TEXT OF THE INTRODUCTORY ADDRESS DELIVERED BY PROFESSOR TONY ROCHE, UCD School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin on 16 June 2010, on the occasion of the conferring of the Degree of Doctor of Literature, honoris causa on HÉLÈNE CIXOUS
Professor Hélène Cixous may genuinely be described as a pioneer. As a leading feminist theorist, her writings have influenced several generations of scholars, not least on this island. As a novelist and playwright, her creative work has drawn her into fruitful interaction with other French writers like Jacques Derrida and with theatre practitioners like Ariane Mnouchkine. As an educationalist, she founded the Université de Paris VIII during the revolutionary year of 1968 as a groundbreaking centre for interdisciplinary study. Her subsequent development of Études Feminines as Chair of English Literature at Paris VIII saw her once more working against the grain to open up new areas of thought, as successive French governments tried (and failed) to overthrow the doctorate in the new discipline. But the foundational activity of this extraordinary and still evolving career was laid by her pioneering work on the writing of James Joyce and it is with that I would like to start.
Helène Cixous began work on Joyce in 1960. She was drawn to the Irish writer not only by a shared passion for language and its transformative possibilities but by certain cultural affiliations: her Jewishness enabled her understanding of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses and her Algerian background made her prescient on the postcolonial dimensions of the novel. Joyce formed a profound link in her connections with other emerging French theorists of the 1960s like Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. Her doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1968 was one of the first PhD dissertations on Joyce in France, subsequently published as L’exile de James Joyce, ou l’art de remplacement in 1969 and as The Exile of James Joyce in 1972. It is a sustained and brilliant meditation on the theme of exile in Joyce as ‘a rhythm of outgoing and return’ throughout the work and life. Joyce’s decision to leave Ireland with Nora and to write his masterpieces in self-imposed exile, to distance himself from but maintain contact with his origins, is only the starting-point for Cixous’ analysis. Alert to the frequent moves of household to which Joyce père subjected his family and which his eldest son continued on the continent, Cixous detects ‘an almost pathological nomadic urge’ in Joyce which leaves him with only two possible secure locations: an attachment to the body ‘as a place from which he cannot be dispossessed’ and an ever more absolute commitment to the manifestation of reality through language, to building a home in words. The body will eventually decay and die. Hence Joyce’s commitment ‘to seek out and develop a kind of writing that would not stop its evolution and development once the writer had left it.’ The death of the writer does not stop the writing; and it is a crucial point throughout Cixous’ writing that the words of the dead are transmitted and modified through the guts of living writers.
In the 1970s Cixous moved out from the last words of Molly in Ulysses ‘And yes, I said yes, I will yes’ toward the new writing, women’s writing, that she has done so much to pioneer and articulate. Of all the many texts by her that might be cited, I will restrict myself to the most influential: ‘Le rire de la meduse’/’The laugh of the medusa’ (1975/6). She develops her insights from Joyce to stipulate two sites in which this revolution can take place: in woman’s bodies – ‘my body knows unheard of songs’ – and in language. Cixous is alert to the binary oppositions within which women have been categorized and rendered passive and so is careful to avoid essentializing the characteristics of an écriture feminine since ‘it is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing’. But she does argue that woman’s writing will surpass patriarchal limits, that it will be transgressive. She argues against the divide between the oral and the written, for speaking and writing to come together, for the latter to be an act of reclamation by women of their bodies: ‘I write this as a woman, toward women. … Why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you: your body is yours, take it.’
Cixous has also probed these concerns through the media of prose fiction and drama. Her novel writing falls into three distinct phases or periods. The first novels, starting with Le Prénom de Dieu in 1967, are less experimental in style and work within the context of a second French feminism (après Beauvoir). The 1970s, not unsurprisingly, sees Cixous devise her own type of feminine writing in such novels as Souffles (1975), Angst (1977) and Déluge (1992). Since Les Lettres de mon père in 1997, her novels have become more autobiographical, probing painful memories of the past and examining family relationships. As her friend, former pupil and leading Joycean Jean-Michel Rabaté puts it, ‘issues of Jewishness and links with Jacques Derrida, who is often mourned, are more prominent’ in these recent novels. What fascinates me in Cixous’ plays is how she uses the stage space to access the unconscious. In her first play about Freud’s famous patient, Portrait de Dora (1976) – which ran for a whole year in Paris – we see the men in Dora’s life and hear what they say about her. But we also witness Dora’s dialogue with herself and the many possible selves she contains. Cixous’ most moving play, Voile Noire Voile Blanche (1994), is about the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. The setting is the snow-laden, forested countryside near the River Neva; but it is also and simultaneously the place of writing, where Akhmatova fills her poems of hope and revolution with these images.
It is so fitting that we gather on June 16th to honour Professor Hélène Cixous, this woman of so many achievements. She herself has written that ‘this day, June 16th, is not an ordinary day, for even if one can go to a funeral or visit a bawdy house or hospital any day, it is not every day that one will find one’s own truth there’. Hélène Cixous has found her own truth in everything she has written and left the rest of us profoundly in her debt.
Praehonorabilis Praeses, totaque Universitas,
Praesento vobis hunc meam filiam, quam scio tam moribus quam doctrina habilem et idoneam esse quae admittatur, honoris causa, ad gradum Doctoratus in Litteris; idque tibi fide mea testor ac spondeo, totique Academiae.