivations in writing these plays, the construction of parallels between intersubjective and historical processes, the combination of the politics of personal relations with the representation of the struggle for autonomous identity of oppressed and colonised states, 68 69 70 71
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Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née, p. 130. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘French Feminism Revisited: Ethics and Politics’ in Judith Butler and Joan Scott (eds) Feminists Theorise the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 54-85, p. 71. For further discussion of this point see Adrian Kiernander, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Morag Shiach, op. cit., p. 136.
remains radical and ambitious. However, the figurative exile that Cixous presents through the allegorisation of these histories can serve to undermine the radical nature of the project and ultimately mask the real differences that exist within those histories. In the published ‘Introduction’ to The Indiad…, Cixous asks: ‘But what happens when these characters, with souls fashioned from the fabric of myth, encounter reality?72 (Mais quand ces personnages, aux âmes taillées dans l’étoffe du mythe, rencontrent la réalité,)’. This is indeed a pertinent question but one which may be equally resonant if reversed to explore the consequences of the mythologisation of real, historical characters and events. Jennifer Birkett summarises this aspect in relation to L’Histoire terrible… in a valid criticism that can be applied to both plays: What becomes of history in this play is what becomes of the feminine subject in patriarchal discourse. Colonised, expropriated, made up and over into the mirror of more powerful others.73
Birkett reveals the central paradox at work here, the danger that Cixous’s text, as part of an œuvre which demonstrates an acute political and poetic awareness of the pernicious powers of a dominant discourse, should fall into the trap of replicating such a discourse. The spaces and histories of Cambodia and India are not ultimately maintained in their difference, but framed and appropriated as an extension of ourselves as audience and subjects of an Orientalist spectacle. The lack of an explicit acknowledgement of the political implications of many of the metaphors employed in the representations of India and Cambodia that are contained in these two plays works to draw attention away from Cixous’s important attempts to find new discourses of alterity, and give the plays a misleading and unsatisfactory dominant tone of political naivety.
History and Myth In her discussion of the problematic influence of Shakespeare’s history plays on the representation of complex contemporary historical events, 72 73
Hélène Cixous, L’Indiade…, p. 15. Jennifer Birkett, ‘The Limits of Language: The Theatre of Hélène Cixous’, p. 183.
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Evelyne Ertel tenders an unfavourable comparison of Cixous’s epic theatre of the 1980s with a Brechtian model of historical drama.74 One of the principles of such a model is the insistence upon the necessity of the temporal, spatial or cultural transposition of events in order to ensure effective audience alienation, an alienation which will engender active, political recognition of the connections between the scenarios. Cixous’s next engagement with historical events in the theatre, The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes (La Ville parjure ou le reveil des erinyes),75 transposes events from contemporary France to an unspecified time and place, in which the forces of Greek mythology are called upon to register the tragic consequences of contemporary political and moral bankruptcy. Cixous’s writing continues to sustain complex intertextual relationships with the narratives and figures of classical Greek mythology. Whilst her essays of the 1970s, and the play, The Name of Oedipus…, constructed radical gender critiques of the powerful cultural influence of these narratives, her employment of them in the intervening decades has been quite different. In both Illa76 and The Book of Promethea (Le Livre de Promethéa),77 Cixous adopts mythical female figures, or indeed changes the sex of characters such as Prometheus, in order to reinterpret them as positive personifications of female creativity. The re-emergence of myth in Cixous’s theatre is inherently linked to her desire to present contemporary history, as the employment of elements of classical mythology provides a scale alongside which the crimes of modern times can be measured. Thus, through their association with scenarios of culturally recognised tragedy, the incorporation of references to classical mythology provides some defence, in her view, against the anaesthetic effects of mass media coverage of contemporary atrocities. Cixous insists upon the potential tragic stature of contemporary events, regretting the absence of a modern mythology capable of representing ethical absolutes, as symptomatic of society’s restricted discourse.78 74 75 76 77 78
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Evelyne Ertel ‘Entre l’imitation et la transposition’ Théâtre / Public, 63 (1986), pp. 25-29, p. 26. Ertel compares Brecht’s ‘The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui’ to Cixous’s ‘The Terrible but Unfinished Story…’ Hélène Cixous, La Ville parjure ou le reveil des erinyes (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1994). Hélène Cixous, Illa (Paris: des femmes, 1980). Hélène Cixous, Le Livre de Promethea (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). See Hélène Cixous, ‘Le droit du légende’, L’Avant-scène Théâtre, 745 (1984), p. 5.
French theatre, particularly of the immediate post-War period, looked to the Greek tragedies to articulate humanity’s apparent vulnerability in the face of greater powers, and to dramatise existential dilemmas. The French New Theatre and the aesthetics of the Absurd marked a distinct move away from a reliance upon classical narratives to provide a dramatic framework for representation of the human condition, and the adaptation of classical mythology by contemporary playwrights in France has diminished significantly since the 1960s.79 Mnouchkine was, however, eager to re-examine Greek tragedy in a search for forms of theatre which foreground ritual and performance above psychological realism and dialogue.80 In the early nineties, the Théâtre du Soleil undertook a series of productions of Greek tragedies,81 indeed Cixous provided the translation for their 1992 production of The Eumenides, and this work clearly developed into the thematic core of The City of Perjury…82 The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes imbues a contemporary medical and political scandal (the supply of blood that was known to be contaminated to haemophiliacs in France) with the status of classical tragedy through the intervention of the Furies.83 In an unnamed city, a mother grieves for her two children, who have died as a result of medical negligence and corruption. Having failed to find justice in the courts, she seeks sanctuary in a cemetery situated outside the city walls and, under the watchful eye of the guardian, Aeschylus, joins the band of outcasts who have found shelter there. She is pursued by the establishment’s lawyers who aim, by fair means or foul, to silence her claims of 79 80 81 82 83
Vilar’s ‘Antigone’ is an exception in its evocation of the Algerian War. See Adrian Kiernander, Ariane Mnouchkine and the Théâtre du Soleil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 135. The company performed adaptations of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis in 1990, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in 1990, The Choephori in 1991, and The Eumenides in 1992. Aeschylus, Les Eumenides translated by Hélène Cixous (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1992). The families of those affected brought prosecutions against the head of the French Blood Transfusion Service who was found to have knowingly continued to supply contaminated blood for financial gain when other supplies were available. He received a four-year prison sentence and a minimal fine. Over five thousand haemophiliacs were infected with HIV, many have since died. For further details of the scandal see Anne-Marie Casteret L’Affaire du sang (Paris: La Découverte, 1992).
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infanticide, and to ensure that their version of events is the one which is left to posterity. Accompanied by with the mystical character of the goddess Night, Aeschylus adopts the mother’s cause. This support is dramatically strengthened as the Furies, who were banished to the depths of the Earth by Athena as she established democratic justice at the end of The Eumenides, are awakened by the mother’s cries, and pledge to avenge the deaths of her children. The Furies capture the accused doctors and arrange a new trial in the cemetery in which the mother calmly requests that the doctors admit their guilt and apologise. The medical establishment are also asked to issue a public statement condemning the doctors, but fail to do so. A wider political dimension is added as these events take place a few weeks before the elections in which the population will decide whether to retain the King or replace him with the fascistic leader of the opposition, Captain Forzza. The impromptu trial founders and tension rises between the mother’s non-violent demands for the truth and the Furies’ threats of violent revenge. The newlyelected Forzza decides to flood the cemetery to rid his regime of any potential opposition, and the central characters enter a glittering afterlife in the final scene. The introductory essay and programme notes bear witness to Cixous’s intention to use the combination of myth and recognisable recent events to disturb the audience’s perceptions of news and tragedy: And how and why does such an unthinkable crime occur? Particularly in such proudly advanced countries as ours, where it is the fashion to repeat the word ‘ethics’ all day long? And what if this strange and monstrous crime was simply and deservedly born of our time? Justly from the many injustices and errors fabricated in our own age? Is it not the symptom of the kingdom’s new disease? All the perfumes of Arabia would not cleanse the stained white hands. But in our kingdoms there are those who have perhaps found ways of desensitizing their noses. But this is not a fable.84 (Et comment et pourquoi un crime si impensable? Surtout dans nos pays fièrement avancés, et où la mode est à répéter le mot ‘ethique’ toute la journée? Et si ce crime étrange et monstrueux était justement né de notre époque? Justement des nombreuses injustices et injustesses enchevêtrées de notre propre temps? N’est-il pas le symptôme de la nouvelle maladie du royaume?
84
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Hélène Cixous, La Ville parjure…, p. 6.
Tous les parfums d’Arabie n’adouciraient pas les blanches mains souillées. Mais dans nos royaumes certains ont peut-être inventé les moyens de dévitaliser les nez. Mais ceci n’est pas une fable).
The passage’s oblique references to Macbeth, whilst serving to reinforce the magnitude of the crime, also align it with fictional narratives, yet the closing line of the passage warns against over-abstraction. This juxtaposition of abstraction and identifiable references to political events reveals the tension in Cixous’s increasingly explicit insistence upon the double meaning of the French term histoire as history and narrative. The role that this plays in the representation of writing, and the construction of poetic identity in the theatre will be explored in Chapter Four, whilst I will focus here upon the impact of the combination of myth and history. Cixous’s prefatory essay ‘Our bad blood (Nos mauvais sangs)’ examines the power of the metaphor of blood and the way that it has been used to symbolise purity of race, particularly in the context of antisemitism.85 The essay rightly draws our attention to the pernicious use of metaphor, yet Cixous’s development of this theme in specific relation to the HIV infection of haemophiliacs through the sale of infected blood does not wholly avoid the dangers of such metaphors. Following a reference to the ‘scourge of Aids’, Cixous attests that ‘We don’t take many precautions against the moral plague (Contre la peste morale on ne prend pas beaucoup de précautions)’.86 The implicit metaphorical representation of Aids as an abstract force visited on the population, and transcending issues of individual responsibility is problematic, as is the subsequent use of the extended metaphor, linking this to moral imperatives. In a discussion of Cixous’s Manne aux Mandelstams aux Mandelas, Morag Shiach asks an important question: The ambiguity surrounding the status of the text, however, remains: if it is a fiction, to what extent does factual accuracy matter? If it is a history, can it also, productively, be a myth? Can the emotional power of a mythic text be the means of transforming our historical knowledge, or does it simply supplement or refine it?87
The relationship between history and myth in The City of Perjury…is complex and shifts throughout the play. The references to contemporary 85 86 87
ibid., p. 6. ibid., p. 6. Morag Shiach, Hélène Cixous. A Politics of Writing, p. 105.
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political discourse are clear. The play and the programme notes render the reference to the recent medical and political scandal explicit, and the representation of a medical establishment keen to preserve their institutions above all else, and a political elite wholly uninterested in the delivery of justice are intrinsically linked to this. The portraits of a distant and isolated monarch and a right-wing republican opposition are equally disturbing and offer no hope of a renewal of faith in the political institutions. Forzza’s decision to engineer the flooding of the cemetery is articulated through a language which proves strongly reminiscent of both the terms of ethnic cleansing, and the discourse with which the rightwing Front National present their anti-immigration policies and racist attitudes to non-white populations in France. He talks of undertaking ‘a thorough clean-out (un bon nettoyage)’, of ‘disinfecting the cemetery’, of ‘putting an end to the intrusions that are defiling the household (mettre un terme aux intrusions qui souillent la maison)’.88 Such close linguistic parallels would be recognised by a French audience and serve to highlight the contemporary relevance of the play. The doctors and lawyers employ the jargon of modern litigation and their cynical manipulation of language in the service of their own interests is striking and realist. As the baton of blame is passed from the doctors to the ministers and so on to the State the powerlessness of the individual in the face of institutional intransigence and denial is clearly represented. These realist elements are integrated successfully into settings which remain clearly symbolic. The cemetery, with its open catacombs and hiding places, from which the inhabitants periodically emerge and disappear into, is a realm of temporal and spatial abstraction. Situated outside the city, and menaced by the recurring creaking of the failing dam, it proves a marginal site in which the audience cannot be sure which of the inhabitants are still living and which have become more permanent residents. Aeschylus engraves the names of the late twentieth century’s most famous martyrs (for example Anne Frank and Steven Biko) on the walls of the cemetery, inscribing the space as a symbolic repository of memory and of history. The city scenes, those of the medical committees and the dysfunctional royal palace, contrast starkly with the cemetery through their minimal decoration and emptiness. The committee meets on an empty stage which serves to emphasise the 88
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Hélène Cixous, La Ville parjure…, pp. 206-208.
spatial relationships between the characters, thus revealing the loyalties, rivalries and factions within the group. The palace is as dysfunctional as its resident regime. The lights fail, leaving the king and ministers in the dark, and symbolising a more profound lack of illumination at the heart of their reign. The mise en scène is extremely effective in its simplicity, evoking the central themes and contrasts of the play and permitting the convincing visual and spatial coexistence of the contemporary and the mythical. The most evident mythical presences in the play are the three Furies. Their introduction provides a vivid and effective dramatic device as the characters’ violence, mobility and noise provide a necessary contrast to both the mother’s stillness, and the careful manoeuvres of lawyers and politicians. In Mnouchkine’s production the Furies make their first screaming entrance from behind the audience, and provide flourishes of exuberant movement throughout the play as they rush on and off stage in search of their prey. Their caustic remarks about the state of contemporary civilisation, and their eagerness to enact bloody revenge are both scathing and humorous, introducing a variety of tone into the predominantly epic narrative: I’m here! I’m here! But I see that nothing has changed! Everything looks different But, in the five thousand years since we last came up above the ground Nothing has changed, neither for the good nor for the better Within humanity’s song There is still the same screeching which grates on my teeth Mothers’ tears are still flowing.89 (J’arrive! J’arrive! Mais je vois que rien a changé! Tout a changé en apparence Mais, depuis cinq mille ans que nous n’étions pas remontées dessus la terre Rien n’a changé, ni en Bien, ni en Mieux, Dans la musique humaine. Toujours les mêmes grincements intolérables pour mes dents. Les larmes des mères coulent toujours).
The City of Perjury… is faithful to classical conceptions of tragedy in its inclusion of a chorus which is made up of the excluded figures that 89
ibid., p. 52.
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inhabit the cemetery. Their recurrent preoccupations are their mortality and vulnerability as they express their moral and spiritual superiority over the inhabitants of the City: In short, here I am a whole Man, including the cry Whilst the well-heeled inhabitants of the City Are nothing but meat without inspiration. Me, I live, they just get fatter.90 (Bref, içi je suis l’Homme entier, y compris le cri Cependant que les nantis de la Ville Ne sont que viande sans inspiration. Moi je vis, eux grossissent.)
The Chorus anticipates events and reflects upon the progress towards justice within the play. Aeschylus’s function in the play is inextricable from Cixous’s increasing preoccupation with the representation of poetic identity in the theatre, and it is in this context that the full importance of Aeschylus being played as a woman must be understood. However, her presence as the writer of myths and arbiter of tragedy supports and foregrounds other mythical elements in the play. The goddess Night is perhaps the most abstract figure in the play. She protects the mother and Aeschylus by invoking nightfall and acts as a guide for their entrance into the afterlife. In Mnouchkine’s production, Night was a visual cocktail of fairytale witches and godmothers. Dressed in a tattered cloak pointed boots and hat, she clambers on the high iron cemetery gates to address the other characters from above. The Mother functions as an effective symbol of non-violent resistance to the self-interest and corruption of the city authorities, politics and the Law. Consistently characterised by her pure and plaintive voice, her cry of anguish which raises the Furies, menaces the regime and finally demands a response from the audience, the Mother is thus aligned with the power of the parole of the theatre in Cixousian aesthetics. It is in the scenes in which we see mother and children together that the play’s insistence upon the inherent links between the personal and the political, the private and the institutional, the unconscious and the real are crystallised. The children visit the mother on two occasions as she lies sleeping in the cemetery and it remains unclear whether they are part of a vision conjured by her dreams, or are spirits visiting her. 90
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ibid., p. 39.
The emotional impact of these scenes is immense as the two small boys approach their mother and silently witness her exhaustion, providing a tangible reminder to the audience of the tragic catalyst for the mother’s interrogation of justice. Although Cixous’s text contains dialogue for these scenes, Mnouchkine’s production staged them as silent, spotlit scenes, which are rendered all the more poignant by their contrast with the verbal density of the preceding scenes. The Mother is seen to be in her natural environment in the final scene as, freed from the City’s discourses of conflict and recrimination, she is finally reunited with her children. This maternal realm inhabited by the nurturing forces of Aeschylus, the goddess Night, and the Mother constitutes a final escape from the diametrically opposed settings of the patriarchal city and the marginalised cemetery, and entry into it is described as a cosmic rebirth.91 The adoption of the figure of a universal Mother and the feminisation of Aeschylus and the Night construct a central opposition in the play between the patriarchal City and the maternal space finally inhabited by the women and children. Mary Noonan has usefully pointed out that Cixous’s construction of an exclusively feminine realm at the end of the play may be interpreted as a response to the Eumenides, and its insistence upon a gender hierarchy that privileges men as the agents and founders of the State.92 However, the clear message of the play concerning modes of justice, and the different (gendered) economies that govern social relations is, to some extent, undermined by the stark division between positive and negative central protagonists on the basis of sexual difference. The relentlessly patriarchal worlds of medecine, law and politics may deserve criticism, but the stark contrast achieved in the play between villainous men and nurturing women seems inflexible and detracts, to some extent, from the more subtle messages about justice and exclusion that are successfully articulated in the play. The interweaving of recognisable recent events with the timeless realm of myth carries other potential consequences which prove more problematic. Whilst the use of myth may result in a consideration of events in wider cultural and political contexts, it may also deprive them of contemporary specificity and political resonance. In Barthes’s seminal 91 92
ibid., p. 170. See Mary Noonan, ‘Performing the Voice of Writing in the In-Between: Hélène Cixous’s “La Ville parjure”’ Nottingham French Studies, 38 (1999), pp. 67-79.
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study of the semiotic structure and function of myth, he claims that the demobilising potential of mythmaking supports: ‘…universalism, the refusal of explanations, the unchangeable hierarchy of the world.’93 Indeed Barthes considers myth and history to be incompatible: ‘Myth deprives the object it describes of any History.’94 The undefined temporal setting of the play is clearly intended to support the universal import of the events represented in the play, and Cixous suggests further that the temporal setting of the events portrayed is secondary in importance to the continuous present of the theatrical experience: The events of this story took place between 3500 B.C. and the year 1993. Afterwards, reality has produced events which resemble them. The word of the Theatre, offered in the present and outside of time, is by definition prophetic.95 (Les événements de ce récit se sont produits entre 3500 ans avant J.C et l’année 1993. Par la suite sont arrivés, dans la réalité, des faits qui leur ressemblaient. C’est que la parole du Théâtre, proférée au présent et à l’intemporel, est par définition prophétique).
However this temporal abstraction serves also to foreground the otherworldliness of the narrative, and to diminish the impact of the final, didactic message of the play. The Mother’s appeal to the audience to acknowledge the scale of such tragedies, and to register their protest, is set outside of time and space, in the luxurious ‘kingdom of Night’ from where Aeschylus, the Mother and the two children survey the world that they have left behind. Mnouchkine’s production staged a visually stunning coup de théâtre at this point in the play. The main stage lights gradually dimmed to darkness only then to slowly reveal hundreds of tiny lights set into the ceiling of the Cartoucherie. This sudden celestial dawn enacted a magical transformation which changed the tone of the play abruptly, and formed a backdrop to the mother’s final direct address to the audience in which she outlines the moral choice facing them: What can I say? The play is finished. I find myself sat with my friends on rocks of silver and gold And now I understand, you have to keep quiet.
93 94 95
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Roland Barthes, ‘Le Mythe aujourd’hui’ in Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957), pp. 191-247, p. 239. ibid., p. 239. Hélène Cixous, ‘Nos mauvais sangs’ in La Ville parjure…, p. 7.
But for you who remain in the rooms down there What can I do? … I will build for you A temple out of silence A courtroom out of silence A theatre out of silence But if I am making all these silences Who amongst you will shout out? I will place my words, my thoughts, my furies In the ground, beneath your feet. But from all these lands heavy with my secrets A cry must sprout forth. … Our play is finished. But let yours begin. In your turn hang onto the hope that justice will come justly. As a souvenir I leave you my story of tears and milk.96 (Que dire? La pièce est finie. Je me retrouve assise avec mes amis sur des rochers d’or et d’argent. Et maintenant, je le comprends, il faut se taire Mais pour vous qui demeurez dans les salles d’en-bas Que puis-je faire? … Par la suite je vais construire pour vous Un temple avec du silence Un tribunal avec du silence Un théâtre avec du silence Mais si moi je fais tous ces silences Qui, parmi vous, va crier? Je vais mettre mes mots, mes pensées, mes fureurs En terre, sous vos pieds. Mais il faut que toutes ces terres grosses de mes secrets Pousse l’arbre du cri … Notre pièce est finie. Mais que la vôtre commence. A votre tour obstinez-vous à vouloir que le juste advienne justement. En souvenir Je vous laisse mon histoire au goût de larmes et de lait.)
The Mother passes the ethical responsibility and agency on to the audience. In a parallel to the banishment of the Furies, she commits her 96
ibid., pp. 218-219.
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experience to the earth in anticipation that it will bring forth further resistance and opposition. The heavenly setting enables the Mother to impart her final message to the audience with maximum ethical authority, as it comes from beyond the grave, yet this final scene contrasts so sharply with the visual and verbal codes of the rest of the play that it remains difficult for the audience to assimilate. The sudden further temporal abstraction can be seen to have a parallel effect to the potentially demobilising and conservative capacity of myth and mythmaking, here the danger of narrative disempowerment conferred through the mythologisation of contemporary events, to reveal the temporal chasm which opens up between audience and protagonists at the end of the play. The City of Perjury… is a visually stunning and thematically complex play which was awarded the Prix de la critique dramatique in 1994, and is far more accomplished in its portrayal of contemporary events than the epic treatments of Indian and Cambodian histories that preceded it. Cixous’s programme notes with its simple glossary of terms such as conscience and justice, set the context for the play’s re-evaluation of human values, and its call for their reintegration into contemporary society. The central debate between violent retribution and democratic justice proves extremely relevant as, at the end of the twentieth century, the world is confronted by the atrocities committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The play also features more rewarding roles for female actors, and articulates a more positive representation of women’s engagement with history, even if this concludes in ultimate withdrawal and separation. The interweaving of history and myth loses some equilibrium in the final scene as the abstraction of the afterlife impedes the final cathartic message, yet is otherwise subtle and effective. The plays discussed in this chapter illustrate Cixous’s growing concern with the role of the theatre in representing recent events, and in inscribing the stories of those marginalised or excluded from conventional historical accounts. These plays also include increasingly explicit adoptions of historical and mythical characters as representatives of poetic identity, as projections of the force of writing and it is this aspect of Cixous’s theatre that will dominate her most recent plays.
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CHAPTER FOUR
The Poet in the Play
Cixous’s œuvre has articulated a consistent concern with the process of writing,with the role of the writer and the implications of the relationship between writer and language (or play of languages), writer and text, writer and reader for the construction of subjectivity and the evolution of a writing self. For Cixous, writing remains the site in which the subject can transform themselves in order to challenge oppressive cultural and social restrictions: Everyone knows that there is a place which is not bound economically, politically to all the degradations and all the compromises. Which is not obliged to reproduce the system. And it is writing. If there is an elsewhere which can escape the infernal repetition, then it is where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.1 (Tout le monde sait qu’il existe un lieu qui n’est pas obligé éconiquement, politiquement à toutes les bassesses et les compromis. Qui n’est pas obligé de reproduire le système. Et c’est l’écriture. S’il y a un ailleurs qui peut échapper à la répétition infernale, c’est par là où ça s’écrit, où ça rêve, où ça invente les nouveaux mondes.)
In The Newly Born Woman, Cixous calls for women to free themselves from the oppressive representations of femininity disseminated by patriarchal culture through an assertion of a new relationship between language and the body. This reconfiguration is to be achieved through their own writing. Writing, an act which will not only ‘realise’ the uncensored relationship of woman to her sexuality, to her being-woman, giving her access to her own energies; which in turn will restore her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her vast corporal territories which have been kept under seal… Write yourself: your body must make itself heard.2
1 2
Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, La Jeune née, pp. 131-132. ibid., pp. 179-180.
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(Ecrire, acte, qui non seulement “réalisera” le rapport dé-censuré de la femme à sa sexualité, à son être-femme, lui rendant accès à ses propres forces; qui lui rendra ses biens, ses plaisirs, ses organes, ses immenses territoires corporels tenus sousscellés … Ecris-toi: il faut que ton corps se fasse entendre.)
Such reliance upon metaphors of the body (often of a specifically maternal body) which are evident in Cixous’s visions of a new mode of writing, have been criticised for their apparent courting of the parameters of biological essentialism, the tenets of which have long been employed to prescribe women’s place in the world.3 However such accusations widely underestimate the complexity of Cixous’s project as, in a move which insists upon a deconstruction of the very nature of metaphor itself, her work insists that the political reclamation of the body as text is the only means through which an end could be sought to the pervasive alienation of women from their own bodies. The foregrounding of specific links between gender and writing remains important to Cixous’s writing and teaching, yet her theatre has not continued to engage primarily with these themes. The plays discussed in Chapter Three were inspired by Cixous’s exploration of the relationship between History and the self and this evolves, in her theatre of the last decade, into an investigation of the role of the writing self in relation to History and the process of writing. During the 1990s, Cixous’s theatre has manifested an increasingly explicit thematic focus on the figure of the writer, and the projection, into the scenes of her plays, of figures who function primarily as representatives of poetic identity. However, on closer consideration, this theme proves far from recent in her theatre and can be identified as a more minor element in many of her earlier plays. The nature of the representation of poetic identity in Cixous’s theatre clearly changes in accordance with the shifting concerns of her own projects, and her changing perceptions of the role of the poet. Throughout her theatre, however, the representation of poetic identity comes to reflect the construction and projection of her own creative persona as poet. The emergence of a preoccupation with the nature of poetic identity in her œuvre coincides with a commensurate rehabilitation of the theatrical 3
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See for example Donna Stanton, ‘Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva’ in Allen Jeffner and Deborah Young (eds) The Thinking Muse. Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989), pp. 156-179.
form as the ideal genre through which to explore and represent this concern. As Cixous embraces the theatre, so her theatre in turn explores the role of the poet in representations of increasing specificity. Dora and Jocasta can both be interpreted as women who struggle to enunciate their own identities and are both ultimately excluded from language by the stifling constraints of patriarchal definitions of their identities and desires. If Cixous’s writing on écriture féminine constitutes an invitation to women to reclaim their subjectivity and “come to writing”, then these two plays present dramatisations of the restrictions and taboos which prevent women ultimately from answering this call. The double movement charted by Cixous in The Newly Born Woman, in which the revelation of the female subject’s oppression is countered by her access to the utopian site of writing, is not replicated in these plays. In the final scene of Portrait of Dora, when Dora informs Freud of her decision to cut short her treatment, his immediate response is to ask her to write to him. Her reply and her parting words to both Freud and audience are: ‘Writing?... That’s not my business’.4 This response can clearly be interpreted as a refusal to maintain communication with Freud, and consequently as a rejection of his narrative of femininity. Dora’s riposte also contains a degree of irony, as her interest in books and reading was regarded by her father as somehow symptomatic of an unhealthy imagination, and as constituting an unsuitable occupation for a young woman. Her answer could thus be seen as a sarcastic deflection of patriarchal discourse and an assertion of her own emerging identity. However, this irony would need to be very heavily emphasised in production for its full impact to be felt. Dora leaves the scene with no promise of inscriptions of her subjectivity other than the hysterical symptoms which dominate the play and, whilst the discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis, the ‘talking cure’, is rejected, Dora’s access to a ‘writing cure’ remains ambiguous and unrepresented. In The Name of Oedipus..., Jocasta’s death is represented as a decline into silence, as a loss of agency and self-expression.5 As discussed in Chapter Two, Jocasta’s association with voice and song, and her allegiance with Tiresias as the representative of a possible plurisexual identity, align her with many of the central elements of écriture féminine. Her position as exiled from her desire, from dominant dis4 5
Hélène Cixous, Portrait de Dora, p. 102. Hélène Cixous, Le Nom d’Oedipe..., p. 76.
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course, from language, from the city and from Oedipus can be interpreted as symbolic of the further exile of the woman writer. Yet she fails to inscribe her desires and relies on another’s song to mark her exit. Portrait of Dora and The Name of Oedipus… contain central female protagonists who contend with dominant discourses of gender yet succeed solely in articulating their exclusion and ultimate silencing by the respective patriarchal regimes. These female protagonists remain potential sites of an unrealised resistance and, whilst this marginalisation of the female subject/writer is presented within a mise en scène which simultaneously engages with, and undermines dominant theatrical conventions, the characters’ own disruption of a dominant discourse within the play remains illusory. The two plays end with the central female protagonists leaving the scene of patriarchal discourse in order to explore unspecified and unrepresented ‘elsewheres’, but these abstract spaces are not defined as spaces of writing. It is important to note that the gender specificity of these narratives is not maintained in Cixous’s later plays and that the figures who serve as projections of poetic identity in her theatre remain predominantly male. The historical plays discussed in Chapter Three cannot be understood satisfactorily without an appreciation of the centrality of the figures of Gandhi and Sihanouk to Cixous’s projections of poetic identity. They serve as poet-figures, their poetic identity established, as discussed in Chapter Three, through correspondences with Cixousian tropes of creativity rather than through their roles in the events portrayed. This appropriation of historical figures is clearly problematic, particularly in the case of Sihanouk, and serves to undermine the representation of specific differences and historical narratives. These plays do not, however, foreground the writing process nor the role of the poet in society. Cixous’s engagement with the representation of poetic identity has become far more explicit in her recent plays, which contain clearly demarcated poet-figures as characters, relying not on the adoption of figures from world history, but rather on the inclusion of actual poets. Cixous’ three most recent plays contain poet figures. Black sail white sail (Voile noire, voile blanche)6 is set in the Soviet Union of Stalin’s 6
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Hélène Cixous, ‘Voile noire, voile blanche: Black Sail, White Sail’ Translated by Catherine A. F. MacGillivray New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 25 (2) (1994), pp. 219-354.
regime and presents the losses, dilemmas and struggles of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova and the writer Nadezhda Mandelshtam. The City of Perjury… revives the classical Greek dramatist Aeschylus and The Story (History) That We Will Never Know (L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais))7 the writer of Icelandic sagas, Snorri Sturlusson. The representation of poetic identity in these three plays is clearly influenced by the Heideggerian model of the poet as bearer of essential truths and guardian against moral disjunction between the world and the individual.8 From this point on, the poet figures in Cixous’s theatre become impassioned commentators and inevitable participants in tragic events and impossible situations.
Writing and Resistance Towards the end of the 1980s, Cixous’s seminar programme began to reflect her interest in the work of the doomed generation of Russian poets who lived under Stalin’s regime, in particular the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. Tsvetaeva is presented as a figure of passion and excess, as a challenge to social and literary conventions and is selected for detailed discussion in both Cixous’s seminars and published work.9 Akhmatova has come to function as the primary illustration of Cixous’s interest in the value of writing as resistance, resistance to a hostile and oppressive political regime, but also writing as a vital resistance to loss, disappearance and death. Black Sail White Sail maintains the dominant trope of exile as the central structure of poetic identity in Cixous’s aesthetics, yet the focus has moved from the creative impact of exile, as witnessed in The Terrible but Unfinished Story... and 7 8
9
Hélène Cixous, L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais) (Paris: des femmes, 1994). See Martin Heidegger, ‘What are poets for?’ in Poetry, Language, Thought translated by Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), pp. 91-142. It is interesting that Cixous presents herself in this role as revealer of truths in Jours de l’an (Paris: des femmes, 1991), pp. 255-257. See particularly Hélène Cixous, ‘Poetry, Passion, and History. Marina Tsvetaeva’ in Readings. The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetaeva Translated by Verena Aldermatt Conley (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 110-152.
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The Indiade… to an emphasis on writing and poetry as providing both resistance and inscription of exile and loss. The central theme of resistance through writing, resistance both to death and censorship, is evident in the play’s persistent undermining of boundaries between the dead and the living. Osip Mandelshtam is dead but remains a palpable presence in the play through his poetry, Akhmatova describes her potential erasure from cultural memory as a living death, and the constant references to the disappeared position them in a time and space removed from the living, yet not yet confirmed as dead. The importance of this aspect of the play is signified by the striking division of part of the dramatis personae of the written text into two categories; the ‘Absent-presences’ and the ‘Present-absences’. The consequences of such labelling is twofold. The first category permits the acknowledgement of the both the spritual presence and the physical loss of figures close to the main protagonists; the poet Osip Mandelshtam, Akhmatova’s first husband, the poet Nikolai Goumilev, and her son Lev. The category of ‘Present-absences’ denotes those who Cixous considers to have fallen short of their artistic and moral duty to support resistance. Her category contains only one name, that of Boris Pasternak, a figure represented in the play as failing to heed the needs and solicitations of his contemporaries for fear of jeopardising his own position. In Black Sail White Sail, the Russian writers, Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam (Osip Mandelshtam’s widow and an acclaimed writer in her own right), are seen in their daily lives to ensure both the survival of the work of those poets persecuted in Stalinist Russia, and to assume the duty of representing this persecution to others and to the future. The play is built around an effective contrast between the absurdity of everyday life in such conditions: the quest to find edible potatoes, access to the black market, abiding anxiety about the trustworthiness of your neighbours, and the enormous moral decisions that confront the central characters. These writers struggle in the face of changes in State policy and personnel, paranoia and poverty to maintain the memory and the integrity of writing, the writing of the dead and the disappeared as well as Akhmatova’s continuing production of poetry. The play’s title refers to the ancient custom of hoisting black or white sails on returning ships to communicate bad or good fortunes, and are applicable here to the many bearers of news that punctuate the play as publication of Akhmatova’s work is promised, delayed, rejected, and
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promised anew, and messages from her imprisoned son articulate despair, blame and hope. The play begins as an exhausted Akhmatova and Nadezdha Mandelshtam gather firewood in the forests outside Leningrad. Akhmatova’s soliloquy informs the audience of the tragic personal consequences of the Stalinist regime, yet the tone changes abruptly as the ice on the River Neva is heard cracking in the background, evoking the metaphor of the thaw which is so resonant in Russian culture. Lydia delivers the good news that the Writers’ Union are prepared to publish Akhmatova’s work: Lydia Winter, break up and let the rivers’ song ring out again! You’ll see: when Akhmatova’s work is published, her poems will fall like burning tears upon your frozen breasts and that will be the end of winter in your thoughts. We’ll start to desire again, to laugh… Ah my dreams race ahead of reality! I would so like to see this Spring arrive before I die. Will we see it?10 (Hiver, brise-toi et laisse à nouveau résonner le chant des rivières! Vous verrez: quand sera publiée l’œuvre d’Akhmatova, ses poèmes comme des larmes brûlantes tomberont sur vos poitrines glacées et ce sera la fin de l’hiver dans vos pensées. Nous recommencerons à désirer, à rire… Ah, je rêve plus vite que la réalité! Je voudrais tant voir ce printemps avant de mourir. Le verrons-nous?)
The trope of looking towards the future for hope of better news, better times, possible publication and rehabilitation underpins the entire play and provides a sense of potential movement in what is a predominantly static drama. The play is structured around outbursts of mobility and omens of change, the journeys between Moscow and Leningrad to negotiate publication and the change of the seasons, yet these movements prove illusory, and the characters remain trapped between a past and present over which they have little control. Akhmatova journeys to and from Moscow, the frozen River Neva thaws (both of course potent tropes in Russian culture) yet the characters remain curiously suspended in time, both guardians and servants of the past attendant on uncertain future change. This temporal exile, which finds Akhmatova isolated from her contemporaries, and her post-1917 poetry unpublished and unrepresented, is seen to have consequences for her own sense of self. Akhma10
Hélène Cixous, ‘Voile noire, voile blanche: Black Sail, White Sail’, p. 239.
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tova’s situation is symbolised by the loss of her identity card (apparently stolen on the tram) and her own failing memory, illustrated by her stubborn insistence that she was the author of one of Mandelshtam’s poems. Having established the extreme conditions in which the poets continue to write and shelter the poetry of others, the play highlights the difficult personal choices that ensue from such an undertaking. The play dramatises the conflict between social and artistic responsibility and personal survival through Akhmatova’s dilemma of whether to submit to compromise and misrepresentation, by allowing the clumsily edited and highly selective state publication of her work, or to refuse to participate in the knowledge that such a stance would further damage the prospects of her imprisoned son. The poet’s first duty is seen to be to represent the times in which they live, to give a voice to those who have been marginalised, expelled or silenced by the State: Lydia: The Russian soul has lost its death, the gentle death. We don’t die of death. We die of murder and remorse. And there is no one to describe this. All the power of Shakespeare himself, with all his murderers, his murderous kings and his king-murderers, his shocking traitors, his dazzling parricides, would not be enough to describe our drama. He had not foreseen us. Our Dante died with Osip. The only violin of our new hells now lies broken beneath an icy waste. Nadezhda: From now on it’s up to you, Anna Andreevna, to collect our petrified tears.11 (L’âme russe a perdu la mort, la douce mort. Nous ne mourons plus de mort. Nous mourons de meutres et de remords. Et personne pour décrire cela. Toute la force de Shakespeare lui-même, avec tous ses assassins, ses rois assassins et ses assassins de rois, ses traîtres stupéfiants, ses éblouissants parricides, ne suffirait pas à décrire notre drame. Il ne nous avait pas prévus. Notre Dante est mort avec Ossip. L’unique violon de nos nouveaux enfers gît maintenant brisé sous un éboulement glacé. Nadejda: A vous, Anna Andreievna, désormais de recueillir nos larmes pétrifiées.)
The mantle of responsibility thus passes to Akhmatova, who is both inspired and cowed by it. If she chooses to allow publication of a 11
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Hélène Cixous, ‘’Voile noire, voile blanche: Black Sail, White Sail’, p. 253.
neutered version of her poems, this would at least attest to her survival and would reinstate her cultural status as poet . However this would be at the cost of her artistic integrity, the selected early poems carrying no reflection of the hardships and tragedies that have befallen the Russian population in the intervening years. However, Akhmatova’s poetry is not what is at stake here, rather it is the legacy of poetry and the survival of writing against all odds. Indeed, one might argue that that it is ultimately Osip Mandelshtam whose poetry haunts the play, and who is presented as ideal metapoet.12 He has achieved the ultimate exile; that of the dead from the living yet his words, decisions and images permeate the whole text in his function as ‘a sublime mole (une taupe sublime)’ an image which recurs within Cixousian aesthetics as a marker of subversion. Writers who were seen as hostile to the State in this period could not hope to be published, and indeed their poetry could not even be written down for fear of it being used as evidence of anti-State activity. The only means of ensuring that such poems survived was for a dedicated group of people to commit them to memory in anticipation of a more hospitable time and regime in which they could be safely published. Nadezhda Mandelshtam and Lydia act as human repositories for Akhmatova’s work which she often demands that they recite, only to correct them, or accuse them of abandoning her art. Such moments reveal a more subtle exploration of the poet’s role, as Lydia responds to Akhmatova’s demands: Lydia; They took my beloved too and threw me into eternal night. Write down your poems, Anna Andreievna, I beg of you. Note them down and free me. I want to live without being more afraid for your poems than I am for my own daughter. And without wearing out my eyes rereading your translations before I have finished my own. And leave me to weep for my dead in my own words.13 (Lydia: Moi aussi on m’a pris mon bien-aimé et jetée dans la nuit eternelle. Ecrivez vos poèmes, Anna Andreievna , je vous en prie. Notes-les et délivrez-moi. Je veux vivre sans trembler pour vos vers plus que pour ma propre fille. Et sans user mes yeux à relire vos traductions quand je’n’ai pas fini les miennes. Et laissez-moi pleurer mes morts avec mes propres mots.)
Lydia’s exhaustion from the responsibility of acting as cultural memory, and the erasure of her own faculties, income and expression raise the 12 13
Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelshtam argue over which of them was the closest confidant or the greatest inspiration to the poet. ibid., p. 308.
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question of the plausibility of articulating a collective loss. Can Akhmatova’s grief be truly representative of the unvoiced tragedies of her contemporaries, and at what point does its survival necessitate the sacrifice of other individual stories? This is an interesting addition to the representation of creative identity in Cixous’s theatre, a representation which often posits the poet as an unchallenged positive force within a scenario of starkly opposed figures of good and evil. The play’s presentation of the choices, loyalties and passion for writing shared by the female protagonists is subtle and engaging, and the sense of their impossible existence between a paranoid present and an uncertain future remains compelling. The play, although dedicated to Alexandre Mnouchkine, was not produced by the Théâtre du Soleil and has not yet been performed in France. Indeed the relatively small size of the cast, scale of the settings and time span of the play run counter to Cixous’s previous collaborations with the company. The production by the Actors Touring Company, who performed the play in Britain, was subject to very different conditions than those which prevail at the Cartoucherie, namely a restrictive budget and the necessity of adapting to a series of very different performance spaces while touring. Their production emphasised the contrast between Akhmatova’s small, cluttered and claustrophobic apartment in which everything gets lost, and in which the women were always aware of spying neighbours, and the vast, inaccessible spaces of the Russian landscape and the River Neva which frame their unsuccessful journeys. The characters’ constant yearning for good news, for signs of a better future, is maintained through out the play and finds its climactic articulation in the final scene in which the poets address the audience directly: Akhmatova: You who are living later, have you heard of Osip and of his wife here present? And of Anna Akhmatova? I would so like to know. One would have to die, leap forwards a century, and return. Nadezhda: Or receive a telegram from the future: poems arrived safely. Signed: the shore of the twenty first century. Lydia: Anna Akhmatova: Complete Works.
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Akhmatova: And tell me, you who are living later, do you know who Mandelshtam really was? Akhmatova? And Pasternak? Gumilev? Tabidze? Tsvetaeva? Do you know who amongst us was loyal, who was betrayed, who was a traitor, who saw the doors in the sky open? Is this visible later in our poems? Has the History of Truth begun? Nadezhda: When will it begin?14 (Akhmatova: Vous qui vivez plus tard, avez-vous entendu parler d’Ossip et de sa femme içi présente? Et d’Anna Akhmatova? J’aimerais tant le savoir. Il faudrait mourir, sauter un siècle, et revenir. Nadejda: Ou recevoir un télégramme de l’avenir: Poèmes bien arrivés. Signé: le rivage du 21 siècle. Lydia: Anna Akhmatova: Œuvres complètes. Akhmatova: Et dites-moi, vous qui vivez plus tard, savez-vous qui fut vraiment Mandelstam? Akhmatova? Et Pasternak? Goumilev? Tabidzé? Tsvetaeva? Savez-vous qui d’entre nous fut loyal, qui fut trahi, qui fut traître, qui vit s’ouvrir les portes dair? Cela se voit-il plus tard dans nos poèmes? L’Histoire de la Vérité a-t-elle commencé? Nadejda: Quand commencera-t-elle?)
In the final scene the writers appear to abandon all hope of change in their present time and address the future in a plea for news of their status. They thus inhabit a temporal limbo, trapped between a continuing lack of cultural inscription (the impossibility of publication) which divorces them from their present whilst also endangering the survival of the past, and an uncertain future over which they have no control. These direct questions are effective and provide the play with a striking closure which contrasts greatly with the frustrated progression, and static mode of the preceding scenes. This simple dramatic device ensures that audience is both implicated in the maintenance of cultural memory and alerted to the subjective nature of all histories. The poets thus draw attention to their own ambiguous legacies that would somehow combine the personal and the Historical in an unproblematised ‘History of Truth’. These poet figures remain curiously outside of time, as the final scene removes them from their historical context and distances them from the present of the theatrical performance. The imposition of a 14
ibid., p. 350.
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dramatic closure which removes the central characters of the play from their specific spatio-temporal contexts, and situates them in a transcendent realm has become recurrent in Cixous’s theatre of the last decade, and will be discussed further in the concluding sections of this chapter.
The Guardian of Memory Following Cixous’s exploration of the role of the poet which moved from transforming historical figures into poets to the dramatisation of the lives of actual poets, the plays turn to the realm of myth and saga as contexts in which better to assert Cixous’s vision of the transcendent nature of poetic identity.15 The complex interaction of myth and contemporary history enacted in The City of Perjury… has been discussed in Chapter Three, however a closer examination of the role of Aeschylus as poet figure and guardian of memory is important in the context of this Chapter, as the representation of the writer’s responsibility to ensure that the truth is told remains at the forefront of Cixous’s theatre. The double meaning of the French histoire as history and story is again important to Cixous’s intentions in this play. The Mother’s struggle to tell her story of personal tragedy, and of her refusal to be silenced by hostile institutions is posited as emblematic of the difficulty of ensuring that History reflects the experience of all of its protagonists. Throughout the play, different protagonists are characterised by their attitude to the Mother’s story and so to History. In the opening scene, as the Mother sets out her accusations against the city she describes how her claims have been dismissed by the establishment as ‘old news, another old wives’ tale (une vieille histoire, encore un conte de bonne femme)’.16 The establishment lawyers display their cynically manipulat15
16
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Cixous’s play You Cannot leave, you cannot return (On ne part pas, on ne revient pas) (Paris: des femmes, 1991) is the only one to feature a writer in a contemporary setting. Clara is an unfulfilled writer, who reassesses her life in the face of personal grief and impending blindness. The play was read at ‘La Métaphore’, Lille in November 1991, in a production directed by Daniel Mesguich in which he also starred alongside Nicole Garcia. Hélène Cixous, La Ville parjure… , p. 13.
ive relationship to language and contrast their allegedly objective survey of the facts with the Mother’s impassioned calls for justice: But tomorrow when the winds which are turning this affair On its head have stopped blowing, History will resume its true face And we will set down the story for eternity. It will be a version free from the passions That horribly distort scenes which are still too recent. I will see to it. That’s what I told my client.17 (Mais demain quand les vents qui tourbillonnent cette affaire Sens dessus-dessous seront tombés, L’Histoire reprendra son vrai visage Et pour l’éternité nous en rédigerons le récit, dis-je. Ce sera une version délivrée des passions Qui distordent horriblement les scènes encore trop fraîches. Je m’y emploierai. Voilà ce que je disais à mon client.)
Their rejection of the place of personal tragedy in history, and their admission of their conscious intention to distort the truth in the interests of their clients, defines them as the villains of the piece. The King is similarly defined by his response to the Mother’s tragedy as, although entreated by the Queen to take the scandal seriously and so save his political skin, his condescending description of the Mother’s story as ‘nothing to do with history (nullement historique)’18 reveals his prejudice and isolation. Aeschylus’s function as poet in the play is to act as a support for the Mother, to provide the space and time in which she can communicate her story safely and effectively, and to act as a foil to the moral bankruptcy of contemporary political and corporate manipulation of both the Mother’s story, and of History, which ensures that many events and victims remain marginalised and unacknowledged. Aeschylus’s literal inscription of the names of victims and martyrs (including Anne Frank and Steven Biko) on the walls of the cemetery serves to reinforce his function as advocate of memory and conscience, yet it should be noted
17 18
ibid., p. 24. ibid., p. 78.
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the figures of universal martyrdom privileged here are also those who had also succeeded in articulating their own experiences in writing. The ethical responsibility which Cixous bestows on writers to record the tragedies and injustices of their contemporary surroundings is stressed in a prefatory essay to the play as she imagines the distress of her literary ancestors: All poets have tarried on the banks on the red river...powerless to hold back the life which is slipping away and they watched the thread of tragic horror run on from century to century. Listen to them wail their hymn of outrage, Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Balzac, Hugo, horribly fascinated by the carnage caused by humankind and the city.19 (Au bord de la rouge rivière…se sont penchés tous les poètes impuissants à retenir la vie qui s’en va, et ils regardaient courir, de siècle en siècle, le fil de l’horreur tragique. Entendez-les gémir l’hymne indigné, Eschyle, Shakespeare, Balzac, Hugo, affreusement fascinés par les carnages dont l’homme est l’auteur avec la cité.)
Cixous’s references to canonical writers whom she regards as having attempted to document such injustices, includes the figure of Aeschylus and it is clear that the poet’s role in sheltering and encouraging the Mother is of vital importance to the play. This structure serves, in turn, through the play’s self-reflexive concern with the role of the poet, to associate Cixous with this group of writers and implicate her in her own definitions of poetic identity. This play, whilst engaging consistently with the role of the poet in Cixousian aesthetics, does not reveal any interest in the representation of the writing process itself. The only references to writing remain humorous and represent it as an inadequate response to both the scale of tragedy described and the pace and immediacy of the theatre. After hearing the Mother’s story, Aeschylus is lost for words: I will go and look for my dictionaries Experience has taught me this. Pain needs many synonyms20 (Je vais chercher mes dictionnaires. L’experience me l’a enseigné. La douleur a besoin de nombreux synonymes) 19 20
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ibid., p. 5. ibid., p. 73.
At no point does Aeschylus attempt to articulate her story, leaving her to address the audience in the final scene. When faced with impending death as the flood waters rise, she is not concerned to remain in the land of the living but rather worries that she is not ill-equipped for death: ‘My notebook! My pencil! I must note this down. It’s the first time that I have died. (Mon carnet! Mon crayon! Il faut que je note. C’est la première fois que je meurs).21 This image remains comic and incongruous in its disruption of the dominant tone and themes of the concluding speeches of the play. In The City of Perjury… Cixous can, to some extent, be seen to continue to employ historical events (the ‘scandale du sang’ in France and the reality of HIV) with perhaps inadequate acknowledgement of the political implications of such allegorical usage. However, her engagement in this play with the nature of poetic identity and the role of the writer remains subordinate ultimately to the ethical questions and definitions of justice which are wholly appropriate to the events to which the play alludes.
Staging the Scene of Writing The discussion of the changing nature of poetic identity in Cixous’s theatre, as illustrated by the different poet-figures who populate her plays, provides a useful background to what is arguably her most ambitious project in the theatre to date, the dramatisation of the writing process, the staging of the scene of writing. The Story (which we will never know) (L’Histoire qu’on ne connaîtra jamais), first directed by Daniel Mesguich at the Théâtre de l’Odéon in 1994, is a complex and multi-layered play which explores the role of the poet, the creative process of writing and the relationship between writing and the theatre. Through its dramatisation of the writing self, the play also provides a fascinating illustration of the inherent tensions between Cixous’s adoption of the theatre as privileged mode of writing, and the undermining of the theatrical form by references to the process of its written creation. 21
ibid., p. 214.
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In a similar strategy to that adopted in The City of Perjury… , a recognisable poet figure is separated from their own historical context, and placed in an abstract, mythical setting. This play’s central protagonist, the Icelandic poet and writer of sagas, Snorri Sturlusson, is chosen by a bored and malevolent group of Nordic gods to be sent back in time to recover and recount the vengeful saga of Sigfrid and Brunhild. This narrative is more commonly known to a modern audience through Wagner’s Niebelungen, yet originates in an thirteenth century Icelandic Edda, The Niebelungenlied, by an anonymous court entertainer.22 The legend tells how Sigfrid and Brunhild met and fell instantly in love. However Gunther wanted to marry Brunhild himself and so was keen to arrange a marriage for Sigfrid to his sister Kriemhild. In order to overcome Sigfrid’s love, Gunther tricks him into drinking a magic potion which erases all memory of his meeting with Brunhild. She, however, remains painfully aware of their encounter and assumes that Sigfrid has abandoned her in favour of Kriemhild. The action of Cixous’s play centres on the first state visit of Sigfrid and Kriemhild to the court of Gunther and Brunhild and the political machinations and personal tensions that eventually bring about Sigfrid’s death. Interpretations of the saga itself remain secondary in the play to the dramatisation of poetic identity. Sturlusson, an unwilling narrator, is keen to recount the tale and return to his other writing commitments as quickly as possible, but it soon becomes clear that he is unable to remain a dispassionate observer of the narrative, and so becomes involved in the intrigue. As he commits murder, witnesses murder and falls victim to it himself, his grip on the narrative weakens and, although he manages to avert successfully the eternal cycle of vengeance associated with the narrative, he is forced to admit defeat in his recuperation of a closed text that would be acceptable to the gods who sent him on this mission. Sturlusson has two companions in his quest for the narrative. Edda is a mysterious old woman who appears to know the outcome of events but who is neither heeded nor consulted by Sturlusson. In Mesguich’s production her dramatic entrances and exits were made through a trapdoor in the stage floor. Her costume and movements suggested a 22
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The narrative is clearly much older than this (probably eighth or ninth century) yet this written version is the most easily accessible. For translated text and historical analysis see The Niebelungenlied, translated by A. T. Hatto, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).
cross between a witch and a reptile, yet her name clearly links her to some of the most ancient narratives in existence and suggests that she might have been of invaluable help to Sturlusson’s project. His second companion is Barout, a symbolic wandering rabbi who, through his explicit Jewishness, functions as a representative of the exiled: I have dreamt all the dreams of all those in exile (J’ai rêvé tous les rêves de tous les exilés)’.23 The strong identification between Sturlusson and Barout is consistently highlighted and their comments on observing the first private meeting of the two queens, Brunhild and Kriemhild, demonstrates this amply: Barout: Between you and me, Snorri Sturlusson, it seems as if I heard a strange music of compassion pass between these women. Snorri: Between us, Barout, I think I heard it too.24 (Barout: Entre vous et moi, Snorri Sturlusson, il m’a semblé entendre passer entre ces femmes une obscure musique de compassion. Snorri: Entre nous, Barout, j’ai cru l’entendre aussi.)
The ambiguity of Sturlusson’s response posits emotional and creative correspondences between them. Indeed, when Sturlusson realises that he cannot carry out the wishes of the gods and return a narrative of revenge, violence and hate, but must endeavour to intercept events and change the story, it is to Barout that he turns for help: ‘Rabbi, do you want to help me to begin the world anew? (Rabbin, veux tu m’aider à recommencer le monde?)25 Barout’s status as archetypal exile, and other defines him as appropriate alter ego for the Cixousian poet,26 and he proves a trusty and perceptive companion until, in a fit of rage at having lost his manuscript, Sturlusson turns on him and murders him. This narrative twist could be interpreted as a rather simplistic enactment of the persecution and 23
24 25 26
Hélène Cixous, L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais), p. 104. During her seminar of the 27th May 1994, Cixous revealed that the character of Barout was based upon a Jewish salesman who lodged at her grandmother’s house. He went on to become a rabbi and was killed by Nazi forces in the Second World War. Cixous also commented that the inclusion of this Jewish figure in the play was intended to counter what she perceived as Nazi interpretations of Wagner’s work. Hélène Cixous, L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais), pp. 114-115. ibid., p. 116. His relation to Jewishness and the construction of Cixous’s own poetic persona is clearly also important here.
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exclusion of Jews within this story, and so within History, yet is far more effective if seen as an act of symbolic self-mutilation on Sturlusson’s part. If Barout represents the excluded other, then Sturlusson’s failure to accommodate him denotes his failure to attain Cixousian definitions of poetic identity. The recovery of the truth continues to be represented as a vital moral and personal ambition of poetic identity. Sturlusson’s futile quest to recover the metanarrative, the lost story, is juxtaposed with the tragic consequences of the repression of the story of Sigfrid and Brunhild’s passion, a forgotten narrative which is seen to inflict loss and trauma on all sides. It is unclear to which story the play’s title refers, indeed Cixous may be implying that no narrative can ever be fully clarified, recorded and closed. The repression of Brunhild’s story results in trauma which undermines her sense of identity and leaves her isolated and lost: Brunhild: No past, no present, where can I live? One must forget, cut the throat of life, act as if there had never been life, cut out the living part and stitch the body back up, as if never… Now I am leaving this scene, with my secret wound as my story … The mirror which smiled at me has broken. I am faceless. … After this disappearance, you will also survive The story will go on Forget me. Have you forgotten me?27 (Ni présent, ni passé, où vivre? Il faut oublier, trancher la vie au collet, faire comme s’il n’y avait jamais eu la vie, trancher le morceau vivant et recoudre le corps, comme si jamais… Aujourd’hui je me retire de cette scène, avec ma blessure inconnue pour histoire .. Le miroir qui me souriait est brisé. Je suis sans visage. … Après cette disparition, vous aussi vous survivrez. Cette histoire va continuer Oubliez-moi. Vous m’avez oublié?)
27
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ibid., p. 145.
This direct address to the audience is strikingly similar in tone to that delivered by Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelshtam at the end of Black Sail, White Sail. Brunhild expresses her sense of temporal alienation yet, rather than expressing hope for the future, she articulates a desire to be free of the past. Incapable of the mutilation of the self which she describes, and so unable to survive in this present without a past, Brunhild’s greatest desire is to be forgotten herself. In Mesguich’s production, which employed a consistent visual notation of cloth and fabric to signify narrative,28 Brunhild withdraws from the front of the stage and her gown is incorporated into a luxurious red stage curtain, the repressed yet utopian past narrative from which her present identity cannot be disentangled. However, it is not the revelation of truths that is the primary concern of Cixous’s dramatisation of the scene of writing in The City of Perjury… The play is formally and thematically structured around a contrast between two different modes of writing; one which fosters the illusion of creative mastery and closed narrative and the other which insists upon a model of writing which is fluid, open and reflexive. In the programme notes, Cixous presents Sturlusson’s dilemma as common to all poets: ‘What the poet wants is to rediscover the truth. But in looking for it he finds himself caught up in the fabric which he was watching being woven. (Ce que veut le poète: retrouver la vérité. Mais à la chercher, il se voit pris lui-même dans la toile qu’il regarde se tisser)’.29 Despite the machinations of the central figures, the dramatic tension in the play, originates not from this story but from Sturlusson’s ambiguous status as both passive observer charged with the delivery of a closed narrative, and albeit reluctant participant in the unfolding theatrical play. Sturlusson’s obsessive desire to produce a closed narrative is presented as both absurd and dangerous. Mesguich’s production employed towering piles of enormous books to represent the ultimate futility of the poet’s ambition of producing finished products which would act as a literary ladder to the heavens and thus to immortality. It is his fixation with the finished document, the whereabouts of his manuscript, that also 28
29
The extended metaphor of narrative as fabric recurs verbally and visually throughout the play. Snorri’s first encounter at court is with the seamstresses who are preparing the fabric of Brunhild’s dress. A central scene in which the two queens confront each other employs the visual metaphor of their entwined robes as a symbol of their inextricably linked stories. Hélène Cixous, programme notes to L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais), 1994.
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leads him to fatally attack Barout. After having lost all hope of authorial control, Sturlusson is also killed, yet he returns to participate in the final scenes. His murder and subsequent return would not appear to add much to the development of the plot as, even in his spirit form, he successfully intervenes in the chain of events. I would argue that the purpose of his murder is to provide a literal representation of the ‘death of the author’, the rejection of authorial omniscience and influence in favour of a more open model in which the author is one of many participants in the construction of the meanings of a text. This murder of the author puts an end to Sturlusson’s pretensions of narrative control, and thus leaves Sturlusson, the character, free to participate successfully in the aversion of the revenge dénouement of the narrative. The subsequent success of his engagement with unfolding events forms a striking contrast to the his failure to occupy the role of passive yet informed observer. Sturlusson The model of writing and of poetic identity implicitly valued in the play succeeds in changing the course of events and in re-appropriating the myth as a metanarrative of forgiveness and acceptance. The dead Sigfrid rejects the gods’ exhortations to assert his tragedy through the perpetuation of violence, and it is Sturlusson who persuades him to renounce all claims to revenge: Snorri: Someone is needed. A man is needed who can carry the heavy weight of solitude and injustice. A murder victim who is strong enough.30 (Il faut quelqu’un. Il faut un homme qui porte tout le poids de la solitude et de l’injustice. Un assassiné assez fort.)
Sturlusson’s further triumph is his creative vision of a force capable of stopping Kriemhild in her tracks as she sets out to wreak revenge, the snowflakes that serve as metaphors of Brunhild’s tears and symbols of forgiveness and regeneration. As Brunhild and Kriemhild are reunited in the dazzling snowstorm of Mesguich’s production, Sturlusson and Edda are left to reflect upon the radical change in the narrative that contradicts Edda’s ‘ancient tapestry (vieille tapisserie)’.31 This poet has succeeded in rewriting the narrative. In his role as participant he has put an end to the vicious cycle of revenge that has traditionally defined this saga, and, as disseminator of narratives to the reader/audience has achieved a reinter30 31
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L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais), p. 181. ibid., p. 184.
pretation of the saga of the Niebelungenlied as a allegory of forgiveness and love. The programme notes describe this intervention: Why shouldn’t a poet change History? If only Snorri Sturlusson had survived the events of which he was both actor and historian, we would have a very different tale to that with which tradition has presented us under the title of the Niebelungen.32 (Pourquoi un poète ne changerait-il pas l’Histoire? Et si seulement Snorri Sturlusson avait survecu aux événements don’t il était lui-même l’acteur et historien, nous aurions un récit bien différent de celui que la tradition nous a presenté jusqu’içi sous le titre des Niebelungen.
Cixous thus deconstructs the process of writing and myth-making by presenting the audience with an unfolding narrative which beguiles, frustrates and surprises its author. Cixous joins poetic forces with Sturlusson, not only to attempt to avert the tragic dénouement of the narrative within the play, but to revalorise the legend in the face of what she considers as the misappropriation of Wagner’s version for Nazi propaganda purposes. This demystification of the story and History is complemented by the play’s construction and embellishment of poetic identity, an identity characterised by an affinity with the exiled, an openness to the other, and a willingness to renounce the desire for authorial omniscience. The play thus serves as an ambitious mise en abyme of the writing process, or rather of an ideal model of writing privileged by Cixous. Sturlusson’s teleological and reductive approach to writing is seen to be flawed and can only be amended by his death and subsequent rebirth as a writer who better fits a Cixousian aesthetics of writing. However this play contains yet another reflexive move in its implicit references to theatre as the ideal mode of writing evoked within the play. The juxtaposition of the text that Sturlusson is commissioned to write, a closed narrative recounting past events with a story still unfolding in an emphatic present introduces another parallel, that between the text and the theatre. Sturlusson’s doomed attempt at constructing an account of the past has been surpassed by the theatre as narrative in process, and the temporal structures of this comparison are vitally important. Cixous’s programme notes foreground the evolution of Sturlusson’s relationship to time: ‘The past which was his object of 32
Hélène Cixous, programme notes to L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais) 1994.
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desire yields to the present… (Le passé qui était son objet de désir, le cède au présent....)’.33 Cixous had previously acclaimed the temporal immediacy of the theatre and its cathartic effect on writer, actor and spectator: The ability to exist in the absolute present is the charm and the necessity of the theatre. Writing the absolute present in the poetic text is an acrobatic feat.34 (Arriver à être au présent absolu, c’est le charme du théâtre et sa nécessité. Ecrire le présent dans le texte poétique, c’est acrobatique).
The staging of poetic identity in this play advocates a writing in the present which is represented here by the theatre – it is implied that Sturlusson’s error was to pursue omniscience rather than to participate freely in the present scene of writing. Through its persistent focus on relationships between time and writing, process and text, this play presents a fascinating site for an exploration of the temporal zones of Cixous’s theatre. The play’s temporal messages are complex, indeed the title itself constitutes a temporal puzzle – a narrative that denies its own presence remaining elusive and forever incomplete. We will never reach full knowledge of a narrative because it resides in what Cixous perceives as the continual present of theatre. It is indeed a radical change in Sturlusson’s relationship to time (his death) which enables him to participate in the absolute present of the theatre. His acceptance of the present is accompanied by the concomitant acceptance of mortality that Cixous associates with writing: ‘Writing is learning to die. It’s learning not to be afraid, in other words to live at the extremity of life, which is what the dead, death, give us’.35 The relationship of the poet to time within the play, however, remains clear. Sturlusson’s somewhat precipitated acceptance of his own mortality is represented as a necessary constituent element of a successful poetic identity. The nature of the representation of poetic identity and the adoption of different tropes of poetic identity in Cixous’ theatre changes in accordance with the shifting concerns of her own creative projects and perceptions of the role of the poet. Her thematic and generic use of 33 34 35
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ibid., Françoise van Rossum-Guyon, ‘A propos de “Manne”: Entretien avec Hélène Cixous’ in Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, pp. 213-234, p. 227. Hélène Cixous, ‘The School of the Dead’ in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) pp. 1-55, p. 10.
theatre in which to engage with these issues however, remains consistent. The transcendent and remote afterlives which provide the final settings of The Terrible but Unfinished Story… and The City of Perjury… were followed by the attempt to accommodate the past and the future in the present of the theatre in the final address of Black Sail, White Sail and superseded by the present of both the theatre and the writing process. The Story (which we will never know) signals Cixous’s adoption of many generic features of the theatre to posit as an ideal form of writing and an evolving and fascinating reworking of the utopian ‘scene of writing’ projected in her early writings.36 The radical implications of Cixous’s undermining of notions of closure through the assertion of writing as a fluid, ever-present and non-excluding process in the very final scenes of her recent plays are, however, somewhat undermined by the implicit simultaneous assertions of her own authorial omniscience in the final scenes of the three plays. The final speech of Black Sail White Sail constitutes an appeal to the audience for recognition of the poets’ story and history in Akhmatova’s interrogation of the future. The audience’s response is complex. We have perhaps only heard of these poets through the dramatisation of their stories in Cixous’s play and, whilst we cannot attest to the survival of their poetry nor its efficacy in describing their truths, we can recognise the parallel function of the play itself in representation of the same. The poetic identity of the characters before us is joined by that of Cixous, asserted in her role through the writing of this play. The characters’ plea to the audience from the haven of the afterlife in The City of Perjury…, evokes the dangers of maintaining a silence which permits injustices to remain unrecognised:. The Mother: Make a temple with silence. A courtroom with silence. A theatre with silence... Our play is finished. But may yours now start. In your turn persist until justice is justly done. As a souvenir, I leave you my story with its taste of tears and milk. 37 (Un temple avec du silence. Un tribunal avec du silence. Un théâtre avec du silence... Notre pièce est finie. Mais que la vôtre commence. A votre tour obstinezvous que le juste advienne justement. En souvenir je vous laisse mon histoire au goût de larmes et de lait) 36 37
For theatrical metaphors of utopian sites see La Jeune née, p. 143. Hélène Cixous, La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes, p. 219.
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The audience are thus encouraged to reflect that it is Cixous who has evidently already broken this silence, as it is implied that the wronged Mother’s rhetorical questions are answered by Cixous’ play. Again parallels are constructed between the function of poetic identity within the text and Cixous’s status as author of the play. In The Story (which we will never know), Sturlusson witnesses the last minute avoidance of the violent dénouement which had hitherto characterised this narrative. However, rather than concluding the play with a celebration of this radical subversion and the power of writing, he implicitly undermines the thematic importance of the narrative of Sigfrid and Brunhild by lamenting his own failure as an author to communicate these changes. His striking parting words of the play remain: ‘No one will ever tell our story. (Personne ne racontera jamais notre histoire)’38 Sturlusson’s final lament constitutes an ironic reference to Cixous’s play, as the audience reflects that this story has indeed now been told. Such a reflexive ending serves ultimately to distance the audience from of the present of the theatre, and to remind them of the creation of the written text of the play in the past. Thus Cixous’s employment of the theatre as metaphor for an ideal mode of writing is shown, in her own play, to be not wholly compatible with her perception of the role of poet as moral narrator, a role which implies at least a degree of omniscience, and perhaps a superior level of knowledge to that of the reader or audience. Sturlusson, the author may have been denied control and the attainment of true poetic identity, a status posited as only possible through unprivileged participation in an unfolding narrative, but Cixous, as poet and purveyor of truths, retains the last word and is clearly identified behind the scenes of writing. Certain aspects of this most recent dramatisation of poetic identity in Cixous’s theatre are thus revealed as contradictory, and the play’s emphatic closing reference to Cixous’s own creativity does seem rather heavy-handed. This twist does not however, weaken the originality of the play nor the strength of its enquiry into the relationship between time, narrative and subjectivity, between text and performance Cixous’s first plays explored theatre’s potential and perceived capacity for representing a subject-in-process, a non-unified, evolving and multiple identity characterised by the occupation of the present 38
138
Hélene Cixous, L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais), p. 184.
moment and the impact of the spoken word (parole). This subject was defined in part by their gender, as the female protagonists struggled and failed to assert their subjectivities in a repressive patriarchal world. The cultural and linguistic barriers faced by these women, who leave their respective scenes for undefined ‘elsewheres’, could be interpreted as representative of those that effect the woman writer, yet these figures remain potential writers of unrealised texts. The epic scale of Cixous’s dramatisations of recent Cambodian and Indian history is thrown into relief by the insistent adoption of central figures, namely Sihanouk and Gandhi, as markers of poetic identity, defined respectively through their relationships to exile and to difference. Such manipulation of historical characters creates a central tension in the plays between the recounting of other histories (here the core function of the poet) and the construction of a poetic identity that transcends all cultural and historical specificities. Cixous’s most recent plays displace a group of writers from their historical contexts in order for them to function as illustrations of the choices that face the writer confronted with political censorship and oppression (Akhmatova and Mandelshtam), moral bankruptcy (Aeschylus) and the ethics and aesthetics of rewriting histories (Sturlusson). As discussed, earlier in this chapter, the closing speeches of Black Sail, White Sail, The City of Perjury… and The Story (That We Will Never Know) construct parallels between the poets featured in the plays and Cixous’s own creative persona as ultimate narrator of these stories. In a context which does not discuss these plays, Verena Andermatt Conley charges Cixous with self indulgent escapism in her focus on such writers: Cixous’ increasing desire to be associated with a group of timeless poets, amidst a Pléiade of limit-writers, appears to underscore the futility that the individual artist cannot help finding when he or she looks at the abyss between real issues that determine the conditions of the world and the writer’s lack of power in being able to change them. From writing elsewhere that makes possible, she has shifted to writing elsewhere, but in the space of the impossible.39
Indeed, Cixous’s theatrical representations of poetic identity seem to be partly motivated by a desire to construct and strengthen a model of poetic identity and a mode of writing which closely resembles elements of Cixous’s own personal persona and writing. Yet to suggest that the 39
Verena Aldermatt Conley, Hélène Cixous (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf Press, 1992), pp. 130-131.
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plays could simply be reduced to narcissistic exercises in literary selfcanonisation would be to greatly underestimate the depth of engagement that they contain with the ethical, cultural and political role of the writer, the theatre and the audience.
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Conclusion Cixous’s theatre encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of subject matter and her plays range in style and scale from the disruptive disunity of Portrait of Dora, to the epic sweep of L’Indiade or the India of their Dreams, from the staging of a repressed, specifically female subjectivity in The Name of Oedipus..., to the call for the active recognition of a common humanity at the close of The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes. The central concerns of Cixous’s work; the search for a mode of writing that will allow a more positive representation of difference, of the other, and a discourse which can acknowledge and inscribe loss, are evident throughout her plays. It is perhaps the evolution and movement of these themes, and their inherent linking with the form of theatre, that constitutes one of the most rewarding aspects of her plays. Cixous’s initial engagement with the theatre was fuelled by a politically motivated desire to challenge and change the traditional structures and narratives of Western theatre, to reveal the patriarchal ideology which she identified as central to both the main thematic concerns and to the formal structure of the theatre. This desire, to change the theatre by means of her writing, has gradually been replaced by the realisation that her experience of the creative process of writing has been transformed as a result of her contact and engagement with the theatre. The implications of this change resonate far beyond the intimate relationship between writer and text. It is through her writing for the theatre that Cixous has felt able to articulate a relationship between the self and history, and this has manifested itself predominantly as a desire to tell the histories of those who have either been marginalised or forgotten by the grand narratives of history, or simply excluded from the reductive mass-media reporting of contemporary world events. Cixous’s dramatisations of the political manipulations and genocide in Cambodia, of two writers’ struggle to preserve cultural memory under Stalin’s reign, or of the institutional corruption and moral bankruptcy at the heart of the ‘scandale du sang contaminé’ are all motivated by a desire to ensure that these stories are told. Such a move serves, in turn, to position Cixous’s work, and her personal poetic identity, alongside those characters in her plays who are seen to resist hypocrisy and to determine 141
to tell the truth. This aspect of her theatre has become increasingly explicit and self-conscious, and its method finds parallels in the constructions of poetic identity evident in the selection of writers for the syllabi of Cixous’s seminars. These writers often share personal or aesthetic traits with Cixous (such as experience of exile, a multilingual childhood) and so serve both to perpetuate an image of poetic identity that has many similarities with her own writing, and to insert herself in this selective canon of authors. The combination of such elements constitutes a complex and constantly evolving aspect of Cixous’s theatre. As discussed in Chapters Three and Four, the ambitious juxtaposition of actual historical events with meditations on the nature and role of poetic identity, which are found in Cixous’s recent theatre, involves the maintenance of a fine balance which often achieves a dazzling integration of the themes of artistic and political responsibility and reviews the relationship between self and world but which, at times, risks an unwitting reinforcement of the structures of appropriation and abstraction, which the plays unarguably set out to contest. Indeed, the majority of Cixous’s plays that have been published and performed since 1994 (The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes, and The Story (That We Will Never Know) are marked by the tension created between the ambition of asserting the scale of tragedy of contemporary events, by presenting them as myth or legend, and the consequences of such abstractions. These plays are set in unspecified times and events unfold in unidentified or legendary places and, whilst the specific resonance of these allegories may be appreciated by the audience, their engagement is, to some extent, diminished by these displacements. The time and space of theatrical performance continues to occupy a utopian site in Cixous’s aesthetics, apparently offering access to other selves, to other places and to other histories that Cixous cannot approach nor embrace in her ‘fictions’. The theatre thus functions simultaneously as a site of ethical and political engagement and a space in which Cixous can develop new models of difference and multiplicity that remain entirely abstract projections. The spatial uncertainties of Cixous’s recent theatre are accompanied by a striking temporal displacement which can be interpreted as a consequence of two coexisting concerns in her work. Firstly the belief that writing (including writing for the theatre) constitutes a means of ensuring the inscription of the past, of recording loss and so preserving 142
memory, remains a consistent focus and motivation of Cixous’s œuvre. The second concern is her espousal of the theatrical form as a mode which, through the temporal immediacy of the performance, permits a writing of the present. Cixous’s theatre has always been concerned with the time of writing and the rewriting of time. The primary engagement of Cixous’s first plays and their challenge to conventional dramatic representations of subjectivity, is realised by means of militant disruptions of spatial unity and chronological linearity. This is achieved through the juxtaposition of simultaneous zones of spatial and temporal perception witnessed in Portrait of Dora and the adherence to the Classical unities undertaken in The Name of Oedipus... in order to foreground what Cixous regarded at the time as the inability of conventional theatre to represent the (female) subject-in-process. The nature of time in the recent plays mentioned above is neither radically disrupted nor unproblematically epic. As the theme of poetic identity becomes more apparent in Cixous’s plays, so author and audience find themselves constantly repositioned between shifting temporal planes, between the ethical function of writing to inscribe memory, to insure the survival of things past and lost, and the desire to assert the liberating power of the absolute present of the theatre which functions in both writing and performance. This tension manifests itself in the abundance of closing scenes in Cixous’s theatre which move the audience and action to a place of temporal transcendence, removed from both the time of the preceding scenes of the play, and the present of inscription, of catharsis, in which the audience resides. These scenes have commonly featured representations of immortality as characters return from the dead or address the audience from an apparent afterlife, outisde of time. Such closures, involving the characters’ direct address to the audience, achieve a dramatic impact due to their difference in tone and setting from the rest of the play and locate a site in which the present of the audience and the process of past inscription can be mutually accommodated. Thus Cixous’s engagement with the theatre has engendered and inspired a temporal acrobatics in her search for a mode of writing, perhaps a ‘theatre of writing’, from which it has become inseparable. The constantly evolving relationship in Cixous’ work between the theatre as textual metaphor for an ideal mode of writing, and the performative space of the theatrical text gives rise to both problematic reductions and fascinating possibilities around the position of the space of writing behind the scenes of her theatre. 143
It is fitting to conclude this book with a discussion of Cixous’s most recent and most successful play in which the main themes and concerns of her theatre persist. Her most recent production at the time of writing, Tambours sur la digue (Drums on the Dyke), was performed by the Théâtre du Soleil (the production ran from November 1999 to June 2000) and met with widespread public and critical acclaim in France. This praise formed a stark contrast to the reception afforded Cixous’s And Suddenly (on) nights of awakening (Et soudain les nuits d’eveil) which alternated with it during its run at the Cartoucherie.1 Tambours sur la digue is an exhilarating play which can arguably be seen as the most successful combination to date of the Théâtre du Soleil’s capacity for innovation and exploration of different traditions of non-Western theatre (in this case the Japanese traditions of Noh and Bunraku), and Cixous’s search for new means of representing the relationship between subject and world. The play depicts the political manœuvres and betrayals of a government, forced by impending environmental disaster, to choose whether to flood the industrial, urban centre of its regime or the outlying agricultural provinces. The vested interest of the ruling class, weak leadership, and the greed of developers combine to ensure the betrayal of the population. The contestatory characters; the Divine and his daughter, a comic noodle seller, and an aged puppeteer, can do nothing to stop either the unending chain of violent personal betrayals and assassinations or the flood. There is not space here for a detailed discussion of the plot, nor the mise en scène, yet it is important to acknowledge the remarkably effective marriage of thematic concern and form which this play achieves in its investigation of the relationship between writer and character, actor and character and importantly, spectator and character. The subtitle of Drums on the Dyke is “an ancient play for marionettes performed by actors”, yet this does not fully describe the
1
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This play marked a return to the company’s creative method of collective collaboration. Set during a theatre rehearsals which is interrupted by the appeal for sanctuary of a group of immigrants, whose legal status has been affected by changes in French law, the play was criticised for the perceived adoption of a simplistic political stance in relation to the situation of immigrants and the struggle for independence in Tibet.
complex dynamics created in performance.2 Each character is presented as a puppet – through the actors’ stilted movements, stylised gestures and lack of facial expression. Each character (as puppet) is apparently controlled by a puppeteer (a manipulateur) who accompanies the puppet throughout, anticipating their movements and enabling their entry and exit from the stage. Unlike the tradition of Bunraku which is clearly evoked by the costume of the controllers, these puppets deliver their own speeches. The audience is captivated both by the eerie effects of the actors’ technique and the sinister and moving nature of the relationship between controller and puppet. The emotional impact of their physical proximity to each other, and their shared human scale, is countered by the evident and disturbing power relation between them as the puppet cannot reciprocate either gaze or touch. This striking element of performance forms an integral part of Cixous’s developing aesthetics of theatre as, in the essay which accompanies the published text,3 she describes the relevance of the relationship between puppet and puppeteer to the practice of both writing and acting.4 Cixous’s interest would seem to lie more in the puppets and their controllers as symbols of a doubling, of a multiplicity of selves, than in an exploration of the power structures of their relationship. The dramatic device is linked to the process of writing: ‘Be two: it’s writing itself. The puppet writes with time, with precise intervals, with blanks (which are invisible)…(Sois deux, c’est l’écriture même. La marionnette écrit avec des temps, des intervalles nets, des blancs (invisible...).5 The precise nature of Cixous’s comparison remains unclear as the marionette’s movements are offered as an image of writing. However, Cixous seems to posit a parallel between the relationship between controller and marionnette and that of writer and text, evoking the spatial and temporal distance between the two elements as an essential aspect of the writing process.
2 3 4 5
The play reflects the Théâtre du soleil’s continuing engagement with non-Western traditions of theatre (here Noh and Bunraku) and recalls Cixous’s interest in the figure of the marionette, as witnessed in her seminar work on Kleist. Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Théâtre surpris par les marionnettes’ in Tambours sur la digue (Paris: Théâtre du soleil, 1999), pp. 115-124, p. 116. Cixous rejects an image of the writer as the puppet of an ancient inspiration to acknowledge the lived reality of writing. ibid., p. 121.
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A theoretical investment in the metaphor of the puppet is clearly important to the continuing development of Cixous’s ‘theatre of writing’, yet these human puppets remain a startling and moving theatrical device through which the vulnerability of humanity and the complex structures which bind together notions of agency, identity and empathy are successfully articulated. The spectator’s inevitable fascination with the actors’ skill and their enjoyment of the stunning simplicity of the set6 establishes an emotional complacency as the ‘puppets’ meet their individual fates. However, the emerging model discussed earlier in this study, in which the final scene of Cixous’s recent plays enact a mise en abyme of the writing process, is used to startling effect in this play. The central characters have met their deaths and the central section of the stage caves in to reveal a deep pit of water, into which the aged puppeteer’s wooden puppets are thrown. In complete silence,7 the puppeteer and the controllers recover the figures, arranging them on the front of the stage to face the audience. It becomes apparent that they are miniatures of the play’s main characters.8 The abrupt change in scale of the figures, and the dramatic revelation of the gulf between the controllers and these puppets, puppets who have no control over their own fates nor the hostile environment, deals a shock to the audience. This play thus contains a consolidation and continuation of the multifaceted nature of Cixous’s engagement with the theatre. It maintains an indirect dramatisation of recent political and historical events through the adoption of figures, narratives and motifs from mythology and legend.9 The presence of the puppet-subjects confronts the audience with wider questions of the abuse of power and the representative nature and mandate of governments. This engagement remains central to Cixous’s theatre, as she states: ‘Theater for me is tragedy, characters, 6 7 8
9
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The set is sparse yet sumptuous, and evokes a Japanese landscape through elevated wooden decking, pebbles and silk backdrops which fall to the floor to announce changes of scene. A silent scene is used to similar effect in The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes when the mother is visited by the spirits of her dead children. This can be compared with Anthony Gormley’s artwork ‘Field for the British Isles’ in which a gallery floor of 35,000 diminutive clay figures implore the spectator to recognition of responsibility, agency and recognition of a common humanity. See Anthony Gormley, Field for the British Isles (Llandudno, Oriel Mostyn, 1994). Drums on the Dyke engages with recent debates over dam projects in central India, the floods in China and the wider ethical questions of the divisions between the creators and victims of environmental damage on a global scale.
combats against destinality… I think that only in a tradition with a profoundly political message does the theater have a reason for being’.10 Yet, clearly interwoven with these themes, the play reveals concerns which are equally important to a mapping of the political and ethical relationships between self and world. The theme of doubling, demonstrated so graphically by the puppets and their controllers, clearly articulates Cixous’s renewed interest in the employment of the theatre to portray the multiple identities that she perceives in human subjectivity. The dual function of the marionettes is emphasised in Cixous’s description of the play: A play peopled by puppets enacts the truth that, in society, we would like to deny: the extent to which we go backwards whilst advancing, that by threatening we are running away and that by running away we threaten, our backs are our other sides and from one moment to another we can change our fate, our choice, our faith, our loyalties, our type, our direction, our party and even our sex! What remains unchangeable is pain.11 (Une pièce peuplée de marionnettes joue la vérité que dans la société nous voudrions dénier : à quel point nous reculons en avançant, et en menaçant nous fuyons et en fuyant nous menaçons, le dos est notre autre face, et d’un instant à l’autre nous pouvons changer de destin, de choix, de foi, de fidélité, de genre, de direction, de parti et même de sexe ! Ce qui demeure inchangeable c’est la douleur.)
The apparent agency of the life-size puppets is revealed as illusory through the fate of their diminutive doubles in the final scene, inviting the audience to reconsider their own relationship to the puppets and ultimately their own situation as agents of change or objects of sacrifice. The self-reflexive nature of the final scene’s repositioning of the audience is indicative of the implications of the ending for a consideration of the role of theatre itself. The puppeteer is the sole survivor of the flood and can be aligned with the other representatives of poetic identity witnessed in Cixous’s theatre to serve as an illustration of the necessity in Cixousian aesthetics of assuring the inscription of loss, an inscription which he achieves through the recovery and arrangement of the tiny figures. Yet importantly, it is not the scene of writing which is evoked at this point, but the nature of theatre itself, as the present of the perform10 11
Hélène Cixous ‘Interview’ in New Literary History 28 (1997) pp. 425-456, p. 432. Hélène Cixous, ‘Le Théâtre surpris par les Marionnettes’, p. 120.
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ance is neither overshadowed nor undermined by an explicit reference to the writing of the play and the role of the writer. The direct, but silent, address to the audience at the end of Drums on the Dyke, through its playful yet moving animation of concepts of identification, empathy and catharsis, invites us to consider our own position as spectators and the possible diversity of roles available to us, ranging from dispassionate observers to engaged participants. Thus, Cixous’s relationship with the theatre continues to provide some of the most successful collaborations between writers and directors in contemporary French theatre, and a provocative exploration of the possible dramatisations of history and writing. A wider recognition of Cixous’s status as playwright can only be achieved through wider access to both the plays in performance and the texts in translation. That other directors and companies might produce these plays, outside of a collaborative framework with their author, is an exciting prospect. This book has identified the central preoccupations of Cixous’s theatre and discussed their place in the politics and poetics of her œuvre and its indelible insistence upon the inherent links between the structure of relationships between the individual and the other, and the wider articulations of political and ethical discourses. For Cixous, the assertion of such links is fundamental both to the role of the writer, and to the status of the theatre in contemporary culture.12 Her theatre constitutes an evolving and ambitious search for a mode in which self and other, the personal and the political, the mythical and the historical can be simultaneously engaged with by writer and audience. Cixous has described the primary motivation of her work as ‘... a question of writing today’s pain and making it heard without betraying it’.13 This remains a difficult project in which the thematic and formal innovations of her theatre seek to maintain a precarious balance between embrace and appropriation, the undeniable tension at the heart of all encounters of self and other, of subject and text.
12
13
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The recent staging of an adapted text on the position of the writer in contemporary Algeria bears witness to the continuation of these concerns. The play, L’Algérie – un couteau dans le soleil by Hélène Cixous, J. Senac, R. Belamri, T. Djaout, and H. Tibouchi, was performed at the 1997 Avignon festival by the company ‘Empreintes de demain’, directed by Hamida Aït El Hadj. Hélène Cixous, ‘Interview’ in Qui parle (1989), p. 9.
Bibliography
Hélène Cixous: Theatre La Pupille, (Paris: Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, 78 (1971), pp. 3-136. Le Nom d’Oedipe. Chant du corps interdit. (Paris: des femmes, 1978). Portrait de Dora. (Paris: des femmes, 1976). La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï. (Paris: Avant-scène, 1984). Théâtre (Paris: des femmes, 1986) L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk roi du Cambodge. (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1985). L’Indiade ou L’Inde de leurs rêves. (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1987). On ne part pas, on ne revient pas. (Paris: des femmes Antoinette Fouque, 1991). ‘Voile noire, voile blanche: Black Sail White Sail’ translated by Catherine A.F. MacGillivray New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 25 (2), (1994), pp. 219-354. La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes. (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1994). L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais). (Paris: des femmes, 1994). Tambours sur la digue (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1999).
Theatre in Translation Portrait of Dora translated by A. Barrows in Benmussa directs: Portrait of Dora and the Singular Life of Albert Nobbs (London: John Clader, 1979), pp. 27-67. Cixous: Other Writings ‘Aller à la mer’ translated by B. Kerslake Modern Drama 27 (1984), pp. 546-548. ‘The Conquest of the School at Madhubaï’ translated by Deborah Carpenter, Women and Performance 3 (1986), pp. 59-96.
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‘From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History’ translated by D. Carpenter Future Literary History (1989), pp. 1-8. ‘The Name of Oedipus’ translated by J. Miller and C. Makward in Out of Bounds: Women’s Theatre in French (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996). The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia translated by Juliet Flower Maccannell, Judith Pike and Lollie Groth (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).
Hélène Cixous: Selected other works Le Prénom de dieu (Paris: Grasset, 1967) Dedans (Paris: Grasset, 1969) L’Exil de James Joyce ou l'art du remplacement. (Paris: Grasset, 1969). Le Troisième Corps. (Paris: Grasset, 1970). ‘La Déroute du sujet ou le voyage imaginaire de Dora.’ Littérature et Psychanalyse, 3 (1971), pp. 79-86. Neutre (Paris: Grasset, 1972) and Catherine Clément. La Jeune née. (Paris: Union Générale des Editions 10/18, 1975). ‘Le Rire de la Méduse’ L’Arc 61 (1975), pp. 39-54. ‘Le Sexe ou la tête’ Cahiers du Grif 13 (1976), pp. 5-15. ‘Etre femme-juive’ Les Nouveaux Cahiers, 46 (1976), pp. 92-95. ‘La Missexualité ou jouis-je?’ Poétique, 26 (1976), pp. 383-402. La. (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). ‘Aller à la mer.’ Le Monde, 28 April 1977, p. 19. with Annie Leclerc. La Venue à l'écriture. (Paris: Union Générale des Editions, 1977). ‘Poesie e(s)t Politique?’ Des femmes en mouvement, Nov. 30, 1979, pp.29-33. Le Livre de Promethea. (Paris: Gallimard, 1983). ‘Tancrède continue.’ Etudes Freudiennes, 21/ 22 (1983), pp. 115-131. ‘L’Incarnation.’ L’Art du Théâtre, 5 (1986), pp. 95-98. ‘Une Témerité tremblante. Entretien avec Véronique Hotte.’ Théâtre Public 68 (1986), pp. 22-29. ‘Le Tragique de la Partition.’ Théâtre Public, 1 (1988), pp. 81-85. 150
‘Comment arriver au théâtre’ Lettre Internationale, 17 (1988), pp. 55-56. Manne aux Mandelstams aux Mandelas (Paris: des femmes Antoinette Fouque, 1988). ‘Théâtre enfoui.’ Europe, 726 (1989), pp. 72-77. ‘Je suis plutôt un être de bord’ Quinzaine Littéraire, 352 (1989), p. 10. ‘De la Scène de l’Inconscient à la scène de l’Histoire’ in Françoise van Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous: Chemins d’une écriture. (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), pp. 15-34. ‘The Two Countries of Writing: Theater and Poetical Fiction.’ in The Other Perspective in Gender and Culture: Rewriting Women and the Symbolic. Juliet Flower MacCannell (ed) (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1990). pp. 191-208. Jours de l’an. (Paris: des femmes, 1990). ‘L’auteur entre texte et théâtre: entretien avec Marie-Claire Ropars et Michèle Lagny’ Hors Cadre 8 (1990), pp. 31-65. ‘Clarice Lispector - Marina Tsvetaeva: Portraits’ Avant Garde 4 (1990), pp. 147-155. ‘A quoi bon le théâtre?’ Théâtre Ouvert (July 1991), pp 17-18. Coming to Writing and Other Essays. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991). Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector and Tsvetayeva. Translated by V.A. Conley (ed). (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992) Les Eumenides (translation) (Paris: Théâtre du Soleil, 1992) Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Translated by Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Hélène Cixous: Photos de racines. (Paris: des femmes, 1994). Or les lettres de mon père (Paris: des femmes, 1997). Stigmata: Escaping Texts. (London and New York : Routledge, 1998). and Jacques Derrida. Voiles. (Paris: Galilée, 1998). Les Rêveries de la femme sauvage. (Paris: Galilée, 2000). Unpublished seminar archives. 1987-present. Collected and transcribed by Marguerite Sandré.
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Interviews ‘Hélène Cixous et le ‘Portrait de Dora’.’ with Claire Devarrieux, Le Monde, 26 February 1976, p. 15. ‘Le Portrait de Dora’ with Madeleine Gagnon, Philippe Haeck and Patrick Straramn, Chroniques 1 ((1977), pp. 22-26. ‘Hélène Cixous reçoit le rêve de l’écriture’ with Anne Laurent.’ Libération, 30 December 1983 ‘L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge’ with Gisèle Barret, Jeu, (October 1985), pp. 131-153. ‘L’Auteur entre texte et Théâtre’. with Marie-Claire Ropars Hors Cadre, 8 (1990), pp. 31-65. Relevant critical texts Alexandrescu, Liliana. ‘Norodom Sihanouk: l’inachevé comme lecture Shakespearienne de l’histoire contemporaine.’ in Françoise van. Rossum-Guyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture, (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), pp. 187-204. Allen, J. & Young, I.M, (eds). The Thinking Muse: Feminism and Modern French Philososphy. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). Aneja, Ann. ‘The Medusa’s Slip: Hélène Cixous and the Underpinnings of Ecriture Féminine.’ Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 4 (1992), pp. 17-28. Artaud, Antonin. Le Théâtre et son Double. (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). Austin, Gayle. Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). Bablet, Marie-Louise & Bablet Denis. Le Théâtre du Soleil ou la quête du bonheur. (Paris: C.N.R.S, 1979). Banting, Pamela. ‘The Body as Pictogram: Rethinking Hélène Cixous’ écriture féminine.’ Textual Practice, 6 (1992), pp. 225-246. Barthes, Roland. Sur Racine. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1963). –— Mythologies (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957). Barucha, Ruston. Theatre and the World (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
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Battersby, Christine. Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. (London: The Women’s Press, 1989). Belli, Angela. Ancient Greek Myths and Modern Drama: A Study in Continuity. (New York: New York University Press, 1969). Belsey, Catherine and Moore Jane. The Feminist Reader: Essays in the Gender and Politics of Literary Theory. (London: Macmillan, 1989). Benmussa, Simone. Benmussa Directs. (London: John Calder Press, 1979). Bernheimer, Charles & Kahane, Claire. In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism. (London: Virago, 1985). Bhabha, Homi. (ed). Nation and Narration. (London and New York: Routledge, 1990). Binhammer, Katherine. ‘Metaphor or Metonymy? The Question of Essentialism in Cixous.’ Tessera, 10 (1991), pp. 65-79. Birkett, Jennifer. ‘The Limits of Language: The Theatre of Hélène Cixous.’ in Dunkley and Kirton. (eds) Voices in the Air: French Dramatists and the Resources of Language. (Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications, 1992). Bowlby, Rachel. ‘Flight Reservations: Cross-Cultural Positions in Contemporary Feminist Theory.’ Oxford Literary Review, 10 (1988), pp. 71-72. Boyman, Anne. ‘Dora or the Case of L’Ecriture Féminine.’ Qui Parle, 3 (1989), pp. 180-188. Bradby, David. Modern French Drama 1940-1990. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). –— & Williams David, Directors’ Theatre. (London: Macmillan, 1988). –— & Annie Sparks, Mise en Scène: French Theatre Now, (London: Methuen,1997) Brater, Enoch. (ed). Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Brennan, Teresa, (ed). Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis. (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Brodsky, Joseph. ‘The Condition we call Exile.’ Renaissance and Modern Studies, 34 (1990), pp. 1-8. Broe, Mary & Ingram, Angela (eds). Women Writing in Exile. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). Brugmann, Margret. ‘Between the Lines: On the Essayistic Experiments of Hélène Cixous in ‘Laugh of the Medusa’.’ in R. Joeres and E. 153
Mittman, (eds) The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), pp. 73-84. Canning, Charlotte. ‘The Critic as Playwright: Performing Hélène Cixous’ ‘Le Nom d’Oedipe’. Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory, 4 (1992), pp. 43-55. Carpenter, Deborah. ‘Hélène Cixous and North African Origin: Writing L’Orange.’ Celfan Review, 6 (1986), pp. 1-4. Case, Sue-Ellen. Feminism and Theatre. (London: Macmillan, 1988). –— (ed). Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and the Theatre. (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1990). Casteret, Anne-Marie. L’Affaire du sang (Paris: La Découverte, 1992) Chapsal, Madeleine. ‘Hélène Cixous contre Freud.’ L’Express, 28 June-4 July 1976, p. 64. Conley, Verena Aldermatt. ‘Hélène Cixous and the Uncovery of a Feminine Language.’ Women and Literature. 7 (1979), pp. 38-48. –— Hélène Cixous: Writing the Feminine. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). –— ‘Saying ‘Yes’ to the Other.’ Dalhousie French Studies, 13 (1987), pp. 92-99. –— ‘Hélène Cixous.’ in Catherine Brosman (ed) French Novelists Since 1960. (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989). –— Hélène Cixous. (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992). Costaz, Gilles. ‘L’Indiade: un troupeau d’animaux furieux. Un double entretien avec Hélène Cixous et Ariane Mnouchkine.’ Le Matin, 28 September, 1987, p. 18. Dane, Gabrielle. ‘Hysteria as Feminist Protest: Dora, Cixous, Acker’ Women’s Studies 23 (1994), pp. 231-255. Daly, Pierette. Heroic Tropes: Gender and Intertext. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993). Davis, Robert. ‘Woman as Oppositional Reader: Cixous on Discourse’ Papers on Language and Literature, 24, (1988), pp. 265-282. Defromont, Françoise. ‘L’Epopée du corps’ in Françoise van RossumGuyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture. (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), pp. 91-98. Delphy, Christine. ‘The Invention of French Feminism: An Essentialist Move.’ Yale French Studies 87 (1995), pp. 190-204.
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–— Our Voices, Our Selves. Women Writing for the French Theatre. (New York: Peter Lang, 1991). Lamont, Rosette. ‘“The Terrible but Unended Story of Norodom Sihanouk: King of Cambodia” by Hélène Cixous.’ Performing Arts Journal, 10 (1986). pp. 46-50. –— ‘The Reverse Side of a Portrait: The Dora of Freud and Cixous.’ in Enoch Brater (ed) Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Lefkowitz, Mary. Women in Greek Myth. (London: Duckworth, 1986). Lindsay, Cecile. ‘Body: French Feminist Utopias.’ French Review, 60 (1986), pp. 46-55. Longchampti, Jacques. ‘Cette Plainte de toutes les femmes: L’Oedipe de Cixous et Boucourechilev’ Le Monde (30 May 1978) p. 24. Makward, Christiane. ‘Structures du silence / de délire: Marguerite Duras / Hélène Cixous.’ Poétique, 35 (1978), pp. 314-324. –— ‘Theatre of Genocide.’ The Women’s Review of Books, 3 (1986). Negron, Mara, ‘Comment faire pour écrire l’Histoire poétiquement ou comment faire pour ne pas oublier’, in Françoise van RossumGuyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz (eds) Hélène Cixous, chemins d’une écriture. (Vincennes: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990), pp. 205-212. –— (ed). Lectures de la différence sexuelle. (Paris: des femmes, 1994). Marks, Elaine. ‘Women and Literature in France.’ Signs, 3 (1978), pp. 832-842. –— and Stamboulian, George. Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts / Critical Texts. (New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1979). –— and Courtivron, Isabelle de, (eds). New French Feminisms. (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). Micha, Réné. ‘La Tête de Dora sous Cixous.’ Critique 33 (1977), pp. 114-121. Miller, Judith G. ‘Jean Cocteau and Hélène Cixous: Oedipus.’ in J. Redmond (ed) Drama, Sex and Politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). pp. 203-211. –— ‘Contemporary Women’s Voices in French Theatre.’ Modern Drama, 32 (1989), pp. 5-23. Miller, Nancy K. (ed). The Poetics of Gender. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).
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Zeitlin, I. ‘Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality and the Feminine in Greek Drama.’ in J. Winkler and I. Zeitlin (eds) Nothing to do with Dionysus? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).
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Index Aeschylus, 13, 105, 108, 110, 111, 112, 119, 126, 127, 128, 129 Akhmatova, Anna, 13, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 133, 137 Algeria, 11, 79, 148 Artaud, Antonin, 52, 63, 64, 66 Barthes, Roland, 111, 112 bear, 7, 39, 94, 106 Benmussa, Simone, 28-31, 68 Bradby, David, 9, 66, 76 Brook, Peter, 88, 100, 101 Cixous, Hélène L’Algérie – un couteau dans le soleil, 148 ‘Aller à la mer’, 16, 20, 46, 55 Et soudain les nuits d’eveil, 144 L’Histoire (qu’on ne connaîtra jamais), 13, 23, 71, 90, 119, 127, 132, 135-138, 139, 142 L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge, 48, 66-67, 75-80, 83,, 88, 90-92, 95, 96, 104, 119, 137 L’Indiade ou l’Inde de leurs rêves, 48, 61, 68, 76, 88, 97, 120 La Jeune née, 7, 15, 16-19, 22, 31, 33, 43, 47, 65, 79, 101, 117 Le Livre de Promethea, 104 Manne aux Mandelstams aux Mandelas, 57, 79, 107, 136, 153, 162 Le Nom d’Oedipe. Chant du corps interdit, 11, 15, 34-35, 43-46, 62, 104, 117-118, 141, 143 On ne part pas, on ne revient pas, 126 Photos de racines, 65 Portrait de Dora, 10, 11, 15, 20, 2430 31, 33, 44, 46, 62, 117-118, 143 La Pupille, 23,
La Prise de l’école de Madhubaï, 48, 61, 71-73, 74, 84 Tambours sur la digue, 7, 144-146, 148 La Ville parjure ou le reveil des Erinyes, 13, 58, 68, 104-109, 114, 119, 126, 129, 133, 137, 139, 141, 142, 146 Voile noire, voile blanche, 8, 13, 118, 121-123, 133, 137, 139 création collective, 66 Derrida Jacques, 64 Duras, Marguerite, 30, 46 écriture féminine, 9, 10, 21-22, 55, 117 exile, 13, 46, 71, 77-80, 81, 83, 87, 9596, 102, 118, 121-123, 131, 139, 142 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 15, 23-29, 31, 3334, 44, 117 Furies, 105, 109, 110, 113 Gallop, Jane, 28, 29 history, 11-15, 24, 60, 66-68, 73, 74, 7679, 81-83, 94, 98, 102-104, 114, 118, 126, 137, 139, 141, 148 hysteric, 10-11, 15, 24, 29, 33, 43 Irigaray, Luce, 8, 35, 116 Kristeva, Julia, 8, 116 Lacan, Jacques, 26, 34-35 Mandelshtam, Nadezhda, 13, 79, 119, 120-123, 125, 133, 139 marionette, 145
165
maternal imagery, 72 Mesguich, Daniel, 126, 129, 130, 133, 134 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 7, 12, 46, 64-67, 75, 76, 84, 90, 97, 99, 102, 105, 109, 112,-124 myth, 11, 15, 18-19, 23, 41, 60, 79, 102104, 106, 111, 114, 126, 134, 135, 142 Niebelungenlied, 130, 135 Noh, 67, 75, 144, 145 Orientalism, 88, 97, 100-102 poetic identity, 10, 13, 44, 69, 78, 84, 86, 99, 107, 110, 114-118, 126, 128, 130, 134-139, 141, 143, 147 rabbi, 131, 133
166
scandale du sang, 129, 141 sexual difference, 54, 55, 101, 111 Shakespeare, William, 54, 59, 66, 67, 75, 76, 83, 98, 103, 122, 128 Shiach, Morag, 9, 46, 64, 74, 76, 94, 100, 102, 107 Spivak, Gayatri, 97, 99, 102 Sturlusson, Snorri, 13, 119, 130-133, 135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144 Théâtre du Soleil, 7, 12, 23, 46-47, 55, 64-68, 75, 76, 80, 88, 100, 102, 104, 105, 124, 144 Théâtre Populaire, 66 Tiresias, 41, 117 Wagner, Richard, 130, 131, 135
Modern French Identities Edited by Peter Collier This series aims to publish monographs, editions or collections of papers based on recent research into modern French Literature. It welcomes contributions from academics, researchers and writers in British and Irish universities in particular. Modern French Identities focuses on the French and Francophone writing of the twentieth century, whose formal experiments and revisions of genre have combined to create an entirely new set of literary forms, from the thematic autobiographies of Michel Leiris and Bernard Noël to the magic realism of French Caribbean writers. The idea that identities are constructed rather than found, and that the self is an area to explore rather than a given pretext, runs through much of modern French literature, from Proust, Gide and Apollinaire to Kristeva, Barthes, Duras, Germain and Roubaud. This series reflects a concern to explore the late-century turmoil in ideas and values that is expressed in the works of theorists like Lacan, Irigaray and Bourdieu and to follow through the impact of current ideologies such as feminism and postmodernism on the literary and cultural interpretation and presentation of the self, whether in terms of psychoanalytic theory, gender, autobiography, cinema, fiction and poetry, or in newer forms like performance art. The series will publish studies of individual authors and artists, comparative studies, and interdisciplinary projects, including those where art and cinema intersect with literature.
Volume 1
Victoria Best & Peter Collier (eds.): Powerful Bodies Performance in French Cultural Studies 220 pages. 1999. ISBN 3-906762-56-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4239-9
Volume 2
Julia Waters: Intersexual Rivalry A ‘Reading in Pairs’ of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet 228 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-74-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4626-2
Volume 3
Sarah Cooper: Relating to Queer Theory Rereading Sexual Self-Definition with Irigaray, Kristeva, Wittig and Cixous 231 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-46-X / US-ISBN 0-8204-4636-X
Volume 4
Julia Prest & Hannah Thompson (eds.): Corporeal Practices (Re)figuring the Body in French Studies 166 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906764-53-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4639-4
Volume 5
Victoria Best: Critical Subjectivities Identity and Narrative in the Work of Colette and Marguerite Duras 243 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906763-89-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-4631-9
Volume 6
David Houston Jones: The Body Abject: Self and Text in Jean Genet and Samuel Beckett 213 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906765-07-5 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5058-8
Volume 7
Robin MacKenzie: The Unconscious in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu 270 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-38-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5070-7
Volume 8
Rosemary Chapman: Siting the Quebec Novel The Representation of Space in Francophone Writing in Quebec 282 pages. 2000. ISBN 3-906758-85-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5090-1
Volume 9
Gill Rye: Reading for Change Interactions between Text and Identity in Contemporary French Women’s Writing (Baroche, Cixous, Constant) 223 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906765-97-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5315-3
Volume 10
Jonathan Paul Murphy: Proust’s Art Painting, Sculpture and Writing in A la recherche du temps perdu 248 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-17-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5319-6
Volume 11
Julia Dobson: Hélène Cixous and the Theatre. The Scene of Writing. 166 pages. 2002. ISBN 3-906766-20-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5322-6
Volume 12
Emily Butterworth & Kathryn Robson (eds.): Shifting Borders Theory and Identity in French Literature VIII + 208 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-86-1 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5602-0
Volume 13
Victoria Korzeniowska: The Heroine as Social Redeemer in the Plays of Jean Giraudoux 144 pages. 2001. ISBN 3-906766-92-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-5608-X
