week 9

An Author Clariced to Know: the case of Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector

Hélène Cixous, chiefly regarded as a “pioneer of the reflection on sexual difference, author of powerful critical essays, and prolific writer of poetic fiction” (Fort 1997: 425), is one of the most significant names of the academic world. Cixous’s dramatic, literary and scholarly works –particularly the ones between 1990 and 2000– have either taken the colonized countries, such as Cambodia and India (e.g. The Terrible But Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia and Manna, for the Mandelstams for the Mandelas), or the Japanese and Chinese theatre traditions (i.e. Drums on the Dike) as a focal point. Seen from this perspective, Hélène Cixous can be considered as one of the most prominent scholars of the West who has brought the issues, traditions, and socio-cultural elements of the “unknown” to the notice of the (Western) world. Yet, Cixous was concerned with the “foreign” long before the 1990s. For instance, in the 1970s, the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector had been a source of inspiration for Cixous in terms of developing her own way of writing and thinking (Arrojo 1999: 144). Various scholarly projects undertaken by Hélène Cixous have been quite influential during the “canonization” of Clarice Lispector in the Western world.

When this brief glance at Hélène Cixous and her “relationship” with Clarice Lispector is taken into consideration within postcolonial context, the abovementioned broad introduction becomes merely the tip of an iceberg: Hélène Cixous, being the agent of the dominant culture and Clarice Lispector, being the “treasure” of the distant lands become the personas of a dramatic performance in which the notions of fidelity, love and emotions are seriously questioned. Taking this argument as a point of commencement, Rosemary Arrojo, discusses Hélène Cixous’s “textual affair” with Clarice Lispector from the perspective of postcolonial theories in her article entitled, “Interpretation as Possessive Love: Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and the Ambivalence of Fidelity”.

By taking Jacques Lacan’s notion of “the subject presumed to know” –the person in whom one deems knowledge to exist, acquires the love of that individual– as a basis for her discussion, Arrojo offers a comprehensive analysis of Cixous’s approach to Lispector. According to Arrojo, in the (post)colonial situation, “the subaltern culture desires the knowledge which supposedly belongs to the dominant, the latter never doubts the legitimacy of its status as the owner and guardian of such knowledge. [C]onsequently, from such a perspective, the tragedy of the subaltern is precisely the blindness with which it devotes itself to this transferential love that only serves the interests of the dominant and feeds the illusion of ‘the subject presumed to know’, as it also legitimates the latter’s power to decide what is proper and what is not, what is desirable and what is not” (ibid.: 143).

As far as postcolonial translation theories are concerned, Hélène Cixous’s interpretation of Clarice Lispector –in a sense– suggests itself as a unique example. In the (post)colonial situation, “while choosing texts for rewriting, the dominant power appropriates only those texts that conform to the preexisting [sic] discursive parameters of its linguistic networks” (Sengupta 1995: 159). In the case of Cixous and Lispector, instead of a direct linguistic transfer, translation takes an obvious form of re-writing in the hands of authority and used in order to impose a certain attitude to a literary figure pertaining to a “foreign” culture (Arrojo 1999: 155, 159). Still, the case of Cixous and Lispector differs in one way from the general understanding of (post)colonial situation with respect to translation: whereas Lispector was “compatible” with Cixous’s way of thinking, therefore was conformed and even used as an aesthetic value by the French scholar’s in terms of developing her productivity, translation –precisely speaking, the translations of Lispector’s works– were strictly rejected by Hélène Cixous with the purpose of having the knowledge that she finds in Lispector merely for herself: The French scholar establishes a so-called “dialectical” relationship with the Brazilian writer in which Lispector’s value as a renowned literary figure becomes dependent to the point that her works conform to Cixous’s way of thinking (cf. ibid.:150).

The emphasis on the very adjective dialectical becomes quite interesting when one thinks of Cixous’s and Lispector’s situations. The dialectical relationship which Cixous assumes to have established with Lispector, actually lacks the essence –a logical dialogue between two individuals– of such a rational connection. As Rosemary Arrojo puts it, “in this truly asymmetrical dialogue, while Cixous practically does all the ‘talking’, Lispector is inevitably forced not only to be saying ‘the same thing everywhere’, as Cixous explicitly declares in an essay on Água Viva, but also to agree unconditionally with her powerful reader” (ibid.:153). Furthermore, Cixous under the guise of adopting a feminist strategy in terms of transforming Clarice Lispector’s name into a noun, adjective and a verb, explicitly appropriates Lispector to her own texts (cf. ibid.: 155). In this sense, Cixous’s interpretation of Lispector takes the form of “colonization”; Cixous’s approach to Lispector regarding the transformation of her name stems from the situation of Lispector. Lispector, being the representative of a peripheral culture can become the subject of this appropriation but as far as the distinguished literary figures of the twentieth century writing, say, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, are concerned Cixous’s approach differs (ibid.: 156).

The case of Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector suggests itself as a representative example of the arguments proposed by André Lefevere in his Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (1992). Within the framework proposes by Lefevere, Cixous achieves the position of a “professional” who is responsible for the aesthetics of a given society. However, Cixous, instead of writing for a given society, is writing texts for women, marginalized, and oppressed societies and in this sense differs from the position which one might bestow upon her within the theoretical framework of Lefevere. During the course of Hélène Cixous’s re-writing of Clarice Lispector, the French scholar herself becomes “‘the subject presumed to know’, particularly for those [her proponents] who are blindly devoted to her texts and who have transformed her into the author (and the authority) that she is today within the broad area of cultural studies” (Arrojo 1999: 155). Seen from this perspective, one can is see how the case of Hélène Cixous and Clarice Lispector can be discussed in detail within a broader (post)colonial systemic framework in the light of the arguments developed by Rosemary Arrojo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arrojo, Rosemary, “Interpretation as Possessive Love: Hélène Cixous, Clarice Lispector and the Ambivalence of Fidelity”, in Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish (eds.), Post-Colonial Translation, London-New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 141-161

Fort, Bernadette, “Theater, History, Ethics: An Interview with Hélène Cixous on The Perjured City, or the Awakening of the Furies”, in New Literary History vol. 28.3, The University of Virginia Press, USA, 1997, pp. 425-456

Lefevere, André, Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame, London and New York: Routledge, 1992

Sengupta, Mahasweta, “Translation as Manipulation: The Power of Images and Images of Power”, in Dingwaney, Anuradha and Maier, Carol, (eds.) Between Languages and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts. Pittsburgh and London: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 159-173