Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec 9780773570269

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Illustrations
Introduction
1 History, Ideology, Theory: Tracing the Contexts of Feminist Writing in the 1970s in France and Quebec
The Revival of Feminism in France and Quebec
The Question of a New Writing by/for Women
Hélène Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brassard, and Jeanne Hyvrard: Four "Mothers of Invention"
Feminist Writers and Avant-Garde Practice
2 (W)Rites of Passage: Hélène Cixous's La
Points of Departure
Bringing Language to (De)Light
3 Excavating the Body, Unwinding the (Inter)Text: Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur
Maternal Archaeographies: Writing the Body's Will and Legacy
Her Daring Paradigms: Hybridized Genres, Subversive Syntax, and Innovative Intertextualities
4 Drawing the Line and Transgressing Limits: Nicole Brossard's L'Amèr
The Lesbian Subject as Writer: Again(st) the Mother
The Problematics of Genre and Its Links with Gender
5 Madwomen and the Mother Tongue: Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels
Of Madness and the (M)other
The Refusal of Language and the Language of Refusal
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
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Citation preview

Mothers of Invention Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec

Mothers of Invention draws together innovative works of fiction written by French and Quebec feminists in the mid-1970s. Through an analysis of the strategies adopted by Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard as they rework maternal and (pro)creative metaphors and play with language and conventions of genre, Milena Santoro identifies a transatlantic community of women writers who share a subversive aesthetic that participates in, even as it transforms, the tradition of the avant-garde in twentieth-century literature. Santoro elucidates notoriously difficult works by the four "mothers of invention" studied - Cixous and Hyvrard from France, and Gagnon and Brossard from Quebec - showing how the rethinking of images associated with feminity and motherhood, a disruptive approach to language, and a subversive relation to novelistic conventions characterize these writers' search for a writing that will best express women's desires and dreams. Mothers of Invention situates such ideologically motivated textual practices within the avant-garde tradition, even as it suggests how women's experimental writings collectively transform our understanding of that tradition. Santoro makes clear the shared ethical and aesthetic commitments that nourished a transatlantic community whose contribution to mainstream literature and cultural productions, including postmodernism, is still being felt today. MILENA SANTORO is assistant professor of French at Georgetown University.

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Mothers of Invention Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec MILENA SANTORO

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

McGill-Queen's University Press 2002 ISBN 0-7735-2373-1 Legal deposit third quarter 2002 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free, and printed with vegetablebased, low voc inks. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been provided by the International Council for Canadian Studies through its Publishing Fund and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University. McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its publishing activities. We also acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Santoro, Milena Mothers of invention: feminist authors and experimental fiction in France and Quebec Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7735-2373-1 1. Feminist fiction, Canadian (French) - History and criticism. 2. Feminist fiction, French - History and criticism. 3. Experimental fiction, Canadian (French) History and criticism. 4. Experimentalfiction,French History and criticism. 5. Canadian fiction (French) Women authors - History and criticism. 6. French fiction - Women authors - History and criticism. 7. Canadian fiction (French) - 20th century - History and criticism. 8. Canadian fiction (French) - Quebec (Province) - History and criticism. 9. French fiction 2oth century - History and criticism, 1. Title. PQ149.S25 2002 0843.54'99287 c2001-904132-2 Typeset in Palatino 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City

To the many inspiring "mothers of invention" I have known but most especially to my own, most beloved mother, Rolande

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations xi Illustrations xiii Introduction 3 1 History, Ideology, Theory: Tracing the Contexts of Feminist Writing in the 1970s in France and Quebec 10 The Revival of Feminism in France and Quebec 10 The Question of a New Writing by/for Women 15 Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brassard, and Jeanne Hyvrard: Four "Mothers of Invention" 23 Feminist Writers and Avant-Garde Practice 30 2 (W)Rites of Passage: Helene Cixous's La 37 Points of Departure 41 Bringing Language to (De)Light 76 3 Excavating the Body, Unwinding the (Inter)Text: Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur 98 Maternal Archaeographies: Writing the Body's Will and Legacy 104 Her Daring Paradigms: Hybridized Genres, Subversive Syntax, and Innovative Intertextualities 129

viii Contents 4 Drawing the Line and Transgressing Limits: Nicole Brossard's L'Amer 153 The Lesbian Subject as Writer: Again(st) the Mother 162 The Problematics of Genre and Its Links with Gender 185 5 Madwomen and the Mother Tongue: Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels 208 Of Madness and the (M)other 212 The Refusal of Language and the Language of Refusal 246 Conclusion

268

Notes 283 Bibliography Index 337

319

Acknowledgments

The research for this book was completed in part with funding assistance from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from Princeton University and, more recently, with support from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University, whose Summer and Junior Research Grants were invaluable in allowing me to bring this project to completion. I am also indebted to the editorial staff of McGill-Queen's University Press for their deft and expedient shaping of the manuscript into book form and for their assistance in obtaining publication subventions. I would like to express my deep gratitude to the four authors whose works I study here: Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard. All have given generously of their time to answer my questions both in person and in writing, and have offered me sustained encouragement in the course of my work in the form of intellectual guidance, copies of their works (published and unpublished), or access to their archived materials. It is a great privilege to study the writings of women who are as inspiring in their mentoring and friendships as they are in their word craft. Over the ten years that I have been working on this project, I have been most grateful for the intellectual and personal support of Karen McPherson, an extraordinary adviser but an even better friend. I have also been blessed by Rene Lapierre's constant presence in defiance of all distances; his intellectual rigour, gentle guidance, and confidence in me have meant more than words can say for the progress of this book and its author.

x Acknowledgments Many others have accompanied and encouraged me over the course of this project, giving of their humour, their understanding, and their experience. My parents, Bruce and Rolande Andrews, are first among these, for they always manage to find the right words, creative thinking, and healthy laughter to see me through. My thanks also go to, in alphabetical order, Margaret and David Boyes, Cynthia Cupples, Louise Dupre, Barbara Havercroft, Anne and Uwe Hollerbach, Cathy Saunders, and of course, my husband, Robert Santoro, whose patience and love I treasure always. The author gratefully acknowledges permission to use material previously published in the following edited volumes: "Feminist Translation: Writing and Transmission among Women in Nicole Brossard's Le Desert mauve and Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur," in Women by Women: The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980, edited by Roseanna Lewis Dufault (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997): 147-68; and "Eblouissements: La portee des rencontres artistiques dans La," in Helene Cixous, croisees d'une ceuvre, edited by Mireille Calle-Gruber (Paris: Editions Galilee, 2000): 153-62. Poetry excerpts from Nicole Brossard's "Suite logique" in Le Centre blanc (©1978 Editions de 1'Hexagone) and from Madeleine Gagnon's Pensees du poeme (© 1983 VLB editeur and Madeleine Gagnon) are reproduced by permission.

Abbreviations

Ai Madeleine Gagnon, Autographie 1 A2 Madeleine Gagnon, Autographic 2 AL Nicole Brossard, The Aerial Letter L'Amer Nicole Brossard, L'Amèr ou le chapitre effritè Budge E.A. Wallis Budge, The Book of the Dead CTW Helene Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays Encore Jacques Lacan, Le Sèminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre xx: Encore Feminine Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and Sexuality the ecole freudienne HCPW Morag Shiach, Hèlène Cixous: A Politics of Writing HCR Helene Cixous, The Hèlène Cixous Reader HCWF Verena Conley, Hèlène Cixous: Writing the Feminine JN Hèlène Cixous, "Sorties" from La Jeune nee Laugh Helene Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa" LLA Nicole Brossard, La Lettre aèrienne LM Jeanne Hyvrard, La Meurtritude

xii Abbreviations

Lr Madeleine Gagnon, Lueur LV Alice Parker, Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard MD Jeanne Hyvrard, Mother Death MM Jeanne Hyvrard, Mere la mort NEW Hèlène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman PC Jeanne Hyvrard, La Pensee corps PdeC Jeanne Hyvrard, Les Prunes de Cythère PPR Charles Russell, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries Rire Helene Cixous, "Le Rire de la Meduse" si Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent Souv. Sigmund Freud, Un Souvenir d'enfance de Leonard de Vinci sv Louise Dupre, Strategies du vertige TAG Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde TOM Nicole Brossard, These Our Mothers, Or: The Disintegrating Chapter Venue Helene Cixous et al., La Venue a I'ecriture WF Karen Gould, Writing in the Feminine

1 The Nightmare, 1781. Henry Fuseli Founders Society purchase with funds from Mr and Mrs Bert L. Smokier and Mr and Mrs Lawrence A. Fleischman. Photograph ©2000 The Detroit Institute of Arts.

2 Cover of Hèlène Cixous's Souffles (1975) ©1975. Reprinted with permission of Editions des femmes.

3

The Prisoner's Dream, 1836 [Der Traum des Gefangenen].

Moritz von Schwind

Inv. Nr. 11565. Bayerische Staatsgemadesammlungen, Schack-Galerie, Munich.

AERIAL VISION The SPIRAL'S sequences in its energy and movement towards a female culture

c. Work done on the imaginary, language, thought, and knowledge Dangerous zone: madness, delirium, or genius d. Radical feminism, political, economic, cultural, social, ecological, and technological feminism

Women's invisibility The great darkness

a. New sense within Sense e.g. The Second Sex Three Guineas

d. Questing sense, born of the conquest of non-sense e. Sense renewed, through excursions into and explorations of non-sense f. New perspectives: new configurations of womanas-being-in-lhe-world of what's real, of reality, and of fiction

b. New sense in movement within Sense e.g. Feminism from the Sixties to the Eighties: bookstores, theatres, music, books, films, demonstrations, etc.

Female culture, whose existence essentially depends on our incursions into the territory until today held by non-sense. Without sequences 5 and 6, the spiral, repressed in the borderlines of sense, would end up closing in on itself.

4 "Aerial Vision," by Nicole Brossard Reprinted with permission of the Women's Press from The Aerial Letter, by Nicole Brossard, translated by Marlene Wildeman. ©1988. www.womenpress.ca.

Mothers of Invention

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Introduction Pendant qu'un certain fèminisme prend sa bouderie et son isolement pour de la contestation et peut-etre meme de la dissidence, une veritable innovation feminine (dans quelque champ social que ce soit) n'est pas possible avant que soient eclaires la maternite, la creation feminine et le rapport entre elles.

[While a certain feminism continues to mistake its own sulking isolation for political protest or even dissidence, real female innovation (in whatever social field) will only come about when maternity, female creation, and the link between them are better understood.] Julia Kristeva1

Julia Kristeva, along with her contemporaries Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray, is often mentioned as one of the defining thinkers of what North American literary critics have called "French feminism." And yet as the above excerpt from a 1977 Tel Quel essay shows, even at this fairly early juncture in contemporary French feminist activism, Kristeva is at pains to distance herself from "a certain feminism," already negatively connoted because it does not practise the forms of dissidence and innovation that she so clearly valorizes both in this essay and elsewhere in her important body of critical work. In the current period of considerable anti-feminist backlash and ebbing commitment to feminist activism, which make some women nostalgic for what they perceive as the movement's halcyon days, it seems salutary to look back at this earlier critical moment and recall how conflicted the terrain of feminist thought has always been historically, both in the international forum2 and within its culturally specific manifestations. Indeed, conflicts have been one of the greatest sources of vitality in feminist thinking, and they have led to a greater understanding and tolerance of differences among women which are essential to the ethical objectives at the heart of the movement. In the French context, given the substantial differences among those who have been called - and have often denied being - "French feminists," I must therefore wholeheartedly agree with critics such as Lynne Huffer when she suggests that since "the concept [of French feminism] no longer works ... it is time to move on."3

4 Mothers of Invention

While it seems clear that moving on from a reductive view of French feminism's major figures and consequential texts is both a timely and a necessary gesture, I am not convinced that this can be done solely through the kind of comparative theoretical and philosophical critique so often undertaken by American feminist scholars, of which Huffer's Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures is an impressive recent example. By contrast, the way I choose to move beyond the French feminist cliches nourished by so many blanket statements about women's texts of the 19705 is to examine the writing practices that women were really exploring, how they were doing so, and in what context. While the debates over essentialism, difference, or the ineluctable conservatism of nostalgic notions of the mother as origin (effectively argued by Huffer) are indeed important, I prefer to combat the reification of certain figures and the conceptual stances imputed to them by sidestepping these seemingly endless theoretical skirmishes to focus, rather, on what they have often occulted or even completely ignored: the prodigiously creative and fascinating fiction written by the very women who were caught up in what was arguably feminism's finest moment. It is my desire and purpose that we not forget the extent to which creative writing fuelled and complemented the gestation of feminist theory in French. In addition, I believe a persuasive case can be made that dissidence and innovation do in fact characterize what many women were publishing during this period, and that, moreover, there was a definite community of thought and a shared set of strategies among women writing in French both within and outside France. It is significant that in her move to work around one of the central impasses she has noted in current feminist theory, Huffer finds support and a fresh perspective in the writings of Quebec author Nicole Brossard. Like many of her readers, I too have been inspired by Brossard's writings ever since I first encountered her best-known experimental novel, Le Desert mauve, in 1990. In fact, it was my readings of Quebec women authors that sparked my desire to explore French feminist thought, since it seemed unquestionable that these francophone women's works were influenced by those of French theorists such as Cixous and Irigaray, in addition to Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. What the ensuing research revealed, of course, both nourished and transformed my initial insights into these women's writings, for I discovered that there was a broader context of exchange and dialogue than many have been willing to grant these women, and that their connections were reciprocal, rather than merely unidirectional along an axis of influence extending from the French metropolitan centre to the francophone periphery of Quebec.

5 Introduction

In addition, in the course of my readings of the last ten years, I have found it a particularly effective strategy to analyze feminist writing in French outside France if one wishes to look past an undifferentiated notion of French feminism and to gain a better understanding of both the specificity and the congruity of the feminist voices emerging during the period. In its transatlantic scope at least, the feminist activism of the 19703 thus distinguishes itself from other twentiethcentury intellectual and artistic movements that have had Paris as their epicentre, such as surrealism, the "new novel," or, more recently, the theoretical schools generated by post-structuralist thinkers like Derrida. It is nonetheless undeniable that much of the energy displayed in the feminist revival of the 19705 came from the same kind of contestation and dissidence that have characterized past avant-garde or revolutionary currents. What Kristeva so cogently points out in the Tel Quel article cited above, however, is the difficulty that women can experience in maintaining a dissident stance when they are so biologically and psychologically identified with maternity, and thus with perpetuating the social order which the reproduction of the species implies. As she puts it, "Si la grossesse est un seuil entre nature et culture, la maternite est un pont entre singularite et ethique. Une femme s'en trouve done, par les evenements de sa vie, aux charnieres de la socialite - garantie et menace pour sa perennite [If pregnancy is a threshold between nature and culture, maternity is a bridge between singularity and ethics. Through the events of her life, a woman thus finds herself at the pivot of sociality - she is at once the guarantee and a threat to its stability]."4 It is this pivotal role occupied by women that so many 19705 feminists took as a point of departure for their efforts to rethink themselves and their ethical commitment to their sex, both politically, in terms of women's control of their bodies and reproductive capacity, and aesthetically, in the writing that some women elaborated in response to the need to rethink and revise the symbolic dimensions and representations of their lives. Since necessity is the mother of invention, as the proverb goes, many women who began to write in the heat of feminist fervour were seeking to invent on all possible fronts: to find new words for their experiences, to create new literary forms to express their visions, and to explore new mythic and symbolic paradigms that would allow women to think beyond their traditional roles as man's "other" and mother, and thus to liberate their creative and intellectual potential. As part of the renewal of feminism in the 19703, it was thus very important to understand and deconstruct traditional notions of maternity and to displace these in favour

6 Mothers of Invention

of other, more open visions of women's relationships to themselves and the dreams and desires through which they relate to the world. It should not be surprising, then, that most fiction written by women touched by feminism reflects a preoccupation with the figure of the mother. As psychoanalytic theory so compellingly shows us, the bond between child and mother is a primary one, and it can exercise a determining influence on a person's subsequent relationships with others, in addition to his or her development as an individual. A significant number of critics have already analyzed the importance of the mother figure and the question of maternity for women writers, both in France and in Quebec.5 Still, much remains to be done, as Kristeva puts it, to comprehend the diversity of approaches to "maternity, female creation, and the link between them" in women's fiction. In this study, it is my intent to explore these intimately linked problematics in the works of four women whose fiction of the mid- to late 19705 began to display a womancentred and often explicitly feminist aesthetic sensibility. Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard all invented their fictions out of a sense of necessity; their work clearly shows that they felt compelled to try out new forms and daring language and images in their efforts to imagine and revise the maternal and the feminine. Furthermore, because of their provocative, innovative writing, these women quickly emerged as leading voices for their generation and communities of women, making them influential literary "foremothers" in their own right in the two decades since their experimental texts first challenged readers to rethink the feminine in language. Mothers of Invention is thus a study with a dual purpose. First, as a corrective to past scholarship, it focuses on fiction in an attempt to show the enduring power of the creative impulses born of these women's personal experiences and feminist trajectories. I concentrate solely on novels by these authors because it is a genre they all practise and because, in its length and conventions, the novel offers a particularly inviting showcase for their creativity and target for their irreverent wit. Second, this study attempts to show how these women's fictions go further than so many, including Kristeva herself,6 have been willing to grant: in each case, the writing strategies deployed are examined for their subversive intent and effects, so that, collectively, the avant-garde nature of these women's work becomes clear. This second objective, outlined in the chapter that follows, will in fact provide a cohesive subtext for the succeeding analyses, which furnish support for my claim that these women deserve to be granted the status of the last avatar of the avant-garde in the twentieth

7 Introduction

century. In essence, then, this study emphasizes textual praxis, rather than the theoretical debates surrounding the essentialism of a "feminine writing," debates that have often evolved without adequate consideration of the innovative fictions elaborated by these authors and their contemporaries. Moreover, whereas in the past, critics have examined these writers almost exclusively in isolation from one another, my readings offer a broader, comparative perspective on what was a transatlantic community of women working towards similar political, ethical, and aesthetic goals with virtually identical creative strategies. While all these women's works demand that we read differently, with our minds open to their disruptive approaches to traditional narrative fiction, in the readings I perform I try to expose both the more approachable aspects and the enigmas of their writing. After an introductory chapter outlining the historical context of the renewal of feminism in France and Quebec, the justification for including the authors chosen, and the theoretical background for this study, each author is treated individually through close readings of her texts. I begin with Helene Cixous because of her international renown as a theorist of the feminine, but also because she was the most important literary voice for French feminism in the mid-1970s. My second chapter examines La (1976), a novel that Cixous published the year following "Le Rire de la Meduse" and La Jeune nee, and thus a work informed by her theoretical and political thinking of the period which for many continues to define her reputation today. As this novel opens with a scene of rebirth and discovery, it offers a fitting entry into the key problems facing the feminist writer, who must seek a voice and create a space - give birth to herself, in other words - in a language so often used to silence and elide women's presence. The following chapter deals with Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur, a novel published in 1979 but based on and even reprising work dating back to her collaboration with Helene Cixous on La Venue a Vecriture, which began in 1975. At the time, as Quebec's leading Marxist feminist, Gagnon was in particularly close contact with what was happening in France, in part because she had completed her doctorate there in the 19603, in part because she was pursuing an academic career that involved teaching French texts, with an emphasis on theory. Her close links and collaborative efforts with feminists from Europe constitute one of the justifications for considering these women as a community, involved with elaborating a self-consciously avant-garde feminist poetics. Moreover, Gagnon's Lueur offers one of the most notable examples of what the often-theorized "writing the

8 Mothers of Invention

body" might look like in practice, through its portrayal of the corporeal links between a grandmother figure and the narrator, who transmits her foremother's heritage of unspoken words and will. I devote the next chapter to Nicole Brossard's L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite (1977), a crucial text for literary feminism in Quebec and one that challenges the limits of genre as it plays with language and traditional gender roles in the creation of its "fiction-theory." Brossard is arguably the most internationally recognized Quebec feminist author today, and her move from formalism to a feminist-oriented textual experimentation in the mid-1970s can be seen as emblematic of the kind of shift in thinking and writing that many women performed during that time. Her clear lesbian commitment, however, makes much of her early work seem more radical in hindsight, in particular because of the powerful language with which she refuses "the reproduction of mothering" studied by psychoanalytic critics such as Nancy Chodorow.7 As Brossard puts it, in the signature phrase that has come to symbolize the power of her novel, "J'ai tue le ventre et je 1'ecris [I have murdered the womb and I am writing it]."8 In its thematic and metaphoric content, as in its fragmented form and poetic play with language, L'Amer continues to be one of the most innovative and challenging manifestations of feministinspired textuality. Finally, I examine the first three novels of Jeanne Hyvrard - Les Prunes de Cythere (1975), Mere la mart (1976), and La Meurtritude (1977) - a triptych in which images of a woman's madness are rethought from the perspective of the patient, who is desperate to understand the language being used to marginalize her. In fact, in all of the works chosen for this study, the conscious-use (and misuse) of language is central to the ways in which the authors try to defy normative readings as they borrow from poetic and mythic traditions to fuel their disorienting narratives. What is most interesting about Hyvrard, however, is how her resolutely heterosexual vision of a woman's plight leads her to a critique of maternity similar to that performed by Brossard, for in Hyvrard's textual world the mother is literally and figuratively a smotherer, and so must be resisted in order to ensure the daughter's survival and sanity. Furthermore, Hyvrard's extensive and lyrical use of repetitions within and across her early novels offers yet another example of how women were challenging the boundaries and possibilities of the genre as part of their efforts to rethink questions of gender. As with most avant-garde movements, the collective dynamism of these women's pursuit of an experimental textuality expressive of a feminist aesthetic did eventually wane. In the concluding chapter,

9 Introduction

I resituate the work of Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard within the evolution of their respective literary communities, tracing both the extent of their influence and their individual trajectories since the height of their creative engagement with feminist ideology. That all four women continue to pursue their creative visions today is a testimony to the endurance and compelling originality of the literary voices they have cultivated - voices that have made them such inspiring "mothers of invention" in the eyes of their contemporaries and, I dare hope, in those of many readers to come.

i History, Ideology, Theory: Tracing the Contexts of Feminist Writing in the 19705 in France and Quebec

THE REVIVAL OF FEMINISM IN FRANCE AND QUEBEC AND THE WRITING IT E N G E N D E R E D

The decade of the 19605 was a period of intellectual and political upheaval in both France and Quebec. In France, social and labour unrest contributed to the events of May 1968, which fostered a renewed consciousness of political efficacy and responsibility within the French intellectual community. In Quebec, following what has been called the "Grande Noirceur" (the great darkness) of the Duplessis era,1 this was the period of the Quiet Revolution, a time of dramatic change that saw a radical secularization and a massive socio-economic restructuring of the province. In both cases, one of the outcomes of such change was a revival of active feminism, the likes of which had not been seen since campaigns for women's suffrage.2 This revival of feminism, while not entirely unaware of earlier collective initiatives by and for women, was nonetheless rooted in specific conditions in the contemporary context of each country, conditions that ultimately produced movements with strikingly similar objectives and results. In France, even after Simone de Beauvoir published her foundational study Le Deuxieme Sexe in 1949, feminism did not immediately take hold as a mobilizing force for change, although some historians have pointed out the importance of the establishment of women's associations with reformist tendencies during the post-war era.3 Still, it was not until various leftist groups inspired

ii Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

and even initiated the student protests against the educational system in 1968 that French women began to find an effective voice for their collective frustrations and desire for social justice.4 In Quebec, while "democratization"5 of the educational system after Duplessis symbolically offered women new opportunities, the historians of the Clio Collective have documented that women were still not encouraged to take advantage of such openings and thus generally continued to enter fields consonant with the traditional view of women's "natural" abilities.6 If one adds to such educational issues the impetus of the more politicized labour forces in which women were also participating in the two countries, as well as the influential example of how radical feminism grew out of civil-rights activism in the United States,7 it becomes clearer how such social upheaval came to inspire French and Quebec women to mobilize in favour of radical social change. Still, perhaps because of the complex confluence of so many factors, very few historians or critics have fully elucidated the social and historical reasons for the virtually simultaneous renewal of feminism in so many Western countries.8 When global comments are offered, however, observers often suggest or imply that it was the egalitarian or reformist ideals fuelling the strikes and demonstrations of the 19605 which most directly fostered the growing realization among women that such ideals did not extend to them, inasmuch as they did not respond specifically to women's need for legal, economic, and social self-determination and equality. Such a linking between reformist ideals, social upheaval, and the rise of a feminist consciousness is not historically without precedent; one only has to look to the involvement of women such as Olympe de Gouges in the French Revolution for an important instance of such a conjunction. In this regard, what distinguishes the contemporary renewal of feminism from its precursors must be in part the international scope of the realization of the oppression suffered by women and the ensuing struggle for change. This struggle, coming at a time so rich in examples of the political impact of other collective efforts worldwide, seems to have been the most likely catalyst for the coalescence of women's energies into various influential feminist organizations,9 of which the Mouvement de liberation des femmes (MLF) and the Front de liberation des femmes (FLF) are, respectively, the best known examples in France and Quebec. This resurgence of politically active but heterogeneous women's liberation movements was accompanied in many countries by a new interest in the expression of women's condition and identity in writing, that medium which, in the hands of male authors, had so often

12 Mothers of Invention

served to silence the woman's voice and preserve her status as other, as object. Simone de Beauvoir articulates this problem succinctly in her introduction to Le Deuxieme Sexe: "[la femme] se determine et se differencie par rapport a rhomme et non celui-ci par rapport a elle; elle est rtnessentiel en face de 1'essentiel. II est le Sujet, il est 1'Absolu: elle est 1'Autre [woman is determined and differentiated in relation to man, and not the latter in relation to her; she is the inessential opposite the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute: she is the Other]."10 Coming after de Beauvoir's groundbreaking theoretical analysis of women's condition in Western culture, it is no wonder that, as Isabelle de Courtivron puts it, "the newly-radicalized feminists who emerged from May '68 aimed not so much at raising consciousness and claiming equity as they did at asserting differences and transforming structures. Significantly, they concentrated on language rather than on sociological or biological facts, and, instead of demanding acceptance into the symbolic order, were intent on altering, displacing and transforming that very order/'11 Along with various ongoing campaigns to improve women's legal and economic status, then, the decade of the 19703 witnessed increased theoretical and literary production by women about women, aimed in part at improving their current condition by confronting their historical subordination in language and culture. In 1974 Editions des femmes became the first contemporary French publisher to dedicate itself exclusively to women's writings. In addition, French women founded journals such as Le Torchon brule, Sorcieres, des femmes en mouvements (which saw various incarnations), and Questions feministes (edited by de Beauvoir), in order to provide a forum for their creativity and concerns. In Quebec one could similarly point to journals such as Quebecoises deboutte! and Les Tetes de pioche12 and to the establishment of Les Editions du Remue-menage and La Pleine Lune dedicated to the same purpose. These genderspecific incursions into the publishing world in France and Quebec offered an invaluable forum for a new literature that involved not only an affirmation of the woman as subject but also a valorization of a female or feminine tradition repressed or rejected by a cultural canon overwhelmingly dominated by male authors and authorities. It is this context that nurtured the generation of feminist writers who emerged during the 19703 in France and Quebec, that is, writers who display "an awareness of women's oppression-repression that initiates both analyses of the dimension of this oppression-repression, and strategies for liberation." This definition of feminism, elaborated in the prefatory remarks to Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron's classic anthology, New French Feminisms,13 is broad enough to encompass the

13 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

visions of those women who have in fact openly rejected being called "feminists." Such rejection of the term has been due in part to its radical connotations in particular socio-political contexts and in part to "internal" differences in political and theoretical approaches which have proven divisive for women's movements in many Western countries.14 As defined by Marks and de Courtivron, however, the term "feminism" allows us to see more clearly what united so many women, pointing to the fundamental realization that inspired them to seek a voice, either literary or political, more or less concurrently in so many countries. Within such a perspective, differences in women's writings can be explored without losing sight of the importance of the feminist groundswell. Even if some critics, eager to preserve the originality of individual voices and conscious of the lack of focused "leadership" in the collective phenomenon, still shy away from speaking of a literary movement, it seems equally inaccurate to deny the commonality of purpose displayed in the works of so many women writers. To speak of this phenomenon, it seems appropriate to begin by using the concept of a community, for if, as some claim, feminism did not produce an identifiable literary school per se, we can see that it significantly affected and inspired the writings of many women authors such that a new polyphony of feminist voices emerged in texts on both sides of the Atlantic, which continues, although admittedly more sotto voce, even to this day. Indeed, it seems all the more fitting to describe this feminist outpouring in terms of a community when one remembers earlier communities of women and their role in the history of women's writing in French, beginning with Christine de Pizan's Cite des dames?5 The contemporary feminist writing community, while not unified around a single movement or central figure, nonetheless displays common directions in writing which in fact far exceed the localized scope of earlier communities of literary women.16 Contemporary women writers of Quebec and France, animated by the desire for an appropriate expression of their woman-centred visions, explore similar textual avenues and focus on the same kinds of problems in language and life, despite distance and cultural differences. But what of the exchange of ideas and common concerns that is also necessary for such a community to exist? While a cursory glance at much of the critical work to date might lead one to conclude that the French and Quebec women writers who began to publish in the wake of the renewed activism of the 19605 were at the time completely isolated from one another, this view is not accurate. In reality, some of these writers did find ways to maintain more than a peripheral awareness of their transatlantic colleagues'

14 Mothers of Invention

literary and theoretical activities and displayed a tangible sense of community in their writing. As it became apparent in the early 19705 that women's struggles for equality were of global consequence, the organization of international conferences on women and women's writing became an increasingly common occurrence and contributed to the establishment of a transatlantic feminist network. One of the earliest of such conferences was the 1975 "Rencontre quebecoise internationale des ecrivains," devoted to "La Femme et 1'ecriture." In addition to many of Quebec's promising writers and literati, this event was attended by such French authors and feminist theorists as Christiane Rochefort, Annie Leclerc, Dominique Desanti, and Michele Perrein. For Claire Lejeune, the only Belgian writer present and one of the conference's closing speakers, it was a key "first meeting"17 that permitted her to initiate important relationships with her North American counterparts such as Madeleine Gagnon, one of Quebec's most prominent and militantly Marxist women poets. In fact, Lejeune subsequently sent many of her texts to Gagnon and maintained a correspondence with her, in addition to returning to guest lecture several times at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, where Gagnon was a professor.18 In turn, Gagnon visited Belgium and lectured there as well as in Paris, where she was welcomed, among others, by Christiane Rochefort and Annie Leclerc; Gagnon and Leclerc had in fact become close friends at the 1975 conference and collaborated on several occasions in the years that followed. Following as it did the two influential series of lectures given by the French feminist author Helene Cixous in 1972 and 1974, the 1975 conference in Montreal represented a watershed in these women's consciousness of international solidarity, in addition to serving as an expression of the sustained interest by those in Quebec feminist and literary circles in what their French contemporaries were producing.19 Although Quebec writers were clearly more informed about the literary scene in France than the reverse, one can also find contemporaneous evidence of interest on the part of French women writers in what was being thought and written by women in Quebec. A notable manifestation of this awareness is the collaborative effort of La Venue a 1'ecriture (1977), for which Helene Cixous invited the participation of Annie Leclerc and Madeleine Gagnon. As Gagnon described it in an interview, "Cixous avait lu mes textes et les avait aimes. Quant a Annie, nous nous sommes rencontrees au colloque et sommes tornbees en amour comme deux petites filles. Je crois qu'il y a eu une rencontre d'amour de nos textes .... Trois ecritures, trois demarches faites separement mais s'imbriquant les unes dans les autres [Cixous

15 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec had read my texts and had liked them. As for Annie, we met at the conference and fell head over heels like two little girls. I think that there was a meeting of hearts in our texts ... Three types of writing, three approaches developed separately but interwoven]."20 While one could legitimately argue that French feminist thought had more influence on the work of Quebec women writers than the reverse, such remarks show that the degree of awareness in each community of the other's presence and production was not insignificant. Given the similar historical circumstances surrounding and inspiring the concurrent activities of women writers in the two communities, as well as transatlantic collaborations and correspondences such as those outlined above, it is somewhat surprising that no systematic study has been undertaken to date that compares the work of Quebec and French feminist writers of the 19703. Indeed, most feminist literary critics have generally chosen to consider these writers in isolation or in relation to their local peers, and have thereby elided an important dimension of their works - their sense of connection with other women in the world, a conscious solidarity of purpose that defies borders and distance. It is my intent, in the close readings that form the core of this study, to bridge this critical gap and provide convincing evidence of the similarities and reciprocal influences that highlight the common matrix of ideas and strategies which effectively fuse the two communities into one larger, if loosely knit, literary context. THE Q U E S T I O N OF A NEW W R I T I N G BY/FOR WOMEN

Even if one is reluctant to grant that writings by feminists constitute a coherent literary movement in the 19703, it is clear that the community I have described does indeed have its pivotal texts, key moments of articulation that serve to inspire, and even enflame, the larger group of women participants. Two such texts, both from the pen of Helene Cixous, appeared in 1975, declared the "Year of the Woman" by the United Nations: "Le Rire de la Meduse" ("The Laugh of the Medusa") and La Jeune nee (The Newly Born Woman}.21 In these essays, Cixous articulates both the aspirations and the anger common to so many of her contemporaries, for she calls women to writing in order to undo their alienation in Western society and literature, challenging them to speak and write their difference and to have confidence in the power of their creativity to express their desires. This new writing is something she calls "ecriture feminine," a term that has remained unshakably identified with Cixous's thought and writing ever since: "Je parlerai de 1'ecriture feminine: de ce qu'elle fera. II

16 Mothers of Invention

faut que la femme s'ecrive: que la femme ecrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes a 1'ecriture, dont elles ont ete eloignees aussi violemment qu'elles Tont ete de leurs corps; pour les memes raisons, par la rneme loi, dans le meme but mortel. II faut que la femme se mette au texte - comme au monde, et a 1'histoire, - de son propre mouvement [I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text - as into the world and into history - by her own movement]" (Rire 39).22 This dramatic opening to "Le Rire de la Meduse" provided both a beacon and a catch phrase for women writers and their critics, focusing the debate on the "difference" of the new writing that many claimed women were or could be producing. The first urge, of course, was to try to explain the term, to typify the writing it described, a writing that many thought Cixous's daring essay exemplified, even as it denied the very possibility of absolute definition: Impossible de definir une pratique feminine de 1'ecriture, d'une impossibilite qui se maintiendra car on ne pourra jamais theoriser cette pratique, 1'enfermer, la coder, ce qui ne signifie pas qu'elle n'existe pas. Mais elle excedera toujours le discours que regit le systeme phallocentrique ... Elle ne se laissera penser que par les sujets casseurs des automatismes, les coureurs de bords qu'aucune autorite ne subjugue jamais. (Rire 45) [It is impossible to define a feminine practice of writing, and this is an impossibility that will remain, for this practice can never be theorized, enclosed, coded - which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. But it will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system ... It will be conceived of only by subjects who are breakers of automatisms, by peripheral figures that no authority can ever subjugate.] (Laugh 883)

Though Cixous here attempts to escape the dangers of having her thinking immobilized by labels and definitions, the body of her essay is nonetheless suggestive of her perspective; her insistence that women write is accompanied by her reflections on the nature of the new writing they might produce, which, although she is careful not to link it entirely to the sex of the author, still seems to involve a privileging of the female body "with its thousand and one thresholds of ardor" (Laugh 885). As she says, "il faut que la femme ecrive par son corps, qu'elle invente la langue imprenable qui creve les cloisonnements, classes et rhetoriques, ordonnances et codes [women must

17 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes]" (Rire 48, Laugh 886). Although for Cixous, "il n'y a pas ... une femme generate, une femme type [there is ... no general woman, no one typical woman]," to which she adds that "on ne peut parler d'une sexualite feminine [you can't talk about a female sexuality]" (Rire 39, Laugh 876), her essay does address a collectivity of women and their common experience, with remarks such as "[s]'il y a un 'propre['] de la femme, c'est paradoxalement sa capacite de se de-proprier sans calcul ... Sa libido est cosmique, comme son inconscient est mondial [if there is a 'property' that is uniquely woman's, it is her ability to divest herself of everything unselfishly ... Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide]" (Rire 50). By exploring the question of difference and by positing an alternative, "feminine" libidinal economy complementary to the "masculine" one privileged by Freud, Cixous tries to find an opening and a voice for what emerges from women's unconscious, a source of inspiration for writing that cannot but upset the traditional, phallocentric order because of its difference: Un texte feminin ne peut pas ne pas etre plus que subversif: s'il s'ecrit, c'est en soulevant, volcanique, la vieille croute immobiliere, porteuse des investissements masculins, et pas autrement; il n'y a pas de place pour elle si elle n'est pas un il? Si elle est elle-elle, ce n'est qu'a tout casser, a mettre en pieces les batis des institutions, a faire sauter la loi en 1'air ... Parce qu'elle ne peut pas, des qu'elle se fraye sa voie dans le symbolique ne pas en faire le chaosmos du "personnel," de ses pronoms, de ses noms et de sa clique de referents. (Rire 49) [A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there's no other way. There's no room for her if she's not a he. If she's a her-she, it's in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law ... For once she blazes her trail in the symbolic, she cannot fail to make of it the chaosmos of the "personal" - in her pronouns, her nouns, and her clique of referents.] (Laugh 888) It is on the basis of this "chaosmos"23 on the level of language (the symbolic) that Cixous predicts the development of a writing in the feminine, a writing drawing on the feminine unconscious and its drives which could revolutionize our vision of sexuality, textuality, and thus reality, for "1'ecriture est la possibilite meme du changement [writing is precisely the very possibility of change]" (Rire 42, Laugh 879). The effect of this essay and the concomitant publication of Cixous's lengthier and more precise formulations on femininity in La ]eune nee

i8 Mothers of Invention would be hard to overestimate, particularly if considered on an international scale. In fact, while the term "ecriture feminine" appears prominently only in the beginning of "Le Rire de la Meduse" and far more discreetly in La Jeune nee,24 it nevertheless quickly provided the impetus for a multitude of contemporary feminist writings and became the focal point of a lively debate on questions of essentialism and the nature of feminine difference. Some, such as Irma Garcia in her Promenades femmilieres: Recherches sur I'ecriture feminine,25 accepted the concept of feminine writing without question and set out to inventory its manifestations, while others, less convinced, probed the questions it raised from various angles. Claude Pujade-Renaud, for instance, although interested in the relationship between the female body and writing, nonetheless astutely cautioned against the tendency to "enfermer les productions des femmes dans un regionalisme dialectal ou dans un regionalisme sexue, limite aux zones erogenes [confine Women's output to a dialectical regionalism or a sexual regionalism, limited to the erogenous zones]."26 Indeed, however Cixous has tried to reformulate her ideas since 1975 - and she has repeatedly articulated her dissatisfaction with terms such as "masculine" and "feminine," which she uses for expediency27 - it seems that "ecriture feminine" will always be read as central to her writing and theory. While Cixous's reflections on the feminine and writing, along with those of her contemporaries Annie Leclerc, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva,28 fuelled imaginations and offered direction for women writing in France and elsewhere, similar ideas were also appearing in the writings of Quebec feminists. As Karen Gould explains in her invaluable study Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec, the development of feminism in Quebec was significantly influenced by nationalism and socialism and the discourse of decolonization that such ideological commitments engendered (WF 10-17). In addition, many Quebec feminists were inspired and influenced as much by anglophone feminists as by the French; the film Some American Feminists, made by Luce Guilbeault and Nicole Brossard in the mid-1970s, is a who's who of American feminists which shows the Quebec women's acute awareness of their American peers' activities and thought.29 Still, in terms of theoretical reflections, one would be hard put to single out a Quebec text contemporary with "Le Rire de la Meduse" that served in the same way to focus discussion. Even the 1971 Manifeste des femmes quebecoises did not attain the status of a founding text, despite its consciousness-raising ambitions.30 In Quebec at least, "theory" from at home and abroad seems more often to have been incorporated into creative endeavours, or

19 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec when it was articulated, seems not to have become an immediate nexus for debate within the feminist community. This phenomenon would perhaps explain the subversive effect (and the relative success) of novels such as Louky Bersianik's L'Euguelionne (1976) and Nicole Brossard's L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite (1977), which offered analyses of women's oppression and repression from within the frame of fiction. Indeed, although both authors would eventually publish collections of theoretical reflections, these would not appear until after the feminist movement's crest: Brossard's La Lettre aerienne dates from 1985, while Bersianik's La Main tranchante du symbole came out as late as 199O.31 These observations are not to imply that Quebec women did not theorize their condition and ideals at the time of feminism's heyday, for one has only to look at some of the texts published since Madeleine Gagnon's "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture," the essay she began writing as early as 1975 for La Venue a 1'ecriture (1977), to be persuaded otherwise.32 Nicole Brossard's La Lettre aerienne (1985) in fact includes texts dating from 1975 and 1978, in addition to more recent material. One could also cite, for example, Madeleine OuelletteMichalska's L'Echappee des discours de I'ceil (1981), France Theoret's Entre raison et deraison (1987), or the collaborative effort of La Theorie, un dimanche (i988).33 Such theoretical texts, products more than initiators of exchanges within Quebec's feminist community, both borrow from and build upon works by their French and American counterparts, tackling many of the same ideas and suggesting various liberatory strategies for women's writing. Theoret, in Entre raison et deraison, succinctly articulates the distinctions made in Quebec between feminist and feminine writing and "writing in the feminine" (here termed "ecriture au feminin"): Ce que nous avons designe sous 1'expression ecrits feministes ce sont les essais, les textes manifestaires, les temoignages, c'est-a-dire les ecrits qui participent de la communication. Nous avons appele litterature feminine les ceuvres litteraires qui ne remettent pas en question, dans le langage, les stereotypes feminins. L'ecriture au feminin proprement dite propose 1'emergence du sujet feminin dans un langage conscient du fait que la langue patriarcale rend souvent invisible le feminin. L'emergence du feminin confronte le symbolique, repensant tout autant 1'unite lexicale et le genre litteraire.34 [What we have designated by the term feminist writings are essays, manifestos, and testimonies, that is, works that perform a communicative function.

2O Mothers of Invention We have called feminine literature the literary works that do not throw into question, in and via language, feminine stereotypes. Actual writing in the feminine proposes the emergence of the feminine subject in a language conscious of the fact that patriarchal speech often renders the feminine invisible. The emergence of the feminine confronts the symbolic, rethinking both lexical units and literary genre.]

While such practical distinctions, which show among other things the qualified use of the terms "feminist" and "feminine" in Quebec, could still be considered refinements of Cixous's original conceptions, they should also be seen in their complementarity to the more sexually and politically radical theories of Nicole Brossard or Madeleine Gagnon. Unlike Cixous in her theory, these two writers insist on both the metaphorical and the more literal importance of the body in the production of a female textuality and authority. As Gagnon writes in "Mon Corps dans recriture," Je veux etre douce, douce et tout dire. Couler comme du bon lait que je buvais ou que je donne. La liberation des femmes, e.a veut dire la parole du corps ... Je veux deshabiller ce corps et 1'habiter. Je veux le meubler de mots, couvrir les places qui m'attendent, les blancs laisses la par son histoire d'ecritures qui jusque-la m'avaient echappe ... Et s'il faut parfois que la syntaxe s'erupte et s'insurge centre la linearite apprise, je suivrai les mouvements, les emiettements paradigmes du mien, jusqu'au lexique qui ne m'est pas etranger mais refuse par des flics du bon ordre.35 [I want to be gentle, gentle and explicit. To flow like good milk that I used to drink or that I give. Women's liberation means the language of the body ... I want to undress that body and inhabit it. I want to furnish it with words, cover the places that await me, the blank spaces left there by its history of writings that had until then escaped me ... And if sometimes this means syntax must erupt and revolt against acquired linearity, I will follow the movements, the shattered paradigms that are mine, even into a vocabulary that is not alien to me but denounced by the cops of law and order.]36

If, as Karen Gould asserts, the most prominent Quebec feminist writers differ from Cixous in that they "consistently understood their own approach to writing in the feminine as a gender-marked experimental writing practice in which women alone are engaged, rather than as an anti-logocentric or anti-phallocentric approach to writing that male and female writers alike might pursue" (WF 38), we can nonetheless see in texts such as Gagnon's a drive, similar to Cixous's, to write her desires and her body in terms expressive of their difference. In effect, what all these women are searching for is a writing

21 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

which, whether or not it is articulated through the trope of the female body, will introduce more than just a new, woman-centred thematic network into the novel. As shown in the last sentences of the passages by Theoret and Gagnon quoted above, both insist upon language as the privileged site of change, a change that involves a conscious displacement of women from their place of silence in the symbolic, along with a deliberate textual inscription - a (re)placement - of a gender-marked voice and subjectivity, which Louky Bersianik has called women's "gynility."37 What tends to be elided in some of the theoretical and critical discussions of femininity in the texts of French and Quebec women writers is the problem of equating a theory of "ecriture feminine" with the real project of writing. Devotees of the theory vehemently reject accusations of essentialism, but in doing so, they neglect some of the other questions that arise when textuality is so linked with female sexuality and the unconscious. Claude Pujade-Renaud, for example, points out that 1'avenement d'un "ecrire-femme" repose, entre autres, sur ce glissement du corps a 1'inconscient ... par rapport a ce mythe d'une continuite reliant inconscient-corps-ecriture, il convient de rappeler combien le corps peut aussi servir de defense centre 1'inconscient ou combien 1'inconscient peut venir s'y camoufler en un jeu de derobades symptomatiques. Ainsi des "maux-de-corps" de 1'hysterique. L'illusion serait de croire que ces "mauxde-corps" pourraient, d'eux-memes, se transformer en "mots-de-corps."38 [the advent of a "woman-writing" depends, among other things, on this slippage from the body to the unconscious ... with respect to this mythic continuity linking unconscious-body-writing, it is worth recalling to what extent the body can also serve as a defence against the unconscious or how the unconscious can be camouflaged by the body in a play of symptomatic evasions. Thus the "body-woes" of the hysteric. The illusion would be to believe that these "bodywoes" could, on their own, transform themselves into "body words."]

If there is no unmediated relation to the body, then it seems that what is more important is to scrutinize the mediation, that is, language and the way it is used to construct, deconstruct, or reconstruct the notion of femininity. Writing in the feminine in this sense is perhaps better described as feminist writing, for it is the ideological angle with which these women come to writing that motivates their deliberate (mis)use of language as they rewrite and invent representations of the feminine adequate to their woman-centred visions. In essence, my premise is that "ecriture feminine," while powerful as an ideal, has less of a real existence than many critics and feminists

22 Mothers of Invention

alike have been willing to admit. At best, one can say that in searching for new means to express the reality of women's subjectivities, desires, and visions, these women writers bring new perspectives to the literary forms and the content they choose: their transgressive explorations of textuality are illuminating but cannot by themselves succeed in overthrowing the structures of language or society in any definitive way. As early as 1978, Madeleine Gagnon herself seems to realize this problem, when she speaks of her vision of the collective feminist project in terms of the metaphor of an illuminated book: Nous devons operer un re-centrement, hors de la tradition elitiste et exclusiviste. Non pas un logo-centre. Mais un centre enluminure ou le texte et les marges se joindront. Nous devons joyeusement nous astreindre a un double travail historique: travail de de-construction de leurs projections de nous, non pas liberantes mais alienantes; travail de resurrection de nos mortes mal lues, de nos mortes non muettes.39 [We must conduct a re-centring, outside the elitist and exclusionary tradition. Not a logo-centre. But rather an illuminated centre where the text and the margins will conjoin. We must joyously apply ourselves to a double historical task: a de-construction of their projections of us, which are not liberating but alienating, and a resurrection of our poorly read ancestors, of our non-mute foremothers.]

Gagnon here does not pretend to do away with the book of history, but rather, she advocates looking at it in another way, shifting the centre of our attention from the symbolic hegemony of men's words towards the (re)discovery of images and texts more reflective of women's stories. In her vision, "text and margin will be conjoined" and are thus to be considered concomitantly, rather than one at the expense of the other. Clearly, this is a pragmatic - some might even say conciliatory - view of what can reasonably be accomplished by women's incursions into the logocentric annals of tradition. Perhaps a similar kind of pragmatism explains why, in New French Feminisms, Marks and de Courtivron placed Cixous's "Rire de la Meduse" in the section entitled "Utopias," rather than with the texts they classify as "Creations" or "Manifestoes - Actions."40 Pragmatism is certainly one of the reasons that Nicole Brossard, for her part, insists on her "strategic" use of the term "ecriture feminine," for as she says, "le rapport qu'un sujet a a 1'ecriture a mon avis est identique pour un homme et pour une femme. Ce qui est important, c'est la notion de sujet. C'est un rapport qu'un sujet pose [the relationship that a subject has to writing is, in my opinion, identical for a man and a

23 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

woman. What is important is the notion of the subject. It is a relationship that a subject posits]."41 And in feminist fiction at least, this relationship is posited consciously, always already coloured by an ideological position, for if, to repeat a famous slogan, "la vie privee est politique" (the personal is political), then the writing of women's desires must ineluctably be so too. HELENE CIXOUS, MADELEINE GAGNON, NICOLE BROSSARD, AND JEANNE HYVRARD:

FOUR "MOTHERS OF I N V E N T I O N "

Just as feminism brought into sharper focus the personal dimensions of the political, so feminist literary criticism has shown reinvigorated interest in the intimate and in the author's context because they may significantly enrich the reading of a text. This move away from the "author is dead" school of criticism is particularly pertinent for works by women whose lived experiences shape and fuel their writing and for whom, to borrow Brossard's phrase, "[ejcrire je suis une femme est plein de consequences" (to write I am a woman is full of consequences) (L'Amer 53). For this study, where my principal focus is on close readings, I too feel that it is essential to recall who the writers I have chosen are, and why they are important in the history of feminist literature and beyond. I have chosen to limit the scope of my analysis to those subjects who are exemplary, at least in some sense, and yet allow for the most pertinent and interesting discussion of individual literary originality. Furthermore, the time frame within which the chosen texts fall is relatively short, ranging from Cixous's publication of "Le Rire de la Meduse" in 1975 to the appearance of Gagnon's novel Lueur in 1979, a period which is roughly that of the height of feminist literary experimentation. Naturally, this focus has meant that certain important and interesting authors whose work falls outside this period have been omitted, including Monique Wittig, a key figure in the earliest stages of French feminist renewal, whose experimental novels Les Guerilleres (1969) and Le Corps lesbien (1974) were influential for many in the movement in which she was a pioneer.42 Writers such as Chantal Chawaf, who published her first book at Editions des femmes in 1974, or Louky Bersianik and France Theoret, whose first major works appeared during the same period in Quebec, are also excluded because their work is similar to that of the authors I have chosen, because it is not sufficiently experimental, or because their most interesting publications were not part of the initial creative groundswell.

24 Mothers of Invention

It thus is for reasons of timing, eminence, and originality that the chapters of this study are dedicated to four writers who emerged from the social unrest of the 19605 and early 19705 with a new feminist voice in writing, namely, Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard. Of these four, Cixous is undoubtedly the most prominent. A Joyce scholar and key participant in the founding of the Vincennes campus as an alternative to the repressive environment of the existing Parisian universities, she began her writing career in 1967 with the short stories of Le Prenom de Dieu, which was followed by Dedans in 1969, a first novel for which she received the prestigious Prix Medicis. Since these first publications, Cixous has written at what sometimes seems an astonishing rate: at the threshold of the new millennium, she already had to her credit over twenty-five novels, several highly acclaimed plays, and some shorter works of fiction, as well as a number of influential theoretical texts among the many articles and essays for which she is perhaps still best known in North America. While all of Cixous's work is concerned with revitalizing language and the patterns of traditional narrative, it is possible to see her career in terms of cycles or periods. The early works, informed (some might say overly so) by the discourses of deconstruction and psychoanalysis that are part of her intellectual landscape, are marked by a radical subversion of character, plot, and language not uncommon in the work of French writers influenced by Joyce and by the generation of experimental writing associated with the "nouveau roman." Cixous's first works were followed by a shift in the mid-1970s toward less neutral, more woman-centred, if not openly feminist, narratives and a commitment to publish with Editions des femmes.43 This period, during which she founded the Centre de recherches en etudes feminines at the Universite de Paris vin in 1974, was the most important in terms of her theoretical writing on difference and femininity. More recently, Cixous has produced a considerable body of writings for the theatre and in her fiction has moved toward an increasingly limpid and often more autobiographical prose whose clarity could perhaps be linked in part to her appreciation for the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, which began when she encountered the latter's texts in the late 1970s.44 As it is a new feminist consciousness in literature that interests us here, the "middle" period of Cixous's writing will be our focus, as seen through the lens of a detailed analysis of La. This novel, first published in 1976 by Gallimard and reprinted in 1979 by Editions des femmes, is perhaps most closely associated chronologically and in content with the theoretical works "Le Rire de la Meduse" and La

25 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

Jeune Nee. While it was not the first of her novels to deal with questions of sexual difference, it is arguably both the most obviously feminist and the most accessible of the period, since it is far less hermetic than texts such as Partie, for example, another work she published that year. While I will not hesitate to mention other novels where pertinent, La seems an appropriate text to open my discussion, especially since it has not received as much sustained critical attention as Cixous's other contemporaneous works, such as Souffles or the successful theatrical production of Le Portrait de Dora. Very close to Cixous in age, Madeleine Gagnon also shares with her Algerian-born contemporary the prestige of a French graduate education and the experience of an academic career. Gagnon left her birthplace of Amqui on the Gaspe Peninsula to pursue undergraduate studies in literature in Acadia and then a master's degree in philosophy at the Universite de Montreal. She then spent most of the crucial decade of the 19605 in France, where she successfully defended her thesis on Claudel in 1968, the same year that Cixous obtained a doctorate for her influential reading of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Given this coincidence, it is surely not surprising that the writings of these two women display strikingly similar frames of reference and areas of theoretical concern. By pursuing an education in France when they did, they both witnessed and were part of a decade of extraordinary intellectual effervescence, when existentialism and its emphasis on "engaged" writing was waning in the face of challenging new discourses on politics, language, and textuality that were discussed and disseminated in, among other places, the pages of the journal Tel Quel (1960-82), that "vast and powerful intellectual enterprise that terrorized the French intellectual scene for over two decades," as one literary historian puts it.45 Notwithstanding their individual trajectories, it is apparent that both Gagnon and Cixous were marked by the intellectual air du temps; they both found creative inspiration in the insights of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and their early works are all informed to some degree by an understanding of the discourses of Marxism and structuralism, as well as of the theories of contemporary philosophers and critics such as Derrida, Foucault, and Kristeva. In a final coincidence of note, the two women also began their writing careers at approximately the same time, choosing the short-story form for their first publications: Gagnon's Les Morts-vivants appeared in 1969, a mere two years after Cixous's Prenom de Dieu. Since returning to Quebec to take up a position in literature at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal (which she held from 1969 to 1982), Gagnon has enjoyed a sustained career, with some fifteen works of

26 Mothers of Invention

prose and eleven collections of poetry to her credit, as well as two retrospective anthologies entitled Autographic i and 2 (1982 and 1989 respectively). During the 19705 she became a prominent, figure on Montreal's literary and ideological scene, co-founding the radical leftist journal Chroniques in 1975 and participating in union leadership at the university, even as she was writing the militant Marxist poetry of Pour lesfemmes et tons les autres (1974) and Poelitique (1975), the former of which is considered by some to be the first clearly feminist collection of poetry in Quebec.46 Interestingly enough, Gagnon's awakening to feminist thinking and her shift in interest towards women's issues are contemporaneous with, if not earlier than, Cixous's own, although the latter's publications and academic initiatives perhaps seemed to respond more quickly to the new groundswell at the time. As the previously unpublished text entitled "Inedit" included in Autographic i shows, as early as 1971 Gagnon was inspired by her reading of the influential double issue of Partisans dedicated to the "Liberation des femmes, annee zero" in 1970. In addition to mentioning this "beau titre, [qui] fait du bien [beautiful title, (that) heartens one]" (Ai, 41), she also gives a list of intellectual references and reflections on her own writing, concluding: "Je veux ecrire un autre livre. J'oscille entre poesie et roman. Cette hesitation va me poursuivre longtemps. J'ai 1'impression. Je fais des encres [I want to write another book. I hesitate between poetry and the novel. This hesitation will dog me for a long time. I have the impression. I am doing some ink drawings]" (Ai, 42). As it turned out, Gagnon opted to voice her resolutely Marxist and increasingly feminist ideological convictions primarily in poetry in the early 19705, although she did contribute the prose text of "Amour parallele" to Portraits du voyage (1975), signing it with the nickname "la gentille lionne" (the kind lioness), inspired, it would seem, by Cixous's use of the expression in Portrait du soleil (i974).47 That Gagnon knew this novel well is confirmed by the interview with Cixous that she did for the February 1975 issue of Chroniques, entitled "Entretien: Dora et Portrait du soleil. Madeleine Gagnon, Philippe Haeck et Patrick Straram le Bison ravi parlent avec Helene Cixous." Notably, this issue of the journal was devoted to the theme "Liberation de la femme et lutte des classes" (Women's liberation and class struggle), a title that reflects the increasing priority of feminism over Marxism that would take hold in Gagnon's work from this point on. The period of Gagnon's most evident feminist engagement, 197579, is also one during which her emphasis shifted mainly to prose, in the form of articles for journals (especially Chroniques}, theoretical essays such as "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture" for La Venue a I'ecriture,

27 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

or the "complaintes politiques" she contributed to Retailles, coauthored in 1977 with Denise Boucher. It is not until Lueur, the "roman archeologique" she published in 1979, then, that Gagnon actually fulfills her desire to write a novel. What is most original about this experimental and oneiric text is the way in which it incorporates and echoes her earlier poetry and theory, making it a fascinating collage of genres as well as of her thematic and stylistic concerns from throughout her period of Marxist-feminist commitment. For contemporary observers, this novel clearly represented the culmination of Gagnon's explorations of "1'ecriture au feminin/'48 and according to one critic, it even elevated her work above Brossard's in the cosmogony of "la nouvelle textualite dans nos lettres."49 Since her departure from full-time academic employment in 1982, Gagnon's writing has earned her significant institutional recognition if not broad popular success, garnering her Canada's most prestigious prize, the Governor General's Award, for Chant pour un Quebec lointain (1991) and membership in the Academic canadiennefrangaise (1988). Nonetheless, she unfortunately remains perhaps the least internationally recognized author of the four highlighted here, despite her inclusion in Gould's important study Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental 'Writing in Quebec. It is in part because of this neglect, in addition to the sensuous lyricism of her approach to "1'ecriture au feminin" and the important link she furnishes between the French and Quebec communities of women, that I have chosen to focus on her here. Born in 1943, Nicole Brossard is five years younger than Helene Cixous, a difference in age that meant that she would be one of the students who attended Cixous's lectures at the Universite de Montreal in the early 19705. Brossard's publishing career, however, began before both Cixous's and Gagnon's, for her first poetry, appropriately entitled "Aube a la saison" (Dawn to the season), appeared in 1965, the same year she co-founded the important Quebec literary journal La Barre du jour. Principally a poet, Brossard did not try her hand at prose fiction until Un livre in 1970. As of 2001, she had written nine novels in addition to her twenty-six collections of poetry, the essays of La Lettre aerienne, and Anthologie de la poesie desfemmes au Quebec (1991), co-edited with Lisette Girouard, the first such collection to appear in print. Brossard has twice won the Governor General's Award for her poetry, and she also received the Quebec government's Prix AthanaseDavid, a lifetime achievement award for literature, in 1991. She has been a member of the Academie canadienne-frangaise since 1993. Like Cixous, Brossard did not always write from a feminist perspective, and indeed, her trajectory in poetry could be seen in parallel

28 Mothers of Invention to that of Cixous's novels, for her initial formalistic experimentation underwent a radical shift in the early 19703 with her turn toward women in both her political views and her personal life. In her poetry the shift can be seen as early as "Masculin grammaticale" (sic), published with the Governor General Award-winning "Mecanique jongleuse" in 1974, and even more obviously in "Le Cortex exuberant" (La Bane du jour 44 [1974]), in La Partie pour le tout (1975), and in the theatrical monologue "L'Ecrivain," which she contributed to La Nef des sorcieres (i976).5° As my principal focus is prose fiction, however, it is L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite that will concern us here. Published in 1977, this text inaugurates what Brossard has called "theorie/ fiction" or "fictiontheory," that is, a prose work which combines fictional, poetic, and theoretical elements, a hybridization of genres that many other feminist writers would also explore. Within this community, however, L'Amer remains the most important and controversial text of its kind in Quebec. Written during Brossard's collaboration on Les Tetes de pioche, the radical feminist journal she co-founded and edited from 1976 to 1979, L'Amer embodies the personal commitment as a lesbian feminist which has informed Brossard's work for over twenty years, while providing ample proof of her awareness of the larger community within which she writes. As it is thanks in large part to the success of her more recent prose texts such as Picture Theory (1982), Le Desert mauve (1987), and Baroque d'aube (1995) that she owes her current international reputation as Quebec's foremost feminist writer, it is both fitting and necessary to return to L'Amer as a pivotal moment in the ascending, dynamic spiral of Brossard's woman-centred thinking and of her prolific career. Of the four authors considered here, Jeanne Hyvrard is the youngest in terms of her "coming to writing," for she began her career in 1975 with the publication of Les Prunes de Cythere.51 This first publication led to a career that now comprises twenty works of prose and poetry, six of which were published by Editions des femmes. Hyvrard's writing was almost immediately recognized by critics and reviewers as important and innovative,52 and more recently her work has been acknowledged in dissertations and critical studies, particularly by Canadian scholars. The first English translation of one of her books, Mother Death, appeared in 1988, while the first book-length exploration of her work, Jennifer Waelti-Walters's Jeanne Hyvrard: Theorist of the Modern World, was published in 1996. Although Hyvrard is still not as well known as Cixous and Brossard, her voice is undeniably one of the clearest and most compelling of the generation of

29 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

women writers I am drawing on here, and like Gagnon's, it deserves to be more widely heard, if only because of the contrast she offers with the trajectories of her contemporaries. Interestingly enough, while the renewal of feminism in France subsequent to the ferment of 1968 encouraged many women to write and speak out in France and elsewhere, Jeanne Hyvrard was not one of these. At the time, she was in fact teaching in the Antilles, and by her own account, it was her specific experiences there which incited her to write, not necessarily in order to strive for a feminist or feminine form of expression but, rather, to understand and analyze the repressive and oppressive effects of colonialism in the region. As she puts it, "J'ai vu dans la perte de soi-meme qui arrivait aux Antillais ce qui m'etait arrive, a moi, comme femme, j'ai vu sans le comprendre, sans que c.a passe par la tete, c'est-a-dire, qu'est-ce qui arrive quand on s'est completement perdu soi-meme. II n'y a plus de conflit, on a disparu. Moi, j'avais disparu [I saw in the loss of self that was happening to the Antilleans what had happened to me, as a woman, I saw it without understanding it, that is, without consciously thinking about what happens when one has lost oneself. There is no more conflict, because you disappear. I had disappeared myself]."53 Hyvrard's experiences, it could be argued, thus give her something in common with Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, and Nicole Brossard, all of whom were born outside of continental France, in Algeria and Canada respectively, countries historically affected by western European colonialist policies. Of these authors, however, the French-born Hyvrard is, surprisingly enough, the one most explicitly concerned with the alienation experienced by colonized peoples, as the above quotation shows. This disturbing effect of colonialism has often been compared by feminist theorists and writers to the alienation of women in Western culture, a comparison that has fuelled their arguments for social and political change. Nonetheless, it is important to note that if Cixous, Gagnon, and Brossard were highly conscious and even active participants in the new wave of feminist politicization in Europe and North America, Hyvrard was not. As she explains in an interview, she did not take part in the renewal of feminist activities in the 19705: Quand dans la foulee soixante-huitarde eclata le Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes, j'etais ... a mille lieues de ce type de preoccupations. Je 1'etais d'autant plus que j'etais heureuse en menage, et ne comprenais vraiment pas de quoi il s'agissait ... Aussi ma rencontre avec les groupes femmes de 1'epoque fut-elle un bide complet ... On m'y prit a parti comme taree et

30 Mothers of Invention reactionnaire parce que j'etais mariee, heureuse en menage, et entendais le rester ... Or done, a la suite de cette malheureuse experience, je ne me suis pas interessee aux mouvements feminins.54 [When the Women's Liberation Movement exploded in the wake of '68,1 was ... a million miles from such ideas. I was all the more so since I was happily married, and did not understand what it was all about... Consequently, my meeting with the women's groups of the time was a complete failure ... I was branded as sick and reactionary because I was married, happily so, and intended to remain so ... And therefore, as a result of this unhappy experience, I was not really interested in feminist movements.]

Despite this lack of interest in active feminism, which distinguishes her from many of her writing contemporaries, Hyvrard does not deny the influence of history, of the French cultural and intellectual climate of her time, on her thinking, for as she puts it earlier in the same interview, "[c]'est parce que j'ai baigne largement et profondement dans cette epoque et ce pays que je peux maintenant croitre de toutes ces branches textuelles et conceptuelles [it is because I was immersed deeply and broadly in this time and this country that I can now grow with all these textual and conceptual branches]."55 However one chooses to weigh the autobiographical detail offered by such declarations, it is nonetheless true that, on the level of writing at least, Jeanne Hyvrard's focus and the passion with which she expresses her concerns are very close to those emerging in contemporaneous writings by Cixous, Gagnon, and Brossard. It is for this reason that, beyond their individual literary merit, her works are of interest in the present study, providing, in the "difference" of their author's trajectory from that of the other women writers examined here, still further confirmation of the importance, vitality, and community of the textual and aesthetic questions that have guided this analysis. FEMINIST WRITERS AND AVANT-GARDE PRACTICE

Thus far I have taken care to establish the existence of a community of women writers with common aesthetic goals and shared literary strategies. I have also suggested that among the many women who came to writing in the 19705, some of whom did not choose experimental or innovative approaches,56 there were several notable individuals who deserve to be considered an avant-garde. In advancing this argument I am adopting a contestatory viewpoint, for many

31 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

critics and theorists - including Julia Kristeva, as noted in the introduction - have been reluctant to recognize the originality of these writers or accord them the status they deserve. Given some of the recent work done on French avant-gardes, however, it seems clear that there has been an oversight where contemporary women writers are concerned. In this section, I thus turn to the question of defining the avant-garde, as explored by critics whose work has encouraged me to pursue a vision of the phenomenon that would be more inclusive of feminist experimental texts. The term "avant-garde" has been used so often that some have asked, albeit rhetorically, if it has not become "so vague and general as to be virtually useless" in the contemporary context.57 Still, as Charles Russell points out in his study Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism, the avant-garde, which he calls "an important, if subsidiary, phenomenon in modern culture," has nonetheless figured significantly in the history of post-revolutionary French literature, for "a movement and a tradition of avant-garde creation have existed in Europe and the Americas for the past one hundred years."58 Indeed, in the two major anthologies that serve as "official" purveyors of the French literary tradition to students - Lagarde and Michard's and Nathan's volumes covering the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - there are significant chapters dedicated to avant-garde currents or to the authors whose works exemplify them. Notably, however, neither anthology considers contemporary women's writings as constituting an avant-garde, although Nathan's Litterature, xxe siecle, compiled by Mitterand and others, does at least have a chapter on feminist thought and fiction, whereas Lagarde and Michard give them no notice at all.59 It is this oversight or occulting by literary historians of the innovative and challenging aesthetics of women's writings which motivates me to argue for their valorization and for a recognition of their importance to their respective traditions. Until women are also given a place in the avantgarde pantheon, they will continue to be passed over or read only on an individual basis, rather than in the broader context of their collective efforts and impact. A revision of literary history is thus all the more justifiable, given the evidence I have uncovered documenting that these women writers did in fact form a community, united by a network of exchanges that fostered an acute awareness of other women's experiences and writing practices, in which individuals found encouragement and inspiration in their collective aspirations. To return to the definition of this term, which even he admits is often "loosely defined and indiscriminately used" (PPR, v), Russell

32 Mothers of Invention

identifies the avant-garde in literature according to the "four basic assumptions" that he says all such movements share: (i) the avant-garde perceives itself to be a part of a self-consciously modern culture subject to constant socio-historical change; (2) the avant-garde adopts an explicitly critical attitude toward, and asserts its distance from, the dominant values of that culture; (3) each avant-garde movement reflects the writers' and artists' desire that art and the artist may find or create a new role within society and may ally themselves with other existing progressive or revolutionary forces to transform society; (4) but most essentially, the avantgarde explores through aesthetic disruption and innovation the possibilities of creating new art forms and languages which will bring forth new modes of perceiving, expressing, and acting. (PPR 4)

Although only briefly alluded to in this passage by Russell's use of the plural and of the word "movement," the existence of a collectivity or community must be underscored as equally essential to the definition of an avant-garde, which generally coalesces because of the participation of a group of like-minded creators and thinkers who support each other's contestatory stances and aesthetic innovation. Susan Suleiman, in her aptly titled Subversive Intent, succinctly articulates the importance of this group effort to past avant-gardes when she writes, "The hallmark of these movements was a collective project (more or less explicitly defined and often shifting over time) that linked artistic experimentation and a critique of outmoded artistic practices with an ideological critique of bourgeois thought and a desire for social change, so that the activity of writing could also be seen as a genuine intervention in the social, cultural, and political arena" (si 12). The conjunction of aesthetic innovation and political or social activism, it would seem, is the one characteristic upon which current scholars agree when it comes to defining an avant-garde practice. As I suggest here and in the close readings that follow, the contemporary French and Quebec women writers selected for this study all display characteristics which could be termed avant-garde according to the above definitions. Not only do they participate in a collective phenomenon of "aesthetic disruption and innovation," but they also self-consciously combine their critique of Western culture's "dominant values" with an expression of the Utopian desire "that through the rewriting of old stories and the invention of new forms of language for doing so, it is the world as well as words that will be transformed" (si 143). That is not to say, however, that all the women writing during the 19705 share the same political affiliations; as we have seen, Hyvrard

33 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec

did not participate in feminist groups or activities in France, just as many of Quebec's feminist writers had little or nothing to do with the running of the FLF or the publication of Quebecoises deboutte! One could also point to the firmly Marxist stance of Madeleine Gagnon's early poetry, which contrasts with what could be termed a considerably weaker interest in class issues in the works published at the same time by Cixous and Brossard. Nevertheless, despite this apparent divergence in political opinion, Cixous and Gagnon collaborated on La Venue a I'ecriture in 1977, proving that, at least in the early stages of feminist writing and theorizing, a plurality of ideological approaches did not obscure the broader feminist commitment that brought these women together. Although a significant number of the women writing during the 19705 show an interest in textual experimentation and attempt to disrupt social, linguistic, and literary codes in their works,60 Russell hesitates to accord them an avant-garde status on the same footing as the other, male-dominated "vanguard" (PPR 16) movements he discusses. The most he will grant them is the potential of being an avant-garde, and that almost as an afterthought to his study of the postmodern61 period, where he writes that "the radical feminist investigations of literary form and social discourse have the potential to be the most significant expression of a revitalized avant-garde sensibility in the postmodern era, precisely because they bring together an aggressive aesthetic activism and a social collectivity that sees itself acting in society and its history" (PPJR 251). Despite the seemingly affirmative tone, this one sentence does not do justice to women's contributions to (and divergences from) the postmodern aesthetic, especially in the context of a critical study that has as its ambition to cover the avant-garde's incarnations from Rimbaud through the 19805 in both Europe and elsewhere. More than just potentially "the most significant expression of a revitalized avantgarde" in contemporary literature, I would argue with Suleiman that feminist writings in France and Quebec in the mid-1970s do in fact constitute the latest avatar of the avant-garde in their cultures, and as such, they are important not only for their particular historical moment but also for the directions subsequently taken by other contemporary writers and the critics and scholars who study them. It is hard to believe that the current interest in questions of gender and writing would be so intense were it not for the work of writers such as Helene Cixous who so eloquently drew attention to the question of sexual difference in their texts. In Quebec, women would not occupy the important positions they do in the literary establishment, and would not find it as easy to be heard and published, were it not

34 Mothers of Invention

for the leadership and encouragement provided by writers such as Nicole Brossard or, later on, by the likes of Anne-Marie Alonzo, who founded her own press (Les Editions Trois) and journal (Trois, 198599). Finally, in academic circles, gynocriticism62 would not have the vitality it does if feminist novelists and poets had not collectively made themselves heard over the last twenty-five years, continually providing us with new women-centred visions of the world to explore and enjoy. But, one may ask, what distinguishes the feminist avant-garde from its predecessors? If language has typically been the site of contestation and the focus of the efforts of previous avant-gardes, how does a feminist writer's approach to language differ from that of her male counterparts? What is the specificity of this feminist avantgarde, as seen in the works of some of its key figures? These are the kinds of questions I intend to explore here, in the belief that there are, as Suleiman puts it, "substantive (ideological and existential) differences between feminist avant-garde practice and the practice of male avant-garde artists who, for all their formal innovations, are still deeply implicated in patriarchy" (si 162). As this quotation from Subversive Intent suggests, one of the principal differences of the feminist avant-garde is precisely the fact that it has an ethical dimension and implies an ideological stance which presuppose a minimum of political awareness, if not social activism and protest, and which certainly set these women apart from many of their male contemporaries. In the chapters that follow, I propose to tease out the ways in which this ideological commitment emerges in the fiction of Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard, examining its influence on their play with the conventions of genre, plot, character, syntax, and grammar, not to mention its role in the thematic networks of these women's writings. As I explore each work in turn, I hope to point out the "double allegiance" which Suleiman astutely notes that many of these writers display, "on the one hand, to the formal experiments and some of the cultural aspirations of the historical male avant-garde" and, "on the other hand, to the feminist critique of dominant sexual ideologies, including those of the very same avant-gardes" (si 162-3). This phenomenon of "contamination" or influence is framed by Russell in similar terms, when he points out that "any statement or work has meaning only in reference to the particular linguistic framework in which it is placed, so that any innovative text, although struggling to transform that framework, is necessarily dependent on it ... The literary work can never claim complete originality" (PPR 263). Keeping this observation in mind, my analysis will nonetheless attempt

35 Feminist Writing in France and Quebec to focus on the particular ways in which these feminist writers disrupt or play with familiar frameworks, as well as on the ideological urgency with which they do so. Beyond questions of political commitment, it is also essential to emphasize the aesthetic quality of these women's writings, particularly since so much attention has been focused on their theory and so little on their textual practice. It is, in fact, precisely for this reason that I have chosen to focus my study on works of prose fiction by Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard. Not only does writing prose fiction interest all four authors,63 but it also seems to be the literary form preferred by experimental women writers of the time, probably because of the amplitude it offers them in the development of their ideas. In this regard, I concur with Russell, who suggests that "the novel allows the most extended elaboration of the interpenetration of personal, literary, and social discourses. It illustrates the determination of the individual subject or literary text by the various meaning systems of the society and, conversely, can chart the gambits of demystification directed against those codes" (PPR 252). To return to the question of originality, in addition to a significant degree of formal experimentation, the texts I have chosen also display a concomitant attempt, both on the thematic level and in their use of bodily metaphors, to deal with issues of import to the lives of real women. While this characteristic in no way constitutes a return to realism or purely referential fiction, it is a concern that sets Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard apart from their formalist predecessors and contemporaries. Even as these authors attempt to find new language and forms with which to explore the perennial textual questions of identity, alterity, and subjectivity, one must not overlook the strategies they employ to draw the reader into their fictions, to include us in a collective experience that helps us "make sense" of their deliberately disorienting textual experimentation. As a final note, it is an undeniable truth that these women's writings are accessible to a rather limited reading public, a fact that could lead one to argue that their works have little influence on the world and the lives of ordinary women, and thus that their ethical and political efficacy in promoting the causes of feminism is limited. The critic Rita Felski advances precisely such arguments to justify her decision to analyze only realist fiction in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Still, she does admit that "experimental art forms ... can nevertheless play an important role in the development of a critical feminist presence in 'high' art."64 Indeed, the ideas and writing strategies that these experimental women writers put into practice and imagined were actually both appreciated

36 Mothers of Invention

and hotly debated by their select contemporary readership, often composed of writers, artists, scholars, and theorists who subsequently put their textual "finds" into broader circulation, albeit often in diluted or limited ways, within the larger cultural context. Radical feminist textuality has in fact been seen as a major contributor to the development of a postmodern aesthetic, particularly in Quebec, where Nicole Brossard's Le Desert mauve was labelled "le premier roman postmoderne ecrit au Quebec" (the first postmodern novel written in Quebec).65 A case could also be made that the experimental, genre-bending narratives published by avant-garde feminist writers paved the way for many other women to begin to tell their stories in that particular blend of fiction and autobiography that critics such as Barbara Havercroft have called "autofictions."66 Beyond the ways in which a feminist aesthetic sensibility reached a broader public and influenced other cultural and theoretical currents, the principal value of its textual manifestations resides for me in the richness of the fictions that give it expression. It is their irreverent humour, their breathtaking metaphors, their shattering of conventions, and their lyric prose that make these women writers still worth reading. Indeed, long after the debates over feminist theory have exhausted themselves, these novels will remain challenging and exhilarating examples of women's innovative creativity. It is my hope that, in presenting the readings that follow, I will incite others to return to these women's works and discover for themselves the excitement and pleasure of their "subversive intent." Or, to borrow an inviting metaphor from the writer whose work we now turn to: "Je rassemble des mots pour faire un grand feu jaune paille mais si tu n'y mets pas ta propre flamme, mon feu ne prendra pas, mes mots n'eclateront pas en etincelles jaune pale. Mes mots resteront mots morts [I gather words to make a great straw-yellow fire, but if you don't put in your own flame, my fire won't take, my words won't burst into pale yellow sparks. My words will remain dead words]."67

2 (W)Rites of Passage: Helene Cixous's La Je parlerai de 1'ecriture feminine: de ce qu'ellefera. II faut que la femme s'ecrive: que la femme ecrive de la femme et fasse venir les femmes a 1'ecriture, dont elles ont ete eloignees aussi violemment qu'elles 1'ont ete de leurs corps; pour les memes raisons, par la meme loi, dans le meme but mortel. (Rire 39)

[I shall speak about women's writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies - for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal.] (Laugh 875) Helene Cixous

Reading Helene Cixous's theory is one of the rites of passage for those who study contemporary French feminisms. Yet few seem to venture beyond these theoretical texts into her fiction, into her attempts to practise the kind of writing she so pointedly calls for in "Le Rire de la Meduse." Moreover, many critics involved in the debate over the theory of ecriture feminine also gloss over the future tense with which Cixous opens her famous essay, a future implying no claim of truth other than that of the force of her desire for difference and change.1 In the pages that follow I will explore how that desire is embodied, both literally and figuratively, in the fiction that Cixous was working on at the time she was elaborating the idea of feminine writing for which she is most widely known today. The text of La provides an ideal opportunity to discover the relations between Cixous's fiction and her theory, and the ways in which her fictional writing differs from the programmatic pronouncements so many critics have extrapolated from her essays, despite her attempts to resist rigid conceptualization. There is no doubt that Cixous believes in the potential of writing to effect change. In "Le Rire de la Meduse," for example, she writes: "1'ecriture est la possibilite meme du changement, 1'espace d'ou peut s'elancer une pensee subversive, le mouvement avant-coureur d'une transformation des structures sociales et culturelles [writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures]" (Rire 42, Laugh 879). Such statements show

38 Mothers of Invention

Cixous's conscious desire to identify the feminine writing she calls for as an avant-garde practice, here signalled explicitly by her use of the adjectives "subversive" and "avant-coureur." Hers is a visionary writing springing from the desire to incite socio-cultural change through a contestation of logocentric thought and phallocentric tradition (JN 118-19). As Verena Andermatt Conley puts it, Cixous's "endeavor is double: to re-traverse all the loci where women [have] been excluded ... and to produce a subversive fiction that is not a representation of a real but a phantasmatic writing undoing censorship and repression."2 The hope in such a writing, of course, is that it will both reflect and produce changes in the way real women envision the world, and their relation to it and to themselves. Such rhetoric is not new in European art and literature, and in La Jeune nee particularly, Cixous shows her awareness and appreciation of writers whose exceptional and occasionally eccentric voices contrast with those of the literary mainstream, "poets" such as Kleist, Joyce, and Genet, who were able to "faire passer a tout prix quelque chose d'heterogene a la tradition [let something different from tradition get through at any price]" (JN i8i).3 In this respect at least, Cixous seems to accept what Conley calls "the post-revolutionary myth of the artist as subversive and effeminate [according to which pjoetry, like the other arts, questions and transforms ideology" (HCPW 59). It is no doubt partly for this reason that Cixous consistently describes her aesthetics and her writing as poetic. As she says to Henri Quere, when he tries to get her to say what "Ecrire du roman, aujourd'hui" (Writing [of] the novel today) means for her: J'ecris un texte de fiction poetique. Ce n'est pas un genre, c'est une qualite d'ecriture, c'est une forme textuelle inqualifiable par les anciens codes et qui n'a pas non plus grand cours dans notre lirterature. Je me situerais dans un espace qui tient un peu du poetique et un peu d'une philosophie poetique: la ou la poesie tient du philosophique ... Au fond, le genre qui me convient le plus et vers lequel je tends, ce serait ce qui date d'avant le roman, le recit, la narration la plus simple, celle qui se declare comme narration.4 [I write a text of poetic fiction. It is not a genre, it is a quality of writing, it is a textual form indefinable by the old codes and that is really not very widespread in our literature. I would situate myself in a space that resembles poetry a little and also a little poetic philosophy: where poetry borrows from philosophy ... Basically, the genre that suits me best and towards which I lean would be that which dates from before the novel, the narrative, the most simple narration, that announces itself as such.]

That Cixous should attempt to trace her generic affiliations to a time predating the novel is significant, for in doing so, she is essentially

39 Helene Cixous's La

echoing previous avant-garde figures in a rejection of the mainstream understanding of the genre in favour of other precursors and cultural influences. In fact, as her contemporaries Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy point out in their presentation of the Schlegels' "Dialogue des genres": "un roman ... n'est en fait d'aucun genre, melant tous les genres, y compris le genre du melange 'lui-meme,' la satire [a novel ... is in fact no genre, mixing all the genres, including the genre of mixture itself, satire]/' where "satire" is understood to designate the Latin satura, meaning mixture of genres.5 In other words, in searching for a "genre" that would describe the mixture of poetic prose, philosophical reflection, and narration that she practises, Cixous in fact returns to the origins of the novel, which was initially a hybrid genre,6 at least according to the Athenaeum group led by the Schlegels, whose own work could be considered the first manifestation of an avant-garde phenomenon in European literature. Many contemporary critics would rather adopt the perspective represented by Morag Shiach when she remarks that "Cixous's 'fictions' stretch the limits of the novelistic. Character is uncertain, narrative point of view unstable, the apparent transparency of language is challenged, and linear temporality is unsettled, or completely undone. Some of these techniques are already familiar from the work of other modern writers: what is specific to Cixous, however, is the intensity and extremity of her project, and its insistent questioning of the categories of sexual identity. Each of her texts pushes the limits of the representable, in a political and cultural project whose terms are constantly reworked, whose conclusions are always challenged" (HCPW 69). Cixous's challenge to the conventions of the nineteenthcentury realist novel as they are recognized by such commentaries could certainly justify rethinking the classification of her texts, if not the currently accepted understanding of the novel. Indeed, one review of La goes so far as to comment on her "[e]criture tout en beautes, fulgurances, fremissements, mais aussi condensation et densite telles qu'il faudrait ecrire en gros "Poesie" sur la couverture [writing full of beauty, flashes, tremblings, but also condensation and density such that 'Poetry' should be written in big letters on the cover]."7 Cixous addresses this issue of genre classification herself, however, by resorting to the more general appellation of "fiction," which she uses to characterize all her novel-length works, beginning with Souffles in 1975. While this may seem a rather insignificant detail, it does at least show her recognition that her texts do not conform to the current horizon of expectations associated with the novel and her attempt to find a less restrictive way to situate them in the broader spectrum of literary possibilities. In this sense, Cixous is trying to open up a space for her writing that will remain recognizable

40 Mothers of Invention

to her potential readers even as it marks her difference from the mass of literary production.8 Cixous's awareness of her place in the contemporary literary landscape as well as in literary history is scarcely surprising, given that she earned her own academic credentials with work on James Joyce, whose writings, although now considered crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century modernity, continue to present some of the most radically challenging reading experiences in the "canon." Indeed, Cixous is no doubt the feminist writer most self-consciously affected by the "double allegiance" that Susan Suleiman notes in her analysis of women in the avant-garde (si 162), for she, of all the women involved in experimental writing, is arguably most attuned to the influence of precursors such as Joyce. As Cixous's essay "Sorties" in La Jeune nee amply documents, previous forays into experimental textuality and the writing of difference have almost always been carved out by male authors, and it is in the works of these authors that women such as Cixous have had to seek inspiration for their own attempts to voice difference.9 In this respect, she shares the difficult position of many writers in the latter half of the twentieth century, at least according to Barthes's perspective on literary innovation and influence in Le Degre zero de I'ecriture. While his rather pessimistic description of the "impasses" in which contemporary writing finds itself is certainly not one shared by the author of the tellingly titled "Sorties," in one important passage he does offer a succinct articulation of the more universal dilemma at work in any writing aspiring to be innovative: "II y a done dans toute ecriture presente une double postulation: il y a le mouvement d'une rupture et celui d'un avenement, il y a le dessin meme de toute situation revolutionnaire, dont I'ambigui'te fondamentale est qu'il faut bien que la Revolution puise dans ce qu'elle veut detruire 1'image meme de ce qu'elle veut posseder10 [There is therefore in every present mode of writing a double postulation: there is the impetus of a break and the impetus of a coming to power, there is the very shape of every revolutionary situation, the fundamental ambiguity of which is that the Revolution must of necessity borrow, from what it wants to destroy, the very image of what it wants to possess]."" Again, although Cixous would no doubt object to some of Barthes's choice of vocabulary - she often refers to the drive to possess as masculine (Rire 50, JN 177) - the important issue of influence and inspiration remains relevant to any discussion of how her fiction embodies the revolutionary feminine writing she envisions. The question of antecedents is thus one that will guide us in the first part of this chapter, where I will discuss the intertextual resonances

41 Helene Cixous's La

of La.12 In the discussion of such sources, my focus will be most particularly on the revisionary aspect of Cixous's appropriations and on the way they serve to develop a number of themes and images crucial to the text, including maternity and parturition, death and rebirth, dreams, water, the journey, and the omnipresence of the eroticized body. In the latter portion of this chapter, I will turn to the playful language in which these networks of images and references are couched, the better to examine her attempts to transform language and its structures into a vehicle not only expressive of her desire and dreams but also liberating for other women, who may find in them encouragement for their own voyages of self-discovery and writings of difference. POINTS OF DEPARTURE

On ne salt pas, dans une naissance, qui nait d'abord.

[One knows not, in a birth, who is born first.] Helene Cixous, Souffles, 161

In her 1976 essay "Castration or Decapitation?" Cixous speaks of the way that women's texts deal with beginnings, saying: "I think it's more than giving the departure signal, it's really giving, making a gift of, departure, allowing departure, allowing breaks, 'parts/ partings, separations."13 In the pages that follow, I will pick up on the doubleness of this notion of departure, which suggests the promise of the new even as it calls on the known by virtue of the fact that every break or innovation is also a departure from familiar "parts." For potential readers, the point of departure of any text is most often the title. The title of La proves intriguing because it seems incomplete, open to many interpretations that its scholarly readers have been eager to suggest. Christiane Makward was the first critic to make an inventory of its possibilities, a gesture subsequently repeated by others in an attempt to find a point of entry into this complex text.14 Makward's interpretation, however, remains the most closely attuned to the predominant images in La: LA, syllabe unique, maigreur essentielle du nom le plus bref, le plus vague, le plus discret, le plus etonnant jarnais donne a un texte. "LA" renvoie a la musique et au don: "donner le la" c'est donner le ton juste aux musiciens ..., c'est donner le depart pour la production de la musique. "LA" c'est aussi le lieu que Ton designe du geste a 1'autre, un espace eloigne mais visible ... Ce "LA"-la est une invitation au voyage, au mouvement, a la mise en branle comme le don du "la" tonal. "LA" c'est encore le bruit de la voix, la syllabe

42 Mothers of Invention la plus facile a produire ...; celle qui permet de sauter par-dessus les defaillances de la memoire pour chanter "tra-lalala .../' substitut done plaisant de (la) parole. "LA" c'est encore et surtout 1'article defini et le pronom personnel feminin: le titre de Cixous c'est aussi "Ecce Mulier" ou "la voi-la." Reponse (et non echo) a la formule de Lacan avec son a barre: "La7 femme n'existe pas" [sic]. Dialogue done avec le discours phallocentrique et la psychanalyse.15 [LA, sole syllable, essential meagreness of the briefest, the vaguest, the most discreet and most astonishing name ever given to a text. "LA" refers to music and to the gift: "to give the LA" is to give the right key to musicians ..., it is to give the starting point for musical production. "LA" is also the place one designates to another with a gesture, a distant but visible place ... That "LA" is an invitation to a journey, to movement, to the setting into motion as in the giving of the tonal "la." "LA" is also the sound of the voice, the easiest syllable to pronounce ...; the one that permits us to get past our memory lapses to sing "tra-la-la," an agreeable substitute for the word(s). "LA" is additionally and most especially the definite article and the feminine personal pronoun: Cixous's title is also "Ecce Mulier" or "t/zere she is." An answer (and not an echo) of Lacan's formulation with it's a[rticle] struck through: "The woman does not exist." Thus a dialogue with phallocentric discourse and psychoanalysis.] In the course of my reading I will return to the various metaphoric networks touched upon by Makward, for the title is certainly intended to initiate a multiplicity of resonances within the text. What is most intriguing here as a point of departure is the (slightly inaccurate) intertextual connection that Makward makes to Jacques Lacan, a colleague of Cixous at Vincennes, whose work on psychoanalytic approaches to femininity and female sexuality has been targeted by many feminists for perpetuating the marginalization and silencing of women in patriarchal culture. Lacan made his infamous pronouncement "the woman does not exist" (with the whole of the article "la" barred, not just the vowel as in Makward's transcription) in a seminar he gave on 21 January 1975/6 although his reflections on femininity were more fully developed two years previously in a series of lectures that included "Dieu et la jouissance de ta femme."17 Interestingly enough, these lectures were not published until 1975, when they appeared in Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre xx: Encore (1972-1973). Essentially then, Lacan's most provocative reflections on femininity were not made readily available until the very year that saw Cixous elaborate her own theoretical visions, which evolve in large part from her own understanding of psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and psychosexual development.

43 Helene Cixous's La

In this context it is virtually impossible not to read La, with Makward, as a direct reference and response to Lacan's pronouncements. In "Castration or Decapitation?" while Cixous certainly invests the unconscious and dreams with a great deal of transformative power, she also pointedly contests the theories of Freud and "Old Lacan" where they define woman as "excluded from any possible relationship with culture and the cultural."18 The essay is in fact devoted almost entirely to refuting Lacan's conclusions about femininity, such as those he offers in "Dieu et la jouissance de fea femme" (God and the jouissance of the woman), where he says, "II n'y a de femme qu'exclue par la nature des choses qui est la nature des mots, et il faut bien dire que s'il y a quelque chose dont elles-memes se plaignent assez pour 1'instant, c'est bien de ga - simplement, elles ne savent pas ce qu'elles disent, c'est toute la difference entre elles et moi19 [There is woman only as excluded by the nature of things which is the nature of words, and it has to be said that if there is one thing that they themselves are complaining about enough at the moment, it is well and truly that - only they don't know what they are saying, which is all the difference between them and me]."20 Most of Cixous's writing stands as a vehement rebuttal of such statements; not only does she refuse to accept that women are somehow inherently excluded from the "nature" of language and culture, but she also claims that they know exactly what they are talking about when they speak of their sexuality, for "[c]elle qui a tourne dix mille fois sept fois sa langue dans sa bouche avant de ne pas parler, ou elle en est morte, ou elle connait sa langue et sa bouche mieux que tous [those who have turned their tongues 10,000 times seven times before not speaking are either dead from it or more familiar with their tongues and their mouths than anyone else]" (Rire 48, Laugh 886-7). In choosing a title like La, then, Cixous is removing the feminine from the kind of erasure and silencing performed by Lacan in his lectures. Moreover, she not only reinstates the article, but she affirms it on its own, without qualification, as if to underline that the feminine needs no noun, no modifier, for it to enter the realm of signification, of the symbolic. From another perspective, by not adding a noun, she is also sidestepping an essentialism that Lacan is in part trying to point out with his own strategy of "rature" (crossing out). Cixous will not tell us what is feminine, but only that it exists as a "definite" article. She thus marks her break with certain aspects of psychoanalytic theories on feminine sexuality with a La that sets the tone for her own explorations of the "Continent noir," which she says "n'est encore inexplore que parce qu'on nous a fait croire qu'il etait trop noir pour etre explorable [is still unexplored only because we've

44 Mothers of Invention

been made to believe that it was too dark to be explorable] (Rire 47, Laugh 884-5). It is indeed ironic that what Cixous seems to take from Lacan and his theories are the "parts" that suit her - his La - breaking it off from the rest in her eagerness to provide an opening to her own text. Perhaps performed unconsciously here, this thieving appropriation is nonetheless a key gesture in both her theory and her fiction. From the opening of La, her intertextual references will expressly partake of this irreverent strategy, such that it becomes a principal motif and motor in the unfolding of the text. My initial approach to reading La will thus be through its important intertexts: the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Fuseli's painting The Nightmare (1781), and Freud's work on dreams and sexuality in his studies on Leonardo da Vinci and Dora, whose story Cixous also dramatized in her Portrait de Dora, which opened in Paris in February of the year that La appeared. In each case, I will discuss not only the precise intertext that Cixous engages but also the way in which she rewrites and transforms her sources into new networks of metaphors, that feminist "act of survival" that Adrienne Rich describes in "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision": "Re-vision - the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves."21 The opening section of La is entitled "Le Livre des mortes" (The book of the dead women), a title that, at one time at least, Cixous was considering for the book as a whole.22 From the text's first page, then, the promise of La is fulfilled, for she rewrites her source in the feminine, telling the reader that this book, while it may contain instructions for the afterlife like the original Book of the Dead, is destined specifically for women - "mortes" being a feminine plural - in their "coming forth by day."23 In this respect, Rich's "When We Dead Awaken" suggests a thread common to feminists on both sides of the Atlantic, for Cixous's purpose is similar: to encourage women, deadened by the roles and limits imposed upon them by tradition, to awaken to their oppression and begin to tap into their unlimited creative potential. More importantly, as Morag Shiach notes, "Cixous's movement from Greek to Egyptian culture as the site of her fictional exploration" (HCPW 88) reveals her efforts to recover or rediscover a forgotten alternative and precursor to the revered classical sources of Western thought and mythology. The Book of the Dead is a composite document based on an oral tradition that significantly predates GrecoRoman mythology and the Bible (Budge, xxx).24 By drawing on such

45 Helene Cixous's La

an ancient source, Cixous effectively circumvents many of the images, myths, and traditions that have served to support what she calls the "[subordination du feminin a 1'ordre masculin qui apparait comme la condition du fonctionnement de la machine [subordination of the feminine to the masculine order, which gives the appearance of being the condition for the machinery's functioning" " (JN 118-19, NEW 65). More specifically, as Shiach puts it, "[b]y re-introducing the imagery and rituals of Egyptian religion, she is challenging the adequacy of Greek legend as a cultural origin" (HCPW 85). In addition, as the famous Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge readily admits, the Book of the Dead as we know it is far from being "a connected and logical account" (Budge, xxix-xxx), for it was "copied and recopied, and added to by one generation after another for a period of nearly 5000 years" (Budge, x), and often the scribes "themselves did not know which variants represented the correct readings" (Budge, ix). In other words, in the Book of the Dead Cixous finds a source that is itself without origin, with no authoritative text, and thus one that both thwarts the masculine "desir d'etre (a) 1'origine [desire to be (at) the origin]" (JN 118, NEW 65) and invites variation and interpretation, including her own. The Book of the Dead is essentially a collection of hymns, rituals, and magical incantations intended to secure for the dead passage "out of the darkness of the tomb or of the Other World into the light of the day-sun," and to ensure that they have "complete freedom of action after death."25 According to Jacques Vandier, whose work Cixous consulted for her thesis on Joyce, the Egyptians "n'avaient pas le sentiment de la mort [did not have a sense of death]," for "ils ne pouvaient pas realiser qu'un homme mort etait vraiment mort [they could not understand that a dead man was really dead]."26 The conclusion Vandier draws is that "[d]es lors que la mort est un passage, et non un terme, on doit supposer qu'il existe, chez I'homme, un principe spirituel qui n'est pas soumis a la mort [so long as death is a passage, and not an end, one must suppose that there exists, in man, a spiritual principle that is not governed by death]."27 Cixous draws quite clearly on this idea of death as a passage rather than a terminus to counter the association of those "deux irrepresentables: la mort et le sexe feminin [two things that cannot be represented: death and the female sex]" " (JN 126, NEW 69)], a conflation she imputes to men. Egyptian religion as it is embodied in the Book of the Dead enables her to recast the notions of death and rebirth in the context of life itself, as in this passage from "La Venue a 1'ecriture": Combien de morts a traverser, combien de deserts, combien de regions en flammes et de regions glacees, pour arriver un jour a me dormer la bonne

46 Mothers of Invention naissance! Et toi combien de fois es-tu morte avant d'avoir pu penser, "je suis une femme" sans que cette phrase signifie: "Done je sers"? Je suis morte trois ou quatre fois. Et combien de cercueils font tenu lieu de corps pendant combien d'annees de ton existence? ... Es-tu nee? Nous naissons tard parfois.28 [How many deaths to cross, how many deserts, how many regions in flames and regions iced over, in order to give myself the right birth one day! And you, how many times did you die before being able to think, "I am a woman," without having this phrase signify, "Thus I serve?" [sic] I died three or four times. And how many coffins have taken the place of a body for you during how many years of your existence? ... Have you been born? We're born late sometimes.] (CTW 28)

For Cixous, then, the passage through death addressed by the Book of the Dead is rich in resonance for women. To evoke the awakening or rebirth of women to themselves and to writing, she will thus depart from, even as she calls upon, Egyptian mythology and religious beliefs to provide the impetus for her text. As she puts it in an interview with Franchise van Rossum-Guyon, "ce qui m'interesse la c'est d'entrainer le vieux texte des vieux morts de telle maniere qu'il eclate et que ce qui s'en degage (au sens de "se tirer de") c'est tout son contraire: de la femme, de la vivante [what interests me here is to pull away at the old text of the old dead men so that it ruptures and that what emerges (in the sense of 'is extricated from' it) is precisely its opposite: something of woman, something alive]."29 From the beginning of "Le Livre des mortes," we understand that this particular journey into the afterlife is one being undertaken by a woman, in the company of other women, an immediate contrast to the papyri on which the Book of the Dead is based, where the deceased is usually either a lone male or a husband accompanied by his wife. To cite La's opening lines: A present, on est nulle presque. Apres tout, on vient d'etre couchee. Et peu importe mon lever, car j'y reviendrai encore. Plus personne, mais quelle foule je suis, apres moi! ... On voudra se lever apres une certaine nuit qui nous retient ... Presence d'absolument personne; et pourtant c'est moi-meme! Naissance et mort au loin se rejoignent, a 1'infini.30 [Now, we women are almost nothing. After all, we were just laid out. And it matters little when I get up, as I will come back to it again. Nobody anymore, yet what a multitude I am, after me! ... We want to get up after a certain night that holds us back ... The presence of absolutely no one; and yet it is myself! In the distance, in the infinite, birth and death meet each other.]

47 Helena Cixous's La

By maintaining feminine agreements with the collective "on" (which normally requires a masculine agreement), Cixous pointedly identifies the subject of her narration as a group of women. Moreover, the first-person narrator, whom we initially assume is one of this group, seems to contain the community as well, for she is not only herself but also a "multitude." At the same time as it suggests plurality, however, this opening passage plays on the contradictory meanings of the singular personne in French, which can refer equally to somebody and to nobody.31 Thus the narrator is paradoxically not "somebody," or one person, but a multitude ("Plus personne, mais quelle foule"), just as, in being almost "nulle," she logically has a "presence d'absolument personne," that is, no presence at all. It is from this disconcerting beginning in negation and confusion that the narrating woman will gradually acquire presence, will be reborn according to the rituals set forth in Cixous's "Book of the Dead Women." As in the case of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Cixous's first chapter contains instructions and incantations that, if carried out properly, should guarantee her feminine collectivity, embodied by her narrator, a secure passage from the night into the light of day. In some instances, Cixous directly cites rituals contained in her source, as in the following passage: "Recite ce chapitre sur un bracelet fait avec des fleurs myosotis place sur 1'oreille droite de la personne qui dort ... Recite-le aussi sur un autre bracelet taille dans un tissu couleur de pourpre place sur le poignet gauche, sur lequel, a la lumiere du jour, hi pourrais lire le nom de la morte [Recite this chapter over a bracelet made of forget-me-nots placed on the right ear of the sleeping person ... Recite it also on another bracelet made of purple fabric placed on the left wrist, and on which, in daylight, you could read the name of the dead woman]" (La 26-7). This excerpt is clearly inspired by the rubric to chapter 13 of the Book of the Dead, summarized by Budge in his introduction: "This Chapter was to be recited over two rings made of a nkha m flowers; one was to be laid on the right ear of the deceased, and the other was to be wrapped up in a piece of byssus [cloth] whereon the name of the deceased was inscribed" (Budge, Ixxviii). As with the title of her source,32 Cixous here takes some minor liberties with the original text. She retains the idea of the two bracelets, of which one is placed around the right ear and the other marked with the name of the dead person. With the second bracelet, however, she adds her own instructions for its colour and placement around the left wrist, and she also offers a recognizable French name for the flowers in the first bracelet, in place of the Egyptian plant name. Her choice of "myosotis" is a calculated one, though, for the flower known as a forget-me-not in English is in France also called

48 Mothers of Invention

"herbe d'amour" (literally, love grass) and "oreille de souris" (mouse ear),33 the latter of which connects directly to the placement of the bracelet around the ear of the "sleeper," as Cixous terms her. The appropriation and elaboration of this ritual is but one of many examples of her imaginative interaction with her intertext, where her desire seems to be more to create an atmosphere than to specifically engage her source. This is one of the reasons for the abundance of imperatives and prayer-like passages in La, which, although they are not precise references, recall the tone and style of her source text. In addition to citing rituals, Cixous makes liberal use of the mythological figures and images present in the Book of the Dead. In the first section of La, which contains the most references to Egyptian religion, she apparently picks up on an "ancient pun on the words ma u 'cat' and ma u 'like'" (Budge iO3n) from chapter 17, where we find out that the cat is a figuration of Ra, the sun god. Cixous's mentions the "Grand Chat divin" (La 10) a number of times (16, 35, 39), but what is interesting is that her original reference can also be traced to a punning reading of another chapter altogether, chapter 42. In La the first reference, "Je suis ce Grand Chat divin [I am that Great Divine Cat]," appears between the question "Qui arrive de toujours? [Who is arriving (from) forever?]" and the answer "Celle qui ne sait pas ses noms [She who does not know her names]." (10) This context would seem to indicate a reference to the passage in chapter 42, where the narrator says, "I am he who cometh forth, advancing, whose name is unknown" (Budge 177). Still further, shortly after this passage in Budge's translation, there are several mentions made of the hieroglyphic representation of Ra's eye, known as the "Utchat." It would seem that Cixous, in addition to engendering the narrator again ("Celle qui ne sait pas ses noms"), has read the "chat" in the "Utchat," taking Ra's figuration as a cat as much from this context as from the earlier chapter, where the reference is more explicit. Such association through wordplay, while perhaps obscure in this particular case, is in fact a preferred strategy in her writing, for wordplay disseminates meaning and can create a subversive relation to the intertext. Of course, Ra is not the only mythological reference present in Cixous's text. She also mentions Osiris, for example, which is appropriate since, according to Egyptian mythology, he becomes "the type and emblem of the resurrection" (Budge, Iv) and king of the Underworld after his dismemberment at the hands of his treacherous brother Seth and his reconstitution by his queen and consort Isis.34 Overall, however, Cixous shows more affinity for Egyptian goddesses than for their male counterparts. In the course of her text we

49 Helene Cixous's La

encounter Isis, Nephtys, Nut, Mut, and Neith, particularly in the context of images of maternity, as in the following passage, the first in La to mention Egyptian deities: "Si 1'arrivante a appris pendant sa vie le chapitre sur 1'Entrevies ... elle pourra sortir de sa maison et penetrer dans ses jardins a son gre, soit le jour, soit 1'ete. En outre, elle rencontrera Isis, Nephtys, Nuk [sic], ou la mere qu'elle voudra, a 1'aube, vers le soir, ici ou la, au moment propice [If the arriving one learned the chapter on the In-between-lives while she was alive ... she will be able to leave her house and go into her gardens at will, either during the day or the summer. Moreover, she will meet Isis, Nephtys, Nuk, or the mother she wants, at dawn, towards evening, here or there, at the right time]" (9). According to their respective myths, Isis, Nephtys, and Nut are all mother figures: Isis is "the prototype of the faithful wife and devoted mother"35 and is often depicted nursing her son Horus; Isis's sister Nephtys was mother to Anubis and was also seen as a protector of the dead because she helped Isis to reassemble Osiris's scattered remains; finally, Nut was mother to Isis, Nephtys, and Osiris and, though goddess of the sky, was often also depicted as a cow, symbolically a source of maternal nurture as well.36 Since many of the Egyptian goddesses associated with nurturing were also protectors of the dead, it is not hard to see why Cixous's "arrivante" in the above passage will find a mother figure as part of her journey through death.37 In fact, much of the first chapter of La is dedicated to the narrator's desire to touch and be noticed by a female figure who is connected with both mothering and death. At one point, the narrator prays that the object of her desire help her in the passage from night to day, from death into life, much as the Egyptians might have done: "Faites qu'elle se retourne! Faites qu'elle me regarde comme un enfant regarde sa mere. Comme la memoire regarde un souvenir d'enfance. Faites qu'elle me sorte de la mort comme le soleil ramene la terre au jour! [May she turn around! Make her look at me as a child looks at his mother. As memory looks back on a childhood recollection. May she bring me out of death as the sun brings the earth back into day!]" (36). While in this excerpt it seems that the narrator wishes simply to be the recipient of the other's tender aid, elsewhere her desire is more forceful and incestuous: Une mere epaisse et menacee. Je ne suis pas reconnue. le lui envoie a travers 1'air des visions qui dechiquettent. Mes vceux de douleurs. Mes crocs luisent ... D'autres meres se sont presentees. En tous genres ... Ce n'etait pas ca. Elles n'ont pas touche mon secret.

50 Mothers of Invention II n'y en aura qu'une: je ne vois pas bien son visage. De prime abord, je ne la vois pas, je la rec.ois. Elle tombe sur moi, c'est une masse, c'est un corps, elle me renverse dans un berceau de voiles rouges, dans une barque court amarree. Elle m'ecrase sur la poitrine d'innombrables vagues passionnees. Comme je voudrais la renverser, la saisir a la gorge avec mes crocs, lacerer ses mamelles de morsures desesperees, et a la fin, enivree, me laisser couler entre ses flots, qu'elle me noie. (24-5) [A thick and threatened mother. I am not recognized. I send to her through the air visions that tear her to pieces. My dolorous wishes. My fangs glisten ... Other mothers presented themselves. Of all sorts/sexes ... It wasn't right. They did not touch my secret. There will be only one: I do not see her face well. At first, I do not see her, I receive her. She falls on me, a weight, a body, she knocks me down into a cradle of red veils, into a tightly moored craft. She crushes me against her bosom of innumerable, passionate waves. How I would like to knock her down, grab her by the throat with my fangs, slash her breasts with desperate bites, and in the end, drunk, let myself sink into her waves, that she drown me.] Here the narrator places herself more clearly in the position of a child, whose desire for the mother is expressed in a fantasy of erotic violence. In Egyptian mythology, incest is apparently not a sacrilege, given that Isis and Osiris are married despite the fact that they are siblings, as are Seth and Nephthys. Against this mythological backdrop, Cixous's narrator's desire becomes less surprising, and her selection of one particular mother out of her possible companions (the "autres meres") is merely one step on the path of "rebirth" that includes recognition of one's desires. The connection between the mother she seeks and the journey of death and rebirth is not elucidated until later in the first chapter, when, after witnessing her own rebirth, the narrator is able to identify the object of her desire: (Voici: ayant suivi le chemin qui va vers 1'interieur, je suis arrivee en pleine nuit noire en bas de ma mere gigantesque. J'ai vu s'ouvrir les grands genoux de ma mere, j'etais la quand je suis nee. Ayant passe le portail de ma mere, j'existe! Je suis sortie! Amies, criez ... je suis nee encore une fois!) Je vois la mort en personnel La reine Encore jamais vue! ... Et je la vois, amies, ja la vois! Levez la tete: regardez-la. Mon autre mere! (44) [(Here: after having followed the path that leads inside, I arrived in the middle of the black night at the foot of my gigantic mother. I saw her great

5i Helene Cixous's La knees open, I was there when I was born. Having passed through the portal of my mother, I exist! I am expulsed/I exited! Friends, shout ... I am reborn once again!) I see death in person! The queen As yet never seen! ... And I see her, friends, I see her! Lift your head: look at her. My other mother!]

In this passage, it is almost as if the narrator is looking up at one of the great statues of deities that adorn the tombs and temples in Egypt. In her state of wonder, she seems to be imputing to the statue the curious conjunction of qualities that characterize goddesses such as Neith, who was "regarded as the Great Mother Goddess" (since she "created the world"), but who was also one of the four protectresses of the Canopic jars containing the organs of the dead, thus assisting them in their passage.38 What makes this passage somewhat difficult to interpret is the various subject positions taken by the narrator, who is both being born and watching her own birth, and is also accompanied by her friends ("amies"), whom, it would seem, belong to a time preceding the birth, since she knows them from the moment she "exists." Only the context of the first chapter as a whole allows us to interpret this moment as one of metaphoric emergence into a new state of self-knowledge and awareness, where the narrator is merely recognizing the import of her passage through "death" as analogous to rebirth. In this passage, Cixous is clearly playing with our notions of birth and maternity, stretching the limits of our conceptualizations to include contradictory possibilities such as those embodied by Neith or by the multiple mothers present in her narrator's vision. In fact, in the second chapter of La, entitled "Portee de I'inconnue" (The reach/effects of the unknown woman), we discover that the woman desired and admired by the narrator is indeed identified, among other female figures, as Neith (60, 73).39 Interestingly enough, Neith was also a "bisexual goddess,"40 a characteristic that no doubt inspired Cixous to play with the gender associations of this mother figure, as in the following passage: Une belle jeune mere masculine: elle a tout ce qu'il faut pour m'affoler, me faire gemir d'adoration. Saliver, ecumer, etre moi-meme 1'ecume qui ceint ses reins, la bave aux rives de son vagin, la mousse de ses penis. D'abord il sort d'une mer dans un tableau, ensuite elle devient jeune homme dans 1'element aerien, moi son ami son amante sa soeur son frere plus jeune, et mere a cause de son calme et de sa haute taille. (87)

52 Mothers of Invention [A lovely young masculine mother: she has everything it takes to drive me wild, to make me moan in adoration. To salivate, froth, become myself the lather around her loins, the foam on the shores of her vagina, the spume on her penises. First he comes out of a sea in a painting, then she becomes a young man in the aerian element, me her girlfriend her lover her sister her younger brother, and mother because of her calmness and her tall stature.]

Such a description, in which neither the desired other nor the desiring subject has stable gender identification, would seem to be a deliberate attempt on Cixous's part to demonstrate the kind of bisexuality she theorizes in "Le Rire de la Meduse."41 In La the multiple possibilites to which Egyptian mythology seems open provide legitimacy for her alternative visions of mothering as a relation open to both genders and even as a bisexual exchange. Ultimately, though, in Cixous's theory as well as in her fiction, mothering is a life force more often found in women than in men: "Dans la femme il y a toujours plus ou moins de la mere qui repare et alimente, et resiste a la separation, une force qui ne se laisse pas couper, mais qui essouffle les codes [In women there is always more or less of the mother who makes everything all right, who nourishes, and who stands up against separation; a force that will not be cut off but will knock the wind out of the codes]" (Rire 44, Laugh 882). Or as she will put it in La, "Ma mere n'est pas la mere. Mere est la force qui fait vouloir les filles se tirer d'elle vivantes [My mother is not the mother. Mother is the force that makes girls want to get out of her alive]" (65). In addition to their maternal qualities, it would seem that Cixous privileges female deities because of their ability to transform themselves into birds and fly. Both Isis and Nephtys could take the form of kites, Mut's form was that of a vulture, and according to some sources, even Nut was sometimes depicted with wings.42 Images of flight can be found throughout La, as can specific references to vultures and falcons, the latter being the symbol of the sun god, Horus, although Cixous's references are almost exclusively to a female "fauconne."43 While we shall return to some of the images of flying and of specific birds later, it is significant that she incorporates into her narrative the multiple figurations and metamorphoses which characterize some of the Egyptian goddesses, since such transformational powers are what her narrator is to acquire as part of her self-discovery and in disregard of all barriers - including those of gender roles, as we have seen. To cite the narrator's own articulation of these powers, which are nonetheless identified as "feminine":

53 Helene Cixous's La - le pouvoir d'etre 1'Hier et 1'Aujourd'hui; - le pouvoir d'etre les autres qu'on est; - le pouvoir d'entrer et sortir a son gre de ses quatre inconscients ...; - le pouvoir de garder autour d'elle ses lumieres, ses rnusiques, ses dons d'harmonie, et de s'envelopper de toutes ses epoques. (89) [- the power to be the yesterday and the today; - the power to be the others one is; - the power to enter and leave at will one's four forms of the unconscious ...; - the power to preserve around her her lights, her musics, her gifts of harmony, and to envelop herself in all of her epochs.] This passage in a sense offers one explanation or at least a description of Cixous's own writing strategies in La, for it is a text that evolves as much from poetic associations (hence the power of "harmony") and dream imagery drawn from "ses quatre inconscients/' as from any planned narrative sequence. Moreover, her privileging of "le pouvoir d'etre les autres qu'on est" is clearly connected to the constantly shifting pronouns and narrative point of view in La, which give the reader an impression of multiplicity while avoiding the creation of "characters." As Martine Motard-Noar explains in her study of Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, le personnage cixousien etant depourvu de tout statut classique de "caractere," au sens balzacien du mot ... il est des 1'ouverture du texte, une psyche mouvante. II en suit la quasi impossibilite pour le lecteur a reconnaitre, definir et delimiter ces personnages feminins, dissemines comme un jeu de voix en echo. Aucun critique n'a encore etudie un seul des personnages d'une fiction en detail, ce qui provient probablement de cette difficulte a decrire sa specificite: non seulement il n'y a plus de type humain, comme 1'a presente le Nouveau Roman, mais chez Cixous, il n'existe meme plus de demarquage individuel.44 [the Cixousian character being deprived of any classic status as a personality, in the Balzacian sense of the word ... it is from the opening of the text, a moving psyche. The result for the reader is the near impossibility of recognizing, defining, and circumscribing these feminine characters, disseminated like a game of echoes. No critic has yet studied a single one of a fiction's characters in detail, probably because of this difficulty in describing its specificity: not only is there no longer a human type, such as the New Novel presented, but in Cixous's work, there is not even individual demarcations any longer.] This lack of "individual demarcation" is something that we have already noted in the opening passage of La, where the narrator is at

54 Mothers of Invention

once a singular and a collective being. In a sense, it allows us to read the constant transformations of subject and object pronouns in La as part of the imaginary of a single "persona," albeit one that bears no resemblance to the unified subject of the traditional novel. Such a reading can find justification on the text's metaphoric levels as well, since La's network of metaphors is woven together at so many different points that it becomes almost easier to read it as a whole than to separate out the individual strands of images on which it depends. However one chooses to read the shifting narrative identifications in La, the result of Cixous's experimentation remains disconcerting enough that it seems the only way to read it is to let its images, rather than a sense of "character," become the threads that tie the narrative together. One such strand of images is associated with the journey by boat that the deceased had to make, according to the Book of the Dead, in order to reach the Elysian fields and "lead a life of celestial happiness" (Budge, Ixvii). In La this voyage over water proves an attractive trope for Cixous: it is linked to the figuration of the narrator's progress towards self-discovery as a rebirth, and because the journey and associated images recur in every chapter, it generates one of the text's dominant metaphoric chains. As it was for the Egyptians, a boat, for the women in La, is one means of issue from "death," represented here as a dream: "Quelqu'un a 1'ecart au fond presque invisible sur un lit devine, dormait. A voix haute et d'une tristesse modeste elle reve, et on ecoute sans s'etonner qu'elle demande justement ce qu'on a demande. Une barque [someone, seemingly on a bed, almost invisible in the back and away from the others, was sleeping. Aloud and with modest sadness she dreams, and one hears without surprise that she is asking for exactly what we have asked for. A boat]" (21). As we have already noted, Cixous prefers to let her intertext inspire, rather than dictate, her writing. In La this boat metaphor is quickly assimilated into another chain of metaphors associated with the body, because, as Claudine Guegan Fisher notes in her book La Cosmogonie d'Helene Cixous, the body is both "fin et moyen vers 1'etape superieure [an end and a means to a higher plane]"45 for Cixous as much as for the Egyptian dead. We can see the beginning of this association about halfway into "Le Livre des mortes," in a passage where the narrator envisions herself as a companion to another sleeping woman: "Cependant les bords de son lit s'etirent... Nous pourrions etre dans les entrailles d'une mere. Tres loin sous la mer. Ou nous y sommes. Les draps rouges font en tombant un bruit de vagues contre la coque de ma barque. Me fiant aux feux fixes de ses seins, je navigue en silence [Yet the edges of her bed stretch out

55 Helene Cixous's La

... We could be in the entrails of a mother. Very deep under the sea. Or we are there. The red sheets make a noise like waves against the hull of my boat as they fall. Trusting in the steady beacons of her breasts, I navigate silently]" (30). This short passage is indicative of a number of metaphoric connections: the female body as vehicle, as transportation and transporting in its erotic capacity; the body as matrix, linked to the ocean and fluidity; and the body as goal, as territory to be reached and explored at the end of the journey. While the Egyptian dead had to recite spells to obtain the use of a boat in the afterlife (Budge, clii-cliii), Cixous's narrator "sera elle-meme sa barque, son mouvement et son aviron [will herself be her boat, her movement and her oar]" (133), for her exploration of her body will be part of her journey of self-discovery. From this one example, we can begin to see the complexity of Cixous's text, which, although it draws on the Egyptian intertext, also weaves the original into entirely new metaphors and networks of images. The boat metaphor also ties in with the narrator's powers of language in La, for in the passage immediately following the list of "the four powers of femininity" cited earlier, we see that language, like a ship, can be boarded, pillaged, and piloted: Son art de parcourir les langues nuit et jour, de les ecumer, les pirater, les peloter, les piloter, les enivrer, de les etreindre, les dechainer de nouveaux desirs, de se livrer a la chasse avec leurs mots, leurs sons, leurs rires, de s'embarquer, d'aller pecher leurs poissons pour les remettre en d'autres eaux, de s'y adonner a la rapine, a la fraude, a la cueillette de leurs fruits ... de se glisser la nuit dans une phrase etrangere en se moquant des barrieres, et passionnement, gaiement coller ma bouche a sa bouche.46 (89-90) [Her art of traversing languages night and day, of skimming them, pirating them, petting them, piloting them, getting them drunk, embracing them, unleashing them with new desires, of going hunting with their words, their sounds, their laughter, of embarking, catching their fish in order to release them in other waters, of devoting oneself to plunder, to fraud, to harvesting their fruits ... of slipping by night into a foreign phrase, not caring about barriers, and passionately, gaily, pressing my mouth to it.]

In this passage, Cixous again links the metaphors of the boat and the body, here in the form of the kiss that the narrator shares with the "vessel" of language as she moves from third- to first-person narration. The narrator's relation to language is thus the site of conflation of La's metaphoric networks, and it is an important tool in her emergence from a moribund state into one of exuberant freedom, a theme that the second part of this chapter will examine in more detail.

56 Mothers of Invention

In her attempt to open up a space for women's desires in language and writing, however, Cixous is very sensitive to that which censures the individual, from both within and without. This is one of the motivating factors in the appearance of the Arab in the last section of La, as a representative of the internalized form of the law that is self-censure. To cite Cixous, here referring to her traveller in the third person, "II y a toujours un flic, un gardien, un arabe interieur ou un symbole de 1'autre, pour la faire payer [There is always a cop, a guard, an internal Arab or symbol of the other, to make her pay]." (228)47 Like the guardian in Kafka's "Before the Law,"48 which Cixous paraphrases in "Sorties" to illustrate women's self-imposed exile in language and from their bodies (JN 187-91), the Arab in La guards the threshold of a portal, and the narrator must try to get past this "bel Arabe ... qui a au moins deux maitres, la conscience et la societe [handsome Arab ... who has at least two masters, conscience and society]" (215). Her solution to "sa fac.on de me barrer, quand soudain il cherche a m'arreter [his way of blocking my way, when suddenly he tries to stop me]" (216), is to try "tendrement a 1'arabattre [tenderly to arabeat me back]" (217; note the "arab") by playing with the syllables of his "name": "Et tous les mots avec lesquels il entre en composition, en lutte, en douce, a bras le corps, les tranches, a bas les banes, les barrages, son clwme de marabout, barbare, de lambyrinthe / les armes, les animaux, charabe, scambe, arbalete, arabuste49 [And all the words with which he can be combined, in conflict, on the quiet, around the waist, the branches, down with the bars, the dams, his marabout's charm, barbaric, of larabyrinth / the arms, the animals, charabe, a scarab, a crossbow, a shrub]" (216-17, emphasis added). As part of the narrator's "art de liberer sa libido" (217), this humorous play with the sonorities of the word seems an effective strategy, for the guardian Arab disappears after this passage. When he reappears later, the censuring figure is subjected to the same humorous treatment: the narrator (referred to in the third person) even tries to "incite" the Arab to liberate himself by offering him advice on how to connect with "les ressources de 1'oralite" (234) that inspire her. While the Arab seems to be linked to the narrator's internalized barriers to self-expression, since he guards her "cul-de-chambre" (bed(room) end; 215) much as Kafka's guardian does the door intended solely for his man, Cixous also tackles obstacles to writing posed by external forms of censure. One such passage of contestation, found at the opening of the book's last chapter, "Qui rira la derniere" (who laughs last), presents her rejection of certain beliefs in the Book of the Dead, which she recasts as characteristic of a police state:

57 Helene Cixous's La Sa scene d'ecritures sauvages echappe a jamais a la vigilance la raison armee ... les pieges et les morsures des ennemis de la vie. "Je ne me presente pas devant les tribunaux: d'Heliopolice - de Busiris, de Memefils - de Pe et Dep - de Recti - du Seuil - de Djetoudi - de Nairef - de Re-stau - de la region des tenebres - du royaume des haines. "Je ne me defends pas devant ces tribunaux. "Je revets a volonte les formes de toutes mes lettres." "Ecrire ce chapitre a 1'aube de 1'aube, sans reprises, avant le reveil des Superes Hautes Surveillances. Ceci assurera la victoire de son humour sur la Parole de la Mort. Ce texte est d'une efficacite infaillible." (207) [Her scene of wild writings forever escapes vigilance armed reason, force ... the traps and bites of life's enemies. "I do not attend before the tribunals: of Heliopolice - of Busiris - of Memefils - of Pe and Dep - of Recti - of Seuil - of Djetoudi - of Nairef - of Re-stau - of the region of shadows - of the kingdom of hatreds. I do not defend myself before these tribunals. I sign at my pleasure the forms of all my letters." "This chapter to be written from dawn to dawn, without recommencement, before the waking of the SuperFathers High Surveillance. This will assure the victory of its humor over the Word of Death. This text is of an unfailing efficacy."]50

This passage, even to its "guaranteed efficacy," is quite clearly a rewriting of chapter 18 of the Book of the Dead, in which the deceased prays to Thoth, the god of writing among other attributes, to ensure as successful a passage as Osiris once enjoyed as a result of Thoth's intervention (Budge, c).51 In the source text, mention is made of what the French translation calls "tribunals"52 at the ten different "mythological localities" (Budge, c) where Osiris apparently was victorious over the attendant gods. In Cixous's La, however, the narrator, first designated in the third person and then by direct speech, refuses even to present herself - or more precisely, her writing - for judgment by those she will call "motmificateurs" (wordmummifiers, LA 208, HCR 66). In what Makward notes is a "petit reglement de compte malicieux" (a little malicious settling of scores),53 Cixous identifies these censorial "embalmers of words" or "Superes Hautes Surveillances" with certain French publishers by including such names as Seuil and the Nouvelle Revue Franchise (NRF or, to cite Cixous, "Nairef") in the list of ancient Egyptian localities such as Heliopolis, Busiris, "Pe et Dep,"54 the Rekhti lands, "chez les morts," Naref,55 and Re-stau. That these judges are all male is made obvious by her play with Memphis ("Memefils") and with "superes/' and she makes equally clear her narrator's refusal of their

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policing "Deathword/' which would arrest or silence the kind of humour she indulges in "sans egard pour les delimitations littorales et acoustiques des syllabimes [regardless of the littoral and acoustic delimitations of their syllabysses]" (La 208, HCR 59). In this last significant reference to the Book of the Dead, Cixous thus makes clear that she only follows her intertext to a point, for she rejects the censuring Egyptian "tribunals" as figurations of the same male-dominated establishment that judges and marginalizes women's writing in her own time.56 By her ludic treatment of those authorities who would restrict or condemn her linguistic liberties, Cixous shows her writer-narrator's "independance dansante a 1'egard de 1'assentiment de la censure [dancingly independent (stance) with regard to the censor's consent]" (HCR 66), which her humour undercuts. Indeed, according to Cixous, her narrator "ignore le non, le nom, la negativite [knows not no, name, negativity]" (La 209, HCR 60). Since, in psychoanalytic terms, the prohibition (non) that the name (nom) of the Father represents must be recognized to complete entry into the symbolic,57 what Cixous is doing here is positing that her narrator's relation to language is one of affirmation and plenitude, and not based on the fear of castration or the realization of a lack to be overcome. This is why, in the last chapter of La, Cixous writes of her narrator that the "souplesse de sa libido, accomplissant ses allees et venues entre les diverses parties de ses lettres de ses especes et de ses formes, a la grace de la liberte nocturne et la vigueur du reve eveille conscient et inconscient [pliancy of her libido, accomplishing her comings and goings between the diverse parts of her letters and her types and her forms, has the grace of nocturnal liberty and the vigor of the conscious and unconscious woken dream]" (La 209, HCR 60). It is to preserve this "liberte nocturne" that the narrator learns to circumvent and escape all figurations of the law, such as the guardian Arab, which would impede or limit her inspiration and action. One source of that inspiration would seem to be "la vigueur du reve eveille conscient et inconscient" mentioned in this last citation. This reference brings us to the important network of dream images based on a different set of intertexts that are also present early in La and serve to fuel the narrator's desire and quest for self-knowledge. From the book's opening page, in fact, the first-person narrator asks, "Qui reve? [Who dreams?]" (7), thus establishing a relation between the metaphor of death as a passage and images of a bad dream from which the narrator hopes to awaken. This association is, of course, not without literary precedents: Shakespeare's Hamlet compares death to sleep and will decide against suicide in part because of fear

59 Helene Cixous's La

of the unknown, since "to sleep" is "perchance to dream," and the unknown "dream" that lies beyond death is one from which no one awakens.58 In La there are resonances of Hamlet's dilemma in the passage where the narrator expresses the fear of not waking from the state of negation and confusion in which she and her companions find themselves: "Et si on ne se reveillait pas? C'est cette terreur qui te retient nulle part, et qui te separe d'un reveil, elle ne parle pas, elle ne montre pas, elle t'epaissit, elle t'injecte des silences fous. Et si on s'eveillait non reveille? ... Reste a inventer la force d'inventer un autre reveil, se dit quelqu'un [And if one did not wake up? It is this terror that holds you back in nowhere, and that separates you from an awakening, she does not speak, she shows not, she thickens you, she injects you with mad silences. And if one awoke not awake? ... It remains to invent the strength to invent another awakening, says someone]" (10). The desire to awaken here is in effect a desire to escape from a state of nothingness ("nulle part"), in order to regain a sense of agency that is lost in the experience of bad dreams. In Cixous's text, as I have noted earlier, this opening state of being "floue" (vague; 7), of wandering in the dark "entre deux vies" (between two lives; 23), is a figuration of the loss of self experienced by women both in their relationships to men and in culture as a whole. It is the resulting feeling of dispossession and emptiness that Cixous points to in the following passage about the threat of this dreamlike state: "Dans ce reve j'etais done le sans corps de 1'oubli; et qa se savait. Or, il y avait une sorte de douleur vague qui servait a 1'oubli de corps et c'etait moi. Ainsi j'avais aime ailleurs a mourir d'amour mais pour qui? etait-ce? je 1'appelais avec cette sans-voix qui me vidait, je ne me souviens plus comment mais on savait Men a ma place [In this dream I was thus the without body of forgetting, and it was known. Now, there was a sort of vague pain that served the forgetting of body and it was me. And so I had preferred elsewhere to die for love but for whom? was it? I called with that voicelessness that emptied me out, I don't remember how but one knew full well for me]" (21, emphasis added). The "on" who seems to possess authoritative knowledge here contrasts sharply with the "sans" of the bereft narrator. The fear of remaining in such a state is why Cixous's feminine collectivity in La "resiste d'instinct, comme a la mort" (resists instinctively, as against death; 18), for their only hope seems to be in the promise of an "autre reveil" that they themselves invent. A figuration of such a threatening dream can be found in a painting called The Nightmare (1781) by Johann Heinrich Fussli, a Swissborn pre-Romantic artist better known as Henry Fuseli in England, where he lived for most of his life. While Cixous does not mention

6o Mothers of Invention

this painter's name until the last chapter of her book (La 227), the image of his painting - that of a sleeping young woman whose posture of abandon is eroticized by the incubus crouched on her stomach (see figure i) - haunts her narration from its outset. Indeed, in the sentence immediately following the question "Who dreams?" cited above, we read: "Je suis aux cotes de moi en meme temps en haut dans la galerie [I am beside myself and at the same time up above in the gallery]" (7). This is the first, somewhat oblique reference to Fuseli's painting, the original of which Cixous is likely to have seen in Paris while it was hanging in the galeries of the Petit Palais during the Fuseli retrospective of 1975-59 The most direct intertextual reference to The Nightmare comes twenty pages later, and it indicates the lasting impression that the painting's image left on Cixous herself, although the reactions and description are ostensibly her narrator's: Je m'accoude. Contemple tout. D'ou vient la lumiere qui eclaire tres vivement la plus grande partie de son corps, le sait-on? Depuis le genou gauche la cuisse pleine dure moulee dans un miel electrique. Le buste renverse, a partir de la taille violemment cassee a angle droit le buste moule dans un tulle de lumiel, tombe les seins etires dans la chute des bras fortement muscles. Comme si des mains puissantes 1'avaient saisie par les poignets, par les flammes epaisses de la chevelure, et 1'entrainaient vers le bas tandis que la poigne d'une autre puissance la retient par les chevilles sur la couche. Mais les mains sont invisibles. Sa reverie est d'une force incomprehensible. (27) [I lean on my elbows. Contemplate everything. Where does the light come from that illuminates so brightly most of her body, does anyone know? Starting with the left knee, the full, firm thigh moulded in an electric honey-glow. The torso thrown back, from the waist violently broken at right angles, the torso hugged by moon-honey tulle, the breasts fall, elongated by the drop of the muscular arms. As if powerful hands had seized her by the wrists, by the thick flames of her hair, and were pulling her downwards while the grip of another power holds her back by the ankles on the bed. But the hands are invisible. Her dream is of an incomprehensible force.]

Two things are clear from this passage: first, the narrator is intrigued by the posture, the physicality, and the lighting of the woman in this painting - so much so that the adjective "lumiel" is invented to describe the colour and luminosity of her garment, if not its formfitting sensuality as well. Second, the sleeping figure's dream is of "incomprehensible force," which is to say it is both mysterious and

61 Helene Cixous's La

compelling, contributing to the fascination felt by the spectator. Indeed, such is the attraction of this female figure that it receives sustained commentary for several pages in this first chapter of La and will ultimately be incorporated into the narrative as a whole as one of the many faces of the woman who is the object of the narrator's homoerotic desire. As with her reading and rewriting of the Book of the Dead, Cixous will try to approach Fuseli's painting in a way that is affirmative for women, even though the image of the woman in The Nightmare is one of vulnerability in the face of an erotic menace. As art critic Nicolas Powell puts it: "there can be little doubt that the girl in Fuseli's painting is experiencing an imaginary sexual assault."60 In Cixous's narration, as in the original, the "dormeuse" (sleep/zer; La 28) is threatened by a "cauchemar qui pietine et laboure son estomac [nightmare that tramples and labours her stomach]" (33), echoing the frightening dream that the narrator and her companions struggle against at the book's opening. The incubus that Fuseli uses to represent this nightmare is connected by Cixous to her Egyptian intertext as well, when she refers to it as "le petit seth" (the little seth), in a reference to the malevolent god who was responsible for Osiris' death (La 33). In this same passage, however, Cixous's first-person narrator will attack and dispose of this menace rather than permit its influence, so that the sleeping woman will be free to dream and wake to occupy "la place qu'elle voudra" (the place she wants; 33). This incident is one example of the narrator's mobile subjectivity, for so strong is her connection to the image that she becomes part of it and sees herself affecting it as if it were a living person.61 Moreover, in other passages she even becomes the luminous female figure at the same time as she gazes at her in the painting, simultaneously spectator and participant as she was in the birth scene examined earlier: Dans ce cas - debout sur un gradin, accoudee a une balustrade et simultanement etendue dans un tombeau que ma chair eclaire tres vivement - des gouffres aux cotes de mon berceau sont houleux de vagues rouges - un genie me traine vers le bas (en tant que reve de la mort), inversement, au cas ou le tableau est regarde du bord oppose, la dormeuse echappe a la matrice, a la fleur de son age maintenant, une feminine maturite 1'eclaire vivement, des ailes rouges la soulevent, plus haut sont des nuages gonfles, des voiles courent les hautes mers, elle mue. (34) [In this case - standing on a terrace, leaning on a balustrade and simultaneously stretched out in a tomb that my flesh vividly illuminates - the depths about my cradle are turbulent with red waves - a genie pulls me down (as

62 Mothers of Invention a dream of death); conversely, in (the) case (that) the painting is regarded from the opposite side, the sleeping woman escapes the womb, in the prime of her life now, a feminine maturity illuminates her vividly, red wings lift her up, above are swollen clouds, veils sail the high seas, she transformolts.]

The predominance of the colour red in this passage is a reference to the red curtains and salmon-coloured shawl in the original painting, but these hues and drapery also play into the images of birth and the journey imagery we discussed earlier, for the folds of red fabric suggest flesh and their fluid curves could indeed evoke waves or sails.62 The metaphoric transformation of the sleeper's bed from sepulchre to cradle also ties this image in with the Egyptian intertext, since, after entombing their dead according to ritual, the Egyptians fully expected the deceased's ultimate rebirth in the form of a successful passage into the afterlife. What is new here is the spectator's second perspective on the painting: her liberating gesture of looking at the canvas "du bord oppose" - that is, upside down - makes it seem as if the woman is in an ecstasy of flight rather than defenceless against the terror of a bad dream. In fact, this reversal was operated intentionally by Cixous herself on the cover of her previous novel, Souffles, which shows an inverted reproduction of Fuseli's painting in which the only visible figure is the woman, who thus seems to float in mid-air (see figure 2). As Cixous explains it in an interview with Alain Clerval, "j'ai voulu montrer 1'envol de la femme. On a trop longtemps voulu representer la femme dans une posture alienee et douloureuse, ecrasee. II s'agit, cette fois-ci, de l'affirmation d'une feminite vigoureuse et triomphante [I wanted to show the soaring of the woman taking flight. One has for too long wanted to represent woman in a suppressed, alienated, and painful posture. This time, the goal is an affirmation of a vigorous, triumphant femininity]."63 In La we are thus told, "Vue de la barque, apres la revolution, la dormeuse n'est pas renversee. Ne sombre pas. Un sommeil ne 1'ecrase pas. Une evasion lui est revee. Elle ne reste pas dans sa chambre. Une sortie [Seen from the boat, after the revolution, the sleepher is not knocked down. Does not sink down. Sleep does not crush her. An escape is dreamed for her. She does not remain in her room. An exit]" (32). In this way, Cixous converts the nightmare into a dream of escape, providing the possibility of freedom where the original showed only a disturbing helplessness. The sleeping figure is transformed by inversion into one of graceful flight, an image closely connected to the avian incarnations of Egyptian goddesses that recur elsewhere in La.64

63 Helene Cixous's La

By taking such transformative liberties with her intertext, Cixous is offering an example of the kind of "vol"' she sees women characteristically performing, explaining in La Jeune nee: Voler, c'est le geste de la femme ... Ce n'est pas un hasard si "voler" se joue entre deux vols, jouissant de 1'un et de 1'autre et deroutant les agents du sens. Ce n'est pas un hasard: la femme tient de 1'oiseau et du voleur comme le voleur tient de la femme et de 1'oiseau: illes passent, illes filent, illes jouissent de brouiller 1'ordre de 1'espace, de le desorienter, de changer de place les meubles, les choses, les valeurs. (JN 178) [To fly/steal is woman's gesture ... It's not just luck if the word "voler" volleys between the "vol" of theft and the "vol" of flight, pleasuring in each and routing the sense police. It is not just luck: woman partakes of bird and burglar, just as the burglar partakes of woman and bird: hesheits pass, hesheits fly by, hesheits pleasure in scrambling spatial order, disorienting it, moving furniture, things, and values around.] (NEW 96)

If we accept this definition of theft as both a (mis)appropriation and a kind of disorientation, then it is indeed what Cixous performs in her use of Fuseli's painting: she not only takes its central image (without crediting its source until her book's last chapter), but also reorients it to envision an alternative to the nightmare it portrays. In fact, when she finally mentions Fuseli by name, as part of her revisionary strategy, Cixous will also refer to Moritz von Schwind's The Prisoner's Dream (1836; see figure 3), comparing the two artists' visions as follows: "Avec quelle puissance d'intuition 1'artiste a saisi entre la femme et le prisonnier une essentielle affinite. Leur 'Reve' ne peut naturellement pas avoir d'autre contenu que 1'evasion. Leur evasion doit egalement s'effectuer par la fenetre, car c'est par la qu'a penetre 1'excitation lumineuse, 1'appel qui met fin au sommeil du captif [With what powerful intuition the artist seized an essential affinity between the woman and the prisoner. Their 'Dream' naturally cannot have any other content but escape. Their escape must, by the same token, be accomplished through the window, for it is from there that the light stimulation came in, the call that ends the sleep of the captive]" (La 227). Whether or not von Schwind knew of Fuseli's earlier painting, Cixous herself makes the connection between the dreams, perhaps also because one of the magical creatures imagined by the prisoner in the later composition is a small woman seemingly floating in mid-air, recalling the dreamer's flight in Cixous's own revision of Fuseli's work. Not content with her reading of Fuseli's dreamer as just as much a prisoner as the man in von

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Schwind's painting, she will go on to revise the latter image as well by changing the gender of the prisoner in her description (La 228). In addition to echoing the dream images from La's opening passages, the woman wishing to escape in this last chapter is also associated with the more contemporary image of a young wife whose Parisian apartment has become her prison. This woman dreams of flying or transforming herself into a volubilis - a climbing plant whose French name is also a pun on vol - in order to escape the conjugal confinement she was lured into like a fish to bait.65 In her use of both of these paintings as intertext, then, Cixous tries to emphasize the creative power of dreams that allow escape from the restrictive or threatening circumstances in which women often find themselves. Her revisions make space for her own desire, as much as for that of the women who figure in the narration of La. In fact, the force of female desire is perhaps the most important theme Cixous develops in her use of dream paintings as intertext, for the desires they depict enthrall even as they provide a key impetus for the narrator's self-explorations. So prevalent is dream imagery in La that Verena Andermatt Conley, whose monograph on Cixous offers many keen insights into her work, is prompted to claim, "In texts like La, the dream writings are so profusely adumbrated that no one can, as perspicacious critic, ever penetrate the text with stylistic acumen" (HCPW 79). While penetration may not necessarily be the goal of a reading of La, Conley accurately notes the difficulty of this text, in which the reader is hard pressed to distinguish between the dream images and the narration in which they are set. When, for example, we read "Seule, j'ai reve [Alone, I dreamed]" (52) near the end of La's first chapter, the words may merely apply to the immediate context, but they also raise the question of whether the text itself is not in fact the product of a lone narrator's imagination. In an interview with Conley, Cixous gives an indication of why dreams are so important to her work when she says: "I owe everything, almost everything to dream. What does that mean? It means that there is somebody else besides me."66 According to Freud, dreams are expressions of the work of the unconscious mind. Cixous's remark shows her indebtedness to Freud, since her writing employs both myth and dreams "as ways of exploring the archaic and the repressed, and as ways of unsettling the illusion of subjective autonomy and conscious control," to quote Shiach (HCPW 70). For Cixous, the narrative of dreams is one way of approaching the other in oneself, and consequently the "external" other as well, because "there is always a mystery of the other. In general, when there is a mystery, one feels hostility. One wants to destroy, one wants to oppose it. That is where

65 Helene Cixous's La

I think there is an enigmatic kernel of the other that must be absolutely preserved."67 This difference in the desire motivating her approach to the other is why Cixous claims that her writing - and indeed, "feminine writing" - does not reproduce the phallocentric paradigms in which the other must be annihilated, controlled, or excluded. The paintings she chooses in La offer her the opportunity to elaborate a different relation between her narrator and the mysterious, incomprehensible other. The opening to her second chapter, "Portee de rinconnue," is in fact a description of the narrator's encounter with the portrait of an "unknown" woman, who could very well be Fuseli's dreamer or, more likely still, the unnamed woman he painted on the reverse side of The Nightmare, whose penetrating gaze and posture make her look as if she is about to move out of the frame toward the spectator.68 In La this encounter is significant on two levels. In terms of its effect, the sight of this portrait is as much a painful as it is a passionate experience for the narrator: II y a un tableau que je ne peux pas voir sans supplier. C'est le portrait d'une inconnue. L'une de nous deux doit disparaitre ... Elle me fait signe de mourir, de vivre. Sa sveltesse m'exalte, sa haute legerete. A sa lumiere, mon corps noirci, petrifie. Ma langue enflammee. Ma pesanteur. Parmi ma poussiere, enervee, les traces de son invasion. "Tiens le journal de ta passion. Prends des notes destinees a toi seule. Ecris ... Pour ne pas mourir." Une inconnue a la fenetre de I'mfini. Qui n'arrete pas de faire apparition. L'une de nous deux est rien. L'une est absolument tout. (57) [There is a painting that I cannot see without supplicating. It is the portrait of an unknown woman. One of us must disappear ... She beckons me to die, to live. Her sveltness exalts me, her lofty lightness. In her light, my body blackened, petrified. My tongue inflamed. My heaviness. And in my ashes, enervated, the traces of her invasion. "Keep the journal of your passion. Take notes destined only for yourself. Write ... In order not to die." An unknown woman at the window of the infinite. Who never stops appearing. One of us is nothing. The other is absolutely all.]

From the vocabulary used in this passage - "supplier," "mourir," "noirci," "petrifie," "enflammee," "enervee," "invasion" - we can see that the narrator's response to this portrait is, to say the least, physically tortured. In fact, the vocabulary used is for the most part at

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least etymologically related to torture: supplier at one time meant to fall to one's knees, and it is related to supplice, or torture; and enervee, a cognate of enervation, is linked to the practice of hamstringing, which would certainly caused the victim to kneel much as the narrator does in response to this unknown woman's "invasive" image. So physically reduced is this narrator that she becomes "ashes," her body blackened by contrast with the painting's luminosity. The painful connotation of these images, however, is counterbalanced by the passionate love that is the cause of this narrator's suffering, for she also feels exalted in the presence of this image, which tells her to "live" and to write her "passion." Ultimately, the ambivalence in this passage remains, since the unknown in 'Tune de nous deux" is who of these two women is "absolument tout" and who "must disappear." One might even go so far as to argue that neither disappears since one can still hear the "two" in "tout," a translingual pun much like that of the Utchat noted earlier. The relationship developed between the narrator and this "unknown" woman, the "inconnue," is the other significant element in this passage. Logically, for something to be unknown, it should never have been seen before, yet in this passage we are told by the narrator that she cannot view the portrait "sans supplier," indicating that she has already established her relation to the painting. Moreover, while this experience of the unknown might be uncomfortable enough to make others avoid it, this narrator seeks it out without fear. She neither tries to distance herself from her object nor masters its mystery; she is content to let the painting be a "window on the infinite," rather than trying to contain within the borders of its image the "influence non humaine de 1'Inconnue [the non-human influence of the Unknown (woman)]" (61), that is, its "otherness." In this way, this passage serves as an example of the non-threatening relation to the other that Cixous qualifies as feminine in her theory. The painting's unknown woman is furthermore given a surprising agency. While in this passage the woman merely "fait signe," in others, according to the narrator at least, she "[a] mi-corps sort du tableau [emerges from the painting, to the waist]" (60). As the narrator will later put it: "Elle ne reste pas dans son tableau. Elle arrive. Parfois. Toujours autrement. Me frappe et disparait [She does not stay in her painting. She arrives. Sometimes. Always otherwise. Strikes me and disappears]" (80). The narrator's gaze is thus not met by a mere representation, but by a powerful mystery "[q]ui n'arrete pas de faire apparition [that never stops appearing]" (57), as she recognizes in the following apostrophe to the portrait:

67 Helene Cixous's La Loue sois-tu, intolerable, qui entretiens dans ma poitrine la passion qui mord! Je ne comprends pas ce que tu me fais, Visage de Puissance, silence! ... Cruellement, me sentir aimee de toi! Je viens, je te regarde, je lance vers toi mille fins regards brulants et mille regards obliques, et dans ta direction un filet de regards, mais je ne prends rien, je ne retiens rien, je te rate, le filet retombe sur moi, je suis captee: je te regardes-et je ne te vois pas, je suis vue. (sic; 159) [Praise be to you, intolerable, who fuel in my breast the biting passion! I do not understand what you do to me, Face of Force, silence! ... Cruelly, to feel loved by you! I come, I look at you, I send a thousand burning, piercing looks your way, and a thousand more out of the corner of my eye, and in your direction I cast a net of gazes, but I catch nothing, I retain nothing, I miss you, the net falls back on me, I am captured: I watch you - and I do not see you, I am seen.]

In La, then, the narrator seeks out the unknown other and willingly suffers the effect this encounter has. While she may not understand her passion for the enigmatic other woman ("je ne comprends pas")/ it does allow her to explore her own desire and examine herself more closely. As Cixous herself will say of the relationship of the narrator to the woman in the portrait, c'est une sorte ... d'appel de la femme par elle-meme. File s'appelle sans avoir d'autre nom que La, c'est-a-dire celle-la qu'elle pourra etre. File va en direction de la femme qu'elle n'est plus ou qu'elle n'a jamais ete, qu'elle n'est pas encore et qui est cette inconnue que je projette comme une sorte d'image. On pourrait 1'appeler 1'ideal de la femme, 1'ideal du moi, la femme absolue qui apparait comme visee.69 [it is a kind ... of call to the woman from herself. She calls herself without any other name than There, in other words the her she can be. She goes towards the woman she is no longer or that she never was, that she is not yet and who is that unknown woman that I project as a sort of image. One could call it the ideal of woman, the ideal of myself, the absolute woman who appears as sighted.]

Given the double purpose of the image as Cixous explains it here, the "je suis vue" of the above passage can thus be interpreted not only as a reference to the return of the narrator's gaze by the face in the portrait but also as the narrator's perspective on herself. In looking at such manifestations of the other, the narrator also explores her own potentialities and capacity for "otherness." This is surely what will later motivate her to exalt: "Riche en formes cachees, je deborde,

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j'echappe, tant d'Autres sont moi, mon nom est: 'je-vis-en-autre/ celles qui vivent en moi je les delivre dans les chairs de mes formes neuves [Rich in hidden forms, I overflow, I escape, so many Others are me, my name is 'I-live-in-other/ those that live in me I liberate them in the flesh of my new forms]" (203). That the scene of specularity and speculation is important to Cixous's writing of this period is confirmed once again by the author in an interview with Franchise van Rossum-Guyon: 1'ensemble de mon travail textuel tend a interroger la scene speculaire, le spectaculaire ... parce que les femmes dans 1'histoire ont ete culturellement reduites a etre a la place du spectateur. Ce n'est pas leur scene, elles ont toujours ete confinees a la passivite, a etre la domestique du transformateur ... Je regarde ailleurs et autrement. Je regarde la ou il n'y a pas de spectacle. Et ce regard est extremement interieur ... Ce n'est pas la mise a distance, alors que le regard de l'homme est eloignant, par definition. C'est au contraire, pour moi, le plus pres possible. D'ou le fait que j'affectionne surement quelque chose comme le regard les yeux fermes. Voir les yeux fermes c'est a la fois faire le geste meme de la confiance, du don et c'est le contraire de 1'aveuglement.70 [the totality of my textual work tends to question the specular scene, the spectacular ... because women in history have been culturally reduced to be in the spectator's seat. It is not their scene, they have always been confined to passivity, to being the drudge of the transformer ... I look elsewhere and otherwise. I look where there is no spectacle. And that gaze is extremely intimate ... It is not a distancing, while the gaze of man is by definition that way. It is for me, by contrast, the closest possible gaze. Hence the fact that I surely privilege something like a gaze with eyes closed. To see with one's eyes closed is both to make the very gesture of trust, of giving, and it is the opposite of blindness.]

These remarks would certainly seem to explain some of the drama of the portrait in La, which the narrator at first experiences passively, but which will later give her the impetus to explore more actively the mechanisms of her own desire. This gaze, which brings things closer, rather than distances, is further developed in La with an intertextual reference to Freud's famous case history of Dora, published in English as Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria.71 In the course of his examination of one of Dora's dreams, he recounts her trip to Dresden, where she visited the art gallery and saw Raphael's Sistine Madonna (1512-14). This painting inspired in her such feelings of admiration that she spent two hours looking at it and, according to Freud, had no explanation to offer for

69 Helene Cixous's La

her attraction other than the words "The Madonna." In his analysis of this incident, he writes: "I may remark at once that 'pictures' was a nodal point in the network of her dream-thoughts ... I should also like to single out, with a view to subsequent investigation, the theme of the 'Madonna/ of the virgin mother. But what was most evident was that in this first part of the dream she was identifying herself with a young man ... wandering about in a strange place."72 While we too will return to the role of the Madonna, it seems clear that Freud's recognition of the pivotal role of pictures in Dora's psyche could equally apply to Cixous, since she too has a fascination with paintings, especially portraits.73 Her interpretation of Dora's case, however, differs significantly from Freud's, as is shown in her rewriting of Dora's excursion to Dresden (here called "Dresse," perhaps playing on the English "dress" to refer to the feminine): En ce temps-la, tu avals erre en etrangere dans Dresse, et tu n'avais pas neglige de visiter la celebre galerie de tableaux. Seule? Avec personne. Devant un tableau elle demeure deux heures en admiration recueillie et reveuse. Quand elle revint (a moi) je lui demandai ce qui lui avait tant plu dans ce tableau. Elle repond de facon confuse, des phrases sortent de sa bouche sans verbe. ... Devant la Madone Sixtine. Ce qui lui avait fait tant de mal? Enfin elle dit: la Madone. Qui sans bouger, etait descendue sur elle, sans frapper, entree, sans sortir d'elle-meme, depuis la hauteur invariable de son eternite, lui etait arrivee. Avec la legerete de la lumiere. Son immobile rapidite. Enfin elle dit: Personne. (La 70) [At that time, you had wandered as a stranger in Dressden, and you had not neglected to visit the famous gallery of paintings. Alone? With no one. Before a painting, she remains in calm and dreamy admiration for two hours. When she comes back (to me) I ask her what had so pleased her in this painting. She answers confusedly, sentences come out of her mouth with no verb. ... In front of the Sistine Madonna. What had so pained her? Finally she said: the Madonna. Who, without moving, had descended upon her, without knocking, entered, without coming out of herself, from the invariable height of her eternity, had arrived upon her. With the weightlessness of light. Its unmoving rapidity. Finally she said: Nobody]

The first difference we notice in Cixous's approach is the slippage from the second person who addresses Dora directly to the third person, indicating at least initially a greater intimacy than the

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consistent third-person objectification adopted by Freud. The second significant difference is the by now familiar description that Cixous adds of the painting's invasive effect: her narrator fills in the details of the experience, where Dora was only able to mumble a few words. The narrator even records an alternative response supposedly offered by Dora: "Personne." Playing again on the possibilities of this ambiguous word in French, Cixous's imaginary second response, on an elementary level, answers the question of what "pained" Dora in the painting. Although this was not Freud's original question, the answer in Cixous's text emphasizes that Dora's experience was a pleasurable one, that the painting's "arrival" caused her no psychological or physical suffering, so indeed "nobody" hurt her. However, "personne" is also who accompanied her to the gallery, since she went alone. Thus, on another level, what did "pain" Dora in her encounter with the Madonna was the person she lacked, as the following passage from a few pages later shows: Face a elle [the painting], 1'adorant, cette jeune fille n'est plus moi. Elle reste la plantee devant toi, comme une figure importee, d'une autre histoire ... Ce n'est pas a toi que Dora adresse son infini, mais a une confusion de toutes les personnes. On aura repique devant toi la figure de la fille douloureuse toujours en mal de mere, celle qui se donne a mal aimer. Sa vie erre de je en je, ne sait jamais a quel sein se fier ... Comme s'il y avait une mere particuliere pour chaque fille! (72-3) [Facing it, adoring it, this young woman is no longer me. She remains rooted there in front of you, like an imported figure, from another story ... It is not to you that Dora addresses her infiniteness, but to a confusion of all persons. One will have retouched right before you the face of the dolorous girl always suffering from motherlack, the one who devotes herself to loving the wrong way. Her life wanders from I to I, never knowing what breast to trust... As if there were one particular mother for each girl!]

The phrase "en mal de mere" shows us what Cixous sees as the lack in Dora that the Madonna fulfills: the presence of a loving maternal figure, whom she could address with the familiar "tu" as the narrator does the Madonna here. This affirmation of a need for the other contrasts with Freud's conclusion that the Madonna "was obviously Dora herself."74 In this way, Cixous's rereading of Freud is a development of both the maternal metaphor and the narrator's relation to the other. Dora's fascination with the Madonna shows the importance of the mother figure to the development of female subjectivity: without that maternal

71 Helena Cixous's La presence, Dora "wanders from I to I" in confusion. The nature of the inspirational bond figured by the Madonna is described in another oneiric passage of La bearing the subtitle "Annonciation": Elle s'est visitee en reve. Elle se voit assise sur les genoux maternels et elle se penche en avant et tend les bras vers 1'enfant qui joue avec les flots de sa chevelure, et la pluie de leurs boucles est d'abord si epaisse qu'elles ne se voient pas. Alors leurs bras se croisent et tirent les rideaux et c'est elle-meme que chacune rnontre a 1'autre au rniroir des yeux. Et sans se retourner elle voit que c'est elle-meme qui porte assise sur ses genoux la jeune femme qui se penche sur elle-meme. Elle dit d'abord: "Comment est-ce possible, quand je ne suis qu'une femme?" Et il lui est dit: "Une femme est plus qu'une femme regarde toi entre toi-meme." Et cette voix est si penetrante qu'elle eveille au fond d'elle-meme quelqu'un qui depuis longtemps sommeillait, sa premiere personne d'amour ... Et cette personne est si chere qu'une fois relevee en elle, elle ne veut plus s'en delivrer, elle veut sans cesse la voir venir en des incarnations nouvelles ... Elle comprend qu'elle a toujours porte sa mere dans sa chair et qu'elle s'est maintes fois redonne naissance ... La mere repousse. A travers les generations elle se sourit. (63-4) [She visited herself in a dream. She sees herself on the maternal lap and she leans forward and holds her arms out to the child who is playing with the waves of her hair, and the torrent of their curls is at first so thick that they cannot see one another. Then their arms meet and they pull back the curtains and it is herself that each shows to the other in the mirror of their eyes. And without turning around she sees that it is herself who holds on her knees the young woman who is leaning over herself. She first says: "How is it possible, when I am only one woman?" And it is said to her: "A woman is always more than one woman, look yourself between you." And this voice is so penetrating that it awakens in her depths someone who was slumbering for a long time, her first person of love ... And this person is so dear that once awoken in her, she does not want to free herself from her anymore, she constantly wants to see her come in new incarnations ... She understands that she has always carried her mother in her flesh and that she has given birth to herself many times over ... The mother regenerates. Across the generations she smiles at herself.] This passage has been quoted at length to show the complex vision of the mother that Cixous elaborates in La. Among other things, it offers an example of the multiple subject positions or "others" that her women contain, even if only in their dreams. It also shows the literal embrace of the other that Cixous valorizes, an embrace that permits an awakening in and to the self through the mysterious effect of otherness. Finally, it integrates the metaphor of birthing and Cixous's

72 Mothers of Invention expansion of the possibilities for the maternal relation: here, in an exchange of roles, the daughter gives birth to the mother as much as she does to herself.75 Put another way, she becomes her own mother and thus is also her own child. This passage is an example of what Verena Conley points out in Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine, when she notes, "Against Freud's oedipal theories, Cixous asserts that the woman is never cut off from her mother. The absent, lost mother must be found again. She has to be read outside a cultural role, as non-name, as non-proper, and as source" (HCPW 62). In the above passage we are witness to one such scene of recovery of the mother as a source who connects and inspires generations of women. In addition to opposing Freud's theories with such alternative images, Cixous also rewrites his characteristic representations of the mother, including the phallic mother who appears in his analysis Un Souvenir d'enfance de Leonard de Vinci. In the case of da Vinci, Freud relies on diary entries and interpretations of paintings to support his discussion of the artist's erotic attachment to his mother and latent homosexual desire sublimated into the thirst for knowledge and creative fervour that typify his endeavours.76 In one key diary entry, which provides the impetus for much of Freud's interpretation, da Vinci writes: "Je semble avoir ete destine a m'occuper tout particulierement du vautour, car un de mes premiers souvenirs d'enfance est, qu'etant encore au berceau, un vautour vint a moi, m'ouvrit la bouche avec sa queue et plusieurs fois me frappa avec cette queue entre les levres [This writing distinctly about the kite seems to be my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy, it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips]."77 This image of the phallic mother, according to Freud, can reveal either a passive homosexual fantasy or a common woman's fantasy (Souv. 54). In either case, the bird's tail is, at least on one level, a substitute for the mother's breast, a connection that Freud makes, coincidentally enough, through the Egyptian myth of Mut, the goddess of maternity who is often depicted in kite or vulture form (Souv. 57). He also adds to this association the "croyance qu'il n'existait que des vautours femelles [only female vultures were believed to exist]" (Souv. 58)78 transmitted by classical authors, which no doubt in part motivates Cixous's feminization of bird names such as "fauconne" (falconess; 119, 126, 138) and "vautoure" (female vulture; 231) in La.79 More germane to this novel, however, are the contrasting interpretations of this phallic mother offered by Freud and Cixous. Where Freud is convinced this memory is a sign that the young da Vinci missed his father (Souv. 61), Cixous interprets the

73 Helene Cixous's La

scene as one of promise and pleasure for the first-person narrator so nurtured by her "fauconne": Alors je me sentis tres tres heureuse, et demeure en moi pour tous les jours la puissante impression vitale de cette visitation ... qui signifie que moi aussi je suis une fille de fauconne, et que toute enfante nee d'une mere a plusieurs queues est faite pour maitriser 1'espace, pour le rythmer, le danser ... Et comme je suis de toujours destinee a approfondir 1'espace du vol des jeunes femmes puisqu'encore au berceau j'avais ete visitee par une fauconne. (124) [Then I felt myself to be very very happy, and for all time there remains in me the powerful, vital impression of this visitation ... which signifies that I too am a falconess's daughter, and that any girl child born of a mother with several tails is destined to master space, to give it rhythm, to dance it ... And how I am destined since forever to deepen the space of young women's flight since I had been visited by a falconess while still in the cradle.]

In the last paragraph, Cixous is clearly rewriting da Vinci's remark that he "semble avoir ete destine a [sj'occuper tout particulierement du vautour [seems to have been destined to take an interest in vultures/kites]," here in favour of "1'espace du vol" (space of flight) of young women in La, which her narrator obviously feels destined to expand.80 On the next page, Cixous adds yet another dimension to her narrator's mandate, for she will also write, "Elle semble avait [sic] ete destinee a s'occuper tout particulierement de la langue [She seems to have been destinted to take a particular interest in language]" (125), language being of course the narrator's prime target in her subversion and rewriting of the codes which circumscribe the space of feminine desire. Cixous's own preoccupation with language will be our focus in the next section of this chapter, but before we leave our discussion of maternal images in La, it bears pointing out that she does not fail to offer passages which contrast with the predominantly celebratory depictions of mothering we have examined thus far. In a passage entitled "Lamentation centre la mere maigre" (Complaint Against the Meagre Mother), for example, we find a litany of complaints addressed to a mother who did not nurture and who refuses the narrator's adoration and caresses. In their proximity there was no closeness, for as the narrator says to this mother, "Tout pres de toi tu m'as tenue hors de toi ... Tu m'as entouree de glagons, j'ai gele, tu as mis une solitude entre nous [right close to you, you held me outside you ... You surrounded me with ice, I froze, you placed a solitude between us]" (76). This passage finds an echo later in La

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when the narrator will explain that "la mere s'est divisee en deux: une partie de la mere s'allie a elle, 1'autre se replie et s'apprete a se battre [the mother split herself in two: one part of of the mother allied with her, the other withdraws and prepares to fight]" (163). Against such opposition, the narrator will offer her "Incantation contre les images": Que les formes revues soient abimees Que les meres avares s'abyssent, que leurs miroirs leur ogressent ... Que les vieilles goinfresses soient devorees par leurs dentiers Que les mangeuses de filles avalent de trayers et soient etouffees Que les femmes qui se nourissent des leurs soient eVentrees Qu'elles se mangent... qu'elles se grossissent de 1'inaccouchable, qu'elles se tumefillent et se verrouillent dans leurs cuisines ... Je ne reste pas a ta porte je ne tombe pas dans ta tombe Je n'habite pas parmi les images. (163-4) [May the received forms be ruined May the meagre mothers be abyssed, may their mirrors make ogres of them ... May the fat old pigs be devoured by their false teeth May the daughter-eaters choke on what goes down the wrong way May the women who feed off of their own be eviscerated May they eat each other ... may they get fat on the unbirthable, may they swell up like tumours/whores and lock themselves in their kitchens ... I do not wait at your door I do not tumble into your tomb I do not live among the images.]

In addition to the humour evident in this exaggerated passage, we can also see the determination of the narrator not to emulate or accept certain kinds of mothering that involve the figurative domination of the other, or any conservative attempt to preserve the status quo, "les formes revues." While "meagre mothers" are thus shown to exist in Cixous's exploration of maternal figures, they are categorically refused in favour of the gifts and inspiration provided by the luminous portraits of nurture depicted elsewhere in La. It is surely because Cixous's narrator refuses to be "sage comme une image" (good as gold) that she will affirm that she does not live "parmi les images" in this passage, for as we have seen, the many intertextual images present in La are reworked precisely to allow an escape from the socio-cultural "tomb" which has historically contained women's desires, dreams, and creativity. All the intertextual references we have discussed are rewritten, revised, and reinvigorated by Cixous in order to address what Tilde Sankovitch, in her chapter "Helene Cixous: The Pervasive Myth," terms "woman's most

75 Helene Cixous's La

fundamental need: that of authentic self-recuperation, of free selfexpression, and of uninhibited contact with the self, that female self which had been oppressed and occulted in the stale stories of our cultural past."81 In La, Cixous depicts the cruelty of that oppression in a graphic passage in which men are shown committing acts of exaggerated violence against women: Ou les hommes se retournent centre 1'amour et le matraquent ou les males haissent les lieux de leurs naissances et les empalent, les bouchers hachent le sein; ils capturent leurs propres meres, ils leur arrachent les antennes, et les quatre ailes enluminees, ils rompent les pattes, ils decollent les membres ... et maintenant, les memes, apres la mort du sommeil, gluants du crime repete, epouvantent leurs femelles par le gonflement de leurs parties, etalent devant leurs tendres faces attristees d'enormes lambeaux de peau pustulee, glapir, brandir, roter, etourdir, intimider, insinuer, hypnotiser, angoisser, attaquer, par la violente exhibition du muscle du charme de la beaute de la laideur. (198-9) [Where the men turn against love and beat it down where the males hate their places of origin and impale them, the butchers hack at the breast; they capture their own mothers, they rip their antennae off, and the four illuminated wings, they break the legs, they rip off the limbs ... and now, the very same, after the death of sleep, slimy with the reiterated crime, terrify their females with the swelling of their organs, parade before their tender, saddened faces enormous tatters of pustular skin, to yelp, flourish, burp, deafen, intimidate, insinuate, hypnotize, worry, attack, with the violent exhibition of the muscle of charm of beauty of ugliness]

In La, Cixous phrases the goal of liberating women from the destructive mechanisms of patriarchal thought differently from Sankovitch, although the meaning is the same: "Le vrai chemin de naissance ne passe pas simplement par la mere ... II faut surtout se debarrasser des morts, des dieux et des hommes qui font la mere [The true path of birth does not simply pass through the mother ... Above all we must rid ourselves of the dead, gods and men who play the mother]" (La 270, HCR 66), or who actively denigrate women, as in the above quotation. What such passages show, of course, is that despite her efforts to explore different configurations of gender, to include a bisexual element in her text, Cixous's La remains for the most part centred on images of women and women's desires, and it incorporates intertextual references in accordance with this focus. As Verena Conley puts it, "There is a certain slippage in Cixous' texts between the erasure of the concept 'woman' - libidinal drives do not refer to one or the other of the sexes exclusively - and

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a return to woman. A new chain forms: women, bisexuality, artists, writing" (HCWF 60). The second section of this chapter will deal with Cixous's approach to writing, and it will explore the lyric and ludic dimensions of language that she draws upon in her attempt to renew language as part of her re-visionary strategy in La. BRINGING LANGUAGE TO (DE)LIGHT

Elle laisse parler 1'autre langue a mille langues, qui ne connait ni le mur ni la mort ... Sa langue ne contient pas, elle porte, elle ne retient pas, elle rend possible. (Eire 50)

[She lets the other language speak the language of 1,000 tongues which knows neither enclosure nor death ... Her language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.] (Laugh 889) Helene Cixous

According to Budge, one of the religious beliefs of the Egyptians was "that every word spoken under certain circumstances must be followed by some effect, good or bad" (Budge Ixxv). This belief is at the heart of the rituals and incantations that accompany the chapters of the Book of the Dead. While at first many of these were merely recitations made over the deceased at burial, "later the same words written upon some substance and buried with him were believed to be effectual in procuring for him the good things of the life beyond the grave" (Budge Ixxv). In La, Cixous echoes this ancient belief in the efficacy of the word when she claims that speech and writing can liberate and serve as a means for transformation in women's lives. As we see in the opening pages of La, "Si 1'arrivante a appris pendant sa vie le chapitre sur 1'Entrevies, et si elle a fait ecrire ses vceux sur les parois de son ancien corps, elle pourra sortir de sa maison et penetrer dans ses jardins a son gre, soit le jour, soit 1'ete [If the newcomer learned during her lifetime the chapter on the In-between-lives, and if she had her wishes written on the surfaces of her former body, she will be able to exit her house and enter her gardens as she wishes, either by day or in summer]" (9). Inspired by the Egyptian intertext, this passage is the first in Cixous's text to show the importance of writing and also its links to the body, which serves as a space of inscription for multiple desires ("ses vceux"). The exploration of one's desire, "read" from the body, and the knowledge acquired from other women's stories ("le chapitre sur 1'Entrevies" surely comes from "Le Livre des mortes") are thus guiding principles in the narrator's search for autonomy and a renewed sense of self in La. Her progress towards this goal cannot help but bring change and perhaps the upset of the old order, figured in the following excerpt by the law of gravity: "Si

77 Helene Cixous's La

la femme connait le chapitre qui suit, elle sortira la nuit dans la pleine lumiere de son jour, elle s'en viendra et s'en ira en toutes les parties de son monde, elle passera a volonte par toutes ses metamorphoses! La gravite sera bouleversee. Elle changera 1'espace [If the woman knows the next chapter, she will come out of the night in the full light of her day, she will come and go through all the parts of her world, she Will pass through all of her metamorphoses at will! Gravity will be disrupted. She will change space]" (129). In La the narrator's rebirth to herself will be paralleled by a renewal of language and of writing, since "[l]es vieux mots ne marchent plus. Ne frappent plus [the old words don't work anymore. Don't hit home anymore]" (23). Echoing "The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day," which is the literal translation of the title of her source, Cixous will thus playfully entitle her third chapter "La Sortie de la langue vers la lumiere du jour" [The emergence of language into the light of day; 111], subsequently reworking this phrase still further in one of the chapter's subheadings: "Sortie de la langue vers le jour de sa lumiere" [The emergence of language into the day of its light; 120]. As part of her emergence from the nightmarish confusion of the book's opening passages, the narrator must revivify language, bringing its full expressive potential to light: "Des mots sont arraches vivants a la langue defunte [Words are torn, alive, from the dead tongue]" (23) in order to articulate her process of awakening to herself and her desires. The crucial role of language in the narrator's "coming forth" is underscored by Cixous in an interview where she discusses the writing of La, saying: "une femme ne peut se naitre a elle-meme en tant que femme qu'a condition de naitre en se dormant a elle-meme sa langue, une autre langue, pas celle dont elle est heritiere, ancienne, masculine, mais sa langue a elle, capable d'ecarts linguistiques, de traversees, de multiplications [a woman can be born to herself as a woman only on condition that she be born as giving her language to herself, another language, not the old, masculine one which she inherits, but her own language, capable of linguistic deviations, of crossings, of multiplications]."82 While this statement does little to clarify the differences between the "old" language and the "other" language that women are to invent, it does at least indicate Cixous's interest in exploring that which disturbs our habitual relation to language and words, forcing us to read with fresh eyes. So consistently consuming is this interest that Claudine Guegan Fisher will go as far as to affirm that, "chez Cixous, en effet le langage est lui-meme le heros des textes [in Cixous's work, language is in effect itself the hero of the texts]."83 The pages that follow will focus on the themes of language and writing in La, as well as the disruptive

78 Mothers of Invention

stylistic, syntactic, and linguistic strategies that Cixous employs to create a praxis commensurate with both her feminist project and her avant-garde poetic sensibility. Although her Egyptian intertext certainly supports the initial thematization of language and writing as part of her narrator's development, it is quickly displaced by other intertexts and fuelled by other progressions of images. One such image is the portrait of "Portee de 1'inconnue," which, in direct speech, seems to tell the narrator to write "le journal de [sa] passion [the journal of (her) passion]" (57), and a few lines later adds: "fais voir dans ton texte que 1'inconnue est un astre comme la lune ou a peu pres, et toi-meme la terre pour elle [make visible in your text that the unknown woman is a celestial body like the moon or something like that, and yourself the earth for her]" (57). These passages, which address a "tu" and appear between quotation marks, echo in content as well as style the writings of Leonardo da Vinci in his journals, as noted by Freud in his study of the artist. In fact, the latter excerpt would seem to be a rewriting of a passage that Freud himself quotes from da Vinci's notebooks: "Tu as a faire voir, dans ton traite, que la terre est un astre comme la lune, ou a peu pres, et a demontrer la noblesse de notre monde [In your discourse you must prove that the earth is a star much like the moon, and the glory of our universe] (Souv. 84)."84 By taking a page from da Vinci's book without divulging her source,85 Cixous accomplishes two things: first, she opens up a dialogue with the other woman represented in the painting by seeming to give her a voice, thus making her a motivating factor in the narrator's search for adequate self-expression; second, since the passages are spoken to a "you," she implicates the reader, who is thus also told to write a journal "[p]our ne pas mourir" (in order not to die; 57). This is one way at least that Cixous can been seen as trying to touch the lives of the real women who may read her work. While the origin of this intertextual reference is deliberately omitted, its prescription becomes the first substantive indication in La that part of the narrator's "sortie au jour" (coming to light) will involve a "venue a 1'ecriture" (coming to writing).86 Before she can write, however, the narrator must search for a language adequate to describe her experiences. We witness the "birth" of this language in a passage that humorously evokes the delivery of a human baby: "Et bien sur 1'enfant sort, roule, tombe. Bon Dieu! quelle vitesse! Et quel silence! Qu'est-ce qui est sorti? Elle se rappelle qu'il faut pousser un cri. Alors elle pousse un cri. Le cri pousse, s'enracine dans Fair, repand en un instant ses sons, ses vibrations, ses notes nomades. Deja quelles courses, quelles voices! Gargon ou

79 Helene Cixous's La

fille? C'est une langue! [And of course the child emerges, rolls, falls. My God! What speed! And what silence! What has exited? She remembers that it is necessary to shout. So she shouts. The shout pushes, takes root in the air, spreads in an instant its sounds, its vibrations, its nomadic notes. Already what races, what flights! Boy or girl? It's a language!]" (108). This is only a metaphoric birth, of course; the real strategy at work in this renewal of language is one of shaking off the constraints of what the narrator will later call 'Tetat de mortmale" (the death state of normale; 223), which refers both to "normal" language, full of calcified expressions and structures, and to the deadening effect of the power historically exerted by male authors in that language: En verite la langue invisible qui m'avait enveloppee naguere et qui commandait mes pas, je 1'ai arrachee, la vieille langue noueuse, qui me gainait le souffle, je 1'ai enlevee ... Ma terre interne mon climat. Que la jeune langue me la dise! Je 1'ai portee dans les flancs de ma bouche ... La voila nee! ... Puisqu'elle sort en toute liberte, de meme je peux sortir en meme liberte! (112-13) [In truth the invisible language that had enveloped me once and that guided my steps, I tore it away, the gnarled old language, that restricted my breathing, I took it off ... My internal earth, my climate. Let my young language tell me of it! I carried it in the flanks of my mouth ... And here it is born! ... Since it comes out freely, I can likewise come out with the same freedom!]

From this passage, we see how important an unrestricted, insubordinate relation to language is to the narrator, who feels that her own liberty depends on it. But what is exactly being constricted by the "gnarled old language" that the narrator tears away? What does she want her "newborn" language to express? In her essays, one of the things that Cixous encourages is the adoption of a language and writing practice that derive their energy from the particular "unconscious drives" ("pulsions") and concomitant repressions associated with what she calls a feminine libidinal economy. "We are made of repressions, and the unconscious is nothing but that," she says in her interview with Verena Conley, adding that, nonetheless, "one may attempt to write as closely as possible to the unconscious, to the area of repressions."87 This is no doubt why La depends so heavily on dream imagery and play with language, both of which are products of what Freud calls "the system of the unconscious."88 "Toutes les langues de 1'inconscient, j'ai essaye de les faire travailler [all the languages of the unconscious, I tried to make them

8o Mothers of Invention

work]/' Cixous thus says of her writing in La, which she calls "une sorte d'immense exploration, visitation, invention des ressources feminines aux niveaux linguistique, libidinal, sexuel, et au niveau de 1'inconscient [a kind of vast exploration, visitation, invention of feminine resources on the linguistic, libidinal, sexual level, and on the level of the unconscious]."89 The frequent mention in La of the narrator's multiple "inconscients" (89, 94), her "pulsions" (85), and her "libido" (248), which inspire her, show the extent to which Cixous is consciously working on the problem of creating a space for the uncontrollable unconscious in the controlled process of symbolization that is writing. Within the narrative framework of La, however, Cixous's predominantly first-person author-narrator seems to have no such difficulty, since she claims her new language is one in contact with her desires, "Ses forces branchees directement sans la moindre censure sur une batterie d'inconscients aux ressources intarissables [Her forces directly connected without the least censorship to a battery of unconsciouses with inexhaustible resources]" (La 208, HCR 59). While she never claims explicitly that her writing and use of language come unmediated from her unconscious, the narrator is shown, in passages such as this one, to be aware of that source of her creative strength; that is why we read elsewhere, "Le rapport qui s'etablit entre ses noms, ses vetements, ses organes, certaines parties de son corps, et sa personne est un rapport inattendu - ce qui surexcite sa curiosite - , mais determine par 1'intervention laterale et puissante d'un moment de sa libido [The relation that is established among her names, her clothes, her organs, certain parts of her body, and her person is an unexpected one - that overexcites her curiosity - but determined by the powerful lateral intervention of a moment of her libido]" (248). One could say that, in addition to determining her relationship to herself, these "powerful libidinal interventions" also occur in this woman's contacts with others, and in fact, they provide much of the "flesh" of this text, both in terms of body metaphors and in terms of narrative focus. The double meaning of langue as both language and tongue is fully exploited by Cixous in a number of erotic passages that also demonstrate her narrator's love of words and verbal dexterity. The narrator rejoices in her uninhibited language, which permits her de se glisser la nuit dans une phrase etrangere en se moquant des barrieres, et passionnement, gaiement coller ma bouche a sa bouche, 1'enivrer avec les baisers de ma bouche, et avec ses levres, avec la pointe de sa langue elle me prend aux mots, goulument de repandre ... mes salives dans son palais, dans

8i Helene Cixous's La sa gorge, mes desirs d'animer, de changer, de me travailler dans 1'autre, de nous alterer, de nous dormer le gout de traverser les mers interdites ... , de se rejouir de jouir de toute sa langue dans un seul mot ... , de provoquer les adulteres, les mutations, les adoptions, de pousser hardiment les liaisons jusqu'aux fugues, les rencontres jusqu'aux fougueux langue a langue au-dela des regions du sens ... (90) [slipping by night into a foreign phrase, not caring about barriers, and passionately, gaily, pressing my mouth to it, inebriating it with the kisses of my mouth, and with its lips, with the tip of its tongue it takes me at my word, to greedily spill ... my saliva on its palate, down its throat, my desires to stimulate, change, and work on myself in another, to alter us, to give us the taste for crossing outlawed oceans ... , rejoicing to be able to orgasm from one's whole tongue in a single word ..., provoking adulteries, mutations, adoptions, pushing the liaisons to elopements, the casual encounters to fiery tongue trysts beyond the regions of sense ...]9° Although this is only one example of Cixous's play with the multiple meanings of langue, it does show the determining role that desire and the body play in the thematization of language as well as that of a writing "close" to the unconscious. Cixous's use of metaphors of the body in her theorization of ecriture feminine have caused much polemic in the critical community, since many see her privileging of female body images as an essentializing gesture.91 In La her association of the female body with the "new" language of her narrator is made clear in the following excerpt, where the narrator affirms her body and desire: Je veux nuque. Je veux col. Je veux cul ... Je veux tout. Je veux joue je veux joues, je veux tout joue. J'ai une langue. Je veux que ma langue jouisse ... Je veux vulve. Qu'elle prononce mes noms, et j'ai! Qu'elle me Use le livre de mes parties, et moi-meme je m'avance avec le livre de mon corps dans ma bouche, et dans ma bouche je contiens le volume qu'elle ceuvre pour moi ... tout ce qu'elle prononce est fait beau du point de vue de ma langue: "Vulve!" ... En verite ma bouche et ma langue, voila mes yeux pour vivifier mes recoins stagnants. (113-14) [I want nape. I want neck. I want ass ... I want it all. I want cheek I want cheeks, I want everything cheeky. I have a tongue. I want my tongue to orgasm ... I want vulva. Let her pronounce my names, and I have! Let her read the book of my parts, and myself I advance with the book of my body in my mouth, and in my mouth I contain the volume that she works for me ... everything she pronounces is made beautiful from the point of view of my

8a Mothers of Invention tongue: "Vulva!" ... In truth my mouth and my tongue, here are my eyes to revivify my stagnant nooks.]

As Vivian Kogan notes in her detailed analysis of this passage, what Cixous does here is affirm woman's desire and her body through the powerful "ontological status of the sign," while at the same time favouring writing ("le livre"), which "alone expresses the dynamics of desire and provides a mode of self-reflection, self-recognition, and self-validation/'92 Where Kogan puzzles over the ambiguous body/ book metaphor by asking whether "the body [is] a metaphor for writing or ... writing a metaphor for the body,"93 I would suggest that Cixous's point here is precisely that this process of substitution indeed works in both directions. I thus share the opinion of Barbara Freeman, when she observes that "when the reader tries to grasp [the Cixousian body] in hopes of finding a stable ground or centre, she instead finds more metaphors. What is at stake is not Cixous' use of metaphor, for example, the ways in which she employs feminine bodily imagery, but rather that she relates the domains of the proper (or referential) and the metaphorical (or textual) in non-hierarchical terms."94 In other words, in the above passage from La, both the body articulated in writing and the writing inspired by that eroticized body are important, inasmuch as they are both part of the narrator's quest for a language appropriate to her desires. Such double-edged metaphoric relations in La, moreover, are far from static, for the body, language, and writing appear elsewhere intertwined with so many other images that there is indeed little if any "stable ground" for an essentializing interpretation. This is clearly why, as Martine MotardNoar notes, Cixous tends to "valoriser la complexite transformationnelle de 1'ecriture poetique ... constitute d'un reseau de pistes ouvertes [valorize the transformational complexity of poetic writing ... constituted by a network of open paths]."95 If the constantly transforming network of metaphoric associations creates an impression of elusiveness in this text, then the frequent and unexpected shifting in narrative point of view only reinforces this effect. While La consists of first-person narration a great deal of the time, including in both its opening and its conclusion, there are also many passages that use the second person, examples of which I cited in the context of Cixous's use of da Vinci's journals, and still more adopt the third person, as I have also tried to point out.96 The abrupt changes from the first to the third person are perhaps the most disconcerting for the reader; they give the narration a disorienting instability of focus, as if the narrator were alternately living and evaluating from a distance her own experiences and emotions. This

83 Helene Cixous's La

is certainly the effect of the following passage, where the narration refers to an "elle" who, as a "dompteuse des metaphores" (female metaphor tamer), clearly recalls the first-person author seen elsewhere, especially in the supreme virtuosite dont elle fait preuve dans 1'invention et 1'execution de nouveaux modes de deplacement, d'excursion, d'expansion erotique, de communications sensorielles, et en general de traduction simultanement manuelle, linguistique, corporelle et bisexuelle. Et qui s'augmente de 1'habilete avec laquelle elle transforme en agents de son energie tous les objets qui 1'entourent ... et tous les mots des langues qui lui viennent a la bouche, surtout ceux qui sont passes entre les mailles des langues qui pechent en des eaux plus ou moins proches des siennes. (211-12) [supreme virtuousity that she displays in the invention and execution of new modes of movement, of excursion, of erotic expansion, of sensorial communication, and in general of simultaneously manual, linguistic, bodily and bisexual translation. And that increases by virtue of the skill with which she transforms into agents of her energy all the objects around her ... and all the words of the languages that come to her lips, especially those that slipped through the nets of languages that fish in waters more or less close to her own.]

With its metaphoric association of fishing and language, seen earlier in the description of femininity's "four powers" (89), and its references to invention and "simultaneous translation," this passage in the third person could easily be describing the verbal virtuosity of Cixous's first-person author-narrator, who later tells us: "Je puis meme enseigner mon art [I can even teach my art]" (254). Indeed, by the end of La, we find that the narrator has become so proficient in the practice of this "art" that she becomes both "le trapeze et le trapeziste" (trapeze and trapezist; 256), in the course of an extended circus metaphor describing her relationship to writing and the freedom it provides. The circus metaphor perhaps offers one way to explain La's shifting perspective, for in the constant juggling of narrative pronouns, it is this narrator's special talent to assume them all at one time or another. Just as she embodied the feminine "foule" (multitude) at the book's opening, in this passage the narrator can be read simultaneously as the object of and the observer producing this description, which applies to them both. The fact that, by the end of the text, La's narrator refers to her writing and use of language as an art is evidence that there is a good deal of conscious thought and refinement involved in this activity ostensibly inspired by her libidinal energies. In sum, Cixous negotiates the thematization of writing and the body with some delicacy

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in La, recognizing that there is no direct link to the unconscious, even as she tries to suggest, through her narrator's increasingly exuberant confidence in her linguistic prowess, the creative possibilities for women in language: Et entre terre et mer me lever, entre mere et mer m'engendrer, devenir elle a partir de moi-meme et de la entre nous s'elancer plus loin dans le sanslieu ou nos langues se parlent, s'epanchent, se rencontrent, ne se rencontrent pas, se livrent, s'entendent parler dans d'autres langues ou viennent se jeter d'autres parts, depuis d'autres corps, d'autres discours d'eaux, le cours d'autres desirs, le contenu d'autres inconscients, en relation non logique avec nous, sans loi, sans grammaire, mais appeles par le meme rythme, 1'amour, les affinites affectives, Sans s'inquieter jamais de savoir de qui il s'agit du moment qu'il y a du feminin qui jouit. (205-6) [And between earth and sea rise up, between mother and ocean engender myself, become her out of myself and from there soar up from between us further into that with/out place where our languages speak to one another, confide in one another, meet one another, don't meet, bare their souls, hear one another speak in other tongues into which other places flow, from other bodies, other (dis)courses of water, the course of other desires, the contents of other unconsiousnesses, in a non-logical relationship with us, without law, without grammar, but called by the same rhythm, love, affective affinities, Without ever worrying about knowing who it has to do with so long as there is femininity feeling pleasure.]

In this celebration of language, what seems important is the narrator's capacity to transform and "engender" herself and the freedom with which she expresses her desire for connection with "otherness," signalled by the repetition of the adjective "other" as well as by the pronominal verbs ("s'elancer," "se parler," "s'epancher," "se rencontrer/' "s'entendre," "se jeter"). Once again, however, there is no direct connection to the body: "depuis d'autres corps" designates the body as merely an indirect tributary of the reservoir of languages available to the narrator and those with whom she shares the rhythm of feminine "jouissance." In this passage the condensation of metaphors and the repetition of words and syntagmatically equivalent units contribute to the lyric effect that characterizes much of this novel. Moreover, as the narrator of the above excerpt points out, rhythm is often a more important structuring principle in La than the laws of grammar, to the point where, in some instances, it becomes very difficult to follow the

85 Helene Cixous's La

narrative logic of the text. Such is the case in the following example, excerpted from a longer lyric passage: Couchee mille nuits chercher en vain son lit, sa chambre, son palais, et mille fois 1'avoir sentie si pres, son santal, son sillage, son echarpe d'orangers, 1'avoir vue rouge dans le noir, et mille fois cru par peau, par langue, par paumes languees tater son gout lavande, sa fleur de fraise, son extrait, 1'avoir sentie passer tout pres, silloner les arteres de la cite cuivree, fouiller les temples en pleurs, supplier, supplier, sentir passer le temps, la vie, la mauvaise minute, monter, ramper, retourner, tu es dans les failles des rochers. (179) [In bed a thousand nights to look in vain for her couch, her room, her palace, and a thousand times to have felt her so close, her sandalwood, her wake, her scarf of orange trees, to have seen her red in the dark, and a thousand times to have believed with my skin, my tongue, my palms tongued to have touched her lavendar taste, her strawberry blossom, her extract, to have felt her pass close by, criss-crossing the arteries of the coppery city, to search the tearful temples, to supplicate, supplicate, feel time passing, life, the wrong minute, to climb, crawl, go back, you are in the cracks in the rocks.]

The ternary rhythm in this passage is created by repetition of possessive adjectives ("son santal, son sillage, son echarpe")/ of prepositional phrases ("par peau, par langue, par paumes"), of semantically related units ("le temps, la vie, la mauvaise minute"), and of verb forms ("monter, ramper, retourner"). In addition, Cixous uses assonances here to lyric effect, although other passages demonstrate this poetic technique more clearly; for example: "remur me roule me moure me lave lalle lappe lente ferme moi sa lie voulue savouree repechee mes muscles re lies mes brins, mes branches, mes reins arques mes cheveux, je veux [rewall rolls me slays me lathers me lalle laps up slow shuts me its sediment desired savoured recovered my muscles re linked my fibers, my limbs, my curved loins my curls I desire]" (82). In this latter passage, assonance and alliteration are more important than any semantic connections between words, showing Cixous's preference for lyrical association over grammatical logic, which makes some parts of La quite disconcerting reading for those accustomed to novelistic prose. As Irma Garcia puts it in Promenade femmiliere, "Les mots obeissent plus aux sons, au rythme musical qu'a la grammaire, bouleversant continuellement la lecture [The words obey sonorities, the musical rhythm, more than grammar, continually disrupting reading]."97 As one might expect, Cixous endows her narrator with a similar awareness of the lyric power of language in the practice of her art.

86 Mothers of Invention The narrator's sensitivity to the music of words emerges first in her references to voice and song that pick up on the musical resonances of La's title, pointed out in Christiane Makward's interpretation cited at the outset of this chapter.98 At one point, La's narrator will explicitly recognize the lyric quality of her "ceuvre," when she says: "Car tout ce que je fais est harmonie, est creation de lignes, de rythmes, de traces, qui s'entendent pour changer le monde, pour rayer le temple, pour bouleverser 1'equilibre des forces [For everything I do is harmony, is the creation of lines, of rhythms, of traces, that conspire to change the world, to erase the temple, to upset the balance of forces]" (221). What is most interesting about this metatextual commentary is the narrator's claim that her "harmonie" and "rythmes" are subversive and have the potential to "change the world." This claim clearly resonates with contemporary theories of the semiotic, developed by Julia Kristeva in La Revolution du langage poetique, where she associates rhythm and music with the "chora" which erupts most recognizably in poetic language to disturb the logic of the symbolic, understood as, among other things, "la chaine signifiante et ... la structure de la signification" [the signifying chain ... and the structure of signification]."100 Given that one of the themes in La is the search for a disruptive language close to the unconscious and responsive to its energies, the narrator's interest in poetic rhythms and harmonies is as appropriate as it is subversive of "1'etat de mortmale" (the death state of normale; 223) that she wishes to escape in her use of language. If we accept that the structures of language also structure our perceptions and our thought, then upsetting the normal "signifying chain" could indeed "change the world," or at least our perspective on it. For her narrator as much as for Cixous herself, then, the lyrical qualities of language open up the possibility for alternative ways of shaping thinking and writing that more closely resemble what women wish to express. As Christiane Makward so rightly points out in her article "Structures du silence/du delire," however, there are many different poetic styles one can adopt. Makward notes the presence of at least seven in La, citing passages for each and giving them the following labels: "'style messianique' a la Saint-John Perse," "style oratoire (liturgique)," "evangelique," "lyrique-erotique (Cantique des Cantiques)," "style surrealiste," "style saphique," and, no doubt at a loss for adjectives by this point, "style stroboscopique" ("messianic style" a la Saint-John Perse, oratory [liturgical] style, evangelical, erotico-lyric [Song of Songs], surrealist style, sapphic style, stroboscopic style).101 Without going into the details of this classification, which Makward admits is "peu systematique,"102 it is clear that

87 Helene Cixous's La Cixous deliberately incorporates many different tones and "styles" into the writing of La, no doubt as part of her strategy of renewing our relation to language by disturbing the regular flow of prose text. Just as lyrical rhythms may disrupt the logic of the sentence, so then can poetic styles upset narrative logic, allowing new forms of textuality and new approaches to reading to emerge. Humour and, in particular, wordplay are two other techniques that tend to disrupt the logic and laws of language use, as Freud points out in his study Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. In La, in which the last chapter is entitled "Qui rira la derniere," Cixous quite openly explores the subversive value of laughter and play present in what Freud calls "joke-techniques." These tactics by which humour is produced, by "re-establishing old liberties" once enjoyed in childhood and by "getting rid of the burden of intellectual upbringing," produce a pleasurable and liberating relation to language.103 Given the number of critics who have read and written on "Le Rire de la Meduse," it is surprising that so few have thought to examine Cixous's obvious interest in laughter as a disordering principle within the social as well as the linguistic order. She makes this last point herself in "Castration or Decapitation?" noting: "Culturally speaking, women have wept a great deal, but once the tears are shed, there will be endless laughter instead. Laughter that breaks out, overflows, a humor no one would expect to find in women - which is nonetheless surely their greatest strength because it's a humor that sees man much further away than he has ever been seen. Laughter that shakes the last chapter of my text La, 'she who laughs last.' And her first laugh is at herself."104 For Cixous, laughter has both a freeing and a distancing effect, such that what once seemed threatening is seen in its proper proportions. In this instance, she posits that man's oppressive authority can be brought into perspective and even disrupted by women who can face it with laughter. Elsewhere, in a remark that could very well describe the narrator's journey in La, she will go so far as to claim that one can escape from death itself "en poussant un eclat de rire [with an irrepressible burst of laughter]" (Venue, 46, CTW 41). As we have already noted in the scene of the "birth" of language, sometimes Cixous's humour is situational, its comic impact dependent on our recognition of a familiar event or behaviour pattern. Such is the case in the passage in which the "arrivante" proceeds to the next stage in her journey "en marche arriere, vers la pleine lumiere de son autre jour" (in reverse, toward the full light of her other day): Elle trouvera sa voiture garee a 1'extremite de la derniere artere. Elle pourra conduire son vehicule a travers toutes ses energies. Son ame or dormer a les

88 Mothers of Invention changements de vitesse. En outre, si elle sort de 1'Immobile, elle foncera d'est en ouest en coupant les vieilles circulations et quittera le chapitre inferieur en sens interdit. Celle qui tient le volant demarrera dans crainte sous le nez d'un demon de Seth ... sans ecraser personne elle foncera sans perdre haleine avec la plus grande prestesse. (132) [She will find her car parked at the end of the last artery. She will be able to drive her car through all her energies. Her soul will command the change in gears. Moreover, if she exits the Immobile, she will accelerate from east to west while cutting across the old traffic patterns and will leave the lower chapter going the wrong way on a one-way street. She who holds the wheel will start up without fear right under the nose of one of Seth's demons ... without hitting anyone she will accelerate with the greatest dexterity without losing her breath.]

This figuration of spiritual progress as the negotiation of urban traffic congestion certainly pokes fun at the "conveniences" of modern life, which so often contribute more to our stress than to our progress. The ironic tone of this passage is further intensified by Cixous's use of 'Tlrnmobile," which reminds us of "automobile" even as it seems to refer to the gridlock that the woman is trying to escape by using alternative routes and going the wrong way down a one-way street. This scene is certainly an example of the laughter directed at oneself mentioned in "Castration or Decapitation?" a laughter that Vivian Kogan qualifies as "philosophical" because of its latent irony.105 In a conversation with Franchise van Rossum-Guyon after the publication of La, Cixous herself speaks of her text as simultaneously serious and humorous, saying, "On peut entendre ce texte comme il est ecrit, c'est-a-dire a plusieurs niveaux. D'une part, c'est un texte poetique, c'est un texte qui fait reference a 1'inconscient, d'autre part c'est un texte qu'on peut prendre au serieux et ou on peut entendre en meme temps quelque chose que j'appellerais de 1'humour [One can understand this text as it is written, that is, on several levels. On the one hand, it is a poetic text, it is a text that refers to the unconscious, and on the other, it is a text that can be taken seriously and in which one can yet hear something that I would call humour]."106 Most often, Cixous's humour tends to be generated by wordplay and puns, which she uses to comic effect. Such verbal humour occurs in many different contexts, but is most consistently present in her treatment of male figures of authority and their activities. We have already noted the humorous neologism of "motmificateurs" (wordmummifiers), used to refer to grammarians and other proponents of "la raison dans le langage" (208). Cixous also turns her punning pen on the leaders of "la naindustrie" (indwarfstry; La 209, HCR 60), on

89 Helene Cixous's La

the "seducateurs" (seducators; 247), and on their "agressiculture" [aggressive (agri)culture; 149], which, mentioned in the context of both the countryside and women, points out the invasiveness of patriarchal culture as well as of cultivation. She also derides male authority with her invention of "peremission" (p(at)ermission; 247) and a "jeune fille trop male-elevee" (young lady too poorly/malely raised; 245), both of which preserve the sounds of standard expressions even as they expose the oppressive reality of the authority buttressing their semantic value.107 Still, Cixous saves her most sardonic puns for her commentaries on the androcentric god she calls 'THeritier des Hiers" (the heir of yesterdays; 131) and "le prime maire de Memeplus" (the prime mayor of Moresame), who "creacha" (crejected) the patriarchal world in a combination of spitting (cracker) and creating (creer) (132). As one might expect, this parodic image contrasts with a more inviting chalk "craie-ation," attributed to a female "artiste de Portee" (artist of Consequence; 93), which inspires the narrator in her own process of becoming the "tisserand pour un chef-d'oeuvre delirant" (weaver of a deliriously funny masterpiece; 266). The neologisms and wordplay in La are not restricted to passages where Cixous pokes fun at figures of authority; nor are they always humorous in intent. Many of her most compelling inventions occur in passages where she is explicitly trying to expand the possibilities of language to better express the situation and desires of women. While she may prize women's ability to laugh (rire) despite their suffering (souffrir) - "souffrire" (84) is the verb she coins for this she is also sensitive to their "diffemmation" (diffamation/defaming of women; 89) and the neglect that causes her narrator to cry "Fernmine" (famine/Womine), since "c'est de faim qu'elle fait la femme" (it is from hunger that she makes woman; 75). Later the narrator will further articulate the bitterness of the emotional and creative starvation she feels by exclaiming: "Je m'aigris, je m'aigris! [I am dieting/ embittering]" (100). It is thus in the gaps of language and even across languages that the narrator and Cixous try to create the words that inspire and liberate, "[e]ntre 1'ellement et 1'anglais, dans les craintes du franc.ais, en 1'angoisse, entre 1'helenigme et la langue fondamentale, en jewgreek, entre les grand-meres mourantes et les mortes maintenues vivantes" [between Germane and English, in the fears of French, in Hungryish, between the Helenigma and the fundamental tongue, in Jewgreek, between the dying grandmothers and the dead women kept alive]" (81). While most of the neologisms mentioned in the preceding paragraphs are formed by altering the spelling of words while preserving their sounds, other examples of what Martine Motard-Noar calls

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Cixous's "deconstruction du mot" are made "d'une addition ou d'une substitution de lettres, par consequent, pour certains des mots, d'une addition de sons qui introduisent de nouveaux aspects a 1'interieur de ces mots [from the addition or substitution of letters, consequently, for some of the words, from the addition of sounds that introduce new features inside these words]/'108 An example of this type of neologism is the suggestive "voiluptes" (veiluptuous pleasures; 61), which the narrator uses to describe the veiled sensuality of the woman she identifies as Neith. Other examples include "cielle" (skyher; 222, 231, 243), which identifies the normally masculine del as the space for the feminine elle; "sensueur" (sensuwet; 84), which suggests the sensuality of perspiration; and "messonges" (fibrications or, more literally, deceptive dreams; 94), which breaks down into mes songes (my dreams) even as it plays on mensonges (lies). In terms of sheer concentration of wordplay, the passage entitled "Son Don des transferts" (Her gift of transferences; 82-6) deserves special mention, for it contains over twenty-five neologisms, puns, or grammatical errors such as nouns used as verbs ("j'echo"; 84). While we have already cited some neologisms from this passage, "etymolorgiaques" (etymolorgiastic; 84) stands out as a particularly apt descriptor of Cixous's invigorating verbal splices, which often draw their power from etymological resonances as well as from the sheer "exuberance de sa langue sauvage" (116) in which orthographic and grammatical rules are cast aside in the pursuit of both the expression of difference and the uninhibited delight of experimentation. Here Cixous's writing strategies and her narrator's are identical, such that the following passage from La could apply equally well to the approach to language of both: Repandre sur ses pentes et ses versants une pluie d'images verbales volantes, s'introduire dans une phrase a la faveur d'une ressemblance avec un des animots de cette derniere ... contaminer les genres et les nombres, passer d'un bord a 1'autre bord de son plus beant abime par enchantement, enfantement, ou enjambement, jeter un pont verbal entre ses desirs et ses realites, entre ses souvenirs et ses evenements ulterieurs, et entre ses propres personnes infantiles et celles qui sont deja puberes, reconnaissables a ses contours, sa minceur, son elegance, son extreme vivacite, quelle que soit alors sa nature ou son incarnation. (248) [Spread on its slopes and sides a rain of flying verbal images, introduce oneself into a sentence thanks to a resemblance to one of its wildlife-words ... mix up genders and numbers, pass from one side to the other of its most gaping abyss by magic, childbirth or enjambement, verbally bridge the gap between her desires and her realities, between her memories and her subsequent

91 Helene Cixous's La events, and between her own childish selves and those already adolescent, recognizable by her shape, her slenderness, her elegance, her extreme vivacity, no matter what her nature or her incarnation then be.]

In his review of La, Bertrand Poirot-Delpech describes Cixous's strategies articulated in such passages as an attempt to "casser le moule ..., de se glisser en cachette dans la langue de 1'occupant male et de s'y frayer un passage en provoquant, dans ses moindres articulations, adulteres, mutations, pagailles de sens [break the mould ... to slip into the language of the male occupier on the sly and to blaze herself a trail by provoking, in its least articulations, adulteries, mutations, messes of meaning]." Although one could argue that, far from occurring "on the sly," Cixous's forays are conducted quite openly, Poirot-Delpech does highlight the irreverent, subversive quality of her experimentation with language. He goes on to add, though, that "le calembour erudit ne semble pas une si invincible maniere de voler le feu a la grammaire masculine. C'est encore lui faire, malgre soi, soumission [the erudite pun does not seem to be such an invincible way to steal the fire of masculine grammar. It is once again, in spite of one's intent, to submit to it]."109 If Cixous's strategy to subvert "masculine grammar" were limited to puns and neologisms, such innovation would indeed fall short of its iconoclastic goal, for the syntactic order would remain intact. In La she plays with more than just words, however, for she also disrupts syntax, experiments with punctuation, and even upsets the connections between paragraphs. As she states in her interview with Christiane Makward: "I have never had any relation of obligation to the law of legibility."110 In contrast with the extremely hermetic textual experimentation in Cixous's Partie, also published in 1976, La remains a relatively legible text, despite numerous disruptions of syntax and textual logic. To show how such disturbances trouble the text's readability, we may quote the narrator's description of the woman she follows through the passage of death: elle marche plongee en elle-meme comme une reveuse dans 1'eau absolument bleue, devant moi. Sans me remarquer. Un jeune sapin d'en haut. Une volute epaisse de cheveux rousse se degage si lentement, tendre roule, vapeur, sourd, echappee de la coiffure nattee ses mains sont cachees, ses bras cachees ... sa demarche est mesuree - tendrement se deroule, regret, se frole, les boucles se dependent le long de la nuque, tombe. Elle ne le sent pas, avance devant moi le long du corridor. (36) [she walks wrapped up in her thoughts like a dream/ier in absolutely blue water, before me. Without noticing me. A young fir from the heights. A thick

92 Mothers of Invention curl of hair escapes so slowly red, unrolls tender, vapour, rises, straying from the braided hairstyle her hands are hidden, her arms hidden ... her stride is measured - tenderly progresses, regret, brushes itself, the curls relax along the nape of the neck, falls. She does not feel it, advances before me the length of the corridor.]

On a syntactic level, the first disconcerting moment is the appearance of the adjective "rousse," which modifies 'Volute'' but seems at the very least out of place, if not grammatically incorrect, because of its placement after "cheveux." This mild disturbance, which leaves the reader scrambling to connect the adjective to a noun, is then followed by "tendre roule, vapeur, sourd," a phrase that completely disrupts the sense of the sentence. Is "tendre" an adjective, and if so, why does it seem to modify the verb? And what does "vapeur, sourd" describe? Given that vapour is a feminine noun, "sourd" must be a verb, but is "vapeur" its subject, and if so, why are they separated by a comma? A similar disjunction occurs later in the passage with the appearance of the noun "regret," unattached in any clear way to what precedes and follows. Finally, the word "tombe" also presents some ambiguity, since it could be a noun or a verb; but if it is a verb, its subject remains difficult to identify. As one critic aptly puts it, such "indecisions contribuent a une tactique de renversement du discours et a une explosion d'un sens en de multiples sens [indeterminacies contribute to a tactic of disturbing the discourse and to an explosion of one meaning into multiple meanings],"111 strategies that in fact characterize much of Cixous's fiction. In addition to disrupting syntax, as in the passage above, she uses punctuation to sow disorder in the sentence. One example of this is a three-paragraph passage in which words and short phrases are separated by dashes (48-9). This punctuation, which allows Cixous to juxtapose syntactic units without apparent logical connection, creates a panting, disjointed effect that ultimately renders the emotion of the passage quite convincingly, since the women it portrays are fleeing in fear and confusion.112 More frequently, however, Cixous pushes her sentences past the grammatical limit by omitting all punctuation or by using commas instead of periods for sequences several paragraphs long (82-3, 89-90, 118-19, 149~5°/ 197)- This is no doubt the chief reason for the feeling of "breathlessness" that Susan Suleiman notices in her reading of Souffles, about which she says that "the feeling one has is not of fragmentation but rather of effusion, as if everything were being written in a single breath" (si 128). Although the impression of effusion is certainly predominant in La, with its "pluie d'images verbales volantes" (rain of flying verbal

93 Helene Cixous's La

images; 248) and its disconcerting punctuation, there are also passages that can only be described as fragments, which also contribute to the disruption of linear reading practices. In some cases, these fragments can be linked to others despite intervening sequences. An example is the passage "D'abord la mort aura reve d'elle ... Puis elle reve de la mort [First death will have dreamed of her ... Then she dreams of death]," which is split in two and appears on pages 34-5, such that it can be reconstituted by reading across both pages.113 In this case, the fact that the sentence is in italics in contrast to the surrounding text helps the reader to reconnect its severed segments. In other instances, however, the clues are less obvious; the continuation of a description of the dress worn by the woman in the portrait on page 60 does not appear until the following page after several unrelated paragraphs. Given that the description in the two passages is ambiguous at best, ultimately the only confirmation of the relation between them is the ellipsis at the end of the first passage, which feeds into the one at the beginning of the later fragment. These two examples aside, there are many paragraphs that seem to bear no relation at all to what precedes and follows (65,85,141,152), displaying yet again Cixous's calculated disregard for the traditional 'Taw of legibility" governing the narrative organization of the novel. In the course of my reading of La, I have noted a number of levels on which she disrupts conventional semantic and grammatical codes as a way of rejuvenating a language in which women's voices have so seldom found freedom of articulation. It is this pervasive strategy of rupture that causes Claudine Guegan Fisher to claim that Cixous is creating a new, "third" language: "Le franc,ais est la langue avec laquelle jongle Cixous, mais le franc, ais s'eclate de sa gangue grammaticale; 1'auteur fait appel a toutes les langues pour ajouter des dimensions inconnues a 1'art de dire et d'ecrire. II y a litteralement et poetiquement une creation d'une nouvelle langue tierce, a cheval sur toutes les langues, capable de voler a 1'infini et de faire entrevoir des demultiplications [French is the language with which Cixous plays, but French breaks out of its grammatical straitjacket; the author calls upon all languages to add unknown dimensions to the art of speaking and writing. There is, literally and poetically, the creation of a new, third language, straddling all the languages, capable of infinite flight and of making visible the reductions]."114 This is without doubt an overstatement of Cixous's accomplishment in La, since the text is still written in French - as Fisher herself notes - and the innovation and rupture that Cixous introduces are not so extreme as to render the whole by any means illegible. Moreover, even if she succeeded in creating a "langue tierce" and sustaining it for the

94 Mothers of Invention

length of an individual text, such an idiosyncratic language would not necessarily serve her broader purpose of helping other women to express themselves more freely in language and changing the way her readers view the world. In this respect, Mitzi Myers's remarks in her essay on Mary Wollstonecraft hold true for the modern context in which Cixous writes as well: "Subordinate groups like women must shape their world views through the dominant models, transforming their own perceptions and needs as best they can in terms of received frameworks. If women's alternative or counterpart models are not acceptably encoded in the prevailing male idiom, female concerns will not receive a proper hearing. Women's ways of ordering, of making significant their situation, must thus be carefully disinterred from the dominant structures which muffle them. Even though female models of reality and desire mostly follow the ground rules, their unique deviations from the norms make a woman's world of difference."115 Although we have shown how Cixous occasionally transgresses and ignores the "ground rules" of signification, grammatical structures, and narrative continuity in important ways, it is also true that her writing in La demands to be heard, and it thus must negotiate a balance between innovation and conformity with respect to the linguistic and narrative expectations of her readership. In order to make "a woman's world of difference," Cixous therefore tries to preserve contact with her public by affirming the connection between her first-person narrator and other women. As Morag Shiach astutely notes, "What Cixous tries to do is to subvert the discourse of patriarchy, to open it up to contradiction and to difference, while still retaining the possibility of shared recognition which would make a political movement of and for women possible" (HCPW 20). This "shared recognition" is fostered in part, on the level of La's narration, by the frequent use of the second person, which addresses the reader as much as it does the narrator's fictional interlocutor or the narrator herself. When we read the exhortation "Ecris! En plus net, plus visible, plus sonore, c'est la cle de 1'autre musique! [Write! More clearly, more visibly/more sonorously, it is the key to the other music!]" (54), we are certainly called to that writing process as much as the narrator, who seems to be directing this imperative at herself. The reader is similarly implicated by the use of the first-person plural, the "nous" which often connects the narrator to a collectivity of women within the text of La. This collectivity, represented by a rather impersonal "on" at the beginning of La, becomes an increasingly visible, feminine "nous" as the text unfolds. By the end of La, this "nous" is clearly meant to include Cixous's female readers, as in

95 Helene Cixous's La

the following passage, which focuses once again on the imperative to write that she transmits so convincingly in both her fiction and her theory: "cet art que nous n'avions pas quand nous ne savions pas qu'il etait deja la, il se donne a nous ... et c'est alors que nous cessons d'etre aveugles, gauches, innocentes, affolees, et que nous devenons des artistes. Maintenant, nous ne pouvons plus, car il faut desormais faire vivre aussi notre art, ne pas le nourrir, 1'exercer ... L'artiste ne peut pas ne pas creer. Et ne pas ecrire est 1'impossible de celui que 1'ecriture a reconnu pour sien [this art which we did not have when we did not know that it was already there, it gives itself to us ... and that is when we women cease to be blind, awkward, innocent, panicky, and become artists. Now, as henceforth we must also support our art, we can no longer not nourish it, exercise it ... The artist cannot not create. And not writing is the impossibility of he whom writing has recognized as one of its own]" (253). In La's last chapter this liberating writing of a feminine "nous" no longer "affolees" is opposed by a "vous" designating men who would be critical of this project. It is thus to a masculine interlocutor that the narrator says: "Vous avez entoure nos propositions de toutes les limitations necessaires ... Pas a pas, en comptant les marches vous avez 1'esprit d'escalier. Au fond, c'est-a-dire au premier degre de cet escalier - en haut duquel vous etes sur que vous attend la recompense de votre longue sagesse -, ce n'est pas par hasard que vous avez invente la machine a vapeur [You have surrounded our clauses/propositions with all the necessary limitations ... Step by step, counting the stairs, you are slow on the repartee. In the end, that is at the base of this staircase - at the top of which you are sure that the recompense for your long wisdom is waiting - , it is not by chance that you invented the steam engine]" (251). While the deprecating tone of this passage is somewhat rare in the context of La, it does confirm both a solidarity with women and the narrator's defiance of the men whose language of limits is in fact their own limitation. The rigid logic of patriarchal language is contrasted with the narrator's own experimentation, designed to give voice to the disorderly desires and dreams of not only herself but other women as well: La joie qui fait rire mon cceur reellement rire et rayonner 1'astre dans la poitrine de la terre n'a pas de nom dans votre langue. Jamais nous n'avons la chance quand nous ne sommes que mortelles de jouir des combats sublimes d'ou elle jaillit ... Nous avons invente la danse de 1'eternite. Et le contentement surabondant de soi qui se prodigue aux corps et nous fait voir la musique pour laquelle on n'a pas encore trouve d'instruments. (222)

96 Mothers of Invention [The joy that makes my heart laugh, really laugh, and makes the star shine in the breast of the earth does not have a name in your language. We never have the chance when we are only mortal to enjoy the sublime combats from which the joy springs ... We invented the dance of eternity. And the overabundant self-satisfaction that is unstintingly lavished on the bodies and makes us see the music for which we have not yet found the instruments.]

In this way, Cixous reaches out to her female readers by giving voice to their presence on the level of language as well as by appealing to their sensibilities and experiences through the text's themes and images."6 The many passages in which the narrator delights in her body are echoed by her enthusiasm for the innovative, transgressive language used to express that sensuality, a clear demonstration of the freedom of articulation that Cixous wishes her own readers to seek. The individual trajectory of the narrator in La is therefore linked to the paths of real women, whose histories-and self-perception may potentially be transformed by what they read. However often Cixous may deny being a feminist because of the excessive, as well as imprecise, use of the term in the contemporary French context,"7 the project in La of awakening women to their creative energies and desires is in fact clearly feminist, according to the definition articulated in chapter i. Her innovative wordplay, her lyric and ludic strategies that disrupt linear reading patterns, her rewriting of the feminine relation to the other and particularly to the maternal, and most importantly, her inventive reworking of her intertextual sources all serve to create .a space in La that is open to the feminine and expressive of the desires of her female narrator. In a sense, La is designed to serve in a capacity similar to that of the "Effelle" tower, which the narrator sees, at the book's conclusion, as a springboard for her own creative flight, which she will make "[s]ans ailes" (without wings) but "avec elles" (with them [women]), recalling the collectivity of women with whom she started her journey. Just as the Eiffel Tower is transformed by "elle" into a propitious space from which the narrator "prendra son la" (will take her tone/ place; 278), so the text of La itself, with all its subversive strategies and erotic lyricism, aspires to provide fertile ground for the reader's own imagination. It thus fulfills the role played by the books that Cixous read in childhood, which allowed her to imagine an elsewhere and to live her dreams, for "tout le monde sait que pour aller ailleurs il y a des passages, des indications, des 'cartes' - pour une exploration, une navigation. Ce sont les livres. Tout le monde sait

97 Helene Cixous's La

qu'il existe un lieu qui n'est pas oblige economiquement, politiquement, a toutes les bassesses et tous les compromis. Qui n'est pas oblige de reproduire le systeme. Et c'est 1'ecriture. S'il y a un ailleurs qui peut echapper a la repetition infernale, c'est par la, ou c.a s'ecrit, ou c,a reve, ou c.a invente les nouveaux mondes [everyone knows that to go somewhere else there are routes, signs, 'maps' - for an exploration, a trip. That's what books are. Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds]" (JN 131-2, NEW 72). In La, Cixous achieves a dual purpose. On the one hand, her selection and use of intertexts and neologisms demonstrate the tactics necessary to undermine the hegemony of male authors and authorities in language. On the other, her sumptuous and passionate images and language also furnish the reader with the affirmative opportunity of experiencing the joy and even the laughter involved in voicing difference. In his essay "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles," Lyotard extends the following invitation to those who would try to express feminine difference in language without simultaneously buttressing the "masculine imperialism" at work in philosophical and theoretical discourses: "Let us set to work forging fictions rather than hypotheses and theories; this would be the best way for the speaker to become 'feminine.'"118 Cixous's La is a prime example of the space that experimental fiction can provide for the paradoxical portrayal of both the desire for a difference that does not become a fixed "identity" and the feminist project of selfexpression, which presupposes the desiring self. Although it would be going too far to posit that La is an example of ecriture feminine, given the obstacles encountered by any writing that pretends to inscribe the unconscious and its drives, this complex and highly poetic text does offer an intriguing approximation of what "1'art d'aller la" (the art of going there; 86) might be.

3 Excavating the Body, Unwinding the (Inter)Text: Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur C'est dans 1'oeuvre qu'il faut trouver les reseaux d'analyse. Chaque texte veritable de fiction comporte en luimeme les outils, les materiaux de sa propre analyse ... Toute lecture, comme toute ecriture, est une perte de soi et de 1'autre. Un abandon des prejuges et des a priori.

[It is in the work that the networks of analysis must be found. Every true text of fiction carries within itself the tools, the materials of its own analysis ... Every reading, like every instance of writing, involves a loss of self and of the other. An abandonment of prejudices and of a priori.] Madeleine Gagnon1

Madeleine Gagnon is a key figure in Quebec feminism, important not only for the role she played in theorizing the feminine and in cultivating creative connections with other francophone feminists such as Helene Cixous but also for her engaged and powerful writing, most especially her poetry, which garnered her the 1986 Prix du Journal de Montreal and Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award for poetry in 1990. A mere ten years into her career, in 1978, she also achieved the distinction of being elected to the Academic canadiennefrangaise, a fact all the more notable since she was the only one of her generation of feminists to receive this honour so early in her trajectory. Nonetheless, as noted in chapter i, Gagnon remains relatively unknown outside Quebec and is quite often a neglected figure even within local feminist circles. Dorothy Todd Renault's 1986 cinematic portrait of Quebec feminist writers, Les Terribles vivantes, includes Louky Bersianik, Jovette Marchessault, and Nicole Brossard but not Gagnon, despite the fact that the latter was, as Karen Gould rightly points out, the only Quebec author included in Marks and de Courtivron's influential 1980 anthology New French Feminisms (WF no). The reasons for Gagnon's singular status as an essential, yet sometimes overlooked, participant in the history of Quebec feminism are several, including her post-graduate academic training in France, which distinguished her from her Quebec-educated peers; her militant Marxist-feminist ideological convictions, which were not shared by

99 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur other feminist factions during the 1970s;2 her criticisms of lesbian feminists, who formed the most outspoken and ideologically radical wing of the movement at the time;3 and finally, her decision to leave the Universite du Quebec a Montreal to dedicate herself more fully to her writing in the early 19805, a move that meant she no longer had the ongoing support of an institutional structure which came to nurture or consecrate many other women writers of her generation in the years that followed. However the internecine conflicts within Quebec feminist circles may have affected Gagnon's own literary trajectory and reputation, it still bears recalling what an extraordinary role she played within the French and Quebec communities we are considering and, most especially, how she became one of the principal links between them. At the height of feminist activism, Gagnon was an internationally known figure, in part because she published in France on Quebec women writers in Le Magazine litteraire and Sorcieres* and also because her works were mentioned or reviewed more often than those of her compatriots in these French journals and others, including Liberation and Les Nouvelles litteraires.5 Her reputation and association with the call for "ecriture feminine" was of course also based to a considerable extent on her connections and collaborations with French feminists such as Helene Cixous and Annie Leclerc, which resulted most notably in the publication of La Venue a Vecriture.6 Gagnon's archived correspondence with Cixous shows that this essay collection, although published in 1977, was in fact in gestation from early in 1975. Interestingly enough, La Venue was launched in France only one week before Retailles, another feminist text elaborated over precisely the same period by Gagnon and her compatriot Denise Boucher, with whom Gagnon had participated in the feminist consciousness-raising group that inspired the project.7 Such collaborative efforts bear witness to the sense of solidarity and genuine Marxist commitment that Gagnon had displayed at the Rencontre quebecoise internationale des ecrivains in 1975, where she announced: "Je ne veux plus mes textes seuls, je veux d'autres paroles dans mes textes [I don't want my texts (to be) alone anymore, I want other words in my texts]."8 Gagnon's desire to unite with others, born in part of her ideological engagement, was clearly also at the heart of her participation in founding the important leftist journal Chroniques in 1975, to which she contributed regularly until 1978. Significantly, her first pieces for the journal were also collaboratively produced and included a group interview with Cixous and a co-written article "Liberation de la femme et lutte des classes" (Women's liberation and

ioo Mothers of Invention class struggle).9 From 1975 to 1978, then, she participated in a number of projects that contributed to setting the tone for a period of feminist activism characterized by women working together to make their voices heard and to legitimize their shared experiences. It would be hard to overestimate the defining influence both of Gagnon's ideologically inspired belief in collaboration and solidarity and of the 1975 Rencontre on the texts that she would produce in the latter half of that decade. Indeed, in talking about her memories of that historic meeting of French and Quebec feminists in a later series of radio exchanges with Annie Leclerc, Gagnon herself underscores its lasting effects, when she observes: "II y a eu un double effet. £a a donne d'abord des ecritures ... ou j'ai voulu concretement travailler avec des femmes, des femmes amies qui ecrivaient. £a a donne La Venue ... mais aussi Retailles en '77 avec Denise Boucher. Et puis, c.a a donne aussi un cycle d'ecritures que j'ai qualifie d'archeographiques, ou j'essaie d'explorer, de chercher ce que j'appellais le Iangage maternel [There was a double effect. First, it resulted in writings ... where I wanted to work concretely with other women, women friends who were writing. It produced La Venue ... but also Retailles in '77 with Denise Boucher. And then, it also resulted in a cycle of writing that I have called archaeographical, where I try to explore, to look for what I termed maternal language]."10 It is this latter cycle of writing, culminating in the "archaeographical" text of Gagnon's "roman archeologique" Lueur, which will be my principal focus here.11 Although several critics have not failed to remark on the shifting emphasis of her texts from the Marxistfeminist Pour les femmes et tons les autres (1974) and the militant poetry of Poelitique (1975) toward a more intimate voice in the latter half of the 19703, Louise Dupre gives what is perhaps the most elegant synopsis of Gagnon's evolving literary trajectory, in which "tour a tour se melefnt] marxisme, feminisme, syndicalisme, contreculture dans un flot qui les emporte pour les diriger ensuite vers une recherche plus interieure, davantage centree sur la psychanalyse. Peu d'ecritures ont su suivre un tel parcours dans un laps de temps aussi restreint [one after the other, Marxism, feminism, syndicalism, counter-culture combine in a sweeping tide that is then channelled into a more inner search, centred rather on psychoanalysis. Few careers negotiated such a trajectory in such a short period of time]" (sv 156). If Pour les femmes et tons les autres is, as Dupre claims, the first clearly feminist collection of poetry in Quebec (sv 25in.7), then Gagnon's 1979 novel can be seen as her most fully conceived and executed woman-centred work of the period and one

ioi Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

that both embodies and concludes a decade of extraordinary transformations in her career. As Gagnon indicates to Leclerc in the radio exchange cited above, one of the central thematic nodes that inspires this deliberately unconventional novel is the maternal and the search for language capable of expressing all of its valences, but most especially the female body, its memories, and its desires. In one of the earliest scholarly analyses of this work, Karen Gould also notes the importance of process to this project, for Gagnon's "archaeological novel" emphasizes "the long, slow, internal excavation of the writer's own depths as well as ... the painstaking nature of the creative undertaking. In addition, Gagnon's archeological imagery draws more particular attention to the act of stripping away, of exposing what has long remained hidden from the female artist and from history."12 The title of the present chapter indicates the extent to which I too feel that the archaeological image is a key one to understanding this complex text, where excavating a personal and collective past that is specific to women is intimately bound up with the theme of writing, of inscribing the transmission of women's memories between and within generations. Still, as Gagnon's own remarks recall, "maternal language" is what dominates this text as well as her thinking of the time and is part of what gives her writing its particular power. It is for this reason that I dedicate the first part of my analysis to exploring Lueur's "maternal archaeographies." I thus take to heart Gagnon's suggested approach to reading offered in this chapter's opening epigraph, because it is clear that her text, like La, demands to be read differently and constantly challenges the reader to follow its self-conscious rejection of narrative and linguistic conventions. It is by picking up on the text's own fragmented cues in its metaphoric and thematic explorations of the (lost) maternal and of its legacy in and of writing that I have chosen to approach Lueur's complex, interwoven "reseaux d'analyse" and the demands they make on the reader to abandon a priori expectations of the novel. Gagnon's archaeological enterprise is in some ways quite similar to that of Cixous, whose revisionary use of the Egyptian Book of the Dead unleashes her exploration of a woman's dreams and symbolic death and rebirth in writing, themes that Gagnon will also develop in Lueur. The most obvious difference between the two novels, however, is that Gagnon does not adopt an existing text as her point of departure, although she does make important use of intertexts, as the second part of this chapter will show. In Lueur the body is the privileged source for her take on the work of memory and the birth of

1O2 Mothers of Invention

the female subject in and of writing. As she puts it in an interview with Gerald Gaudet: "Le corps serait comme un immense monument rempli de tatouages. Et pour moi, 1'ecriture me permet d'aller retrouver le sens des premieres inscriptions: elle est necessairernent une quete archeographique, psychique [The body could be considered as an immense monument full of tattoos. And for me, writing allows me to go and find the meaning of the first inscriptions: it is necessarily a psychological, archaeographical quest]."13 These remarks demonstrate Gagnon's conception of the body as something to be read and discovered in writing, because writing offers a way to record and make sense of the psychological traces and memories "tattooed" on our skin and in our minds. For Gagnon as for Cixous, psychoanalytic theory is thus an important touchstone in the search for ways to establish the connection between the body and writing, to translate corporeal memories and desires into words. As early as 1975, the same year Cixous published "Le Rire de la Meduse," Gagnon revealed the theoretical basis for her approach to writing in these terms: "c'est sans doute I'ecriture qui colle le plus au fantasme qui permet davantage de depister, de suivre, de s'inserer dans le frayage du desir ... 1'inconscient tisse (materiellement) d'hieroglyphes (Freud, Lacan, Derrida) est luimeme ecriture et ... le dechiffrement ou decryptage de ses inscriptions s'opere du travail meme de 1'ecriture [it is no doubt writing that most closely adheres to the fantasies which permit us to better unearth, follow, and experience the paths of desire ... the unconscious (materially) woven of hieroglyphs (Freud, Lacan, Derrida) is itself a writing and ... the decryption or deciphering of its inscriptions proceeds from the very work of writing]."14 For Gagnon, writing can thus become a form of therapy/5 because it can offer a way to give a voice to non-verbal traces, the "hieroglyphs," which women's (hysterical) bodies have often inscribed as an expression of their (repressed) desires and (traumatic) experiences. In Lueur she even punctuates her text with a series of photographs of petroglyphs, for which the explanations are not immediately apparent since the descriptive list appears only at the end of the book. The initial mystery of these prehistoric images, several of which refer to the human body and sexuality, thus becomes a metaphor for our lack of understanding of the inscriptions and traces we all carry within us and a constant reminder of the "archaeological" project of Gagnon's narrative, in which memory, death, repressed experience, and the body's inscriptions of them must be deciphered in and by the writing - and reading - process.

iO3 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

Since writing is an integral part of Lueur's thematic network, it is clear that the fragmented structure of the novel itself is equally fundamental to Gagnon's project. In the second part of this chapter, my focus will thus expand beyond thematic and metaphoric content to include the avant-garde strategies that she adopts in searching for a narrative form appropriate to her creative vision. The disruption of linearity on both the narrative and the syntactic levels is one way in which she tries to develop an innovative aesthetic in keeping with her desire to express the difference of women's stories. As the novel is also structured by a significant amount of repetition of her own text and others, the question of inter- and intratextuality is also central to the consideration of form. It is in this context that archival research on Lueur's genesis proves helpful, for the early versions of Gagnon's manuscript indicate how she incorporates previously published pieces, especially from the poetical work Antre (1978), into the weave of the novel. The fact that Lueur contains passages of her poetry is merely one way that the author transgresses the traditional conventions of genre. Much like Cixous, Gagnon is not afraid to mix tones and levels of language to create a hybrid text that is at times highly theoretical, at times confessional, and at others strikingly surreal and sensual. Just as her early collections of poetry are "impure" in the sense that they contain theoretical discourse, prose passages, advertisements, and fragments of familiar speech, so this later text by Gagnon also eschews "straight" narrative, both in its structure, where repeated text creates a spiralling effect, and in its generic form, which, as Louise Dupre puts it, "tient davantage de la fiction-theorie que du roman a proprement parler [is more like fiction theory than a novel, properly speaking]" (sv 235). I will discuss the innovative development of "fiction theory" at more length in reference to Nicole Brossard's L'Amer, but it bears noting here that Gagnon was herself consciously transgressing the limits between genres at a very early stage in her career. To cite Gould, whose chapter on Gagnon remains the most important critical survey of the author's work to date, Gagnon's early collections of poetry "are already experimental in terms of their formal construction, particularly in the ways in which they violate conventional distinctions of genre and notions of acceptable poetic tone" (WF 111). Lueur, while not the first "fiction theory" published in Quebec, nonetheless participates in a subversive approach to genre that characterizes most of Gagnon's work of the period. Like the other novels I consider, Lueur is thus a key feminist experimental text, for it showcases the many daring paradigms that she develops in the form as well as the content of her women-centred fictional writings.

104 Mothers of Invention MATERNAL ARCHAEOGRAPHIES: WRITING THE BODY'S WILL AND

Mon corps est mots ... Comme des millions de femmes, je veux inscrire mon corps en lutte car quelque chose me dit - et ce n'est pas ma science d'homme - qu'une grande partie de 1'histoire, pour ne pas avoir ete pensee et ecrite par nous, s'est figee dans la memoire du corps femelle.16

LEGACY

[My body is words ... Like millions of women, I want to write my body into struggle, because something tells me - and it is not my male science - that a great part of history, never thought out or written by us, has been embedded in the memory of the female body.]17 Madeleine Gagnon

In 1975, when Gagnon finished what has ultimately become her most important feminist theoretical essay, she immediately sent it to Cixous, who had solicited her contribution and who responded to it in an enthusiastic letter commending its approach to four themes that are in fact vital to all of Gagnon's work: mother figures, death, language, and the body.18 The very title of Gagnon's contribution to La Venue a I'ecriture, "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture" (My body in writing), is a clear indication of the body's centrality to her thought, particularly at this juncture in her career, when her feminist commitment and the experience of psychoanalysis converged to emphasize the necessity of exploring corporeal experience and memories as a source of knowledge and identity. Two texts that Gagnon published in 1974, "Amour parallele" and Pour les femmes et tous les autres, already suggest this marriage of interests in her approach to rethinking the body: "Amour parallele" ends with a critique of the Oedipal complex at the heart of Freud's theory of sexual development, which perpetuates even as it reveals the subordination of women in patriarchal society/9 while in Pour les femmes et tous les autres Gagnon affirms, using the "we" of women's solidarity, that "nous sortons de 1'histoire par notre propre ventre / en criant nous sommes nos propres enfants [we are exiting history through our own wombs / shouting we are our own progeny]."20 In her early feminist texts, she is already reading women's bodies as a site of oppression but also as a place from which to begin their liberation via a rebirth to and of themselves, an image that also appears prominently in Cixous's essays and novels of the same period. For Gagnon and many of her feminist contemporaries, the body can thus be a double-edged symbol. On the one hand, because of its potentially debilitating cycles, the female body has constituted the primary pretext for centuries of enforced inferiority, lack of self-

105 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

determination, and outright oppression for many women. In the worst cases, such demoralizing experiences have led to hysteria and madness in which the "ventriloquized body"21 voices what some women cannot otherwise express about their unspeakable psychosocial suffering. On the other hand, the body's vitality, its difference, and its gestational, maternal, and sexual pleasures can also be a source of strength and inspiration and can provide a profound sense of connection between women. In a sense, then, the body can be seen as an archive of the best of women's lives, an alternative record to the history which, as Gagnon notes in the epigraph given above, women have not written and which male historians have so often overlooked. Unlike some writers of her generation, however, Gagnon does not content herself with lamenting the forgotten women of the past, but instead actively pays tribute to the strength of foremothers who, despite their oppression, still managed to think, rebel, and write. As she puts it in "Dire ces femmes d'ou je viens" (Speaking of those women from where I come), a 1978 article she wrote on Quebec women writers for the French Magazine litteraire, "Nous sommes definitivement sorties de 1'antre obscure ou se tenaient nos grandsmeres. Mais sans elles, sans les premieres traces de leurs revokes, sans leurs toutes premieres inscriptions timides qui nous frayaient la voie dans 1'ecriture, je doute que 1'explosion recente ait ete possible. Je veux retrouver ces premiers balbutiements, refaire 1'histoire autrement, relire nos cris initiaux [We have definitively left the dark den where our grandmothers clung to one another. But without them, without the initial traces of their revolts, without their very first, timorous inscriptions which paved the way for us in writing, I doubt that the recent (feminist) explosion would have been possible. I want to uncover these first mumblings, to rewrite history differently, to reread our initial cries]."22 The article goes on to speak of women who have marked the history of Quebec and its literature, including pioneers such as Marie de 1'Incarnation, who founded the Ursuline convent in Quebec City in 1639, and important modern writers such as Laure Conan, Gabrielle Roy, and Marie-Claire Blais, among many other, lesser-known names. In her own fiction, where she is not performing the function of a critic introducing noteworthy women from Quebec to a European audience, however, Gagnon privileges more intimate histories and prefers to retrace the links between generations and women's stories through intense bodily experiences associated with suffering, death, or desire. Lueur is without doubt the most developed aesthetic exploration of the concern for recovering the past and celebrating the "memory of the female body" that Gagnon expresses in "Mon Corps dans

106 Mothers of Invention

1'ecriture." In this "[h]istoire aux centres multiples / aux floues peripheries [story with many centres / with blurry boundaries]/'23 the theme of the body is inextricably entwined with many other images and motifs - death, birth, maternal figures, dreams, and memories, to name a few - such that it becomes virtually impossible to unwind one thread without unravelling the pattern of the whole. This difficulty is intensified by the non-linear narrative of the novel, which loops and returns on itself and juxtaposes fragments of stories and dream sequences without apparent relation to one another. The disorienting organization of this text seems much like the disparate elements of the petroglyphs that Gagnon reproduces in double-page photos on the front and back leaves, which show a serpent, a pipe, and a lizard with other carved shapes in a grouping with no clearly discernable logic. Despite this deliberately fragmentated narrative, echoed by the seemingly unconnected petroglyphs that punctuate the text, Gagnon's novel does contain a central storyline that the author herself once identified in an unpublished paper written for a conference in Brussels, where she underscored the complexity of Lueur's archaeographical project: Archeographie d'une parole qui prend plusieurs voix de fernmes, plusieurs personnages, plusieurs noms, plusieurs generations. Le personnage central est celui de la grand[-]mere paternelle, d'ascendance huronne mythique; elle est illettree; illettree mais intelligente, avec une parole fine et une culture sans bornes, sans frontieres - une vaste culture. Cette parole, elle la transmet a une petite-fille qui capte le testament sonore et en deroule la trame dans 1'ecriture.24 [Archaeography of speech that takes several women's voices, several characters, several names, several generations. The central character is that of the paternal grandmother, of mythic Huron descent; she is illiterate; illiterate but intelligent, with kind and wise words and an education without limits, without borders - a vast knowledge. She transmits her speech to a granddaughter who picks up this vocal testament and unravels its weave in writing.]

This summary highlights the plethora of narratives and narrative voices in Lueur, as well as the outline of the pivotal connection made in the novel between a grandmother and her granddaughter, where the oral transmission of knowledge from one generation of women to another becomes the essential gesture in this multi-layered text, which thematizes the writing of a story that has been excluded from (or perhaps buried beneath) the annals of history. Before reaching the scene of transmission at the heart of Lueur, however, the novel invites the reader to participate in the process of

107 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

unearthing the sources and purpose of its writing. In addition to using the mysterious petroglyphs to set the tone, Gagnon situates her novel even more deliberately in relation to traditional disciplines of historical research by choosing an epigraph from Michel de Certeau's L'tcriture de I'histoire, where he says: "C'est au moment ou une culture n'a plus les moyens de se defendre que 1'ethnologue ou 1'archeologue apparaissent [It is when a culture no longer has the means to defend itself that the archaeologist and the ethnologist appear]" (qtd. in Lr 9). This is a very interesting choice of quotation to introduce what Gagnon herself labelled a "roman archeologique," for it implies that this text is the result of a kind of post-mortem, a document based upon knowledge or artifacts that have been lost, that belong to what one might call a dead past. Etymologically, the word "archaeology" itself comes from the Greek archaeo, for ancient or original, and logos, for word (and by extension, science or theory). Gagnon's chosen epigraph and designation for her novel together suggest that the author of this project intends to recover an "ancient knowledge," becoming like the archaeologist or ethnologist whose mission is to unearth the missing, buried, or forgotten relics of a human story that is no more. The archaeological writer is thus one who re-members, who puts the pieces together again in the hopes of making them a part of living memory by giving them words that will enhance our understanding of ourselves and our history. Nevertheless, as de Certeau underscores by speaking of cultures unable to "defend" themselves, there is also the possibility that the archaeological gesture can turn into one of recuperation and distortion, effectively colonizing or doing violence to the fragile, fragmentary traces of the past, in other words. In Gagnon's work, there seems to be a consciousness of this danger and a deliberate attempt to avoid it in several ways. First, she tries to give a voice to women's stories, not by creating a monolithic, authoritative narrative, but by offering up fragments of stories told using the voices of a multiplicity of narrative subjects and subject positions. Second, she chooses to navigate in the waters of fiction, not historical discourse, and so she makes no claims about the factuality of the stories she writes. As she puts it in one of her interviews, "1'ecriture ne retrouve jamais le reel. Elle doit retrouver la verite d'une histoire, la verite des histoires, mais jamais la realite [writing never encounters the real. It must find the truth of a story, the truth of stories, but never reality]."25 Such statements show Gagnon's particular take on the distinction between reality and truth: she acknowledges the artifice (or unreality) of writing even as she suggests its value as a way of approaching certain shared verities of women's experiences. This is why, in the book's first two

io8 Mothers of Invention

pages, we see her narrator affirm that she "n'invente rien" (invents nothing; 13) even as she admits, "Je veux que I'ecriture s'approche de sa fraude et s'aime malgre tout [I want writing to approach its own fraud and love itself despite it all]" (14). In Lueur, Gagnon does not impose a coherence on the experiences and dreams she recounts and the voices she inscribes. In this way, the reader can see how she is consciously trying to avoid the kind of phallocentric distortions and authoritative gestures that some historical discourses can be seen to perform. Gagnon establishes the theme of recovery and remembering - and the danger of a writing that tries to record them - from the opening lines of "Fiction," Lueur's first part, where the narrator announces: Je re-apprends les couleurs de la nuit. Elles ne sont pas noires. Elles ne sont pas non plus les couleurs du jour que j'imaginais, sans les voir, quand je les projetais, de memoire, sur toutes les choses de I'obscurite. Je n'essaierai pas de les reproduire ici, car ce faisant, une autre fois je les tuerais ... [Ces couleurs] ne sont la que pour m'ouvrir la premiere page de ma premiere nuit. J'ai perdu la raison mais je n'ecris pas pour autant dans le noir. (13) [I am re-learning the colours of night. They are not black. Neither are they the colours of day that I imagined, without seeing them, when I projected them from memory onto all the things of the darkness. I will not try to reproduce them here, for in doing so, I would only kill them a second time ... (These colours) are only there to open up for me the first page of my first night. I have lost my reason but for all that I do not write in the dark.]

From the first sentence of the novel, as this passage shows, the narrative is placed under the sign of retrieving what was lost, of learning something anew. The expression "je re-apprends" emphasizes the repeated learning by isolating the "re" with a hyphen, a departure from the standard spelling of the verb reapprendre. This narrator, who is quickly revealed to be a woman, is explicitly working from memory ("de memoire") in her learning process, which also involves discovering what cannot be remembered, what must be accepted as unrepresentable or unreproducable, and what therefore can change her understanding of herself. The paradoxical experience of the colours of night sheds light on "la premiere page de [s]a premiere nuit" (the first page of her first night). Lueur thus opens with a beginning for the narrating subject, but one that is also a rediscovery, a return with fresh eyes to what she thought she already knew. The darkness that this woman writes in and about is clearly a metaphor, a device used to introduce a narrative that aspires to recover from obscurity an unwritten history and forgotten memories. Gagnon

109 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

reveals these aspirations by immediately reinforcing the paradoxical opening metaphor with other apparent contradictions, for the narrator says that she is not rational but neither is she crazy ("J'ai perdu toute raison et je ne suis pas folle [I have lost all reason but am not crazy]" 14) in writing this text where, as she affirms, "Je n'invente rien. Je ne cree pas de personnages de fiction. £a n'est pas non plus du jeu ni de la representation. J'ecris [I invent nothing. Neither am I creating fictional characters. Nor is this a game or representation. I am writing]" (13). The negative constructions in this passage are some of many that distinguish the first two pages of "Fiction," creating a tone that immediately alerts the reader to the fact that this novel is not going to conform to expected patterns of storytelling. The writernarrator not only rejects the conventions of character and representation associated with fiction, but also refuses to respect traditional genre distinctions. Her writing is thus not like any other, for her words are dictated by a "savoir etrange et lointain" (a strange and faraway knowledge; 14), and her writing strives to make performative these "mots subis ou conquis a grande peine pour que s'infiltrent les discours qui les feraient ne plus s'ecrire. Des mots de corps pleins la bouche [words borne or conquered with great difficulty so that the discourses which would make them stop being written anymore could filter through. A mouthful of body words]" (15). As part of its focus on the body as an alternative source of knowledge, this narrative also seeks to bring to light and to inscribe the unconscious and its drives in language. In the novel's opening pages, Gagnon makes a clear reference to the Freudian terminology used to describe the unconscious, when she uses the term "qa" (id), as in the following excerpt: "Je n'est pas c.a. Je porte son roman et sa fiction se decryptera a son rythme. £a ne sera pas une chanson ... Ni la lettre de I'inconscient, dictee sonore reconstituee des bribes mnemesiques: cette lettre s'evanouit avant le son qui la suit ... Je sais pourtant que c.a n'est pas du vide qui dicte cette ecriture de nuit [I is not the id. I bear its novel and its fiction will be deciphered in its own time. It/d will not be a song ... Nor the letter of the unconscious, sound dictation reconstituted from mnemonic fragments: that letter fades away before the sound which follows it ... I know nonetheless that it/d is not emptiness dictating this writing of the night]" (14). In the first sentence here, the narrating subject is split into the "I" and the "id" such that the story of the latter is borne (literally "carried") by the "I" who writes. Based on Freud's classification in The Ego and the Id (1923) of the id as the unconscious - the source of human drives that are expressed in desires and must in turn be controlled by the ego26 - we can see here that Gagnon is deliberately

no

Mothers of Invention

positing a narrative inspired by such drives and written under the spell of desire. In her narrative the "ca," that "dark continent" of the human psyche, is what dictates her "night writing/' a writing that is also closely associated with the time of dreams. Given the number of passages in Lueur that are devoted to dreams and their meaning (e.g., 28,34,42,48,58,146), it becomes that much clearer how intently Gagnon is engaging with Freud's ideas, since his work on interpreting dreams as one of the privileged outlets for the unconscious is central to his theory. Despite such clear references to the unconscious reservoir nourishing her writing, Gagnon is not claiming that her narrative can directly express the difference of women's desires, for she also understands that language is always one step away from the source, an inevitably imprecise translation. Where the passage cited above alludes to this distinction by affirming that the text is not itself a "letter of the unconscious" - something so fleeting, in any case, that it is always already mediated by memory - elsewhere Gagnon is more specific about the distance and distinction between her writing and the drives she aspires to transcribe. In the stanzas of Pensees du poeme, for example, she writes, "L'ecriture / touche / a la pulsion / a la conceptualisation / sans en etre / elle se trame par elles / et se deroule / en leur absence [writing / touches / the drives / and conceptualization / without being them / it weaves itself from them / and unfolds / in their absence]."27 From the beginning of Lueur, we can see in this way how Gagnon's work is informed by psychoanalytic theory as she tries to invent a writing that is as close as possible to women's intimate drives and memories, even though she accepts that language is predicated on absence and the impossibility of coinciding with its object. As Barbara Godard points out in "Redrawing the Circle: Power, Poetics, Language," where she discusses Lacan's reworking of the Freudian theory of the split subject, this pyschoanalytic terminology is not without consequence for the woman who writes, since it is part of a discourse that has tended to exclude women. Godard explains that "the controversial issue of the female subject ... follows from Jacques Lacan's suggestion that discourse is a grammar of the self. The self or subject is split into a "je" [and] "c,a" both participating in the production of discourse. While "je" produces discourse, "qa" speaking makes a latent signified perceptible through metaphor and results in the discovery of signification. Lacan's insistence on the primacy of the Oedipal complex in the split of the subject, in the development of the possibility of differential analysis, has seemingly excluded women from the production of discourse."28 Gagnon's own recognition of this exclusionary aspect of Freudian and Lacanian

in Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

theory is clear from the frequent references she makes to their works in "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture" and other texts written during this period of her career. In the poetical sequence of Antre (Lair), she even affirms how much her feminist thinking is indebted to Lacan, when she writes, "Sans Lacan, je n'aurais jamais vu le grand trou noir ou les femmes n'existaient pas [Without Lacan, I would never have seen the enormous black hole where women did not exist]" (Ai, 239). Her need to refute some of Lacan's conclusions is nonetheless evident in texts such as Lueur, where she will take issue with the identification of women with lack: "Le ventre enorme des forets interieures dit le contraire du manque, pourquoi persistent-ils a ne pas comprendre, dit 1'autre versant du desir. Non pas Ten trop, le superflu ou le dechet, mais le comble, le plus de vie dont jamais aucun langage ne pourrait se faire traduction ou miroir [The vast womb of the internal forests speaks the opposite of lack - why do they persist in not understanding - speaks the other face of desire. Not the surplus, the superfluous or the remainder, but the fullness, the 'more-of-life' for which no language could ever become the translator or mirror]" (56). By deliberately playing on psychoanalytic vocabulary and ideas in the way she does, Gagnon is accepting the challenge, along with Irigaray (whose work she cites in Lueur) and other feminists of her generation, to open up this "science d'homme" (Ai, 145) to women's subjectivities and interpretations. Her realization of the "black hole" of traditional historical and psychoanalytical discourse inspires her to try to bring women's stories to light in Lueur, particularly in passages like the following, which stresses the importance of foremothers to the nocturnal female narrator: Je suis dans 1'espace lucide de 1'insomnie bleue. Je viens de revoir 1'histoire ecrite des evenements politiques et des savoirs des peuples. Je viens de revoir aussi 1'histoire ecrite de leurs mythes. Les deux furent redigees par eux, sans elles. La premiere a nie les faits de mes ai'eules. La seconde projette d'eux leurs images d'elles. Us nous ont fantasmees a cause de notre absence de la premiere. De tous temps les poetes ont su le manque de nous. Cette connaissance les faisait nous rejoindre dans ce vaste marais nomme folie. (18) [I am in the lucid space of blue insomnia. I have just gone over the written history of political events and of the knowledge of nations. I have also just gone over the written history of their mythologies. Both were written by men, without women. The former denied the facts of my foremothers. The latter projects men's images of those women. Men have fantasized about us because of our absence from the former. From time immemorial poets have realized that we were missing. This knowledge made them join us in that vast marshland called madness.]

H2 Mothers of Invention

This explicit critique of the male-authored versions of history and culture underscores the absence of women's truths and desires from such writings. It no doubt also explains why Gagnon revisits classical myths in Lueur, in order to open up the possibility that, for example, Rome could have been founded by "une Enee toute neuve" (a totally fresh Aenea) and "deux louves jumelles" (two twin female wolf pups), as alternatives to the "grand dieu fetiche et impuissant a concevoir dans la jouissance des autres qui longeaient les rives de cette sacree histoire [great fetish god impotent to conceive in the pleasure of the others who lined the shores of that damned sacred story]" (39). Although such recasting of traditional myths may seem at best irreverent and at worst an example of doing violence to mythological history, Gagnon is careful to frame such playful allusions in the context of dreams, in which alternative visions of women's symbolic incarnations do not have to make sense to make the point. The passage cited above also points to why the narrator takes such pains to deny that her disorienting narrative is a work of madness or mental disorder. It suggests that this narrator's writing has affinities with that of the poets, who, as Gagnon explains it in an interview, often exhibit "la belle folie de la marginalite, de la creation artistique, de la prise de parole excentrique, de la capacite de dire ce qui n'est pas prevu par la norme ... de dire ou d'exprimer dans diverses formes artistiques 1'inconvenu, 1'inconnu [that lovely madness of marginality, of artistic creation, of eccentric speech, of the ability to say what the norm does not allow ... to say or to express in various artistic forms the unconventional, the unknown]."29 In this novel that "ne craint pas la poesie [does not fear poetry]" (Lr 20), then, the split subject writing under the influence of her unconscious is merely drawing upon a creative source well known to the likes of Rimbaud or the Surrealists - or to Gagnon herself, since she is also a poet - who seek the new, the unorthodox, and the disruptive effect of surprise in their writing. One of the unconventional features of Lueur which could perhaps be considered an amplification of the notion of the split subject is the multiplicity of narrative voices that emerge in the course of the narration. In addition to the initial first-person narrator, whose writing is inspired by a motivating qa, there are others who seem to accompany her text, companions to this first-person narrator, who shows her solidarity with them in the plural of the "nous": "Je sens la presence des autres tout autour qui avancent a tatons. Nous ne voyons pas le ruisseau, le lac, le torrent, deborder. Nous les entendons ... Nous cherchons tous une oasis de secheresse ... Dans la longue nuit qui nous entoure, nous entendons des paroles d'eau [I feel the

ii3 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

presence of the others all around me who grope along. We don't see the stream, the lake, the torrent overflow. We hear them ... We are all looking for an oasis of dryness ... In the long night that surrounds us, we hear the words of water]" (15). While here we see that this company is composed of both sexes (indicated by the masculine plural form of "tous"), we are later made aware of a female subset, who are also given voice as a "nous," as in the passage cited earlier where the sleepless narrator discusses the exclusion of women from history. On several occasions, the sexes are thus seen in opposition to one another, because of the way that women's destinies have been affected and portrayed by men. As the narrator asks, in what can only be read as an outcry, "Pourquoi Demeter fut sanglotante du debut de sa vie a la fin? Pourquoi Psyche tremblante juste d'aimer? Pourquoi la Xanthippe, 1'Ophelie, la Beatrice, la Juliette, Laure, la Dora, la Donalda, ma tante Yvette, Albertine et ma tante Rita? Pourquoi 1'eau les noyait-elles [sic]? Pourquoi n'ont-elles jamais construit une arche a leur mesure? Parce que c'est ainsi qu'ils 1'ont ecrit [Why was Demeter sobbing from the beginning of her life to the end? Why was Psyche trembling simply from love? Why a Xanthippe, an Ophelia, a Beatrix, a Juliette, Laura, a Dora, a Donalda, my aunt Yvette, an Albertine, and my aunt Rita? Why did the water drown them? Why did they not build an ark just right for them? Because that is how they (men) have written it]" (16). In moments of protestation like this one, the principal narrator establishes her affiliation far more unequivocally than before: whereas the "debordements" (overflows; 15) of water may threaten men and women together, this narrator cannot sympathize with the men's desire for "[u]n chef ... pour la conquete des eaux folles" [a leader ... for the conquest of the wild waters]" (15). Her allegiance is rather to her toremothers, whose traces she is trying to bring to the surface and into words: "Elles ont laisse trainer des sons qui se promenent et que la presente nuit me permet de capter. Des mots qui suintent pendant qui je croyais dormir. Des sons qui avaient besoin de 1'eau pour vivre [They left sounds lying around that wander and that this present night allows me to pick up. Words that ooze while I thought I was sleeping. Sounds that needed water to live]" (16-17). From such passages in Lueur, the reader can see that the unnamed principal narrator feels from the start a strong attachment to a larger community of women, and that this solidarity is a key to her identity and purpose in the writing of her story. Indeed, this collective identity/identification with a collectivity becomes even more important in the "reprise" of the novel's beginning entitled "Second Mouvement," as I will discuss subsequently.

114 Mothers of Invention

The narration of Lueur is presented using more than just an "I" and a "we," however. Fairly early on in the book, the reader also encounters a "tu" which could signify that the original narrator is speaking to herself, to an unnamed interlocutor, or even to the reader. This second person is shown to have a connection to writing ("Jamais je ne t'ecris si fort [Never have I written you so hard]" 19) and often seems to share the experiences of the first-person narrator, an association that supports the interpretation that the narrator is in dialogue with herself. An example of this connection occurs in the passages where the subject dreams of a devouring ogre and ogress who try to destroy or mislead the "tu," who then becomes the "je" (23-5). This narrating subject in turn escapes 'Togre et 1'ogresse de nos miseres [the ogre and the ogress of our misery]" (32) by writing "LUEUR" (24) using "[d]es restes d'etincelles archa'iques faisant jaillir le sens [remnants of archaic sparks making meaning fly out]" (25), which are all the glimmerings of understanding that she possesses. Although such shifts in pronouns from second to first person are relatively intelligible, and in fact recall the pronoun shifts we already noted in Cixous's La, the narrative of Lueur is complicated by other instances where the person addressed directly by the narrator is distinct from her (as when she speaks to Andine and Canque; 31), where the narrator speaks of herself in the third person ("Elle, c'est noire, c'est moi qui s'ecris [She, it's black, it's me who is writing herself]" 115), and where the first-person narrator herself seems to change identity, becoming a grandmother speaking to her granddaughter, for instance. Finally, there are even passages where the narrative is addressed to a "vous," one of which seems to offer a metatextual comment on the multiple pronouns used in the elaboration of the novel, because it shows the narrator observing that "vous etiez devenue le premier mot de votre fiction, vous etiez devenue plurielle. Elles n'etaient pas trop, toutes ces personnes de la conjugaison, a vous soutenir [you had become the first word of your fiction, you had become plural. They were not excessive, all these personal pronouns, to support you]" (114). By the presence of all the subject pronouns, representing multiple narrative voices, the reader is paradoxically made aware of the unsettling instability of the principal narrator's identity disseminated among what she calls "ces nombrantes de moi ressurgies [these numerous incarnations re-emerging from me]" (31), but also of the arbitrary nature of the narrative conventions of character. Indeed, in the logic of dreams, at least, identity boundaries are notoriously fluid, and so to impose them would create that false sense of order which I have suggested Gagnon deliberately avoids. As she writes in Lueur,

115 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

in a comment seemingly referring to her own approach to character but presented in the third person as if someone else was speaking of her: "Elle n'aurait qu'a leur donner des noms, apres tout, plutot que de coller betement aux personnes de la conjugaison ... Si les personnages se presentent sans noms, toujours, va-t-elle en inventer juste pour rire, pour faire plaisir et pour se perdre encore a coup sur dans une autre fiction frauduleuse, ce qu'elle se refuse, follement, depuis le debut de ce periple? [She would only have to give them names, after all, instead of sticking stupidly with the personal pronouns ... If the characters present themselves without names, always, is she going to invent some just for laughs, so as to be pleasing and to definitely lose herself once again in another fraudulent fiction, which she has been trying to avoid, madly, from the beginning of this journey?]" (52). This passage confirms the impression given at the novel's outset that Lueur chronicles, albeit fragmentarily, a quest or journey where the only recognizable landmarks are the related themes of writing and the body as they are dreamed or contemplated by the various incarnations of the narrating subject. As an illustration of the linking of writing and body metaphors central to this narrative, one can also point to the consistent physical presence accorded to language in the novel. An early example of this occurs when the narrator describes her textual expedition in terms of climbing a wall and, successful in her ascent, says of herself: "Je me tenais prise de vertige dans cet espace blanc, les mains tremblantes sur le garde-fou du langage [I steadied myself struck by vertigo in this white space, my hands trembling on the parapet of language]," (36) as if language had a physical limit or summit that one could conquer and see beyond (into madness, as the French "garde-fou" implies?). Conversely, the body can also become a kind of language or a form of writing. In one poignant scene of a mother mourning her dead child, the narrator recounts: Elle se souvient que je I'avais trouvee, etendue de tout son long sur le mur blanc, son corps imprime dans la fresque ..., projetant ses mains au bout d'elle-meme jusqu'a toucher sans plus etreindre tout 1'espace occupe par les petits doigts de 1'enfant disparu, nageant sur cette nappe solide ... etendue sur la page blanche, alignant les signes de la raison sans jamais depasser les limites de ses empreintes ... comprenant bien que ... ma venue dans son deuil ... ne changerait strictement rien a ce qui etait vecu d'etrangement inaccessible entre son corps a elle et la marque, pourtant visible et materielle, de son souvenir. (37-8) [She remembers that I had found her, stretched out full length against the white wall, her body pressed to the fresco ... , extending her hands as far as

ii 6 Mothers of Invention she could to touch - while no longer holding - all the space occupied by the little fingers of her dead child, swimming on this solid sheet ... lying on the white page, aligning the signs of reason without ever exceeding the limits of his fingerprints ... understanding full well that ... my intrusion on her mourning ... would change absolutely nothing about what she experienced as a strange inaccessibility between her body and the mark, however visible and material, of her memory]

Here the reader can clearly see the child's handprints on the wall, which the bereaved mother tries to touch so closely that her body also becomes a legible sign of sorrow, imprinted on the fresco of the wall's "white page." As the above passage demonstrates, the metaphorical association of language and the body is quite often a gender-specific one in Lueur, particularly in the repeated use of birth metaphors that punctuate and symbolize the narrator's journey. In one such moment, the narrator "reve du petit tunnel serpentin ..., qa n'est pas un cauchmar, mais une espece d'initiation calme a 1'intelligence du dedans, corps ceuvrant contractions tendres, se faufilant entre les parois douces de 1'etroit serpent qui se dilate au fur et a mesure de [s]on avancee [dreams of the small serpentine tunnel ... it is not a nightmare, but a kind of calm initiation to understanding the inside, the body working in tender contractions, worming its way between the soft inner walls of the narrow serpent that dilates the further along (she) advances]" (44). This passage is but one example of the many birth metaphors that symbolize this narrator's awakening to herself and her writing, which can be traced back to that moment of solidarity with her mother during her delivery where the body was the "unique repere" (only reference point; 45) for both of them. The narrator thus ties this crucial experience of the maternal body to her writing, in passages such as the one where she remembers the "douce nuit de ma mere en sueurs aimantes [sweet night of my mother in loving perspiration]" and claims that "ce souvenir precis du lait de sang m'a constamment retenue au langage, malgre qu'il se livrait dans le nonrepresentable le plus total ... Tu en avais ecrit ton premier roman. Tu divulguais la source [this precise memory of the milk of blood always kept me in language, even though it revealed itself in the most total unrepresentability ... You had written your first novel about it. You were divulging the source]" (23-4).3° Although the birth imagery highlighted here is clearly an important source of inspiration for the writing of this story, it is not the only one, as the above quotation seems to suggest, because in other passages Gagnon's association of the body and language is in fact

117 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

more purely sexual. As much as her narrator's relationships with other women (her mother, grandmother, or African girlfriend) are primordial, the desire she feels is clearly heterosexual, and it is celebrated in scenes of lovemaking that are sometimes poignant, sometimes playful, and frequently poetic. To cite but one extended passage that displays all these qualities: Pose tes levres ou c,a ne disparait plus. Une vapeur de lait, tes mains sur moi le ventre aime, j'accouche de tout meme de ton sexe, tu as penetre dans les sinuousites de la dentelle visqueuse, les membranes te contractent, tu aimes, le souvenir de ton premier respir te revient, tu sugotes la vie ... les mains lechent mon dos, des langues de feu me parcourent, je frissorme. Je t'ai regarde jouir pour la premiere fois ... quelque chose de la feminite a traverse les frontieres sans douanes, elle a saigne sur le tapis blanc ..., c'etait dimanche, c'etait admirable, c'etait sans dessus dessous ... c'etait de la lueur sur 1'ombre de 1'ombre, le sang de son sang, la fibre de ses fibres, la moe'lle, le haletement, 1'os, le filament de sa raison, la fille de sa folie ... Se poser comme des mots qui tombent et touchent, 1'autre corps, en meme temps. (141-3) [Place your lips where it/d no longer disappears. A milky vapour, your hands on me, the womb loves, I give birth to everything even your sex, you entered into the undulations of the viscous lace, the membranes squeeze you, you love, the memory of your first breath comes back to you, you suckle life ... your hands lick my back, tongues of fire cover me, I shiver. I watched you orgasm for the first time ... something of femininity crossed the borders duty-free, she bled on the white carpet ... it was Sunday, it was amazing, it was without upside (or) down... it was glimmerings in the shadow of shade, the blood of her blood, the fibre of her fibres, the marrow, the panting, the bone, the filament of her reason, the daughter of her delirium ... Set oneself down like words that fall and touch, the other body, at the same time.]

Clearly, Gagnon is trying here to "[l]aisser parler le corps, juste le corps sans fragments, sans morcellements [to let the body speak, just the body without fragments or divisions]" (59), because, as she points out in "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture," "1'ecriture du corps, fantasmes et desirs, fut exclue systematiquement des textes de 1'ordre et de la science [the writing of the body, fantasies and desires, was systematically excluded from the texts of order and of science]" (Ai, 180). In Gagnon's novel, the narrator's writing is designed to remedy this exclusion, and is thus associated with birth and women's corporeal experiences, in an attempt to articulate women's specificity and their solidarity in the pains and pleasures of their lives.

n8 Mothers of Invention In most of Lueur, the woman's body is seen as a source of creative inspiration, largely because, according to Gagnon at least, it can be read and explored as a palimpsest bearing traces of repressed memories and even of unwritten cultural heritage. In one of the novel's most beautiful metaphoric translations of this idea, the narrator describes a woman who is daydreaming in a wheatfield, her head resting on a flat stone bearing hieroglyphics that have been covered by grain dust. When she blows away the dust, the markings emerge and their mystery inspires her to "laisser parler le corps ... Laisser parler les paradigmes pulsion[n]els d'avant 1'image. Avant tout substitut, avant tout montage, tout collage, toute greffe, il y avait un tout dans la fragmentation, il y avait une petite fille opaque et nocturne, cherchant des coquelicots dans les bles [let the body speak ... Let the paradigms of the drives from before the image speak. Before any substitute, before any montage, any collage, any graft, there was a totality in the fragmentation, there was an opaque and nocturnal little girl, looking for poppies among the wheat]" (59). In this metaphor, the engraved stone that bears witness to the past becomes the body that can be explored for traces of its own history, represented here by the desires and memories that date from a childhood unmarked by the piecemeal performance of remembering. While the symbolic richness of this wheatfield image has been explicated more thoroughly by critics such as Lori Saint-Martin in Le Nom de la mere,31 this brief summary suffices to underscore the logic of the connection between the body and writing to Lueur's "archaeological" project. Just as deciphering symbolic inscriptions can lead to a better understanding of past cultures, so can reading and transcribing the body's signs reveal the buried or forgotten memories that so often determine one's relation to oneself and to others. The preoccupation with language and writing in Lueur finds its most compelling expression in the passages that deal with the death of a grandmother figure and her legacy to the narrator, later identified as her granddaughter (94). As Karen Gould puts it, "the grandmother figure ... functions as a crucial bridge between generations of women and an active disseminator of female power."32 Her legacy, as with many of the elements in this novel, is presented to us in a fragmentary, non-linear fashion. The reader is first introduced to the grandmother almost exactly halfway into the book's first part. Her entry into the narrative is subtle, however, because it begins with the voice of the remembering mother - "etrange dans son incessant monologue, dans son inaudible discours, dans ses paroles inarticulees qui coulent avec le flot de ses lamentations [strange in her incessant monologue, in her inaudible discourse, in her inarticulate words that flow with the tide

119 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

of her lamentations]" (65) - which is then transformed in the next sentence into that of the grandmother. The grandmother is like a ghost to the "nous" of her family, because her "inaudible monologue persistant" haunts them so constantly that, as the narrator puts it, "tous les rites de tes enfants cannibales ne parviendraient pas a te faire vraiment revenir non plus qu'a effacer le souvenir en nous de ta disparition [all the rituals of your cannibal children could not manage to bring you back any more than to erase the memory in us of your disappearance]" (65-6, emphasis added). After this passage, the grandmother figure appropriately disappears for a time, as if in ironic response to her children's thoughts. The next indication that the reader receives of the importance of this female ancestor is given in the following section, where the narrator speaks of a "task" which an old woman gave her: "Ma tache consistait a recoller des bouts de papier jaunis d'un manuscrit tout racorni et effrite que m'avait confie avant de mourir une vieille femme si sage et meconnue pourtant, dont je reparlerai un jour [My task consisted of putting back together bits of yellowed paper from a shrivelled and tattered manuscript that had been entrusted to me by an old woman so wise and yet misunderstood, of whom I shall speak again one day]" (69). The "restoration" or rewriting of this manuscript inspires a series of reflections on the difficulty of rendering its "scandalous" content ("[s]on livre etait scandaleux, c'est-a-dire, piege et deroutant [her book was scandalous, in other words, explosive and disorienting]" (69). Finally, the narrator admits that this moment was what she was approaching, albeit indirectly, all along, saying: "Pourquoi avoir mis tout ce temps a glisser cette histoire de nous? Parce que maintenant la deroute est a son comble [Why take so long to slip in this story of ours? Because now the confusion is at its peak]" (70). This confusion is certainly shared by the reader - the narrator's rhetorical question gives a welcome voice to our disorientation here yet it appears to be an essential component of the "translation" of the grandmother's legacy into narrative. The narrator, now turned scribe/translator (75), feels the need to reproduce the manuscript's disturbing quality in her own text, affirming of her legator, "Elle avait su que ... je saurais transcrire 1'absence quand elle se produit ... Que je ne tenterais, pas plus qu'elle, de remplacer le vide, de dejouer la mort d'obvier le silence, quand tout cela se presente [She knew that ... I would know to transcribe absence when it happened ... That I would not try, any more than she would, to replace the void, to elude death to obviate silence, when it all appeared]" (70). Absences and silences are indeed crucial aspects of this woman's writing of and beyond death: "[j]e n'ecris que pour raconter les

12O Mothers of Invention

temps et les espaces entre les riens, les lieux entre les trous, instants entre ces vides neants d'ou 1'on aurait bien pu ne jamais revenir et n'en jamais parler [I write only to tell of the times and spaces between the nothings, the places between the holes, instants between these empty voids from whence one could very well have not returned and about which one could never have spoken]" (71). Having rejected "la metaphore logique et les images coherentes" of a "langage putrefie" (74) associated with men, this writer is able to proclaim with increased confidence: C'est ici qu'un fou projet d'ecritures prend forme, ayant fait le pari d'emerger de la mort meme, de raconter ce qui vient de 1'absence, projet fomente ... aux confins de 1'histoire qu'ils ne nous ont jamais transmise, 1'interdite et 1'inedite, comme un grand souvenir ressuscite de la maison des morts et capte au passage par une enfant femelle qui n'est plus, remis precieusement a 1'autre qui 1'etend ce souvenir, le defend comme on deroulerait un mince manuscrit des temps passes, le prend, le saisit et le pare des lettres qu'il attendait pour devenir lisible. (77) [This is where a crazy project of writing takes shape, having made the wager to emerge from death itself, to narrate what comes from absence, a project devised ... on the margins of the history they never transmitted to us, the forbidden and the unheard of, like a great memory resuscitated from the house of the dead and picked up on the way by a female child who is no more, handed on carefully to the other one who spreads it out, this memory, unrolls it like a thin manuscript from days gone by, takes it, seizes it, and adorns it with the letters it was waiting for in order to become legible.]

In both its content and its continuous syntax, this one sentence articulates the central concern of the novel: the transmission and transcription of a specifically woman-centred ancestral memory or tradition which, once (re)written, voices another (his)story - one that can only be preserved in and by the links made when it passes from one set of hands (or one clause) to another. In the following section of Lueur, this transmission is still more explicitly linked with the final passage of death. In this case, the death is that of the grandmother, whose third-person (and partly first-person) narration returns to occupy a large portion of the last section of "Fiction." Here the reader finally reaches the crucial and moving scene of the legacy, where the grandmother says to the principle narrator: "C'est toi qui ecriras mon veritable testament, ces paroles de moi si vieille, les dernieres, celles qui sont remontees a 1'origine et qui se sont assises sur le mur du vide, le mur de la fin des mots, le garde-fou, les bornes de mon entendement [It is you who

121 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

will write my true testament, these words of an old woman, the last ones, those that went back to the beginning and sat on the wall of the void, the wall of the end of words, the parapet, the limits of my understanding]" (95). The words of this bequest deliberately recall earlier episodes of the author-narrator's own playful and disorienting struggle with words. Her interest in her foremothers and her "syntaxe ... toute perturbee" (syntax [that is] all mixed up; 99) are thus revealed to be a part of her now-explicit mission to translate these ancestral, "original" words and memories - which might otherwise be lost in the "generation gap" - into the more permanent, "communicable" realm of discourse that is writing. In Alice Parker's analysis of Nicole Brossard's Le Desert mauve, she remarks, "Between the original and the translation ... codes are unpacked; layer after layer is examined for its archeological import, the horizon is registered from every angle."33 Although I will not enter here into the details of Brossard's writing, to which I turn in the next chapter, it is interesting to note that this remark could very well have been written in reference to Lueur, for once the moment of transmission is articulated, Gagnon begins a second part entitled "Archeologie," in which the themes and techniques of her first part are "unpacked" in light of the grandmother's motivating legacy. For example, the earlier variation in pronouns is taken to an extreme both with the addition of second-person forms that I have already pointed out and with the more radical slippage among pronouns even within the same sentence. It is as if the story she must pass on needs all the pronouns, all the grammatical "angles," in order to be told. Furthermore, in this maternal archaeography the grandmother's memory seems to provoke the narrator's exploration of her own unspoken past. "Ces souvenirs, Dieu, je les raconterai [These memories, God, I will tell them]" (118), she affirms. After the plethora of body metaphors in the first section of the novel, it is not surprising that the granddaughter's memories are intimately associated with her physical experiences. Indeed, in this sense she seems to have internalized the thrust of the grandmother's dying gesture, when the latter wordlessly tries to communicate her past, her legacy, by baring her breast and stomach to her surviving offspring. This self-exposure is intended to draw attention to the scars and traces not only of her living children's passage but also of that of all the others who did not survive, her body thus becoming a living monument to her losses. For her part, the granddaughter similarly evokes both her dead child and her past lovers, relating them to an archetypal "Dieu et Elle" (iiy),34 whom she identifies with both herself and her first childhood love, a boy who is in turn later associated in death with

122 Mothers of Invention

her own son: "Comment pouvais-tu raconter la mort d'un enfant, d'un semblable a ton enfant? Comment peux-tu raconter la mort de ton propre enfant? [How could you tell the death of a child, of someone like your child? How can you speak of the death of your own child?]" (128). Clearly, the narrative of Lueur is generated in part by an associative, repetitive logic whereby one sensual or painful experience or metaphor can provoke or find resonance in another. More importantly, as much as this novel insists on what can be recovered and saved, it also recognizes and proceeds from losses and silences, here figured by the death of a loved one. As the narrator later affirms, "La seule chose qui echappe constamment a la science, c'est la mort, et seul le langage peut signifier cette fuite. La signifie mais ne 1'explique jamais, ses signes ne sont pas positivement certains. II leur manque toujours quelque chose, quelque chose d'indefinissable et d'innommable ... c'est la mort [The only thing that constantly escapes science is death, and only language can signify this escape. It signifies it but never explains it, its signs are not positively certain. They always lack something, something indefinable and unnamable ... it is death]" (138). Once again, this passage points to the importance that words can have to mediate and articulate loss, even as they always fall short of expressing its essence. This insistence on the attempt to verbalize the inexpressible of course intersects the theme of writing "1'inedit" (unheard of), repeatedly associated with gaps, absences, and interstices ("1'interstice signifiant" [the signifying interstice] 63). In this part of Lueur, the narrator affirms that her transcription can only take place because of these "holes" in the grandmother's manuscript: "Elle n'aurait pu me leguer ces pages ouvertes a ma parole, si son roman se fut ecrit sans trou, sans failles, sans envers, sans cette forme indefinie ou tout devenait possible, mon ecriture tout autant que la sienne [She would not have been able to bequeath me these pages open to my words, if her novel had been written without a hole, without fissures, without underside, without that undefined form where everything became possible, my writing as much as hers]" (128-9). The writing process thus involves the use of the ambiguities, the imprecision, and the polyvalence of words - as well as what they leave unarticulated - in order to give this narrator's text its substance. This is a basic truth of any great writing, whose enduring power depends as much on the unsaid and the enigmas of language as on what it can inscribe. In Gagnon's textual community, despite the absence of fully developed "characters," emphasis is clearly placed on the process of transmission between women, who feel the need to reformulate and to

123 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

effectively translate their shared knowledge into their own language or style. Rewriting appears to be a necessary part of women's involvement in the transmission process, as I have suggested elsewhere.35 If, as the translation theorist George Steiner suggests, "no language, no traditional symbolic set or cultural ensemble imports without risk of being transformed/'36 then it would seem that the woman writer must in addition record the transformation she undergoes as a result of the "importation" of another woman's words: as she is displaced, so must she re-place herself in discourse. In Lueur this re-placement is most obviously shown in the rewriting of the beginning of the novel, which constitutes the text's penultimate part. "Second Mouvement" consists of occasionally slightly modified, but on the whole sequentially ordered, excerpts from the novel's first part, compiled into an eight-page "telescoped" version of the original "Fiction." What is interesting in this novel is the cumulative effects of the subtle changes made as part of this gesture of repetition. Notably, all the repeated passages are taken from the novel's first part; it is as if, in other words, the reprise is what survives of the text after the archaeological process provoked by the grandmother's death and legacy. This interpretation would partially account for the insistence on rewriting passages from the very beginning of the novel, the part farthest from the scene of transmission and so, by virtue of that distance, most in need of revision. Admittedly, the changes are often small, involving single words ("eteinte" [14] becomes "etreinte" [154]) or the spacing and division of the words into sentences and paragraphs. The sentences following the previously cited "Je veux que 1'ecriture s'approche de sa fraude et s'aime malgre tout" (14), for example, are transformed into a more consciously and formally poetic, incantatory series of repetitions by the elimination of paragraph divisions: L'ecriture des mots imprimes sur des gravures deja la. L'ecriture des mots compris sur toute representation. Des mots soumis a du savoir etrange et lointain. Des mots qui s'etalaient sans fin ... Des mots subis ou conquis a grande peine ... Des mots de corps pleins la bouche. (154) [The writing of words printed on engravings already there. The writing of words understood across all representations. Words subject to a strange and faraway knowledge. Words that spread out without end ... Words borne or conquered with great difficulty ... A mouthful of body words.]

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The initial effect of such modifications is almost imperceptible, as if the narrator were remembering her original text, but not exactly, or as if her subsequent experiences have just resulted in a gentle restructuring of her thinking, such that the original words are slightly displaced but still in recognizably similar configurations. This rewriting and displacement of the opening passages becomes more radical, however, as the narrator progresses; she soon starts to eliminate increasingly larger sections of text, excerpting only short passages and completely rewording others. An example of such a passage is the one in which she originally questioned why women in myth, literature, and history had always succumbed to unhappiness, repressed their desires, or even killed themselves, answering, "Farce que c'est ainsi qu'z'/s 1'ont ecrit [Because that is the way men wrote it]" (16, emphasis added). In the passage as it is rewritten in "Second Mouvement," the rhetorical questions are gone, and in their place we find a brief statement of "leurs histoires" (their stories), followed by the narrator's refusal to accept "cette fin" (that ending), for, as she puts it, "Nous n'avons pas a renaitre de Zeus et de leur science pour le savoir et celle-ci nous est tout de meme connue [We don't have to be born again from Zeus or via their science to know it and that ending is familiar to us even so]" (156). This modification effectively eliminates the gesture of accusation present in Lueur's first part, putting the emphasis, rather, on what can instead be done by this obviously feminine "we" in the face of misogyny: understand it but not necessarily continue to accept it. This reappearance of the feminine plurality to which the narrator belongs is perhaps the most subtle yet significant change of the "Second Mouvement." The passages that the narrator chooses to rewrite generally tend towards a more pronounced valorization of this collectivity in the face of "patriarchal" tradition. The narrator, for her part, recognizes her role in (re)writing that tradition, for the women's "sons qui avaient besoin de 1'eau pour vivre [sounds that needed water to live]" (16-17) have become "mots" (words; 156) in the second version through her agency. Nevertheless, this agency is still seen as an integral part of the efforts of the whole, for one of the few new passages inserted in this part insists on the collective voice: "nous trempons dans les langages des autres et cherchons, parmi eux, notre voix ... pas bien assuree encore, elle se retrouve mal dans les elucubrations regues. Elle murmure des mots un peu bizarres, des mots qui sont des lettres et qui chantent [we bathe in the languages of others and search among them for our voice ... not very certain yet, it is hard to find it in conventional imaginings. It speaks slightly weird words, words that are letters and that sing]" (159).37

125 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

However tentative the quality of this voice, there is no doubt of the power of this concerted, gender-specific undertaking, termed "notre jouissance aubale" (our dawning orgasm; 160) at the close of this part of the novel. Despite the positive feminine energy suggested by such terms, one must note that the conclusion, which follows this inserted passage in the "Second Mouvement," does not end with an inscription either of narrative agency or of gender. The novel is in effect "laid to rest" without an author, without even terminating punctuation: "ci-git le livre mort aux cimetieres de leurs academies / ici 1'ecrivit [here lies the book, dead in the cemeteries of their academies / here wrote it]" (160). It would seem that the manuscript, now put into print, is regarded as bereft of the life and the past that gave it its impetus: the living book and the archaeological process are absent in this document destined for some moribund archive, because the text is "written" ("I'ecrivit") by an indeterminate but eternal "here and now" ("ici") that depersonalizes its source and inspiration. Were the novel indeed to end here, the reader would be left with a very ambiguous, if not disturbing, vision of the significance of this "archaeological" exploration of women's voices and their corporeal inscriptions. The facing page, however, offers a black expanse (like the title pages of the novel's other parts), which leads to a kind of coda - thus a part yet not a part of the rewriting process in its lack of a name or distinguishing title but obvious separation from the rest by the black page backed by one of the petroglyphs. This coda in fact proves a more coherent revision and commentary on the text, for in it we find the narrator's return to significant themes and images and even a kind of "resolution" to the "enigma" of her text. Appropriately enough, this resolution is given using an amalgam of the text's earlier metaphors, which seems meant to justify the necessary "death" of the text and of the grandmother figure in terms of the insight and rebirth in writing since achieved by the narrator. As she declares, "il m'apparait... evident que sans mes supercheries, la suite se serait deroulee sans meme que je ne la saisisse ... Heureusement que je m'y suis reconnue. Et bouche bee je clos le livre, un terme a sa fiction, comme la formule du debut le laissait entrevoir [it seems ... obvious to me that without my fabrications, the remainder would have unfolded without my being able to grasp it ... Fortunately, I recognized myself in it. And mouth ajar I close the book, a term to its fiction, as the formulation at the beginning permitted one to foresee]" (164). Although in some ways such a statement, like the repetition of text in the third part, would appear at first glance to close the book in on itself as if it were circular in structure, we must not forget the overall

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significance of this coda-like conclusion in the economy of the novel. Whereas the "Second Mouvement/' in its "telescoping" of the first part, could be seen as an inwardly spiralling progression towards an absence or death at the centre of the text suggested by the "ici 1'ecrivit" (160), this untitled coda allows for a reopening of the themes of the novel. It is a writing past closure on a structural level that mimics the thematic effort by the narrator to write beyond the death of her foremothers and loved ones. In the concluding paragraphs to Lueur, the reader sees, for example, that the story of the ogre and the ogress has a positive ending, because the woman who was devoured "avait besoin pour enfin vivre d'etre toute entiere avalee [needed to be entirely eaten to finally live]" (163). This paradox recalls that of Jonas and the whale, a myth which is also mentioned here and which points to the movement of rebirth or resurrection that this coda implies for the novel as a whole. This last part also offers a resurgence of the voice of the grandmother, who requests to be laid to rest by the narrator on Easter Island, surrounded by the "statues geantes de [s]es enfants morts-nes [giant statues of her stillborn children]" (164). She expresses this dying wish as part of a series of predictions for the narrator, who she foresees will also find the mother figure that the narrator had dreamed was hibernating under fur blankets (29) - an early presence in the narrative that might easily have been forgotten, given the intervening emphasis on the grandmother's voice. Clearly, the grandmother is once again highlighted here as a conduit for memory and a link between generations of women. That the granddaughter has understood her legacy can be seen when she herself speaks of the day when, "a 1'approche de la mort, je transmettrai a une plus petite ce manuscrit de 1'impossible [as death approaches, I will pass on this manuscript of the impossible to a younger woman]" (128). As Lori Saint-Martin puts it in her reading of the novel, in this way, a "[m]ailIon dans la chaine des generations de femmes, celle qui ecrit invente une nouvelle etreinte charnelle et textuelle [link in the chain of the generations of women, the one who writes invents a new fleshly and textual embrace]."38 By the addition of this short concluding passage, then, Gagnon eliminates the possibility of a totalizing circularity, and she places her text under the sign of a provisionality that is oriented toward the future, underscored in her affirmation that "cette archeologie se donnera, se donnera a lire [this archaeology will offer itself, will offer itself to be read]" (164). This narrative has been but a stage in the narrator's ongoing search for an understanding of herself and her

127 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

identity, an identity beyond any unitary definition. Indeed, her narrative pronouns remain destabilizing to the end: "Alors seulement tu peux signer quand moi dans ma pierre impregnee tu sais bien que je la meus [Only then can you sign when I, in my permeated stone, you know well that I disturb it]" (165). Despite the presence of the period, which in this case closes the novel, the dynamic gesture of this final sentence (and section) reminds us that the book reaches beyond its own closure and borders, both into a common women's past and into the future, a time when the narrator's "herstory" will no longer be needed, for, as she speculates, "les petits enfants males et les petits enfants femelles qui nous liront dans les siecles lointains, [pleureront et riront] tout a la fois, de considerer de quels marasmes nous les avons enfantes, de quelle folie aveugle, de quel incomprehensible amour [the little male and female children who will read us far in the future will cry and laugh at the same time to consider out of what stagnation we gave birth to them, out of what incomprehensible love]" (55). But for such an outcome to occur, there must first be writing, because, as Louise Dupre notes, in her study of Gagon, writing "permet ... [l]e retour a 1'origine comme trajet vers ce qui a ete oublie, centre ces trous de memoire, trajet qui desenfouit le temps historique et, le plagant en pleine lumiere, nous amene a questionner la nature meme de la temporalite. De statique, le passe devient mobile, il traverse le temps, lui donne une orientation, conduisant ainsi vers le futur [permits ... the return to the origin as a journey toward what has been forgotten, against the memory lapses, a journey that disinters historical time, and, drawing it into the spotlight, leads us to question the very nature of temporality. From static, the past becomes mobile, it crosses time, gives it a direction, leading in this way toward the future]" (sv 204). The conclusion to Lueur is what helps to create a horizon beyond the end of the text, perhaps pointing to the enigma that spurs the endless drive to interpret but certainly also to a place beyond the finality of death because of the writing that can, at the very least, "nommer cet ecriteau d'absence [name this sign of absence]" (165) and, at best, "produire autre chose qu'un destin de morte muette [produce something other than a destiny of a deadmute woman]" (117), silenced by patriarchal tradition or by a lack of the confidence necessary to put her story into words. In writing about Retailles, Gagnon's collaboration with Denise Boucher, Karen Gould observes, "For Gagnon, to write is to refuse death and repression in all its forms, a position that clearly echoes the work of Helene Cixous during this same period" (WF 122). I have

ia8 Mothers of Invention

demonstrated both here and elsewhere to what extent I too feel that Gagnon's work consistently engages with and resists the presence and the effects of death.39 Nevertheless, I must take issue with the idea that she somehow takes her cue here from Cixous's work. While it is true that she followed Cixous's writings very closely during this period - she cites Cixous's Portrait du soleil (1974) in her contribution to Portraits du voyage (written in 1974 but published in 1975)4° and also mentions "Le Rire de la Meduse" (1975) in an article she wrote for the 10 May 1975 issue of Le Devoir41 - it is also clear from the beginning of her career that death constitutes "the trigger mechanism for [Gagnon's] writing ... Actual and imagined death, death of the individual and of the group."42 In Lueur it is the death of the grandmother that galvanizes the writing of her granddaughter, who discovers that this legacy also helps her to confront and move past the other losses in her life. This process awakens her still further to the absence of women's voices in the annals of history and culture, so that she comes to see her writing not only as a form of personal and familial recollection but also one of recovery and transmission for the broader community of her foremothers and contemporaries, with whom she feels a nascent solidarity. Through writing, then, the experience of death, be it symbolic or real, is confronted and transformed, as is the narrator herself. From her losses, comes the realization that "le corps les mots font nceud font cceur [the body the words make a knot make a heart]" (107), and that these words "conjurent la mort, font la fete dedans, ils font rire dans la mort, la deplacent [avert death, celebrate in the midst of it, they make one laugh in death, (and) displace it]" because, as she puts it, "mon corps aime autrement quand la mort passe [my body loves differently when death passes]" (133-4). Indeed, this practice of writing out from death is ultimately an enriching, lifegiving one, for even as it reveals the lacunar nature of language and memory, it can also draw our attention to the body's will, both in the sense of a vivifying desire and as a legacy of women's intimate experiences, for which the written word is the most telling and timeless form of collective transmission. As Gagnon herself puts it, women's writings are thus "les moyens privilegies de parler toutes les morts qui nous ont precedees, de parler tous les silences qui nous ont precedees ... 1'ecriture peut degager des traces de desir qui nous ont tenues malgre tout en vie [the privileged ways to speak of all the dead women who preceded us, to voice all the silences that preceded us .... Writing can release the traces of desire that despite everything kept us alive]."43

129 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur HER DARING PARADIGMS: HYBRIDIZED GENRES, SUBVERSIVE SYNTAX, AND INNOVATIVE INTERTEXTUALITIES

Je suis la matrice des figures exploreennes ... Ma langue emet des fresques sonores, elle dessine les etres maternels de la fonte des ceuvres, elle ouvre des plaies joyeuses, suppliques amoureuses, elle medite sur la pierre dont a mesure les inscriptions fuient, elle entonne un chant monumental et fragile, mortel, elle s'effrite en lui, mortelle, elle est fugace et persistante, elle est la et s'enfuit.

[I am the matrix of exploratory figures ... My tongue voices sonorous frescoes, it draws the maternal beings of the founding of artistic creation, it opens joyful wounds, amorous supplications, it meditates on the stone from which inscriptions flee as they go along, it intones a monumental yet fragile, ephemeral song, in which my mortal tongue dissolves, for it is fleeting and persistent, it is there and then it is gone.] Madeleine Gagnon44

This passage from a text that Gagnon published five years after Lueur attests to her enduring aspiration to use language inventively, as she does here by creating metaphors that celebrate the body even as they point to the paradox at the heart of writing: the attempt to immortalize in words what is elusive or ineffable in life. Karen Gould, the first American critic to have surveyed Gagnon's career, has already established the centrality of the theme of writing to this author's work in her chapter "Madeleine Gagnon: The Solidarity and Solitude of Women's Words" in Writing in the Feminine. For Gould, Lueur is Gagnon's "most ambitious" text, and it can be analyzed "on a number of levels, as a personal search for origins, as a collective recuperative act that binds generations of women together in a common history, and most important, as an original inquiry into the re-viewing and reformulation of women's language" (WF 132-3). In the first part of this chapter, I dealt directly with thematic aspects of the novel that include those Gould points to here, although I recast the first "level" more specifically as a search for the origin and impetus of writing and explored what I see as the crucial role of the body as a binding force, a reservoir for memory and creativity, and a means of communication between the generations of women narrators in Gagnon's text. In the pages that follow, I now turn to what Gould deems the "most important" level of the novel, that of language, and also to the question of form, where the innovative aspects of Gagnon's writing become most evident. The question of "women's language" that Gould raises in her synopsis of Lueur is a controversial one, and it must be recognized that

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the debate was in fact brought into focus largely because of the kinds of textual strategies and lexical innovations that Gagnon, Cixous, and others were trying to explore in the mid-1970s. Their efforts were aimed at enriching French vocabulary so that it may better express women's experiences, of course, but were also designed to more seriously disrupt the pattern of orderly discourse, to expose and explode its linear logic, and to offer instead a language they deemed more appropriate to their feminist and feminine visions. Despite Gagnon's ideals and ambitions, however, she fully recognizes the difficulty, if not impossibility, of achieving any radical change through writing alone, in part because writing is based on and perpetuates the very thought structures that feminists are trying to undo. In an article she wrote in 1974, she explains her perspective on the potential for change inherent in the encounter between "la femme et le langage" by positing, "Toute parole transforme un discours, inconscient, qui lui-meme est structure par un pouvoir historique. Toutefois ce cheminement ... ne peut a lui seul liberer la parole. Si la parole peut et doit preparer la revolution feministe, celle-ci se fera au niveau du pouvoir reel: economique, politique, ideologique [All speech acts transform an unconscious discourse that is itself structured by historical power. Still, this progress ... cannot alone liberate speech. If speech can and should prepare (for) the feminist revolution, this last will be accomplished on the level of real power: economic, political, ideological]."45 For Gagnon, then, the efficacy of spoken or written language lies primarily in the way it can work on our unconscious, articulate our processes of symbolization, and ultimately limit or liberate our dreams and identities. Since it is always already part of "une histoire logocentrique,"46 however, she understands that language - and thus writing - cannot divest itself entirely of what she calls "ideological effects," leading her to conclude: L'ecriture ... ne pourrait en rien s'aneantir, ni meme se subvertir de sa propre inscription, quelles que soient les formes mises en place pour secouer ce qu'elle porte et traine de retombees ideologiques. Quelle prevention que de penser une revolution par 1'affrontement des signes, leur discontinuity ... La seule revolution reside au cceur de 1'analyse ... ou ce qui est inscrit s'echappe a mesure de ce qui le supporte, parole ou ecriture ... elle s'etale avec ce qui la troue, elle insiste avec ce qui lui manque. Elle se trouvait defaite bien longtemps avant sa mise en forme. Celle-ci ne peut que rappeler celle-la. (Lr 69) [Writing ... could in no way become utterly transparent, nor even subvert itself via its own inscription, no matter what forms are deployed to destabilize what writing carries and clings to of ideological effects. What pretension

131 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur to theorize a revolution by way of the conflict of signs, their discontinuity ... The only revolution resides in the heart of analysis ... where what is inscribed escapes its medium, be it speech or writing, as you go along ... it discloses itself along with what fragments it, it asserts itself with what it lacks. It was unravelled and disintegrating long before it was given a form. The latter (its form) can only recall the former (its disintegration).]

In this passage from Lueur, Gagnon, through the voice of her narrator, clearly places the hope for change in what psychoanalysis and a receptivity to our unconscious drives can bring to light. In this process, all that writing can do is "recall," in its form, what remains formless, silent, absent or at best lacunar in the desires and images that well up from the reservoir of the unconscious. Interestingly, this mitigated vision of writing's possibilities is one of the things that distinguishes Gagnon from Cixous, whose theoretical essays seem to demonstrate a greater confidence in the revolutionary power of the written word than do Gagnon's. In the first part of this chapter, I have already indicated some of the ways in which Lueur attempts the kind of remembrance or recollection that Gagnon points to in the above passage, significant in itself for its elliptical phrases and ambiguous pronouns, which defy easy parsing. In both its structure and its syntax, this novel is a fragmented text, notwithstanding the many fluid metaphors that she uses to evoke the feminine in her writing. Lueur's logic is borrowed from dreams, its narrative segments and voices juxtaposed or linked more often by implicit associations than by explicit diegetic connections. In its form, then, the novel aspires to embody what it is trying to communicate, both in terms of tracing the convolutions of the desires and reveries of its women narrators and in terms of its disrupted and disruptive language, designed to unsettle the reader and challenge the kind of narrative teleology associated with the maledominated tradition of historical and novelistic writing. In an important articulation of her objectives and vision, "Pourquoi, comment, pour qui ecrire?" Gagnon answers the question of why she chooses to write in this way by offering a litany of unequivocal motives: Pour tracer une difference ... Pour n'etre plus objet dans le fantasme de 1'autre. Pour me constituer difference et non plus miroir ou reflet ... Pour contribuer a ce que les femmes prennent la parole et non plus 1'hysterie. Pour que nous prenions notre part de desir et de revolutions ... I'ecris pour dejouer la langue. Pour tenter de transgresser tous les codes ... Pour dire que si j'ai droit au disaccord du participe passe; a 1'imparfait du subjonctif quand

132 Mothers of Invention je decide; si je peux ecrire je pluriel; si je peux transformer je au texte en tu, il, nous, vous, ils, elle, elles - fabriquer mes propres shifters - c'est parce que 1'esthetique bourgeoise accepte des poetes seuls ces dereglements. J'ecris pour qu'un jour la parole dereglee - ou les jeux sur le code - soit 1'affaire de tous ... J'ecris pour mettre en crise la matiere textuelle.47 [To trace a difference ... In order to no longer be an object of the fantasy of the other. To constitute myself as difference and no longer as a mirror or reflection ... To contribute to women's speaking out instead of their hysteria. So that we have our share of desire and revolution ... I write to thwart language. To try to transgress all the linguistic codes ... To say that if I have a right to not make the past participle or the imperfect subjunctive agree when I want to, that if I can write "I" in the plural, if I can transform "I" into the text as you, he, we, you all, them (men), she, and them (women) make my own shifters - it is because the bourgeois aesthetic only accepts such disorder from the poets. I write so that one day disorderly speech - or playing games with the rules - is everybody's business ... I write to throw textuality into crisis.]

This representative excerpt is condensed from three pages of similar declarations, where Gagnon connects her rebellious approach to language with her desire to effect change in both human relations and conventional thinking. Her words here once again illustrate her belief that, even if writing cannot create a revolution, it does hold significant subversive power and the potential to express difference if deployed in a sufficiently disruptive way. It is as if, by mobilizing all the "shifters" at her disposal, her ultimate hope is that her readers will be moved to shift their own vision of women and their place in language and in life. The passages quoted above resonate with the ideas of theorists of the "Other" such as Simone de Beauvoir, with linguistic terminology ("shifters"), with the avant-garde exhortations of the poet Rimbaud,48 and with Marxist rhetoric ("bourgeois aesthetic"). In its multiple allusions, this quotation offers a glimpse into Gagnon's personal library, where feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, linguistic theory, and Marxism often converge with affinities for avant-garde poetry and countercultural tendencies. Lueur offers a similar panoply of cultural and theoretical references and citations, such that one critic goes so far as to claim, "La citation n'est plus dans le discours de Gagnon; celui-ci est plutot dans la citation. Dans le meme sens que 1'ecriture de Gagnon defait la distinction entre theorie et fiction, elle traverse aussi les frontieres separant 'je' et 1'Autre [Quotation is no longer within Gagnon's discourse, but rather the latter is within the regime of quotation. In the same sense that Gagnon's writing undoes the

133 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

distinction between fiction and theory, it also crosses the borders separating T and the Other]."49 One of the ways that Gagnon tries to "throw texuality into crisis" is by undoing conventional distinctions among genres and hierarchical notions of the author as the sole source of authority in the text. In interviews and articles, she herself frequently remarks on her own tendency to mix genres, most particularly fiction and theory, because, as she puts it, she had "toujours voulu ne pas dissocier les deux versants de 1'ecriture: le versant reflexif et le versant fictif [always wanted not to dissociate the two sides of writing: the reflective side and the fictional side]."50 To begin with, then, it seems natural to approach the broader question of how Gagnon's text defies genre categories, before honing in on the question of intertextuality, since the latter at least in part participates in supporting the former strategy. While I have already shown how Lueur offers examples of Gagnon's efforts to engage with psychoanalytic discourse, the theoretical allusions in this novel are far more systematic and varied than my analysis of her deployment and critiques of Freudian and Lacanian theories and topoi may have suggested so far. Feminist theory is also an important reference point for her, as one might expect, and there are several points where this novel presents issues and ideas in a way that recalls the style and content of feminist essays of the period. This penchant among Quebec feminist writers for incorporating essayistic elements in their fiction (or the reverse) led to the popularization of the term and the practice of "fiction theory"; so much so that in 1986 Canadian fiction Magazine published a special issue on "Fiction Theory/Theorie fiction," in which there is even an article entitled "Theorizing Fiction Theory." Gagnon was clearly not alone in feeling the need to meld the imperatives of reflective and fictional writing in her work, although the authors of "Theorizing Fiction Theory" seem to privilege the former over the latter when they define the hybrid genre as "a narrative, usually self-mirroring, which exposes, defamiliarizes and/or subverts the fictional and gender codes determining the re-presentation of women in literature and in this way contributes to feminist theory"5'1 (emphasis added). In what ways, then, does Lueur participate in this hybridization of feminist theory and women-centred fiction? Certainly, the reinterpretation or rereading of myths, including the story of the founding of Rome, which the narrator recasts in the feminine, is one way that it displays both content and strategies familiar to feminist theorists. One has only to think here of Cixous's rehabilitation of a laughing, beautiful Medusa to understand the potential power of such a critical gesture. In addition to her revisions of traditional myths, however,

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the reader can also observe Gagnon's efforts to deconstruct certain binary oppositions that characterize phallocentric discourse, such as sense and nonsense or reason and madness. Not only does Gagnon's narrator refuse to let her night writing be labelled madness, but she also rejects the very notion of such a marginalizing gesture, claiming that "le duel raison-folie ne tient plus [the opposition between reason and madness no longer holds up]" (27). Just as this narrator attempts to rectify the omission of women's voices from history, so she also refuses to accept the arbitrary patriarchal standards of coherence and logic as the only way to think and write. She realizes that she has been trained to accept men's lessons about "la metaphore logique et les images coherentes," but she also recognizes that this (mis)education made her mistrust and even disdain her own "entendements de deroute, ma vertigineuse raison d'etre" (understanding of the rout, her vertiginous reason for being), concluding that we are all "les suicides de quelqu'un, de quelque sentence enfoncee comme un clou, rouillee dans la gorge et dans 1'ame [someone's sacrificial suicide lamb, victims of some maxim hammered in like a nail, rusted in one's throat and in one's soul]" (74). If it is true that many women are "les produits amorphes et amovibles d'une suite reguliere d'alienations douces [the passive and dispensable products of a regular series of gradual alienations]" (41), then this text, like many feminist essays, tries to alert readers to this process and permit them to deconstruct internalized norms that tend to marginalize, devalue, or infantilize women. In this way, the narrator's awakening also becomes the reader's, a strategy often deployed in the work of feminist theorists, where personal experience is called upon for its political potential. Like Gagnon's narrator, then, the reader also begins to question "ces mots de 1'ordre, dans une nausee d'autant plus profonde qu'elle se croyait folie totale, paranoia, schizophrenic et quoi encore, pour oser defier ce que les apparences nomment, liberte, democratic, egalite et finalement bonheur. Tranquillites suspectes [these words of order, in a nausea all the more profound that it believed itself to be complete madness, paranoia, schizophrenia, and what all else, to be daring to defy what appearances call liberty, democracy, equality and finally happiness. Suspect tranquillities]" (40). The feeling of shared experience and of solidarity in what Gagnon calls "notre Siberie a nous" (our very own Siberia; 40) is reinforced throughout Lueur by the use of "nous," designating the collectivity of women, as I have already noted. Lest it be forgotten, "we" has ever been one of the powerful tools used by feminists, albeit one critiqued by Black feminists in particular for

135 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

its elision of the differences of race and class that affect individual women's experiences of oppression. Interestingly enough, Gagnon seems to anticipate such critiques of the attempt to invoke women's solidarity (perhaps because she herself is partially of Huron descent, as she reveals in "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture"); the narration of Lueur offers several passages where the reader sees that women's struggles are based on more than just White women's issues, as in the passage where an African woman the narrator adores speaks to her of rape (21) or in the isolated paragraph addressed to the "Femme Inuit Noire" (149). Whereas in many passages Gagnon claims a universal experiential knowledge for women, who, "[a] cause du ventre et des enfants [because of the womb and children]," best understand "la mort sous toutes ses formes [death in all its forms]" (20), for example, at other times she clearly displays a consciousness of the differences that distinguish women within the collective "nous." This awareness is particularly conspicuous in the closing paragraph to the novel's first part, "Fiction," where the narrator lists the women whose voices she hears in the first-person plural pronoun: je suis le son du je et ce peut etre nous, petites meres mortes-vivantes, petites indiennes devalant les collines, petites filles violees-battues, petites menageres courageuses ... petites ouvrieres ereintees ... petites intellectuelles ... petites inuites enceintes ... petites musiciennes en devenir ... petites prisonnieres de vos pays guerriers ... toutes les moins que grandes avec nous, se souvenant sans fin de leurs labeurs comme si c'etait demain. (107-8) [ I follow the sound of I and it can be we, little dead-mute mothers, little Indians rushing down the hillsides, beaten and raped little girls, brave little homemakers ... worn out little factory girls ... little intellectuals ... little pregnant Inuit ... budding little musicians ... little women prisoners of your warring nations ... all the less than great along with us, remembering their labours incessantly as if it were tomorrow.]

While Gagnon's Marxist background can be detected here in the number of women listed who belong to the working class or the poorer segments of society, her mention of Native women, Amerindian and Inuit, points to her consciousness that feminist solidarity must also be aware of the specific needs of non-White women. For the period, this is an exceptionally inclusive gesture on Gagnon's part, for a sensitivity to the voices of women of ethnic and racial minorities would not become mainstream in feminist discourse in Quebec until much later, and then mostly in the context of "la

136 Mothers of Invention

litterature migrante" ([im]migrant literature) in the late 19803 and the 19905. Marxist theory is also evident in the narrative of Lueur, particularly in the passages where the narrator speaks of power relations and how they can destroy or stifle individuality and difference. One thinks in particular of the metaphorical significance of the ogre and ogress mentioned in the first part of this chapter, who pressure the narrator to conform to their ways, such that she feels in danger of being "devoured" (23-5, 27-8), even as she is grateful for what they reveal to her of cutthroat competition and what they help her to remember of her own origins through her resistance to them (33). Another example of Marxist-influenced thinking can be seen in the narrator's analysis of how the system reproduces itself through the education and acculturation of the "milliers de petits enfants, diplomes bientot sans comprendre les rouages de 1'exploitation, des oppressions, du sexisme [thousands of little children, soon to be graduating without understanding the wheels of exploitation, of oppression, of sexism]," who remain unaware because, as she puts it, "la soumission se suce avec les vitamines. Des milliers de petites prisons humaines deviennent par la suite avides du pouvoir. Ca s'apprenait avec le reste, naturellement [submission is sucked up with the vitamins. Thousands of little human prisons subsequently become avid for power. It was taken in with the rest, naturally]" (40). Also on the theme of education, Gagnon's narrative offers a cogent critique of the master-disciple dynamic as a similarly learned, consensual power relationship (46-7), where writing becomes a "lieu grandiose de pouvoir ou toutes ses laideurs demeurent insoup^onnees tant que rien ne veut se risquer [a grandiose site of power in which all its ugliness remains unsuspected as long as one does not seek to risk anything]" (49). Of course, Gagnon's narrative and narrators are on the side of risktaking, and so Lueur offers many instances where norms and conventions of any sort are exposed and rejected in favour of an experimental, individualistic approach to writing, which is perhaps why the unfolding text is qualified by her narrator as "hors categoric litteraire" (outside any literary category; 31). Although one could argue about the metatextual intent and validity of this claim, what is no doubt true of Gagnon's novel is that it records a search for difference, for a narrative that defies orthodoxy, even as it offers various explanations and analyses of its difference which have a distinctly theoretical tenor. In her refusal to submit to any conventional wisdom, there are even points where the narrator questions the dominant radical lesbian feminist discourse of the time, when she asks herself

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"le plus serieusement du monde, s'il [lui] fallait un corps lesbien pour ecrire, [et lui] faudrait-il marchander [s]on corps pour un autre, cornme ces livres a grand tirage [with dead seriousness, if she needed a lesbian body to write, and if she would have to barter her body for another, like those books with huge print runs]" (145). While appreciating the "grandes ecrirures du corps lesbien" (146), the narrator ends up rejecting this feminist orthodoxy with all the others, because she values the difference of her own creativity, her writing of 'Tentredeux, de 1'antre, avec une encre de sang et d'eau salee [the inbetween, from the cave, with an ink of blood and salt water]" (145). Ultimately, Gagnon's narrator and narrative also reject the authoritative discourse of theory, because the emphasis in Lueur remains on writing the innermost story of the self and on the poetry of language. In one passage, the principal narrator openly rules out philosophical or psychoanalytical angles in her quest for words appropriate to the ambiguities of her story: Les mots sonores, les mots musiques, les mots ecrits. Les mots pour dire que mon corps aime autrement quand la mort passe. Si j'etais philosophe ... j'ecrirais un chapitre [sic] exactement ici, sur cette derniere phrase. Je parlerais du corps-objet. Ou si j'etais psychanalyste, je parlerais de 1'objet, de la lettre et de la castration. Mais je suis ecrivante, mon metier c'est d'ecrire ... L'ecriture est une conjuration ... A lire dans les replis des ombres tracees, dans les indices, 1'interstice, le flou, 1'a peu pres, 1'humble objet, et non dans 1'eclatement lumiere aveuglante, evidences coercitives, phallophores. A lire dans ... sa singularite fluctuante fluide. (133-4) [The sonorous words, the musical words, the written words. The words to say that my body loves differently when death passes. If I were a philosopher ... I would write a chapter ... on this last sentence. I would speak of the body-object. Or if I were a psychoanalyst, I would speak of the object, of the letter and of castration. But I am a penwoman, my craft is writing ... Writing is a conjuration ... To be read in the recesses of the sketched-out shadows, in the signs, the interstices, the vagueness, the approximate, the humble object, and not in the blinding light explosion, coercive, phallophorous evidences. To be read in ... its fluid, fluctuating singularity.]

In this passage, not only are various phallocentric theoretical or analytical approaches to discerning meaning set aside, but one also sees a significant emphasis on the singularity or uniqueness of this narrative, despite the persistent presence of the collective voice of women elsewhere. It would seem that even feminist solidarity can become a stifling imperative for the solitary writer. To quote Gagnon's remarks to this effect from her collaboration to Retailles:

138 Mothers of Invention II m'aura fallu 1'illusion du collectif amoureux pour redecouvrir I'inepuisable generosite de la solitude. £a n'est que dans la reconnaissance lucide des limites du sujet qu'il est possible de franchir les bornes de 1'isolement ... Le Nous du collectif permettant alors le brouillage du moi/je et du moi/tu: le Nous s'installe comme politique, comme morale, comme religion; ga agit par nivellement, par neutralisation de toute la complexite du reel, de I'imaginaire et du symbolique de chaque sujet.52 [I will end up having needed the illusion of the loving collective in order to rediscover the inexhaustible generosity of solitude. It is only in the lucid recognition of the limits of the subject that it is possible to cross the bounds of isolation ... The We of the collectivity permitting thus the blurring of I/ me and of I/you: the We installs itself as a policy, as a moral, as a religion; it acts by levelling, by the neutralization of all the complexity of the real, of the imaginary and of the symbolic of each subject.]

If the "we" is an important strategy in feminist theory, it is clearly one that brings with it a set of expectations that can prove inimical to creative freedom. In Lueur the blending of fiction and the authoritative discourse of theory is thus not always a harmonious one, such that the text itself in several instances can be seen to critique the very politics of collective action that feminist and Marxist approaches tend to valorize. Even as there is an important component of solidarity among women in this novel that aspires to voice their stories, there is nonetheless a concomitant recognition that an individual woman's life and thought cannot always adhere to the tenets of class- or gender-based politics. In Gagnon's novel, as in her writing career, the freedom to find one's own way, one's own voice, in defiance of all prescriptive doctrines (theoretical, political, or literary), is of paramount importance. It is perhaps for this reason, for its emphasis on the individual story and testimony, that Lueur at times appears to verge on the autobiographical. In the light of other writings that offer details from Gagnon's life, such as "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture" or the later work Le Deuil du soleil (1998), which is almost fully autobiographical, it becomes clear that Lueur is not playing in any systematic way with the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. While the scene of the dying grandmother certainly recalls Gagnon's experience of her own grandmother's last words (recounted in "Mon Corps," Ai, 190-2), and while one might see an allusion to the suicide of her cousin Regis in the "[pjetit suicide, grand criminel" (little suicided one, great criminal; 124) mourned in Lueur (a suicide that also haunts Gagnon's later Deuil),53 these real losses are but touchstones for her inspiration and do not make this novel an autofiction, to use the

139 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

increasingly widespread term that recent criticism has adopted to describe the hybridization of fiction and life-writing.54 What makes this novel resonant of lived experience, then, is its first-person narration, in which the narrator recovers the memories of others even as she is inspired to delve into her own and tries to redefine her "night writing" from the beginning as not being an "invention." Despite such gestures, which seem to suggest that a kind of realism is at work, it would nonetheless be erroneous to think that the narrator and Gagnon are the same person or that the novel refers transparently to the author's own memories. As if to ensure that no such mistake is made, Lueur in fact concludes with a telling quotation from Regine Robin's Le Cheval blanc de Lenine, where she states, "II ne s'agit pas de memoires, genre litteraire norme, categorise, institutionnalise, mais du travail de la memoire [It is not a matter here of memoirs, a normative, categorized, institutionalized literary genre, but rather of the work of memory]" (cited in Lr 167). Clearly, Gagnon chooses this quotation to remind the reader of the nature of her archaeological project, which involves a process of unearthing maternal pasts and excavating personal memories, yet does not pretend to reflect the real in its search for the truth of women's experiences and aspirations. In an interview given shortly after she published Lueur, Gagnon responds to the issue of genre hybridization by privileging the contemporary tendency to mix fiction and theory, even though she herself admits, in reference to Antre and Lueur, that there are times when "on se demande si c'est du roman ou de la poesie [one wonders whether it is a novel or poetry]."55 As Louise Dupre notes in the chapter of Strategies du vertige that she devotes to Gagnon, the latter's poetry of the mid-1970s already displays a mix of discourses, levels of language, and genres, as the title of Poelitique alone indicates, with its neologism that melds poetry and politics (sv 177, 182). Given such an early and pronounced penchant for what Dupre calls the "metissage" (interbreeding) of genres, the transgression of the distinction between fiction and poetry would seem to be a rather more important and pervasive strategy, at least in Gagnon's work, than the increasingly prevalent merging of fiction and theory she points to in the interview cited above. In terms of its overall subversive impact, in fact, it is the poetic quality of Gagnon's narrative that creates a more serious disruption of traditional novelistic conventions and syntax than any other strategy she deploys. Moreover, the lyricism of her language plays a major role in the novel's seductive and haunting effect on the reader. In poetry, the effect of surprise can be subversive and liberating, a fact the Surrealists observed and valued so highly that it became

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central to their aesthetic. In a novel, unexpected poetic images and language are all the more disruptive in that the genre presupposes a certain continuity. Gagnon confirms her recognition of this latter principle in drawing her own distinction between poetry, which for her is "necessairement contemplative," and narrative, which implies, rather, "le mouvement de s'inscrire dans la continuite historique [the movement of inscribing oneself in historical continuity]."56 In Lueur her incorporation of poetic elements becomes an effective strategy in her quest to expand the possibilities of the novel, because she uses it to open up narrative to a non-linear, imagistic or figurative language expressive of the difference of women's dreams, experiences, and desires. In this way, the narrative of Lueur reflects both the poetic voice and the storytelling vocation of its narrator, as in the following passage, where poetical images ultimately take over the woman's pursuit of her "night writing": Scriptrice de ce qu'elle voyait se mouvoir sur cette vaste et changeante scene nocturne, elle ne I'imposerait pas plus que les autres scripteurs, isoles, elle ne ferait que constamment revenir a sa source et reveler ses origines. Jamais done la fiction ne saurait 1'emporter sur cette verite historique, la plus riche en images, fantasmes delirants, personnages multiformes, multiples splendeurs, ardeur des desirs eclates, joyaux rubis et diamants, huitres perles et salamandres, mots d'amours et corps de mots. (75) [Scribe of what she saw moving on this vast and changing nocturnal scene, she would no more impose it than the other, isolated writers, she would only constantly return to her source and reveal her origins. Fiction would thus never prevail over this historical truth, the richest in images, wild fantasies, multiform characters, multiple splendours, ardour of exploding desires, jewels rubies and diamonds, oysters pearls and salamanders, words of loves and bodies of words.]

In this passage, explicitly initiated by the mention of a "truth ... richest in images," Gagnon offers an accumulation of clauses containing incongruous but sumptuous signifiers that create the effect of surprise and oblige the reader to suspend the effort to read for meaning in favour of an openness to the lyrical, metaphoric qualities of what is evoked. While the eye may follow the assembled words literally through to the last "mots," the intrusion of poetic juxtapositions of pearls and salamanders, for example, disrupts the reader's ability to make sense of the sentence, and so contributes to the impression of a fragmented, non-linear narrative. As a poetic device, metaphor derives its power from the way in which it brings together two seemingly disparate elements to create

141 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

an arresting image. In Gagnon's case, as Dupre notes, metaphor also "devient le moyen de fuir le sens propre, de creuser dans le langage de communication un espace flou, mouvant, approximatif [becomes the means to avoid literal meaning, to excavate a shifting, approximate, ambiguous space within the language of communication]" (sv 187). Through such ambiguity and conceptual juxtaposition, it becomes possible both to imagine what Gagnon's narrator calls "cette extraordinaire lumineuse metaphore corporelle que je suis [this extraordinary luminous corporeal metaphor that I am]" (78) and to overcome the problem that Dupre notes of how to transpose 'Tunivers maternel dans le monde des mots et de la representation [the maternal universe into the world of words and of representation]" (sv 183).57 More importantly, however, metaphor affects the legibility of the text, forcing the reader to slow down and savour the images instead of the story. So effective is this strategy to disrupt a linear consumption of the narrative that few critics (if any) have remarked on the fact that Lueur only contains approximately 167 pages, some of which are black or show the petroglyphs, and many of which have a significant amount of blank space, such that the narrative itself is even shorter. The length of the novel is therefore deceptive, for it does not read quickly, its poetry giving it a density and an intricate rhythm that make it seem a more expansive text than it actually is. In addition to the extensive use of metaphor, Gagnon also incorporates other figures and poetic repetitions that contribute to the hybrid nature of the narrative of Lueur. One exemplary phrase repeated several times is particularly fecund, both semantically and phonetically: "1'ode sanguisorbe a 1'amour [the Sanguisorba58 ode to love]" (132, 134, 135) contains alliterations (in "I" and "s") and assonances (in "o" and "a"), even as the unfamiliar word for what is a suggestive spike of flowers evokes equally sensuous images of blood (sang) and celestial shapes or berries (via orbe or sorbe). The "sanguisorbe" in fact unleashes a veritable cascade of poetic play when it first appears. To cite merely the beginning of the journey it initiates: "Sanguisorbe, faux-gui-de-1'Est qui donne des balais de sorciere sanqui, sans qui, qui sorbe sang sort quand la riviere coule entouree d'Elles, elles, sans la mort en bateaux [Sanguisorba, Eastern pseudomistletoe, that makes the brooms of Sanqui witches, without whom, who (ab)sorbs blood spell/releases when the river flows surrounded by the banSfrees, they, without death in boats]" (132). These two lines alone show how Gagnon plays with the nasal vowels, sibilant consonants, and polysemic potential of this one evocative word, even as they also offer an example of the poetic logic of association and repetition that often drives the narrative of Lueur.

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Unlike Cixous's La, where neologisms are relatively frequent, Gagnon's novel contains very few invented words and none that could be considered extremely disruptive or subversive of sense. Gagnon's inventions tend rather to the liberatory, normally combining two or more recognizable words to create a poetically charged image. Her most effective neologism is probably "paroles desiliriantes" (19), which, unpacked, resonates with desire (desir), delirium and something wild or funny (from delire and delirant], reading (lire), and lastly, laughing women (riantes, a feminine adjectival form taken from the verb rire). The words that her narrator is generating are clearly qualified here as integrating an irreverent, sensual, and often freewheeling approach to language patterns. A similar strategy of poetic condensation can be seen in the delicious phrase "enfantemailles orgiaques" (61), which brings together children (enfants), birthing (enfantement), and the weave or linking of generations (maille, meaning stitch, link, or mesh) in a pleasure-filled (orgiaques) celebration of women's (pro)creativity. Gagnon's use of such innovative and joyous wordplay, while more discreet than in the works of her colleagues, nonetheless shows her desire to take liberties with language so that it may better accommodate her creative vision. One other disruptive strategy typical of Gagnon's poetry that she incorporates into Lueur is the use of widely different levels of language, from the formal to the familiar. The elements of formal theoretical discourse that I have pointed out in parts of the novel are offset elsewhere by other passages that deliberately evoke the patterns of everyday speech. At the beginning of the novel's second part, entitled "Archeologie," for example, the reader can almost hear a girl named Zoe remark that "1'pays j'sais pas ce que c'est [the country, I dunno what it is]" (113). Such transcriptions of oral speech patterns are familiar territory for Gagnon, whose use of joual, particularly in Pour les femmes et tons les autres (1974), is usually interpreted as a sign of her solidarity with working-class women. In Lueur, where class issues are not as prominent, Zoe's words seem rather to offer a response to other passages containing voices critical of the narrator's approach, which ask her questions such as "Et les personages? ... faites-les se mouvoir en des lieux reperables, je sais pas, disons ... UN PAYS ... tu pourrais faire un effort, je sais pas moi, contribuer a la naissance d'une litterature NATIONALE [And the characters? ... have them move about in some recognizable places, I dunno, say ... A COUNTRY ... you could try a little harder, like maybe contribute to the birth of a NATIONAL literature]" (51-z).59 The use of an oral style here disrupts the oneiric, personal quality of much of the narrative and creates the effect of an outsider's voice bluntly intruding on the narrator's thoughts and

143 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

writing. In this way, the use of multiple levels of language and tones can be seen to contribute to the fragmented, multivocal - or polylogic, in Kristevan parlance - style of Lueur. Ultimately, however, the most effective subversion of the conventions of novelistic narrative through the use of poetry occurs on the level of syntax. Gagnon's narrator points this out herself, when she declares: "Je m'en tiendrai a mon roman de nuit, du reve, qui se decrypte en mots tres simples, mais sa syntaxe, collant a la lettre de son recit, a la lettre des images, n'adhere pas aux conventions regues [I will stick to my novel of night, of dreams, which is deciphered with very simple words, but its syntax, sticking to the letter of its story, the letter of the images, does not adhere to accepted conventions]" (51). In many of the poetic passages I use as examples in this section, the chief source of the difficulty in reading - and, incidentally, in translation - which they present derives from the fact that Gagnon often chooses not to respect the conventions of French syntax in her effort to open language up to rhythms and images expressive of a feminine imagination. The effect of her writing thus resembles that created by Cixous's texts of the period, which use similarly disruptive poetic word order and associations. To return to the important passage cited earlier from "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture," where the author articulates this strategy: "Et s'il faut parfois que la syntaxe s'erupte et s'insurge centre la linearite apprise, je suivrai les mouvements, les emiettements paradigmes du mien, jusqu'au lexique qui ne m'est pas etranger mais refuse par des flics du bon ordre. Flics males ou femelles, males surtout pourtant, pour qui la langue des opprimes menace dans sa fraicheur soudaine et sa jeune violence [And if sometimes this means syntax must erupt and revolt against acquired linearity, I will follow the movements, the shattered paradigms that are mine, even into a vocabulary that is not alien to me but denounced by the cops of law and order. Male or female cops, males above all, for whom the language of the oppressed is a threat in its sudden freshness and its youthful violence]" (Ai, i66-7).6° The "violence" that Gagnon commits in trying to shatter our normal reading habits and invent new paradigms or patterns of thought is principally enacted through unusual word order and usage. In the above passage, for instance, "les emiettements paradigmes du mien" is very difficult to parse because she creates an ambiguity in her juxtaposition of two words that ought to be nouns but are difficult to read (and translate) as such, since "paradigmes" functions here like an adjective, itself qualified by the imprecise "du mien." The latter expression lacks any obvious antecedent, and so it too contributes to the ambiguity or indecipherability of a phrase that, in microcosm,

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performs the very kind of "eruption" in syntax that the author is in the process of describing. Although this passage comes from a text other than Lueur, it is indicative of the kind of syntactic destabilization common in the novel, where ambiguous pronouns and unexpected adjective and adverb placement frequently surprise the reader. These disruptive strategies are perceptible, predictably, in one of the passages where the narrator explicitly points to syntax as the site that can best reflect what escapes narrative teleology, because "[s]eule la syntaxe peut rappeler ces temps de fuites fragiles, immemoriaux, indelebiles. Le lexique tant bien que mal s'y ajuste et les sonorites, a tous deux, leur vont de pair [only syntax can recall these times of fragile, indelible, immemorial evasions. Vocabulary, as well as can be expected, fits, and the sonorities, for both of them, go along with them]" (Lr 71-2). Here again, the second sentence displays the kind of syntactic ambiguity that Gagnon cultivates in her search for daring paradigms reflective of her "revolt against acquired linearity." Of course, at least since Mallarme if not before, poetry has been the genre of French literature most open to experimentation with and disruption of syntax, and thus the most demanding of a reader's concentration and participation to be understood. Gagnon is not only aware of this characteristic, but also believes that therein lies the power and aspiration of writing. As she puts it, giving credit to those who have preceded her in this thinking: "Si 1'ecriture ne transforme pas ses lecteurs en scripteurs ou createurs virtuels, ce n'est pas la peine d'ecrire. Si un texte ne conduit pas au moins un lecteur vers une mutation radicale, qa n'est pas de 1'ecriture. Ces reflexions sont finement elaborees par Mallarme et Blanchot [If writing does not transform its readers into virtual creators or writers, then it is not worth writing. If a text does not steer at least one reader into radical transformation, then it is not writing. These ideas have been subtly elaborated by Mallarme and Blanchot]."61 In Lueur, Gagnon's play with syntax is one of the chief ways she attempts to create a writing that will compel both the reader's participation and a modification of his or her perspective. Her feminist project of opening language up to the voices and experiences of women, and thus transforming the scope and tenor of their visions, is clearly based on the belief that writing can accommodate and effect such changes. The narrative of Lueur incorporates the kind of ruptures in syntax usually associated with poetry to a double purpose, then, for in addition to Gagnon's agenda, one must also recall her narrator's project of transcribing her foremother's memories by faithfully translating their lapses along with what they recover. The misplaced modifiers, the ellipses, the ambiguities, and the litanies of

145 Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur

images and clauses with little logical or syntactical coherence are all there to evoke the syntax of dreams and the lacunar language that permeate women's stories in the novel. Lest we forget, in describing the legacy she wants her descendant to write, it is the grandmother who predicts: Ta syntaxe sera toute perturbee, un souffle haletant, des phrases hachurees, ou bien des temps qui ne distingueront plus le futur du passe ..., qui ne sauront plus comment s'arreter. Des contre-sens. Tu auras en horreur les constructions elegantes ... Tes mots seront deroutants dans la repetition ..., a chaque fois ce sera different, les etats de memoire toujours a vif ... certains bruleront nos pages. Patiente, tu ramasseras les feuilles qui restent et tu poursuivras mon desir de ne rien perdre du reste de ce que j'ai vecu. (99) [Your syntax will be all disrupted, a panting respiration, choppy sentences, or rather, tenses that will no longer distinguish the future from the past ..., that will no longer know how to stop themselves. Some nonsensicalities. You will abhor elegant constructions ... Your words will be disturbing in repetition ..., each time it will be different, states of memory always bared ... some people will burn our pages. Patiently, you will pick up the sheets that remain and you will pursue my desire to lose nothing of the rest of what I have lived.]

This passage neatly encapsulates both the purpose and the practice that Gagnon and her narrator share in their irreverence for the grammatical and logical conventions which they feel limit the expression and the comprehension of their ideas. And while some may wish to "burn [their] pages" in frustration, it is clear that they hope others will accept the challenge of their poetic syntax and have their reading horizons transformed by the experience. The above passage is particularly useful in that it points to more than just the poetic syntax deployed in this narrative; it also mentions the idea of repetition with a difference. In fact, if Lueur might be better termed, a la Cixous, a "poetic fiction" instead of "fiction theory," it is largely because its poetic content, in addition to its lyric style, is derived, if not directly copied, from Gagnon's earlier publications. Louise Dupre is the first critic to trace this penchant for repeating certain phrases and fragments from one text to another, a strategy particularly visible in "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture" and in Antre, of which Dupre rightly notes many fragments also find their way into Lueur (sv 209).6z In turn, pieces of Lueur appear in later texts by Gagnon, including La Lettre infinie (1984). Repetition of and in her own writing, then, is one reason why her Lueur is a hybrid work, incorporating as it does passages from previous texts that span genres as disparate as theory and poetry.

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The archived materials now available in the Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec as part of the Fonds Gagnon offer precious documentation of how Gagnon's works of the 19703 and 19805 are thematically and chronologically related, connections revealed in preparatory notebooks that served as resources for several publications at a time and most especially in the multiple draft manuscripts that trace the gestation and evolution of Lueur. These drafts clearly show that the novel started out with several sections, differently titled and differently organized from those in the published version. As the drafts were revised, Gagnon seems to have eliminated selected parts, some of which later appeared as separate articles, one notable exception being a segment called "Pre-texte," which remains unpublished to this day. It is in this excised section that she in fact meditates on the very question of self-repetition, which she prefers to call a "reprise," translatable as a repeat (in music) but also a revival or reuse, meanings that Gagnon turns to as she seeks to deconstruct the modern emphasis on originality: La reprise ... est admis[e] de la musique mais beaucoup moins de 1'ecrit. Comme si le mystere entourant le texte et 1'ecrivant exigeat non seulement que Ton ne devoile pas ses sources ou ses techniques, mais encore que Ton ne re-prenne pas ce qui fut deja dit et si jamais 1'on ose, que cela soit cache, comme s'il existat une faute qui s'appellait "plagiat" de soi-meme et plagiat tout court, et qu'il fallait a tous prix dissimuler ... Comme si le texte devait toujours paraitre jeune et neuf, non troue, non marque.63 [Repeats ... are permitted in music but much less in writing. As if the mystery surrounding the text and the writer demanded not only that one not unveil one's sources or one's techniques, but also that one not reuse what was already said and if one ever dared, that it be hidden, as if there was an offence called "plagiarism" of oneself and plagiarism period, that one had to conceal at all costs ... As if the text must always appear young and new, without holes or gaps, without marks.]

Gagnon's resistant attitude to the traditional aversion to plagiarism is here revealed to be a product of a different perception of the nature of originality and of the relationship that one text can have to its antecedents. Like her narrator, she seems motivated by an "immense desir de profaner 1'interdit, [ ... et une] intention nette et precise de dechirer le voile du temple, de boire a meme le vase sacre, de reveler 1'inceste de toute ecriture, ce lieu secret du racolage ou son pouvoir se noue [immense desire to violate the interdiction ... and a clear and precise intention to rend the temple veil, to drink from the sacred

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vessel, to reveal the incest of all writing, that secret place of solicitation where its power takes shape]" (Lr 47). In the realm of academic writing, power is seemingly located in the originality and authority conferred by being the first to publish an idea or by being the one to have articulated it best. Just as one is not supposed to repeat what others have already said without giving them credit, so should one not repeat oneself by rewriting or reusing earlier materials. In literature, however, these rules of originality and plagiarism are somewhat more supple, because literary texts can and do make references and allusions to one another and retell the same stories in many different - but equally "original" - ways. This common strategy now falls under what literary criticism calls intertextuality, a concept traceable to Mikhail Bakhtin but explored by many critics, including Todorov, Barthes, and Kristeva, and which can include practices as distinct as "le plagiat, le collage, la reference et la parodie [plagiarism, collage, references, and parody]," to cite Evelyne Voldeng's article "L'Intertextualite dans les ecrits feminins d'inspiration feministe." This article contains a very useful summary description of the main types of intertextuality distinguished by its theorists, which include "une intertextualite generate (rapports intertextuels entre textes d'auteurs differents), une intertextualite restreinte (rapports intertextuels entre textes du meme auteur), une intertextualite externe (rapport d'un texte a un autre texte) et une intertextualite interne (rapport d'un texte a lui-meme) [a general intertextuality (intertextual links between texts by different authors), a restricted intertextuality (the intertextual links between texts by the same author), an external intertextuality (the connection between one text and another), and an internal intertextuality (the connection made within a single text to itself)]."64 What is surprising and, ironically, original about Lueur is that the author consciously seems to be exploring all these possible kinds of intertextuality within its pages, in an effort to open the novel up to other voices, other discourses, and other interpretations - in other words, to that "disturbing repetition" highlighted in the predictions of the grandmother cited earlier. As I have demonstrated in the preceding paragraphs, Gagnon's archives and recent critical studies both offer proof of her regular practice of restricted intertextuality, for she often repeats phrases and fragments from one text to another. Moreover, according to the distinctions inventoried by Voldeng, the repetition and condensation of fragments of Lueur's "Fiction" in its "Second Mouvement," outlined in the first part of this chapter, can be identified as internal intertextuality, employed here by Gagnon to

148 Mothers of Invention create a spiralling effect and an increasing tension before the ultimate release and open-ended resolution of the novel's coda-like conclusion. Both these intertextual strategies partake of that subversive attitude to "self-plagiarism" that she displays in her discussion of "reprises" in the unpublished "Pre-texte" of her manuscript. Clearly, in the writing of Lueur, Gagnon was intending all along to play with the conventional interdiction to cite or repeat one's own words and images. More importantly, however, her self-repetitions are always executed "with a difference," and in Lueur the distinct context or condensation of the repetitive gesture is precisely what gives the text its power and originality. In my earlier discussion of the theoretical references present in the novel, I already pointed to some of the more general intertextuality at work in Lueur, exemplified by Gagnon's references to the ideas of Freud and Lacan, among others. Of course, in some instances the general intertextuality takes on the more specific form of external intertextuality, where she actually mentions the text she is engaging or citing. In point of fact, there are nineteen authors quoted in Lueur, twelve of those citations coming from titles that Gagnon specifically mentions. While over half the authors mentioned reside or were born in Quebec, only six are women, and, surprisingly, of those women, five are from Europe (Luce Irigaray, Claire Lejeune, Michele Montrelay, Nata Minor, and Regine Robin). From this choice, it would seem that at the time of writing Lueur, Gagnon felt an affinity with several male poets and writers from Quebec, but was more drawn to French and Belgian feminist thought than to that of her compatriots. She confirms that the act of citation is one of solidarity for her, when she says that it is "une fac,on de reconnaitre les influences et ceux et celles, parmi les penseurs et les ecrivains, qui [IJ'avaient marquee [a way of acknowledging influences and those men and women, among the thinkers and writers, who had marked her]."65 In the more militantly feminist "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture," where the preponderance of citations are drawn from Annie Leclerc's Parole de femme and from the New Portuguese Letters of the "Three Marias," Gagnon describes her use of citations as an act of translation, explaining, "Je me suis etrangere en ma propre langue et me traduis moimeme en citant tous les autres [I am a stranger to myself in my own language and translate myself by citing all the others]" (Ai, 152). It is clear that this is what is going on in Lueur as well, where the references to other authors' texts often have the effect of distilling or rearticulating themes and ideas at the heart of the novel's project. One example is the passage that Gagnon takes from Philippe Haeck's important critical study entitled Naissances: de 1'ecriture quebecoise,

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where he describes the dissolution of writer's block using the metaphor of a wall: "II y avait un mur, il n'y a plus de mur ... Comment cela? Par 1'autre ... De 1'autre cote du mur il y avait une autre personne qui est venue sans y prendre garde traverser le mur qu'on croyait infranchissable - 1'autre ne voyait pas le mur ... Maintenant vous savez que les murs se deplacent ... que c.a arrive toujours avec des autres [There was a wall, there is no longer any wall ... How is that? Via the other ... On the other side of the wall there was another person who, without paying attention, crossed the wall thought to be insurmountable - the other did not see the wall... Now you know that walls move ... that it always happens with others]" (cited in Lr 144). This passage puts a finger on the necessity of the other, which is thematized at many different levels in Gagnon's novel, from the grandmother's need for the listening ear of her descendant and the narrator's desire for a loving partner, to Gagnon's need for the reader's participation in creating meaning (and deciphering syntax) in her writing, and finally, to her desire to include or repeat others' words in her texts via intertextuality. To return to the critic Marilyn Randall's analysis of Gagnon's use of citation, it seems an accurate portrait of her purpose to claim, as Randall does, that her strategy, "loin de marquer un mouvement excentrique vers 1'autorite de 1'Autre, apparait comme la transgression et la subversion du pouvoir de 1'Autre qui depend de son occultation [far from marking a eccentric movement toward the authority of the Other, appears to be a transgression and subversion of the Other's power that depends on its concealment]."66 In this approach to citation as a way of undoing the hierarchical thinking that implicitly confers authority on the person cited, the other becomes the means - the permeable "wall" breaker of Haeck's metaphor - by which the writing subject can access a new voice and extend her possibilities. Paradoxically, this process is accomplished via a kind of voluntary renunciation of authority and of self-centredness that accompanies the recourse to others' words. As Randall puts it, it is a "[p]erte de soi, mais reconstitution et transformation de soi dans la parole constituante des autres [loss of self, but reconstitution and transformation of the self in the constitutive speech of others],"67 a kind of rebirth which is figured in the re-emergence of the narrator after she has been devoured by the ogre and ogress at the novel's conclusion, and which is also underscored as an essential part of both the reading and the writing processes in the epigraph with which I opened this chapter. In Gagnon's textual universe, as in that of Cixous, it is only through an openness to alterity that one can most fully come to know oneself.

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While Gagnon admits elsewhere that citing others could be interpreted as a sign of insecurity,68 it seems clear that in Lueur quotations of herself and others take on the subversive cast they do because they form part of a larger set of strategies designed to upset the notions of authority and the narrative and syntactic conventions that have historically characterized novelistic prose. This choice of fiction as the vehicle for feminist subversion is in part dictated by the fact that narrative offers a significant degree of amplitude for the expression and exploration of women's sexuality and desires and of their influence on women's experience of their subjectivities over time. This is one of Gagnon's points in "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture," where she hypothesizes, "Si les femmes ... utilisent de plus en plus ce que 1'on nomme, a defaut de mieux, fiction, c'est que jusqu'ici ce mode d'ecriture (et de parole) est le seul qui puisse redonner au discours ce qu'il y a en nous tous de pulsions, fantasmes et desirs [If women ... use more and more often what is called, for lack of a better term, fiction, it is that until now this mode of writing (and of speech) is the only one that can give back to discourse what we have in us of drives, fantasies, and desires]" (Ai, 163). In Gagnon's case, the fiction she creates in her effort to give voice to such desires is one constructed from a hybridization of several genres and permeated by the practice of intertextuality, a set of intertwined strategies that combine to make the novel a multi-layered, multi-voiced, poetic journey. Ultimately, Lueur's entire traverse could be placed under the sign of paradox, as I noted even in the first pages of the novel in the way the narrator presented her contradictory project of "night writing," visually underscored by the author in the use of black pages to punctuate the text. In this part of my analysis, I have tried to point out the many ways that Gagnon is playing with the form and conventions of the traditional novel, but it must also be recognized that her strategies are double-edged and reveal the profound contradictions inherent in the attempt to experiment with writing as a way to express difference. For example, she borrows others' words and even her own, and yet defends the originality of her narrative because her repetitions are "with a difference," that difference being in large part due to the novel's thematic context of transmission and exchange among women. Moreover, she employs syntactic disruption and poetic licence to provoke the active participation of her readers and to transform their ways of thinking and reading, despite the fact that the working-class women with whom she ostensibly empathizes would find such a fragmented, dense narrative arduous going indeed. In truth, those most likely to enjoy Lueur even today would most probably be highly educated feminists already well versed in

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avant-garde textualities - a point that could be made about the elitism of almost all experimental fiction, feminist or otherwise. Even the strategy of hybridizing genres is fraught with contradiction, because of the ideological implications of any form of theoretical discourse. On the one hand, for instance, Gagnon affirms, with many of her time, "On assiste depuis le debut des annees 70, a une nouvelle revolution de la pensee, de 1'ecriture. Le saut, qualitatif, est du meme ordre que les grands bouleversements apportes par des mouvements comme le surrealisme ou rautomatisme ... dans tous les domaines de la pensee, 1'eveil des femmes a ete marquant [We are witnessing since the beginning of the 19705 a new revolution in thought, in writing. The leap, qualitatively, is of the same order as the great upheavals brought on by movements such as surrealism and automatism ... in all realms of thought, the awakening of women has been significant]."69 With such remarks, Gagnon is clearly situating the collective impetus of feminist-inspired creativity within an avant-garde tradition that women are continuing, even as they are shifting its paradigms with a "leap" of innovation all their own. On the other hand, even as she incorporates feminist theory into her fiction, she ultimately valorizes the creative liberty to reject feminist (or any other) discourse that threatens to form a prescriptive aesthetic. Even as she speculates that "le mouvement feministe contemporain aura donne a 1'histoire litteraire un mouvement- inedit d'[e]criture [the contemporary feminist movement will have given a new movement in writing to literary history],"70 she also posits that in writing "[o]n ne peut dieter, a cause de principes politiques, les visees de 1'experimentation formelle, tributaire des lois ayant justement echappe aux censures du refoulement: celles de 1'inconscient et de ses representations pulsionnelles et imaginaires. Le reve, la fiction ne se programment pas [one cannot dictate, because of political principles, the aim of formal experimentation, tributary of laws that precisely escape the censures of repression: those of the unconscious and its representations in the drives and in the imaginary. Dreams, fiction, cannot be programmed]."71 This is indeed one of the fundamental paradoxes that characterizes Gagnon's womancentred texts and theoretical reflections. Finally, it must also be recognized that the exploration of the maternal body, language, and the imaginary, however salutary and original many critics deemed it to be at the time when Gagnon was writing, is also a problematic gesture, because it can lead to a perpetuation of the identification of women with their bodies, a literal and symbolic link that is at the root of the oppression and silencing of women in patriarchal society. In her recent study Le Nom de la mere, Lori Saint-Martin summarizes some of the theoretical pitfalls of the

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search for a maternal language by writers such as Gagnon, but she concludes that even in its "echec inevitable" (inevitable failure), it is nonetheless "une utopie vivifiante" (an invigorating Utopia).72 It is in this way that Gagnon's Lueur and Cixous's La are perhaps most similar, for in their joyous, poetic exploration of women's bodies and procreative potential, they inspire hope for change and for freedom for all women to know and voice their stories and "[f]ouiller 1'ecrit comme on cherche la mere, a tatons, redevenir 1'infante des songes creux, aridite, en plein desert en caresser les sables. C'est tout ce qu'il nous reste de cette traversee [excavate the written work in the same way that one searches for the mother, feeling one's way along, to become once again the infanta of empty dreams, aridity, in the middle of the desert to caress the sands. This is all that is left us of this time spent crossing the wilderness],"73 as Gagnon puts it in La Lettre infinie. Still, if writers like Gagnon and Cixous thus approach the maternal as a site to be rediscovered and celebrated in a narrative that displays a subversive relation to literary and linguistic traditions, it must be recognized that there are other writers whose avantgarde experimentation begins with a rejection of the mother as part and parcel of the same set of repressive traditions and conventions. In the two chapters that follow, I now turn to works of the 19703 by Nicole Brossard and Jeanne Hyvrard, both of whom deconstruct the maternal bond and body in their search for symbolic and literal freedom of expression - a new voice for women (in) writing.

4 Drawing the Line and Transgressing Limits: Nicole Brossard's L'Amer Nous existerons dans le recit que nous inventerons. Mais il faudra de formidables coleres, un desir plus fou que tous les desirs surrealistes, une curiosite qui oblige a commettre de terribles indiscretions, a poursuivre de difficiles enquetes. II faudra apprendre a depasser les bornes.

[We will exist in the story of our own design. But we will need formidable anger, desire more wild than all the Surrealist desires put together, curiosity such that it leads to committing terrific indiscretions, to pursuing difficult inquiries. We will have to learn to go too far.] Nicole Brossard1

Nicole Brossard began her writing career in 1965, when she published her first collection of poetry, appropriately entitled Aube a la saison. That same year she co-founded what was to become an extremely important literary journal, La Barre du jour, the title of which also metaphorically points to the new directions in which Brossard and her contemporaries wished to lead the Quebec literary and critical community. Although it began at a time when nationalism and a denunciation of the effects of colonialism were important themes for many Quebec writers and artists, particularly those publishing with L'Hexagone or contributing to the journal Parti pris, La Barre du jour was deliberately oriented toward experimentation with form and its analysis, rather than political themes.2 As Louise Dupre explains, the editorial collective to which Brossard belonged was "mainly concerned with the linguistic code. The aim was to unhinge syntax, rupture the sentence, restore to words their polysemic 'unconscious' content, and to produce a body-centered writing in the image of the sex/text metaphor."3 In these impulses, the Barre du jour contributors were exploring a subversive writing aesthetic that can be traced back to the period of the Grande Noirceur, when PaulEmile Borduas and the group of fifteen artists and writers who surrounded him revolted against the oppressive milieu of Quebec society by signing the famous, surrealism-inspired manifesto, tellingly entitled Refus global, in 1948. From that almost mythic moment forward, experimental aesthetics became part of Quebec's artistic vocabulary and fuelled the desire for the "inedit" (unrecorded, original,

154 Mothers of Invention unheard-of). As I noted in the preceding chapter, this is a notion that Gagnon also privileges, but not to the extent Brossard does, for the latter has vigorously pursued 'Tinedit" throughout her career.4 Of course, the work and words of Borduas and the automatist movement were not the sole source of inspiration for the generation of La Bane du jour. As many critics have noted, the influence of the journal Tel Quel, where linguistic concerns found an early forum in France, was also extremely important to the development of what would be called formalism in Quebec literature, particularly in the late 19603. Pierre Milot even goes so far as to posit what he terms a "homologie recurrente" between the aesthetic and institutional strategies at work in Quebec and French journals associated with experimental writing at the time,5 while Rene Prieto has noted, in Brossard's work specifically, an affinity for "the theoretical reflections of critics, linguists, and philosophers who rallied around and published in ...Tel Quel."6 In interviews, Brossard herself does mention contemporary French influences important to her early writings, including Blanchot and Barthes, although she is also quick to point out the impact of earlier writers such as Mallarme on her .work.7 Nonetheless, in her first collections of poetry, there is no sign of any commitment to the kind of political engagement that was emerging in the writings of her Tel Quel contemporaries. In Theorie d'ensemble, published by Tel Quel in 1968, Philippe Sollers makes this commitment explicit: "Toute ecriture, qu'elle le veuille ou non, est politique. L'ecriture est la continuation de la politique par d'autres moyens ... L'ecriture et la revolution font cause commune Tune dormant a 1'autre sa recharge signifiante [All writing, intentionally or not, is political. Writing is a continuation of politics by other means ... Writing and revolution have a common cause, each giving the other its signifying energy]/'8 It would seem that, in contrast to the French intellectuals' assumption of such a political stance, Brossard and her Bane du jour colleagues chose to situate their vision of renewal purely in the realm of language, the "neutral" (and thus apolitical) becoming central to the new formalist practice. As she herself writes in 1970 in Suite logique, "neutre ce qui fut dit / neutre ce qui emprunte tant / car de moi rien sinon / 1'objet repeint hasarde [neutral what was said /neutral what borrows so much / for, nothing from me, if not / the repainted object risked]."9 The Bane du jour generation's "new writings" were thus distinct, at least initially, from the predominant forms of literary nationalism in Quebec, as well as from the overtly ideological texts produced by the Tel Quel group. The interest of La Bane du jour's contributors in the French critical scene, moreover, was at best

155 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer uneven, a result perhaps in part of their heightened sensitivity to issues of cultural colonization.10 This is perhaps one of the reasons why Brossard herself is reluctant to elaborate on the influence of French intellectuals in her earliest work, preferring to insist on the later texts, which she feels show fewer "assimilate[d] influences."11 It would not be until the October Crisis gripped Montreal in late 1970 that Brossard's work would explicitly partake of the political climate of the time: La Barre du jour's "Document Miron"12 is in part a protest against the arrest of that poet and the repressive measures taken by the Trudeau government to suppress dissidence.13 This is also the year that saw Brossard publish her first work of fiction, the self-reflexive Un Livre, a move to prose writing that she has said was motivated by the desire to "intervenir plus directement dans le quotidien des scenes [intervene more directly in the quotidian of the scenes]" and to "'[f]aire le personnage' dans le double sens d'ecrire le personnage et dans le sens d'etre le personnage [make the character in the dual sense of writing the character and being the character]."14 Her first three prose works - Un Livre, Sold-out (1973), and French Kiss (1974) - all bear traces of everyday reality and contemporary societal problems, including references to conflicts with governmental authorities and to urban life in Montreal. These references do not, however, amount to a coherent political stance: such commitment does not appear in Brossard's writings until the early 19703, when her interest in formalist experimentation would be nuanced by her journey into both feminism and lesbianism. As Alice Parker summarizes it in Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard, the only Englishlanguage scholarly monograph to date dedicated entirely to her work, "Brossard went through her ... formalist period from 1965 until the early 19703, modeled on avant-garde experimentation through the first half of the century (modernism, surrealism, the 'nouveau roman' et al.), and she was instrumental in elaborating textual practices of modernite in Quebec. But for her the challenge to phallogocentrism inherent in Barthes' proclamation of the 'death' of the author - the authority of male subjectivity and patriarchal control of meaning production - has been accompanied since the early seventies by a consciously feminist Utopian countermovement."15 In her article "The Political in the Work of Nicole Brossard," Louise Forsyth claims that "Vaseline," first published in 1973 in La Barre du jour, is Brossard's "first explicitly feminist text."16 While it could be argued, as Quebec critic Pierre Nepveu does/7 that the focus of this text is more on the question of ludic transgression in writing than on a feminist analysis of language, "Vaseline" certainly hints at the directions Brossard would subsequently explore, when we read, for

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example, "Une grammaire ayant pour regie: le masculin 1'emporte sur le feminin doit etre transgressee, susciter quelques manoeuvres de fond, de lames, de plaisir ... d'humour [A grammar which has as its rule that the masculine dominates the feminine must be transgressed, to elicit some fundamental shifts, some waves, of pleasure ... of humour]."18 Rather than trying to locate such a change in stance in a single text, however, it seems more accurate to suggest that Brossard's increasingly feminist tone developed over a period of two years, between 1973 and 1975, culminating in the text we will be examining here, L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite, the writing of which she discusses in an interview in 1976.19 While "Vaseline" and even French Kiss do offer indications of a nascent feminist awareness, the development of Brossard's thinking on feminism and writing was certainly bolstered by Cixous's lectures at the Universite de Montreal, where Brossard was a student. The effect of the French feminist's presence is perhaps made most obvious by the interview with her that Brossard conducted and published in Le Devoir in 1974, in which she questions Cixous's ideas on writing in the feminine in an extremely informed and intelligent way.20 Earlier that same year, Brossard gave birth to her only child, a daughter, an event that also profoundly affected her thinking and writing, if we can credit the Journal intime she would publish ten years later: Le 6 juin 1974. J'habite dans une grande maison au bord de la riviere des Prairies. J'ai une fille de deux mois. Le terrain qui entoure la maison est inonde. J'ecris tout cela sur une grande table rouge ou il y a ma fille, mon cahier et un dictionnaire. Un bouquet de fleurs rouges dont je n'oublierai jamais le parfum. II y a aussi dans la maison, des odeurs de lait, de couches et de poudre pour bebe. Des odeurs qui se repandent mal dans un texte formaliste. La poesie se trouve quelque part dans le jardin inonde.21 [6 June 1974. I live in a big house on the shores of the Prairies river. I have a two-month-old daughter. The yard of the house is flooded. I am writing all this at a big red table on which are my daughter, my workbook, and my dictionary. A bouquet of red flowers whose perfume I will never forget. There are also odours of milk, diapers, and baby powder in the house. Odours that do not fit well in a formalist text. Poetry is to be found somewhere in the flooded garden.]

This short passage suggests that at least part of the reason for Brossard's growing dissatisfaction with formalism lay in its incompatibility with the quotidian demands of motherhood. Moreover, her description of the house she inhabits is indicative of her feelings of isolation and struggle: the flooded garden surrounds her, making

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access to the outside world difficult, and even the name of the nearby river evokes the isolation of the unpopulated expanses of the Canadian prairies. Her intimate world, characterized by the warmth of the colour red and the smells associated with the baby, stands in contrast to the flooded terrain, but the poetry that has been her creative and intellectual mainstay is somehow lost in the flood waters, far from the writing she produces next to her daughter on the red table. Indeed, the demands of motherhood are literally placed on the table before her, along with her stock of words and the paper she will write them on, showing us how very difficult it is to find poetry, especially the abstractions of formalist textuality, with such a concrete reminder of the realities of maternity at her very elbow. This image is indeed appropriate to a period of change that seems to have been markedly less conducive to poetry for Brossard, given her relatively sparse publications between 1975 and igyS.22 Of the two prose texts she did complete during this period, only one would be immediately available to the public: her contribution of "L'Ecrivain" to the collaborative play La Nefdes sorcieres. By her own admission, this text and "La Plaque tournante," which she would not publish for ten years, were both painful to write because of the new questions she was asking and the new feminist ideas she was exploring. As she puts it in a 1976 interview, "pendant deux ans, je n'ai produit aucun texte de fiction sauf celui de La Nefdes sorcieres et celui de la Plaque tournante, deux textes qui m'ont completement dechiree quand je les ai produits [for two years, I produced no fictional text except that of La Nefdes sorcieres and of the Plaque tournante, two texts that completely tore me apart when I produced them]."23 This is not to say that Brossard was not otherwise creative or productive in the mid-1970s. On the contrary, she helped to organize and participated in the 1975 international conference in Montreal on "La Femme et le langage," and in 1976 she worked on the film Some American Feminists with Luce Guilbeault.24 The experience of meeting with American feminists would seem to have been the more powerful of the two, given the frequency with which Brossard has acknowledged the influence on her thinking of prominent American feminist activists and writers such as Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Ti-Grace Atkinson, and Kate Millett, the latter two of whom were profiled in the film.25 Until this time, at least in the citations she makes, Brossard had shown a greater affinity for French authors and the occasional Quebec compatriot than for writers south of the border. In "Le Cortex exuberant,"26 for example, she opens with the famous passage on the potential of women's poetry from Rimbaud's letter to Pierre Demeny27 and includes quotations by contemporary French intellectuals such

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as Sellers, Le Clezio, Barthes, and Cixous, along with Joyce and the Quebec poet and editor of Parti pris Paul Chamberland. After 1976, however, the preponderance of European intertexts diminishes, for as we shall see in L'Amer, Brossard will draw more and more on her North American context and on other women writers for inspiration for her new woman-centred perspective. It is this increasingly explicit sense of context that leads the critic Alice Parker to underscore, "Unlike her French counterparts, Brossard has a keen sense of connectedness to the North American continent and to the feminists of the last two decades who have been transforming the imaginary of this rough, recalcitrant space" (LV 167). Notwithstanding her declared predilection for feminists from this continent, however, Brossard does not cease to be inspired by or indebted to her French contemporaries, especially Helene Cixous. In fact, it would be hard to ignore the affinities between her ideological orientation and feminist writing project of the mid-1970s and the ideas that Cixous expresses in "Le Rire de la Meduse" and elsewhere. Specifically, in her interview with Cixous published in Le Devoir, tellingly entitled "Une Romanciere et critique sur le phallocentrisme" (A novelist and critic on phallocentrism), Brossard immediately probes Cixous's conception of ecriture feminine and questions her on the practical issue of how to avoid the trap of repeating the power structures and hierarchies that feminism hopes to overturn or undermine. The force of her questions lies in her insight into both feminism's potential and its potential impasses. Not only are her questions ones that will continue to trouble feminist thinkers for years to come, but it is obvious that these are questions she is also struggling with herself, and that she is attentive to Cixous's answers, even as she is not entirely convinced by them. In fact, from interviews Brossard herself later granted, one can begin to see where she agrees and where she parts ways with Cixous's conception of the feminine and feminine writing. Both Brossard and Cixous start from the basic observation that, to change their self-image and colonized situation in the world, women must begin to find a voice and appropriate language to break the hegemony of the patriarchal word and to define their own identity. "Male being valued as superior to women by millenia of traditions, religions and culture is the question at the heart of the problem," Brossard will note in an interview with Clea Notar. "In order to change this mental imagery, women have to dig deep in the symbolic field, to figure out the image they want of themselves and to connect with other women in order to do so."28 Like Cixous, then, she emphasizes the importance of speaking out and writing, and of doing so as part of a group of women. Such interventions, Brossard notes, cannot help but be disruptive, subversive:

159 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer Toute femme qui ecrit et qui va porter sa parole ou son ecriture sur la place publique est subversive du seul fait de s'installer sur la place publique, d'investir 1'histoire ou elle n'est pas convoquee. Toute femme qui ecrit desobeit en quelque sorte a la loi qui assigne le fils - et non la fille - a 1'ecriture. Au depart, toute femme qui prend la parole en public dejoue quelque chose de 1'ordre, de la norme, de la loi. Toutes les femmes qui veulent etre autonomes, qui veulent trouver leur identite sont condamnees a desobeir, de toute maniere. C'est pourquoi la solidarite des femmes est tres importante: c'est ce qui souvent te permet d'oser ... Pour te rendre compte que plusieurs autres femmes passent par la meme crise que toi, par le meme questionnement que toi.29 [Any woman who writes and who takes her speech or her writing out into the public forum is subversive by virtue of her very presence in the public sphere, her investment in history where she is not called for or upon. Every woman who writes disobeys somehow the law that assigns to the son - and not the daughter - the task of writing. From the beginning, any woman who speaks out in public defies something of order, of the norms, of the law. All women who want to be autonomous, who want to find their identity are condemned to disobey, in any case. That is why women's solidarity is very important: it is what often permits you to dare ... To realize that many women go through the same crisis as you, through the same questioning as you.] This solidarity in "disobeying" the law relegating women to the role of silent partners in history and language serves to encourage each woman's quest for self-determination and self-expression. Where Brossard differs from Cixous is in the prediction of a "feminine writing" that would result from this transgression, for as Brossard puts it in her 1976 interview with Jean Fisette and Michel van Schendel, "en fait le rapport qu'un sujet a a 1'ecriture ... est identique pour un homme et pour une femme. Ce qui est important, c'est la notion de sujet. C'est un rapport qu'un sujet pose [in fact, the relationship that a subject has with writing ... is identical for a man or a woman. What is important is the notion of the subject. It is a relationship that a subject imposes]."30 For her part, Brossard is wary of Cixous's privileging of the unconscious drives and emphasis on the feminine libidinal economy, in her conception of a new, "feminine" writing. As she will say to Andre Roy, Je ne suis pas d'accord pour entrer dans le decor des categories faites par la psychanalyse, parce qu'elles deplacent la question de 1'ecriture des femmes. Je vois dans cette ecriture deux dimensions. Une qui touche a tout le champ fictionnel, la realite se deplac.ant dans la fiction et la fiction empietant sur la realite. L'autre dimension, elle, concerne Tangle de vision. Par cet aspect, en signifiant ou en ecrivant a partir de leur angle de vision

160 Mothers of Invention (different de celui des hommes), les femmes mettent a jour, sur la place publique, un nouveau content!.31 [I am not willing to enter into the decor of psychoanalytical categories, because they displace the question of women's writing. I see in this writing two dimensions: one that touches the whole fictional field, reality being displaced by fiction and fiction impinging on reality. As for the other dimension, it concerns the angle of vision. By this aspect, by signifying or by writing from their angle of vision (different from that of men), women bring to light, to the public sphere, a new content.]

Essentially, although she accepts the term "ecriture feminine," Brossard will only use it - or more often its Quebec equivalent, "ecriture au feminin" - "strategically,"32 for she does not entirely agree with Cixous's stance that this new writing could come from authors of either sex, or that, if it could, it would have a similar content. Women are the only ones, according to Brossard, whose "angle of vision" allows them to speak legitimately of their particular relationship to language and the world. As she puts it, "I believe it would be a great mistake to think for a second that what women are trying to subvert in language can be compared to what colonized men have done in their search for identity. There is a lot of room in language for a man to express his anger, his revolt, his solidarity, his need of freedom, etc., but there is no space in language for a woman to express these same emotions in a patriarchal language where she, as subject, does not exist. In fact, we women are foreigners in our mother tongue, in language. In the patriarchal language we don't exist as individual, as person, we only exist as long as we are related to a man, as wife, mother or femme fatale. A woman relating to women is not welcome in language. This makes all the difference."33 While such a statement raises questions of essentialism and could certainly be considered an overgeneralization in terms of women's experience in language, what is important here is to see where Brossard departs from Cixous's delicate dance around the definition of femininity in "The Laugh of the Medusa." Despite her shared focus on questions of desire and the body, Brossard is seemingly more concerned than Cixous with a woman's affirmation of herself as a concretely different subject in language than that posited by male authorities. In the special issue she edited of La Barre du jour on "Femme et langage," which appeared the same year as "The Laugh of the Medusa," Brossard goes as far as to posit in the opening "Preliminaires" that only a woman "peut formuler pour elle d'abord, pour les autres ensuite, le sujet feminin et ce faisant, faire eclater nos pratiques d'ecriture [can formulate for herself first, and then for others, the feminine subject, and in so doing, explode our writing practices]."34

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On balance, then, Brossard situates herself closer to American feminists than to her French counterparts, principally because of her preference for the pragmatic affirmation of women as subjects over the approach to femininity offered by French feminists' psychoanalytic models. To cite her interview with Andre Roy again, she feels an agacement face aux textes qui jouent beaucoup avec la psychanalyse, parce que j'ai 1'impression d'y sentir un sur-moi tres fort ... qui s'empeche d'un delire au feminin, qui empeche d'enoncer une part fictive qui est vitale non seulement pour moi, lectrice, mais pour tous ceux et celles qui lisent ... Par centre, le discours des femmes americaines, des feministes m'est extremement important, celui de Millett, de Firestone, de Rita May Brown, de TiGrace Atkinson. Je me sens beaucoup plus, au niveau des discours d'exploration theoriques, pres d'elles, alors que les Francaises n'abordent le discours qu'a travers la psychanalyse, et meme si elles contestent Freud, elles ont toujours partie liee avec le freudisme et le lacanisme.35 [irritation when confronted with texts that play with psychoanalysis a lot, because I have the impression that there is a strong superego ... that prevents a feminine delirium, that prevents one from articulating a fictive element that is vital not only for me, as a reader, but for all those who read ... On the other hand, the discourse of American women, of feminists, is very important to me, that of Millett, of Firestone, of Rita May Brown, of Ti-Grace Atkinson. I feel myself much closer to them, on the level of the discourses of theoretical exploration, while the French women only tackle the discourse through psychoanalysis, and even if they contest Freud, they are always implicated in Freudian and Lacanian theory.]

Although not mentioned by name, Cixous is certainly one of those targeted by such remarks. Nonetheless, whether she acknowledges it or not, Brossard's writing displays, to borrow Milot's phrase, a startling "homologie recurrente" with Cixousian textuality of the time. Moreover, Brossard is not uninterested in the unconscious sources of women's creativity, which she often terms "delire," as in the above passage. In L'Amer she not only directly addresses Lacanian psychoanalysis and Lacan's affirmation of language acquisition as the child's entry into the symbolic but also privileges the exploration of women's desires and the creativity they inspire. While it may appear from many of the passages I cite that Brossard is rather categorical in her stance, her struggle in the mid-1970s with the kinds of questions raised by the notion of a writing specific to women will be ongoing and will in fact be the principal inspiration for L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite.36 Indeed, she is acutely aware of the contradictions underlying her continuing search for such a specificity in writing when she can bring herself to only accede to a "strategic"

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use of the very term "ecriture feminine."37 According to Brossard herself, L'Amer is her first coherent attempt to deal with the impasses engendered by "simultaneously appropriating and rejecting the dominant discourse," and by "the experience of both participating in and standing outside the dominant culture."38 For this reason, it is a crucial text in her development and in feminist literature in Quebec,39 and thus provides an excellent opportunity to ascertain the common questions and strategies at the heart of the feminist avant-garde text. Even from a first reading of L'Amer, it is obvious that the question of identity and subjectivity is central to Brossard's vision of feminism and women's writing. In Cixous's La and Gagnon's Lueur, we found the role of the mother and of women's relationships with each other to be of capital importance in the search for a new identity for women. This emphasis is true to an even greater extent in Brossard's L'Amer, and so the maternal theme will provide the point of departure for my analysis in the section that follows. The issue of maternity is intimately involved with questions of gender identity, as we have already seen; consequently, I will proceed as before to link these themes to textuality and writing, through the explicit connections that Brossard herself makes via the writing vocation of her narrator. Finally, I will explore the larger question of the links between gender and genre, because one of the chief transgressive writing strategies evident in L'Amer is the refusal to conform to expectations associated with the novel. Brossard's "fiction theory," as she terms it, is in fact a hybrid genre in which the text's heterogeneity becomes a key component of her attempt to negotiate the impasses she encounters in language as a woman and a lesbian. THE LESBIAN SUBJECT AS WRITER: AGAIN(ST) THE MOTHER J'ai la forme encombree par le feminin retrouve. Je suis grosse d'une forme que je ne parviens pas a faire mienne et qui me marque dans ma difference et mon autre sujet. Je suis d'un savoir d'homme et d'une condition feminine: hybride ... Difficile d'exprimer clairement la raison et le savoir dans une langue dont la raison d'etre est d'etre maternelle.

[I have a shape encumbered by the rediscovered feminine. I am pregnant with a shape that I cannot manage to make my own and that marks me in my difference and my other subject. I am of male knowledge and a female condition: hybrid ... It is difficult to express reason and knowledge clearly in a mother tongue whose reason for being is to be maternal.] Nicole Brossard40

Brossard's L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite announces its major themes in its very title: a complex, even vexed relationship with motherhood

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and the writing of a text. These words, while presented in the title as alternative labels for the book by the use of the conjunction "ou" (or), in fact point to themes that are intertwined, interdependent, and indeed inseparable in the weave of the text. While neither title can account for the book's entire thematic network, each in its own way helps the reader to gain access to what lies at the heart of the text: the atypical mother (l'amer/la mere) and the tattered or disintegrating chapter (le chapitre) in which her difference will find form. Following Brossard's own choice of presentation, this section will examine the figure of the mother, focusing most particularly on the relationship of motherhood to selfhood for the principal female narrator, and on the role of writing and reading in the development of her lesbian subjectivity and in the presentation of her narrative. The neologism that Brossard creates for this text is an arresting one: 'Tamer" is a polysemic term that resonates in complex ways. Louise Forsyth, in her article "The Novels of Nicole Brossard: An Active Voice," has perhaps most succinctly pointed out some of the many possible word associations evoked by 'Tamer": "la mere, la mer, 1'amere, 1'amour, la mort, larme, la matiere, 1'imaginaire, etc. [the mother, the sea, the bitter woman, love, death, tears, matter, the imaginary, etc.]."41 To this list one could certainly add, as Karen Gould does, "la matrice" (the womb; WF 262 n.29) and still further, the nouns "ramertume" (bitterness) and 'Tame" (the soul). While not all of these key words and images have equal importance in the thematic network of L'Amer, it is evident that most of them are present and in some way connected to mothering or the mother. The mother as matrix, as giver of life and death, as creator, as source of love and sorrow, and even the association of mothers (or women generally) with water (la mer) or materiality (la matiere) are all familiar tropes in Western literature. This section will examine how Brossard reworks such tropes in consonance with her lesbian feminist perspective. An indication of the shift in viewpoint on motherhood that she explores is incorporated into the neologism of the title: a reader's first impulse would in fact be to read "amer" as a masculin adjective which, because of the article, functions as a noun referring to some bitter or unpleasant thing. We are prevented from reading it solely in this way, however, by the accented "e," which also evokes the word mere. This "souring" of the mother42 (and doubling of the reading possibilities) is rendered still more explicit by the title page of the first section of the book, where the word appears yet again, only this time on a background of grey and white, with the diagonal borderline between the colours also slicing the title in two so that we read "I/A / MER." We are thus encouraged to see the mother and the bitterness simultaneously, an emotional connection reinforced by the

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preliminary words of L'Amer, where we read: "La fiction commence suspendu mobile entre les mots et la vraisemblance du corps a mere devorante et devoree ... La theorie commence la quand s'eloigne le sein ou 1'enfant. Blessure strategique ou le sens suspendu43 [Fiction begins suspended mobile between words and the body's likeness to this our devouring and devoured mother ... Theory begins there when the breast or the child moves away. Strategic wound or suspended meaning]" (TOM 8-9). In these first lines, we are offered not only a reformulation of the title, since we read "a mere" as "belonging to the mother," but also a possible source of the bitterness in the distancing of the child from the mother's breast, what Brossard terms a "strategic wound." This weaning or separation, in psychoanalytic theory, is part of the child's eventual sexual maturation and acceptance of the paternal law, the "entry into the symbolic."44 In this light, 'Tamer" may also signal a distancing from the mother, given that in Latin a (or ab) is the prefix of the movement away from (ad being that of movement towards] and that in modern French a- can also mark a negation in its capacity as a privative prefix. This reading is in fact supported by the book's opening epigraph, chosen from Huguette Gaulin's poetry: "la mere se contracte a distance [and the mother contracts at a distance]" (L'Amer 14, emphasis added; TOM 8).45 This quotation evoking an expectant mother's contractions is suspended above the two liminary passages that appear at the bottom of the first two pages, seeming to ground the blank space above them and at the same time support the birthing struggle quite literally "at a distance." The spatially separated passages are quite clearly related in focus, however, for the fight to give birth is echoed by the narrator's first words: "C'est le combat. Le livre [It's combat. The book]" (L'Amer 14, TOM 8). Motherhood is in this way immediately connected to the book, and both are seen as a site of conflict. It is worth noting the wordplay on "livre," which can also function as the firstperson singular form of the verb livrer, meaning to engage in or begin, most often associated with a battle (livrer un combat). As we will see, this battle waged by the narrator is about both mothering and writing, and moreover, it hinges on the very question of the relation made necessary by distance or separation. This link becomes most clear in the previously cited sentences about writing, where we read that "fiction begins suspended ... between words and the body" (TOM 8) and that "[tjheory begins there when the breast or the child moves away. Strategic wound or suspended meaning" (TOM 9). The word "suspended" appears twice to underscore the point that distance initiates, provokes, and even permits creation, be that in the form of writing or in child-bearing. It is in giving birth and becoming

165 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

separated from the child that the mother can give life to the newborn, just as the separation of weaning can be seen as a necessary step in the child's progress toward finding and voicing its own individuality and need. If we accept that this is a bitter process for the child, we are also shown that it is not an unproblematic one for the mother, for after this initial evocation of creative struggle, the narrator counters the reader's expectations in the opening of the book's first section entitled "L'Amer" with the surprise statement "J'ai tue le ventre [I killed the womb]" (L'Amer 19, TOM 13). This affirmation, which almost becomes this section's refrain, shocks, first, because we do not normally associate maternity with killing, even if we have accepted the metaphor of combat established in the opening lines and, second, because we are puzzled by the reasons and the process of this sterilizing gesture. What does it mean to "kill the womb"? Although the words certainly could be a metaphor for sterilization, they would seem to be something more here, for it is not just her own womb the narrator is killing but a more universal womb, raised to a symbolic level by the definite article ('le ventre"). In short, from the book's very opening, the narrator establishes that the womb is paradoxically both fecund and sterile, connected to death as well as to life. Still further, the narrator clearly connects her own womb with her position in the line of reproduction between her mother and her daughter: "Trente ans me separent de la vie, trente de la mort. Ma mere, ma fille. Mamelle, une seule vie, la mienne. Reseau clandestin de reproduction. Matrice et matiere anonymes [Thirty years separate me from life, thirty from death. My mother, my daughter. Mamma, Mamd/e, Mamilla, a single life, mine. Clandestine system of reproduction. Anonymous matrix and matter]" (L'Amer 19, TOM 13). If reproduction is the destiny of the female line ("reseau clandestin de reproduction" is not a fortuitous phrase), then the female narrator is equally aware of the elision of the individual mother in the symbolization of the womb, and she is obviously struggling with it. The silent "e" on which Brossard meditated in earlier texts such as "Vaseline" and "E muet mutant"46 is dropped from 'Tamer," echoing the absence of the mother with that of the grammatical marker of the feminine which is never heard, the "matrice et matiere anonymes" of difference in language. As the narrator will ask farther on, "Que peut-il en etre d'une femme qui reconnait le processus et qui, de fait, d'age et d'histoire, de corps en rencontre 1'inexorable? [What happens to a woman who recognizes this process and encounters its inexorability in fact, in age and in Wstory, in body]" (L'Amer 19, TOM 13).

i66 Mothers of Invention

The narrator's answer to this question is in part her gesture, her killing of the womb being a refusal to reproduce the same silencing process by letting it pass unnoticed. The silent "e" of the mother, when dropped, marks and thus bespeaks her absence and silence.47 The narrator, by "killing the womb," will try to escape the "[i]nternement par la matrice" (L'Amer 19), that designation of women's place by their function in what Levi-Strauss termed the "elementary structures of kinship."48 By choosing sterility and refusing the continuing mandate to reproduce, the narrator tries to escape a societal structure that confines women in certain roles. While she has a child and thus is a mother, she has refused to participate in motherhood as an institution, as a repetitive, reproductive function within patriarchy. As Brossard will explain in an interview with Gerald Gaudet, "'J'ai tue le ventre/ c'est dire: il ne faut pas que les meres soient rendues infirmes par la maternite. J'ai tue le ventre c'est inscrire une volonte de rompre le cercle de 1'enfermement. C'est une expression qui traduit une volonte de se detacher de la mere patriarcale et de se rapprocher de celle par qui tout peut arriver ['I killed the womb' means that mothers must not be made invalid by maternity. I killed the womb is a way of inscribing a desire to break out of the circle of imprisonment. It is an expression that translates a desire to detach oneself from the patriarchal mother and to draw nearer to she through whom anything can happen]."49 The "patriarchal mother," according to Brossard, is the collaborator in partriarchal culture, which, she suggests, prevents women from realizing their full potential and limits their ability to express themselves. A patriarchal mother would be one who raises her children to conform to socio-cultural expectations conditioned by respect for traditional notions of authority, gender roles, and sexual identity, notions that have, according to this narrator at least, served too often to elide or devalue women's voices. It is in relation to such mothering that "killing the womb" becomes such a subversive gesture, one which strikes at the heart of patriarchy's ability to reproduce and sustain its ordering principles. A mother who refuses to conform poses a threat, if only by example, to the continued stability of the existing order, symbolized in the person of the mother as nurturing child-rearer and caregiver. It is surely not by chance that L'Amer's subtitle contains the adjective "effrite," for not only does it evoke the disintegration or crumbling of a certain structure, but it also has a further etymological resonance because the verb effriter historically refers to the exhaustion or sterilization of the land. The "disintegrating chapter"50 could thus also be read as the "sterile chapter," a reference to the narrator's hope to disrupt and render impotent the

167 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

patriarchal system of reproduction with her gesture of "killing the womb" and her concomitant refusal to be one of the "clan des meres patriarcales. Vouees aux hommes. Elevant leurs petits. Qui n'ont rien a dire. A echanger un silence domestique. Encloses [clan of patriarchal mothers. Devoted to men. Raising their young. Who have nothing to say. To exchange a domestic silence. Enclosed]" (L'Amer 32, TOM 2.6).

As Shirley Neuman rightly points out, "Brossard is not arguing that women should not bear children"51 in L'Amer. The affirmation that the narrator has "killed her womb" is "a statement about women's relationship to cultural symbols and to the symbolic, not a statement about their experienced relationship to childbearing."52 While Brossard's narrator sees her gesture of refusal as originary and liberating, she also realizes that it distinguishes and even isolates her from other women. This latter feeling is rendered most poignantly when the narrator takes her daughter to the park and realizes with some regret that the effect of her sterilizing gesture is to leave her with nothing to exchange with the other mothers, even though they all have and love children: "Ma fille joue dans le sable, tout pres de nous. Les autres meres. Le silence ici est insupportable. Tout gravite autour d'une grammaire insensee. J'ai tue le ventre trop tot, seule et primaire dans un pare avec pour toute vision, entre les jambes d'un enfant, frolant les chairs lisses, 1'inexactitude des pas poses sans age, 1'herbe foulee [My daughter is playing in the sand, right beside us. The other mothers. The silence here is unbearable. Everything gravitates about a senseless grammar. I killed the womb too soon, alone and primitive in a park with for my entire vision, between a child's legs, brushing against the smooth flesh, the inaccuracy [of] ageless, deliberate steps, the trampled grass]" (L'Amer 32, TOM 26). The use of the adjectives "seule" and "primaire" and the mention of a vision associated with her own child show us precisely how the narrator views herself here: she is a pioneer whose refusal to conform is the first step in what she hopes will be a transmissable gesture. Her vision, however, seems sometimes hard to maintain in the face of the silence that isolates her and the "senseless grammar" of reproduction which provides the focus of the pattern of existence shared by the other mothers. In essence, we see here how difficult it is to posit a difference in a system where the obverse side of this gesture is an isolation that may indeed effectively mean silence or the elision of the subversive voice, crushed and ignored like the grass under the children's feet. What is interesting about Brossard's formulation of the refusal of reproduction is that it is modified even as it is repeated and reaffirmed

i68 Mothers of Invention

in the course of the book's first section. It is not enough for the mothernarrator to choose sterility: she must also protest the process of codification, and must consequently enter into language, the Lacanian symbolic, in order to articulate her rejection of the linguistic order in which women, particularly the mother, have traditionally been objectified and silenced. It is for this reason that the narrator must not only "kill" her own womb; she must also reject the mother as she has been symbolized in the language used by male authorities. As the narrator will put it, "Crampe au ventre et cramponne un male qui ne pourra y entrer. N'entre plus qui veut dans le laboratoire s'il n'est sujet a transformation. J'ai tue le ventre et fait eclater la mer [Cramp clutching the belly and clutching a male who cannot go in. Now none may enter the laboratory unless he is transformable. I have killed the womb and exploded the S^ur mother]" (L'Amer 20, emphasis added; TOM 14). Here, in addition to closing off her womb, the narrator feels she must explode the mythic "mer," the sea traditionally being associated with the mother in part because the words are homonyms in French, as I noted earlier in discussing the book's polysemic title. While images of the ocean and water are not frequent in L'Amer, we can certainly see from the opening section a particular association of women with fluidity. On the very first page, the narrator mentions the woman's body "comme un maillon perdu, retrouve dans 1'eau [like a missing link, found again in the water]" (L'Amer 19, TOM 13), and she goes on to play on the idea of drowning on the next page, where we find the verb "noyer" repeated together with the water (eau) ,in "noyauter," a verb meaning "to infiltrate." The association of a woman's death with water is thus prepared from the book's opening passages, so that we are not entirely surprised to read later, in playful reference to Einstein's mother and the Dead Sea ("la mere morte"): "La mere recouvrant la mer comme une parfaite synthese" [(Mere) She covering (mer) sea like a perfect synthesis]" (L'Amer 29, TOM 23). "J'ai tue le ventre et fait eclater la mer" (L'Amer 20) thus describes simultaneous and transformative actions, both for the narrator and for the potential lover who accepts this experimental gesture ("[n]'entre plus qui veut dans le laboratoire s'il n'est sujet a transformation"). In her search to reinvent herself, Brossard's narrator will thus deliberately eschew certain images associated with maternity, including that of the sea as fluid matrix for life. Here, only dead women's bodies are found in the water, while the narrator's evocations of fluidity will be principally in reference to the living body's productions (milk, urine, cyprine) or the ink with which she writes, a dual association that Brossard made as early as 1970 in "Suite logique."53 As a final note on this passage, the choice of the verb "eclater" in the

169 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

phrase "eclater la mer" is compelling, for it can mean to divide or shatter, which the author does with the graphic presentation of this section's title split by the colours on the page, and it can also mean to shine forth, or to declare oneself. By refusing to be a patriarchal mother, to reproduce a system that functions to empower the male, the narrator both declares herself and shatters the relation between maternity and identity just as she does with the poetic "mer/mere" association. By pointing to the effective "liquidation" of women's desires and their very presence when they become mothers, she takes the first step towards shattering this cultural silencing. Nonetheless, the narrator's self-affirming, subversive gesture carries no weight without its formulation in language and, more specifically, in writing. Thus in the third appearance of the book's opening phrase, the narrator adds emphatically: "J'ai tue le ventre et je 1'ecris [I have murdered the womb and I am writing it]" (L'Amer 27, TOM 21). Of all the repetitions of this declaration, this is clearly the most important, for not only is it underlined in the text, but it also contains a repetition of the first-person singular subject. This insistance on the "I" is crucial: it shows that, from the narrator's perspective at least, the gesture's efficacy depends on her being the one who also inscribes and frames it. Elsewhere the narrator will declare: "Ce n'est pas le corps de la mere qui pourrit mais celui de toute femme qui n'a pas trouve de mots pour regarder le ventre meurtri: le corps de la mere comme fiction prolongee ... Cul-de-sac ideologique: le mot a mot pour echapper au corps a corps [It is not the mother's body which decays but that of every woman who has not found the words to look at the bruised womb: the body of the mother as extended fiction ... Ideological dead end: word for word to escape the hand to hand, body against body]" (L'Amer 29, TOM 23). The urgency of the narrator's search for the right words to describe her vision motivates the text, appearing, for example, in her poignant rhetorical question: "Ce livre sera-t-il le produit d'une fievre ou un exercice majeur de survie? Coup de reins qui me sorte de 1'abime [Will this book be the product of a fever or of a major exercise in survival. Twist of the hips which gets me out of the abyss]" (L'Amer 45, TOM 37). Part of the conquest of her difference, her selfhood, is thus her ability and her desire to write the "I," to be the subject in discourse instead of the object seen from the perspective of the male "eye." To do so, as Neuman observes, she must become "the symbolic mother, as opposed to the mother as symbol," controlling cultural representations rather than being controlled by them.54 The power of the male gaze to appropriate and control is recognized by the narrator in the scene that opens the book's second

170 Mothers of Invention

section, entitled "L'Etat de la difference" (The state of difference). In what Neuman describes as "a near-perfect dramatization of the Lacanian 'mirror stage' conceived of as a cultural experience of sexual opposition/'55 the infant narrator will discover the difference between her parents as she watches her father gazing at her and her mother, while she is in her mother's arms: Je touche (a) ma mere. C'est evident son corps, je la connais comme une sensation. Lui, pour le connaitre, il me faut mes yeux. II faut que je lui parle. II ne se laisse pas toucher ... Us sont differents: elle et moi, nous nous touchons. Lui, il me parle. Je ne comprends pas tres bien. II faut que je me concentre. Je ne puis a la fois garder le contact physique avec ma mere et 1'ecouter lui en meme temps. J'essaie de le comprendre. De le saisir. C'est mon pere apres tout. II s'existe. II faut que j'apprenne a parler. Mot a mot comme lui... Pas question que ma mere vienne me toucher quand il est la. (41) [I am touching my mother. It is obvious, her body, I know her like a sensation. But to know him, I need my eyes, I must speak to him. He won't let himself be touched ... They are different: she and I touch each other. He speaks to me. I don't understand very well. I have to concentrate. I can't both keep the physical contact with my mother and listen to him at the same time. I try to understand him. To get hold of him. He's my father after all. He s/exists. I must learn to speak. Word for word, like him ... No question of my mother touching me when he is there.]56

This scene elaborates on the separation of mother and child introduced at the book's opening. Brossard is clearly playing with Freudian theory here: the infant girl rejecting the mother in favour of the father is precisely what Freud was wrestling with when he tried to explain female sexuality in terms of his notion of the Oedipal complex. In Shirley Neuman's analysis of this scene, she claims that, in fact, "Brossard re-reads Lacan's transposition of the Oedipal scenario into linguistic terms to make clear that, for the daughter, what is at stake in the entry into language through the internalizing of male discourse is her separation from her mother, and the suppression of female sexuality, the female subject, and a female relation to language."57 While it seems accurate to suggest that Brossard is dramatizing the child's "entry into language through the internalizing of male discourse," what Neuman seems to gloss over is the nature of the subject who is at the heart of this drama of linguistic identityformation. Because this scene is related retrospectively and from the point of view of the girl child, the narrator's presence is double: she is, at one and the same time, child and mother, and she is certainly,

171 Nicole Brassard's L'Amer

as such, a "female subject" articulating her "relation to language/' a relation that was obviously not totally "suppressed." In this passage, for example, we are given the narrator's feelings about the father, who is the cause of this separation between mother and child: it is not difficult to read "il sexiste" in the unusual pronominal usage of the verb exister, an instance of the ludic transgression that Brossard privileges in her approach to language. In this retrospective re-enactment of the separation of mother and child, then, we see that the bitterness felt by the narrator is in fact no longer directed at the mother but rather at the father, the "[bjigamous dog" (TOM 33) whose invasive, seductive gaze causes the rupture of the girl's physical and emotional bond with her mother. In a sense, then, while Brossard shows an awareness of Freudian and Lacanian theory, she resists their conclusions by offering her narrator the opportunity to comment and reflect on the processes they describe. In Brossard's narration, the mother's physical proximity to the child is opposed to the father's distance, a distance which institutes difference and which gives rise to language, as in Lacanian theory. In the following passage, however, her narrator comments more directly on her entry into what Barbara Godard has termed the "wor(l)d of men"58 when she concludes: "Entre lui (sa chair son pouvoir) et moi done une distance: les mots. Y avoir acces ... Je suis entree fixe vive dans le livre, par ce premier combat, de ma main repoussant le corps de ma mere, de ma bouche ecartee a m'organiser comme lui, pour parler vrai. Sous ses yeux. Puis me ranger a ses cotes. Mais de fait etrangere comme un autre sexe [So between him (his flesh his power) and me a distance: words. To have access to them ... I have entered the book pinned down alive by this first struggle, my hand pushing back my mother's body, my mouth parted to organize myself like him, to speak the truth, to lay down the law. Under his eyes. Then to align myself at his side. But act^lTpon, stranger like a different sex]" (L'Amer 42, TOM 34). Here again we see the juxtaposition of struggle and the book, of words and the maternal body, as we did at the opening of L'Amer. Even if the daughter struggles to emulate her father by leaving her mother's embrace and by entering history ("le livre") through language, she remains a "stranger like a different sex" (TOM 34). Because she has rejected her mother (her own sex) and cannot succeed in emulating her father's "truth" (the other sex), she in a sense becomes a foreigner to both. What she comes to realize, moreover, is that her father's difference will in essence dominate and even erase her own, for as she goes on to say, "La difference a prise. S'installe comme lui dans ma vie. M'englobe comme un territoire. Sa difference s'est transformed en

172 Mothers of Invention

pouvoir systematique. II s'assure des lors du controle des differences [Difference has taken over. Has established itself like him in my life. Surrounds me like a territory. His difference is transformed into systematic power. From this point he secures for himself control of the differences]" (L'Amer 42, TOM 34). This control of difference by the father is, of course, based on the power of his gaze to determine and single out difference. The narrator, reverting to her perspective as a mature woman writer after this scene, will offer her own analysis of the appropriating mechanism of the male gaze: J'ai choisi d'abord de parler de son regard. Parce que c'est ainsi que commence la perception de la difference. Ainsi que se confirme et que s'alimente la difference ... Usage precis de la difference: controle et maitrise de ce qui est sous observation, appelant la logique de la specialisation ... Pour recuperer ... un peu de sa depense, de son regard, il forcera 1'evidence par la voix ideologique, tentant de produire a partir des differences une unanimite factice. Abolir la difference qu'il a lui-meme choisi d'accentuer, cherchant a 1'engloutir elle lui pese lourA interieure comme une mere ... Elle sera done codee, legiferee. Ensanglantee. (L'Amer 43) [I chose to speak first about his look. Because this is where the perception of difference begins. In this way difference is confirmed and nourished ... Exact use of difference: control and mastery of that which is under observation, calling on the logic of specialization ... In order to recoup ... a little of his expenditure, of his look, he will use the ideological road to stretch the evidence, trying to produce a factitious unanimity on the basis of differences. To abolish the difference that he himself has chosen to accentuate, seeking to swallow her up she weighs heavily inside like a mother ... So she will be coded, legislated. Blood-stained.] (TOM 35)

What the narrator is pointing to here is how difference - in particular, women's difference - comes to be recuperated by the very men who assign themselves the task of differentiating. The image of difference weighing heavily on the male conscience "inside like a mother" (TOM 35) is striking, for in her play with syntax, Brossard demonstrates the illusory nature of the "artificial unity" that is created by this effacement of women's differences. Although the word "interieure" is in fact an adjective modifying the feminine noun "difference," its unexpected placement allows association with both the mother and the man: difference is "inside" and acts on both, such that neither is truly self-identical, unified. As the image offered is one of digestion, we see that the mother is heavy, indigestible, and thus ultimately irrecuperable for the male subject, for he cannot eliminate her from his system. Similarly, the mother's body is also one that

1/3 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer carries the weight of a child, a non-self-identity within the individual that the simile introduced by "cornrne" makes clear. Finally, the very appearance of "interieure," the feminine "inside" language, in such an unusual place within the sentence disrupts its sense sufficiently that it demonstrates to what extent the feminine cannot be ignored or recuperated, even within the structures of syntax. Both the mother and difference become the targets of patriarchal law because their presence cannot be ignored and thus must be controlled even on the most basic syntactic level. As Brossard writes, with a fine feel for the ambiguity of a subject pronoun that could refer to either "mere" or "difference," "[e]lle sera done codec, legiferee. Ensanglantee [so she will be coded, legislated. Blood-stained]" (L'Amer 43, TOM 35).59 The narrator perceives the process of control of differences and objectification by the male gaze to be threatening, a reaction made clear in her use of the adjective "ensanglantee" and in the series of accretions made to the capitalized title phrase in the section called "L'Acte de Tcei!" (The act of the eye). In the following list of the successive changes in the heading of each page in this section, it is important to note the addition of "violent" to the scene of seduction of the eye by the colour mauve, which Barbara Godard will describe as a scene of rape in which the male subject "looks at and projects his desire onto [women] as objects."60 L'ACTE DE I/CEIL L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'CEIL L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'O3IL AU L'ACTE DE L'CEIL AU MAUVE L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'CEIL AU MAUVE EPRIS L'ACTE DE L'CEIL AU MAUVE EPRIS S' L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'CEIL AU MAUVE EPRIS S'INFILTRE L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'CEIL AU MAUVE EPRIS S'INFILTRE RAVI L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'CEIL AU MAUVE EPRIS S'INFILTRE RAVI DEPLOYANT L'ACTE VIOLENT DE L'CEIL AU MAUVE EPRIS S'INFILTRE RAVI DEPLOYANT

LA (L'Amer 59-68) [THE VIOLENT ACT OF THE EYE ON ENAMOURED PURPLE INFILTRATES ENRAPTURED UNFOLDING HER] (TOM 6d) While Godard claims that the association of mauve with women stems from a reference to "Les handles mauves, a book on sadomasochism by Yves Gabriel Brunet,"61 one could equally cite the entry "Violet" in Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant's Dictionnaire des symboles, where this colour is associated with women's sexual desire: "la lumiere violette stimule les glandes sexuelles de la femme, alors

1/4 Mothers of Invention

que le rouge active celles de 1'homme62 [the mauve light stimulates the sexual glands of the woman, while red activates those of the man]."63 In either case, the male gaze is seen as invasive and violent, its threat counterbalanced by the epigraphs on eyes and watching that Brossard places under each title phrase. These epigraphs are all by women writers: Luce Irigaray, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, Claire Lejeune, Anai's Nin, Flora Tristan, Helene Ouvrard, France Theoret, and Huguette Gaulin.64 Each epigraph stands in counterpoint to the capitalized titles, and in a sense, it introduces the single paragraph that Brossard places under it, as a kind of elaboration of a female space for specularity and for speculation on the uses and meaning of the gaze. In one such passage, for example, the narrator makes the menace of the title phrase explicit: "L'acte violent de 1'ceil au mauve epris enonce son systeme. Avide. Personne n'eut songe qu'erotique servirait a publier le papier de luxe a tracer le portrait d'un homme penis dans la bouche d'une fille de deux ans. Ou d'une femme engorgee. Ou d'une fille flambee [The violent act of the eye on enamoured purple articulates its system. Av(o)id. Who would have dreamed that the erotic would be used to publish the deluxe paper for tracing the portrait of a man penis in the mouth of a two-year-old girl. Or an engorged woman. Or a burned-out girl]" (L'Amer 63, TOM 55). The violent and avid purpose of this gaze is to satisfy the voyeuristic component of male desire, which is also no doubt why the narrator says, in another paragraph in this section, "L'acte violent de 1'ceil me fait resister [The violent act of the eye makes me resist]" (L'Amer 60, TOM 52). The narrator's resistance to such a gesture in fact begins shortly after the scene when she realizes the symbolic mastery of her own father's gaze: "tout ce temps que j'ai regarde mon pere nous regarder ma mere et moi comme une statuette mythique, je savais que la difference viendrait de la: le regarder en pensant a ce que je pourrais ecrire sur sa pierre tombale. Comme une ceuvre d'art ... [c]e dessein d'enfant [all this time that I have looked at my father, looking at us, my mother and me like a mythical statue, I knew that the difference would come from there: looking at him while thinking of what I could write on his tombstone. Like a work of art ... This childish de-sign]" (L'Amer 44, TOM 36). This brief statement reveals the daughter's perspective on her father and, by extension, on the patriarchy. From the narrator's perspective, the father's gaze reifies women, making them into an inanimate statuette the likes of which is put in museums, on which the narrator will later comment by saying, "je vais chez les hommes au musee [I visit the men in the museum]" (L'Amer 59, TOM 51). Ironically, the daughter's gaze is also one of

175 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

objectification, since the father is replaced grammatically by an object pronoun ("le") and then by the possessive adjective for "his tombstone." Her gaze reaches beyond its object towards death, thus undermining her father's authority, which she will no doubt outlive. Her childhood speculations, "like a work of art/' point to the death inherent in objectification, ironically exaggerating and subverting the reifying effect of the male gaze with her own. The motif of figuration and artistic representation is elaborated in the second series of capitalized titles in the section "L'Acte de 1'ceil." These titles, when read sequentially, have poetic resonance, even as they reveal the narrator's project: FIGURE FIGURATION DEFIGURER GEOMETRIQUE D'INTENTION PRISE AU FIGURE LA FIGURINE A FIGURE PREFIGURE

FIGURE LIBRE (L'Amer 69-78) [FIGURE ... FIGURATION ... DISFIGURE ... GEOMETRICAL ... ON INTENTION ... TAKEN FIGURATIVELY ... THE FIGURINE ... HAS FIGURE(D) ... PREFIGURE ... FREE FIGURE] (TOM 61-70)

Since the variations on the word "figure" are all cognates stemming from the Latin words for form and formation, we can see how the narrator's re/ormulations of the "figure" in her desire to dissolve "le contrat qui la lie a la figuration [the contract binding her to figuration]" (L'Amer 70, TOM 62) lead her towards the "figure libre" (free figure). This progression is important, since it is part of her refusal of the figure and form imposed on her by the "act of the eye," which "disfigures" its female object. If such figuration is indeed of "geometric intent" - that is, a framing device or structuring gesture which does violence to its object - then the narrator will transform "figurative" language to allow the statuette image, "la figurine," when "taken figuratively" on her terms, to announce if not become a "free figure." In this way, the narrator again appropriates the "statuette mythique" created by her father's gaze for her own iconoclastic ends, thus returning us, through the question of interpretation inherent in figurative understanding, to the themes of reading and writing crucial to her project of resistance and subversion.

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As we saw in the choice of epigraphs for the first part of "L'Acte de 1'ceil/' the narrator's resistance is fuelled by the possibilities she reads and hears in other women's words. Such articulations contrast starkly with the silence that characterizes her experience with the "patriarchal mothers" in the park. Moreover, the intertextual references in "L'Acte de 1'ceil" support the explicitly lesbian perspective the narrator has adopted from the beginning of L'Amer, where she divides her attention between her lover and her daughter to the exclusion of the outside world. These are the two "free figures" around whom she chooses to build her life, and in their own way, each becomes a figuration of "celle par qui tout peut arriver" (she through whom anything can happen), as Brossard puts it in her interview with Gerald Gaudet.65 As companions and sources of inspiration, they provide the narrator with the freedom to write her protest in the face of "[IJ'Humanite [qui] nous passe dessus comme un rouleau presse [Humanity (which) passes over us like a (c)rushing roller]" (L'Amer 21, TOM 15), a humanity in which she and the women she loves do not have legitimacy. In short, as far as the narrator is concerned, S'il n'etait lesbien, ce texte n'aurait point de sens. Tout a la fois matrice, matiere et production. Rapport a. II constitue le seul relais plausible pour me sortir du ventre de ma mere patriarcale. Distance! d'elle suffisamment mon regard pour la voir apparaitre autrement que fragmented dans ses parties metaphoriques.66 Traverser le symbole alors que j'ecris. Une pratique de deconditionnement qui m'amene a reconnaitre ma propre legitimite. Ce par quoi toute femme tente d'exister: ne plus etre illegitime. (L'Amer 22) [If it weren't lesbian, this text would make no sense at all. Matrix, matter, and production, all at once. In relation to. It constitutes the only plausible system to get me out of the belly of my patriarchal mother. And of distancing my eye from her enough so as to see her in a different way, not fragmented into her metaphoric parts. Crossing through the symbol while I am writing. An exercise in deconditioning that leads me to acknowledge my own legitimacy. The means by which every woman tries to exist: to be illegitimate no more.] (TOM 16)

From such statements, we can see how, as Alice Parker aptly puts it, "lesbian love" can become "a discourse that disrupts or interrogates the authorizing codes of our culture" (LV 63). Recalling the book's opening lines, here too distance plays a most important role as much in the creation of the narrator's lesbian perspective as in her ability to create. Observing the patriarchal mother from a distance is the only way that the narrator can see the entirety of the picture, rather than the woman figured symbolically through

177 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

mere fragments of her body or only partially seen by virtue of the child's very proximity to her. Writing, that act necessarily involving a distancing or absence of its object, is the only one which allows the narrator to recognize herself, not as a replica of her reified mother, but as a legitimate living subject, a subject in and of writing who can "cross" the symbol to what lies beyond. This passage has additional significance precisely because of the narrator's effort to go beyond the stage of binary oppositions between male and female. Although, in a recognizably deconstructive gesture, she begins by reversing the hierarchy of this opposition by refusing the position assigned to her as a female and mother, Brossard's narrator does try to overcome the reproduction of the same hierarchy through an "exercise in deconditioning" that involves finding another option, that being her identification as lesbian in language: "If it weren't lesbian, this text would make no sense at all" (TOM 16), as she puts it. L'Amer's narrator is what Brossard will define as a "fille-mere-lesbienne" in her interview with Andre Roy: II y a LA MERE et les mamans. La mere symbolique et les femmes-epousesmeres-domestiques tres concretes ... La mere qui est desirante et qui jouit est une fille-mere-lesbienne. Elle n'est certes pas une mere patriarcale. Elle n'est pas au service de la loi qu'elle sait tres bien contraire a ses besoins. La fille-mere-lesbienne, c'est la femme autonome, celle qui ne perd pas son identite en devenant mere et dont 1'energie circule avec des femmes.67 [There is THE MOTHER and mammas. The symbolic mother and the very real women-wives-mothers-maids ... The mother who is desiring and who orgasms is a lesbian-girl-mother. She is certainly not a patriarchal mother. She does not serve the law that she knows is contrary to her needs. The lesbiangirl-mother is the autonomous woman, she who does not lose her identity in becoming a mother and whose energy circulates with other women.]

This articulation and privileging of lesbian desire is an attempt to escape the oppositions that confine women in patriarchal culture and upon which the common conceptualization of difference is based. It is a desire that cannot but remain in excess, as a supplement to the teleological imperative of desire within the patriarchy, and thus uncontrolled and uncontrollable according to its laws. It gives the narrator a difference from difference, in effect, by placing the emphasis on the "relation" that she posits between herself and (re)production (in both the biological and the textual senses), the very relation that, as we saw in L'Amer's opening, is both produced by and productive of distancing, or what Derrida has called "differance." This emphasis on the production of difference leads, in the section entitled "L'Etat

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de la difference" (The state of difference), to extensive wordplay and more obvious references to Derrida's philosophical considerations, of which the following passage displays some salient examples: La difference, c'est que je ne puis vivre en differe. Surseoir a la transformation, la synthese d'une meme femme seule. Et c'est cette meme difference que je cherche sur ton corps, autre, de femme au meme regard que le mien. Identique au tien. Pareilles comme une equation differentielle. Derivees de nos fonctions. De but en blanc dans le spectre lumineux. Projetees 1'une centre 1'autre ainsi qu'un reve polysemique.68 (L'Amer 45) [The difference is that I can't live deferred. To postpone the transformation, the synthesis of an unique identical woman. And it is this very difference that I seek on your body, different, of a woman with the same glance as mine. Identical with yours. Similar like a differential equation. Derivative of our functions. Point blank in the luminous spectrum. Projected one against the other as if in a polysemous dream.] (TOM 37)

Here, in addition to picking up on Derrida's privileging of deferral and polysemy in his articulation of "differance," Brossard plays with the mathematical use of difference in "differential equations," as well as the more familiar opposition of same and different at the heart of any definition of identity.69 What she is pointing to here, in her own ludic reference to deconstruction, is that Derrida's emphasis on deferral and on questioning meaning and, indeed, all epistemic claims is ultimately, for her at least, an unlivable strategy. The stakes here being the lives of real women, the narrator recognizes that she herself cannot "live deferred," that she must at some point take a stand in her attempt to maintain her identity based on her difference. Her stance is that of an explicitly lesbian subject, who chooses to maintain a dissident's critique of the patriarchy and refuse its codes and social conventions, even at the risk of so codifying herself. As Alice Parker explains, Brossard thus uses the word "deferred ... in a non-Derridian sense" because she "does not mean to return to a metaphysics of presence and/or a univocal subject, but rather to permit heterogeneity and polyvocality. The sociolect that recognizes only phallic mothers and patriarchal daughters is thus attacked from (at least) two angles, by direct provocation or taking (political) positions 'in the old way/ and by textual operations that make new spaces, imagining, theory, fiction possible" (LV 56). Of course, the narrator's critical stance and lesbian identification are not the only sources of her difference. Indeed, both these conscious choices seem rooted in her experience of her body, which, as was pointed out in the introduction to this chapter, is where Brossard's theoretical approach to difference contrasts with that of Cixous. In

179 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

L'Amer, for example, the narrator will quite clearly articulate the importance of the biological body to the recognition of difference: Consentir a la difference, c'est reconnaitre la structure, le fait vivant de tout organisme. C'est pourtant par un refus de la difference (constatee) que toute lutte ideologique s'amorce ... Ainsi la difference nous ramene-t-elle dans le prive d'un organisme qui tend a sa survie comme a sa jouissance, scinde dans sa fonction meme de jouissance par I'idee qu'il organise en lui comme le secret bonheur d'un etat unitaire oii le corps unique a cesse de vivre, ou le corps politique assure sa vivante decomposition. (L'Amer 47) [To consent to difference is to acknowledge structure, vital fact of every organism. However it is with a refusal of difference (acknowledged) that every ideological struggle starts ... So difference brings us back into the private life of an organism bent on survival as well as bliss, rent even in its orgasmic function by the idea it organizes within itself like the secret happiness of a unified state in which the singular body has stopped living, where the body politic assures its living decomposition.] (TOM 39)

According to Brossard, each "organism," to use her term, has a biological structure that affects the way it functions, its survival and its "jouissance" both being products of that functioning. Inevitably, then, biology affects identity, inasmuch as identity is determined by function.70 In L'Amer, as we have seen, mothering is a central biological function for women, and the narrator situates herself as both mother and daughter from the outset of her narrative. Moreover, she insists on the female body and its anatomy repeatedly, underscoring in this way the physical foundations for her vision of the world. At the book's opening, for example, she introduces her daughter and lover through her contact with their bodies: "Un sexe noir, un sexe blanc. L'un que je caresse, 1'autre que je lave. La cyprine, 1'urine. La jouissance et le travail comme versants d'une meme unite. Vos corps, amante et fille. J'ecris pour ne pas vous abimer vos corps et pour y trouver mon espece, mon centre [One black sex, one white sex. One I caress, the other I wash. Cyprine juices, urine. Orgasm and labour as two sides of the same entity. Your bodies, lesbian lover and daughter. I write so I won't engulf and hurt your bodies and so as to find in them my (species)/1 my centre]" (L'Amer 19, TOM 13). The bond that the narrator describes between mother and daughter is expressed through their physical contact elsewhere as well, as we have already noted in the context of the distinctions drawn between her mother's touch and her father's gaze. In another passage, where she imagines herself an infant playing with her mother's lips, the narrator will go so far as

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to posit a direct link between body and identity when she says: "Elle me laisse faire, je ne menace rien encore de sa veritable identite. C'est ma mere, elle le sait et je suis censee le savoir tout autant [She lets me do it, I don't threaten any part of her true identity yet. She's my m ther (sic), she knows it and I am supposed to know it just as well]" (L'Amer 25, TOM 19). The nature of a woman's experience of her body is thus a constitutive element of her identity. For Brossard's narrator, this experience includes the uniquely female ordeals of childbirth (L'Amer 21, 97), Caesarean section (30, 51), and mastectomy (50), as well as women's multiple opportunities for pleasure which provide much of the text's imagery. In the narrator's search to embrace "la totalite jouissive des fragments desirants [the orgasmic totality of desiring fragments]" (L'Amer 93, TOM 85) in her writing as in her life, it is tempting to recall the Cixousian image of the "corps de la femme aux mille et un foyers d'ardeur [woman's body, with its thousand and one thresholds of ardour]" (Rire 47, Laugh 885). Where Cixous is careful to avoid accusations of essentialism in her theory by refusing to speak of "une femme type" (one typical woman) or "une sexualite feminine" (a feminine sexuality; Rire 39, Laugh 876), however, Brossard prefers to nuance the presentation of her female narrator by not universalizing her experiences, by not immediately introducing the impersonal "on" that we saw so clearly associated with the feminine at the opening of Cixous's La or the collective "nous" of Gagnon's Lueur. While Brossard's writing is replete with statements such as "toute femme" (every woman), "pour une femme" (for a woman), or "la femme" (woman) (L'Amer 29, 46, and 89 respectively), which express universalities, she nonetheless privileges her individual narrator's experience and search for identity, and will even ask pertinently at one point, "En fonction de nous, femmes, cela peut-il avoir un sens, a tout le moins engendrer du mouvement? [hi function of ourselves, women, can that make any sense; at the very least engender movement]" (L'Amer 45, TOM 37). As the narrator will write just before her rhetorical question, any conception of a collectivity for women, it would seem, must pass at least in part through the body or a physical connection: "[l]a ressemblance qui nous fait assembler au toucher et a 1'idee que nous nous faisons de nous [the resemblance that brings us together with touch arid the idea we have about ourselves]" (L'Amer 45, TOM 37). In her study of Brossard's poetry, Louise Dupre will go so far as to affirm, "Ce n'est pas le nous du manifeste, du militantisme [It is not the we of the manifesto, of militancy]" that appears in Brossard's work, but rather, the plural pronoun preserves "sa veritable valeur, sa relation dialectique comme jeu et enjeu d'une interrelation," in which "le singulier et le pluriel agissent ensemble, se nourissent 1'un de 1'autre

181 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

[its true value, its dialectical relationship as the interplay and also the price of an interrelation in which the singular and the plural work together, nourish each other]" (sv 97-8). While one could argue that L'Amer has a distinctly militant tone in some passages, in general, the narration relies little on the hortatory use of the plural even to the degree that Cixous uses it in "The Laugh of the Medusa." There is instead a much greater emphasis, as we have seen, on the importance of relationships to the narrating subject. As Brossard will affirm in "La Plaque tournante" (Turning platform), an essay written not long before L'Amer, "Le corps mien est ma difference et ma seule unite de mesure du plaisir et de la douleur. Je ne peux parler nous avant d'avoir su repliquer je72 [My own body is my difference and my sole standard for measuring pleasure and pain. I cannot speak us without first knowing how to reply in I]"73 (LLA 15). To know how to "reply I" is the crucial step in affirming a difference in the face of convention and tradition, as I noted in my analysis of the "killing the womb" gesture. This ability to respond affirmatively is, in this text, predicated on a knowledge and a sovereignty of body in the individual. Only after the narrator achieves this independence of articulation can her body serve to connect her to others in their struggle to reclaim themselves, allowing her to say: "Nous avons mis longtemps a gagner au cceur du monstre le corps exuberant territoire [We have spent a long time winning the heart of the monster the body exuberant territory]" (L'Amer 85, TOM 77). In fact, this collective "nous" appears only at intervals in L'Amer. More often, the narrator will make reference to the collectivity in a less precise fashion, using key words such as "political" to figure her vision of a common bond of resistance to the patriarchy through the "exuberant territory" of lesbian desire, as in the following passage: Le corps des meres enlacees, en realite, c'est aussi le mien trouble et captive par cette heredite ... Publiquement la fiction, publiquement les frasques, les fresques, multiples dans le prisme, cavalierement publiques les filles meres et fantastiques allongeant leurs bras comme des interventions sexuelles dans les pages politiques du quotidien. Le corps des meres enlacees, en realite, c'est une bien belle expression. (L'Amer 35) [The bodies of mothers entwined, in reality, it is also mine uneasy and enraptured by this heredity ... Publicly fiction, publicly escapades, frescoes, multiple in the prism, the daughter mothers cavalierly public and fantastic stretching out their arms like sexual intercessions in the political pages of the daily paper. The bodies of mothers entwined, in reality, is a truly beautiful expression.] (TOM 29)

The "political pages of the daily paper," beyond questions of sexual preference, also refer to the patterns of existence common to

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all women. Indeed, part of the narrator's strategy in expressing the "difference" in her perspective seems to be to intersperse passages of sophisticated feminist political theory with the more quotidian scenes of washing clothes and dishes (28, 49, 53), changing diapers and caring for the daughter's fever (19, 28), drinking beer (20, 25, 28), or dancing "[t]resserrees" (sic; veryclose) to the music of Edith Piaf on a Sunday morning (28). The narrator interrupts both the act of relating her story and the act of theorizing, echoing in this way the interruption of the writing process by the demands of living, and showing more than stating to what extent "la vie privee est politique"74 (the personal is political). In some scenes, it is not even the narrator's own writing that is interrupted, but her mother's, as she becomes the child making the demands on her mother's attention: "Ma mere boit sa biere. Elle ecrit pendant que j'attends qu'elle me donne un biscuit [My mother is drinking her beer. She is writing while I wait for her to give me a cookie]" (L'Amer 20, TOM 14). In this way we see that the narrator's "identite n'est pas simple [Her identity is not single]" (L'Amer 25, TOM 19), to borrow her description of her own mother, for she takes the liberty of viewing life from her perspective as a daughter as much as from that which she develops as a mother and lover. In this way, L'Amer portrays the complexity of women's experiences of themselves, as they try to reconcile their bodies and their desires with the demands of daily life and their political commitments. To enter the public realm of the political, to render "[pjubliquement la fiction, publiquement les frasques" (L'Amer 35), it is necessary to write them, and L'Amer is one possible result of that imperative. It is an attempt to transcend the realm of privately subversive desire and escape being confined there, leaving no lasting impression on or in patriarchal culture. Writing in this way serves to sublimate or channel uncontrollable desires, as the following passage shows: Avec une autre femme, quand nous buvions beaucoup, nous ne faisions pas 1'amour. Nous ecrivions, assises 1'une devant 1'autre. Etat d'urgence. Pour que la bataille n'eclate pas entre nos corps. Que le rapport se fasse ailleurs. Que nos corps ne soient pas immediatement mutiles par la prise des mains, par 1'etreinte chaude ... Coupe narrative autour de 1'Amere dependance. Mode d'echange et code tres precis. (L'Amer 21) [With a different woman, when we used to drink a lot, we didn't make love. We used to write, sitting facing each other. State of emergency. Don't let the battle break out between our bodies. Let the connection happen somewhere else. So that our bodies won't be mutilated immediately by the clasp of hands, by the warm embrace ... Narrative cut around a/s motherly dependence. System of exchange and very precise code.] (TOM 15)

183 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

Here the lovers write as a way to negotiate their relationship by using the distance it creates to preserve a balance that would be impossible to achieve in the physical proximity of "the warm embrace." Although writing thus distances the body for Brossard's narrator, it does not mean that the body is absent from her text. In fact, the very word "corps" appears with extraordinary frequency throughout L'Amer, and where it is not explicit, more specific body parts appear in its stead. As the narrator puts it, she is writing a "[fjiction a laquelle n'echappe a peu pres rien du corps en son proces [Fiction in which almost nothing of the body in its evolution escapes]" (L'Amer 89, TOM 81). She thus posits a strong link between the body and the text, what Brossard will elsewhere term the "cortex":75 "Un texte. C'est comme oblige pour corncider a mes yeux. Dans ma bouche, sous mes yeux, c.a me fait 1'effet du papier c'est ecrit tout de meme il a un corps de femme a mes yeux, le sujet [A text. As if obliged to coincide in my eyes. In my mouth, before my eyes it makes me think of paper it's written just the same it has a woman's body in my eyes, the subject]" (L'Amer 86, TOM 78). Here taste and vision are compared to paper, and the subject takes on the female form, in an intertwining of images indicative of the female body's importance to the narrator's writing project. The narrator's corporeal identity, and the difference of her desire, will inspire her to seek the same disruptive effects of difference in her writing: L'eclat de la difference comme une entree dans la fiction. Une jouissance active de la rupture. C'est a la fois mon corps qui s'ouvre. Mais une fente et non le fragment ... Saisissant le lien occulte qui livre le corps. De la difference a la difference: 1'entre-deux. Un espace de fiction ... Comme un scandale efficace, 1'interminable fiction qui toujours me ramene vers le corps d'une autre femme. (L'Amer 48) [The shattering of difference like an entrance into fiction. An active bliss of rupture. At the same time my body opens. But a fissure and not the fragment ... discerning the hidden bond which frees the body. From difference to difference: the interface. A space for fiction ... Like an effective scandal, the interminable fiction which always leads me back to the body of another woman.] (TOM 40)

The book and the body here appear in the same sentence ("livre le corps"), reminding us of the association of childbirth and the book at the opening of L'Amer. The narrator's transgressive sexual desire finds expression in a text designed to open up new possibilities for the body and for writing in the "interface" that is the "space for fiction." Lest Brossard be accused of positing too direct a relation between the body and writing, however, one may cite her 1976 interview in

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Voix et images, where she clarifies her use of the word "cortex" by explaining that "les mots ne seront jarnais le corps [words will never be the body]," and that, as early as Le Centre blanc, she understood that "il n'y aurait jamais identite entre le corps et le texte [there would never be identification between the body and the text]."76 In L'Amer, too, she shows her narrator to be aware of the contradictions inherent in trying to write alternative figurations of the female body, given her rejection of her procreative function: De ma difference premiere ne reste plus qu'une difference ideologique (puisque je n'enfante plus). C'est alors que, par la force du processus, j'entre a mon tour dans 1'ideologie. II m'est symbole, puisque maintenant j'ecris, je puis le manipuler. Fille-mere lesbienne, j'inscris la derniere contradiction. Minant par 1'interieur 1'histoire a laquelle je puis maintenant participer. L'acide a commence de s'infiltrer dans le papier du livre. (L'Amer 44) [Of my primary difference there remains only an ideological one (since I can no longer bear children). That is when the process itself forces me in turn to take up ideology. He is a symbol for me because now I am writing I can manipulate him. Daughter-mother lesbian, I write down the ultimate contradiction. Undermining from within his-tory in which I can now participate. The acid has begun to soak into the paper of the book.] (TOM 36)

In this short passage we can clearly see the doubleness of the narrator's position. On the one hand, her sterility, her homoerotic desire, and her cultural critique undermine the symbolic representations of motherhood and femininity, disrupting the ideological hegemony of patriarchal language. On the other hand, by taking up the pen and participating in linguistic representation, she is also inscribing the contradiction of trying to express her difference in the very symbolic discourse that has so long oppressed women and elided their difference. As Louise Dupre points out, it is not "possible de sortir du symbolique alors meme qu'on ecrit, c'est-a-dire qu'on travaille justement a meme 1'instance symbolique [possible to escape the symbolic while one is in the very process of writing, that is to say, one is precisely working with and within the symbolic moment]" (sv 97). In this sense, the narrator's discourse becomes part of "history," and her own representations of femininity, even if different from traditional ones, become no less fixed and rigid, and thus vulnerable to the "acid" of a critique similar to her own. While this deconstructive dilemma is ultimately insoluble, Brossard's explicit articulation of it does give her narrator's attempt to maintain her disruptive stance a compelling urgency. Her constant efforts to evoke the female body as a source of difference, and thus to embody her struggle to get beyond that very difference as it is imposed on women as a destiny,

185 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

must find an issue in action for them to have meaning. Her ideologically motivated act of writing is indeed the only possible means to produce change beyond her own personal transformation; it is for this reason that, at the close of L'Amer, the narrator will sum up her project in this way: "je travaille a ce que se perde la convulsive habitude d'initier les filles au male comme une pratique courante de lobotomie. Je veux en effet voir s'organiser la forme des femmes dans la trajectoire de 1'espece [I am working so that the convulsive habit of initiating girls to the male as in a contemporary practice of lobotomy will be lost. I want to see in effect the form of women organizing in the trajectory of the species]" (L'Amer 109, TOM 101). Brossard thus offers us a double gesture in establishing the "identity" of her narrator. Initially we see that the narrator establishes herself by opposition to what is expected of her as a mother in contemporary society. Her refusal to accept the traditional role of women as the "opposite sex" for men is coupled with an affirmation of her own lesbian desire and her re-vision of herself as a "fille-merelesbienne." Finally, she attempts to legitimize her difference in language by writing as a first-person subject in order to convince herself and others that "avant le patriarcat la bouche remue avec un je [before the patriarchy ... the mouth m°uftss again with an I]" (L'Amer 93, TOM 85). In the pages that follow, I hope to show that the differ ence and impact of this "je" has everything to do with the strategic deployment of "genre" as the French understand it - that is, as much with literary genre as gender in Brossard's L'Amer. THE PROBLEMATICS OF GENRE ITS LINKS WITH GENDER

S'il faut attribuer a la modernite quebecoise une remise en question des genres traditionnels, il faut attribuer a 1'ecriture au feminin, un decloisonnement entre les genres, decloisonnement sans lequel le je feminin n'aurait pu simultanement exprimer sa sensibilite, faire etat de sa dissidence et explorer les "angles morts" d'une memoire individuelle et plurielle.

AND

[While a questioning of traditional genres must be attributed to Quebec modernism, writing in the feminine must be credited with a decompartmentalization of genres, without which the feminine I could not have simultaneously expressed its sensibility, voiced its dissidence, and explored the "blind spots" of an individual and plural memory.] Nicole Brossard77

In his preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, Sartre introduces Fanon's analysis of colonization by stating that "nous ne devenons ce que nous sommes que par la negation intime et radicale de ce qu'on a fait de nous [we only become what we are by the

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radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us]."78 While we have certainly seen this gesture of revolt in Brossard's explicit repudiation of the role of symbolic mother to which Western culture has assigned women for millennia, a disruption of similar consequence is also evident in the way she plays with the conventions of genre in L'Amer. In discussing Cixous's La and Gagnon's Lueur, I already noted their problematization of the conventions of the realist novel through an exuberant lyricism, a clearly feminist theoretical dimension, and a lack of a coherent narrative structure or traditional character development. The same could be said of Brossard's L'Amer, which bears the telling subtitle Le chapitre effrite and appears with the designation "theorie/fiction" in its 1988 republication. From its very title page, then, we are given to understand that this prose work cannot be classified or read according to traditional generic boundaries: it is a "tattered chapter," not the coherent structured form we might expect, and the label "theorie/fiction" indicates its polyvalent purpose as well as its defiance of neat classification. "Fiction theory," as the designation has been translated, is in fact Brossard's own neologism and an intentional effort to cross the limits of genres, or to graft them together in a kind of textual hybrid.79 This hybridization is one of greater complexity than even her appellation suggests, and its precise nature, as I will demonstrate, is a key component of her textual and ideological project in L'Amer. It would seem that Brossard was never very comfortable with the novel as a genre, for after her first book, Un Livre (1970), her prose texts of the 19705 all bear unusual identifications. Sold-out (1973) is called an Etreinte-illustration (Embrace-illustration) and French Kiss (1974) an Etreinte-exploration (Embrace-exploration), both titles deliberately suggesting a desire for greater proximity with the body and with other forms of aesthetic pleasure than the designations of "text," "fiction," or even "novel" would usually evoke. Moreover, these texts are not continuous, uniformly typeset works of prose: not only does Brossard play with typefaces and spacing, but she adds mildly prurient illustrative cartoons to French Kiss, and in both texts she plays self-consciously with page layout to create the appearance of formal chapters that she intersperses with the rest of the text. In French Kiss, for example, she divides the text into a series of sections labelled "fois," and yet she also includes three bordered "chapters" in large typeface, of which "Chapter i" does not appear until two-thirds of the way through the book. While this ludic exploration of the novel's formal structures is not as evident in L'Amer, the later text does seem to display a similar reluctance to "play it straight" with genre and the formal conventions of prose fiction, not to mention sexuality.

187 Nicole Brassard's L'Amer

To be sure, a discomfort with genre classifications is not unique to Brossard's work, nor is it merely a local focus of attention in the Quebec experimental writing community. While Louise Dupre notes, "As early as the beginning of the 705, La Nouvelle Bane du Jour [sic] pronounced that classification by genre was inadequate to describe the new textual explorations,"80 a sentiment that can in fact be traced back even earlier to a 1967 volume of La Barre du jour, this is a common theme in literary and critical circles across the Atlantic as well. In his article "Genres, 'types/ modes," Gerard Genette, for example, will himself articulate some doubts as to the relative utility of classical definitions of genres, even though some of his best-known work consists of the meticulous elaboration of narratological classifications.81 Jacques Derrida, for his part, devotes a substantial essay to meditations on the theme in "La Loi du genre," where he writes that "la loi du genre ... est precisement un principe de contamination, une loi d'impurete, une economie du parasite [the law of the law of genre ... is precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy]."82 In his view, the "limits" or boundaries we use to distinguish between genres are permeable, and genres are intrinsically interdependent, existing in a relative, rather than a pure, sense. In terms of classification, this theory implies that the designations we give to genres can never adequately contain the texts they purport to identify: each text will, to a degree, participate in more than one "genre" or will at least be dependent on texts of other "genres" for its perceived adherence to or divergence from generic tradition. Of course, such a view begs the question of what or whose perception of genre is prevalent in any given historical context. As Genette points out, the question of genericity also involves critical and reader reception of specific works, which can and does change historically. What is important here, however, is that during the late 19605 and early 19705, the critical reflections on genre of theorists such as Genette and Derrida find a parallel in literary practice, most notably in the kinds of questions posed by feminist texts that set out to challenge "the law" on as many levels as possible. To return to Brossard's wilfully transgressive textuality, it must be said that, even if we accede to Derrida's vision of the permeability of genres, there are degrees of "contamination" which are more disturbing or surprising to contemporary readers than others, and so the transgressive value of L'Amer is, in part at least, a function of its historical and cultural context. Indeed, Derrida himself alludes to this important point when he writes, "La question du genre litteraire n'est pas une question formelle: elle traverse de part en part le motif de la loi en general, de la generation, au sens naturel et symbolique, de la naissance, au sens naturel et symbolique, de la difference de

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generation, de la difference sexuelle entre le genre masculin et le genre feminin, de 1'hymen entre les deux, d'un rapport sans rapport entre les deux, d'une identite et d'une difference entre le feminin et le masculin [The question of the literary genre is not a formal one: it covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the natural and symbolic senses, of birth in the natural and symbolic senses, of the generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and the masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference between the feminine and the masculine]."83 In other words, explorations of genre are bound up with much more than just issues of structure and presentation of content; they must take account of "the generation difference," both in terms of a text's particular historical matrix (its heritage) and in terms of its difference from that matrix (its individuality). If, as Mary Gerhart does in her Genre Choices, Gender Questions, we understand "genre not merely as a means of classification but as a principle of knowing," then a text's "identity," its relation to generic tradition, is ineluctably implicated in the larger epistemological question of sexual difference.84 Both gender and genre classifications assist us in structuring and interpreting our knowledge of the world, such that we may situate ourselves and be situated by others in relation to it. An individual response to the conventions of such classification, a particular "generation difference," is thus productive and indicative of the relation of a person or text to a given cultural context. In this way, we can see a consistency in how the thematic questioning of motherhood and identity is played out on other levels of L'Amer as well. Brossard's refusal of the role of patriarchal mother, of traditional gender identification for her first-person narrator, is echoed by her refusal to be confined by literary genre and the obvious desire to disrupt reader expectations with a text requiring a revision in reading strategies. The thematic re-vision of the woman as subject is accompanied by a similar displacement of convention in terms of genre. The woman writer narrating this text will refuse traditional storytelling conventions, just as she refuses to accept the sexually and socially accepted gender role assigned her, preferring to centre her life around the women she loves. To borrow an observation from Derrida, "on ne nous interdira pas de croire qu'entre ce melange des genres comme folie de la difference sexuelle et le melange des genres litteraires il y ait quelque rapport [we will not be barred from thinking that this mixing of genres, viewed in the light of the madness of sexual difference, may bear some relation to the mixing of literary genres]."85 But what genres is Brossard mixing

189 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

in L'Amer? Can we identify the different conventions she is playing on and with? How does what we recognize in terms of genre help us to read the text as a whole? And what effects are achieved by such a hybrid of genres, and how are they ultimately linked to her questioning of gender? Given that Brossard chooses to call her text "fiction theory/' at least in the second edition,86 it is logical to begin with these classifiers and their motivation. As I noted earlier, she seems reluctant to use the generic label of novel, and indeed, there are critics who speak of L'Amer as "une sorte d'anti-roman"87 for its explicit refusal of a certain realism and structure associated with the genre. Still, Brossard herself will not go so far as to place her work in opposition to the traditional novel but, like Cixous, will rather call it "fiction," a more general term that preserves the notion of representation, of fabrication, without the immediate baggage of plot and character evoked by the term "novel." Etymologically, "fiction" is derived from the past participle of the Latin verb fingere, to mould or to form, a verb associated with the kneading of dough. Although this image does not necessarily appeal exclusively to women, it does connote a physicality particularly attractive to a writer so concerned with the female body and its creative capacities. The term "fiction" will in fact be one of lasting interest to Brossard, who will later write at length about the different meanings of fiction in women's lives, opposing it to (patriarchal) reality and giving it weight as a force for change for women and as a space for their desires. As she writes in her essay "La Lettre aerienne," "jusqu'ici la realite a ete pour la plupart des femmes une fiction, c'est-a-dire le fruit d'une imagination qui n'est pas la leur et a laquelle elles ne parviennent pas reellement a s'adapter ... D'autre part, on peut dire aussi que la realite des femmes a ete perdue comme fiction ... C'est done a la limite du reel et du fictif ... que se trace une ecriture de derive [until now reality has been for most women a fiction, that is, the fruit of an imagination which is not their own and to which they do not actually succeed in adapting ... On the other hand, we can also say that women's reality has been perceived as fiction ... It is thus at the border between what's real and what's fictive ... that this elusive derived writing, writing adrift, begins to make its mark]" (LLA 53, AL 75-6).88 In this passage, Brossard succinctly articulates the tension she perceives between a patriarchal reality that imposes its vision of femininity on women and the visions which women have of themselves and which have traditionally been elided or discounted in the objectifying discourses of male authorities. According to her, patriarchal reality is a fiction for most women because they cannot conform to

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it and make it fully their own. Similarly, women's reality is seen to be a fiction by those who cannot understand it from the inside. Fiction and reality are thus relative terms, for as Brossard puts it, "la ligne entre la realite et la fiction n'est jamais vraiment precise. Et par mon ecriture, je travaille a deplacer la ligne entre la fiction et la realite [the line between reality and fiction is never really precise. And, with my writing, I am working to shift the line between fiction and reality]/'89 This "displacement" allows her to open up a space for writing in which the limits of fiction and reality are called into question, a liminal textuality that participates in both the quotidian and the Utopian or imaginary. It would seem that this combination is essential to Brossard's emerging feminist discourse, for as she will ask rhetorically in L'Amer, "Ou commence le prive ou s'arrete le politique, le fictif, le reel? [Where does the private begin where does the political stop, the fictional, the real]" (L'Amer 55, TOM 47). The most compelling answer to this question is of course the text itself, where on every page we are shown to what degree all aspects of life and writing involve an interpenetration of these elements, which cannot be confined by arbitrary limits.90 Given her deliberate questioning of limits, what lines, if any, does Brossard draw in L'Amer? If some critics venture to call it an antinovel, against what novelistic conventions is this "fiction" operating in order for it to seem so subversive? To answer such questions, it seems logical to begin with the two basic elements of narrative: temporality and characterization. Traditionally, the narration of a novel involves recounting a succession of events in time, not necessarily in chronological order. In this sense, at least, L'Amer preserves a semblance of novelistic convention, because we are made aware of the passage of time quite explicitly in the course of the book. On the first full page of text, for example, we are given the indications of "le meme jour" (the same day) and "un autre jour" (another day; 19), as if the words that follow are a diary of what was done or thought on those days. In the book's second part we are told what day of the week it is three times (41, 48, 53), while in the section entitled "La Fiction du prive" (The fiction of the personal) we are given four precise dates in parentheses and in chronological order (97-8). The disconcerting feature of these temporal precisions, however, is their precise lack of significance in terms of the narration. As the paragraphs unfold, we understand that the scenes and thoughts they contain have no causal linking dependent on some kind of temporal continuity. In effect, the temporal indications serve paradoxically to highlight the lack of importance of the passage of time in the overall structure of the text.

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If chronology is not important in L'Amer, then neither is a traditional plot that would rely upon it. In fact, the text has little or no storyline, progressing rather by a succession of images or moments that Barbara Godard, in her important article "L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter: Nicole Brossard at the Site of Feminist Deconstruction," has suggestively called "communicative events."91 Some of these "events" are recognizable scenes from everyday life, such as mothers watching their children play in the park (32) or the narrator dancing to Edith Piaf with her loved ones on a Sunday morning (28). More often, however, the narrator's thoughts are generated by sights, memories, objects, or even word associations that are simply pretexts for reflection, rather than elements of a coherent scene. A typical example can be seen in the paragraph entitled "Prise au figure" (Figuratively understood) from the section "L'Acte de 1'ceil": "1'effet de longues nuits commence a se faire sentir sur sa surface ou intensement. Sa soif comme on ruse avec le desert, immanquablement: la prise du figure et proliferation. Quand les profils bougent s'organisant pour parler. C'est le frisson ou peut-etre le froissement du papier. Une pomme sur la table de travail suffit-elle a fournir un sens? Ou a faire lever le cceur? [the effect of long nights begins to make itself felt on the surface or intensely. Her thirst like playing tricks on the desert, inevitably: grasping the figurative and proliferation. When the profiles move getting ready to speak. It's the shivering or perhaps the rustling of paper. Is an apple on the work bench enough to make sense? Or to turn the stomach?]" (L'Amer 74, TOM 66). From between the lines in this shor passage, we can perhaps reconstruct the scene of a writer at a table, looking at an apple and feeling thirsty but not hungry. What motivates the passage, however, is not this physical actuality as much as the alliterations in "s" and "f," both of which are contained in the words "soif," "frisson," and "froissement," words that are also key elements of the moment being described. To this pattern one could also add the alliterations in "p," "1," and "f" and the assonance in "i" evident in "prise du figure," proliferation," "profils," and "pour parler." The "communicative event" occurs here between the writer and the words, which no doubt appear on the page being crumpled. The struggle with meaning is suggested most particularly by the perception of an apple, that symbol of knowledge which here seems less an object of desire than of derision, insufficient to or incompatible with the writer's needs. This passage is indicative both of the reading difficulty presented by a text structured so poetically and of the key role played by the figure of the writing narrator, who provides a kind of continuity not furnished in L'Amer by any sequence that could be construed as a plot or traditional narrative of events.

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Similarly, the "characters" in L'Amer receive the most summary of treatments, so much so that Barbara Godard has remarked on Brossard's "dissolution of character," saying, "Character, and the entire concept of characterization, has been defaced, decapitated, doubled, negated - shown to be tropes with no basis in reality. Fictions." Even if the remaining "fictions" are "no longer psychologically motivated beings"92 and thus not characters in the traditional sense, there remains one consistent presence in the text, that being the voice of the first-person narrator, already examined at length in the first part of this chapter. This unnamed woman addresses herself to two other anonymous female characters, her daughter and her lesbian lover, at the opening of the book's first section, "L'Amer." In addition to being a mother figure who gives us occasional glimpses of some of her daily interactions with her loved ones, the narrator also presents herself as a daughter, since part of her narration consists of memories of her relationship with her own mother when she was a child. These "memories," unlike some of the other everyday vignettes we are offered, are not "plausible," however, since at least two of the scenes described are from a period that it would be almost impossible to remember: when the narrator as an infant is nursing and learning how to talk (25, 41-2). This latter scene, discussed in the first part of this chapter, is in effect a dramatization of the Lacanian model of entry into the symbolic, where the child's acquisition of language symbolizes the acceptance of the law of the father and a concomitant disruption of the pre-Oedipal bond with the mother. As the narrator affirms, "Je ne puis a la fois garder le contact physique avec ma mere et 1'ecouter lui en meme temps [I can't both keep the physical contact with my mother and listen to him at the same time]" (L'Amer 41, TOM

33). In short, the most developed scenes in the book are thus the most obviously "fictive" or "imaginary," another example of Brossard's play with the implicit limits of the first-person narrative, where consistency would dictate that only what the narrator could know or remember should be presented in the text.93 The only way in which Brossard's text does conform to first-person narrative conventions is that her narrator's presence provides continuity: she affirms herself as the subject in the last sentence as she does in the first. Although scenes of daily life with the lover and the daughter may disappear from the middle of the text almost to its conclusion, where we see the return of the "meres enlacees" who will not help the children find their pyjamas (98), the narrator and her thoughts are omnipresent. She thus becomes the only approximation of a "character" in the text, albeit one whose features and location are never specified. Brossard has explained her lack of characterization to Andre Roy

±93 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

in this way: "ce sont des personnages symboliques: II n'y a pas de nomination parce qu'il me paraissait plus important de pouvoir faire accompagner la fiction de la theorie [they are symbolic characters: there are no names because it seemed more important to me to be able to make theory accompany the fiction]/'94 In the final analysis, it is perhaps the symbolic value of the characters and the scenes or the "communicative events" in which they appear that contributes in part to the text's literary quality which persists despite Brossard's subversion or transgression of many narrative conventions. To return to the question of fiction and reality in L'Amer, we can also see how she tests the limits between the two in other aspects of her novel. In many ways, it is tempting to read L'Amer as more autobiographical than fictional, because of the many parallels that can be established between the lesbian narrator's concerns and Brossard's own, as expressed in her interviews and in works such as the Journal intime cited at the beginning of this chapter. Both she and her narrator are lesbian feminist writers who are raising a baby daughter. Brossard explicitly plays with this connection between fiction and autobiography when, in one of L'Amer's final paragraphs, she includes her own name, "nicole, sans rature [sic; nicole, without erasure]" (L'Amer 105, TOM 97). While there is no first person present in the same sentence to claim the name as her own, this signature does appear facing a paragraph in which the narrator's "I" is present, notably between the words "reel" and "fiction": "dense est 1'urgence. Politiquement. Mais des poumons le reel, il n'y a qu'une image pour en conclure: 1'ete, durant les heures de chaleur, je ne suis nue qu'a 1'orage, pleine d'appetit. Successivement dans les formes multiples d'une fiction [dense is the urgency. Politically - . But reality from the lungs, there is only one image to bring it to a conclusion: summer, during the hours of heat, I am naked only to the storm, heavy with appetite. Successively in the multiple forms of a fiction]" (L'Amer 104, TOM 96). The disconcerting syntax of this short excerpt notwithstanding, the juxtaposition of words and images permits us to make some important associations: we can see how the urgency of the political is followed by a reference to the real, and how that real gives birth to the desiring subject figured in the context of fiction. Fiction and reality are thus connected by the desiring female subject, a suggestion confirmed by the appearance of Brossard's first name on the following page. As a final note, this name also appears with added emphasis, "sans rature," almost as if to counter the Derridean notion of erasure of the terms of authority with an affirmation of this woman author's real existence, one that cannot be barred from her text.

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Such examples show that, while Brossard herself may explicitly call L'Amer fiction and play with some of the conventions of traditional narrative, she is also challenging the distinction between fiction and autobiography, contesting the strict limits between the two. Indeed, in her introductory essay to the second edition, Louise Dupre even notes that "il y a la un autobiographisme qui, faisant centrepoint aux autres livres de Nicole Brossard, incarne la textualite [one sees there an autobiographism that, by contrast to the other books of Nicole Brossard, embodies the textuality]."95 Dupre succinctly points out here Brossard's reluctance to reveal much about herself; the author has in fact insisted in her interviews that her private life has little place in her writing.96 In an interview with Clea Notar, for example, she remarks that "thousands of people go through the same emotions every day. It is how you combine in language the strongest feelings and emotions that makes literature. So, though personal events can transform my writing, it is not the story of my life but the story of the creative process which is interesting."97 This certainly seems to be Brossard's point in L'Amer, for despite the play with autobiographical detail, it remains clear that the body of the work is not intended to refer to a specific woman's experiences as much as it is an attempt to offer a viable "fictional" revision of the androcentric lifestyle that so many women lead in Western culture. "Nicole"'s presence in the text, in that sense, may serve more as an object lesson, or a living testimony that such an alternative, self-affirming fiction for women can mirror reality or at least be inspired by it. As for the "theorie" underscored by Brossard's subtitle, it seems clear that L'Amer participates in questions essential to feminist thought and, in its own way, presents a consistent theoretical response to same of the impasses of feminist critical practices. We have seen, for example, Brossard's recognition of Derrida's notion of "differance" and her eventual rejection of deconstructive practice as an untenable critical stance in the face of lived reality. We have also noted the way in which she subverts a psychoanalytic explanation of the institution of sexual difference by her strategic revision of that process from the woman's perspective. While she recognizes that the separation of mother and daughter must occur, she shows her narrator in the active process of refuting the psychoanalytic explanation for that separation by seeking to recover the physical bond between women that strengthens, rather than erases, her sense of identity. Moreover, in the narrator's entry into the symbolic, we again see how this can be viewed as an affirmation of difference enhancing her sense of selfhood, rather than an experience that alienates her from her own femininity.

195 Nicole Brassard's L'Amer To this refutation of male theorists of women's difference, Brossard also adds her exegesis on structural anthropology's view of women's role in culture as articulated in Levi-Strauss's influential study Les Structures elementaires de la parente, in which one of his principal observations is that women's importance resides in their potential as objects of exchange: "Or, 1'echange, phenomene total, est d'abord un echange total, comprenant de la nourriture, des objets fabriques, et cette categorie des biens les plus precieux, les femmes [Exchange, as a total phenomenon, is from the first a total exchange, comprising food, manufactured objects, and that most precious category of goods, women]."98 In Brossard's L'Amer a significant page of the first section is devoted to her response to this analysis of women's place in the mechanisms of production and reproduction, where "[l]e seul produit dont la mere dispose comme mode d'echange demeure son enfant [the only product a mother can use as a medium of exchange is her child]" (L'Amer 27, TOM 21). Ultimately, she postulates that the mother cannot even exercise this limited autonomy in the exchange process, for she has no access to "le circuit symbolique comme sujet" (the symbolic system as subject) so long as she is "[cjollee a la matiere et a 1'enfant ... Bredouille. Begayante. Gagachis [stuck in matter and to her child ... Stammer. Stutter. Mmmme mess]" (L'Amer 27, TOM 21). Here, by repeating the syllable "ga" in "begflyante" by doubling it at the beginning of "gachis," Brossard enacts the stuttering she sees as characteristic of the speech of women who, too close to their children and infantilized by association," are unable to express themselves confidently as subjects in language, wasting their potential (a "gachis"). Brossard thus reconfirms the reasons for her narrator's efforts to escape this system of reproduction through a refusal of the silence to which it assigns her as a mother. She will not be so bereft: "Toute femme ne peut profiter que dans la mesure ou elle devient mere symbolique. C'est alors qu'elle a cesse d'enfanter. Le lait surit. Joconde [Each woman can profit only to the extent that she becomes symbolic mother. That is when she stopped bearing children. The milk sours. Mona Lisa smiles]" (L'Amer 27, TOM 21). By refusing to reproduce on demand and by entering the symbolic realm in order to claim a voice, this mother-narrator renders herself inaccessible as an object to be exploited. Cleverly playing on the Mona Lisa's smile, evoked by the juxtaposition of "surit" (almost homonymous with sourit, "smiles") and "Joconde" (the French title for da Vinci's painting), this "symbolic mother" adopts a similar power to that of the woman in the painting, the mystery of whose identity and undecipherable expression continues to fascinate, even as it resists interpretation and thus possession.100

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While this wordplay may provide some idea of the humour present in L'Amer, it must be noted that Brossard's narrator does not generally ally herself with such representations of "the feminine mystique/' to borrow the phrase that Betty Friedan made famous.101 As we have seen, Brossard resists traditional images associated with femininity, such as those of the sea and fluidity, as being "dead ends" for her in the search to revise her place and future in society.102 Still, she does continue to insist on the question of difference throughout the text, pointing to the necessity of self-definition, despite the risk of recreating essentializing categories equally as limiting as those imposed upon women by social convention and cultural mythology. Brossard draws the theoretical line, then, more pragmatically than categorically. She sees lesbianism as the most self-affirming way to avoid being co-opted by the system, for as Louise Dupre puts it, "Concernant plus que le domaine du desir, il constitue avant tout une prise de position politique visant a mettre un terme a la domination phallique [Concerning more than just the realm of desire, it is above all a political stance that aims to end patriarchal domination]" (sv 135). To cite Alice Parker's analysis, "Brossard joins daughter and mother with the third term, lesbian, in a strategy that destabilizes binary logic and eludes reification" (LV 57), precisely because such a strategy undermines patriarchal epistemological traditions. Brossard's criticism of that dominant tradition in L'Amer is based on a strategy of bringing as many critical tools to bear on the system of patriarchal oppression as possible, so as to have a maximal effect on the real as it is lived by women, regardless of their sexual orientation. Although the theoretical intertext called upon in L'Amer is thus heterogeneous, the text's ideological unity comes more from the stance of the narrator, who chooses to offer her experience as a "fille-mere-lesbienne" as a position from which to view the universality of women's oppression and silencing in contemporary culture. It is in this way and for this reason that Brossard grafts together fiction and theory into such a hybrid and occasionally disconcerting work of prose. This mixing of genres forces the reader to approach the fictional and the theoretical differently, each illuminating the other such that they enrich and transform our understanding of both. As Alice Parker astutely points out, the "[n]ew reading strategies" Brossard encourages "can displace assigned meanings that limit the ways women perceive themselves and the world" (LV 194). In her discussion of the writing of L'Amer, Brossard remarks to Andre Roy: Je pense que L'Amer est arrive parce que tout s'est mis a coincider: la realite, la fiction, la theorie, le combat. A partir de la mere qui est la cle, le premier

197 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer lieu de 1'origine, a partir de ce premier rapport, j'ai eu 1'impression de comprendre r"univers," mais cette comprehension n'etait pas toujours precise. Je n'ai pas voulu choisir de genre litteraire (poesie, roman ou essai) parce que cela m'aurait limitee face a ma et a la realite, face a la vegetation touffue des images et des equations qui surgissaient.103 [I think that L'Amer came along because everything began to coincide: reality, fiction, theory, combat. Starting with the mother who is the key, the first place of origin, beginning with this first relationship, I had the impression I understood the "universe," but this understanding was not always clear. I did not want to choose one literary genre (poetry, novel, or essay) because that would have limited me in the face of (my) reality, in the face of the thick vegetation of images and equations that emerged.] In such remarks, Brossard reveals her conscious refusal of the limits inherent in the conventions of genre. Moreover, she points to the one important element of L'Amer that I have not yet touched on in my analysis of her mixing of genres, that being the text's obvious poetic tendency. As I remarked in the introduction to this chapter, L'Amer appeared in 1977, after a period of difficulty during which Brossard had ceased publishing new poetry. While L'Amer is by no means a poem, it nevertheless shares important characteristics with the poetry which she had been writing previously and which was, as she puts it in an interview with Mel Yoken, her "fac.on privilegiee d'exister" (preferred mode of existence).104 For Brossard, the difference between writing poetry and writing prose has to do with a question of expenditure, the synthesis and urgency of poetry requiring a greater intensity of expenditure than the writing of "reality" that she sees in prose: [Jle fais la distinction entre prose et poesie au niveau de la depense, et en ce qui concerne 1'urgence. Et 1'intensite, 1'exuberance, le delire, la brulure, la gergure prennent forme autrement que la realite qui, elle, cherche son realisme dans 1'usage de la prose ... Pour moi, la prose a toujours un petit cote "straight." C'est pourquoi, 1'effet poetique finit toujours par prendre le dessus dans les phrases et les fragments d'histoire que Ton trouve dans mes romans ... La seule prose qui m'interesse est celle des textes qu'on dit etre de prose mais dans lesquels on retrouve toutes les techniques de la poesie: fragments, ellipses, intensite.105 [I make the distinction between prose and poetry on the level of expenditure, and with regards to urgency. And the intensity, the exuberance, the delirium, the burning, the freezing take form differently from reality that, for its part, seeks its realism in the use of prose ... For me, prose has always had this little "straight" side. That is why poetic effects always seem to take over in the sentences and the fragments of story that one can find in my novels ...

198 Mothers of Invention The only prose that interests me is that of texts which one calls prose but in which one finds all the techniques of poetry: fragments, ellipses, intensity]

By now it has become clear that L'Amer is a text in which Brossard refuses to "play it straight" with socio-cultural and novelistic conventions. In the above remarks we can also see the source of this text's poetic dimension: she is drawing on her poetic sensibility as a strategy to disrupt the linearity of the prose text and add to her prose the intensity that she feels is present in her poetry. In the paragraphs that follow, I will examine the specific "effets poetiques" present in L'Amer, including Brossard's methods of textual presentation (ellipsis, spacing, typography) and her use of poetic rhythms and sonorities, polysemy and wordplay, and irregular syntax. Ellipsis is important to poetic practice, particularly since Mallarme,106 because it contributes to a text's rhythm and intensity. It can be explicitly marked, with asterisks (***) or periods (...), or it can be unmarked, revealed only by an absence of words or grammatical elements in a sentence, which the reader must then try to supply or interpret. In some instances, ellipsis can even render a text resistant to interpretation almost to the point of illegibility, because what is deliberately omitted is ultimately irrecuperable, as in Mallarme's "Un Coup de des n'abolira jamais le hasard." In her early writings, Brossard experimented with both marked and unmarked ellipses. In L'Amer she employs both kinds, although the latter by far outnumber the former. In its first three sections "L'A mer [sic]/' "L'Etat de la difference," and "L'Acte de 1'ceil" ellipses are marked using three periods, which signal the absence of a word in sentences left incomplete (19, 33, 75) or serve as breaks between juxtaposed domestic scenes (28). Beginning with the fourth section, "La Vegetation," a single asterisk generally separates paragraphs on a page, indicating a change of subject or the passage of time. What is most interesting in "La Vegetation," however, is the use of parentheses to mark the omission of agreement and leave space for an alternative, supplementary reading, as in the following passage: "Avant c.a vers moi mais des yeux, mais je te veux immense et chaude du corps sache nos energies autrement que dans ton ventre mais des yeux. Asexu() ou peut-etre invariable [Before that towards me but with the eyes, but I want your immensity and warmth of body you must know our energies in a different way than in your belly but with the eyes. Asexu( ) or maybe invariable]" (L'Amer 83,

TOM 75). In this passage the agreement of "asexu()" is left open, its omission allowing multiple readings. Does it agree with the feminine "you" whom the narrator addresses? Or their energies? Or the womb?

199 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

Or the eyes? And do we use the ending "-e(e)(s)" or /"-el(le)(s)/" given that both asexue and asexuel exist in French? The absence of agreement here multiplies the possible interpretations for this passage, where the adjective "invariable" stands in ironic opposition to the variable ending that prevents a definitive reading. Brossard complements this elliptical strategy elsewhere with her use of parentheses around word elements that are present rather than absent, an "opposite" approach with a similar result of multiplying reading possibilities, as in "Nous avons mis longtemps a gagner au cceur du monstre le corps exuberant territoire. Le trace: mutilations, tranche. Anatomie. Or le corps n'est plus le corps mais 1'anecdote terrifiante qui nourrit le corps (gris)e [We have spent a long time winning the heart of the monster the body exuberant territory. The tracing: mutilations, slice. Anatomy. Now the body is no longer the body but the terrifying anecdote which feeds the [faSJed body]" (L'Amer 85, TOM 77). In this second passage, instead of bracketing the ending, Brossard here makes the root word parenthetical. The effect is to allow us to read both "grey" and "intoxicated" as possible modifiers, simultaneously supporting images of dissection and exaltation of the body that are present in the second passage. Because the adjectival agreement is left unbracketed, however, she is also drawing our attention to the process of agreement, where the final "e" is always heard, even if the noun in question is feminine ("-ee"). As "corps" is a masculine noun, even if the body is a woman's, the "e" is in fact indicative of this agreement, and in that sense it can stand unbracketed, independent of the adjective chosen. In both of these passages, as in the book's title, she reminds us that it is often the feminine that is lost or elided in the process of agreement. More often than the techniques described above, Brossard exploits unmarked ellipsis in L'Amer to disturb habitual reading practices. In her landmark study of turn-of-the-century avant-garde writers, La Revolution du langage poetique, Julia Kristeva singles out the disorienting phenomenon of "non-recoverable deletion" in her reading of Mallarme's "Un Coup de des."107 Given Brossard's interest in Mallarme, it is not surprising that she should adopt the disruptive, elliptical strategies at work in his landmark poem to similar effect. In L'Amer she will in fact privilege the practice of unmarked ellipsis, beginning paragraphs in the middle of sentences and suppressing informational units in sentences, such that there is sometimes no way to reconstruct the sense. In cases where the omitted elements are irrecuperable, there is a loss of meaning, a breach in logical continuity that contributes to the text's fragmentation but also to its poetic quality. As Samuel Levin, from whom Kristeva borrows her terminology, puts it, "The

aoo Mothers of Invention

fact that we cannot be sure what the connectives are ... shows that they are not recoverable."108 The first passage cited above for its example of marked ellipsis also contains examples of such "nonrecoverable deletions." The first sentence - "Avant c.a vers moi mais des yeux, mais je te veux immense et chaude du corps sache nos energies autrement que dans ton ventre mais des yeux [Before that towards me but with the eyes, but I want your immensity and warmth of body you must know our energies in a different way than in your belly but with the eyes]" (L'Amer 83, TOM 75) - thwarts

attempts at a coherent reading because it is composed of fragmentary phrases that are not logically connected, and it twice includes a seemingly unmotivated "mais," which further disrupts its syntactic coherence. Nevertheless, the passage does have a poetic impact, stemming in part from the very discontinuities and deletions that seem to enhance the intensity of the desire expressed. In her chapter in Strategies du vertige on Brossard's poetry, Louise Dupre claims, speaking of the writer's use of non-recoverable deletions, that "cet en-moins de sens se renverse en un surplus signifiant: on peut lire le texte de plusieurs fac,ons differentes, il y a du sens qui s'ajoute plutot que de se perdre [this subtraction of meaning flips over into a signifying surplus: one can read the text in several different ways, there is meaning that is added rather than lost]" (sv 91). While in some cases this claim may be true, in L'Amer there are many instances where it is doubtful that accretion of meaning is Brossard's intended goal. It could be argued that a sheer loss of coherence is more important to her project of subverting patriarchal logic than multiplying reading possibilities, even if the effects may at times overlap. This deliberate strategy of incoherence is also evident in her use of space in L'Amer, where the text tends to occupy only part of each page. In a sense, the open spaces can be seen as an extension of ellipsis to the presentation of the text itself as full of "blanks," the meaning of which the reader may not be able to decipher. This hypothesis about the use of space to defy interpretation is put forward by Virginia La Charite with regards to Mallarme's spatial poetics: "[t]he white blanks multiply the possibilities of interpretation, as each reader attempts to penetrate its meaning ... yet, the diversity of these readings and their inherent contradictions and basic disagreements also suggest that space is not instructive because it heightens the impenetrability of the text through an arbitrary placement of words and groupings which disorient the reader."109 A direct comparison of Mallarme's "Un Coup de des" and Brossard's L'Amer would quickly make clear that the poem is far more disruptive and transgressive in its spatial presentation than her text. What is interesting,

2oi Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

however, is that Brossard employs this poetic technique in her prose to the extent that she does. From our analysis of the book's epigraph and liminary passages, I have already shown how she uses blank spaces to support the thematization of the distancing of the mother from the child in her text. In general, however, the placement of her characteristic short paragraphs at the top of each page, as in her poetry, does not support the text's sense but rather serves to emphasize its fragmentary quality.110 Some critics have interpreted the blank space that results from this particular textual arrangement as an indication of Brossard's desire to engage in dialogue with the reader, who is thus called upon to participate in the text's construction. As Karen Gould notes in the context of her discussion of L'Amer, "The open-ended nature of Brossard's invited dialogue accounts at least in part for the abundance of blank spaces in her text. And just as the blank spaces in her earlier poetry brought attention to the unrepresentable, prompting us to consider the holes between the words themselves, Brossard's recent feminist writing solicits our involvement in those female spaces and frames her own explorations with the female reader's interventions in mind" (WF yS).111 While one could interrogate Gould's problematic affirmation about "female spaces" in Brossard's work - are all spaces then female because they are "unrepresentable," or are there specifically "male" spaces as well? can "spaces" be gendered? - we can certainly see how the text blocks of L'Amer offer the reader room for reflection and stand in contrast to novels that, by filling all available space, tend to control the pace and direction of our reading. In L'Amer, while the first two sections generally consist of text that occupies almost all of the page, the sections that follow seem to offer more and more space to the reader's imagination, until in the last section one page contains a mere four lines (105). This trend seems to correspond to the general progression of L'Amer from relatively coherent prose to increasingly poetic and fragmentary passages, as if Brossard wished to lead the reader progressively away from linear reading practices towards the experience of "une jouissance active de la rupture [An active bliss of rupture]" (L'Amer 48, TOM 40) in the freedom offered by the blank page. As La Charite explains, "Space is asymmetrical, having no form, a-logical, having no explanation, and a-temporal, having no beginning or end. Moreover, space is visual, never oral ... Space has no direction; it is anti-linear and open or free."112 The asymmetrical, alogical, and atemporal qualities of space seem to contribute to the narrator's attempts to defy and subvert the linearity and control she imputes to patriarchal logic. After exposing the mechanisms of patriarchal culture and situating her narrator in a

2O2 Mothers of Invention

position of revolt in the text's first two sections, Brossard seems to want to break free of all constraints and offer an alternative articulation and figuration of her narrator's vision for the rest of L'Amer. This alternative articulation plays on the non-sense of space as a way of reinforcing the disorienting effect of L'Amer's non-linear, poetic fragments. As she will later write in her poignant poem "Si sismal," si, tu trembles, tu vois bien forcement il y a du blanc c'est vrai et forcement tu trembles113 [if, you tremble, you see very well there is necessarily white it's true and necessarily you tremble.]

The creative power of this conscious interplay of word and silence, text and space, is later theorized by Brossard in La Lettre aerienne, where she uses the metaphor and trajectory of the spiral"4 to figure her search for a "sens inedit ne de la conquete sur le non-sens [an innovative meaning born of conquering the nonsensical]" (LLA 103)"5 a new configuration of meaning expressive of women's reality and "feminine culture" liberated from its characterization as "madness" or its silencing by patriarchal authorities (see figure 4). According to the last of the diagrams in the series Brossard uses to visualize her aesthetic project, a text such as L'Amer functions as the vehicle for a renewal of the realm of sense as a result of incursions made upon the domain of what has been called nonsense ("the territory until today held by non-sense"; AL 117). In other words, the fragmentary, elliptical writing in L'Amer and its emphasis on blank spaces are both deliberately designed to draw attention to and demonstrate the poetic power of incoherency and silence, which, by disrupting reading, change our understanding of words and reveal the limits of sense and logic. Of course, ellipsis and the interplay of text and space are not the only poetic elements in L'Amer; nor are they the only ones that this text has in common with Mallarme's "Un Coup de des." Like him, for example, Brossard also employs capitalization and seemingly unmotivated italicization to disorienting effect. The title phrase of "L'Acte de 1'ceil," examined earlier, indeed recalls Mallarme's poem, both in its use of upper-case letters to encourage us to read across the pages instead of only from top to bottom and also in its incompletion, for it ends with the italicized article "LA." Such a dangling

203 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

ending is very reminiscent of "Un Coup de des," which itself contains many sentence fragments. Again, it must be said that Mallarme's writing is much more consistently experimental, however, for he also uses different font sizes and a complete lack of punctuation, such that the size and spatial disposition of the words are arguably the only indications of how to read his poem. In the prose of L'Amer, poetic effects are in fact achieved much more frequently with assonance, alliteration, and rhythmic series of words. To cite but two examples: Gravita fictif et reel frolant les formes blanches insolites du soleil. (L'Amer 47) [Fictitious and real it gravitated touching the unwonted white shapes of the sun.] (TOM 39) stridente strie stryge la nuit affluer des touffes denses, des effets speciaux que procure la perte de realite. (L'Amer 88) [strident stria strix night flocks with dense tufts, with the special effects that loss of reality produces.] (TOM 80)

In the first sentence, in which the subject of the verb graviter is suppressed (and is not recoverable even when the sentence is not isolated from its context), the motivation for the sun image depends on repetition of sonorities. There is assonance in "i" (gravzta, fz'ctz'f, insolz'tes), alliteration in "f" (/icti/, /rolant, /ormes), and both alliteration and assonance at work in consonant-vowel combinations with "o" (fro/ant, formes, inso/ites, so/eil). In the second example, similar use is made of repetitions of "stri" (strz'dente, sine, sfri/ge) and then, respectively, of the consonants "f" (aj^luer, tou/Jes, ejects) and "p" (speciaux, procure, perte). The fact that each sound appears three times gives this passage rhythmic impact. Moreover, the second sentence offers another instance of unmarked ellipsis: the lack of an initial capital letter and of logical connectors serves to enhance its poetic effect. Finally, we should note Brossard's lexical choices, which also work to heighten the poetic effects of both passages: in the first, the word "insolites" appears instead of the more quotidian surprenantes, and in the second, the rare word "stryge" is used in place of vampire, which is by far the more common.116 The pleasure that Brossard takes in wordplay and polysemy is as evident in L'Amer, as it is in her poetry. We have already seen this pleasure at work, for example, in her variations on difference and differer, but we could equally cite in this regard her predilection for grammatically incorrect agreements, misspellings, and neologisms, many of which are designed to support her protest against the hegemony of the

204 Mothers of Invention

masculine in French: "laboratoir" (sic, 43), "homoindividuell" (sic, 53), "reellite" (76), and "un tableau maternell noire" (sic, 82) are but a few examples of Brossard's ludic approach to language. Indeed, her invention of polysemic words such as "la mourriture" (93) and 'Tamer" leads critic Renee-Berthe Drapeau to invent in turn the colourful term "mots mille-pattes" (millipede words) to describe her neologisms.117 Finally, I must also mention Brossard's frequent transgression of the conventions of syntax, beyond those occasioned by the ellipsis and non-recoverable deletions mentioned earlier. While syntactic disruption of one sort or another occurs on almost every page of this challenging book, it would seem most instructive to examine specific examples in context. The following passage appears in "La Vegetation," one of L'Amer's most poetic sections: Mais alors nous serons jetees sur le pave pour s'etre mis dans la tete un autre sort a tetes multiples. Une synthese aquatique ou pour deluge aquarelle et poissons, dos douce. Remonter le cours du politique en suivant de presj'agir hallucine prends ma main pour un eventail tout a deployer je veux pouvoir circuler librement. C'est dedans le reve ou d'instinct si je m'accroupis pour y songer. La brume au petit matin c'est bien connu mon exaltation. Quelques exigences dans la neige. La journee commence. Depuis, long temps. Fissure. (L'Amer 83) [But then we will be thrown onto the street for having put into our heads another multiple-headed destiny. An aquatic synthesis or for deluge water colour and fish, soft water spine. Swim back up the political stream following closely / to act hallucinate take my hand for a fan to spread all out I want to be able to circulate freely. It's inside the dream or instinctively if I crouch down to think about it. The fog in the early morning my exaltation is well known. A few wants in the snow. The day begins. A long time ago. Fissure.] (TOM 75)

This passage opens with a sentence presenting little interpretive difficulty to the reader. The following four sentences, however, are each curiously constructed, offering syntactic irregularities that complicate and disrupt our ability to make sense of the whole. The second, for example, uses a construction with "or" ("ou") in a context where the two alternatives are not structurally commensurate, their only link being their associations with the semantic field of water ("synthese aquatique" and " pour deluge aquarelle"). Moreover, Brossard plays with the grammatical rules of agreement in "dos douce" (doux would be the correct adjectival form), because she wishes to complete the image with "fresh water fish" (poissons d'eau douce - d'eau and dos being homonyms). The third sentence in this passage seems to be constructed of three discrete phrases that are not syntactically linked.

205 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

The phrase beginning with "[r]emonter" is disconcerting because of the lack of a subject for the verb. The second phrase, in italics, does have a subject, but the placement of the infinitive "agir" between the subject and verb is, to say the least, disorienting. Finally, because of the lack of punctuation and the cessation of the italics, we do not know what is modified by "tout a deployer," although it is probably associated with the "fan" of her hand; nor are we sure of the relation between "je veux pouvoir circuler librement" and the rest of the sentence. In the fourth and fifth sentences, the lack of logical connectors is again perceptible, for Brossard chooses to juxtapose images and phrases, rather than relate them syntactically using verbs or punctuation (commas, colons, semicolons). The overall effect of such syntactic irregularities is poetic: we must read the passage as we read poetry, depending more on image, sonorities, and word associations to provide us with a sense of meaning than on the logical exposition we expect from syntactically conventional prose writing. Interestingly enough, by the end of L'Amer we become so accustomed to this poetic logic that it ceases to be upsetting, even as it continues to be disorienting; it is almost as if we have learned to read Brossard's "joual syntaxique."118 Alice Parker's cogent remarks on the poetic in Picture Theory are equally valid for L'Amer, for in Brossard's prose fiction, "[p]oetic language does not function ... lyrically ..., but rather poetry is elicited for the sake of its access to the subliminal, the mythic, for its polytonality, for its syntactical flexibility and its precision" (LV 99). Ultimately, it seems clear that Brossard is incorporating elements of prose poetry and free verse into her hybridization of genres in L'Amer, such that we could even speak of "para-strophes" (parastanzas) instead of paragraphs as the basic textual unit in her writing."9 Her own classification of "theorie/fiction" thus tells only part of the story, for L'Amer even transgresses the limits of such an embracing label. The result of her conscious transgression of generic limits is a hybrid text woven of threads from many genres, in which the only constant is the narrator's project of subversion in writing. The fact that the narrator is engaged in a specifically gender-marked "entreprise scriptocentriste" parallel to Brossard's own120 is perhaps the strongest evidence of the links between an exploration of the limits of gender and genre: the narrator's contestation of the circumscription of gender in patriarchal culture is echoed in the way that the text itself refuses to be circumscribed by traditional classifications by genre. In L'Amer, Brossard's project seems to be to disorient and discomfit the reader on as many levels of the text as possible, in order to

206 Mothers of Invention prevent unquestioning acceptance of the difference of her writing as much as of her narrator. As she says to Jean Royer in reference to one of her earlier collections of poetry, L'Echo bouge beau, On peut y reconnaitre un projet d'ecriture qui serait justement la traversee des inedits et un desir de troubler. De troubler par la forme meme du texte, de troubler la lecture. D'etre troublee moi en ecrivant et de troubler la personne qui rec,oit le texte a 1'autre bout de la ligne. Farce que c'est toujours par 1'evenement inquietant, etrange, bizarre, c'est par le trouble, que de nouvelles questions surgissent dans une vie. S'il n'y a pas de trouble, la vie suit son cours. C'est par le trouble que de nouveaux comportements, de nouvelles attitudes vont surgir dans la vie, dans la lecture, dans 1'ecriture.121 [One can recognize in it a writing project that would precisely be a traversing of the unheard of and a desire to disturb. To disturb via the very form of the text, to disturb its reading. To be disturbed myself and to disturb the person who receives the text on the other end. Because it is always in the disquieting, strange, and bizarre event, by a disturbance, that new questions arise in one's life. If there is no disturbance, life stays its course. It is through disturbances that new behaviours, new attitudes will come about in life, in reading and in writing.] Such a commitment to stimulating new thought and attitudes by the transgression of traditional reading and writing practices certainly motivates the urgent tone and intensity of L'Amer. Indeed, the above passage confirms at least one continuity in Brossard's writings from before and after her awakening to feminism, succinctly pointed out by Karen Gould when she affirms, "Ultimately, the literary project of modernite provided Brossard with much of the theoretical grounding for her subsequent experimentation with ecriture au feminin and, perhaps more importantly, strengthened her affinity for the unexpected, the unexplored, and the vitally new" (WF 61). As we have seen, an affinity for the "inedit" is clearly a constant of Brossard's aesthetics.122 What is specifically at stake in L'Amer, however, is not only her particular vision of and for women but also the transmissability of that vision to future generations, expressed so compellingly in the closing "para-strophe" of L'Amer. "Analyse: pour que les levres se representent a moi comme une motivation a suivre les bouches pleines d'affinites. En cela, je travaille a ce que se perde la convulsive habitude d'initier les filles au male comme une pratique courante de lobotomie. Je veux en effet voir s'organiser la forme des femmes dans la trajectoire de 1'espece [Analysis: so that for me lips are represented as a motivation to follow mouths replete with affinities. In that way, I am working so that the convulsive habit of initiating girls to the male

207 Nicole Brossard's L'Amer

as in a contemporary practice of lobotomy will be lost. I want to see in fact the form of women organizing in the trajectory of the species]"

(L'Amer 109, TOM 101). The line that Brossard wants to draw is thus one connecting mothers to daughters, connecting women to one another within the "trajectory of the species." The difficulty of such a project is that, in the past, mothers have been the very means of reproduction of the oppressive patriarchal system that separates women specifically, mothers and daughters - from each other. Indeed, this is no doubt one of the reasons that Brossard rejects feminist psychoanalysis, for, as Marianne Hirsch notes in her study The Mother/Daughter Plot, in such an approach, "looking back is looking to the story of a mother who is defined as subordinate in patriarchy, the backdrop for the child's developing consciousness, the object of the child's subjectivity. Looking back, for the feminist daughter, may permit a form of knowledge, a 'sustained quest,' but it will not permit a different

form

of knowledge. That difference, that break on the hold of tradition, can only come if the feminist daughter becomes a feminist mother who can tell her feminist daughter about that process of becoming."123 Brossard's portrayal of a narrator who is a lesbian, mother, and writer is clearly an attempt to "break the hold of tradition" and achieve the transmission of a new knowledge of difference, which she attains by transgressing the current limits of "conventional" thinking. If the avant-garde textuality of L'Amer is the product of her own process of "deconditionnement" (L'Amer 22), then we must also recognize its efficacy in producing a similar transformation in the reader. In the end, perhaps the greatest achievement of this text is that, in its examination of identity, difference, gender, and genre in writing, we are left with the certainty that, as Brossard's narrator puts it, "Ecrire je suis unefemme est plein de consequences [To write: I am a woman is heavy with consequences]" (L'Amer 53, TOM 45). In the writing of

L'Amer one of these consequences was the necessity of creating a text which, to borrow Alice Parker's apt phrase, "is (ardently) performative, but [in which] there is little improvisation in the play of signifiers, semantic codes or narrative strategies" (LV 98). Indeed, for Brossard, as for her contemporaries Cixous and Gagnon, the pleasure of the avant-garde text is one that is always ideologically directed toward the goal of writing (for) women in a way that liberates their inventive capacities and desires, even as it fosters their sense of legitimacy and selfhood. Despite the difference of her approach in L'Amer, she can thus be considered as important a "mother of invention" as Cixous and Gagnon, because, like them, she is driven by a sense of necessity and a fundamental feminist commitment that motivates and inspires both her work and her world view.

5 Madwomen and the Mother Tongue: Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels Le feminin ne peut se dire avec les mots de 1'homme. Reste a inventer la neogrammaire, le littoral du chant, un lieu ou elle pourrait dire ce qu'elle connait de la monde, la feminin [sic].

[The feminine cannot be articulated in the words of man. It remains to invent the neogrammar, the littoral of song, a place where she can say what she knows of s/the earth, s/the feminine.] Jeanne Hyvrard1

Since Jeanne Hyvrard began her writing career much later and for different reasons from Cixous, Gagnon, and Brossard, it is all the more fascinating to see how remarkably similar her concerns are to those of other women authors, and how her teaching in the Antilles did anything but distance her from the questions of her time. To reprise the remarks she made in her interview with Euridice Figueiredo quoted in chapter i: "J'ai vu dans la perte de soi-meme qui arrivait aux Antillais ce qui m'etait arrive, a moi, comme femme ... c'est-adire, qu'est-ce qui arrive quand on s'est completement perdu soimeme [I saw in the loss of self that was happening to the Antilleans what had happened to me, as a woman ... that is, without consciously thinking about what happens when one has lost oneself]."2 In these few words, Hyvrard sums up what many women of the time were struggling against as feminist writers and thinkers: the loss of self and independent thinking perpetuated by existing power structures, which can only be overcome by a slow process of recovery - of memory, of thought, of community - or what Brossard calls "deconditionnement." This "deconditioning" is certainly at work in L'Amer, Lueur, and La, as we have seen, for part of each female narrator's development in these works involves a rejection of a certain vision and a search for self-definition and new forms of self-expression. When we read the texts of Jeanne Hyvrard, it becomes obvious, as with the other authors considered here, that one of the principal strengths of her work lies in her constant desire to find other terms - another language, even - with which to express the attempts of he

209 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

narrators to escape the censure of what she calls the current "logarchy" (a term she prefers to "patriarchy"). In her analysis, this dominant system is based on the principles of binary logic, which serves as "1'outil de la domination du monde" (the tool for world domination) but should in no way "etre confondue avec la connaissance" (be confused with knowledge) or truth in our understanding of that world (PC 132).3 Informed by her training and career as a political economist teaching at a Paris secondary school, Hyvrard incorporates criticism of contemporary situations and events into her efforts to rethink, invent, or recover a language in which "les mots signifient aussi leur contraire" (words also mean their opposites),4 a language of "contrairation," rather than negation or contradiction: "La contrairation ne doit pas etre confondue avec la contradiction, ni etre defaite meme par la dialectique. Elle permet de penser ensemble les contraires qu'elle ne dissocie pas. Elle les differencie de la negation qui s'y oppose. Elle permet de penser la totalite, constamment refoulee par la contradiction [Contraration should not be confused with contradiction, nor should it be undone by dialectics. It permits us to think of opposites, which it does not dissociate, together. It differentiates these opposites from negation, which is the opposing process. Contraration permits us to think of the totality, constantly suppressed by contradiction]" (PC 47, her emphasis). Hyvrard's invention of the word "contrairation" is but one example of the ways in which she tries to rethink traditional logical categorization, and it shows to what extent she participates in contemporary debates over the way that language shapes - and limits - human thought. Her idea of Contraration, for example, may be seen in the context of the "deconstructive" strategies elaborated by Jacques Derrida, whose seminal work has involved a re-examination of the limits and limitations of binary logic in the context of Western philosophy and culture. Against this philosophical backdrop, Hyvrard's analysis of the marginalization and frustrations of women seems congruent with much of what feminists of her time were concerned with documenting, as part of their efforts to effect social change beneficial to all. Marcelle Marini, a Parisian professor and scholar who began assigning Hyvrard's novels to her classes as early as 1977, goes so far as to affirm, "La lecture attentive des textes de Jeanne Hyvrard ne se separe pas ... de tout ce qui s'ecrit - s'agit, se reve ou se pense - dans le Mouvement des femmes depuis 1970 [An attentive reading of Jeanne Hyvrard's texts is not separable ... from all that has been written - acted upon, dreamed, or thought - in the Women's Liberation Movement since 1970]."5 While I have noted that in some interviews Hyvrard seems to deny any such active connection, in others

2io Mothers of Invention

she is just as explicit in her denunciation of "the cloistering of French women in the field of literature" and in her awareness of the vital importance of feminism in her own life.6 The premise of this chapter is that, beyond questions of political involvement, Hyvrard's works do indeed form part of a community of writings in which questions of women's identities and desires are central issues affecting the very substance and structure of the text. Although unmistakably marked by the questions of her time, Jeanne Hyvrard's work still stands apart from that of her contemporaries, distinguished by a compellingly lyric yet urgent tone noted by many of her early reviewers. Her writing strikes the reader as immediately distinctive in large part because of the complex, transformative nature of her texts; each one seems to recast the distinctively interrelated thematic and poetic ideas of her previous works in new and different ways, in a constant renewal and intertextual resonance defying all attempts at univocal or linear readings.7 This quality of thematic interweaving and transformation requires new terms of reference, words such as "syncretizing," to describe its motivation and effects. Stripped of its derogatory connotations, syncretism is the "attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices."8 Hyvrard's literary vision seems to display a kind of syncretism, for she refuses clear oppositions and structures in her fiction in favour of a kind of narrative and thematic (con)fusion, thus offering an alternative vision of the self in the context of the history and current socio-economic structures with which we are familiar. Her work is syncretistic also in its attempt to articulate an "univers fusionnel" (PC 95-6); Hyvrard makes a conscious attempt to voice the "fusion" we repress - that "lieu d'avant 1'ordonnancement, le temps d'avant le temps, quand ... j'etais dans son ventre, quand j'etais elle, en son ventre [place before the ordering, the time before time, when ... I was in her belly, when I was her, inside her belly]" (PC 94) - and in so doing produces texts that destabilize tradi tional conceptions of the novel. Her "characters," usually designated only by subject pronouns, seem to transgress the intersubjective boundaries that delimit identity, just as her fluid narrative "structure" seems to escape the familiar ordering principles that readers have come to expect. In both these strategies, her writing is entirely consonant with the textual practices of her contemporaries. Like that of Cixous, Gagnon, and Brossard, Hyvrard's writing seeks to lead the reader into a syncretistic domain of differences and margins, or what she has recently called the "littoral." In her own words, this "littoral" that so many women writers try to access and explore is

211 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels 1'espace de rencontre de deux notions heterogenes. Flou, irregulier, fragmentaire, repute informe, il est de nature a pouvoir s'integrer et aux nomes de la logarchie et aux lieux chai'ques.9 Juxtaposes aux ordres connus, on ne peut jamais obtenir ni exiger d'eux une adequation parfaite. Dans la terminologie logarchique, ils manquent de rigueur, mais c'est justement ce manque qui permet de degager 1'espace d'articulation avec le monde logique. En tant qu'adjectif, littoral signifie participation a plusieurs mondes communicants. Comme nom, il est le lieu ou 1'espace qui sert d'interface a des univers differents ... Les littoraux sont eux-memes de nature differente ... Ils ne peuvent s'exprimer que par le recours a la langue poetique, d'ou leur nom. (PC 128-9) [the meeting space of two heterogeneous notions. Vague, irregular, fragmentary, reputedly formless, it is capable of integration both with the nomes of the logarchy and with chaic spaces. Juxtaposed with known orders, one can never obtain nor demand from them a perfect adequation. In logarchie terminology, they lack rigour, but it is precisely this lack that permits the emergence of the space of articulation with the logical world. As an adjective, littoral means participation in several communicating worlds. As a noun, it is the space or the place that serves as an interface between different universes ... The littorals are themselves of a different nature ... They can only express themselves through recourse to poetic language, hence their name.]

Let us retain from this definition a few important points: the role of poetic language in the expression of a vision that escapes the logical world, a world that would furthermore consider such a vision to be incoherent and incomprehensible, and the persistence with which Hyvrard attempts nonetheless to express her vision and guide us towards this littoral space, the space of difference rather than opposition, the syncretic space from which the originality and poetry of her writing seem to flow. In this chapter I will examine aspects of Jeanne Hyvrard's first three novels, omitting detailed discussion of the Doigts du figuier, which she qualifies as a "parole," thus distinguishing it from the other three texts, which are announced as novels on the cover. Even as it allows us to concentrate on the predominantly prose form that all four of my chosen authors share, this selection finds further motivation on the textual level, for Hyvrard's first novels are narrated by women speaking in the first person/0 whereas her "parole" is not. In short, my analysis will be restricted to her first three texts for pragmatic as well as textual reasons, with the expectation that, because of their obvious linkage in narrative form and content, the three texts will afford a coherent and comprehensive reading appropriate to the

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series of comparisons and analytic conjunctions developed in the preceding chapters. OF MADNESS AND THE ( M ) O T H E R

La folie est considered comme un delire et non une parole, un desordre et non un ordre autre, une anomalie et non une objection de culture, ce qu'elle est pourtant ... La folie est le lieu sans limites. C'est celui du cosmos infini et de la vie en chaorganisation. Elle est pensable en termes rationnels. (PC 86)

[Madness is considered a delirium and not a form of speech, a disorder and not an other order, an anomaly and not a cultural objection, which it is nonetheless ... Madness is a place without limits. It is the place of the infinite cosmos and of life in chaorganization. It is thinkable in rational terms.] Jeanne Hyvrard

The theme of the madwoman, the hysteric, or the invalid is not an unfamiliar one in literature, a fact attested to by such critical studies as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic.11 It is also true, however, that manifestations of women's alienation and "otherness" in Western cultures have been re-evaluated and reinterpreted from a feminist perspective, of which the work of Gilbert and Gubar is a landmark in the domain of literary criticism. Other contemporary reconsiderations include Catherine Clement's essay "La Coupable," which appeared in La Jeune nee, a collaborative work co-authored with Helene Cixous, and Cixous's own theatrical translation of Freud's analysis of Dora's case, entitled Portrait de Dora, both of which were published in 1975. Among French-language women writers, one could cite Marguerite Duras, Marie Cardinal, and Emma Santos in France and Anne Hebert and Monique Bosco in Quebec for their fiction and theatre dealing with the issue of the "madwoman" or the hysteric in modern society. What these authors are pointing to in their critical and creative works is the powerfully disruptive force of women's madness, which, in feminist analysis, has been reinterpreted not only as a symptom of society's repression and elision of women's voices but also and perhaps consequently as a source of knowledge - knowledge of the unconscious and the body which, uncontrolled and uncontrollable in cases of hysteria, for example, becomes more immediately "legible" as an expression of desire and revolt. In short, the "aberration of the mind" and the "otherness" etymologically present in women's "alienation" (from alius, other, and alienatio, or separation, aversion, mental aberration) mark a privileged space from which to reconsider, to think "otherwise" about the situation of women in patriarchal culture and the "other wisdom"

213 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

seemingly denied value by the traditional premium placed on rational thought.12 The exploration of women's alienation or madness is not important to all the women writers of the post-sixties generation. Nicole Brossard, as we have seen, does not privilege this strategy, even though she recognizes the potential value of that which lies outside the realm of logic and sense, because she feels that one must always return from the danger zone of nonsense in order to transform the norms of sense (see figure 4). For her part, Gagnon also rejects the term as it might pertain to her narrator's exploration of her dreams and desires in the deliberately unconventional narrative syntax of Lueur. Madness is, however, an important thematic and metaphorical element in the early works of Jeanne Hyvrard, and the (il)logic that its expression entails contributes to the avant-garde aesthetic she develops. The following section will trace this theme's role in the development of the problematic identities of her narrators and its relation to the other and otherness represented especially by the mother figure, whose presence is also a crucial characteristic linking Hyvrard's three novels of this period. Les Prunes de Cythere, the first novel in the trilogy, opens with the voice of a woman who defines herself in opposition to the world and the people around her. She calls herself "dead" in order to express her experience of the madness that others attribute to her: "Pourquoi faire comme si j'allais guerir. Comme si je n'etais pas deja morte. Depuis longtemps. Depuis toujours peut-etre [Why pretend as if I were going to get better. As if I were not already dead. Long since. Since forever, perhaps]."13 The world that would cure this narrator of her mental illness, however, is in turn characterized by her as unbalanced, or at least suffering from some unease. From the opening of the novel, the world evoked is a troubled one, its anguished cries reaching the narrator through the radio, that privileged means of transmitting the voice: "Pourtant, quelquefois, le monde exterieur me parvient par la radio. Comme pour une naufragee sur un radeau. Le monde exterieur avec son cri et sa fureur. Sa plainte et ses vagissements. Son rale et son hurlement. Mais il me parle comme un correspondant qu'on ne peut plus atteindre [Yet, sometimes, the outside world reaches me through the radio. As to a castaway on a raft. The outside world with its shrieks and fury. Its moaning and wailing. Its groaning and bellowing. But it speaks to me as to an unreachable interlocutor]" (PdeC 9). The woman narrating feels isolated, different from the others and incapable of communicating with them, even though she remains within reach of their voices. She feels like a castaway, a victim of a situation that leaves her powerless to express

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herself or make herself heard. The radio was invented to transmit messages over distances and to facilitate communication between individuals, but here it can no longer link the narrator to the world. The isolation experienced by this woman, despite the presence of a means of communication, and the difference between her moribund state and the surrounding world of anger and pain are highlighted by the hammering, binary rhythm of the phrases in the passage quoted above. This rhythmic repetition is characteristic of Hyvrard's lyric prose, a technique that will be more closely examined in the second part of this chapter. The source of the narrator's feelings of anguish and mental disorder is indicated in part in the opening sentences of the novel, where she speaks of her body, asking why she must continue to act as if "ce sang qui coule sans arret de ma vulve ne provenait pas d'une source tarie depuis longtemps, a des annees-lumiere de ma propre naissance. Comme si je ne savais pas que j'avais toujours ete morte et que c'est pour cela que je ne pouvais pas dormer la vie [this blood that continuously flows from my vulva did not come from a spring long since dry, light years from my own birth. As if I did not know that I had always been dead and that that was why I could not conceive]" (9). The feeling of being dead, a corpse, would seem to stem, first, from the fact that the narrator is sterile and, second, from a feeling of loss, the loss of her own blood going back to an ancestral loss, a "spring run dry" and thus irretrievable, but still indicative of a female ancestry of which this woman is the ultimate issue. Indeed, birth and the capacity to give birth are metaphorically central to this opening passage, for on the following page, we see that this "monde qui bascule" (crumbling world; 10) is one characterized by the "cri des accouchees dont on violente les chairs. La tete du monstre apparait, petit a petit, entre les jambes du revers de 1'ete [scream of delivering mothers whose flesh is being assaulted. The head of the monster appears, little by little, between the legs of the tail end of summer]" (10). From the very beginning of this novel, the central focus is thus on questions of maternity, violence, and sterility, viewed from the perspective of a woman who is trying to understand the difference of her situation and take issue with what is seen as "madness" by those around her. The word "mother" does not appear until the third page of Les Prunes de Cythere, but when it does, it is introduced in a significant declaration by the narrator to those visiting her in the asylum: "Je vous entends quelquefois susurrer. Mauvaise mere. Parasite [I hear you whisper sometimes. Bad mother. Parasite]" (11). This is a surprising observation, given that the narrator has just finished reporting

215 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

her sterility; it calls into question the "truth" of her situation. Should we believe the woman, who has already revealed that she is "inside" in relation to the "monde exterieur" of the opening page, when she says that she is barren? Or do we believe the "tu" who comes "avec 1'enfant" (with the child; 10, note the definite article indicating recognition) and who reminds the narrator that the father she says still visits her is dead? Why would the visitors be whispering that she is a "bad mother" if she is sterile, as she has claimed? If "the child" is not hers, whose is it? Why is she a "bad mother" if, interned against her will, she is forcibly separated from her child? Is this apparent incoherence an indicator that the narrator is insane? According to whom? These are the kinds of conflicting questions raised by the appearance of the "bad mother." In the above context, this reported designation serves to highlight the complex question of authority in the novel, for if the narrator is simply repeating what has been said about her, it remains unclear whether she is thereby affirming or questioning others' ability to name her. Furthermore, the criticism implied by such a designation has a bearing on our opinion of the narrator. We may wonder, for example, if her authority is undermined by the reported testimony of her visitors, or if we should rather be questioning their authority to judge her and her relationship to the maternal. The problem of the "bad mother" raised by this second paragraph in this way becomes central to the development of the novel. The thought of being a mother somehow different from others, not in conformity with the traditions represented by her own mother, will haunt the narrator in her relationships, especially in those with "exemplary" mothers, "meres exemplaires" being an expression that is repeated almost obsessively throughout Les Prunes de Cythere. One of the first identifiable episodes at the beginning of the novel subtly shows the nascent conflict between the image of the "good mother" in society's eyes and an ideal of a real maternal "goodness" implied by the tone of the "mad" narrator's observations: J'emmene 1'enfant au pare pour te faire croire que je vis encore ... Et les autres qui sont la. Vison noir, astrakan, leopard. Cauchemars ... Elles ont les cheveux bien peignes, les ongles faits, les pantalons repasses. Echarpes en sole. Bottes en cuir. Pull en laine. Comment font-elles? ... Cauchemars, elles sont la, surveillant 1'enfant du mercredi. As-tu vu comme je suis une bonne mere. As-tu vu comme j'ai de 1'autorite. As-tu vu comme moi et mon fils ... L'enfant faire-valoir. L'enfant alibi. L'enfant-objet. (16) [I take the child to the park to make you believe I still live ... And the others there. Black mink, astrakhan, leopard. Nightmares ... They have their hair

2i6 Mothers of Invention well combed, their nails done, their pants pressed. Silk scarves. Leather boots. Wool sweater. How do they do it? ... Nightmares, they are there, watching Wednesday's child. Look what a good mother I am. Look at the authority I have. Look at me and my son ... The exploited child. The child alibi. The child-object.]

Here, in a scene very much like the one I highlighted in Brossard's L'Amer (1977), the mothers who take their children to the park are not like the narrator, who seems to want to criticize those for whom the child serves as an occasion to display their own personal merits and their fashionable appearance. For this "madwoman," who goes to the park to prove that she still "lives," it is as if the "Wednesday child" were indistinguishable from the minks and the polished nails of these women, whose attributes are described in a monotonous ternary rhythm. Implicitly, the narrator distinguishes herself from these "good mothers" through her recognition of what she lacks physically and materially (it bears noting that "maternal" and "material" are paronyms). Nevertheless, it is also true that this narrator does not entirely escape the exploitation of the child's presence she sees in the others' behaviour, for she too needs the park outing to prove that she still has the vitality of the "living" to those who would deny it to her. She thus does not escape the "faults" of which the other mothers are guilty, despite her implicitly defined ideal of the "good mother" as one who does not use her child to enhance her status, thinking primarily of her own welfare, as the mothers in this passage seem to do. We are thus forced to recognize that the narrator has an ambiguous relationship with the contemporary practice of motherhood and mothering she portrays. Again, as with the designation of the "bad mother," we are faced with the question of her point of view, which is, at least at this early juncture in the text, mainly evident in an implied opposition to what she describes. Indeed, the very ambivalence of her stance on the question of motherhood so central to her inner conflict reinforces its pivotal role in the dynamics of the narrator's vision and situation. As we have just seen, this narrator, critical of her society's maternal models, is herself not exempt from criticism. In subsequent passages, for example, she will fall victim to the reproaches of her own mother, who, for her part, would like to think she is an "exemplary mother." One passage showing a typical exchange between the narrator and her mother occurs in the same paragraph as the observations on the park outing, at which point the mother tries to make her daughter more "reasonable" by saying: "Mais, tu te rends compte, si tu continues comme ca, tu ne trouveras pas a te marier. Tu vas rester vieille

217 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

fille. Fais un effort ... Non, les cheveux longs, c,a ne te va pas. Pas cette robe, ce n'est pas ton genre ... Essaie quand meme d'etre un peu plus coquette. Tu me fais honte ... Ma petite fille sois raisonnable. Un mari, des enfants. Un metier. C'est deja bien pour une femme [But don't you see, if you go on like this, you will not find a husband. You will be a spinster. Make an effort ... No, long hair doesn't suit you. Not that dress, it's not your style ... Try to be a little more attractive. You make me ashamed ... My little girl, be reasonable. A husband, children. A job. That is already pretty good for a woman]" (17). While we can see from the talk of matrimony and having children that the chronology is disturbed here, what is more important is the mother's insistence on trying to make her daughter conform to the model of a woman "comme les autres" (like the others) as much in her dress as in her behaviour. Still, here, as in the park scene, the daughter refuses the images and values that her mother is trying to promote, for she sees the servitude that such an "exemplary motherhood" entails, as evidenced in her own mother's position and duties. In the narrator's mind, her mother's "exemplarity" has as much (if not more) to do with housework as with keeping up a pleasingly feminine appearance. She questions this lifestyle, saying to her mother: "Mere Angoisse, pourquoi laves-tu sans arret mes habits, meme quand ils ne sont pas sales? Mere Angoisse, pourquoi t'epuises-tu a cirer nos chaussures, faire nos lits, laver notre vaisselle, vider nos ordures, nettoyer notre cuisine, repasser nos vetements, ravauder les accrocs de nos tissus [sic] [Mother Anguish, why are you always washing my clothing, even when they are not dirty? Mother Anguish, why do you tire yourself polishing our shoes, making our beds, washing our dishes, taking out our garbage, cleaning our kitchen, ironing our apparel, mending the rents in our cloth]" (72-3). This narrator refuses to submit herself to the same routine, because, even worse than the alienated feeling she has at the beginning of the novel, she sees it as a death sentence: Maternite triomphante des meres exemplaires ... Les draps sont taches. Hourrah, la mariee etait bien vierge. Tu te marieras. T'auras des enfants. Tu seras heureuse. Epouse et mere. La lumiere du foyer. Chacun en a sa part et tous 1'ont tout entier. La fee du logis. La repriseuse a 1'aiguille d'or. Celle qui fait des miracles avec rien. Tu ressembles a un Botticelli, disait la mere a ses quinze ans. Mais Flore finit a 1'abattoir. (155) [Triumphant maternity of exemplary mothers ... the sheets are stained. Hurray, the bride was a real virgin. You will get married. You'll have children. You will be happy. Wife and mother. The light of the home. Everyone

218 Mothers of Invention gets his share and all of them possess her entirely. The perfect homemaker. The seamstress with the golden needle. She who makes miracles out of nothing. You look like a Botticelli, her mother said when she was fifteen. But Flore ends up in the slaughterhouse.]

Parroting traditional cliches offered to marriageable daughters, the narrator reveals the empty nature of such words and refuses to quietly accept the "slaughterhouse" of wedlock and homemaking which she sees in such passive acceptance of traditional roles. Her refusal of the role that awaits her if she follows in her mother's footsteps thus seems to form at least a part of the "madness" of which she is accused. This revolt against her mother and the destiny she represents becomes increasingly pronounced in the novel, until the narrator can no longer dissociate it from her self-defined "cure." Her revolt is what will safeguard her sanity. Her "guerissance" (curessence), as she terms it, is precisely "le consentement de soi a soi" (the assent of oneself to oneself; 225) of which her refusal to conform or to be exemplary is an essential element: Je ne vous dirai pas que j'entre en guerissance tant que je n'aurai pas vomi Cendrillon et Monroe reunies ... La Belle au Bois Dormant, attendant le prince charmant. Blanche-Neige faisant le menage. Et Garbo, et Dietrich. Toutes ces femmes pour qui vous nous avez elevees, repoussoirs resignes, futures meres exemplaires, crevant a essayer de 1'etre ... Bonne a tout faire. Statufiee. Encadree. Enloquee. Je ne vous dirai pas que j'entre en guerissance. Tant que je ne vous aurai pas crache a la gueule. (233-4) [I will not tell you that I am entering curessence so long as I have not regurgitated Cinderella and Monroe together ... Sleeping Beauty, waiting for Prince Charming. Snow White cleaning house. And Garbo, and Dietrich. All those women for whom you raised us, resigned foils, future exemplary mothers, killing themselves trying ... Dogsbody. Rooted to the spot. Framed. Dressed in tatters. I will not tell you I am entering curessence. So long as I have not spat in your face.]

By her violent rejection of the models, both literary and literal, that are presented to her, this narrator operates a reversal of values: the exemplary mother becomes in truth the "bad mother," a mother who is a "porteuse d'angoisse" (a carrier of anguish; 23) because she demands a conformity that her daughter experiences as detrimental to her personal development and happiness. As Jennifer WaeltiWalter's explains it in her analysis of the mother in the works of Hyvrard, "La mere reduit a zero la vie de sa fille pour pouvoir la marier et toute fille qui resiste a cet aneantissement progressif est

219 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

enfermee cornme folle. Ainsi Mere Angoisse impose un choix a sa fille: elle peut soit etre 'morte' et par consequent acceptable, soit vivre au 'mouroir/ c'est-a-dire a 1'asile - choix impossible entre deux angoisses, entre deux morts [The mother reduces her daughter's life to nothing in order to marry her off, and any daughter resisting this progressive destruction is locked up as crazy. Thus Mother Anguish imposes a choice on her daughter: she can either be 'dead' and thus acceptable, or she can live in the 'death house/ that is, in an asylum - an impossible choice between two forms of anguish, between two deaths]."14 The process of the soul-destroying annihilation practised by such a "Mere Angoisse," as she is often termed in Les Prunes de Cythere, is shown in a number of important ways in the novel. First, we see that every time the daughter tries to celebrate and know her woman's body, her mother intervenes to censure her: "J'ai mes fetes, disait-elle alors en s'endormant heureuse, dans la moiteur de son entrecuisse. Fille, on ne parle pas de cela ... Mais pourquoi, mere, ne pas pavoiser la grande joie? Pourquoi ne pas inonder les draps de ce sang bienheureux? Fille, tu es sale. Tu auras honte de ton corps, de ton sang sexueux [I am having my celebrations, she said, falling asleep happily, in the dampness of her crotch. Girl, one doesn't speak of such things ... But, Mother, why not rejoice in such a great delight? Why not flood the sheets with this blessed blood? Girl, you are dirty. You will be ashamed of your body, of your sexual blood]" (21). Written as if it were a transcription of theatrical dialogue, this dramatic scene of the censure of the girl's "sexual blood" is repeated even when the narrator, witness or victim of a rape - the narration is ambiguous asks her mother "comment ^a s'fait qu'un sexe c.a puisse saigner ... Comment ga s'fait qu'un sexe qa puisse faire mal [how is it that a sex can bleed so ... How is it that a sex can hurt]" (116-17), questions to which her mother offers no answer, leaving the reader to speculate on the half-glimpsed violence seemingly elided by the mother's evasive silence. In addition to such interdiction of the body, the mother also censures her daughter's speech when the latter refuses the "mother tongue" just like the other models given her, preferring to speak patois instead of learning proper French. From such confrontations, we see how the daughter questions the values of her mother, whose voice is only heard to offer criticism or to lay down the law to her daughter. The "suffocation" of the narrator by her mother is not only emotional but also physical, repeatedly "remembered" as the scene of the narrator's difficult birth, "naissance vecue comme une tentative de meurtre [birth experienced as an attempted murder]"15 from the point of view of the daughter: "Je n'entends rien que ta matrice qui

22O Mothers of Invention

se contracte centre mon dos ... Ta matrice se resserre autour de moi, m'etouffe. Tu pleureras en disant, encore une fausse couche. Mais moi, je le sais. Moi, je sais que tu ne veux pas d'enfant. Pourquoi m'empeches-tu de naitre. Mere, laisse-moi vivre. Laisse-moi naitre [I hear nothing but your uterus contracting against my back ... Your womb closes in around me, stifling me. You will cry saying, another miscarriage. But me, I know. I know you don't want another child. Why are you preventing me from being born. Mother, let me live. Let me be born]" (78). The annihilation of the narrator's individuality is figured by the life-or-death struggle in a constricting womb from which she escapes only after enormous efforts toward the end of the novel, a birth image that is also linked to the conception and delivery of the novel itself.16 The authoritarianism and the lack of love of this mother, who would put her daughter in the "mouroir," thus both contribute to the anguish of the narrator, who continually struggles to free herself from such censure of her body and her being. What Jennifer Waelti-Walters seems to forget in her succinct description of the narrator's "impossible choice between two forms of anguish" is that this woman does not in fact choose between the asylum and conformity, at least not definitively. Indeed, at times she seems already interned, as we saw in the opening of the novel, while at others she appears to inhabit the same space as her mother, the space of the "normal" world. This narrator is thus able to be "inside" or "outside" in the course of her chronologically chaotic narrative, just as she seems to have been both sterile and fertile at different moments in the opening paragraphs. It bears noting here that the narrator is never named definitively either, even though she seems at times to call herself "Jeanne la Folle" (Crazy Jeanne), sharing the first name that the author uses as her pseudonym.17 This instability or mutability in the narrator's position persists in the relationship between the mother and her daughter, for one of the daughter's reactions to her mother's treatment is to refuse to procreate in her turn, fearing that her child will suffer the same way she has. This is why the narrator celebrates when she loses her own child, taunting her mother: "Alleluia, 1'enfant meurt ... Tu n'auras jamais de petit-fils pour en faire ta chose, faute d'avoir aime 1'amour. Celuici est sauve. II t'echappe pour toujours. Les esclaves tuent leurs enfants plutot que de les voir entrer en servitude [Hallelujah, the child dies ... You will never have a grandson to make your thing, for lack of having loved love. This one is saved. He escapes you forever. Slaves kill their children rather than see them enter servitude]" (147). The narrator is thus shown to be equally capable of stifling life, even if it is not for the same reasons or under the same auspices that her

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mother does, a contrast the daughter makes explicit by her evocation of the practice of child "euthanasia" among slaves. In part, this passage indicates the narrator's recognition of the reversibility of roles, and of the opportunity for murder in every pregnancy, a realization supported by the scene where the narrator, a fetus strangling in her mother's womb, suddenly becomes the strangler herself: "je suis prise dans tes filets ... Je ne parviens pas a naitre. Je ne veux pas naitre. Je ne veux pas la laisser naitre. Je suis toi. Je suis ce corps qui se contracte si fort qu'elle en etouffe ... Je serre mon ventre, je serre les cuisses, pour la retenir encore quelques instants. Elle se cogne la tete contre les murs et elle aboie [I am caught in your nets ... I cannot manage to be born. I don't want to be born. I don't want to let her be born. I am you. I am this body that contracts so strongly that she is suffocated ... I squeeze my belly, I squeeze my thighs together, to hold her back a few instants more. She bangs her head against the walls and she yells]" (73).l8 It is important to note here that this passage forms part of a series of developments of the relationships and experiences which bind women together, especially mothers and daughters. Through her own vision of the trauma of birth, the narrator sees a common experience of maternity, and she recognizes herself as "[p]areille a nous toutes qui n'avons plus a nous que notre moi commun. Pareille a nous toutes qui ne sommes qu'une. D'avoir ete 1'une dans I'autre. De savoir tout 1'une de I'autre. Car nous avons deja lutte a mort. Les unes contre les autres [the same as all us women who only have our common I to call our own. Same as all us women who are only one. From having been one inside the other. From having known everything about one another. Because we have already fought to the death. One against the other]" (188). This theme of the bringing together of women in the experience of birth and birthing is linked to another image of the mother, suggested in the passage quoted earlier in which the narrator speaks of how some slaves kill their children in order that they not have to suffer servitude. In Les Prunes de Cythere, "Mere Angoisse" also takes on the face of "Mere Afrique," the motherland from which Blacks were separated in the horror of deportation and slavery. This separation from the motherland is also part of the narrator's experience, thus adding the perspective of a Black slave and servant, representative of the victims of colonialism, to that of the White madwoman who desires maternal love. To use Hyvrard's own terminology, this is a "centraration" in the identity of the narrator, who can assume two "skins" (both literally and figuratively), two different class backgrounds, at different moments in the novel.19 "Us m'ont arrachee a toi, Mere Afrique. Ils m'ont deportee outre-raison [They ripped me from you,

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Mother Africa. They deported me beyond reason]" (30), she says at the beginning of the novel, a formulation she takes up again closer to the conclusion, where she accuses her mother (land): "Mere Afrique. Ta chair. La separation. La deportation. Je ne suis pas nee. Us m'ont seulement arrachee a toi, le jour ou tu as renonce a m'etouffer pour me livrer a eux [Mother Africa. Your flesh. Separation. Deportation. I was not born. They only tore me from you, the day that you gave up on suffocating me in order to abandon me to them]" (216). The sustained presence of this particular theme constitutes another representation of the relationship between the mother and her alienated child, while at the same time adding a sociocultural dimension that broadens the novel's perspective, making the personal political as well as the reverse. As a result of the forced separations and deportations effected by the "Whites," the dominant colonizers, the memory of the lost country becomes an ideal, a paradise lost overseas ("outre-mer" - note the presence of the homonym for mother in the French), and also "outre-raison" (beyond reason), for the dominant order is based on a logic of separation from which the Black narrator suffers just as much as the White madwoman. Indeed, the "temps d'avant la grande deportation" (the time before the great deportation; 216) is as much the time of union with the motherland as it is with the maternal body, as the following passage shows: Mere Afrique. Tes enfants sur mon dos. Tes tissus imprimes autour de mes hanches ... Ton rire et tes chansons. Mon peuple racontant ton histoire. Tes jambes emmelees aux miennes. Ta peau centre la haute berge du Niger. Les calebasses de ton corps centre ma chair ... Nos bouches insatiables comme les troupeaux qui coulent entre les cailloux. Mere Afrique. Ma terre heureuse. Au temps d'avant. Au temps de la pleine terre sans rivage et sans ile. Sans frontiere et sans moi. Quand je sentais tes muscles autour de mon corps, ta matrice centre mon dos. Ton cceur centre ma peau. Ton cceur et mon cceur impulsant le meme corps. A la fois toi et moi. L'une dans 1'autre. (216-17) [Mother Africa. Your children on my back. Your printed fabrics around my hips ... Your laughter and your songs. My people telling your story. Your legs entwined in mine. Your skin against the high banks of the Niger. The gourds of your body against my flesh ... Our insatiable mouths like the herds that flow between the rocks. Mother Africa. My happy land. In the time before. In the time of the unbroken earth without shore and without isle. Without borders and without me. When I felt your muscles around my body, your womb against my back. Your heart against my skin. Your heart and my heart driving the same body. You and me at once. One inside the other.]

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Although Jeanne Hyvrard claims to have written this first novel with the goal of making it "un rapport sur la situation economique et sociale des Antilles,"20 in the above passage such a didactic effect disappears in the lyric evocation of the theme of the mother and the maternal body. The curves of the "calebasses," the sensual assonance created by the repetition of the sound "ou" in words such as "autour," "bouches," "trowpeaux," cowlent," and caillowx," and the sonorous presence of "sang" in the repeated use of "sans," beating like the hearts that "impulsent le meme corps" - all of these poetic effects seem to evoke the maternal body, pregnant with the narrator, encircling her with tenderness. This maternal space, "sans rivage et sans ile" is also territory without "il"; it lacks the masculine order that would organize it with "shores" or borders instead of the wholeness and unbroken unity which the narrator desires and associates with the maternal. In this passage the specific commentary on the experience of deportation suffered by the African slaves bound for the Antilles becomes, rather, through the lyric quality of Hyvrard's writing, one of the book's most moving evocations of the theme of the mother. This metaphorical imbalance indeed seems to operate to the advantage of the mother for much of Les Prunes de Cythere; this quality is perhaps one of the reasons for the text's power as a novel more than as a report on the effects of colonialism in the Antilles. Even in those passages where it is the mother's body that reminds the narrator of Africa, rather than the reverse, it is often the maternal theme that seems to gain more depth from the comparison,21 despite the important role played by the colonial context in intensifying the novel's urgent tone. The narrator's nostalgia for the time of union with her motherland is also manifested on a physical level as the desire to return to the womb. Although the mother's womb is recognized to have a murderous capacity, it is nonetheless also seen as a place of tenderness, sensuality, and harmony between the mother and daughter: it is the place of the union that precedes all separation. Consequently, the narrator seems to have conflicting desires in relation to her mother, whom she rejects in her exemplarity, but whose body represents a paradise to regain, a desirable haven from the ills of the world: "Mere, reprends-moi dans le ventre de la foret, quand 1'angoisse cesse enfin. Dans la matrice des feuilles, je n'ai plus peur. Je ne t'en veux plus. Je ne t'en voudrai plus jamais ... J'entends les oiseaux siffloter dans tes entrailles et ce chemin qui mene dehors, je ne veux pas le suivre ... Reprends-moi dans les montagnes ravages de ton corps [Mother, take me back into the belly of the forest, when the anguish ends at last. In the womb of leaves, I am no longer afraid. I

224 Mothers of Invention

am no longer angry at you. I will nevermore be angry at you ... I hear the birds whistling in your entrails and the path that leads out, I don't want to follow it ... Take me back into the ravaged mountains of your body]" (63-4). Here the daughter's love for her mother is expressed as a desire to be physically reunited, as if by returning to the womb, she could also regain an emotional closeness that has been lost. The anger that the daughter feels towards her mother is thus incited not only by the criticisms she receives, as we saw earlier, but also by the fact that she feels deprived of her mother's love, a love symbolized by the nurturing womb-forest which the daughter, imagining herself there again, never wishes to leave. As she later articulates it: "Mere, en dehors de ta chair, tout m'est famine [Mother, outside your flesh, everything is starvation to me]" (165). This latter declaration is but one of many manifestations of a hungering desire that turns incestuous toward the middle of the novel, where the interned madwoman narrates one of the visits her mother makes, adding: C'est par cette bouche avide que je hurle ma faim que rien ne peut combler ... C'est par ce sexe castre que monte le spasme qui deferle sur moi en delire ... Mere, mere, je veux un enfant de toi comme ces poupees russes n'enfantant que des filles a perpetuite. Je veux un enfant de toi. Je suis deja ma propre petite fille. Nous sommes ces poupees, 1'une dans 1'autre a 1'infini, dans nos ventres de bois poll. Je suis toi. Dans ce cri de rage et d'amour. Mere, pourquoi ne m'aimes-tu pas? (123) [It is with this avid mouth that I scream my hunger which nothing can satisfy ... It is from this spayed sex that rises the orgasm which unfolds in my delirium ... Mother, Mother, I want a child from you like those Russian dolls that give birth only to daughters in perpetuity. I want to have your baby. I am already my own granddaughter. We are those dolls, one inside the other to infinity, in our polished wooden wombs. I am you. In this scream of rage and love. Mother, why do you not love me?]

This passage recalls the beginning of the novel in that the narrator evokes a lineage of women of which she is the last descendant, but it does so in order to push the idea further: here the generations n't together reciprocally, each individual seemingly able to play all the roles, even to the point of becoming her own daughter or mother. Still, this idealized "Russian doll" interrelationship is not possible for this narrator, since her mother does not love her enough, or at least not as she desires, a feeling articulated above in the final cry she addresses to her mother.

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It is interesting to note at this juncture that the father is practically absent from the life of the narrator.22 This absence is possibly due to his death, mentioned by those who visit the narrator at the opening of the novel. Nevertheless, this father - dead or alive - does come back in subsequent passages of the text. At one point, it seems that he has some power of salvation in the eyes of the narrator, who says to him: "Pere, pourquoi ne m'as-tu pas dit que tu etais semblable a moi et que je pouvais te rejoindre? Je ne serais pas morte [Father, why didn't you tell me that you were like me and that I could join you? I would not have died]" (iig).23 It would seem that an identification with the father, recognized by him, would have made a difference to the narrator's feelings about what seems to isolate her from others. The recognition of similarity would in a sense place the daughter within the scope of the law, thus eliminating the need for her to conform to rules designed to circumscribe a norm that excludes her difference. Despite this momentary recourse to the father, who of course does not respond, it remains true that the mother and other women occupy a far more important place in the imagination of the principal narrator. Since the father cannot help but be a part of the "ils" whose influence the narrator wishes to escape, she can only truly direct her desire for identification toward other women like herself. It is not to her father, for example, that the daughter turns in the sensuality and joy of the last part of the novel. While it is true that in one passage she shows herself in intimacy with an unnamed male figure (221-4), in previous and subsequent passages it is rather with the body of a woman, the bodies of her "sisters" (220, 225-6, 228-31), that she shares her pleasure and her hopes. By the end of the novel, both the father and the mother have effectively been cast aside in favour of a solidarity with those who have similarly suffered under patriarchal authority. The refusal of the order represented by "Mere Angoisse," prepared from the beginning of the text, turns into an affirmation of difference and of community with the other "[e]mmurees de mere en fille" (walled-in women from mother to daughter; 145): "Alleluia, mes sceurs. Nous guerirons. Des nuits d'angoisse. De la robe blanche des mariees ... De 1'obligation d'etre mere. Des sanglots etouffes. De notre corps tordu. Paralyse. Hurlant. Quand il ne nous reste plus que ce langage pour dire non [Hallelujah, my sisters. We will be cured. Of the nights of anguish. Of the white bridal dress ... Of the obligation to be mothers. Of the stifled sobs. Of our twisted bodies. Paralyzed. Screaming. When that is the only language we have left to say no]" (229). This call to revolt articulated by the narrator is the logical

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conclusion of her analysis of the madness of which she is accused: she understands she is not really alone, "castaway" or castoff by her family, but rather one victim among others of an order that rejects the possibility of difference, of an autonomous or mutable identity for those daughters who dare to express their dissidence. The privileged site of this revolt, as the above passage shows, is the female body that links the individual with her foremothers, her "Russian doll" ancestry which symbolizes centuries of submission to the established order: "Ou allons-nous meres et filles errantes. Poupees de bois emboitees les unes dans les autres jusqu'a la plus vieille qui nous enferme toutes ... Ou allons-nous meres et filles errantes les unes dans les autres, nous contenant les unes dans les autres, nous enfermant les unes dans les autres, nous transmettant les unes aux autres les maladies que nous n'avons pas su retourner centre nos maitres [Where are we going, wandering daughters and mothers. Wooden dolls nested one inside the other going back to the oldest that contains us all... Where are we going, wandering daughters and mothers one inside the other, containing each other, enclosing each other, transmitting to one another the illnesses that we did not know how to turn back on our masters]" (101-2). The female body, in its reproductive capacity, thus represents a link as much with the past as with other women who suffer the same anguish as the narrator. Nonetheless, this body is also a place of imprisonment, since the womb from which the daughter's line issues is also the place from which an issue may be denied, a danger of enclosure that is also present in this doll metaphor, since the "poupees de bois" can be "emfooftees les unes dans les autres" - the phonic insistence on the "bois" underscores this point even as it reminds us of coffins, which are also boxes made of wood. Indeed, this "emboitement" of generations is not without loss. The loss of a kind of liberty is accompanied here by the idea of making a mistake and going astray, both present in the French verb errer (to wander, to be mistaken), which appears in the expression "meres et filles errantes." In the above passage, mothers and daughters are wanderers, losing each other, mistakenly leading each other astray, a description that is certainly apt for the principal narrator and her mother, who never manage to understand each other, even though their < constant exchange of reproaches betrays a desperate need to communicate. It would be simplistic, however, to see only a negative and frustrating experience of the maternal in Les Prunes de Cythere. Indeed, one of the most moving scenes exploring the relationship between mothers and daughters occurs when the narrator - at this point obviously fertile - gives birth with joy and even physical pleasure:

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"L'enfant qui me faisait 1'amour, avec tout son corps. Venu de I'interieur de moi-meme. Glissant entre mes cuisses. L'enfant nu traversant mon sexe. Tu enfanteras dans la douleur, disent-ils. La femme n'a pas de sexe. Tu es maudite et impure. Touche pas a c.a, sinon tu ne grandiras pas. (^a s'arrangera quand tu te marieras. Mais toi, ma petite fille, hi m'as fait 1'amour mieux que tout autre [The child that made love to me with her whole body. Coming from inside me. Sliding between my thighs. The naked child travelling across my sex. You will give birth in pain, they say. Woman does not have a sex. You are damned and impure. Don't touch that, or you will never grow up. It will get better when you get married. But you, my little girl, you made love to me better than anyone]" (215). This orgasmic delivery is affirmed despite the censure of the narrator's body by the voices of authority that intervene here almost as if to prevent the birth of the child. The narrator, by articulating the joy of this moment, transgresses even as she recognizes their interdiction. Furthermore, she offers here an experience quite different from her own struggle either to leave the stranglehold of her mother's womb or to remain there so as to escape a painful separation.24 Les Prunes de Cyihere offers a multiplicity of images of the mother and the maternal body, which can be both dangerous and nurturing, submissive to a stifling order and a site of revolt against that order, an earthly paradise forever lost like the African motherland and a neverending source of sensual pleasures for the woman who listens to her desires. Because of the complexity of the images and the many points of view of and on the mother in Hyvrard's text, it is virtually impossible to apply an analytic method such as a Freudian interpretation to the mother-daughter relationship developed here. The insistence on the polyvalence of the maternal body and the fact that the narrative voice seems to circulate freely from one point of view to another in the same scene, as well as in different passages of the text, seem designed to point out the limitations of "Oedipal" logic: all the figures and roles of the mother seem to coexist virtually, repeating and intertwining without fixed chronology or strictly linear development from one relationship to another between the mother(s) and daughter (s). The protecting womb is also the stifling one, and the reader is unable to separate them definitively, to assign a permanent function to one voice or another. The novel indeed presents a "contraration" in the portrayal of the narrating "I," who alternates between sterility and fecundity or between the positions of victim and persecutor, mother and daughter, witness and lover, slave and madwoman. As Hyvrard will put it in La Pensee corps under the entry on "fusion," "Comment nommer autrement le lieu d'avant rordonnancement, le temps d'avant le temps,

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quand rien ne coule qui puisse separer du grand-tout, 1'autre n'etant pas pergu, et la naissance inouie? Comment nommer autrement, quand j'etais dans son ventre, quand j'etais elle, en son ventre? Comment le dire autrement que par cette profusion? [How otherwise to name the place from before the ordering, the time before time, when nothing flowed that could be separated from the great-all, the other being imperceptible, and birth unheard-of? How otherwise to name (the time) when I was in her belly, when I was her, inside her belly? How to say it otherwise than with this profusion?]" (PC 94). At the close of the novel, however, there is no reconciliation (or fusion) with the mother as one might wish after the scenes of pleasure and joy mentioned earlier. The last two pages of Les Prunes de Cythere are, rather, an evocation of the difficulty with which the narrator maintains her position of revolt: she foresees the day when, "de fatigue ou d'inattention" (from fatigue or inattentiveness; 237), she will be cured in a kind of "mort tres douce. A peine un renoncement. Quelque chose comme le glissement hors de soi-meme ... Us diront, elle s'est enfin rendue a la raison. Et je serai tout a fait morte [very gentle death. Hardly a renunciation. Something like a slipping outside oneself ... They will say, she has finally come to her senses. And I will be completely dead]" (237-8). The "glissement hors de soimeme" is also a kind of delivery or birth, and it reminds the reader of the link between birth and the deathlike state of the narrator established at the opening of the book. To paraphrase Jennifer WaeltiWalters's observations, in a certain sense Les Prunes de Cythere is a circular text, an enclosure within which the narrator struggles and tries with limited success to make sense of the voices around her and those she assumes herself in the course of her narration.25 Still, this conclusion is only a possible outcome of her revolt, for the last two paragraphs of the novel are written in the future tense, and thus are not yet realized. We do not know whether the predictions of the eventual submission of the narrator are accurate, or if this is indeed the choice she will ultimately make. If anything, the opening of Hyvrard's next novel, Mere la mort (Mother Death), seems to contradict such projections, beginning as it does with the affirmation that the danger of a cure has been avoided: "Mere la mort, n'aie pas peur. Je ne suis pas guerie [Mother death, don't be afraid. I'm not cured]" (MM 9, MD i), she says. Here a female first-person narrator again places herself in dialogue with another woman, predominantly referred to as "Mere la mort" in this text.26 These are not the only similarities between the novels, however, for the opening emotions and images of Mere la mort, of which the above passage is an example, are surprisingly similar to those of Les Prunes

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de Cyihere, albeit expressed somewhat less passively. For example, the scene is again one of an opposition between the narrator and the others around her, here portrayed as the active agents of her suffering, whereas in the first book her suffering was in the form of "shipwrecked" isolation. Similarly, the narrator again openly declares her sterility, here represented by the metaphor of wax which has "coule dans [son] ventre pour le sceller a jamais [flowed into (her) belly and sealed it forever]" (MM 9, MD i) from the birthday candles that hav been lit on her sacrificial body, a transformation of the painful birth imagery of the first novel. Finally, there is the image of menstrual blood, which in Mere la mort has become the narrator's "unique bonheur" (only bit of good fortune) and "ultime protestation" (ultimate protest; MM 10, MD 2), whereas in the previous novel it was only the link to a dead past. The uncertain ending of the first novel seems to find an answer or at least a kind of echo in the second, refusing the closure traditional to novels that are not explicitly part of a "series."27 In Mere la mort the past - both in terms of the preceding text and within the new narrative - remains important, and once again it is the figure of the mother who is most closely associated with it. In the third paragraph the narrator runs to Mere la mort, asking to return to the "voutes gothiques" (Gothic arches) of her body and demanding that she teach her about the forgotten language, "la langue sedimentee dans les golfes de [sa] memoire [the language that has sedimented in the gulfs of (her) memory]" (MM 10, MD 2). Both thes demands associate the mother with the past, making of her body an archaic church, a site of faith and source of remembrance of lost or archaic knowledge. These positive, even sacred, qualities are counterbalanced by those same threatening aspects of the mother that were developed in Les Prunes de Cythere, namely, the capacity to stifle the daughter in the very womb she idealizes and to which she wishes to return. This (s)mothering tendency is most often attributed to an "elle" in this novel, but this "elle" is at some points significantly associated with a "tu" who is none other than Mother Death: "Je suis dans sa matrice. Elle ne veut pas que je naisse. Elle m'etouffe. Je disparais en elle ... J'ai soif. J'ai chaud. J'aifaim. Elle m'aspire pour me dissoudre dans son corps. Pour me digerer dans sa chair ... Le baiser de sa matrice qui m'absorbe ... Dans ton ventre, j'avais faim et soif et chaud [I am in her womb. She doesn't want me to be born. She's smothering me. I disappear in her ... I'm thirsty. I'm hot. I'm hungry. She inhales me to dissolve me in her body. To digest me in her flesh ... The kiss of her womb absorbing me ... I was hungry and thirsty and hot in your belly" (MM 78, emphasis added; MD 52). By placing the "elle" in

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parallel with the "tu" addressing Mother Death, through the use of the synonyms "womb" and "belly" (in Laurie Edson's translation), and by repeating the nature of her suffering in each, the narrator conflates the two women, who are both posited as murderous in their intent by the narrator claiming to be their victim. Whereas in Les Prunes de Cythere the madness experienced by the narrator was induced or at least exacerbated by the repressive influence of the mother, in part internalized as a memory of suffocation, in Mere la mort the narrator's pain and alienation are attributed much more exclusively to the life and death struggle in the womb. The new element in the drama that seems to be the cause or sign of her "madness" here is what she calls the "red acids," which were apparently transmitted to her at that crucial time: "La matrice de nouveau contractee. Les acides rouges qui suintent. Les acides rouges qui penetrent mon corps gestant. Les acides rouges entres dans ma tete pour toujours. Le mouvement infernal [The womb contracting again. Red acids oozing. Red acids penetrating my gestating body. Red acids entering my head forever. The infernal movement]" (MM 1 MD 5). That these corrosive fluids were deliberately released by the mother is the next step in the narrator's incrimination of the bad mother who so dominated the first novel: "Les acides rouges qu'elle distillait quand j'etais dans son ventre pour m'empecher de vivre. Les acides rouges qu'elle secrete dans mes meandres pour me paralyser. La memoire d'une lutte a mort ... Les acides rouges qui traversent le placenta pour me tuer. Us sont restes [The red acids she secreted to prevent me from living when I was in her belly. The red acids she secretes in my meanders to paralyze me. Memory of a fight to the finish ... Red acids crossing the placenta to kill me. They've remained there]" (MM 28, MD 15-16). These acids are at least in par the cause of the narrator's suffering, and most certainly of her own perception of her madness, for as she says, they are responsible for "la tranquille erosion de la falaise de ma raison [quietly eroding the cliff of my reason]" (MM 23, MD 12). Like the one in Les Prunes de Cythere, this narrator is also guilty of murdering her unborn children, a sign of her revolt against those who would have her reproduce "normally," thus maintaining the ambiguity of the representation of the narrators' maternal instincts from one text to the next. The womb in Mere la mort is nonetheless not an unequivocal site of violence, any more than it was in Les Prunes de Cythere. As with many of the themes developed in these novels, it too has a positive connotation, in this instance as a source of continuity and life, figured repeatedly in this second book by the phrase: "le petit battement dans le ventre des femmes [the tiny beating in women's bellies]" (MM 12

231 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

21, 2.6, 27, et passim; MD 3). This phrase punctuates the text right through to the closing pages, giving it a rhythm not unlike the heartbeat or the pulse of life to which it seems to refer. Moreover, it is what seems to link women in a positive way, a life force emanating from the female body which defies all attempts to silence it. While "the others" (an "ils" to which we shall return) may fear it, the narrator sees this as more than a corporeal connection between women, affirming, "J'aime le sang de mon ventre. J'y entends le battement profond de notre memoire enfouie [I like the blood from my belly. I hear the deep throbbing of our buried memory there]" (MM 145, MD 100). Corporeal experience is thus a source of knowledge and a link to memory, which is, as we have already noted, associated with the "Mere la mort" figure. When the narrator runs towards Mere la mort, however, she is looking for more than an individual memory. As she puts it, she is "[r]echerchant le petit battement qu'ils n'ont pas pu eteindre. Le petit battement qui survit dans les legendes transformees [Searching for the tiny beating they haven't been able to stifle. The tiny beating that survives in transformed legends" (MM 90, MD 6 Legends, that privileged form of collective memory, thus have the power to transmit this life force just as bodies do; this power is perhaps a motivation for the frequent allusions to mythic manifestations of mothers, daughters, and goddesses - biblical, classical, and otherwise - that appear in this novel. Indeed, the narrator of Mere la mort seems desperate to recover some of these legends, so as to find other ways to interpret her situation and avoid submitting to others' definitions of her existence. One of the most persistent of these mythic recollections - one is tempted to say "reconnections" - is that of the separation of Demeter and Persephone through the abduction of the latter by Hades.28 For the narrator, this separation myth has particular meaning, for she sees in it a way to redefine and thus recover the relationship she shared with her mother before the violence and separation of birth: La mere, la fille. Protegeant les moissons. La fille cueillait des fleurs dans les champs. La mere au ventre gigantesque. Ou ai-je vu qu'elle regnait sur la terre et les enfers. Ou ai-je vu qu'au debut elles n'etaient qu'une? Mais non. Les envahisseurs sont venus. Un homme avec ses chevaux noirs et il a emmene la fille. Les envahisseurs sont venus. Ils ont dit qu'elles etaient deux. Ils en ont entraine une. L'avons-nous ensemble invente? Ou moi seule? Mere et fille. Une seule. (MM 89) [Mother, daughter. Watching over the harvests. The daughter was gathering the flowers in the fields. The mother with a gigantic belly. Where did I read that she ruled over the earth and Hades? Where did I read that in the beginning

232 Mothers of Invention they were one and the same person? But no. The invaders came. A man with his black horses, and he carried off the daughter. The invaders came. They said there were two women. They carried one of them away. Did we invent it together? Or I alone? Mother and daughter. One single person.] (MD 60)

This passage, addressed to Mere la mort in the second person, reflects the effort of the narrator to situate herself in relation to her mother, postulating a connection between them. If Demeter and Persephone were one, she seems to be saying, then she and Mere la mort must have been also, and not only during the physical union of pregnancy. Phonemically, this passage reveals the anguish of this questioning, for the "moisson" of the goddesses is echoed by the uncertain "moi seule" of the last line, while the separation of the comma between the mother and daughter, juxtaposing them ("La mere, la fille"), becomes the conjunction "et" in the repetition at the end, establishing the connection further reinforced by the final "Une seule" affirmation. The search for identification through myths is nonetheless not an entirely satisfying one, for, while they may provide models of positive mother-daughter relationships, they do not always completely reassure the narrator of the validity of her interpretation and memory, as the presence of her questions in the above passage demonstrates. The narrator's search for mythic feminine models and the importance of memory in her relationship with Mere la mort are both linked to the problematic of identity. As we saw from the novel's opening, the narrator initially defines herself in opposition to the "others" and to Mother Death, although it is obvious that her relationship with the latter is one of desire rather than of rejection. Indeed, despite the dangers of suffocation in the womb, it is the "ils" who turn out to be far more dangerous and threatening to the narrator in her "madness." Her quest for an understanding of herself is hampered at every turn by those who would "cure" her, who wish to diagnose her malady; the "ils" often seem to be psychiatrists who constantly promise her relief from suffering, provided that she conforms to their standards and expectations. This conflict between the "ils" and the narrator seems to take the place of the repression attributed to the mother figure and the colonizers in Les Prunes de Cythere. The narrator here attributes to patriarchal society and its structures the greatest responsibility for the practices and behaviours that alienate her. While the "red acids" certainly contribute physically to her anguish, the "ils" are more consistently evoked as a source of her frustration and suffering. In this respect at least, Mere la mort is the most militant of Hyvrard's early texts, for the criticisms of the order that the masculine plural pronoun represents, while integrated into the narrator's search for

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understanding of herself and her situation, are quite obviously reflections of a broader feminist critique of patriarchy and logocentrism. Interned in an asylum, she realizes that she disagrees with her doctors and so refuses their attempts to rehabilitate her. "Us disent qu'ils vont me guerir. Mais c'est pour me normaliser. Us disent que je suis folle. Mais c'est pour ne pas entendre ma voix [They say they are going to cure me. But it's to normalize me. They say I'm mad. But it's so they don't have to hear my voice]" (MM 37, MD 22), she says, rejectin attempts to silence her difference, which is perceived as madness, a pattern we have already noted in Les Prunes de Cythere. In Mere la mort, however, this refusal and revolt is much more explicit and angry, erupting towards the end in a barrage of outraged questions: Qui sont-ils? Qu'ont-ils aime? Qu'ont-ils souffert? Qui sont-ils, ceux-la qui disent que j'ai une maladie comme si d'un mot ils allaient me faire taire? ... Qu'ont-ils fait les normaux devant les bras tendus de leur mere, de leur soeur, de leur femme, de leur fille, de leur amante? Qui sont-ils ceux qui disent que nous sommes malades? Que savent-ils du corps des femmes, ceux-la qui parlent a notre place? Que savent-ils de notre amour? Qu'ont-ils fait de leur vie, ceux-la qui disent que nous sommes/ows ... pour se debarrasser de nous? Qui sont-ils ceux-la qui choisissent dans ce que nous avons a dire pour n'entendre que ce qu'ils peuvent supporter? (MM 109, emphasis added) [Who are they? What have they loved? What have they suffered? Who are those men who say I have an illness, as if they could silence me with one word? ... What have they done, those oh-so-normal men, in response to the open arms of their mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, lovers? Who are those men who say we're sick? What do they know about women's bodies, those men who speak in our place? What do they know of our love? What have they done with their lives, those men who say we're mad ... so they can be rid of us? Who are those men who fix on words when we speak and hear only what they can tolerate?] (MD 74-5)

As this passage shows, the narrator speaks not only of women, silenced and marginalized by those men who pretend to define the limits of normality, but also, as shown by her use of masculine form of "fou," of all those who are deemed abnormal, all the so-called insane, who may have something valid to say for themselves but who are never heard. This inclusion of the collective in the protestations of the narrator is what gives Hyvrard's text its militant edge, recalling in its use of the "nous" the other novels examined in this study: Ils ne pergoivent meme pas notre difference. Ou plutot, ils la nient. Leur pouvoir repose sur cette negation. Ils n'entendent pas nos identites balbutiantes cherchant dans la nuit. Ils n'entendent pas ce refus meme de 1'identite

234 Mothers of Invention quand il debouche sur la montagne. Ils ne peuvent pas 1'entendre. Car ils n'ecoutent que ce qui nous asservit ... Prenons courage, les enfollees. Regardons-les s'approprier nos folies pour s'en faire valoir ... Recuperons la parole qu'ils nous ont arrachee et clamons nos differences puisque c'est de cela que nous mourons. (MM 124) [They don't even perceive our difference. Or rather, they deny it. Their power is based on this negation. They don't hear our identities stuttering, seeking in the night. They don't hear this very refusal of identity when it emerges on the mountain. They can't hear it. Because they hear only what subjugates us ... Take courage, maddenedwomen. Let's watch them appropriate our madness to show off ... Let's recover the speech they tore from us and let's cry out our difference since that's the reason we're dying.] (MD 85) Historically, martyrdom at the hands of an oppressor is too often the fate of dissidents and their leaders, a fate that can ultimately serve to strengthen collective resolve. Beyond the repressive order the narrator is struggling to destabilize, however, is an insistence on the question of identity that is equally if not more important. Indeed, if the metaphor of Africa and the colonized is the particularity of the first book, the search for an identity, particularly through memory and myth, is what concerns the narrator in Mere la mort. Significantly, as the above passage indicates, the search for an identity, termed "the missing piece" (MD 63) by the narrator, is accompanied by a para doxical rejection of identity as limiting, as a tool in the hands of the "oppressors" who appropriate through naming: La piece qui manque est une piece de trop. Le je et le moi par erreur. Le je impossible a trouver nous enfolle. Mais le je n'existe pas. C'est le je qui permet d'etre nomme et d'etre approprie. Ils nous enfollent parce qu'ils nous approprient... [et] parce qu'ils nous refusent la difference. Ils nous enfollent parce qu'ils s'obstinent a croire que le je existe ... Plus d'identite. Plus de pouvoir. Nous sommes libres. (MM 95) [The missing piece is one piece too many. The I and the me by mistake. The impossible-to-find I drives us mad. But the I doesn't exist. It's the I that allows us to be named and appropriated. They drive us mad because they appropriate us ... because they deny us difference. They drive us mad because they persist in believing that the I exists ... No more identity. No more power. We are free.] (MD 64) In order to recover freedom and escape appropriation, the narrator seems to advocate the refusal of identity, the refusal to be named or fixed. One of the ways she uses to achieve this seems to be an insistence on the multiple subject and the permeability of the apparent

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barriers separating subjectivities from each other and the world. The relationship between the mother and her unborn child is, of course, central here, for it represents a unity that the narrator idealizes and wishes to recover: "Les fcetus. Le grand retour. Nous sommes deux ... Nous sommes mille ... Un accouchement peut-etre. Une delivrance surement ... Mille moi eclates. Un eventail qui se deplie. Le je qui s'ouvre multicoloure, eventant mon angoisse ... Multipliant mes noms, je suis toujours 1'autre [Fetuses. The great return. There are two of us ... A thousand of us ... A birth perhaps. A delivery, surely ... Explosion of a thousand me's. A fan unfolding. A multicoloured I opening, airing my anguish ... Multiplying my names, I'm always the other]" (MM 15-16, MD 6). Whereas in the first novel the first-perso narrator alternated among several subject positions, in Mere la mort it seems rather that the narrator claims her multiplicity without enacting it. While there are isolated moments where the "je" is masculine rather than feminine (MM 93-4) or where the narrator posits interpen etration between the first and second persons when she wishes to rejoin Mother Death (MM 122), taken as a whole, this narrative seems to have its source in a far more cohesive and stable speaking subject than was evident in Les Prunes de Cythere. Indeed, even if the narrator claims that "je ne suis personne. Je leur echappe tout a fait [I'm nobody. I escape them completely]" (MM 101, MD 68), the "je" is stil she who narrates and who cannot escape using the first-person pronoun to affirm her narration, in opposition to the "tu" of Mere la mort and the "ils" whose logic and language she tries to reject. Even at the end of the book, the narrator is not making her own way independently, but rather with a "tu" to whom she beckons and whose hand she holds as they ford the river. This is a telling scene, for the "je" is thus portrayed as inseparable from the "tu," unable to go on without such deictic, if not physical, support for her journey. Given that much of the narrative is addressed to the Mother Death figure as "tu," this connection with an interlocutor appears vital, as if the narrator were unable or unwilling to sustain the isolation from others that marks the opening of Les Prunes de Cythere. She refuses not to have at least one person, one "other" - in addition to the reader, of course - listen to her tale. Indeed, given that the reader may feel personally included by the second-person form of address, there is a sense in which the narrator, like the author, needs the virtual presence of a reader to legitimate the narration, a phenomenon that blurs the distinction between what is "inside" and what is "outside" the text. The narrator's relationship to the "tu" of the other and most notably, a silent other whose words are only reported to the reader (an equally silent audience from the writer's perspective)

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- is thus based on a need to be heard and believed. By addressing an interlocutor, the narrator affirms herself through the other in a way that reaches beyond the narrative frame to the reader, implicating the latter and consequently heightening the relevance and urgency of her search for a better understanding of the world of alienation that she portrays.29 The narrative opening of La Meurtritude returns both to the images that marked the beginnings of the previous novels and to the conclusion of Mere la mort, where the narrator is crossing a river. While we are again presented with a female, first-person narrator in conflict with the demands of an "ils" and who, despite the menstrual blood which guarantees her life, still claims she is "deja morte/'30 this time the theme of motherhood in its relation to identity is more explicitly articulated. The first paragraph is entirely devoted to the narrator's refusal to comply with demands that she bear another child, because she has three daughters already and fears another pregnancy will kill her. It is the daughters and their relationship to motherhood that destabilize this particular opening, for while one daughter is both "la mere d'une mere de filles" (the mother of a mother of daughters) and "la mere des mortes" (the mother of the dead women), the second is "sa propre fille" (her own daughter) and the third "n'en eut point" (had none; LM 15). This set of relationships, resonant of the "Russian dolls" motif in Mere la mort, reiterates the concepts developed in the previous novels of the permeability of mothers' and daughters' identities and of the importance of the female lineage. There is no mention of fathers here, making it seem as if we are being given a genealogy of motherhood in parody of the genealogical lists of fathers in the Bible's version of history. This interpretation is supported by the references to an originary "mere des eaux" (mother of the waters) who is "plus vieille que la terre" (older than the earth; 15), as well as by the problematic introductory passage that precedes the beginning of the narrative. The question of motherhood is fundamentally, though not exclusively, one of origins and beginnings, which are played out in the very structure of this novel's presentation. To be accurate, the novel has two beginnings, the second of which is the narrative undertaken by the female narrator cited above. The "first" beginning lies, in a sense, outside the fictional space, for while it comes after the title page, which designates the text as a novel, it is followed by the dedication "A une femme morte" (To a dead woman; 13), an unusual placement of the dedication that gives what precedes it the status of a prologue or a long epigraph - or at least of material of a different substance and authority than the main text of the novel.31 The content of this prologue is equally problematic, for it is a complete rewriting

237 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

or revision of the beginning of Genesis, that very story of origins at the heart of the Judeo-Christian world view. In Hyvrard's La Meurtritude the first chapter of Genesis and a portion of the second are rewritten in such a way as to underscore the logic of separation that governs this historically crucial account of Creation. While the traditional form of the sentences is conserved, the concrete terms used in the Bible are consistently replaced by abstractions, as Jennifer WaeltiWalters has pointed out,32 such that the earth becomes "le pensable" (the thinkable) or "Affirmation," while the waters are "Contrairations" (8), and the male and female whom God created become the two principles of reason, "[a]nalytique et synthetique" (10) respectively. It is worth noting that the portion of Genesis rewritten here is the less well known "First Creation," where the two sexes are created together, and not the later one in which Eve is made as an afterthought from Adam's rib.33 Such an abstract rewriting, while confusing enough to become parodic at times, is also subversive in a more serious way, for not only does it challenge the sanctity of the Creation myth, but it also exposes an inherent confusion at the origin, in which God plays the role of organizer and namer of things, the original logic being one of arbitrary separation.34 The names given serve symbolically to establish the knowable for man, who, because a land creature of "affirmative" reasoning, is thus given access to only that part of the universe and not to the sea of "contrarations" born of the "confusion" that was also at the origin (7). In essence, Hyvrard is questioning not only the idea of a precise origin and the function of the biblical Creation myth but also the primacy of man's "analytic" reason; her rewriting functions as a preparation for the "other," "synthetic" or "fusional" logic of her narrator, whose claim to truth is thus supported by a story of origins and given weight by the truth value of the sacred text she has recast. She is thus both affirming a tradition and rewriting it in such a way as to leave herself more space for the articulation and legitimation of difference. This difference is the main reason why the narrator of La Meurtritude feels marginalized. While there are still moments in which she reports the words of those who call her mad, her concern in this novel is less with refuting them directly than with reconnecting with the past, the memories, and the origin that constitute her difference. This question of origins is associated with the mother figure, as we have seen, but in this novel the mother figure is no longer a threatening Mere la mort: she is a "vieille femme" (old woman; 17) whom the narrator addresses as "tu" and who, paralyzed and maimed, will nonetheless serve to encourage the narrator in her quest during the entire course of the narration.

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The narrator's quest in this novel is, among other things, to find a particular woman, one essential to her understanding of her situation and herself. What we find, in echo of the previous novels, is that this woman changes identities, depending on the direction of the narrator 's reflections. At times, for example, the woman is lost or "emmuree dans un pressoir" (walled up in a winepress; 39),35 while at others she is a childhood playmate - alternately "la femme de trois ans" (the three-year-old woman; 55) and "la petite fille de trente mille ans" (the thirty-thousand-year-old little girl), abandoned at some crucial time by the narrator (77). Later still, she will be identified as the "tu," the old woman who encourages the narrator in her search (12832), a development that supports my earlier claim, in the context of Mere la mart, of the necessity of the second-person "other" to the narrator's project. The transformations of the object of her search echo those of the narrator herself, figured by the seven stages of purification in alchemy.36 These seven metaphoric "deaths" mark the narrator's escape from repression and submission into the realm of autonomous understanding and knowledge, in a kind of rebirth and purification ritual similar to that envisioned by Cixous in La through the lens of ancient Egyptian religious practices. In La Meurtritude this alternative, archaic source of knowledge seems to be associated with the narrator's desire to recover and preserve memories that are both hers and belonging to women of whom she is a descendant, and with whom she shares the experience of alienation, a "lignee d'enfollees" (lineage of maddenedwomen; 78): Us veulent nous guerir. De quoi? Ils inventent nos maladies pour nous faire oublier. Ils inventent nos symptomes pour refroidir notre ardeur. Ils inventent des remedes pour nous faire taire ... Ils disent qu'ils ont des remedes. Nous n'en voulons point. Nous avons au front le signe de 1'eternite. Les acides rouges de la mort et de la renaissance. L'or des alchimistes. La pierre philosophale. La memoire ... La matiere de la pierre de folie: la molecule du souvenir. (104-5) [They want to cure us. Of what? They invent our illnesses in order that we may be forgotten. They invent our symptoms to cool our ardour. They invent remedies to shut us up ... They say they have remedies. We don't want them. We have the sign of eternity on our foreheads. The red acids of death and rebirth. The gold of alchemists. The philosopher's stone. Memory ... The material of the stone of madness: the molecule of remembrance.]

As this passage shows, the discovery of a suppressed cultural memory is both what links women together and what differentiates them, as their particular relation to memory serves as a mark of their

239 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

alienation. The death that the red acids of madness entail is not seen as definitive, however, for it is followed by a "renaissance" just like that sought through alchemical initiation. The above passage reiterates what I observed in Mere la mart, in that the alternative knowledge of the narrator and other women is opposed to and by the logic of the men, those who control definitions and naming, including that of the narrator's "madness." In La Meurtritude, however, this collective other is accompanied by the "femme en mauve," who appeared occasionally in Mere la mort associated with the stifling mother (see MM 76 and 156), but who here fully takes on all the qualities of persecutor and perpetrator of the repressive order that the narrator hopes to escape. In the many scenes of pursuit of the fleeing narrator, it is this female figure who seems most cruel, for the narrator often reports her disturbing laughter and her calls for the cure and even the death of the narrator (see LM 85, 109, 112, et passim). The presence of the "femme en mauve" seems to displace some of the negative images previously attached to the mother, for the stifling womb and the mother's criticism are both noticeably less present in this novel than in the previous two. Similarly, the development of the narrator's madness is less important than previously, perhaps because the narrative has gained two new elements in the couple of Frangois and Victorine, who are not only the closest thing to "traditional" characters that has appeared so far, but who also seem to serve as surrogate players in the drama of the narrator, taking on her difficulties and even her insanity. Indeed, as the narrative of Francois and Victorine unfolds, we find striking parallels between Victorine's situation and the narrator's: they both have three daughters who must leave home, abandoning their mother, who is ill in some way. Victorine's daughters also share a relationship to death very similar to that described by the narrator in her litany of daughters at the beginning of the novel, for Victorine's eldest is "pour mourir. La deuxieme pour etre morte [in order to die. The second in order to be dead]," and "[l]a troisieme pour oublier [the third in order to forget]" (LM 67), the last being just like the narrator's youngest, who "ne voulait pas se souvenir [did not want to remember]" (15). Moreover, Victorine's illness very much resembles a kind of hysteria, for she becomes aphonic and sporadically paralyzed (74-5). Her only means of expression then becomes her body, and the description of this condition given by the narrator allows us to see how much they have in common - how much, in a sense, Victorine takes on the "madness" that has been the narrator's until now: Victorine la nuit ... Le corps casse. Les jambes raidies ... Les mains refractaires. La langue perdue ... Victorine tentant de temoigner par son corps. Dans

240 Mothers of Invention son corps. Malgre son corps ... Quoi done? Ce que la langue ne petit dire. La possession. La denomination. L'appropriation. Victorine tentant de dire le pouvoir. Tentant de resister au pouvoir. Tentant de survivre au pouvoir. Victorine cherchant a dire. L'autre chose. L'autre part. L'autre monde. (89-90) [Victorine at night ... The broken body. The stiff legs ... The hands resistant. The lost tongue ... Victorine trying to bear witness with her body. In her body. Despite her body ... What then? What language cannot say. Possession. Naming. Appropriation. Victorine trying to articulate power. Trying to resist power. Trying to survive power. Victorine looking to tell. The something else. The elsewhere. The other world.]

In a very economical way, Hyvrard thus makes the suffering and physical protestations of Victorine a figuration of the narrator's own, allowing her narrator to go on with the search for alternative modes of self-expression without having to deal as directly with the madness that was such an important part of the narrators' struggles in the previous novels. To return to the figure of the mother, it is the "tu" who seems to be invested with a guiding capacity and a privileged relationship to the knowledge sought by the narrator. In the first part of the novel, the narrator visits the paralyzed old woman in the "mouroir," a nowfamiliar term from Les Prunes de Cythere. Faced with this woman's impending death, the narrator affirms their affective connection, a gesture we recognize from the development of the mother-daughter myths in Mere la mart: "Us nous ont separees. Mais nous nous aimons quand meme ... Nos mains se font 1'amour. Nos cheveux aussi. Nos corps aussi peut-etre ... Tes yeux me transmettent la memoire [They separated us. But we love each other anyway ... Our hands make love. Our hair also. Our bodies too perhaps ... Your eyes pass memory on to me]" (26). The memory that the old woman has the power to transmit is directly relevant to the narrator's search for the "lost woman," prompting her to say to her mentor: "Qu'est-il arrive a cette femme de trois ans? ... Tu sais ce qui est arrive. Tu le sais depuis toujours. C'est pour 1'apprendre que je viens te voir. Tu dis que ce n'est pas la peine car je le sais deja [What happened to that three-year-old woman? ... You know what happened. You have always known it. It is to find out that I come to see you. You say not to bother because I know it already]" (77). In fact, as the narrator continues in her search, the old woman will become more and more obvious about her affinity with the object of the quest, for as the narrator will report in the course of her monologue, "Tu dis que si je marche je la retrouverai. Tu dis que si je marche je te reconnaitrai [You say that if I walk on I will find her. You say that if I walk on I

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will recognize you]" (108). The shift in pronouns from "la" to "te" in these sentences is a hint that the old woman and the "lost woman" are one and the same, a suspicion later confirmed by the narrator's own scene of recognition: Je t'ai reconnue ... A tes doigts coupes. Je vais t'appeler par ton nom. Je le connais depuis toujours. Nous n'en avons qu'un seul pour nous toutes. Je caresse tes mains dessechees dans mes mains d'autrefois. Ce sont les mains de la femme de trois ans. Les mains de la petite fille de trente mille ans. Les mains de la femme necessaire. Les mains de la femme perdue. Je t'ai reconnue. Je t'aime ... Peut-etre est-ce moi ta fille? Ou ta mere? ... Nous avons la meme grand-mere et la meme fille. (128-9) [I recognized you ... By your severed fingers. I will call you by your name. I have always known it. We have only one for all of us women. I caress your shrivelled hands in my bygone hands. They are the hands of the three-yearold woman. The hands of the thirty-thousand-year-old little girl. The hands of the necessary woman. Of the lost woman. I recognized you. I love you ... Perhaps I am your daughter? Or your mother? ... We have the same grandmother and the same daughter.]

This critical passage not only reveals the by now familiarly complex set of relationships linking the narrator, the "femme perdue/' and the "in," but it also reminds us of the importance of naming, which was central to the rewriting of Genesis in the prologue. Significantly, while the narrator refers to the name that unites the women, she does not actually articulate it, avoiding the closure that it would impose. Indeed, while it might seem that this particular quest is now completed, she continues to explore the issue of identity, enabled by this scene of recognition to assume the multiple selves that constitute her "identite eclatee" (shattered identity; 141). This is exactly the same kind of selfacceptance that Gagnon's narrator achieves after connecting with her grandmother in Lueur, a novel that Gagnon was beginning to write at about the same time Hyvrard's La Meurtritude appeared. Ironically, in this novel, where the concept of identity is less directly challenged than in Mere la mort, the narrative is in fact more destabilized by the "shattered identity" of the first-person narrator. At several points in the narration of La Meurtritude, for example, it becomes very difficult to identify whose voice is narrating, for the narrator seems to shift from one first-person subject to another with little warning, much as we saw in Les Prunes de Cythere. An early example of this pattern is in fact the scene from which I excerpted the first of the quotations about the "tu" of the old woman. Immediately following the idea of her transmission of memory, there is a

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shift into the first-person narration of the old woman, who speaks in a voice so resonant of the other narrators we have seen, including the principal narrator of this novel, that we are momentarily confused: "Pourquoi faire semblant de continuer a vivre? Comme si je ne savais pas que j'allais mourir. Comme si je ne savais pas qu'ils m'ont condamnee a garder ce qu'ils ne peuvent supporter [Why pretend to go on living? As if I did not know I was going to die. As if I did not know that they have sentenced me to keep what they cannot bear]" (26). The familiarity of the words, combined with the sudden shift in tone and direction of the scene, makes the reader wonder if the narrative is still that of the principal narrator, a confusion only alleviated on the following page, when the speaking subject mentions her "doigts coupes" (severed fingers; 27), which we know belong to the old woman. The shift in narrative voice is further confirmed when the principal narrator finally returns, identifying herself by referring to "ses doigts" (her fingers; 27, emphasis added), that is, the fingers of the old woman whose voice we have just heard. In addition to such changes in narrative voice, the principal narrator's identity is further destabilized from within, for she seems to see herself as simultaneously inhabited and pursued by another woman, a woman without mutilated fingers but who is also associated with memory and death, like the old woman: "Ce n'est pas moi qui crie. Ce n'est pas moi qui ecris. C'est une autre femme. Elle habite mon corps ... Elle me poursuit. Elle s'accroche a moi. Elle me parle d'autrefois ... Elle s'installe en moi. Elle y grandit. Elle envahit ma chair. Elle prend ma vie [It is not me shouting. It is not me writing. It is another woman. She inhabits my body ... She pursues me. She hangs on to me. She speaks of the past to me ... She settles into me. She grows there. She invades my flesh. She takes my life]" (21). A little later, this "other" is elaborated upon and given a name - the pseudonym of the author herself: "La femme qui s'appelle eternite. Memoire. Mort. Elle s'appelle Jeanne aussi sans doute. Mais ce n'est pas mon nom ... Elle dit qu'elle s'appelle Jeanne ... Elle prend ma bouche pour parler. Elle pretend me connaitre ... Elle dit que nous etions ensemble dans la matrice du monde ... Que nous portons le meme nom. Que nous avons le meme corps. Elle dit que je n'ai pas pu 1'oublier [The woman who is called eternity. Memory. Death. She is also called Jeanne no doubt. But it is not my name ... She says she is called Jeanne ... She takes over my mouth to speak. She claims she knows me ... She says we were together in the womb of the world ... That we bear the same name. That we have the same body. She says that I was not able to forget her]" (29). The unity in the

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womb, the sharing of a common name, and the importance of memory combine to make this "internal" other resonant of the "external" others surrounding the narrator, like the old woman and the various mythic figures with whom the narrator identifies and whose stories she assumes. This lack of unity at the origin of the narration is thus congruent with the world the narrator inhabits, and her quest to understand and reunite what has been arbitrarily separated takes on greater urgency. Rewriting biblical as well as classical myths such as that of Demeter and Persephone is part of the narrator's search for an origin and identity that fit her particular vision of difference. In La Meurtritude, in addition to the myths of Lilith, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Judas, which serve both to illustrate the narrator's drama and to link the biblical rewriting of the prologue to the body of the novel, we also find a thread of alternative knowledge in the form of the tarot, of which the various cards symbolize elements in the narrator's life, punctuating her narrative.37 As Waelti-Walters has recognized in her analysis of the role of the tarot in La Meurtritude,38 it is significant that the narrative both opens and closes with the identification of the narrator with the one tarot card "qui a un nom et qui n'a pas de place. Celle qui ferme le jeu et le recommence [that has a name but no place. The card that closes the game and begins it again]" (16, 148). The "Mat qu'ils ne peuvent pas mater [King that they cannot checkmate]" (148), also known as the "Fou" (Madman or Joker), is indeed the "wild card" that, because of its instability, both upsets the game and makes it work, just as the narrator upsets the established order and yet is used by the same order to ensure the "rationality" of its constituents. As the "madwoman" of La Meurtritude explains, Us rient de nous, les normaux. Les bien-portants. Les raisonnables. Us nous enferment. Nous guerissent. Nous separent. Un jour, ils m'arracheront le cerveau ... Pour la rassuration. Pour la tranquillite de tous ces non-vivants. Groupes les uns centre les autres. Pour qu'aucun ne s'ecarte des chaines ... L'heure est venue de penser ensemble la fusion et la separation ... La route n'est pas barree. C'est nous qui nous 1'interdisons. (144-5) [They laugh at us, the normal ones. The healthy ones. The reasonable ones. They lock us up. Cure us. Separate us. One day, they will rip my brain away ... For the reassuration. For the peace of all those un-living. Grouped one against the other. In order that nobody step back from the chains ... The hour has come to think together fusion and separation ... The way is not blocked. It is we who deny it to ourselves.]

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In this way, the narrator comes to identify herself with the Fou of the tarot, for she finds in the card's traditional attributes and function an echo of her own situation. As Oswald Wirth describes it in his comprehensive work Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Age, the "Fou represente, en effet, tout ce qui est au-dela du domaine intelligible, done 1'Infini exterieur au fini, 1'absolu enveloppant le relatif. II est apsou, 1'abime sans fond, 1'ancetre des dieux [Madman represents, in effect, everything that is outside the realm of the intelligible, thus the Infinite outside the finite, the absolute enveloping the relative. He is apsou, the chasm without end, the ancestor of the gods]."39 The Mat is thus "[c]e qui depasse notre comprehension. L'lrrationnel, 1'absurde," which, "place entre le commencement et la fin ..., humilie le penseur tente de s'enorgueillir du peu qu'il comprend au sein de 1'irreductible incomprehensibilite [what exceeds our understanding. The Irrational, the absurd, which, situated between the beginning and the end ..., humbles the thinker tempted to be proud of the little he understands in the midst of the insurmountable incomprehensibility]."40 With its connections to origins and endings and its participation in a larger cosmic order beyond human rationality, this particular card in the tarot embodies the difference and the alternative logic that Hyvrard points to both in the rewriting of Genesis which opens the novel and in the exploration of madness and the connections to the past which are central concerns of the narrator she portrays. In the tarot the wild card is part of the whole, not isolated or cut off from it as the insane are from normal society. In a sense, Hyvrard has thus found a way of envisioning the world that does not exclude difference, but in fact depends on it - depends on the very instability and incomprehensibility of the Fou to figure that which is not included in the rational progression of the other elements of the game. Madness is not stifled or elided, but plays an important role in the functioning of the whole. While, on the one hand, a liberating metaphor for the narrator's situation, the tarot does, on the other, maintain the concept of the "identities" of the cards. In this respect, the tarot metaphor effectively limits the subversive potential of the very instability and rejection of identity that is the basis of the revolt for the narrators of Hyvrard's novels. Furthermore, one could argue that, by using the tarot as an alternative source of knowledge about the world, rooted in archaic practices which mainstream culture has forgotten or repressed, she in fact maintains the very marginalization of madness that she wishes to re-evaluate, for such alternative cosmogonies do not effectively displace the rational standards of what is normal.

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In essence, the presence of any such organizing systems, if only as a metaphorical illustration, undercuts the very project of the narratives of the "madwomen" that constitute Hyvrard's first novels. From what we have seen, we could even go so far as to trace the movement away from madness, its denial on the level of the narrators' consciousness; for while the narrative of Les Prunes de Cythere was convincing enough that many critics thought Hyvrard herself was mad, it becomes clear in the second novel that the narrator is refusing the "madness" attributed to her, a refusal that finally becomes an explicit displacement of insanity onto the character of Victorine in La Meurtritude. Shoshana Felman's analysis of narratives of madness in La Folie et la chose litteraire is useful here, because she explains that "parler de la folie, c'est toujours, en fait, denier la folie; quelle que soit la fac.on dont on puisse representer la folie et se la representer, (se) representer la folie c'est toujours (qu'on le sache ou non, qu'on le veuille ou non) se jouer la scene de la denegation de sa propre folie [to speak of madness is always, in fact, to deny madness; no matter what way one may represent madness and portray it to oneself, to represent madness (to oneself) is always (whether one knows it or not, whether one wants to or not) to play for oneself the scene of the denial of one's own madness]."41 In this context, the narrator's protestations and subversions of tradition, which seemed so consistent and motivated in an initial reading, now seem less a narrative of madness from the inside than a justification for a difference, an alternative vision. This vision is anything but incomprehensible, and indeed, it flies in the face of that madness which, truly outside the realm of logic, would not need or seek any "justification" at all. In typographical terms, however, justification involves a conformity to strict borders to produce a well-centred text, and if we keep this factor in mind, we are still left with the impression that Hyvrard's texts are different, for they do not fall within the traditional boundaries associated with the novel and seem to offer new and compelling insights into that realm of difference that so many women writers are striving to portray. It is with these characteristics in mind that we must concur with the conclusion that Felman adds to the passage cited above, namely that, even though "le discours sur la folie n'est pas un discours de la folie, n'est pas, proprement, un discours fou, il n'en existe pas moins, dans ces textes, une folie qui park, une folie qui se joue toute seule a travers le langage mais sans que personne ne puisse devenir le sujet parlant de ce qui se joue [the discourse on madness is not a discourse of madness, is not, properly speaking, a mad discourse, there is nonetheless in these texts a madness that speaks, a madness that plays itself all alone through language

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but without anybody being able to become the speaking subject of what is being played]."42 This recognition of the possibility of difference, of a madness that escapes direct representation but is present in the language of some avant-garde literary texts, is what I wish to focus on in the concluding section of this chapter. Language is indeed an important theme in all three of Hyvrard's early novels and one that is closely linked to the themes of madness and the mother that I have been discussing thus far. More than a purely thematic concern, however, it also seems to be a key to the difference in her writing, a writing that not only supports her thematic developments but also goes beyond them into the highly transgressive domain of the poetic. THE REFUSAL OF LANGUAGE AND THE LANGUAGE OF REFUSAL CONTRELANGUE: Langue parlee dans un pays, non par appartenance a un groupe ethnique, mais comme une revendication culturelle. Exprimant les differences, elle empeche 1''enfermement totalitaire auquel pourrait mener la translangue generee par la mondialisation. Cette notion peut s'etendre a 1'emploi de la langue litteraire, contrelangue de la langue academique et du sabir informatique. Dans ce cas, elle ne fait pas reference a une litterature initiale, mais temoigne en son sein de valeurs autres. Une objection de culture, en quelque sorte. (PC 48)

[COUNTERLANGUAGE: The language spoken in a country, not through belonging to an ethnic group, but as a cultural affirmation. Expressing differences, it prevents the totalitarian imprisonment that the translanguage generated by globalization could lead to. This notion can be extended to the use of literary language, counterlanguage to academic discourse and to computer science jargon. In this case, it does not refer to an initial literature, but bears witness in its bosom to other values. A cultural objection, in a sense.] Jeanne Hyvrard

Like the mother figure, language plays an important role in the alienation of the women narrating Hyvrard's trilogy, and it is one of the themes announced early in her first novel, Les Prunes de Cythere. From the third page, in fact, the narrator remarks on what distinguishes her from others, expressing her understanding in a way that highlights her relationship to language. She declares to those who accuse her of madness: "Ce n'est pas moi qui ai demande a guerir. C'est vous qui disiez que cela ne pouvait pas continuer. Vous pretendiez que les mots sont faits pour se faire comprendre ... C'est vous qui disiez: on ne comprend pas ce que tu dis [I was not the one who asked to be cured. It was you who said that it could not go on. You

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claimed that words are made to be understood ... It was you who said: we don't understand what you are saying]" (PdeC 11). Those who diagnose the narrator as insane seem to do so on the basis of their inability to understand her, but for this woman, words are not necessarily an effective means of communication, as shown in her use of the word "pretendre" (to claim or allege) to speak of the doctors' attitude. Language, for this "madwoman," is not necessarily intended or used to promote understanding. Like the radio that only serves to increase her isolation, words, as a currency for conceptual exchange, show rather that which separates and alienates the narrator from others, preventing them from understanding her situation and her "cultural objection," to borrow the phrase that Hyvrard coins in La Pensee corps for her resistance to societal norms. Conscious of the incomprehension of others, the woman narrating Les Prunes de Cythere tries to find the cause in language, rather than accepting their diagnosis of madness, and in so doing, she gives words a surprising autonomy and physicality, saying: "Le cloitrement. Le cloisonnement. La claustration. La claudication. Tous ces mots qui, dans ma bouche, se melent. Mange. Mange done. Tous ces mots qui se ressemblent et que je ne maitrise pas ... Des boites de mots plein les placards et pas le courage de les ranger. Une grande fatigue. Une maladie peut-etre. Sequestrement. Squization. Symphonic. Les murs chuchotent. Les coussins hululent [The cloistering. The partitioning. The confining. The limping. All these words that get mixed up in my mouth. Eat. Eat now. All these words that look alike and that I cannot master ... Cupboards full of cans of words and no energy to put them in their place. A great fatigue. Perhaps an illness. Sequestration. Schizophrenation. Symphony. The walls whisper. The cushions screech]" (22). For this narrator, words are confusing, their number and resemblance such that she feels powerless to organize them. Reciting all the words she can think of to describe her isolation and confinement, the narrator shows here to what extent this experience is disturbing to her, and also to what extent she understands her life in the asylum. Her analysis of the situation, which produces the appropriate neologism "cloitrement,"43 is completely lucid and comprehensible, for her words express the forced seclusion and even silence associated with a cloistered existence, which she implicitly compares to that in the asylum. Indeed, even the word "schization" seems apt in the context of the multiplicity of voices that the narrator seems to be able to assume in her revolt against the traditional order which condemns her as insane. The "madwoman" does not make her "schization" an inevitable condition, however, but rather a possible illness, "une maladie peutetre." The only thing indicating some real mental disturbance in the

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above passage is the voices that the narrator seems to hear coming from the walls and cushions, but then again it is also possible to interpret these furnishings as simply part of the metaphor of the unmanageable "boites de mots" which she does not feel like tidying up or sorting out. Even if the narrator is a schizophrenic - if we choose to consider the circulating narrative voice that disturbs the narrative "logic" and chronology in this way - it is nonetheless true that she recognizes her difference44 and will repeatedly try to come to terms with it in the course of her narration. Such efforts are seen first on the page following this initial attempt to articulate her relationship to language. Even in the opening of the novel, then, the narrator offers a possible explanation for the lack of understanding of which she feels a victim: "Et si Ton ne me comprend pas" (And if I am not understood), she says, "c'est parce que je parle patois" (it's because I speak patois; PdeC 23). This patois is obviously not the language expected of her, for the mother's voice intervenes immediately to reproach her for this fault: "Pourtant, tu as ete a 1'ecole. Tu devrais bien savoir [Yet you have been to school. You should know better]" (23). From this remark we can conclude that the narrator has chosen, perhaps fully consciously, not to speak correctly; she rebels against the linguistic norm, just as she does against the forces that seek to make her assimilate socially and emotionally as a daughter and a mother. The repetition of classroom memories, particularly in Les Prunes de Cythere and La Meurtritude, certainly emphasize her rejection of the learning that is demanded of her and the censure to which she is subsequently subjected by teachers who proclaim: "Jeanne Hyvrard n'arrivera jamais a rien! Zero en grammaire. Zero en franc,ais. Zero en lecture [Jeanne Hyvrard will never amount to anything! Zero in grammar. Zero in French. Zero in reading]" (LM 58). In this regard, the fact that she speaks a "patois" is perhaps also a quite literal refusal of others, a "pas toi" which distinguishes her from those who conform, as well as a way to assert her narrating I, for "je parle patois" could thus be read as "I speak not you."45 At school she could have learned with the others the accepted and acceptable French to speak, but she either cannot or will not in such an environment, and so her mother, instead of trying to understand her gesture, simply rejects her with the reproof: La pauvre petite, elle n'arrivera jamais a rien. Elle fait tellement de fautes. La bouche deformee des sons qu'elle ne peut pas prononcer. Vous vous rendez compte, ma fille parle negre. Moi, une Blanche. Mais qu'est-ce que je vais devenir? Ma petite fille. Fais un effort. Pense a moi. A ton pere. Tous les

249 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels sacrifices qu'on a faits pour toi. On ne merite pas ca. Elle parle patois. On ne comprend rien a ce qu'elle raconte. (PdeC 177) [The poor little thing, she will never amount to anything. She makes so many mistakes. Her mouth twisted with sounds that she cannot pronounce. Do you realize, my daughter talks nigger. Me, a White woman. But what will become of me? My little girl. Make an effort. Think of me. Of your father. All the sacrifices we have made for you. We don't deserve this. She speaks patois. We don't understand a word she says.]

But where does this refusal to speak "normally" come from? Where is the "counterlanguage" defined in the epigraph above made manifest, given that the reader can understand her narration precisely because it is not written in patois?46 The explanation for this apparent inconsistency is tied to the development of the narrator's rebellion against others' definitions of madness and sanity and her search for self-expression in spite of their censure. One of the ways in which such censure is imposed in language is syntactically, for "they" adhere to grammatical and syntactic rules that the narrator does not feel are necessary to organize her own thoughts, her "vaisseaux d'outre-raison qu'ils naufragent aux recifs de la syntaxe [vessels from beyond reason that they shipwreck on the reefs of syntax]" (PdeC 12). The restrictive syntax of French represents for her a logical structure that deprives her of freedom of thought and restricts her relation to language. Notwithstanding the narrator's affirmations, it is worthwhile examining closely some passages of Hyvrard's writing, to determine to what extent her narrator's objections and difference are supported on a textual level. For this reason, I have selected a significant portion of a paragraph of Les Prunes de Cythere to analyze in detail: Alors, j'ai commence a chercher dans le dictionnaire les mots qui n'existent pas ... Mere, comment dit-on ceux qui ne sentent pas le soleil sur leur peau et mon blair ecrase centre la criniere de mon amour? Tu rejettes mon avidite dans les souterrains de ma memoire. Je zoreille, tu lambis, elle cowtela. POUT quel voyage au travers du sowpirail de mon cerveau? Sur la place, la grammaire fait du trapeze aux jupes des femmes. Les phrases sautent les cerceaux enflammes des enfants nus. La criniere des grands mots rugit sur son plot. La cavalcade des cliches s'empanac/ze. La syntaxe se dresse entre les oreilles du passe recompose. Mon corps langage au cirque fou. Verbes arraches. Bras metriques. Substantifs desarticules. Mon langage corps. Adjectifs incarnes. Mains versifiees par quel desastre. Corps castre. Recupere encore. (52-3, emphasis added)

250 Mothers of Invention [So then I began to look in the dictionary for words that do not exist ... Mother, how does one term those who don't feel the sun on their skin and my muzzle pressed against the mane of my love? You reject my avidity in the subterranean passages of my memory. I white, you conch, she cutlasses. For what voyage across the grill of my brain? On the square, grammar swings like a trapezist from women's skirts. Sentences jump the flaming hoops of naked children. The mane of big words roars on its podium. The plumed cavalcade of cliches. Syntax rises between the ears of the preterite. My body language in the mad circus. Verbs ripped away. Metrical arms. Disarticulated nouns. My body language. Embodied adjectives. Hands versified by what disaster. Spayed body. Recuperated yet again.]

Although the paragraph begins with a sentence of normal syntax, we can see in this passage several divergences from strictly grammatical prose. The first is the parodic recitation of the conjugation of three invented verbs: "Je zoreille, tu lambis, elle coutela." These verb forms seem to agree with the subjects given, but the disruption of having three different verbs and their relative incomprehensibility cannot but make the reader hesitate.47 The question in the following sentence would seem to indicate a logical link between the actions of the verbs and the "voyage," but because of the strangeness of the invented verbs, the connection to the "pour quel voyage" is equally puzzling and is compounded by the ambiguity of the words "au travers," which indicate either a misplaced article, since we expect to read a voyage "a," or another meaning for "travers" as a "fault" or "defect" or a "width," a reading that would heighten the almost surreal impression the passage gives by its association of the abstract and the concrete. Although the following few sentences have a normal structure, we are arrested yet again by the transformation of the adjective "empanache" into a pronominal verb and then by the series of verbless sentences with which the excerpt closes. This example of parataxis, or a juxtaposition of sentences without connections, is perhaps the most striking tactic used to avoid traditional syntax, given that syntax is designed as a way to permit a clear linking and ordering of ideas - precisely what Hyvrard's juxtapositions prevent. In a sense, this stylistic strategy is consistent with the project of her narrators, for they all protest the tendency towards a single meaning or interpretation of words so often demanded by the dominant order. By using parataxis, Hyvrard allows her narrators to eliminate fixed or arbitrary connections between ideas, thus opening the text to a variety of reading possibilities and contributing to the subversion of traditional linear logic. In this passage, then, there are several grammatical and semantic disruptions - disruptions which are countered by the sustained

251 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

metaphor of the circus, an element that unifies the passage, bringing together the abstract references to words, cliches, sentences, and syntax by giving them attributes associated with circus acts. Such an alternative structuring of writing, based on the poetic power of metaphor as well as on alliteration and assonance (the pervasiveness of which is revealed by the italics I have added in the above passage), is a frequent technique in all three of Hyvrard's novels. To cite another salient example from La Meurtritude: Les mots d'abces coulant de mes chairs blessees. Les mots saignant d'une blessure que rien ne peut guerir. Puisque je ne suis pas d'ici. Puisque blanc et rouge. Puisque linge et sang. Puisque je vais sans fin laver ma peine aux lavoirs d'autrefois. Puisque faim et soif, je ne peux qu'aller vers eux. De plus en plus loin. De plus en plus brulee. De plus en plus seule. Puisque chair et joie. Je m'en vais au bout du sentier. (34) [The words of abscess oozing from my injured flesh. Words bleeding from a wound that nothing can heal. Since I am not from here. Since white and red. Since underwear and blood. Since I go unendingly to wash my pain in the wash houses of yore. Since hunger and thirst, I can only go towards them. Farther and farther. More and more burned. More and more alone. Since flesh and blood. I am going to the end of the path.]

Here, where words are metaphorically made bleeding flesh staining white clothing, the paratactic pattern is even more disruptive than in the previous example, for the juxtaposed elements are not even full sentences or nominal phrases, but sentence fragments. These fragments only find their motivation later in the paragraph, in the main clause "je ne peux qu'aller vers eux." Moreover, some of the "puisque" phrases are missing articles and verbs, an elliptical strategy that eliminates their context and thus renders their parsing more difficult. Finally, the recurring adverbial phrase "de plus en plus" is also separated from the main clause, forcing the reader to find the connection, another common phenomenon in Hyvrard's writing, which Mair Verthuy-Williams has called "hidden syntax."48 This technique, while seeming to disrupt traditional sentence patterns and completion, generally preserves enough coherency that reconstruction of the semantic connections between fragments is possible, even if only retrospectively. The grammatically correct language patterns in common usage are thus criticized as unsatisfactory and inadequate by Hyvrard's narrators. It is for this reason that, beginning in Les Prunes de Cyihere, each narrator rejects them in her revolt against an order based on logic and its rules:

252 Mothers of Invention Je ne veux pas de votre monde. Ni de votre logique. Encore moins de votre langage auquel il manque tant de mots. Je ne veux pas des verbes immobiles, des substantifs endormis, des adjectifs sterilises. Je vous rends ma bouche enchainee. Mon cri troue. Ma chair decoupee en quartiers. Gardez vos mots ... Je ne veux pas devenir pareille a vous ... Faiseurs de mots en pret-a-porter. Je suis le navire ingouvernable, dans le detroit de la revolte. (PdeC 113-14) [I don't want anything to do with your world. Nor with your logic. Even less with your language which lacks so many words. I don't want immobile verbs, dormant nouns, sterile adjectives. I give my shackled mouth back to you. My scream all full of holes. My flesh cut into quarters. Keep your words ... I don't want to become like you ... Makers of ready-to-wear words. I am the ungovernable ship, in the straights of revolt.]

The refusal or the incapacity of the narrator to speak normally is an expression of her individuality and her suffering, for which she cannot find appropriate words or structures in language. It is not that she does not desire to communicate with others, but rather that she feels unable to do it with such overused and thus meaningless or confusing linguistic tools - those "immobile verbs," "dormant nouns," and "sterile adjectives" that constitute the cliches and the automatisms of everyday speech. This dissatisfaction with language will persist in almost all of Hyvrard's subsequent novels and poetry, culminating in the publication of La Pensee corps, her compilation of a new "nomenclature" to describe her alternative vision of the world. In an attempt to escape the impasse presented by this refusal of a lacunar language, the narrators of all three of Hyvrard's early novels try to invent words to express themselves in situations where ordinary vocabulary seems inadequate. Interestingly enough, the neologisms produced are almost all based on existing word patterns, exploiting a variety of common affixes, for example, to revitalize familiar root words.49 A good example of this process is the number of new words based on the model of "negritude"50 in Les Prunes de Cythere: Hyvrard's narrator also speaks, somewhat predictably, of "blanchitude" (whiteness; 60), but ventures also to speak of "femitude" (femininess; 62), "margitude" (marginality; 136), "nevritudes" (neurotitudes; 201), and "foultitude" (throngitude; 130), the last a fitting combination of two French words for crowd, foule and multitude. The culmination of this particular pattern is of course found in the neologism that becomes the title of Hyvrard's third novel, La Meurtritude. The narrator also takes great delight in playing with series of words of the same or similar root and related meanings, as in the case of "cloitrement," which I cited earlier, or as in the series from page 213 of Les Prunes de Cythere - "Forclosion. Eclosion. Forclusion" (Forclosion.

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Opening. Preclusion) - which foreshadows the more systematic use of cognates and affixes in Hyvrard's subsequent novels. To give just a few notable examples, from Mere la mort we can cite two series appearing on the same page, and expressing the painful action and results of separation: "La dechirure. Le dechirement. La dechiration. La dechirance. La dechirude ... La deportation. Le deportement. La deportance. La deporture. La deportude [Laceration. Lacerment. Lacertude. Lacerance. Lacerude ... Deportation. Deportment. Deportance. Deportiture. Deportitude]" (MM 122, MD 83-4). Similarly, w can find two series on a single page of La Meurtritude, here more explicitly framed as experiments to remedy a lack of vocabulary: Comment dire le malheur des servants? Le servage? Comment dire le desespoir? La servitude? Comment dire la nostalgic? La servance? Comment dire le meurtre? La servation? Comment dire I'etat? Le servement. Non. Us disent 1'asservissement. Us rajoutent 1'action et ils perdent la peine ... L'action ou I'etat, jamais les deux. La separation. Jamais le separement. Comment diraije ce qu'ils ont fait si mal? Le separage? Ce qui me fait si mal? La separance? Ce qui nous fait si mal? La separitude? (74) [How to say the misery of servants? Enslavage? How to say despair? Enslavitude? How to say nostalgia? Enslavence? How to say murder? Enslavation? How to describe the state? Enservement? No. They say enslavement. They add the action and they lose the suffering ... The action or the state, never the two. Separation. Never the separament. How do I describe what they did so badly? Seetheration? What hurts me so much? Des(e)pairence? What hurts us so much? Separitude?]

In the latter half of this passage, we see clearly how the neologisms are formed through the use of affixes and how they resonate with other words formed on the same model and thus incorporated into the semantic fields that Hyvrard is creating. The word "separage," for example, is remarkably close to sevrage and to partage, both describing a separation that can be painful for the parties involved, a pain intensified and articulated by the "rage" incorporated into the neologism. In the same way, "separance," one of Hyvrard's preferred inventions which will even appear in La Pensee corps, poetically incorporates the unhappiness of desesperance (despair), of which it is a partial anagram. While these examples are certainly striking in the way they show how Hyvrard exploits nuances of meaning in common affixes, they are not the only neologisms or transgressions of usage to be found in her novels. There are moments, for example, where the narrator offers poetic or deliberately incorrect verb conjugations as an alternative to

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the regular ones, as in the "chanter" (to sing) series that appears in two of the three novels: "Je chantaraide ... Tu chantavers ... Elle chantamort" (LM 59) and "Je chantaral... Tu chantaros ... Elle chantagard" (PdeC 74-5). To such innovative and arguably poetic use of verbs, we can add other instances of incorrect usage, such as an intransitive verb used transitively, as in the phrase "[l]e crissement du gravier a qui le marche [the crunching of the gravel to who walks it]" (LM 26), where "gravier" becomes the direct object of "marcher." Finally, it is important to note that Hyvrard's narrators also show a desire to expand grammatical possibilities by imagining new tenses and moods: the narrator of Mere la mort suggests adding four tenses - the "suppositif," the "faillitif," the "imprecatif," and the "prophetal" (suppositive, fallitive, imprecative, prophetitive; MM 19, MD 9) - and three moods that she calls the "reel," the "imaginaire," and the "fusionnel" (real, imaginary, fusional; MM 60, MD 38). Although she does not give examples of what function these might serve, we can certainly see how such alternative ways of thinking about language are thematized in the three texts through the repeated expressions of the need to reunite what has been separated, the denunciations of the current linguistic order, and the consistent efforts on the part of the narrators to invent and recast words to regenerate meaning. In general, however, such deliberate flaunting of grammatical rules is infrequent; it is the "mots nouveaux-nes" (newborn words; PdeC 28) in all three narratives that seem the most effective method of overcoming the limits of language and its lacunar vocabulary. That Hyvrard is ultimately concerned with being understood, however, is clearly shown by her knowledge of existing grammatical structures and her clever exploitation of them, despite the fact that she portrays language as instrumental in the repression and oppression that her narrators seek to escape. Indeed, the language of the order rejected by these narrators is also the only one that permits them to communicate, albeit inadequately, with others and especially with the mother to whom so much of the narration is directly addressed. In the first two novels at least, there are very few episodes that do not involve either an evocation of the mother or maternity or a direct conflict between the narrator and her mother. Given that this mother figure is, at least in one scene, quite clearly portrayed as a "phallic mother" - that is, both sexually powerful and dominating - it is perhaps surprising that very little mention is made of the father, who in Freudian terms is seen as the more important symbolic source of the phallocentric order. Indeed, in this particular scene, which seems to draw on the same dream of Leonardo da Vinci that so intrigued Cixous in La, the father is called

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to the rescue, to save the narrator from her mother: "Alors, elle s'est etendue sur moi et m'a enfonce son phallus dans la bouche. Arrete, mere, je n'ai plus faim. Je ne veux plus du sperme de ton amour qui m'etouffe. Pere, pere, au secours, elle dit encore que c'est pour mon bien ... Pere, a 1'aide, ne vois-tu pas que je cours vers toi. Mais tu ne reponds pas [Then she lay on top of me and shoved her phallus into my mouth. Stop, Mother, I am no longer hungry. I don't want any more of the sperm of your love that suffocates me. Father, Father, help, she says again it's for my own good ... Father, help me, don't you see I am running to you. But you do not answer]" (PdeC 46).51 This passage introduces the most notable exception to Hyvrard's focus on the mother and the mother's language, for it is followed a page later by a further appeal to the father in which the narrator even seems ready to speak his language if he will guarantee her protection from her mother: Elle va m'etrangler. Je ne veux pas rester seule avec elle ... Pere, je parlerai ta langue et nous nous entendrons. Ne vois-tu pas qu'elle etend ses bras entre nous pour me garder a elle. Ne vois-tu pas qu'elle m'habille comme elle pour que tu ne me voies pas. Pere, je veux dormir centre toi, quel mal y a-t-il a cela, puisqu'elle m'a faite sterile? (PdeC 48, emphasis added) [She is going to strangle me. I don't want to be alone with her ... Father, I will speak your language and we will understand each other. Don't you see that she extends her arms between us to keep me to herself. Don't you see she dresses me like herself so you don't see me. Father, I want to sleep next to you, what harm is there in that, since she created me sterile?]

In almost all the few references to her father in this first book, the narrator seems to see him as a possible saviour, even showing some incestuous desire towards him. As in the case of the daughter's desire for her mother, however, a "typical" Freudian interpretation of this other desire would not be entirely appropriate here, for the narrator will later declare to her mother: "C'est ta chair que je chercherai toujours dans le sexe des hommes ... Nous n'aurons plus jamais qu'un seul moi pour nous toutes, meres et filles courant sans fin vers 1'impossible reunion. Ton corps, mon paradis perdu [It's your flesh that I will always seek in men's sexes ... We will nevermore have more than one me for all us women, mothers and daughters rushing endlessly towards the impossible reunion. Your body, my paradise lost]" (PdeC 169). Even with the disturbed chronology that makes the "reconstructive" analysis of Les Prunes de Cythere so difficult, it would

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seem, from their repetition, that all the desires of the narrator converge on her mother and the maternal body. What remains important in the passage quoted above is not so much her desire for the father as that she associates the language she does not speak with him and his world. The "accepted" language is thus the paternal one, and the order it represents can only be the father's, a patriarchal system that the mother tries in vain to inculcate in her daughter by criticizing and correcting her grammatical errors, using language as the privileged means of transmitting and maintaining the psychosocial status quo. Undoubtedly because of the role played by the mother in perpetuating patriarchal hierarchies and traditions through language, the narrator in Les Prunes de Cythere accuses her mother of lying, of having hidden or even stolen the words that would help the daughter to understand her situation. The narrator pleads: "Mere, mere, rends-moi les mots. Mere exemplaire, que je te crie ma haine et mes amours castrees [sic] [Mother, Mother, give me back the words. Exemplary mother, that I can shout my hatred and my spayed loves]" (147). The mother who wants her daughter to be "reasonable" is actually asking her to live a lie, to conform at the price of her individuality, at least in the eyes of this rebel daughter. It is on the basis of the lie of happy conformity that the narrator decides that her mother's words must be deceptive, saying: "Tes mots dans ma bouche. Ta resignation dans mon corps. Ton mensonge dans mes yeux ... Je suis devenue raisonnable [Your words in my mouth. Your resignation in my body. Your lie in my eyes ... I have come to my senses]" (PdeC 166). This apparent capitulation to her mother's wishes is belied in its very articulation by the way in which the daughter separates her behaviour from that of her mother; all the traits that are involved with being reasonable are still attributed to the mother, addressed in the second person, and thus are not internalized by the narrator herself. This pattern is of course consonant with the daughter's continuing revolt in the novel. There are in fact many other moments where the narrator refuses the words and ways of her mother, just as she refuses to learn the proper language at school. Conscious of the difference between the mother's tongue - in truth, the father's language, as we have shown - and her own, she is equally aware of those words that are hers and those that come from her mother. Consequently, the narrator will reject her mother's tongue towards the end of the novel, asking the latter to take back "[ses] couleurs et [ses] pinceaux et [sa] layette et [ses] tricots ... meme [ses] mots [her colours and her brushes and her layette and her knits ... even her words]," leaving only "la parole qui est mienne [the speech that is mine]" (PdeC 196). This speech, this

257 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

tongue of "newborn words" of which she so often speaks, is above all a language of freedom - freedom from her parents' stifling order, which demands conformity and punishes difference with isolation or ostracism. By calling on her "sisters" to revolt with her at the end of the book, the narrator reveals the nature of the lie she is refusing to live, affirming in the face of those who speak the "dead" language she rejects: Je vous recracherai jusqu'a la derniere miette vos morceaux de cadavres gardes au frigidaire des lieux communs. Vos aliments regurgites de generation en generation, sans qu'aucune fille ose dire a sa mere: mais tu m'as menti. Tu t'es menti. Vos paroles sont baillons. Vos conseils, castrations. Je ne vous dirai pas que j'entre en guerissance ... Que je vous echappe pour toujours, rompant les mots qui m'enchainaient a vous. Je suis ma propre parole que me renvoient les murs que j'ai enfin dresses pour vous echapper. Je suis le sale petit negre qui ne parlera jamais franc.ais et sur lequel alors vous n'aurez plus aucun pouvoir. (PdeC 231-2) [I will spit up to the very last crumb your pieces of cadavers kept in the fridge of commonplaces. Your food regurgitated from generation to generation, without a single daughter daring to say to her mother: but you lied to me. You lied to yourself. Your words are gags. Your advice, castration. I will not tell you that I am entering curessance ... That I escape you forever, breaking off the words that bind me to you. I am my own speech sent back to me by the walls that I at last raised in order to get away from you. I am the dirty little nigger who will never speak French and over whom you will no longer have any power.]

In this manifesto of her revolt, the narrator places her mother on the side of the repressive order in her use of the language as well as in her physical and affective relationship to her narrating daughter. By the same token, the narrator distinguishes herself from that order by an act of will: she metaphorically becomes her "own speech" in her rejection of the order that correct French represents. It is important to note the paradoxical nature of this gesture, for the narrator's refusal is of course written in the language she purportedly refuses. It seems that the light shed by such a gesture on language and particularly its ideological underpinnings is what allows her to retain her difference in her usage of the mother tongue, which she necessarily shares with others whose usage may be more "normal" or normative than her own. In this regard, Mere la mart and La Meurtritude portray normal language as almost exclusively belonging to the patriarchy, represented by the omnipresent "ils," and dissociated from the mother

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figure, who is seen more as a repository of alternative knowledge than as a perpetrator of the current linguistic tyranny. Moreover, these two novels also show the narrator articulating the paradox of her "contrelangue," which is indeed the same tongue used by the patriarchy, just understood differently. As the narrator of Mere la mart speculates, "Si j'invente un autre langage, je leur echappe tout a fait. Mais il n'y en a pas d'autre. Elle est notre langue commune. J'en connais pas d'autres [If I invent another language I escape them altogether. But there isn't another one. It's our shared language. I don't know any others]" (MM 75, MD 49). Later on, she will eve affirm, "Us croient que je ne parle pas la meme langue qu'eux, mais elle m'est aussi maternelle qu'a eux [They think I don't speak the same language they do, but it's my mother tongue as much as theirs]" (MM 108-9, MD 74)- m this way, we see that Hyvrard is conscious of the contradiction inherent in her and her narrators' project to find a language that will be different and will express alternative visions which defy traditional binary logic. Nonetheless, the struggle with language is important, for it is through this struggle that insight into the functioning of the system can be gained, and that the system can eventually be destabilized if not completely revised. The idea of the mother tongue, despite its associations with the patriarchy in all three texts, is still shown to be a fruitful metaphor in Les Prunes de Cythere, for .the narrator herself associates maternity with language by calling the words she invents "newborns." Her relationship to language is articulated very much like that which she has with her mother, for she feels, on the one hand, a strong revolt against and rejection of certain words that make her want to "kill" certain verbal "offspring," while, on the other, she feels a great joy in her ability to create "newborn words" to her taste. This notion of maternity in language, by extension, applies to the act of production as well as to the products: the narrator finds an important creative fecundity in her "etreinte" (embrace) of the language, which acquires a palpable sensual presence in her eyes and thus bolsters her rebellious stance: Vous m'avez tout pris, de ce que vous ne saviez pas garder. Vous ne m'avez laisse que les mots. Vous ne m'avez laisse que les mots pour bonheur. Que les mots pour etreintes. J'en ai cache quelques-uns pour qu'ils echappent a la fouille. Et je fais I'amour avec eux quand vous ne nous regardez pas. Les adverbes se pendent a mon cou. Les verbes m'enlacent dans le mode des conjugaisons que vous ne connaissez pas. Les adjectifs m'embrassent a pleine bouche et les substantifs que vous avez enregimentes s'accouplent avec moi dans un baiser cosmique. (PdeC 140)

259 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels [You took everything from me, of what you did not know how to keep. You only left me words. You only left me the words for happiness. For embraces. I hid a few so they would escape the search. And I make love with them when you are not watching us. The adverbs hang about my neck. The verbs hug me in the mode of conjugations that you don't know. The adjectives smooch with me eagerly and the nouns that you enlisted couple with me in a cosmic kiss.]

The adverbs, verbs, adjectives, and nouns are the same ones that others use, but what this narrator does with them, the effect of her usage of the common linguistic elements, seems to be the element that distinguishes her language from the language she refuses. It is the "cosmic coupling" that produces newborn words to liberate her and allows her to recover and speak of what has been lost: "Je fais 1'amour avec le langage. Corps a corps, mon amour sans merci. Pour lui faire dire enfin ce que vous pretendiez indicible. Je fais 1'amour avec le langage pour qu'il dise dans son etreinte ce qu'il sait et dont nous avons perdu la memoire. Je fais 1'amour avec le langage. Comme [sic] expliquer autrement juillet tout en grace et un ete entier en partitude [I make love with language. Body to body, my love without respite. To make it speak at last what you claimed was unutterable. I make love with language so it says in its embrace what it knows and what we have lost the memory of. I make love with language. As to explain otherwise July all in favour and a whole summer in partitude]" (PdeC 212). In this way, language becomes a place of production and reproduction, of creation and recreation, as much in the sense of a restitution as of play and a moment of relaxation. In her exploration of language, the narrator thinks she is able to remember a language in which she would not have felt alienated, a language that her female ancestors, even her mother, would have known but, forced to surrender to outside pressures, would have been unable to transmit or retain. As she asks her mother almost at the end of the novel, "Mere, mere, apprends-moi la langue que je ne peux parler. Apprends-moi la langue qu'ils m'ont arrachee. Apprends-moi la langue interdite aux ecoles. Apprends-moi la langue que je ne sais pas ecrire [Mother, Mother, teach me the language I cannot speak. Teach me the tongue they tore from me. Teach me the tongue forbidden in school. Teach me the language that I don't know how to write]" (PdeC 235-6). At least in this first novel, the mother figure upholds the repressive order by omitting to teach her daughter this language of remembrance, and by insisting that she learn the language of "substantifs ... enregimentes" (enlisted nouns; 140). In the subsequent novels, as

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I have suggested, although the narrator persists in her belief that the mother figure offers a connection to the past, she mutes her accusations of repression and deliberate omission by the mother, framing her search to recover their lost language and memory in a more collaborative fashion.52 This lost language that Hyvrard's narrators want to recover and the one they want to invent seem somehow to merge and become one tongue, a language that would allow each woman to find and be herself, and thus escape the anguish of the asylum and the kind of emotional destruction perpetuated by those who believe her mad. The search for a language with which to express the self is part of the search for identity, for as the narrator of Les Prunes de Cythere puts it, "Un jour a la recherche des mots, je me retrouverai [One day while searching for words, I will find myself]" (132). This search, however, is not restricted to the spoken language. In Les Prunes de Cythere, writing is also an important aspect of the narrator's "guerissance," as we see in her recognition that she must "[e]crire pour guerir. Ecrire pour reconcilier deux mondes. Pour temoigner du corps-a-corps des mots et des peintures. Pour reunir mes deux mondes separes, effiloches, emmures. Pour achever de naitre a moi-meme. Accepter de mourir pour pouvoir enfin vivre [write to be cured. Write to reconcile two worlds. To bear witness to the hand-to-hand of words and paintings. To reunite my two separate, fraying, walled-up worlds. To succeed in being born to myself. To accept to die in order to be able to live at last]" (200). This passage, returning as it does to the birth images so important in the thematic development of the novel, links up again with the opening of Les Prunes de Cythere. It is interesting to note the progression here from the "corps-a-corps," which "reunites," to the birth of the self to the self, which is almost a contradiction in the sense that a birth usually entails a separation, one that the narrator seems to deny here in the need to affirm her identity. Writing is part of her expression of revolt and a means to escape suffocation, even though, in Les Prunes de Cythere, the mother tries to stop the narrator from writing down the "lambeaux de phrases" (shreds of sentences; 203) that would express her pain. For the narrator, it would be unthinkable not to struggle with language in this way as part of her revolt, for she knows the power it gives her: "Ma delivrance au fil des mots. Ma lave incandescente prenant corps ... Us ne pourront plus m'approprier, ni me prendre, ni me nommer. La jument evadee ne sera jamais rattrapee. Je connais maintenant le verbiage qu'ils prennent pour une parole. Les lecons apprises qu'ils appellent une pensee. Les mots qu'ils incantent pour m'annexer ... Je leur echappe pour toujours dans mes

261 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

mots inventes [My deliverance as the words go by. My incandescent lava taking shape ... They will no longer be able to appropriate me, nor take me, nor name me. The escaping mare will never be caught. I now know the verbiage they take for speech. The rote lessons that they call thought. The words they intone to annex me ... I will escape them forever in my invented words]" (PdeC 209-10). Writing her struggle is, in a sense, a way to give it transcendence, to prove that she can overcome all obstacles in her search for herself. To write legibly, however, the narrator must accept to a certain degree the language she wants to reject; she must "accepter de mourir" (accept to die) by conforming a little, "pour pouvoir enfin vivre" (in order to be able to live at last; 200). But she still has her creativity, her newborn words, to help her to escape the grammatical order she finds so restrictive. In this light, the end of the novel, where she foresees her acceptance of being "dead" like the others, remains a kind of liberation, for her writing, the legible witness that results from her resignation, still allows us to glimpse her vision and her compelling "madness." In the two later novels, writing is also important, but it is not so idealistically conceived, for the narrators are also shown to be aware of the limited possibilities of escaping the constraints of the French language as it exists - "[l]a langue impossible a casser" (the unbreakable language) as the narrator of La Meurtritude will put it (74). Nevertheless, writing remains important to the Hyvrardian narrator as a way to recover memory and deal with suffering. In La Meurtritude the writing of the alienated self's search for understanding seems to come from an "other" source inside the narrator that is perhaps a manifestation of her alienation: "C'est la saison de I'ecriture. La souffrance ne peut plus cesser ... Cette femme aux doigts coupes. Cette femme qui ecrit une histoire qu'elle ne sait pas. Le corps habite par ces mains qui ne m'appartiennent pas. Le corps habite par ce fleuve de mots ... Ces mots necessaires qui ont pris mon corps pour demeure [It's the season of writing. The suffering cannot cease anymore ... This woman with severed fingers. This woman who writes a history that she does not know. The body inhabited by these hands that do not belong to me. The body inhabited by this river of words ... These necessary words have taken up residence in my body]" (171.8). In this by now familiar linking of body and words by the narrator of La Meurtritude, we hear the echo of the sensual dimension of language we found in Les Prunes de Cythere and indeed in all novels examined in this study. It is an association that is as consistent an element in Hyvrard's novels as it is in the work of Cixous, Gagnon, and Brossard. This passage from La Meurtritude underscores the

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functions of storytelling and recollection that writing performs: the woman writing "a (his)story she does not know" organizes the "river of words" that are the resources of language, in order to make sense of her suffering and express the experience of which her palimpsestlike body bears the traces. One technique of organizing language into a literary expression of collective resonance is through the use of repetition. In earlier passages, I have pointed out the poetic effects of repetition in the form of alliteration and assonance in Hyvrard's writing. In addition, her style is also characterized by recurring sentences and litanies, including the "petit battement" we saw in Mere la mort. As critics such as Verthuy-Williams and Cauville have noted, this particular text is also punctuated by the phrase "ecru, bise, grise, burel" (ecru, greyed, drunken, homespun), which operates as a poetic refrain, with its alliteration in "b" and the assonances in "u" and "e" binding the four bisyllabic words together.53 Moreover, since the phrase appears in the context of skeins of coloured wool being wound by the "femme en mauve," it seems to perform a weaving function in the text in echo of its context, appearing more than a dozen times to give the text a rhythmic coherence. The repetition of these two refrain-like phrases is readily evident even in an initial reading of Mere la mort, but such repeated expressions and sentences are in fact one of the most distinctive characteristics of Hyvrard's writing and contribute enormously to the lyricism of her works through the rhythmic element they provide. Within particular passages, Hyvrard often fuses repeated phrases into listings or litanies.54 In considering the use of litany by women writers, Suzanne Lamy has said that "la femme puise dans 1'archeologie des habitudes formelles, recupere la litanie pour son insistance, son ouverture, sa demesure [women draw from the archaeology of formal habits, recuperate the litany for its insistence, its openness, its excessiveness]."55 In the case of Jeanne Hyvrard, whose works are among those Lamy refers to in the course of her discussion, litany does seem to function in this way. As an archaic poetic form often used in oral literature because of its mnemonic qualities, litany creates an insistence that heightens emotion and can become excessive or even obsessive. Given the intensity of her narrators' experiences and her own predilection for the immediacy of oral forms, Hyvrard's revival of litany is thus both strategic and' effective.56 The archaic quality of litany supports her narrators' search to recover the memory of a lost language for women, becoming almost the product of that search, one of the "findings" exploited by her narrators which comes to characterize their questing voices. Finally, the repetitive

263 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

characteristics of litany, as Lamy also notes, can indeed compromise linearity,57 because the emphasis is less on logical progression and connection than on a reiterative insistence that focuses and enhances emotion, often to cathartic effect. This effect is certainly important in Hyvrard's writings, where her narrators are trying to break out of traditional thought structures in order to reach an understanding purged of the conflicts they feel within themselves as well as in relation to the world they inhabit. Litany is only one of the forms of repetition in Hyvrard's texts that support her narrators' alterity, for images and scenes are also repeated in such a way as to disturb attempts to read in a linear fashion. Indeed, any analysis of her texts, including the present one, is rendered problematic because of this use of repetition, for not only does analysis require separating out certain images that are interwoven in a complex network of themes, but it also involves an unraveling and/or reconstitution of the narrative which in a sense runs counter to the nature of the texts. Hyvrard's novels are structured, not on a pattern of linear progression of events or even images, but on accumulation and subtle displacements, both a product of her extensive use of almost hypnotic repetition on all levels of her writing.58 As we saw with the mother and the African homeland in Les Prunes de Cyihere, she uses repeated metaphors and metonymy to create the impression of both continuity and simultaneity in the development of each text's distinctive themes. Moreover, thematic repetition unites the three narratives as a series, for each narrator, in repeating the same questions and thoughts, seems to get closer to discovering what she desires. In its very repetition, this obsessive gesture constitutes progress in the affirmation and the understanding of these women's "madness" in Hyvrard's vision of the relationship between the self and the world.59 As the narrator of La Meurtritude puts it, insisting on the repetition with the sound "re" (both as a prefix and as part of a word), La souffrance qui ne cesse que la tete dans tes mains. Qu'en la parole redresse. Qu'en le geste rectifie. Qu'en le retour au sens des choses. De chaque mot. De chaque signe. De chaque fait. Cette souffrance qui ne cesse qu'en la reparation des objets fractures. Qu'en la repetition de la parole assourdie. Qu'en le recommencement du geste inattendu. Qu'en la reouverture des bras fermes. Qu'en la reunion des chairs separees. (61, emphasis added) [The suffering that ceases only with the head in your hands. With speech rectified. With the gesture redressed. With the return to the meaning of things. Of each word. Of each sign. Of each fact. This suffering that ceases only with the repetition of fractured objects. With the repetition of deadened

264 Mothers of Invention discourse. With beginning again the unexpected gesture. With the reopening of closed arms. With the reuniting of the flesh of separated bodies.]

La Meurtritude also furnishes a similar commentary on the theme of writing itself, as applicable to the narrator's words as it is to Hyvrard's distinctive style: Ils veulent que je leur raconte une histoire mais notre propre histoire nous suffit ... Ils veulent des caracteres, des personnes, des evenements, comme ils disent un sujet, un verbe, un complement. Farce qu'il faut qu'ils ordonnent ... Ils veulent absolument une action. Mais je suis un etat. L'ecriture n'est ni un jeu ni une marchandise. L'ecriture est d'ecrire ce qui doit etre ecrit. L'ecriture est memoire ... Pour qu'augmente la connaissance ... Je suis a I'ecriture ce que les filles publiques sont a 1'amour. L'expression du desastre collectif. Le temoignage de la commune misere ... L'amertume de notre commune memoire. (46-7) [They want me to tell them a story but our own story is enough for us ... They want characters, people, events, like they talk about a subject, a verb, a predicate. Because they must order things ... They absolutely want an action. But I am a state. Writing is neither a game nor merchandise. Writing is to write what must be written. Writing is memory ... So that knowledge is augmented ... I am to writing what whores are to love. The expression of our communal disaster. The witnessing of our common misery ... The bitterness of our common memory]

As I have noted, Hyvrard does indeed eschew traditional narrative and character development, preferring the repetition of descriptions and expositions by her narrators as a way of recasting the age-old search for an understanding of the self. What is interesting here is the way in which the narrator, through the surprising comparison to prostitutes, highlights her role as a spokesperson for those women who would otherwise have no voice. This important role of both recovery and witnessing paradoxically raises the act of writing almost to the level of a sacred necessity and at least to that of a historical imperative. This necessity is something the narrator portrays as being literally felt "in her bones," as an inseparable part of her flesh. It is in this way that the art of writing the self - "[ij'art, je a 1'etat pur [art -1 in the purest state]" (MM 94, MD 64), as the narrato of Mere la mort puts it - is connected in its witnessing function to the collective memory and creativity of women. To cite Mere la mort once again, art, of which writing is one manifestation, acts "comme une •bequille pour temoigner de notre imaginaire [as a crutch to give expression to our imaginings]" (MM 74, MD 49), for it is perhaps th

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only support in the articulation of difference and questioning of the prevailing order. It is the most effective and most fragile stone to throw, David-like, at the Goliath of patriarchy, as in La Meurtritude: "Tant de pierres dans le sentier. II suffit d'en prendre une. Une seule. La plus mince. La plus faible. La plus fragile. Desarmee et invincible. Morte et incorruptible. Abandonnee et vivante. Elle tienne dans le creux de la main. Elle bouche le trou de la paume. Elle fait la separation. C'est 1'ecriture [So many stones in the path. All you need do is take one. A single one. The thinnest. The weakest. The most fragile. Disarmed and invincible. Dead and incorruptible. Abandoned and alive. It can be held in the cup of your hand. It fills the hole in the palm. It creates separation. It is writing]" (125). This precarious witnessing, in which the stakes seem so high, is provided by a paradoxical narrator, entirely under the sign of "contraration" as much in her relationship to language, that essential but inadequate and deceptive tool, as in her relationship to her mother and to others in general. Her contradictory relationship to language echoes her vision of maternity, which represents for her both a sensuous and affective link to other women and a threatening bond, potentially unhealthy for the development of the daughter's individuality and creativity. The mother tongue is thus, like the maternal body and the mother's love, simultaneously nourishing and stifling, a source of creativity and of frustration, according to the individual involved and the voice that speaks it. The mother and language, far from being fixed and separate entities, are, rather, imbued with "contraration" and intimately linked in the development and understanding of the "madness" of these texts. The author's project is thus to "penser ensemble les contraires (think the opposites together; PC 47), without dissociating them or opposing them, as traditional logic would dictate. Her vision is informed by the recognition of both the necessity and the limits of language in the accomplishment of her goals. As she will write in La Pensee corps, "Impossibility de se debarrasser de la litterature. L'ecriture seule ne peut rendre compte de la memoire du temps d'avant. La pensee fcetale ... Je ne peux oublier la pensee fusionnelle. Comment la rendre au logarque, sans les mots du logarque? [The impossibility of getting rid of literature. Writing alone cannot account for the memory of the time before. Fetal thought ... I cannot forget fusional thought. How can one throw it back at the logarch, without the words of the logarch?]" (204). Hyvrard's search to express her thought in new terms by developing a "contrelangue" that transgresses the limits of patriarchal language is perhaps somewhat "mad," inasmuch as it is difficult if not impossible to realize. Still, as

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Marie Moscovici aptly puts it, "C'est de cela qu'elle est folle, et de cela qu'elle est riche [That's what makes her mad, and that's what makes her sumptuous]."60 Like other women writers of her time, Jeanne Hyvrard explores all aspects of the problems that women seem to have in expressing and defining themselves in contemporary society. Her narrators stumble over the limits set by others and those they find inside themselves, inculcated by their parents and the linguistic and social structures that they internalize from childhood. For this reason, their struggles and their "objections de culture" seem to fall squarely within the feminist context of the period, just as Hyvrard's style seems to participate in the search for a "writing in the feminine" that is at work in the texts of Cixous, Gagnon, and Brossard. As Hyvrard herself notes in La Meurtritude, however, such definitions are inevitably limiting and can even become as oppressive, through their prescriptive value, as the system that many feminist writers seek to escape: Ils parlent d'ecriture feminine. Pour nous exclure. Pour garder les mots pour eux seuls. Pour garder la parole pour eux seuls. Pour nous separer encore. Comme si I'amoureux et moi n'avions pas les memes mots pour dire notre amour ... Mais non, ils parlent d'ecriture feminine. Pour etre bien sur de faire la difference ... Pour etre bien sur de retablir leur ordre. Pour dominer par leur ordre. Par le pouvoir qu'ils ont de separer. Par le pouvoir qu'ils s'arrogent de nommer. Ils disent 1'ecrirure et 1'ecriture feminine. La logique et la logique feminine. L'intuition et 1'intuition feminine. Comme si lui et moi nous ne parlions pas la meme langue. (44-5) [They speak of feminine writing. In order to exclude us. To keep words for themselves alone. To keep speech for themselves alone. To separate us yet again. As if the lover and I did not have the same words to speak of our love ... But no, they speak of feminine writing. To make very sure to make the distinction ... To make very sure to re-establish their order. To dominate with their order. With the power they have to separate. With the power they usurp to name. They say writing and feminine writing. Logic and feminine logic. Intuition and women's intuition. As if he and I did not speak the same tongue.]

Rather than adopting such terminology as an expression of the difference she is trying to portray in writing, Hyvrard prefers to avoid the category of "ecriture feminine" because it could too easily become another way of excluding women from a recognition of the meaning of their literary quests to speak the unspoken, to express what has heretofore remained silent, and to find a way to speak of difference which is not oppositional. It is indeed a difficult task, given our paradoxical desire for words to express what resists our understanding

267 Jeanne Hyvrard's Early Novels

and what is lacking in our conceptual vocabulary. In this respect, Hyvrard's writing defies any analysis that attempts to comprehend her work, since she refuses to name what she seeks to express, or names it so often and in so many different ways that we remain unable to grasp a definitive essence, just as her characters have no fixed identity on which the reader can depend with any sense of finality. Confusion or contraration, depending on one's perspective - the fact remains that Hyvrard's questions move and engage us, so in touch is she with contemporary articulations of the problems of identity and difference. As the narrator of Mere la mort puts it, "Je ne sais plus si 1'identite veut dire pareil ou difference. Je ne sais plus. Peutetre que je voulais seulement parler d'amour. Mais de cette detresse s'eleve un chant [I don't know anymore if identity means sameness or difference. I don't know anymore. Maybe I only wanted to speak about love. But from this distress there arises a song]" (MM 13 MD 95). That this song is an innovative one is indisputable, and all the more fascinating in that it evolves from the same strategies which are present in other, more explicitly feminist avant-garde fictions of the period. Incantatory and enchanting, the writing of Jeanne Hyvrard offers a different sort of music from that which we are perhaps accustomed to, but her lyric voice and work on "le littoral du chant" (the littoral of song; PC 82) unmistakably bring new life to the old themes she explores, themes such as language and maternity which are such an intimate part of our experience of the world.

Conclusion The multiplicity of "women" is nowhere more obvious than for the figure of the mother, who is always both mother and daughter. Marianne Hirsh1

For the fall of 2000, Helene Cixous chose as the title for her internationally renowned Paris VIII seminar "Obstetriques de la litterature: Le recriminel de Marnan" (Obstetrics of literature: The recriminal of Mamma). Following as it did the publication of the autofictional Osnabruck (1999), which deals with the relationship of a narrator to her mother, Cixous's academic topos clearly reflects the enduring interest she has in the relationship of writing to the maternal, an interest that dates from the period of feminist activism which saw the publication of all the novels I have analyzed here. Cixous is not the only one of this period's "mothers of invention" who has continued to work through and on the mother-daughter relationship: La Jeune Morte en robe de dentelle (1990) is a more recent text in which Jeanne Hyvrard dramatizes the smothering force of a patriarchal mother, two of the characters in Nicole Brossard's Baroque d'aube (1995) are haunted by visions or thoughts of (becoming) their mothers, and Madeleine Gagnon's autobiographical Le Deuil du soleil (1998) offer poignant meditations on the death of her mother that the author explicitly relates back to her attempts to "saisir des parcelles de cet entre-mere-fille [grasp some pieces of that between-mother-daughter]"2 in Antre, the poetic work she expanded into Lueur. The influence, problematics, and representations of the maternal bond, which were a central focus of feminist writings in the mid19705, have remained paramount for feminist thinkers ever since. Adrienne Rich, exemplifying such preoccupations, considered her chapter "Motherhood and Daughterhood" to be the "core" of what

269 Conclusion

would become her classic book, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). In her introduction to this key chapter, she explains why the relationship is so vital by recalling, "The first knowledge any woman has of warmth, nourishment, tenderness, security, sensuality, mutuality, comes from her mother. That earliest enwrapment of one female body with another can sooner or later be denied or rejected, felt as choking possessiveness, as rejection, trap or taboo; but it is, at the beginning, the whole world."3 Rooted in a shared bodily experience and procreative capacity, the motherdaughter relationship is clearly at the heart of these women writers' concerns because it is both with and against this primary, prelinguistic bond that the subject must work in order to find a voice as a distinct individual. This is in fact the difficulty that motivates Julia Kristeva's somewhat skeptical view of women's innovative creativity and possibility for dissidence, a stance I highlighted in the introduction to this book as a way to point out some of the differences at work among the pioneering French feminist thinkers. Kristeva explains her privileging of male avant-garde figures in her theories by pointing out that for male artists, "le courant mortifere inherent a la creation, en tant que destruction d'une ancienne norme, est erotise parce qu'il s'agit de prendre ce continent maternel, de le detruire, mais aussi de le posseder comme on possederait le corps d'un partenaire sexuel. Autrement dit, le risque de mort est erotise et ... semble ... plus facilement depasse et abreagi lorsqu'il s'agit d'un sujet homme [the deadly current inherent in creation, as an act destructive of an old norm, is eroticized because one must seize that maternal continent, destroy it, but also possess it as one would possess the body of a sexual partner. In other words, the risk of death is eroticized and ... [thus] seems ... more easily overcome and externalized when it comes to a male subject]." For women, therefore, the innovative creative act is more difficult to accomplish, according to Kristeva, since it involves overcoming a more troubling set of obstacles than for men: "cette confrontation avec le continent maternel ... avec la dimension semiotique des signes, suppose une confrontation extremement violente, bien entendu avec la figure de 1'autorite sociale legiferante paternelle, mais aussi avec 1'image de la mere qui garantit 1'identite feminine, ne serait-ce que par la proximite et la ressemblance entre ... la fille et sa mere [this confrontation with the maternal continent... with the semiotic dimension of signs, implies an extremely violent confrontation, of course, with the paternal figure of law-giving social authority, but also with the image of the mother that guarantees feminine identity, if only via the proximity and the resemblance between ... the daughter

270 Mothers of Invention

and her mother]." In other words, any woman who strives for a subversive form of creative expression is destined to enter into conflict with the very source of her sense of identity, "the maternal continent," in addition to the phallocentric tradition, a dual "combat, a la fois erotique et thanatique" (combat, at once erotic and thanatic) that can be psychologically risky.4 As Marianne Hirsch succinctly puts it in The Mother/Daughter Plot, this "struggle [is] with a bond that is powerful and painful, that threatens engulfment and self-loss even while it offers the very basis for self-consciousness."5 In the fictions considered in the preceding four chapters, it is clear that Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard are all negotiating, on both thematic and formal levels, the multiple subjectivities and identifications, the closeness and conflict, that are inherent in mother- and daughterhood. The bond between mother and daughter, while recognized by writers such as Brossard and Hyvrard in particular as having the potential to be destructive, is nonetheless subject to a positive (re)vision in their texts, which also present the possibilities for nurturing and exchange and for the exploration of desire in relationships between women. In addition, the female body's creative capacities, foregrounded in the exploration of the maternal, become a fecund source of literary inspiration, as each author searches for ways to embody and embolden women's desires and their articulation in writing. Given its importance in all the fictions I consider, I must concur with Susan Suleiman's observation that the maternal metaphor, rather than being restrictive or essentializing, was in fact empowering, at least in the earliest feminist fictions of this period, because "it enabled a number of French women writers to imagine a feminist avant-garde practice that would retain the historical avantgardes' subversive/parodic energy but would revise and critique their negative attitude toward women - an attitude which, as Cixous and others rightly understood, had its source in, and was exemplified by, their repudiation ... of the mother" (si 167). Of course, one of the contributions I have tried to make in this book is to show that French women writers were not alone in their exploration of the maternal, for Quebec women writers were just as interested in revisiting the maternal bond and body in their desire for change. Whether or not one subscribes to the psychoanalytic terminology and theories of critics such as Kristeva, it is not difficult to understand why avant-garde feminist fictions display and transmit a sense of edginess, of playing dangerously close to (if not beyond) that limit of sense which Brossard so compellingly maps in the spiral diagrams of her essay "De Radical a integrates" (see figure 4). For a woman artist or writer searching to define herself in terms other than those

271 Conclusion

prescribed for her by patriarchal society, rethinking, revising, and even ultimately rejecting the symbolism and reality of maternity go hand in hand with disrupting the full gamut of symbolic codes that have served to inculcate and legitimate this order, which so often fragments, reifies, and marginalizes women. It is for this reason that feminist fictions, in an effort to contest the "laws" created by the hegemony of male voices in language, privilege disruptive writing strategies which include parataxis, ellipsis, disturbed syntax, and a play with words that sometimes results in powerful and even amusing neologisms. This subversive impulse is also evident in feminist writers' experimentations with genre, which result, as I have shown in the texts examined here, in a hybrid textuality that incorporates poetic and theoretical discourses into a narrative weave no longer structured by a respect for the conventions of chronology and character, but rather by progressions of images and word associations. While this kind of grammatical, generic, and representational disruption is also at work in the traditional, male-dominated avant-garde, what sets these women writers apart is precisely that their practice is grounded in more than just parody or subversive play with language and form; it is also based in an intent, an ethical commitment to render visible an elided element in our culture, that being women's psychological, physical, and metaphysical understanding of both the process and the possibilities of identity-formation. Nonetheless, as the critic Margaret Homans points out in her appropriately titled article "'Her Very Own Howl': The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction," the revisionary strategies employed by women writers do not automatically result in a revolutionary textuality. Indeed, "among scholars who accept the primacy of language, one of the most vexed questions in feminist literary criticism is whether or not anything differentiates women's relation to discourse from other literary revolutions (modernism is the example most often cited), or from the discourse of other marginalized groups, such as colonial writers, or racial and ethnic minorities."6 In my reading of Hyvrard's early works, I show how in some cases women's writings actually participate in two or more "marginalizations," making it less surprising that "women's relation to discourse" should display congruency with that of "colonial" writers, who deal with similar problems of finding a voice and legitimacy in the face of a dominant culture that excludes and often denigrates them. Still, for many other women writers, the fact of belonging to an ethnic or linguistic minority is much less important than the oppression they suffer as women, placing them in a uniquely disadvantaged position in language as well as in society. It has therefore

272 Mothers of Invention

been my hypothesis that these women's writings are indeed distinct from other "literary revolutions" precisely because of what Shirley Neuman calls the "ideology of difference" that inspires them.7 While other modernist and (post)colonial writers display a similar irreverence for the structures and lexicon of the language in which they write, their subversive gestures do not move in the same thematic and poetic directions or share the same woman-centred focus. Moreover, these women writers are not simply resisting an established order that excludes them; they are just as concerned with the invention of a new order, or at least a virtual space in which to freely imagine the possibility of a difference irreducible to the destructive oppositions that have so often supported the oppression of real women, as well as the elision of the feminine in language. Works by authors such as Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard can thus be seen as displaying exactly the kind of ideologically committed "critical distance" that Richard Murphy, in his study Theorizing the Avant-Garde, says distinguishes the historical avant-garde from modernism. In his sophisticated engagement with Peter Burger's classic Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974), Murphy posits that "the avantgarde ... distinguishes itself [from modernist aesthetics] in precisely this aspect: it takes up a certain critical distance in order to see through the duplicities and hidden social functions of affirmative culture, and in order to articulate an awareness of the social and historical conditions of art."8 While taking issue with Burger's omission of expressionism in his considerations of early twentieth-century avant-garde movements, Murphy seems to concur with much of his predecessor's "description of the avant-gardiste work" and of "the intention of the historical avant-garde," if not with his perspective on the avantgarde's failure to achieve the desired "destruction of art as an institution set off from the praxis of life."9 For Murphy, that failure is an inevitable result of the need to preserve critical distance, or aesthetic autonomy, which the modernist proponents of "art for art's sake" took to such an extreme that they in a sense provoked the contrary reaction that became the historical avant-garde. Still, even the most Utopian avant-garde artist must negotiate "between the desire to create a new form of art with a direct bearing upon life, and the need to retain for art a degree of autonomy in order to preserve a distance to reality and thus a vantage point from which art might formulate its social critique" (TAG 29). It is because of this key critical insight into modernism and the avant-garde's "shar[ed] ... reliance on aesthetic autonomy" that Murphy must perforce return to the question of ideology, claiming that the two aesthetics "differ in one major respect, namely the ideology-critical uses to which they put autonomy" (31-2).

273 Conclusion

If one accepts his insight that the radicalism and self-consciousness of its ideological critique is the distinguishing characteristic of the avant-garde, then the feminist avant-garde can also be both identified with and differentiated from its historical predecessors using the same logic. Indeed, many of the phrases that Murphy employs to describe expressionist art, such as its delight in exploring "illogicality, madness and the unconscious" or its "wholehearted embrace of lifeintensity, intoxication and chaos" (TAG 261), could very well be used to describe most, if not all, of the experimental writing by Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard in the 19703. Admittedly, the approaches and individual voices developed by these writers vary considerably: Cixous and Gagnon explicitly privilege the unconscious and dreams as sources of creative energy, while Brossard and Hyvrard do not, even as the differences between these latter two remain equally significant, since Brossard's forays into nonsense and her disruption of syntax do not much resemble the positively connoted madness of Hyvrard's racially and sexually oppressed narrators, although the critical effect of their attempts to express what lies outside patriarchal systems of thought may be similar. In the same vein, one can also recall Gagnon's explicitly Marxist reading of women's oppression, which differentiates her from many of her contemporaries, despite a common commitment to exploring feminist solidarity as much as individuality.10 Notwithstanding such distinctions among these authors' works, just as Murphy can speak of expressionism as an avant-garde despite the diversity of its participants, which make it "unlikely to yield to any single definition or generalization" (TAG 5), so may we consider the varied voices of the feminist experimental writing community of the 19705 an avant-garde because of their shared ideological goals and aesthetic strategies, in spite of the fact that nowhere was there as coherent a "movement" in literature as there was in the political sphere at the time. It is for this reason that, when we discuss these avant-garde French and Quebec women writers, it seems much more accurate to speak of a community than of a movement (with its implication of conformity), since designating them more loosely as a community does not preclude the possibility of recognizing their contribution to the avantgarde tradition. Ultimately, what the contemporary feminist avant-garde I am describing shares with its historical precursors is that its literary expression "foregrounds not just the contents marginalized by the system, but the actual process of marginalization itself: in other words, it is the process of signification and its systemic shortcomings (or ideological biases) which become the center of the counter-text's

274 Mothers of Invention

concerns" (TAG 297, Murphy's emphasis). If anything unites these women's writings, it is precisely this dual preoccupation, first, with what is being silenced and elided in patriarchal culture - namely, women's imaginary and experience - and then with how this exclusion occurs in and through language. It is no wonder, then, that all of these women point up the absence of women and the feminine in the language they share, even as they push both tongue and text to the breaking point in order to "faire passer a tout prix quelque chose d'heterogene a la tradition [slip something by at odds with tradition]" (Rire 42, Laugh 879) and thus make visible the feminine cont(in)ent they wish to explore. Of course, the specific ways in which these women transgress the linguistic and literary norms are not entirely new. As I noted earlier, many of the phrases that critics such as Murphy use to describe the historical avant-garde's subversive practices could just as well have been written about these women's experimental writing strategies. In this respect, I must concur with the observations of Homans or even Rosalind Krauss, who, in her study The Originality of the AvantGarde and Other Modernist Myths, suggests that "if the very notion of the avant-garde can be seen as a function of the discourse of originality, the actual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that 'originality' is a working assumption that itself emerges from a ground of repetition and recurrence."11 My own insistence on the innovative qualities of these women's works notwithstanding, I have also be at pains to point out the traditions and texts they are indebted to and reprise, be it in the frequent use of intertextuality or parodic rewriting (in Cixous especially), in a ludic yet lyrical approach to syntax and imagery at times reminiscent of Surrealist poetics (particularly in Brossard12 but also in Gagnon and Cixous), or finally, in their subversive play with aspects of form and genre (as seen in Brossard's use of space, which recalls Mallarme's poetics, in Gagnon's use of a dream logic once privileged by Surrealist narratives, and in all four authors' hybridization of genres, which hearkens back to the novel's protean origins). My claim that these women's writings are innovative is thus based, not on a lack of appreciation for the fact that their strategies have been used before, but rather on the number and variety of strategies they deploy concurrently, in their search to formulate an ecriture feminine or an ecriture au feminin capable of expressing the reality that women perceive and the dreams and desires they pursue. The overall impression created by their texts, because of the accumulation of subversive strategies at work, is one of originality and innovation, an effect that is certainly among their goals. It is not for nothing that

275 Conclusion

Brossard, recalling Rimbaud's phrase "il faut etre absolument moderne" (one must be absolutely modern), speaks of the necessity of being "resolument moderne" (resolutely modern, LLA 45). In this allusion, she is speaking the language of her generation, who inherited the quest for and cult(ure) of originality that has driven modernism since the latter half of the nineteenth century. But what of the relationship between these feminist avant-garde works and postmodernity, which, after all, was emerging as a recognizable and theorizable aesthetic at the very time these women were writing?13 Richard Murphy essentially argues that, just as the avantgarde is born out of (and critiques) modernist aesthetics (TAG 258), so the characteristics of rewriting and self-reflexivity developed by the avant-garde are picked up and reworked by postmodernism. As he puts it, "forcibly re-writing the discursively constituted world and undercutting its dominant rhetoric and images from within ... produce[s] an [avant-garde] insight which later becomes a paradigmatic position in postmodernism: that one is always already enmeshed in the constant circulation of signs, images and discourses, and that in this realm there can be no 'outside' or neutral point of view since one's perspective is always already informed and contained by this restrictive discursive economy" (262). To this common thread, Murphy adds, "The expressionist avant-garde shares with postmodernism a wariness of nostalgia for any more substantial consolation such as a firm sense of theoretical or cosmological unity" (264), since "it is a defining feature of the historical avant-garde that it is precisely not interested in creating an alternative 'meta-narrative' or 'master-discourse'" (257). I find such parallels extremely interesting because they suggest two key observations: first, that the feminist avant-garde, like its historical predecessors, has obvious points of intersection with postmodern aesthetics, particularly in its deconstruction of "dominant rhetorics" and avoidance of replacing patriarchal logic with another form of psychological, linguistic, or hierarchical hegemony; and second, that this very resistance to positing or creating any absolute discursive authority may very well have been why the feminist avant-garde did not generate a sustained movement, but led rather quickly to more intimate, less collectively identified writings for all of its participants. To address the first observation in a more nuanced fashion, if one concurs with critics such as Janet Paterson who see the postmodern aesthetic as one not as concerned with radical ideological stances/4 then the feminist avant-garde I describe here clearly occupies a place on the aesthetic spectrum in between the historical avant-garde and postmodernism. Although the feminist writers I

276 Mothers of Invention

study certainly share in many of the contemporary aesthetic ideas that are now considered postmodern, they are at the same time clearly an avant-garde precisely because of their ideological engagement and the radicalism of their textual experimentation, which many postmodern writers eschew. Unlike postmodernist works, across which there is seldom a discernable common set of values in the constantly shifting play of and with discourses and intertexts, in feminist aesthetics there is an ethics at work, in which the valorization and exploration of difference and of women's creativity are but manifestations of the basic principle of respect for self and other. By displaying an awareness of such ethical imperatives in writing, avant-garde literary feminism aims to improve the quality of women's existence by transforming their representations and possibilities, in discourse as in daily life. Conversely, and this is my second point, the very fact that feminist writers share in the ambient postmodern critique of any sort of metanarrative is undoubtedly part of what made these women reluctant to impose their vision or faire ecole - in effect, limiting the influence of their aesthetic and ideological strategies. Although they were eager to explore their shared inspirations and insights in writing, they were also wary of assuming an authority that might reproduce the oppressive hierarchies they were trying to abolish.15 The feminist critique of the dynamics of power in collective enterprises is thus precisely what led to the kind of insistence on individuality exhibited in Kristeva's playfully titled article "Une(s) femme(s)" and in cautionary remarks such as those of Louise Dupre, who suggests, "A vouloir trop generalise^ on cour[t] le risque de faire des ceuvres de femmes une totalite ou les differences seraient gommees. Peut-etre est-il devenu urgent d'adopter maintenant un autre angle de vision: partir du particulier, quitte a voir les points de recoupement entre les textes, les livres, les ceuvres [in trying to generalize too much, one risks making women's works a totality where differences are erased. Perhaps it has now become urgent to adopt another angle of vision: to begin with the individual, even if it does mean understanding the points of intersection between the texts, the books, the bodies of work]" (sv 23). In a sense, "another angle" is exactly what I have been seeking in Mothers of Invention. In my arguments and analysis I have tried to strike a balance between recognizing these women's works as avantgarde, so that they may be better understood within the framework of literary history and, in particular, the history of the avant-garde, and still respecting their individuality, their distinctive literary voices, among which differences are as important as their identification with

277 Conclusion

the collectivity of women. Even if one accords this community of writers the status of an avant-garde as I do, it is indisputable that their "moment" of literary synergy was a brief one. In fact, the communal energy of women's avant-garde writings began to dissipate in France as early as 1979, when Antoinette Fouque's group "Politique et Psychanalyse" legally appropriated the MLF abbreviation by applying for its copyright.16 It did not last much longer in Quebec, where the publication of La Theorie, un dimanche in 1988 can be seen as the last concerted attempt to bring together increasingly divergent feminist aesthetic practices, from which writers such as Madeleine Gagnon and Denise Boucher had in fact already distanced themselves a decade earlier. All in all, it seems reasonable to consider the feminist avant-garde as a short-lived but trenchant literary phenomenon, in which a small but significant group of writers stretched the limits of their and their readers' imaginations in such a way that even the literary mainstream became more open to the multiple possibilities of women's experiences and creativity. That the feminist literary avant-garde had a significant impact, despite the scant decade of its coalescence, is borne out both by the subsequent careers of its writers and by the trajectories pursued by others around and after them. Helene Cixous, for all her resistance to being labelled a feminist, has nonetheless continued to explore sexual difference, desire, and the relation both have to the creative impulse ever since the 19705, although it is clear that she has moved away from the search for an ecriture feminine towards writing about other ineffable human experiences and mysteries in her fiction of the last twenty years. A notable shift in Madeleine Gagnon's writing also occurred in the early 19803, when she turned from collaborative projects and the Marxist-inspired theme of solidarity among women towards a much more intimate exploration of the self. Nonetheless, the interest in the body, in alterity, and in the transmission of knowledge and inspiration among women that marked her most militantly feminist texts has persisted even in her recent fiction, such as Les Cathedrales sauvages (1994), where most of the female narrators seek to pass on a story that results from their witnessing of another woman's experiences of loss, suffering, or the search for herself in writing. Similarly, neither Jeanne Hyvrard nor Nicole Brossard has given up on the search to redefine and revise both words and the world in order to make them more open to women's experiences and visions. Even after the publication of her idiosyncratic and inventive "nomenclature" La Pensee corps (1989), Hyvrard has continued to deconstruct the sociological, psychological, and linguistic mechanisms through which our ability to resist oppression is eroded or

278 Mothers of Invention

deadened, particularly in works such as Au Presage de la mienne (At the presage of my own [death]; 1997), and she has persisted in exploring her alternative cosmogony and world view, most recently in Ton Nom de vegetal (1998). Of all four of these writers, however, it is arguably Brossard who has most consistently pursued the innovative, lesbian aesthetics and feminist ethics espoused by so many in the mid-1970s. In both her poetry and her fiction, she has repeatedly explored lesbian desire and experimented with form and language in her search to find new ways to represent women's relationships to other women and to themselves. While the unconventionally structured, self-reflexive narratives of Le Desert mauve (1987) and Baroque d'aube (1995) are more often recognized as postmodern than avant-garde by contemporary critics/7 Brossard's work remains committed to the ethical ideals that originally inspired the search for an ecriture au feminin, for she has never lost sight of the double preoccupation with writing and gender, as the title of her 1998 essay, She Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel/EHe serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman, so eloquently demonstrates. Of course, these individual women writers' sustained careers are not in and of themselves a sufficient indicator of the literary and cultural impact that the feminist avant-garde has had in France and Quebec. In truth, it is quite difficult to isolate proof of such an impact, in part because avant-garde writing was but one form of expression that feminists were pursuing during the 19705, such that its influence is perceptible only inasmuch as it stems from and is a part of the much broader spectrum of literary and cultural manifestations fostered by the feminist movement. Indeed, as Rita Felski points out in Beyond feminist Aesthetics, avant-garde strategies are not evident in what the majority of women writers published during the period because many opted to write (and read) more conventionally realistic narrative representations and testimonials of women's experiences.18 Still, it must not be forgotten that many avant-garde feminist writers were also politically active and participated in founding journals and publishing houses or in editing collections that specialized in women's writing, such that their presence and inspiration did create a critical mass and thus more opportunities for women to gain legitimacy and recognition on the broader literary scene.19 One wonders, for example, to what extent the increasing visibility and influence of feminist writers in the seventies and early eighties contributed to Marguerite Duras's receiving a Prix Goncourt in 1984, finally affording her works mass-market exposure more than forty years after she began her career. More generally, experimental feminist textuality can be seen to have created an interest in and respect for questions

279 Conclusion

of gender that certainly helped to shift the literary "horizons of expectation/' to borrow the terminology developed by Hans Robert Jauss in Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. According to Jauss, new forms of fiction "can make possible a new perception of things by preforming the content of a new experience first brought to light in the form of literature. The relationship between literature and reader can actualize itself in the sensorial realm as an incitement to aesthetic perception as well as in the ethical realm as a summons to moral reflection."20 Without the groundbreaking work of experimental feminist writers such as Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard, the terrain would thus not have been as propitious for the grammatical exploit of Anne Garreta's "genderless" narration of the love story Sphinx (1986); nor would readers have been able to appreciate the humour of Jacqueline Harpman's play with gender and the split subject in the fantastic, psychoanalytically informed tale Orlanda, which won the Prix Medicis in 1996.21 Even more personal works, such as the autofictions of Annie Ernaux, Regine Robin, or France Theoret,22 would probably not enjoy the serious attention and readership they have garnered, were it not for the legitimization of women's life-writing that occurred when feminist writers and theorists affirmed that "the personal is political." The effect of the literary innovations and ethical commitment of avant-garde feminist texts has no doubt been amplified and sustained in part by the rise of feminist criticism and its institutionalization in programs dedicated to women's studies (or, more recently, gender studies), which have come to occupy important, if not uncontested, places within academe. It has clearly been North American feminist critics, for example, who have most thoroughly charted the intersections of feminism and postmodernism, developing a nuanced understanding, most particularly in the Quebec context, of how avant-garde feminist authors contributed to the development of the postmodern aesthetic.23 In addition, the formal and thematic preoccupations of feminist avant-garde writing certainly played some role in contemporary (re)visions of identity politics that have led, among other things, to significant contributions in the field of postcolonial theory and to the development of queer theory and the more recent interest in cultural hybridity, at least in North America.24 Thanks to the radicalism of certain feminist texts, critics and readers alike have been awakened to the multiple allegiances and desires at work in each of us and to the possibilities that literature offers for the expression of such complexity and its effects on a subject's relations with its others. We should note that the influence of innovative feminist textuality and thinking has not been restricted to women readers, writers,

280 Mothers of Invention

academics, and even translators,25 but has also extended to their male counterparts. For the year 1998 alone, one can point to the critical anthology Men Doing Feminism, edited by Tom Digby, and also to a conference such as "Feminisme et creation" (Feminism and creation/ creative writing), where a male author, Francis Dupuis-Deri, affirmed that feminism "enriches and stimulates" his creativity because his "identite feministe - identite politique et non de genre ... - [l]'aide a sublimer (en partie) [s]on identite biologique ... Effet paradoxal puisque le feminisme a justement tres souvent encourage les femmes a exprimer par la litterature leur identite de femme, a liberer la voix des femmes [feminist identity - a political and not a gender identity ... - helps him to sublimate (in part) his biological identity ... A paradoxical effect precisely because feminism so often encouraged women to express their gender identity in literature, to liberate women's voices]."26 Such examples bear eloquent witness to the influence that feminist textuality has had on a broader spectrum of critical and creative practices, and they show that avant-garde feminist writings did indeed help many imagine what, to borrow Dupuis-Deri's phrase, "to create otherwise" might look like.27 The introduction of other creative possibilities by women authors is precisely the heritage of literary feminism that Pascale Navarro refers to when, at the same 1998 conference, she posited that "il existe desormais un imaginaire de la femme de lettres, de 1'ecrivaine, de 1'editrice, de la lectrice; il existe en bref un autre referent [there exists henceforth an imaginary of the woman of letters, of the woman writer, of the woman editor, of the woman reader; in sum, there exists an other referent]."28 In such declarations, one may be tempted to hear echoes of Simone de Beauvoir's analysis of woman as always man's (inferior) other, but it is clear here that the "other referent" Navarro alludes to is in fact a vision consciously and freely chosen by women who have struggled to ensure that their presence is no longer subordinate. From remarks like Navarro's, one can see that the ideologically motivated, lyric, and ludic fictions of writers such as Cixous, Gagnon, Brossard, and Hyvrard have, at least on some level, achieved their goal of changing perceptions. As early as 1982, Suzanne Lamy, a critic who herself did much to forge and foster links between Quebec and French feminist circles, saw very clearly that these women's works could not but transform tradition when she wrote: "Que fera la tradition litteraire de cette poussee, de cette delivrance? De bonne ou de mauvaise grace, elle ne pourra plus faire comme si nombre de femmes n'avaient pas change leur rapport au langage, a 1'ecriture [What will literary tradition do with this upsurge, with this liberation? Willingly or grudgingly, it will no

281

Conclusion

longer be able to act as if many women had not changed their relationship to language, to writing]."29 These women's transformative approach to writing has also changed our strategies of reading. The fictional journeys offered by Helene Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard richly reward the reader who accepts their invitation to challenge the limits of language and sense. Although the specific points of departure of each may differ, it would seem that these women all metaphorically call us to experience the wealth of possibilities and the freedom of language figured so eloquently by Cixous's narrator at the close of La, as she visualizes taking flight from the feminized space of the "tour Effelle": "Se rire des menaces. Sans ailes s'eloigner du perchoir, sans 1'angoisse, avec elles, passer avec ses ames, ses formes et toutes ses lettres a 1'infini ou elle prendra son la [Laugh at the threats. Wingless, to let go of the perch, without fear, with the girls, to pass with one's souls, one's shapes and all one's letters into the infinite where she will take her there/air]" (278). Even if this flight is clearly imaginary, it is a mark of the power of these fictions that even today such metaphoric projections can be a source of inspiration and can remind us of the power of writing to explore and express the differences that inhabit us all.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Kristeva, "Un Nouveau Type d'intellectuel/' 6-7. The translation comes from Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, 298. It should be noted that there is no entirely satisfactory English translation for the French word feminine, which is translated as either "female" or "feminine/' depending on the translator and the context. 2 To this day, persistent differences in strategy, beliefs, and priorities with respect to women's rights and status continue to vex the recent World Conferences on Women in Beijing (1995) and New York (2000). 3 Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures, 22. Huffer quite rightly points out that there has been considerable work done on the conflicts within feminist thought, highlighted in such anthologies as Conflicts in Feminism, edited by Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller. The myth of early feminist unity is one manifestation of the nostalgia that she so eloquently critiques. See Huffer's introduction and 148-50, notes 22 and 26. 4 Kristeva, "Un Nouveau Type d'intellectuel," 6, and The Kristeva Reader, 297. 5 See, for example, Adams, Reproducing the Womb; Bassin et al., eds., Representations of Motherhood; Brandt, Wild Mother Dancing; Daly and Reddy, eds., Narrating Mothers; Davidson and Broner, eds., The Lost Tradition; Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot; Jacobus, First Things; Kahane et al., eds., The (M)other Tongue; Neumann, The Great Mother; Rich, Of Woman Born; Saint-Martin, Le Nom de la mere; and Tuttle Hansen, Mother without Child.

284 Notes to pages 6-11 6 Indeed, some critics such as Kelly Ives go so far as to posit that "Kristeva's enshrinement of (largely masculine) avant garde writers may have helped to exclude considerations of women in high culture" (Ives, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, 73). 7 Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering. 8 Brossard, L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite, 27. All quotations come from the second edition, translated by Barbara Godard as These Our Mothers, Or: The Disintegrating Chapter, 21. CHAPTER ONE

1 Maurice Duplessis was premier of Quebec from 1936 to 1939 and from 1944 to 1959, twenty years of government during which he upheld the Catholic Church and traditional values and opposed progressive change, particularly with regards to women's issues. See Karen Gould's remarks to this effect, in Writing in the Feminine, 7-8, and also Dumont et al. (Collectif Clio), L'Histoire des femmes au Quebec, 264, 35860, 375, 386-7. Subsequent references to Gould's study will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation WF. 2 Women obtained the vote in Quebec and France in 1940 and 1944 respectively. 3 See the chapter entitled "Le Feminisme reformiste" in Albistur and Armogathe, Histoire du feminisme francais, 2: 654-64. 4 In her Feminism in France, Claire Duchen claims that the "students and other protestors who formed the May Movement came from extreme Left groups, with all shades of anarchists, Marxists, Trotskyists, Maoists, socialists and others" (5). 5 Dumont et al., L'Histoire des femmes au Quebec, 465. 6 Ibid., 442-9. 7 Duchen, Feminism in France, 7, and Dumont et al., L'Histoire des femmes au Quebec, 478. For American influences on the development of French feminisms, see also Marks and de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms, 28-38. 8 For an outline of some of the many intellectual and social factors contributing to the renewal of French feminism, see Marks and de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms, 30-1. 9 Karen Gould underscores the importance of "Quebec nationalism" and the "discourse of decolonization" to the rise of Quebec feminism (WF 10-11). Veronique O'Leary and Louise Toupin, in their introduction to Quebecoises deboutte! (47), also make a cogent argument for the role of increased access to contraceptives in Quebec. This motivating factor also may apply to French feminists, given the passage of the Neuwirth Law in 1967, which finally legalized the sale of contraceptives in France after forty-seven years of prohibition.

285 Notes to pages 12-14 10 De Beauvoir, Le Deuxieme Sexe, 15. Translation mine. 11 De Courtivron, "Women and Movement(s): 1968-1978," 78. 12 This is not to belittle the importance of the avant-garde journal La Bane du jour (BDJ), which gave many women writers a forum between 1965 and 1977, particularly in special issues such as "Femme et langage/' BDJ 50 (hiver 1975). 13 Marks and de Courtivron, New French Feminisms, x. 14 The extent of this rejection of the word "feminist" is such that in Albistur and Armogathe's Histoire du feminisme frangais, there is no discussion of the important role played in France since the late 19605 by Antoinette Fouque's "Psych & Po" group, which chose merely to append a position statement to the text rather than to be included as part of French feminist history (Histoire du feminisme frangais, 696). Fouque eventually legally appropriated the acronym MLF, and she also runs Editions des femmes, the publisher of Albistur and Armogathe's two-volume history. 15 See, among other critical studies on the question of communities of women, Nina Auerbach's Communities of Women, as well as Kirk Read's "French Renaissance Women Writers in Search of Community." 16 In his thesis, Kirk Read points out the isolation of such literary communities from one another in the Renaissance, when he remarks: "It is interesting (and, at times confounding) to note the virtual absence of inter-recognition between the authors ... Nowhere do they inscribe each other in their works. Though references to classical female predecessors abound, never once do these women call upon each other as sisters, compatriots, commiserators - a practice so highly prevalent in the strategies of self-edification practiced by their male contemporaries in the male community par excellence, the Pleiade" (Read, "French Renaissance Women Writers in Search of Community," 325). This observation is, of course, not applicable to the feminists of the 19705, given the mass media and the rapid international availability of literary and theoretical publications by women, which allowed them to keep up relatively easily with what other women were thinking and doing. 17 Claire Lejeune in "La Femme et 1'ecriture," 293. 18 See Mss-36i, Fonds Gagnon, Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec, Montreal. This file contains six works by Lejeune with autograph inscriptions to Gagnon. MS5-402 of the Fonds Gagnon contains four more of Lejeune's texts and some of her letters to Gagnon. 19 Notably, Brossard and Gagnon both interviewed Cixous after her 1974 visit. See, respectively, Cixous, "Une Romanciere et critique sur le phallocentrisme" and "Entretien: Dora et Portrait du soleil." Cixous lectured again in Quebec in 1979, lectures discussed by Suzanne Lamy in "Pouvoir du discours et discours de pouvoir," 9.

286 Notes to pages 15-18 20 Roy, "Femmage: Madeleine Gagnon," 50. 21 Cixous, "Le Rire de la Meduse," and Cixous and Clement, La Jeune nee. All subsequent references to these two works will be given parenthetically using the abbreviations "Rire" and JN respectively. 22 Cixous, "The Laugh of the Medusa," 875. Subsequent references to this translation will be given parenthetically with the abbreviation "Laugh." 23 This is a term Cixous borrows from Joyce; see Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 118. 24 In La Jeune nee the "feminine" is initially placed in quotation marks, indicating Cixous's particular usage (JN 158) and thus avoiding precisely the confusion of woman=feminine that became manifest in many essentialist readings of "Le Rire de la Meduse." It should be noted that many passages of "Rire" are repeated and developed in Cixous's chapter in La Jeune nee, entitled "Sorties" (JN 114-246). 25 Garcia, Promenades femmilieres. This two-volume work makes up in scope and enthusiasm what it lacks in rigour as it attempts to identify the feminine in writings as disparate as those of George Sand and Chantal Chawaf. 26 Pujade-Renaud, "Du Corps feminin a 1'ecriture," 118. 27 See her interview with Verena Conley in the latter's seminal work Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine, 129-61. In Conley's 1991 expanded edition, this interview is augmented by a second one (163-78). All citations will henceforward refer to the later edition. 28 Contemporaneous works by Irigaray include Speculum de I'autre femme (1974) and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (1977), while Kristeva's major works of the period are La Revolution du langage poetique (1974) and Polylogue (1977). Leclerc's Parole de femme (1974) was the first in a series of more accessible and thus widely read feminist "personal" essays to be published by Grasset, which include Marie Cardinal's Les Mots pour le dire (1975) and Benoite Groult's Ainsi soit-elle (1975). 29 Some American Feminists (National Film Board of Canada, 1978) includes interviews with Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Rita May Brown, and Lila Karp. 30 The Manifeste des femmes quebecoises, first circulated in photocopy form at a cost of 50^ before being picked up by L'Etincelle, was produced by Marxist women disillusioned with the Quebec nationalist movement and responding to the 1970 manifesto of the FLQ (Front de liberation du Quebec) terrorists. The lack of success of this manifesto was surely due in part to its overly didactic, populist tone and to its repetitiveness, which make it uninspiring reading. While many remember the slogan from the published version's back cover ("Pas de Quebec libre sans liberation des femmes! Pas de femmes libres sans

287 Notes to pages 19-23

31

32

33

34 35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42

liberation du Quebec!"), very few prominent feminists in Quebec actually refer to the text itself or cite its influence. Many Quebec and even Anglo-Canadian feminists seem to have preferred writing shorter texts of a theoretical nature during the height of feminist activism in the mid-seventies. Such essays and reflections found an audience through journals and periodicals such as La Bane du jour and La Nouvelle Bane du jour, Tessera, Les Tetes de pioche, Les Carders de la femme, and Pluri-elles, to name a few. Jeanne Maranda and Mai'r Verthuy offer a useful survey, "Quebec Feminist Writing," covering 1971-77, which includes detailed information on the feminist journals and publications of the period. Gagnon and Cixous exchanged several letters in 1975 about the project. See Madeleine Gagnon, Personal Correspondence, MSS-265, Fonds Gagnon, Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec, Montreal. This work was the result of a discussion group begun in 1983, which involved the participation of some of the most important feminist writers in Quebec, namely, Louky Bersianik, Louise Cotnoir, Louise Dupre, Gail Scott, France Theoret, and Nicole Brossard. One among many collaborative efforts, it indicates the importance and awareness of a community of women exchanging and exploring feminist analyses. Theoret, Entre raison et deraison, 143-4. Gagnon, "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture," Cixous, Gagnon, and Leclerc, La Venue a 1'ecriture, 86-7. Gagnon, "My Body in Writing," 277-8. I have slightly modified Wendy Johnston's translation, which reads: "if, times, the syntax erupts and revolts against ... movements, the disintegration, the inflections of myself into a vocabulary." I choose to keep the idea of "shattered paradigms" in the English translation because Gagnon is clearly proposing to break the rules and rewrite them in her own way, whereas Johnston's translation effaces this subversive element of Gagnon's aesthetic in favour of a more intimate (and limited) project of tracing the self. Bersianik, Les Agenesies du vieux monde, 16. Pujade-Renaud, "Du Corps feminin a 1'ecriture," 110-11. Gagnon, "Madeleine parle," 52. Marks and de Courtivron, New French Feminisms, vii. This essay has elsewhere been classified as a manifesto by other critics. See, for example, Jones, "Inscribing Femininity," 85, and Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 17. Brossard, "Un Livre a venir," 11. Wittig was one of the early feminist activists who demonstrated at the Arc de Triomphe in 1970 to draw attention to "one more forgotten than the unknown soldier: his wife."

288 Notes to pages 24-31 43 For a description of the operation and mission of Editions des femmes, see Makward, "Les Editions des femmes." 44 This brief description of the principal "periods" in Cixous's writing is similar to those found in Conley's Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine, 10; Penrod's Helene Cixous; Blashak's "L'Ecriture feminine dans Ananke d'Helene Cixous," 9-10; and Fisher's La Cosmogonie d'Helene Cixous, 214, although the last critic adds a "fourth" phase superimposed on the "third" to signal Cixous's more recent efforts to connect poetic writing to lived experience. 45 Marx-Scouras, The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel, 2. Marx-Scouras also points out that the review Poetique was founded by Cixous, Genette, and Todorov in 1968 in part as a literary alternative to Tel Quel (120-1). 46 Dupre, Strategies du vertige, 251^. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation sv. 47 This connection with Cixous's work comes from a note on page 5 of Madeleine Boulanger's master's thesis, "Madeleine Gagnon et la quete des origines." Boulanger cites the expression as being on page 134 of Cixous's Portrait du soleil (1974). 48 Melancon, "Madeleine Gagnon," 19. 49 Lequin, "Les Femmes quebecoises ont invente leurs paroles," 120. 50 Brossard's "L'Ecrivain" is one of a series of sketches of women written for the play, which also included the writings of Marie-Claire Blais, Luce Guilbeault, and France Theoret, among others. 51 Hyvrard is also the youngest in age, for she was born in France in 1945. 52 See, for example, the reviews by Alante-Lima, Autrand, Bonnefoy, Cartano, Freustie, Gavard-Perret, and Reid cited in the bibliography. 53 Hyvrard, "Interview avec Jeanne Hyvrard realise a Paris le 20 juillet 1985," 125. 54 Hyvrard, "Un Entretien quelques moments avant la guerre," 137. 55 Ibid., 133. 56 In France one might include such writers as Marie Cardinal, Madeleine Chapsal, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, the Groult sisters, Annie Leclerc, Michele Perrein, and Christiane Rochefort among the non-experimental novelists whose texts display or encourage feminist social critiques, while in Quebec one would have to mention Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hebert, Suzanne Jacob, Michele Mailhot, Jovette Marchessault, Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Helene Ouvrard, Suzanne Paradis, and Monique LaRue. 57 Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 11. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation si. 58 Russell, Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries, vii and x respectively. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation PPR.

289 Notes to pages 31-6 59 Mitterand et al., Litterature, xxe siecle: Textes et documents (1989; referred to by the publisher's name, Nathan); Lagarde and Michard, xxe siecle: Les grands auteurs franqais (1988). In the latter anthology, the few women writers mentioned are scattered among several sections, while even the Nathan anthology's chapter "Ecrits de femmes" contains a mere thirteen pages, far less than half the space accorded to surrealism or the new novel, for example. It is clear from these two anthologies from the late 19805 that women's writing, even after feminism, is still not considered central to the male-dominated canon in France (only 6 per cent of the twentieth-century authors cited by Nathan are women). In Quebec the story is somewhat different, since proportionally more women seem to be included among canonical writers of the last fifty years than in France. Nevertheless, Weinmann and Chamberland's anthology Litterature quebecoise: Des origines a nos jours (1996) still only has one chapter on "L'Ecriture au feminin," and it does not accord women's writing the status of being avant-garde (18 per cent of the authors anthologized are women, however, which is three times the percentage for the comparable French anthology). 60 In France one could point to Chantal Chawaf, Viviane Forrester, Emma Santos, and Monique Wittig, in addition to Cixous and Hyvrard, while in Quebec a summary list would include Genevieve Amyot, Louky Bersianik, Denise Boucher, France Theoret, and Yolande Villemaire, as well as Brossard and Gagnon, whose work I focus on here. 61 Russell justifies his use of the term "postmodern" as follows: "I believe it most practical to take the concept of postmodernism as the temporary but necessary period term of our times" (PPR, 238). Some critics have argued as to whether the literary works of those involved in the resurgence of feminism are modernist or postmodernist. Given the problems of differing usage of the term "modernite" in France and Quebec, it would seem a substantial digression to engage in the debate, when resolution of the issue of such classification would add little to the central arguments of this project. I thus concur for reasons of expediency with Russell's use of "postmodern" as merely a period term within the larger context of modern culture, as he argues it in his chapter "Postmodernism and the Neo-avant-garde" (PPR, 236-70). 62 For the definition of this borrowing from the French, see Showalter's "Toward a Feminist Poetics," 128. 63 While Brossard, Gagnon, and Hyvrard all write poetry and Cixous and Brossard have ventured into theatrical writing, prose fiction remains the genre that all four have explored. 64 Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 174. 65 This designation, taken from the novel's back cover, could certainly be contested. Janet Paterson traces the beginnings of the postmodern

290 Notes to pages 36-9 novel to the late 19605 in her important study Moments postmodernes dans le roman quebecois. What she fails to recognize, however, is the early contribution made by feminists to the development of the aesthetic; she chooses to include only women's texts published after 1980, even though a compelling case can be made, using her own definitions of the postmodern, for including earlier works such as Brossard's L'Amer in the postmodern pantheon. 66 See Havercroft, "Auto/biographic et agentivite au feminin dans Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit d'Annie Ernaux." 67 Cixous, "Le Dernier Tableau ou le portrait de Dieu," Entre I'ecriture, 175. The translation comes from Cixous, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, 107. Subsequent references to this translation will appear in parentheses with the abbreviation crw. CHAPTER TWO

1 To my knowledge, only three critics explicitly discuss the importance of the future tense to this text's visionary mode: Suleiman (si 17), Shiach in Helene Cixous: A Politics of Writing, 17 (henceforward abbreviated to HCPW and referenced parenthetically), and Yaeger in HoneyMad Women, 16-17. Marks and de Courtivron, New French Feminisms, vii, also make this point implicitly when they classify "Rire" under "Utopias." 2 Conley, Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine, 52. Subsequent references to this study will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation HCWF. 3 Cixous, "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays," The Newly Born Woman, 98. All subsequent references to this translation will be given in parentheses with the abbreviation NEW. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. The most complete listing of writers whose works have interested and inspired Cixous is perhaps offered by Shiach (HCPW 39). It should be noted that Cixous did not read Clarice Lispector until 1977, and so that writer is not one of the influences I will discuss, although she is crucial to the shift in Cixous's writings of the "third period" mentioned in chapter i. 4 Cixous, "Ecrire du roman, aujourd'hui," 151; emphasis added. 5 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, "Le Dialogue des genres," 149. For a discussion of the Athenaeum's status as an avant-garde, see their L'Absolu littemire, 17-22. 6 Northrop Frye makes a similar point when he discusses classifying prose fiction into novel, romance, confession, and anatomy and cites texts that combine various of these "qualities," in his "Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres," 303-14. 7 Chapsal, "Helene Cixous centre Freud," 40.

291 Notes to pages 40-4 8 Cixous will further distinguish herself by choosing to publish exclusively with Editions des femmes from 1976 to 1983, in a gesture of solidarity with its project of publishing works by and on women, irrespective of "market pressures" and sales volume. See Cixous, "Entretien avec Helene Cixous: Un destin revolu," 16. For a discussion of her ambivalence about this decision, however, see "Interview with Helene Cixous," 23. Martine Motard-Noar also discusses Cixous's use of the label "fiction" in her study Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, 33. 9 Cixous mentions Marguerite Duras and Colette as foremothers (Rire 42n), but she expresses reservations with respect to their writing and even admits that she does not know Colette's writing as well as she might. See Cixous's interview "Rethinking Differences," 82. 10 Barthes, Le Degre zero de I'ecriture, 64. 11 Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 87. 12 It is not my goal here to differentiate, as Genette does in Palimpsestes, between different forms of what he calls "transtextuality," which includes intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, hypertextuality, and architextuality among the possible relations a given text may have to its context. I use the term "intertext" in a more general sense, to refer to those texts with which Cixous's La is in dialogue, either implicitly or explicitly. Intertextuality is first defined and explored by Julia Kristeva in Semeidtike (1969). 13 Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" 53. This article originally appeared as "Le Sexe ou la tete?" in 1976. All quotations will be from the translation. 14 See, for example (in order of publication): Kogan, "'I Want Vulva!'" 80; Fisher, La Cosmogonie d'Helene Cixous, 259; Shiach, HCPW 87. 15 Makward, "Structures du silence/du delire," 318. 16 This seminar was first published as "Le Seminaire du 21 Janvier 1975," Ornicar? 3 (1975): 104-10. Translated by Jacqueline Rose, it appears as "Seminar of 21 January 1975," in Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, 162-71. The quoted passage appears on page 167 of the translation. Subsequent references to this translation will be designated as Feminine Sexuality. 17 Lacan, "Dieu et la jouissance de La femme." Subsequent references to this text will be abbreviated to Encore and a page number; translated excerpts appear in Feminine Sexuality, 137-48. 18 Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" 45-6. 19 Lacan, Encore, 68. 20 Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, 144. 21 Rich, "When We Dead Awaken," 35. 22 Makward, "Structures du silence/du delire," 319.

292 Notes to pages 44-9 23 This is the literal translation of the Egyptian title, according to Sir E.A. Wallis Budge, the renowned fin-de-siede translator, Egyptologist, and curator at the British Museum. See Budge, preface to The Book of the Dead, xvii. In French the title Livre des marts elides the feminine, such that Cixous's play with gender becomes much more obvious. Subsequent references to Budge's work will appear in parentheses as "Budge." 24 The earliest manuscripts of the Book of the Dead predate the events recorded in the Bible, which itself existed as oral tradition long before it became a written document. 25 Shorter, The Egyptian Gods, 64. 26 Vandier, La Religion egyptienne, 72. In an appendix to her thesis, Cixous studies "Thoth et 1'ecriture" in Joyce's writings, with particular reference to Finnegans Wake. She notes Vandier's study as one of her references in L'Exil de Joyce, 841. 27 Vandier, La Religion egyptienne, 73. 28 Cixous, "La Venue a I'ecriture," Cixous, Gagnon, and Leclerc, La Venue a I'ecriture, 34-5. Subsequent citations from the French text will be identified as Venue. 29 Cixous, "Entretien avec Helene Cixous," 483. 30 Cixous, La (1976; rpt, Paris: des femmes, 1979), 7. All citations to the later edition will hereafter appear in parentheses following the quotation. 31 This particular play on words is one that Cixous repeatedly explores. It is also present, for example, in the title of her collection of critical essays, Prenoms de personne (1974). Morag Shiach's study offers a useful analysis of the ambiguity of personne (HCPW 46). 32 There are only three "correct" references to the Livre des marts in La: on pages 89, 207, and 208. The footnote on page 10, while it gives the correct title, does not cite the correct chapter. All other references to the Book of the Dead contain the feminine "mortes." 33 Le Petit Robert, 1984 ed., s.v. "myosotis." 34 Watterson, The Gods of Ancient Egypt, 78-81. 35 Ibid., 90. 36 One legend of Nut tells how she had to beat Thoth at dice for five days in order to give birth to her five children, including Osiris (Watterson, The Gods of Ancient Egypt, 57). This story is perhaps the origin of Cixous's pun on page 123 of La, "Ses Souvenirs d'Osirisque," where she recalls the "risk" involved in his entry into the world. 37 Cixous's narrator uses many epithets to describe the woman desiring rebirth in addition to "arrivante"; she is also a "dormeuse," a "passagere" and a "reveuse" (sleepher, passenger, dream/zer; La 26, 31, 36 respectively).

293 Notes to pages 51-6 38 Watterson, The Gods of Ancient Egypt, 177, 176, 178 respectively. 39 For Cixous's play on the name Neith, including its links to the verb naitre, see Motard-Noar, Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, 50-2. 40 Watterson, The Gods of Ancient Egypt, 176. 41 "Bisexualite, c'est-a-dire reperage en soi, individuellement, de la presence, diversement manifeste et insistante selon chaque un ou une, des deux sexes, non-exclusion de la difference ni d'un sexe, et a partir de cette 'permission' que 1'on se donne, multiplication des effets d'inscription du desir, sur toutes les parties de mon corps et de 1'autre corps [Bisexuality: that is, each one's location in self (reperage en soi) of the presence - variously manifest and insistent according to each person, male or female - of both sexes, nonexclusion either of the difference or of one sex, and, from this 'self-permission/ multiplication of the effects of the inscription of desire, over all parts of my body and the other body]" (Rire 46, Laugh 884). 42 Shorter, The Egyptian Gods, 137. 43 Horus is also the name of Isis' son, and Barbara Watterson claims that, at one time at least, there were two gods named Horus, although their attributes were eventually conflated. See Watterson, The Gods of Ancient Egypt, 101-9. 44 Motard-Noar, Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, 60-1. 45 Fisher, La Cosmogonie d'Helene Cixous, 244. 46 This sentence continues for over a page and does not end with a period but rather with a comma, indicating the endless possibilities for play with language. 47 The fact that Cixous chooses the Arab for this scene can no doubt be traced to her childhood in Algeria, of which she says: "mes freres de naissance sont arabes; ... Je suis du parti des offenses, des colonises. Je (ne) suis (pas) arabe [my brothers by birth are Arab ... I side with those who are injured, trespassed upon, colonized. I am (not) Arab]" (JN 130, NEW 71). This ambivalent relationship to her Arab "brothers" is also evident in a much later article, "De la scene de ITnconscient a la scene de 1'Histoire: Chemin d'une ecriture," where she writes: "Mes premiers autres ont ete les Arabes, les scarabees, les Franqais, les Allemands. Mes premiers semblables ont ete les poules, les lapins, les Arabes, les Allemands, etc. [My first others were the Arabs, the scarabs, the French, the German. My first fellows were hens, rabbits, Arabs, Germans, etc.]." See Cixous, "De la scene de 1'Inconscient," 16. 48 Kafka, "Before the Law," 3-4. This "parable" comes from the ninth chapter of The Trial. 49 This passage is mentioned by Garcia in her chapter "La Pate de 1'ecriture" in Promenade femmiliere, 190-1.

294 Notes to pages 57-62 50 Helene Cixous, The (Feminine), trans. Susan Sellers, in The Helene Cixous Reader, 59. All subsequent translations from this anthology will be designated by the abbreviation HCR in parentheses. 51 Jacques Derrida offers a very interesting exegesis on Thoth's various attributes and his relationship to writing and death in "I/Inscription des fils: Theuth, Hermes, Thot, Nabu, Nebo," the third section of "La Pharmacie de Platon," 95-107. 52 Barguet, Le Livre des marts des andens Egyptiens, 65-7. 53 Makward, "Structures du silence/du delire," 320. 54 Barguet, Le Livre des marts des andens Egyptiens, 65. Budge translates these cities as Pe-Tep, so it would seem that Cixous prefers the French translation here. I compare Cixous's text to Budge's translation on page ci of his introduction unless otherwise indicated. 55 See Barguet, Le Livre des marts des andens Egyptiens, 66, for "chez les morts" and "Naref." The former is paraphrased by Cixous as "la region des tenebres" (shadowlands), and the latter becomes her punning "Nairef." 56 Suleiman notes the presence of "affirmative" and "critical intertextuality" in Souffles, although she cites separate texts as examples of each (si 129). As we can see from this "tribunal" passage, Cixous uses the Book of the Dead as both a positive and a negative intertext in the course of La. 57 "C'est dans le nom du pere qu'il nous faut reconnaitre le support de la fonction symbolique qui, depuis 1'oree des temps historiques, identifie sa personne a la figure de la loi. [It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history, has identified his person with the figure of the law" (Lacan, "Fonction et champ de la parole," 278; Ecrits: A Selection, 67). 58 Shakespeare, Hamlet 3.1.60-88. 59 If Cixous did not see the retrospective, then she certainly could have noticed reproductions of the painting in museum bookshops, since The Nightmare was used for the cover of the exhibition catalogue. To my knowledge, the only other acknowledgment of her use of Fuseli's painting as an intertext is in Pierre Pachet's rather critical review article, "Un Debordement impressionnant." 60 Powell, Fuseli: The Nightmare, 60. 61 In a subsequent passage, for example, the narrator will find herself leaning against the "jument blanche" that peers through the curtains in Fuseli's painting. Cixous will play on the "mare" in The Nightmare by referring to it as a "cauchemare" (La 50, emphasis added). 62 Water imagery is abundant in La, most often in association with the body or language. See, for example, 25, 30, 58-9, 68-9, 135, 144-7, and 173.

295 Notes to pages 62-72 63 Cixous, "Se tenir dans 1'intenable," n.p. 64 La is not the first Cixousian text to contain images of flight. In fact, her first novel, Dedans (1969), contains a scene in which a girl imagines taking flight (42-3), and in Souffles (1975), the text that immediately precedes La, there are several passages that play on the double meaning of voler (29, 164-5, 179~81)- ^ La itself, images of flight or of birds can be found, for example, on 13, 27, 28, 35, 47, 89, 92, 106, 112, 118-26, 130, and 138-40. 65 In La, Cixous develops this comparison by alternating between images of luring and hooking a fish and the young woman's belated realization of the physical and emotional prison into which she has married (223-8). This reading contrasts sharply with Conley's, who paradoxically sees the rise to the bait as an echo of other liberating gestures in La (HCWF 87). 66 Cixous, "An Exchange with Helene Cixous," 154-5. This interview will subsequently be referred to as "An Exchange." 67 Ibid., 144. 68 See Powell, Fuseli: The Nightmare, 60, for a discussion of the unconfirmed identity of the young woman. Interestingly enough, she has the same V-necked style of garment as the sleeper in The Nightmare, although her hair is quite different from the latter's red curls. 69 Cixous, "Le Grand Je au feminin," 6. 70 Cixous, "Entretien avec Helene Cixous," 487. 71 Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." 72 Ibid., 96. 73 The opening of Cixous's essay in La Venue a I'ecriture describes her adoration of "le Visage," beginning with that of her mother, in terms that are almost precisely the same as those in the portrait passages of La (Venue, 9-11). Shiach notes Cixous's interest in portraits in Joyce's work (HCPW 44-5), as demonstrated in her essay "La Missexualite: ou jouis-je?" published in 1976. This essay was reprinted in Entre I'ecriture, 71-95. Several other essays collected in this volume discuss portraits, including "Le Dernier Tableau ou le portrait de Dieu." One could also cite Cixous's Portrait du soldi (1973) and Portrait de Dora (1976). 74 Freud, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," 104. 75 Many critics have noted the importance of birth metaphors in Cixous's work. See, for example, Suleiman (si 128) and Motard-Noar, Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, 28. Verena Conley has even read the title of La Jeune nee as "la je nais" (HCWF 53). 76 Freud, Un Souvenir d'enfance de Leonard de Vinci, 142-3. Subsequent references to Freud's analysis will appear parethetically as Souv. 77 Quoted by Freud, ibid., 49. This passage from the Codex atlanticus can be found in English as fragment 1363 in Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works, 2: 342.

296 Notes to pages 72-82 78 Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, 38. 79 Interestingly enough, the feminization of "faucon" by Cixous is indeed a redundancy, since, within the family of hawks, falcons are always the females and the males are more properly termed "tercels." Cixous's "fauconne," which also makes visible the female genitalia through the "conne" ending, is thus an exaggeratedly feminine neologism. 80 Cixous will call da Vinci "un des mes plus anciens jeunes freres, un feminin pluriel comme moi [one of my oldest young brothers, a feminine plural like me]" (Venue, 53, CTW 48). From this passage, we can see how she is inspired by his words, even as she hopes to inspire others with hers. 81 Sankovitch, "Helene Cixous: The Pervasive Myth," 146. 82 Cixous, "Le Grand Je au feminin," 6. 83 Fisher, La Cosmogonie d'Helene Cixous, 12. 84 Leonardo da Vinci, The Literary Works, 2: 111. 85 In La, Cixous never credits Freud or da Vinci for this intertext. One more direct reference to da Vinci's writings appears on page 116, where the narrator quotes "O mirabile necessite!" from da Vinci's Codex atlanticus. It can be found in English in Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, 117. 86 "Sortir au jour" is the French translation for Budge's title "Chapters of Coming Forth by Day" (Barguet, Le Livre des morts des anciens £gyptiens, 16) and recalls Cixous's essay "Sorties." La Venue a I'ecriture is of course the title of her collaboration with Gagnon and Leclerc. 87 Cixous, "An Exchange," HCWF 151. 88 Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, 176. 89 Cixous, "Le Grand Je au feminin," 6. 90 Throughout this passage, the feminine word "langue" is referred to using the feminine pronoun "elle," which transforms this passage into a lesbian love scene. Unfortunately, in English, words do not have genders, so "language" is thus an "it." Nonetheless, the erotic relation to language in this passage is made clear by the extended metaphor of a sexual encounter. 91 Articles critical of Cixous's metaphoric and literal references to the female body include Crowder, "Amazons and Mothers?"; Jones, "Writing the Body"; and Lindsay, "Body/Language." In defence of Cixous's practice, we can cite the analyses of Binhammer, "Metaphor or Metonymy?"; Freeman, "'Plus corps done plus ecriture'"; and Kogan, "'I Want Vulva!'" 92 Kogan, "'I Want Vulva!'" 82. For Kogan's complete analysis of all of page 114 of La, see her article, 81-4. 93 Ibid., 82.

297 Notes to pages 82-97 94 Freeman, "'Plus corps done plus ecriture,'" 65-6. 95 Motard-Noar, Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, 33. 96 Corredor also notes the narrator's elusive identity in her study of La, "The Fantastic and the Problem of Re-Presentation in Helene Cixous' Feminist Fiction," 173. Blashak writes rather about what she terms "1'incertitude du pronom personnel" in her thesis "L'Ecriture feminine dans Ananke d'Helene Cixous," 41. 97 Garcia, Promenade femmiliere, 140. Garcia notes a passage of similar alliterative exuberance to that just cited on page 117 of Cixous's Souffles (173). 98 References to music and song can be found in La on 16, 37, 38, 42-4, 46, 54, 85, 90, 120, 147, 185, etc. 99 Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique, 47. Kristeva defines the semiotic, the symbolic, and the chora in the first part of this study, "Preliminaires theoriques," 11-204. See especially 22-3, 29, 40-8. 100 Ibid., 49. 101 Makward, "Structures du silence/du delire," 320-1. 102 Ibid., 320. 103 Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 127. 104 Cixous, "Castration or Decapitation?" 55. 105 Kogan, '"I Want Vulva!'" 84. 106 Cixous, "Entretien avec Helene Cixous," 483. 107 These two neologisms are among those listed in the review of La offered by Colvile in "Helene Cixous: La," 326. 108 Motard-Noar, Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, 103. 109 Poirot-Delpech, "De Guy des Cars a Helene Cixous: Illisibles," 6. no Cixous, "Interview with Helene Cixous," 31. in Motard-Noar, Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous, 21. 112 Irma Garcia notes the important rhythmic effect created by "breathing" in other passages of La as well. See Garcia, Promenade femmiliere, 125. 113 This phrase is in fact a rewriting of the passage from Kierkegaard's Diary of a Seducer that Cixous cites earlier in La: "d'abord 1'amour reve d'elle, puis elle reve de 1'amour" (26). She actually credits this citation, but does not give the precise work it is taken from. It can be found in Kierkegaard, Diary of a Seducer, 161-2. 114 Fisher, La Cosmogonie d'Helene Cixous, 363-4. 115 Myers, "Reform or Ruin," 332. 116 One way that Cixous signals the presence of women in language is by feminizing traditionally masculine forms in expressions such as "une etre humaine [a female human being]" (La 132) and "la race des ailleures [race of elsewheres]" (168). 117 See Cixous, "Entretien avec Helene Cixous," 481-2. 118 Lyotard, "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles," 14.

298 Notes to pages 98-102 CHAPTER THREE

1 Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 10. 2 Interestingly enough, the article "Ou en est le mouvement des femmes a Montreal?" detailing the differences among the various factions, which appeared in Chroniques 26 (February 1977), was not penned by Gagnon and makes no mention of her, although it is preceded by a disclaimer from the editorial collective, of which she was a member. This article clearly valorizes the Marxist-feminist position over the radical feminist one, a position that is logical, given the journal's orientation, so it is unclear why it incited discord among the editors. Another sign of Gagnon's idiosyncratic stance and increasing opposition to the radical lesbian feminists she criticizes in her own work? 3 For an example of Gagnon's theoretical objections to radical feminism, see her critical review of La Nef des sorcieres in "d'une nef a 1'autre" (sic). 4 Gagnon, "Elle m'a parle de son sang et du mien," and "Dire ces femmes d'ou je viens." 5 See the press clippings collected in MSS-4O2, box 34, file 6, Fonds Gagnon, Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec. 6 Gagnon also contributed to "Des femmes en ecriture," a dossier that Cixous put together for Les Nouvelles litteraires (26 May 1976). I am grateful to Karen Gould for alerting me to this earlier collaboration. 7 Monique Roy mentions how both texts were launched in May of 1977, in her dossier "Femmage: Madeleine Gagnon," 49. 8 Gagnon in'La Femme et I'ecriture, special issue of Liberte, 253. 9 They both appear in Chroniques 1.2 (February 1975): 16-25 and 2-7 respectively. 10 Gagnon and Leclerc, "Correspondance." 11 Gagnon, Lueur (1979). All references to this work will henceforth appear in parentheses in the text, with the designation Lr where needed for clarity. 12 Gould, "Unearthing the Female Text," 88. 13 Gagnon, "Le Temps des connivences (entretien)," 64-5. 14 Gagnon, "Pourquoi, comment, pour qui ecrire?" Autographic 2, 127; reprinted from Chroniques 1.6 (June 1975). Subsequent references to articles reprinted in this volume will appear in parentheses with the abbreviation A2. 15 Lequin makes a similar point in her article "Les Femmes quebecoises ont invente leurs paroles," 121. Dupre also suggests this idea in reference to Retailles, but I think the notion is valid for much of what Gagnon publishes (sv 179).

299 Notes to pages 104-23 16 Gagnon, "Mon Corps dans 1'ecriture," Autographic i, 145. This essay was first published in Cixous, Gagnon, and Leclerc, La Venue a I'ecriture, 63-116. All subsequent citations from Gagnon's essay will come from the 1982 reprint and will be designated Ai (for Autographic i) in parentheses after the quoted passage. 17 Gagnon, "My Body in Writing," 273. 18 Helene Cixous, Letter to Madeleine Gagnon, dated 22 September 1975, box 2, file 12, Fonds Gagnon, Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec. 19 Gagnon reprises and develops this analysis of the shortcomings of both Freud's and Lacan's theories, with reference to language and to the question of power relations and class conflict, in her article "La Femme et le langage." 20 Gagnon, Pour lesfemmes et tons les autres; reprinted in Autographic i, 76. "Amour parallele," first published in Portraits du voyage, is also reprinted in Autographic i. 21 I borrow this resonant expression from Beizer, Ventriloquized Bodies. 22 Gagnon, "Dire ces femmes d'ou je viens," 94. 23 Gagnon, Les Fleurs du catalpa, 74. 24 Gagnon, "Formes et discours de la modernite dans le roman canadien d'expression frangaise." 25 Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 17. 26 For a more detailed but concise definition of this important element of Freud's thought, see Roudinesco and Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, 159-60. Freud's essay "Le Moi et le Ca" was made available in French translation in his Essais de psychanalyse. 27 Gagnon, Pensees du poeme, 34. 28 Godard, "Redrawing the Circle: Power, Poetics, Language," I79ni2. 29 Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 17. 30 See also Lr 27, 30, 33, 38, 39, 45-6, and 114, among many other passages that contain birth metaphors. 31 Saint-Martin, Le Nom de la mere, 232-4. 32 Gould, "Unearthing the Female Text," 91. 33 Parker, "The Mauve Horizon of Nicole Brossard," 115. 34 While the "Dieu et Elle" passages can be read as an originary, almost biblical scene, these "archetypes" are nonetheless problematized in other passages such as "J'ai vu Dieu et Elle est noire [I have seen God and She is black]" (Lr 115). As in the case of pronoun use, there seems to be a desire here to destabilize any normative reading of identity and symbolization. 35 See my article "Feminist Translation," on which much of this section is based and which explores the translation metaphor in more depth. Reprinted with kind permission of the publisher from Women by

3OO Notes to pages 123-39

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55

Women: The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980. Steiner, After Babel, 299. This passage, interestingly enough, is a quotation from a male author, Andre Brochu, from his "Lettre sur la lettre en poesie." As Gagnon is primarily known for her poetry, it perhaps not surprising that she should cite a contemporary compatriot who is both a poet and a literary critic. This reference to Brochu does, however, raise the question of precisely how feminist and/or exclusionary she wishes her narrator to be in her search for a collective voice. Saint-Martin, Le Nom de la mere, 231. Santoro, "Writing and/in Mourning." Gagnon, Piotte, and Straram le Bison ravi, Portraits du voyage. Gagnon, "Elle est objet du sujet elle," 19. Boulanger, "Madeleine Gagnon: Words of Women, Words of Life," 33. Boulanger first expresses this idea in "Madeleine Gagnon: Les constantes d'une ecriture." Gagnon in La Femme et I 'ecriture, special issue of Liberte, 250. Gagnon, La Lettre infinie, 72. Gagnon, "La Femme et le langage," 57. Gagnon in La Femme et I'ecriture, special issue of Liberte 251. Gagnon, "Pourquoi, comment, pour qui ecrire?" This article is reprinted in Autographie 2, where the passage is on 124-6. In his famous epistolary poetic manifesto, Rimbaud privileges "un long, immense et raisonne dereglement de tous les sens." See his Correspondance of 1871, cited in Mitterand et al., Litterature xxe siecle, 499. Marilyn Randall, "Madeleine Gagnon et tous les autres: 'Le livre est phallus et je radmire,'" Djebar et al., Mises en scene d'ecrivains, 108. Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 5. Godard et al., "Theorizing Fiction Theory," 10. Gagnon and Boucher, Retailles, 151-2. I explore Gagnon's difficulty in dealing with Regis's suicide in my article "'La Mort avec la vie dedans/" At best, Gagnon might call her novel an "autobiographic poetique," which she defines as a form in which "1'ecriture est la figure centrale" (writing is the central figure) and which characterizes much of the writing of modernity, where "la memoire meme de I'ecriture ... fait battre le cceur de la lettre [the very memory of writing ... causes the heart of the letter to beat]" (A2, 173-4). This definition comes from her 1986 article "La Tentation autobiographique," reprinted in Autographie 2, but since it is not in common usage, I prefer not to use it in the context of this analysis. Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 14.

3oi

Notes to pages 140-53

56 Gagnon, "Le Temps des connivences (entretien)/' 65. 57 Dupre notes this difficulty in reference to Antre, but it holds true for Lueur as well. The maternal universe mentioned here is clearly a reference to Kristeva's chora, or prelinguistic state implied and embodied by the mother-child bond. 58 The Latin name for the sanguisorbe, or Canadian burnet, is Sanguisorba canadensis. 59 This passage is part of Gagnon's riposte, performed via the overly emphatic and thus pathetic exhortations of this critical voice, to those authors and literati of her time who felt that all writing of any value needed to in some way support the nationalist (if not separatist) cause in Quebec. She is clearly writing from a different, women-centred aesthetic, which articulated itself in part in response to the apparent disregard for women's issues displayed by contemporary Quebec nationalists. 60 This translation has been only slightly modified from Gagnon, "My Body in Writing," 277-8. 61 Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 17. 62 To be fair, Gabrielle Fremont also remarks on Gagnon's self-repetition, although she does not cite specific instances of it, in her article "Madeleine Gagnon: Du politique a 1'intime," 28. 63 Gagnon, "Pre-texte," 152-3, MSS 285, Fonds Gagnon, Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec. 64 Voldeng, "L'Intertextualite dans les ecrits feminins d'inspiration feministe," 523. 65 Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 18. 66 Randall, "Madeleine Gagnon et tous les autres: 'Le livre est phallus et je radmire,'" Djebar et al, Mises en scene d'ecrivains, 112. 67 Ibid., 116. 68 Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 18. 69 Ibid., 8. 70 Gould, "Ecrire au feminin," 137. 71 Gagnon, "Percer le mur du son du sens," 9. 72 Saint-Martin, Le Nom de la mere, 250. 73 Gagnon, La Lettre infinie, 11. CHAPTER

FOUR

1 Brossard, Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman, 98-9. 2 See Milot's analysis of La Bane du jour's place in opposition to journals such as Parti pris and Liberte in "La Legitimite offensee de 1'avantgarde litteraire des annees 70." See also Forsyth, "Beyond the Myths and Fictions of Traditionalism and Nationalism," and Milot, "Nicole Brossard: Une influence couteuse."

302 Notes to pages 153-6 3 Dupre, "From Experimentation to Experience/' 355. 4 Brossard writes of the influence on her of Refus global and of meeting one of its signatories, Claude Gauvreau, in her article for Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, "Nicole Brossard, 1943-," 41 and 47. 5 Milot, "Nicole Brossard: Une influence couteuse," 32. 6 Prieto, "In-Fringe," 266. It is worth noting that Cixous was an early contributor to Tel Quel, publishing her first article under the name Helene Berger. 7 Nicole Brossard, personal interview, 20 August 1991. 8 Sollers, "Ecriture et revolution," 78-9.1 am indebted to Milot for pointing out this citation in his article "Tel Quel ou les conditions d'emergence des Herbes rouges," 320. 9 Brossard, "Suite logique" in Le Centre blanc, 150; first published as Suite logique (1970). Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Brossard's early poetry will be from the later compilation. 10 For an analysis of the complex relationship between French and Quebec avant-garde journals from the 19603 to the 19805, see Milot's "Tel Quel ou les conditions d'emergence des Herbes rouges." 11 Brossard, "Order and Imagination," 19. 12 Brossard and Roger Soubliere, eds., "Document Miron," La Barre du jour 26 (October 1970). 13 Forsyth, "Beyond the Myths and Fictions of Traditionalism and Nationalism," 160. The War Measures Act, invoked in October 1970 to deal with the disturbances, was not lifted by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau until April 1971. During that time, many writers and intellectuals were arrested. I am indebted to Forsyth for pointing out the political significance of the Barre du jour's special issue on Miron. 14 Brossard, "La Fiction vive," 31. 15 Parker, Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard, 113. All subsequent references to this study will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation LV.

16 Forsyth, "Beyond the Myths of Traditionalism and Nationalism," 160. Forsyth dates Brossard's emerging feminism to an earlier text than those noted by other critics. Nepveu instead signals out French Kiss (1974) as coinciding with that shift, while Dupre selects "Le Cortex exuberant" (1974) and La Partie pour le tout (1975) as more indicative of Brossard's change in perspective. See Nepveu, L'Ecologie du reel, 151, and Dupre, sv 95-6.

17 Nepveu, L'Ecologie du reel, 150. 18 19 20 21

Brossard, "Vaseline," Double Impression, 43. Brossard, "Un Livre a venir," 3-18. Cixous, "Une Romanciere et critique sur le phallocentrisme." Brossard, Journal intime, 83.

303 Notes to pages 157-63 22 While La Partie pour le tout was published in 1975, for example, the poems it contains were almost certainly written in 1974, since one of the poems is explicitly dated to January of that year. Moreover, her next volume of poetry, the retrospective Le Centre blanc: Poemes 19651975, would not appear until 1978, and the only previously unpublished poems it contains are from before 1974. This pattern certainly would support the idea that Brossard was not writing as much poetry between 1974 and 1976 as she had been, given the seven collections of poetry she published between 1965 and 1974. 23 Brossard, "Un Livre a venir," 14. 24 See pages 18 and 28 of chapter i respectively. 25 See, for example, Brossard's interviews in Books in Canada and in the Journal of Canadian Fiction. 26 First published in La Barre du jour 44 (spring 1974), it was reprinted in Le Centre blanc in 1978 (385-408). All subsequent citations will be from this later edition. 27 The letter is dated 15 May 1871. The passage Brossard selects reads as follows: "Quand sera brise I'infini servage de la femme, quand elle vivra pour elle et par elle ... elle sera poete, elle aussi! [When women's infinite servitude is broken, when she will live for herself and through herself ... she, too, will be a poet!]." 28 Brossard, "Nicole Brossard," So to Speak, 129. 29 Brossard, "La Traversee des inedits," 30-1. Translation mine. See page 49 of Cixous's "Rire" for her remarks to the same effect. 30 Brossard, "Un Livre a venir," 11. 31 Brossard, "La Fiction vive," 37. 32 Brossard, "Un Livre a venir," 11. 33 Brossard, "Nicole Brossard," So to Speak, 126. 34 Brossard, "Preliminaires," 8. 35 Brossard, "La Fiction vive," 39. 36 Alice Parker sees L'Amer as the first book in the "lesbian trilogy" that includes Le Sens apparent (1980) and Amantes (1980), but she does not fully justify her linking of these three texts (LV 13, 31, 44). The latter two fall outside the limited time frame I have selected for this study. 37 Brossard, "Un Livre a venir," 14. 38 Homans, "'Her Very Own Howl,'" 205. 39 See Dupre's remarks to this effect in her preface to the republication of L'Amer, "Du Propre au figure," 7-13. 40 Brossard, "La Plaque tournante," La Lettre aerienne, 12-13. All subsequent references to this essay collection will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation LLA. 41 Forsyth, "The Novels of Nicole Brossard," 38.

304 Notes to pages 163-70 42 Barbara Godard's various translations of the title will indeed include "sour mother" in the opening pages of These Our Mothers, Or: The Disintegrating Chapter. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are Godard's and are cited in parentheses with the abbreviation TOM. 43 Brossard, L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite (1977; Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1988) 14-15. All subsequent references to this second edition of L'Amer will appear in parentheses after the quotation. 44 See Freud's essays "Female Sexuality" and "Femininity" and Lacan's pursuit of Freud's theories in such essays as "La Signification du phallus." 45 This citation is no doubt taken from Gaulin's only work published before her death in 1972, Lecture en velocipede (1972). This biographical information is provided by Brossard and Lisette Girouard in their Anthologie de la poesie des femmes au Quebec, 224. 46 Brossard, "Vaseline" and "E muet mutant," Double Impression, 39-47 and 51-70 respectively. "Vaseline" was first published in 1973, and "E muet mutant" appeared in La Bane du jour 50 (winter 1975). 47 See Gould's remarks to this effect (WF 74). 48 I deliberately recall here Claude Levi-Strauss's Les Structures elementaires de la parente (1949), since Brossard's analysis of the exploitation of women and their function as objects of exchange - with nothing of value to call their own besides their reproductive capacities - is undoubtedly a reference to his anthropological theories. 49 Brossard, "Toucher 1'energie," 221. 50 The translation of the book's subtitle used by Barbara Godard in These Our Mothers. 51 Neuman, "Importing Difference," 398. 52 Ibid., 398-9. 53 See, for example, "Suite logique" in Le Centre blanc, 144: entre les lignes le liquide glisse et s'impose inedit ainsi du corps le plaisir jailli delicieux d'humidite le mauve repose et s'inscrit radieuse la fixite" [between the lines the liquid slides and imposes itself unrecorded thus from the body the pleasure gushed moistly delicious mauve relaxes and inscribes the radiant steadiness] 54 Neuman, "Importing Difference," 399. 55 Ibid., 397. 56 This translation generally follows Godard's (TOM 33), but I have made some modifications to better reflect the narrator's attitude to her father.

305 Notes to pages 170-8 57 Neuman, "Importing Difference," 397. While Neuman never explicitly defines what "a female relation to language" might be, she does privilege the image of "singing women" (405) repeatedly in the course of her article, claiming that the voices of certain Canadian women writers such as Brossard "[confront] the dominant cultural discourse" (393), just as the woman singing at the Regent's Park Tube Station does in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Although her use of the singing motif is suggestive, Neuman's interpretation of Brossard's strategy seems somewhat perfunctory here. 58 Godard, "L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter," 26. 59 Note that the translator, Barbara Godard, has been forced to choose between the personal pronouns "she" and "it," a choice that eliminates an ambiguity which the French language allows Brossard to maintain. 60 Godard, "L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter," 24. Alice Parker has perhaps most thoroughly examined the role and importance of maleinstigated violence in Brossard's work in chapter 6 of her Liminal Visions, entitled "From Post-Modern to Polytechmque: Figuring the Violence." 61 Godard, "L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter," 24. 62 Chevalier and Gheerbrant, Dictionnaire des symboles, 1021. In response to questions asked by Mel B. Yoken in the interview "Nicole Brossard (Montreal, 27 novembre 1943)," 121, Brossard admits to using this text regularly. She is even more clear about the source for this particular colour reference when she writes in L'Amer. "Comme la couleur est sensation, du mauve au rouge, la difference [since colour is sensation, from mauve to red, difference]" {L'Amer 48, TOM 40). 63 Alice Parker claims that mauve "has been in [Brossard's] fictional lexicon at least since French kiss" (LV 138) and repeatedly affirms its aesthetic value (LV 140, 225-7, et passim). 64 Of this list of writers, the last three are Quebec contemporaries of Brossard, while only two of the citations are from French writers and one from a Belgian. This focus shows the shift in her textual community away from France. See the introductory remarks to this chapter. 65 Brossard, "Toucher 1'energie," 221. 66 In the 1977 edition, this sentence begins: "Et de distancer ..." (L'Amer 14). 67 Brossard, "La Fiction vive," 36. 68 Derrida himself plays with the verb differer, of which surseoir is a synonym, in his formulation of "differance" as involving both "espacement" and "temporisation" (spacing and temporization), in his essay "La Differance." This is an essay that Brossard no doubt was familiar with, given her interest in the Tel Quel group in the late 19605.

306 Notes to pages 178-88 69 It is worth noting here that Brossard's use of the mathematical metaphor is accurate: one can derive a differential equation from a function, although that is not the only way to obtain such an equation. I am indebted to Robert Santoro for clarifying this point. 70 This interpretation is confirmed farther on in L'Amer when Brossard writes: "La seule difference qui se puisse est formelle ... Formel etant ici compris comme fonctionnel [The only possible difference is a formal one ... Formal being understood here as functional]" (L'Amer 55, TOM 47). 71 Godard translates "espece" as "void" for reasons that are unclear. I have modified her translation to retain what I feel is the more resonant word "species" in this context. 72 As confirmation of the importance of the reflections in this essay to the writing of L'Amer, we may note that passages from the essay appear almost verbatim in the latter text. For example, on 92 and 93 of L'Amer, we find excerpts from 24 and 17 respectively of the earlier essay. 73 Brossard, The Aerial Letter, 40. All translations come from this version unless otherwise noted and will be designated AL in parentheses after the quotation. 74 Brossard, "L'Ecrivain," 74. 75 See Brossard, "Le Cortex exuberant," Double Impression, 385-408. First published in La Bane du jour 44 (1974). 76 Brossard, "Un Livre a venir," 8 and 10 respectively. 77 Brossard, Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman, 86-7. 78 Fanon, Les Damnes de la terre, 16; in translation from The Wretched of the Earth, 15. 79 This neologism has proven attractive to feminist critics in search of a term to describe the experimentation with genre that many contemporary women writers have privileged as an "emancipatory strategy," to borrow a term from Yaeger's work Honey-Mad Women. In Canada, for example, the feminist editorial collective that produces Tessera devoted its third issue to "Fiction Theory/Theorie fiction," published in Canadian Fiction Magazine 57 (1986). (Tessera started out being "hosted" by different journals for each issue, but it has been an independent publication since 1988.) 80 Dupre, "From Experimentation to Experience," 358. It should be noted that La Nouvelle Barre du jour first appeared in 1977, two years after the last issue of La Barre du jour. 81 Genette, "Genres, 'types/ modes." 82 Derrida, "La Loi du genre," 179; trans, by Avital Ronell as "The Law of Genre," 55. 83 Derrida, "La Loi du genre," 194, and "The Law of Genre," 70.

307 Notes to pages 188-94 84 Gerhart, Genre Choices, Gender Questions, 8. For Gerhart's cogent arguments about the epistemological implications of the literary and historical intersections of gender and genre and the etymological linking of gender and genre and their cognates, see 9, 12-43, and 98-101. 85 Derrida, "La Loi du genre," 196, and "The Law of Genre," 72. 86 The 1977 Quinze edition bears no designation. In personal correspondence (30 December 1993), Brossard affirms that she herself made the corrections to the second edition. The subtitle is thus of her own choosing. 87 Forsyth, "L'ficriture au feminin," 201. 88 In a later essay in the same collection, "L'Appreciation critique," Brossard also plays with the etymology of "fiction": "je retiendrai du mot fiction son origine, 'fingere/ qui est la meme pour le mot feindre, et je lui conserverai son sens d'imagination. Deux dimensions de 1'ecriture vont alors m'interesser: a) le mouvement de 1'imagination, c'est-a-dire les gestes de la pensee; b) les strategies (les feintes) que 1'ecriture emprunte afin que se materialised les figures de 1'imagination [I will draw on the origin of the word fiction, "fingere/ which is the same as for the word feign, and I will retain its sense of imagination. I am interested, then, in two dimensions of writing: a) the movement of the imagination, that is to say, the darting gestures of thought, and b) the strategies (feints/tricks/devices) writing adopts to make the figures of the imagination materialize]" (LLA, 72, AL 91). 89 Brossard, "La Traversee des inedits," 26. 90 Parker's Liminal Visions presents a similar discussion of Brossard's development of "fiction-theory," but it does so in a less sustained fashion than in the present analysis (iv, especially 24, 42 and chapter Two, "A Differential Equation of Lesbian Love"). 91 Godard, "L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter," 23. 92 Ibid., 30. 93 Gerard Genette notes this phenomenon of an auto-diegetic narrative that "spills" beyond its own boundaries into omniscience in his essay "Discours du recit," 258-9. 94 Brossard, "La Fiction vive," 36. 95 Dupre, "Du Propre au figure," 9. 96 The one exception to this general rule of discretion is Brossard's autobiographical article for the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, but even then, as Parker notes, "the piece continuously modulates into an intellectual and artistic odyssey, into writing about writing" (iv 222-3), rather than conforming to a traditional autobiographical narrative. 97 Brossard, "Nicole Brossard," So to Speak, 136.

308 Notes to pages 195-203 98 Levi-Strauss, Les Structures elementaires de la parente, 78; translated as The Elementary Structures of Kinship, 60-1. 99 It bears noting that "gaga" can be translated as "senile" or "mentally disturbed" (The Collins Robert French Dictionary, 1987 ed.) and that in English "googoo, gaga" is a phrase adults use to emulate babies' babble. As Brossard speaks English, both readings are possible here, and both support her characterization of the mother in this passage. 100 Freud interprets the Mona Lisa's smile as that of da Vinci's mother in his Un Souvenir d'enfance de Leonard de Vinci, 108-9 (Leonardo da Vinci, 61-4). 101 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963). This was one of the seminal texts for many feminists of Brossard's generation, both in the United States and elsewhere. 102 With respect to L'Amer, this negative vision of the sea prevails, but as Parker shows, the sea is quite positively connoted elsewhere in Brossard's work, particularly in Picture Theory and Baroque d'aube (LV 65, 71, 76, et passim). 103 Brossard, "La Fiction vive," 37. 104 Brossard, "Nicole Brossard," So to Speak, 125. 105 Brossard, "La Fiction vive," 32. 106 For the importance of Mallarme to Brossard's work, see the introduction to this chapter. 107 Kristeva, La Revolution du langage poetique, 274-84. Kristeva borrows the idea of "non-recoverable deletions" from Levin's study of Emily Dickinson, "The Analysis of Compression in Poetry." 108 Levin, "The Analysis of Compression in Poetry," 47. 109 La Charite, The Dynamics of Space, 9. no For examples of such textual presentation in her poetry, see Brossard's Le Centre blanc. 111 Duranleau also considers the blank pages as an invitation to the reader, in her study "Le Texte moderne et Nicole Brossard," in, and Godard speaks of the "meaning being created in the gap which allows for our interpretive attempt," in her "L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter," 32. 112 La Charite, The Dynamics of Space, 13. 113 Brossard, "Si sismal," A Tout Regard, 128. 114 For the importance of the spiral to Brossard's poetics, see Dupre (sv 113-23) and Gould (WF 78-85). 115 This passage is translated differently by Wildeman as "Questing sense, born of the conquest of non-sense" (AL 117). 116 According to Le Grand Robert de la langue frangaise (Paris, 1986), a "stryge" is a "vampire tenant de la femme et de la chienne et qui, selon la legende, errait la nuit et sucait le sang des hommes [vampire sharing the characteristics of a woman and a female dog and which,

309 Notes to pages 204-10 according to legend, wandered at night and sucked men's blood]." This choice of word is reinforced by the fact that it is followed by "la nuit" and is placed in the context of a "loss of reality" which could be associated with legends. It is also significant that it refers to a female vampire, another example of how Brossard tries to recover and revise women's place in language. 117 Drapeau, Feminins singuliers, 84. Leard also notes Brossard's use of polysemy in his article "Du Semantique au semiotique en litterature: La modernite romanesque au Quebec," 53-4. 118 I take this phrase from Nepveu, who claims, in his L'Ecologie du reel, 144, that it is Brossard's own designation. 119 La Charite's mention of "the structuration by paragraph of the prose poem" (The Dynamics of Space, 168) is what inspired this neologism. 120 I borrow this term from Drapeau, Feminins singuliers, 96. 121 Brossard, "La Traversee des inedits," 24. 122 Parker discusses the importance of the "inedit" across a broad spectrum of Brossard's writings in Liminal Visions (LV 26, 37, 45, et passim). 123 Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 160. CHAPTER FIVE

1 Hyvrard, La Pensee corps, 82. While I am aware of the preparation of a full translation of this text, it is as yet unpublished; therefore all translations are my own. Subsequent references to this text will appear in parentheses after the quotation with the abbreviation PC as appropriate. 2 Hyvrard, "Interview avec Jeanne Hyvrard realise a Paris le 20 juillet 1985," 125. Hereafter, this interview will be referenced as Hyvrard and Figueiredo. 3 This essay of "nomenclature," as Hyvrard calls La Pensee corps, also contains her definitions of "log-," "logarcat," "logarchie," "logarque," "logos," and "logonomie" (PC 129-35). 4 Hyvrard, Mere la mort, 10, and Mother Death, 2. All subsequent references to the original will appear in parentheses after the quotation with the abbreviation MM. All translations from this novel are Laurie Edson's and will be designated MD. 5 Marini, "Production et reproduction langagieres en lisant Jeanne Hyvrard ... ," 24. 6 Hyvrard, "Jeanne Hyvrard," 89-90. 7 This quality or process could be viewed as an example of what deconstructionists would call "dissemination," or that multiplicity or polysemy which allows the text to escape reductive or totalizing interpretation. 8 See "syncretism" in the Oxford English Dictionary.

310 Notes to pages 211-21 9 In La Pensee corps, Hyvrard defines "chai'que" as follows: "Structure de 1'innomme, coherence de I'irrationnel, elle est 1'ordre du desordre. La chai'que est au chaos ce que la logique est au logos [Structure of the unnamed, coherence of the irrational, it is the order of disorder. The chaic is to chaos what logic is to logos]" (PC 29). 10 Marie Miguet notes this feature among others that place the three novels in the "meme espace litteraire" (same literary space), in "Jeanne Hyvrard: Un pacte d'alienation," 178. 11 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic- see especially part 1.2: "Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship," 45-92. 12 This idea of women's thinking "otherwise" is echoed in works such as Cardinal's Autrement dit (1977), Theoret's Entre raison et deraison (1987), and even Ouellette-Michalska's L'Echappee des discours de I'ceil (1981). 13 Hyvrard, Les Prunes de Cyihere, 9. All subsequent references to this text will appear in parentheses with the abbreviation PdeC where needed for clarity. 14 Waelti-Walters, "'Us ont fait de moi la mort/" 122. 15 Ibid., 119. 16 This birth scene is developed between pages 195 and 225 of the novel, ending with the declaration of "la naissance enfin" (PdeC 225). For a specific discussion of the influence of gender in the metaphoric association of the creative and procreative functions, see Friedman, "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor." 17 The name "Jeanne la Folle" appears for the first time on page 26, and it is also used in the novels that follow. In La Meurtritude, Jeanne Hyvrard's full name is used. This name is indeed the one under which the author chooses to write to this day, a choice born of the respect she had for a great-aunt of the same name, whose strong personality and resistance to family wishes and societal pressures inspired the writer's admiration. See Hyvrard and Figueiredo, 120. 18 This is only one example of the exchange of roles between the daughter and her mother. Indeed, the daughter sometimes even assumes another woman's voice in her place in the course of a scene. One of the most striking examples of this exchange occurs in the course of a scene of lovemaking, to which the girl, hidden in a cupboard, is a witness. During the scene, the young narrator assumes the position and voice of the other woman (addressed as "tu") with the lover and in turn relegates the other woman to the position of hidden witness. In the course of her first-person narration, she goes from being an "elle" subject to the other's gaze to being a subject, addressing her object as "tu" (PdeC 75-8). 19 Early critics of the novel believed not only that the narrator was a Black madwoman from the Antilles but also that Hyvrard must be as

3ii

20 21

22

23

24

25 26

27

28

Notes to pages 223-31

well. While the latter question has since been resolved - the author is French and White - it bears pointing out that the narrative voice is only sometimes that of a Black servant (PdeC 32-6); at other times it belongs to a White woman who orders the servant about (42, 46-7, et passim) or to a White woman interned in an asylum. Hyvrard and Figueiredo, 119. See PdeC 169, for example. Waelti-Walters also remarks on the author's use of Africa as a manifestation of the theme of the mother ("'Us ont fait de moi la mort/" 120). Marie Moscovici was one of the first to notice this absence of the father figure, in her review of Mere la mort and Les Prunes de Cythere, entitled "Un Langage decolonise." More precisely, the word "father" appears hardly more than a dozen times in the text, in contrast to the word "mother," which appears on almost every page. The father is also absent from Mere la mort, and he plays a negligible role in La Meurtritude, although the husband plays a positive role in the latter. Waelti-Walters cites this passage but does not comment on it, other than to say that the father is but a manifestation of the lover, a commentary that deserves more elaboration than she gives it. See her chapter "And the Flesh Was Made Word: The Prunes of Cythera (Hyvrard) and Les Guerilleres (Wittig)," in Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination, 99. See also PdeC 74, 140-1, and 187 for passages portraying the narrator's painful birth memories, in which she must fight for her life against her own mother. Waelti-Walters, Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination, 99-100. Waelti-Walters quite accurately points out the shift between the first two texts: "Mere la Mort" of Les Prunes de Cythere becomes "Mere la mort" (lower case) in the following book. ("'Us ont fait de moi la mort,'" i2in). Miguet notes briefly about the transition between the texts: "nous retrouvons vivante la narratrice qui avait annonce sa mort a la fin de 1'ouvrage precedent [we meet again, alive, the narrator who had announced her death at the end of the preceding work]" ("La Bible a rebours de Jeanne Hyvrard," 198). While this remark, among others, inspired me to explore the connection, to my knowledge no one has examined the textual links beyond presuming that the appearance of the given name Jeanne indicates that the narrator is the same in both texts. Hyvrard's use of myth is noted and explicated by several commentators. See, for example, Miguet's previously cited article "La Bible a rebours de Jeanne Hyvrard," Waelti-Walters's contribution to VerthuyWilliams and Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, especially 7-48, and the second and third chapters of Joelle Cauville's dissertation "Feminin et fusionnel dans 1'ceuvre de Jeanne Hyvrard."

312 Notes to pages 236-8 29 Sartre's Huis clos dramatically illustrates how necessary - and how necessary an evil - the "other" can be to the self and to an individual's happiness, as understood in existentialist terms. In Mere la mart the vital importance accorded the other by Hyvrard's narrator, as both a self-affirming and a soul-destroying influence, would seem to place the novel, at least in some respects, within a broader tradition of literary and philosophic inquiry into the nature of the self and its relation to society and the other. In this regard, Hyvrard differs from Brossard, who is much less concerned with the inclusionary dialogue implied by the "tu" than with the call to collectivity voiced by the "nous." The "tu" in L'Amer is not constitutive of the self of the woman narrator, since she only rarely addresses anyone in the course of her narration. All translations are mine. 30 Hyvrard, La Meurtritude, 15. Subsequent references will appear in parentheses with the abbreviation LM where needed for clarity. All translations are mine. 31 While one could consider it an epigraph, given that it makes reference to biblical text, it could equally be called a prologue because of its content and form, etymologically "pro"-logical, since it precedes and lays the foundation for the logic (and logos) of the text. The unusual placement of the "prologue" is identified by Miguet as an unusual placement of the "dedication" in "Jeanne Hyvrard: Un pacte d'alienation," 178. 32 Verthuy-Williams and Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, 37. Much of Waelti-Walters's portion of this study and of her other articles on Hyvrard is translated and integrated into her later book-length study, Jeanne Hyvrard: Theorist of the Modern World (1996). 33 The "First Creation" is described in Gen. 1.26-7, while the more familiar story of Adam and Eve comes from Gen. 2.21-5. 34 See Miguet's "La Bible a rebours de Jeanne Hyvrard," 200, for a similar explication. Miguet explains that the "intention sarcastique" of this rewriting is due to the fact that "1'auteur vit comme un malheur a la fois personnel et universel les differentes separations qui constituent les etapes de la creation du monde [the author lives as both a personal and a universal calamity the different separations that constitute the stages of the creation of the world]." According to WaeltiWalters, Hyvrard is out to expose the basis of the "systeme philosophique" of the Bible, which was "etabli pour preciser des distinctions ... pour eliminer du systeme tout ce qui en est le contraire [established to specify the distinctions ... in order to eliminate from the system everything that is contrary to it]" (Jeanne Hyvrard, 38). 35 The "walled-up woman" is an important figure in Hyvrard's Les Doigts dufiguier (1977).

313 Notes to pages 238-50 36 These seven "deaths" and the experiences associated with them are as follows: "Elle a traverse toutes les morts. La premiere; la resignation. La deuxieme: la soumission. La troisieme: 1'oppression. La quatrieme: la possession. La cinquieme: 1'acceptation. La sixieme: la fusion. La septieme: la confusion [She has overcome all the deaths. The first; resignation. The second: submission. The third: oppression. The fourth: Possession. The fifth: acceptance. The sixth: fusion. The seventh: confusion]" (LM 134-5). These are associated in the novel with the alchemical hierarchy of metals: lead, tin, iron, copper, mercury, silver, and gold, an association well analyzed by Cauville in the fourth chapter of her dissertation, "L'Objet de la quete hyvrardienne: Le fusionnel" (see "Feminin et fusionnel dans 1'ceuvre de Jeanne Hyvrard," especially 243-79). 37 See Miguet, "La Bible a rebours de Jeanne Hyvrard," for an explication of the use and importance of biblical references in Hyvrard's work. See also Cauville, "Feminin et fusionnel dans 1'ceuvre de Jeanne Hyvrard," 124-9, 201-19, 258-61. Waelti-Walters notes that the tarot first appears, although it is not named, in Mere la mart (Jeanne Hyvrard, 35). 38 Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, 40-7. 39 Wirth, Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Age, 255. 40 Ibid., 256 and 267 respectively. 41 Felman, La Folie et la chose litteraire, 347. Translation mine. 42 Ibid., 347. 43 It is important to remember that, in pre-revolutionary France at least, daughters who had no other prospects or who posed a problem were often sent to convents by their families, if they did not go of their own accord. 44 "Dis-moi tu, je te dirai les aboiements. La tete centre les murs. Les petits pas tournants. Dis-moi tu. Je te dirai le moi fracture [Say 'y°u/ to me, I will tell you of the yelling. The head against the walls. The footsteps circling. Say 'you' to me. I will tell you of the fractured I]" (PdeC 39). 45 I am indebted to Helene Cixous for suggesting this reading. 46 The few phrases in patois are on pages 96-7 of Les Prunes de Cythere. 47 Translated as "I white, you conch, she cutlasses." "Je zoreille" is probably formed from the Martinican word zoreill, a name given to Whites, which is cited in Edouard Glissant's "Glossary" in his Caribbean Discourse, 270. Translated, it becomes "I white," where "white" is a verb. "Tu lambis" comes from Iambi, the word for conch shells, which provide a plentiful food source in the Antilles and can serve as horns, thus becoming symbols of the historical revolt of Blacks, who used such conch horns to warn of impending danger (Lasserre, Les Antilles,

314 Notes to pages 251-63

48

49

50

51

52 53

54 55 56

57 58

59

142). Finally, "elle coutela" reminds us of the cutlass, a swordlike weapon that Glissant says was employed in the "'senseless violence' among Martinicans" (Caribbean Discourse, 264). Verthuy-Williams, "Je parle done je suis," in Verthuy-Williams and Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, 86. Verthuy-Williams also writes on 82 that she is "tempted" to name Hyvrard's "syncopated" style paratactic, a notion that inspired my inclusion and development of the idea above. See Verthuy-Williams and Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, 82-4, where Verthuy-Williams analyzes certain stylistic traits in Les Prunes de Cythere, including Hyvrard's penchant for neologisms. It is significant, given the setting of Les Prunes de Cythere, that Hyvrard should use the word "negritude," so important to writers of the Antilles such as Aime Cesaire, whose poetry of rupture in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939) encouraged the development and valorization of a Black identity in opposition to and despite the predominantly White and markedly European literary and political elite. This scene is similar to the childhood memory of Leonardo da Vinci recounted and analyzed by Freud, where da Vinci is also being forcefed by a phallic mother. See Freud, \ln Souvenir d'enfance de Leonard de Vinci, 49-61 and 68-73. I* * interesting that this Freudian analysis also inspired some of the imagery in Cixous's La. See also MM 10, 21, 26, and 106-7, and LM 106, 134, and 141-3 for examples of this change. See Verthuy-Williams and Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, 86, and Cauville, "Feminin et fusionnel dans 1'ceuvre de Jeanne Hyvrard," 100. The latter also offers an explication of the mythic references implicit in the weaving metaphor. See, for example, many of the passages quoted in this chapter from La Meurtritude, Mere la mart, and Les Prunes de Cythere. Lamy, "Litanie des litanies," 97. See Verthuy-Williams's eloquent analysis of this effect (81-3), as well as her section "Quand on ne chante pas, on oublie," in VerthuyWilliams and Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, 96-113. Lamy, "Litanie des litanies," 87. In echo of Barthes and later literary critics, Waelti-Walters calls Hyvrard's books "onion-texts" because of their repetitive, cumulative structure (Waelti-Walters, Jeanne Hyvrard, 8-9). This thematic repetition between novels seems to be part of what inspires Cauville to see Hyvrard's corpus in Jungian terms, as a process of individuation supported by initiatic metaphors such as alchemy and the tarot. While this approach is not without interest, it seems restrictive, given the diversity of Hyvrard's writings, speaking

315 Notes to pages 266-75 more to the author's intentions than to the individuality of her works. Cauville's approach would seem counter to Hyvrard's own avowed eclecticism, for as Cauville quotes on page 301 of her dissertation, "Feminin et fusionnel dans 1'ceuvre de Jeanne Hyvrard," Hyvrard calls herself "refractaire a tous les embrigadements, une libertaire absolue de la pensee, une philosophe free-lance, une anarchiste de la reflexion, une insurrection vivante contre tous les ordres etablis [resistant to all indoctrinations, an absolute libertarian of thought, a freelance philosopher, an anarchist of reflection, a living insurrection against all established orders]." Still, it would seem appropriate to speak of a Hyvrardian vision, since her search for a new understanding of the contemporary world led her to publish La Pensee corps, her philosophical volume of neologisms and "nomenclature." 60 Moscovici, "Un Langage decolonise," 377. CONCLUSION 1 Hirsch, The Mother'/Dauther Plot, 12. 2 Gagnon, Le Deuil du soleil, 129. 3 Rich, Of Woman Born, 218. 4 Kristeva, "Entretien avec Julia Kristeva: L'avant-garde aujourd'hui?" 160. 5 Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 133. 6 Romans, '"Her Very Own Howl,'" 198. 7 Neuman, "Importing Difference," 404. 8 Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde, 32. Subsequent references to this work will appear parenthetically with the abbreviation TAG. 9 Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 83. 10 Benedicte Mauguiere cites minor texts by Carole Paqutn and Michele Mailhot as examples of Marxist feminist works, but she strangely omits a discussion of Gagnon, a much more prominent figure, whose words she merely cites in epigraphs in her chapter "Le Marxisme" (Traversee des ideologies, 25-51). 11 Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, 157-8. 12 Brassard's continuing affinity with surrealism has been noted even in her more recent texts. See Conley, "Going for Baroque in the 2Oth Century." 13 It bears recalling here, as Janet Paterson does, that Francois Lyotard wrote his seminal work, La Condition postmoderne, in 1979, at the request of the Conseil des universites aupres du gouvernement du Quebec (Paterson, Moments postmodernes dans le roman quebecois, i). Both the timing of this commission and the prescience of the Quebec academy are notable here, for it shows how the period of feminist writings I examine coincides so closely with the emergence of the

316 Notes to pages 275-80 postmodern, and also what an interest there was in Quebec intellectual circles in analyzing and legitimizing the cutting edge of cultural expression and production. 14 Paterson, Moments postmodernes dans le roman quebecois, 13. 15 That feminists did not always succeed in avoiding the pitfall of power structures is well known. One salient example can be seen in the autopsy of an all-women consciousness-raising group offered by Madeleine Gagnon and Denise Boucher in their collaborative text, Retailles. 16 Makward, "Les Editions des femmes," 352-3. 17 See Gould, "Feminisme, postmodernite, esthetique de lecture," and Parker, Liminal Visions. 18 For example, one could cite the more traditional fiction and personal narratives of the period by Christiane Rochefort, Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hebert, Annie Leclerc, Marie Cardinal, the Groult sisters, Michele Perrein, Alice Parizeau, Helene Ouvrard, and Annie Ernaux, who were joined in the 19803 by the likes of Lise Gauvin, Francine Noel, and Daniele Sallenave. 19 This "split practice" is what seems to assuage Luise Von Flotow's discomfort with what she sees as Quebec avant-garde feminism's "unreadable" and thus "elitist" texts, in her dissertation "Quebec Feminist Writing" (introduction, 64, 97, 99, et passim). 20 Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 36. 21 If feminist writers and thinkers were not making their presence felt, one wonders if Philippe Sellers would have deemed it so amusing to lampoon them in his 57O-page novel, Femmes (1983). 22 Specifically, one could cite here Ernaux's La Femme gelee (1981), Robin's La Quebecoite (1983), and Theoret's Entre raison et deraison (1987) or Journal pour memoire (1993). 23 Here one thinks not only of Paterson's Moments postmodernes dans le roman quebecois but also of Caroline Bayard's The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec; of Barbara Godard, Sherry Simon, and Patricia Smart's direction of the "Symposium: Feminism and Postmodernism: The Politics of the Alliance," published in a 1989-90 issue of Quebec Studies; of Raija Koski, Kathleen Kells, and Louise Forsyth's book Les Discours feminins dans la litterature postmoderne au Quebec; and even of Craig Owens's article "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism." 24 See, for example, Lamoureux, Les Limites de I'identite sexuelle (1998); Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (1995); and Simon, L'Hybridite culturelle (1999). 25 In her interesting article entitled "Legacies of Quebec Women's 'Ecriture au feminin': Bilingual Transformances, Translation Politicized, Subaltern Versions of the Text of the Street," Von Flotow traces

317 Notes to pages 280-1

26 27 28 29

the influence of ecriture au feminin in the works of younger women writers - or as she terms them, "gendered subaltern translators ... of the text of the street" - such as Helene Monette and Anne Dandurand (Von Flotow, "Legacies," 98-9), but she also points out its impact on bilingual authors such as Lola Lemire Tostevin and Gail Scott and on translators such as Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood. Dupuis-Deri, "Etre ou ne pas etre un ecrivain feministe?" 105 and 108 respectively. Ibid., 105. Navarro, "Les Textes des femrnes," 92. Lamy, "Des Voix comme des fluides," 231.

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320 Bibliography - L'Euguelionne. Montreal: Editions La Presse, 1976 - La Main tranchante du symbole. Montreal: Les Editions du remue-menage, 1990 - et al. La Theorie, un dimanche. Montreal: Les Editions du remue-menage, 1988 Binhammer, Katherine. "Metaphor or Metonymy? The Question of Essentialism in Cixous." Tessera 10 (summer 1991): 65-79 Blashak, Faiza. "L'Ecriture feminine dans Ananke d'Helene Cixous." PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1988 Bonnefoy, Claude. "Le Mystere de Hyvrard." Les Nouvelles litteraires 17 November 1977: 7 Borduas, Paul-Emile. Refus global. Montreal: Edition Mytra-Mythe, 1948 Boulanger, Madeleine. "Madeleine Gagnon et la quete des origines." MA thesis, Universite Laval, 1984 - "Madeleine Gagnon: Les constantes d'une ecriture." Voix et images 8.1 (1982): 45-51 - "Madeleine Gagnon: Words of Women, Words of Life." Ellipse 33-4 (1985): 32-7 Brandt, Di. Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narrative in Canadian Literature. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1993 Brossard, Nicole. The Aerial Letter. Trans. Marlene Wildeman. Toronto: The Women's Press, 1988 - L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite. Montreal: Quinze, 1977 - A Tout Regard. Montreal: Nouvelle Barre du jour, 1989 - "Aube a la saison." Trois. Montreal: A.G.E.U.M., 1965. 37-68 - Baroque d'aube. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1995 - Le Centre blanc: Poemes 1965-1975. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1978 - "Le Cortex exuberant." La Barre du jour 44 (1974): 2-22 - Le Desert mauve. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1987 - Double Impression: Poemes et textes 1967-1984. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1984 - L'Echo bouge beau. Montreal: Editions de 1'Esterel, 1968 - "L'Ecrivain." La Nef des sorcieres. Montreal: Quinze, 1976. 73-80 - Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman/She Would Be the First Sentence of My Next Novel. Trans. Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood. Toronto: The Mercury Press, 1998 - "La Fiction vive: Entretien avec Nicole Brossard sur sa prose." Interview by Andre Roy. Journal of Canadian Fiction 25-6 (1979): 31-40 - French Kiss (etreinte/ exploration). Montreal: Editions du jour, 1974 - Interview by the author, Montreal, 20 August 1991 - "An Interview with Nicole Brossard." Interview by Clea Notar. Rubicon 10 (1988): 173-95 - Journal intime, ou Voila done un manuscrit. Montreal: Herbes rouges, 1984 - La Lettre aerienne. Montreal: Les Editions du remue-menage, 1985

321 Bibliography - Un Livre. Montreal: Editions du jour, 1970 - "Un Livre a venir: Rencontre avec Nicole Brossard." Interview by Jean Fisette and Michel van Schendel. Voix et images 3.1 (1977): 3-18 - Mecanique jongleuse suivi de masculin grammaticale. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1974 - "Nicole Brossard." Interview by Clea Notar. So to Speak: Interviews with Contemporary Canadian Writers. Ed. Peter O'Brian. Montreal: Vehicule, 1987. 122-43 - "Nicole Brossard, 1943- ." Trans. Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood. Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series. Vol. 16. Ed. Hal May and Susan M. Trotsky. Detroit: Gail Research Co., 1993. 39-57 - "Nicole Brossard (Montreal, 27 novembre 1943)." Entretiens quebecois. Ed. Mel B. Yoken. Vol 2. Montreal: Pierre Tisseyre, 1989. 111-28 - "Order and Imagination." Interview by Beverly Daurio. Books in Canada 20.2 (March 1991): 19-21 - La Partie pour le tout. Montreal: L'Aurore, 1975 - "Preliminaires: Femme et langage." La Bane du jour 50 (winter 1975): 6-9 - Sold-out. Montreal: Editions du jour, 1973 - Suite logique. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1970 - These Our Mothers, Or: The Disintegrating Chapter. Trans. Barbara Godard. Toronto: Coach House, 1983 - "Toucher 1'energie." Voix d'ecrivains: Entretiens. Ed. Gerald Gaudet. Montreal: Quebec/Amerique, 1985. 214-23 - "La Traversee des inedits." Ecrivains contemporains. Entretiens 2:1977-1980. Ed. Jean Royer. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1983. 22-31 - and Lisette Girouard, eds. Anthologie de la poesie des femmes au Quebec. Montreal: Les Editions du remue-menage, 1991 - and Luce Guilbeault, prod. Some American Feminists. With Kate Millett, Betty Friedan, et al. National Film Board of Canada, 1976. Videocassette Budge, E.A. Wallis. The Book of the Dead. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 1949 Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 Cardinal, Marie. Autrement dit. Paris: Grasset, 1977 - Les Mots pour le dire. Paris: Grasset, 1975 Cartano, Tony. "Une Theorie generale du chagrin." Magazine litteraire 182 (March 1982): 48-9 Cauville, Joe'lle. "Feminin et fusionnel dans 1'ceuvre de Jeanne Hyvrard." PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1988 Certeau, Michel de. L'Ecriture de Vhistoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1975 Cesaire, Aime. Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. 1939. Paris: Presence africaine, 1983 Chapsal, Madeleine. "Helene Cixous contre Freud." L'Express 28 June~4 July 1976: 40-1

322 Bibliography Chevalier, Jean, and Alain Gheerbrant. Dictionnaire des symboles. Paris: Robert Laffont/Jupiter, 1982 Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978 Cixous, Helene. "Castration or Decapitation?" Trans. Annette Kuhn. Signs 7.1 (1981): 41-55 - Coming to Writing and Other Essays. Ed. Deborah Jenson. Trans. Sarah Cornell et al. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991 - Dedans. Paris: Grasset, 1969 - "De la scene de 1'Inconscient a la scene de 1'Histoire: Chemin d'une ecriture." Helene Cixous: Chemins d'une ecriture. Ed. Franchise van RossumGuyon and Myriam Diaz-Diocaretz. Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990. 15-34 - "Ecrire du roman, aujourd'hui. Entretien: Helene Cixous." Interview by Henri Quere. Fabula 3 (March 1984): 147-58 - Entre I'ecriture. Paris: des femmes, 1986 - "Entretien avec Helene Cixous." Interview by Franchise van RossumGuyon. Revue des sciences humaines 168 (1977): 479-93 - "Entretien avec Helene Cixous: Un destin revolu." Interview by Colette Godard. Ee Monde 28 July 1978: 16 - "Entretien: Dora et Portrait du soleil: Madeleine Gagnon, Philippe Haeck et Patrick Straram le Bison ravi parlent avec Helene Cixous." Chroniques 1.2 (February 1975): 16-25 - "An Exchange with Helene Cixous." Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Interview by Verena Andermatt Conley. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1984. Expanded ed., 1991. 129-61 - E'Exil de Joyce ou I'art du remplacement. Paris: Grasset, 1968 - "Le Grand ]e au feminin: Un entretien avec Helene Cixous." Interview by Nicole Casanova. Ees Nouvelles litteraires 8 April 1976: 6 - The Helene Cixous Reader. Ed. Susan Sellers. Trans. Susan Sellers et al. London: Routledge, 1994 - "Interview with Helene Cixous." Interview by Christiane Makward. Substance 13 (1976): 19-37 - La. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Rpt, Paris: des femmes, 1979 - "The Laugh of the Medusa." Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1.4 (1976): 875-93 - "La Missexualite, ou jouis-je?" Poetique 26 (1976): 240-9 - Osnabruck. Paris: des femmes, 1999 - Partie. Paris: des femmes, 1976 - Portrait de Dora. Paris: des femmes, 1976 - Portrait du soleil. Paris: Denoel, 1974 - Ee Prenom de Dieu. Paris: Grasset, 1967 - Prenoms de personne. Paris: Seuil, 1974

323 Bibliography - "Rethinking Differences." Trans. Isabelle de Courtivron. Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts. Ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. 70-86 - "Le Rire de la Meduse." L'Arc 61 (1975): 39-54 - "Une Romanciere et critique sur le phallocentrisme." Interview by Nicole Brossard. Le Devoir 30 November 1974: 16 - "Se tenir dans 1'intenable." Interview by Alain Clerval. Info Artitudes 7-8 (April 1976): n.p. - "Le Sexe ou la tete?" Cahiers du GRIP 13 (1976): 5-15 - "Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays." The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986. 63-132 - Souffles. Paris: des femmes, 1975 - et al. "Des Femmes en ecriture." Les Nouvelles litteraires 26 May 1976:15-20 - and Catherine Clement. La Jeune nee. Paris: Union generale d'editions, 1975 - Madeleine Gagnon, and Annie Leclerc. La Venue a I'ecriture. Paris: Union generale d'editions, 1977 Colvile, Georgiana M.M. "Helene Cixous: La." French Review 11.2 (December 1977): 325-6 Conley, Katharine. "Going for Baroque in the 2oth Century: From Desnos to Brossard." Quebec Studies 31 (spring 2002): 12-23 Conley, Verena Andermatt. Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Rev. ed., 1991 Corredor, Eva L. "The Fantastic and the Problem of Re-Presentation in Helene Cixous' Feminist Fiction." Papers in Romance 4.3 (1982): 173-9 Courtivron, Isabelle de. "Women and Movement(s): 1968-1978." Manifestoes and Movements. Ed. A. Maynor Hardee and Freeman G. Henry. French Literature Series 7. Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1980. 77-87 Crowder, Diane Griffin. "Amazons and Mothers? Monique Wittig, Helene Cixous and Theories of Women's Writing." Contemporary Literature 24.2 (1983): 117-44 Daly, Brenda O., and Maureen Reddy, eds. Narrating Mothers: Theorizing Maternal Subjectivities. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991 Davidson, Cathy N., and E.M. Broner, eds. The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature. New York: Unger, 1980 Defromont, Franchise. "Metaphorical Thinking and Poetic Writing in Virginia Woolf and Helene Cixous." The Body and the Text: Helene Cixous, Reading and Teaching. Ed. Helen Wilcox et al. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. 114-25 Derrida, Jacques. "La Differance." Theorie d'ensemble. Paris: Seuil, 1968. 41-66 - "The Law of Genre." Trans. Avital Ronell. On Narrative. Ed. W.J.T. Mitchell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980-81. 51-77 - "La Loi du genre." Glyph 7. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 176-232

324 Bibliography - "La Pharmacie de Platon." La Dissemination. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 69-198 Digby, Tom, ed. Men Doing Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1998 Djebar, Assia, et al. Mises en scene d'ecrivains. Grenoble: Presses universitaires de Grenoble; Sainte-Foy, Que.: Les editions Le Griffon d'argile, 1993 "Document Miron." Ed. Nicole Brossard, Roger Soubliere, et al. La Bane du jour 26 (October 1970) Drapeau, Renee-Berthe. Feminins singuliers: Pratiques d'ecriture; Brassard, Theoret. Montreal: Triptyque, 1986 Duchen, Claire. Feminism in France: From May '68 to Mitterand. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986 Dufault, Roseanna Lewis, ed. Women by Women: The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997 Dumont, Micheline, et al. (Le Collectif Clio/The Clio Collective). L'Histoire des femmes au Quebec depuis quatre siecles. Montreal: Quinze, 1982 Dupre, Louise. "Du Propre au figure." Preface to L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1988. 7-13 - "From Experimentation to Experience: Quebecois Modernity in the Feminine." Trans. A.J. Holden Verburg. A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Ed. Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon. 1986. 355-60 - Strategies du vertige. Montreal: Les Editions du remue-menage, 1989 Dupuis-Deri, Francis. "Etre ou ne pas etre un ecrivain feministe?" Trois 15.1-3 (November 1999): 103-9 Duranleau, Irene. "Le Texte moderne et Nicole Brossard." Etudes litteraires 14.1 (1981): 105-21 Duren, Brian. "Cixous' Exorbitant Texts." Sub-Stance 32 (1981): 39-51 Ernaux, Annie. La Femme gelee. Paris: Gallimard, 1981 Fanon, Frantz. Les Damnes de la terre. Pref. by Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: F. Maspero, 1961 - The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1966 Felman, Shoshana. La Folie et la chose litteraire. Paris: Seuil, 1978 Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 "Feminisme et creation: Actes du Colloque des ecrivains du 17 octobre 1998." Trois. 15.1-3 (November 1999): 5-115 "Femme et langage." La Barre du jour 50 (winter 1975) La Femme et I'ecriture. Special issue of Liberte 18.4 (July-October 1976): 1-393 "Fiction Theory/Theorie fiction." Canadian Fiction Magazine/Tessera 3.57 (1986) Fisher, Claudine Guegan. La Cosmogonie d'Helene Cixous. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988

325 Bibliography Forsyth, Louise. "Beyond the Myths and Fictions of Traditionalism and Nationalism: The Political in the Work of Nicole Brossard." Traditionalism, Nationalism and Feminism: Women Writers of Quebec. Ed. Paula Gilbert Lewis. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985. 157-72 - "L'Ecriture au feminin: L'Euguelionne de Louky Bersianik, L'Absent aigu de Genevieve Amyot, L'Amer de Nicole Brossard." Journal of Canadian Fiction 25-6 (1979): 199-211 - "The Novels of Nicole Brossard: An Active Voice." Room of One's Own 4.12 (1978): 30-8 Freeman, Barbara. "'Plus corps done plus ecriture': Helene Cixous and the Mind-Body Problem." Paragraph 11.1 (March 1988): 58-70 Fremont, Gabrielle. "Madeleine Gagnon: Du politique a rintime." Voix et images 8.1 (fall 1982): 23-34 Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 19. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961 - Essais de psychanalyse. Paris: Payot, 1963 - "Female Sexuality." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 21. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1961. 223-43 - "Femininity." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 22. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1964. 112-35 - "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria." The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 7. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1953. 3-122 - Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 8. Ed. and trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1960 - Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Trans. Alan Tyson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1964 - Un Souvenir d'enfance de Leonard de Vinci. Trans. Marie Bonaparte. 1927. Paris: Gallimard, 1977 Freustie, Jean. "Soleil noir." Nouvel Observateur 20-26 October 1975: 71-2 Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963 Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender and Difference in Literary Discourse." Feminist Studies 13.1 (1987): 49-82 Frye, Northrop. "Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres." Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. 303-14 Fuseli, Johann Heinrich. The Nightmare. Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit Gagnon, Madeleine. Antre. Montreal: Les Herbes rouges, 1978 - Autographic i: Fictions. Montreal: VLB, 1982 - Autographic 2: Toute ecriture est amour. Montreal: VLB, 1989

326 Bibliography - Les Cathedrales sauvages. Montreal: VLB, 1994 - "Ce qe je veux s'ecrire ne peut pas m'ecrire autrement par Madeleine Cagnon [sic]." Les Nouvelles litteraires 26 May 1976: 19 - Chant pour un Quebec lointain. Montreal: VLB, 1990 - Le Deuil du soleil. Montreal: VLB, 1998 - "Dire ces femmes d'ou je viens." Le Magazine litteraire 134 (March 1978): 94-9 - "d'une nef a 1'autre." Chroniques 16 (April 1976): 30-7 - "Elle est objet du sujet elle, ou 1'histoire de 1'Autre." Le Devoir 10 May 1975: 19 - "Elle m'a parle de son sang et du mien." Sorcieres September 1978 - "La Femme et le langage: Sa fonction comme parole en son manque." La Bane du jour 50 (winter 1975) 45-57 - Les Fleurs du catalpa. Montreal: VLB, 1986 - Ponds Gagnon, Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec, Montreal - "Formes et discours de la modernite dans le roman canadien d'expression franchise." "Parler 1'ecriture ou ecrire la parole," Brussels, 27 November 1985. Typescript archived in MS5-402, Fonds Gagnon, Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec, Montreal - La Lettre infinie. Montreal: VLB, 1984 - Lueur. Montreal: VLB, 1979 - "Madeleine parle: Texte lu a la Conference interamericaine des femmesecrivains." Canadian Women's Studies 1.1 (fall 1978): 52 - Les Morts-vivants. Montreal: Editions HMH, 1969 - "My Body in Writing." Trans. Wendy Johnston. Feminism in Canada: From Pressure to Politics. Ed. Angela R. Miles and Geraldine Finn. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1982. 273-82 - Pensees du poeme. Montreal: VLB, 1983 - "Percer le mur du son du sens, une entrevue avec Madeleine Gagnon." Voix et images 8.1 (fall 1982): 5-21 - Poelitique. Montreal: Les Herbes rouges, 1975. Reprinted in Autographie i. Fictions - Pour les femmes et tous les autres. Montreal: Editions de 1'Aurore, 1974. Reprinted in Autographie i: Fictions - "Le Temps des connivences (entretien)." Estuaire 42 (fall 1986): 63-74 - and Th.A. "Liberation de la femme et lutte des classes." Chroniques 1.2 (February 1975): 2-7 - and Denise Boucher. Retailles. Montreal: Editions 1'Etincelle, 1977 - and Annie Leclerc, "Correspondance." Dir. J.G. Pilon. Radio-Canada FM, Saint-Sulpice-Lauriere, 21 July 1987. Radio program - Jean-Marc Piotte, and Patrick Straram le Bison ravi. Portraits du voyage. Montreal: L'Aurore, 1975

327 Bibliography Garcia, Irma. Promenade femmiliere: Recherches sur I'ecriture feminine. 2 vols. Paris: des femmes, 1981 Garreta, Anne. Sphinx. Paris: Grasset, 1986 Gaulin, Huguette. Lecture en velocipede. Montreal: Editions le jour, 1972 Gavard-Perret, J.-P. "Les Doigts du figuier, La Meurtritude." Esprit ns 1.11 (November 1977): 128-9 Genette, Gerard. "Discours du recit." Figures in. Paris: Seuil, 1972. 65-273 - "Genres, 'types/ modes." Poetique 8.32 (1977): 389-421 - Palimpsestes. Paris: Seuil, 1982 Gerhart, Mary. Genre Choices, Gender Questions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992 Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979 Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays by Edouard Glissant. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989 Godard, Barbara. "L'Amer or the Exploding Chapter: Nicole Brossard at the Site of Feminist Deconstruction." Atlantis 9.2 (1984): 23-34 - "Mapmaking: A Survey of Feminist Criticism." Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Quebecoise Women. Ed. Barbara Godard. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987. 1-30 - "Redrawing the Circle: Power, Poetics, Language." Feminism Now: Theory and Practice. Ed. Marilouise Kroker et al. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1985. 165-81 - ed. Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Quebecoise Women. Toronto: ECW Press, 1987 - et al. "Theorizing Fiction Theory," Canadian Fiction Magazine 57 (1986): 6-12 - Sherry Simon, and Patricia Smart. "Symposium: Feminism and Postmodernism: The Politics of the Alliance." Quebec Studies 9 (fall igSg/winter 1990): 131-50 Gould, Karen. "Ecrire au feminin: Interview avec Denise Boucher, Madeleine Gagnon et Louky Bersianik." Quebec Studies 2 (1984): 125-42 - "Feminisme, postmodernite, esthetique de lecture: Le Desert mauve de Nicole Brossard." Le Roman quebecois depuis 1960. Ed. Louise Milot and Jaap Lintvelt. Sainte-Foy: Presses de 1'Universite Laval, 1992. 195-213 - "Unearthing the Female Text: Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur." L'Esprit createur 23.3 (fall 1983): 86-94 - Writing in the Feminine: Feminism and Experimental Writing in Quebec. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990 Groult, Benoite. Ainsi soit-elle. Paris: Grasset, 1975 Haeck, Philippe. Naissances: de la litterature quebecoise: Essais. Montreal: VLB, 1979. Harpman, Jacqueline. Orlanda. Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1996

328 Bibliography Havercroft, Barbara. "Auto/biographie et agentivite au feminin dans ]e ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit d'Annie Ernaux." Femmes de lettres et lefrangais hors frontieres. Ed. Lucie Lequin and Catherine Mavrikakis. Paris: L'Harmattan, forthcoming Herrmann, Claudine. Les Voleuses de langue. Paris: des femmes, 1976 Hirsch, Marianne. The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989 - and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds. Conflicts in Feminism. New York: Routledge, 1990 Romans, Margaret. '"Her Very Own Howl': The Ambiguities of Representation in Recent Women's Fiction." Signs 9.2 (1983): 186-205 Huffer, Lynne. Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998 Hyvrard, Jeanne. Au Presage de la mienne. Quebec: Le Loup de Gouttiere, 1997 - Les Doigts du figuier. Paris: Minuit, 1977 - "Un Entretien quelques moments avant la guerre." Interview by Sybil Diimchen. Lendemains 61 (1991): 130-42 - "Interview avec Jeanne Hyvrard realise a Paris le 20 juillet 1985." Interview by Euridice Figueiredo. Conjonction 169 (April-June, 1986): 119-34 - Interview by the author. Paris, 15 May 1992. Tape recording - "Jeanne Hyvrard." Interview by Alice Jardine and Anne M. Menke. Trans. Patricia Baudoin. Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writing, and Politics in Post-68 France. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. 87-96 - La Jeune morte en robe de dentelle. Paris: des femmes, 1990 - Mere la mart. Paris: Minuit, 1976 - La Meurtritude. Paris: Minuit, 1977 - Mother Death. Trans, and afterword Laurie Edson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988 - La Pensee corps. Paris: des femmes, 1989 - Les Prunes de Cythere. Paris: Minuit, 1975 - Ton nom de vegetal. Laval, Que.: Editions Trois, 1998 Irigaray, Luce. Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un. Paris: Minuit, 1977 - Speculum de I'autre femme. Paris: Minuit, 1974 Ives, Kelly. Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva: The Jouissance of French Feminism. Kidderminster, UK: Crescent Moon Publishing, 1996 Jacobus, Mary. First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1995 Jardine, Alice A. Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982 Jones, Ann Rosalind. "Inscribing Femininity: French Theories of the Feminine." Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism. Ed. Gayle Green and Coppelia Kahn. New York: Methuen, 1985. 80-112

329 Bibliography - "Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of 1'Ecriture feminine." Feminist Studies 7.2 (1981): 247-63 Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. 1939. London: Penguin, 1992 Kafka, Franz. "Before the Law." Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Penguin Complete Short Stories of Franz Kafka. Ed. Nahum N. Glatzer. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1983. 3-4 Kahane, Claire, et al., eds. The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985 Kierkegaard, S0ren. Diary of a Seducer. Trans. Gerd Gillhoff. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966 Kogan, Vivian. "'I Want Vulva!' Cixous and the Poetics of the Body." L'Esprit createur 25.2 (1985): 73-85 Koski, Raija, Kathleen Kells, and Louise Forsyth, eds. Les Discours feminins dans la litterature postmoderne au Quebec. San Francisco: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993 Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985 Kristeva, Julia. "Entretien avec Julia Kristeva: L'avant-garde aujourd'hui?" Interview by Franchise van Rossum-Guyon. Avant Garde 4 (1990): 157-82 - The Kristeva Reader. Ed. Toril Moi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986 - "Un Nouveau Type d'intellectuel: Le dissident." Tel Quel 74 (winter 1977): 3-8 - Polylogue. Paris: Seuil, 1977 - La Revolution du langage poetique. Paris: Seuil, 1974 - Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984 - Semeiotike. Paris: Seuil, 1969 Lacan, Jacques. "Dieu et la jouissance de ta femme." Le Seminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre xx: Encore (1972-1973). Paris: Seuil, 1975. 61-71 - Ecrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977 - Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne. Ed. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. Trans. Jacqueline Rose. New York: W.W. Norton, 1982 - "Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse." Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 237-322 - "Le Seminaire du 21 Janvier 1975." Ornicar? 3 (1975): 104-10 - "La Signification du phallus." Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 685-95 - "Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je." Ecrits. Paris: Seuil, 1966. 93-100 La Charite, Virginia A. The Dynamics of Space: Mallarme's "Un Coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard." Lexington: French Forum, 1987 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. L'Absolu litteraire: Theorie de la litterature du romantisme allemand. Paris: Seuil, 1978

330 Bibliography - "Le Dialogue des genres." Poetique 21 (1975): 148-75 Lagarde, Andre, and Laurent Michard, eds. and comps. xxe Siecle: Les grands auteurs fran^ais: Anthologie et histoire litteraire. Paris: Bordas, 1988 Lamoureux, Diane, ed. Les Limites de I'identite sexuelle. Montreal: Editions du remue-menage, 1998 Lamy, Suzanne. "Des Voix comme des fluides." Les CEuvres de creation et le fran^ais au Quebec. Vol. 3, Actes du Congres Langue et Societe au Quebec, November 1982. Quebec: Editeur officiel du Quebec, 1984. 231-3 - "Litanie des litanies." D'elles. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1979. 61-99 - "Pouvoir du discours et discours de pouvoir." Spirale 6 (January 1980): 9 Lasserre, Guy, et al. Les Antilles. 1991. Paris: Larousse, 1996 Leard, Jean-Marcel. "Du Semantique au semiotique en litterature: La rnodernite romanesque au Quebec." Etudes litteraires 14.1 (1981): 17-60 Leclerc, Annie. Parole defemme. Paris: Grasset, 1974 Lejeune, Claire. "Claire Lejeune." La Femme et I'ecriture. Special issue of Liberte 18.4 (July-October 1976): 292-9 Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci's Note-Books. Ed. and trans. Edward McCurdy. London: Duckworth, 1906 - The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. Vol 2. Ed. Jean Paul Richter. 1939. London: Phaidon, 1970 Lequin, Lucie. "Les Femmes quebecoises ont invente leurs paroles." American Review of Canadian Studies 9.2 (1979): 113-24 Levin, Samuel R. "The Analysis of Compression in Poetry." Foundations of Language 7 (1981): 38-55 Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. James Harle Bell et al. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969 - Les Structures elementaires de la parente. Paris: PUF, 1949 "Liberation des femmes, annee zero." Special issue of Partisans 54-5 QulyOctober, 1970) Lindsay, Cecile. "Body/Language: French Feminist Utopias." French Review 60.1 (1986): 46-55 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois. La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit, 1979 - "One of the Things at Stake in Women's Struggles." Sub-Stance 20 (1978): 9-17 Makward, Christiane. "Les Editions des femmes: Historique, politique et impact." Contemporary French Civilization 5 (1981): 347-55 - "Structures du silence/du delire: Marguerite Duras/Helene Cixous." Poetique 35 (1978): 314-24 Mallarme, Stephane. "Un Coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard." CEuvres. Ed. Yves-Alain Favre. Paris: Garnier, 1985. 427-47 Manifeste des femmes quebecoises. Montreal: L'Etincelle, 1971

331 Bibliography Maranda, Jeanne, and Mai'r Verthuy. "Quebec Feminist Writing." Emergency Librairian 5.1 (September-October, 1977): 2-11 Marini, Marcelle. "Production et reproduction langagieres en lisant Jeanne Hyvrard ..." 34/44 13 (1984): 19-25 Marks, Elaine, and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds. New French Feminisms: An Anthology. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980 Marx-Scouras, Danielle. The Cultural Politics of Tel Quel: Literature and the Left in the Wake of Engagement. University Park: Perm State University Press, 1996 Mauguiere, Benedicte. Traversee des ideologies et exploration des identites dans les ecritures defemmes au Quebec (1970-1980). New York: Peter Lang, 1997 Melangon, Robert. "Madeleine Gagnon: Pour reinventer le monde." Le Devoir 26 May 1979: 19 Miguet, Marie. "'La Bible a rebours' de Hyvrard." Recherches sur I'imaginaire 17 (1987): 197-216 - "Jeanne Hyvrard: Un pacte d'alienation." Recherches sur I'imaginaire 18 (1988): 175-86 Milot, Louise. "Nicole Brossard: Une influence couteuse." Modernite/postmodernite du roman contemporain. Ed. Jacques Allard and Madeleine Frederic. Montreal: Les Cahiers du Departement d'Etudes litteraires, UQAM, 1987. 77-86 Milot, Pierre. "La Legitimite offensee de 1'avant-garde litteraire des annees 70." La Camera obscura du postmodernisme. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1988. 29-38 - "Tel Quel ou les conditions d'emergence des Herbes rouges." Voix et images 13.2 (1988): 317-23 Mitterand, Henri, et al., eds. and comps. Litterature xxe siecle: Textes et documents. Paris: Editions Nathan, 1989 Moi, Toril. "Cixous, an Imaginary Utopia." Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Methuen, 1985. 102-26 Moscovici, Marie. "Un Langage decolonise." Critique 32.347 (April 1976): 375-80 Motard-Noar, Martine. Les Fictions d'Helene Cixous: Une autre langue defemme. Lexington, Ky: French Forum, 1991 Murphy, Richard. Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998 Myers, Mitzi. "Reform or Ruin: 'A Revolution in Female Manners.'" A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Ed. Carol H. Poston. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1988. 328-43 Navarro, Pascale. "Les Textes des femmes: Une nouvelle autorite." Trois 15.1-3 (November 1999): 90-3 Nepveu, Pierre. L'Ecologie du reel: Mori et naissance de la litterature quebecoise contemporaine. Montreal: Boreal, 1988

332 Bibliography Neuman, Shirley. "Importing Difference." A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing. Ed. Shirley Neuman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: Longspoon, 1986. 392-405 Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974 O'Leary, Veronique, and Louise Toupin, eds. Quebecoises deboutte! 2 vols. Montreal: Les Editions du remue-menage, 1982-83 Ostriker, Alicia. "Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking." Signs 8.1 (1982): 68-90 Ouellette-Michalska, Madeleine. L'Echappee des discours de I'ceil. Montreal: Nouvelle Optique, 1981 Owens, Craig. "The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism." The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Washington: Bay Press, 1983. 57-82 Pachet, Pierre. "Un Debordement impressionnant." Quinzaine litteraire 1-15 June 1977: 8-9 Parker, Alice. Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard. New York: Peter Lang, 1998 - "The Mauve Horizon of Nicole Brossard." Quebec Studies 10 (1990): 107-19 Paterson, Janet. Moments postmodernes dans le roman quebecois. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1993 Penrod, Lynn. Helene Cixous. New York: Twayne, 1996 Pizan, Christine de. The Book of the City of Ladies. Trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards. New York: Persea Books, 1982 Poirot-Delpech, Bertrand. "De Guy des Cars a Helene Cixous: Illisibles." Review of La by Helene Cixous. Le Monde 6 August 1976: 6 Powell, Nicolas. Fuseli: The Nightmare. London: Penguin Press, 1973 Prieto, Rene. "In-Fringe: The Role of French Criticism in the Fiction of Nicole Brossard and Severe Sarduy." Do the Americas Have a Common Literature? Ed. Gustavo Perez Firmat. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. 266-81 Pujade-Renaud, Claude. "Du Corps feminin a 1'ecriture." Esprit 62 (February 1982): 107-21 Rabine, Leslie Wahl. "Ecriture feminine as Metaphor." Cultural Critique 8 (1987): 19-44 Raphael. Sistine Madonna. Dresden Museum, Dresden Read, Kirk. "French Renaissance Women Writers in Search of Community: Literary Constructions of Female Companionship in City, Family and Convent." PhD diss., Princeton University, 1990 Reid, Martine. "Hyvrard." After the Age of Suspicion. The French Novel Today. Ed. Charles A. Porter. Yale French Studies. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. 317-21 Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. 1976. Rpt, with a new foreword, New York: Norton, 1986

333 Bibliography - "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision." On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. New York: Norton, 1979. 33-49 Richman, Michele. "Sex and Signs: The Language of French Feminist Criticism." Language and Style 13.4 (1980): 62-80 Richter, Jean Paul. The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. 2 vols. London: Oxford University Press, 1939 Robin, Regine. La Quebecoite. Montreal: Quebec/Amerique, 1983 Rossum-Guyon, Franchise van, ed. Helene Cixous: Chemins d'une ecriture. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 1990 Roudinesco, Elisabeth, and Michel Plon, comps. Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse. Paris: Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1997 Roy, Monique. "Femmage: Madeleine Gagnon." Canadian Women's Studies 1.1 (fall 1978): 49-51 Russell, Charles. Poets, Prophets and Revolutionaries: The Literary Avant-Garde from Rimbaud through Postmodernism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 Saint-Martin, Lori. Le Nom de la mere: Meres, filles et ecriture dans la litterature quebecoise au feminin. Montreal: Nota bene, 1999 Sankovitch, Tilde A. "Helene Cixous: The Pervasive Myth." French Women Writers and the Book: Myths of Access and Desire. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988. 127-52 Santoro, Milena. "Eblouissements: La portee des rencontres artistiques dans La." Helene Cixous, croisees d'une ceuvre. Ed. Mireille Calle-Gruber. Paris: Editions Galilee, 2000. 153-62 - "Feminist Translation: Writing and Transmission among Women in Nicole Brossard's Le Desert mauve and Madeleine Gagnon's Lueur." Women by Women: The Treatment of Female Characters by Women Writers of Fiction in Quebec since 1980. Ed. Roseanna Lewis Dufault. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. 147-68 - "'La Mort avec la vie dedans': L'ecriture du deuil chez Madeleine Gagnon." Francographies u 3 (2000): 243-8 - "Writing and/in Mourning: The Legacy of Loss in Recent Texts by Madeleine Gagnon." Doing Gender: Franco-Canadian Women Writers of the ictgos. Ed. Roseanna Dufault and Paula Gilbert. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. 53-77 Sartre, Jean-Paul. Huis clos. Paris: Gallimard, 1947 Schwind, Moritz von. The Prisoner's Dream. Schack-Galerie, Munich Sellers, Susan, ed. Writing Differences: Readings from the Seminar of Helene Cixous. New York: St. Martin's, 1988 Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Shiach, Morag. Helene Cixous: A Politics of Writing. London: Routledge, 1991 Shorter, Alan W. The Egyptian Gods: A Handbook. 1937. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981

334 Bibliography Showalter, Elaine. "Toward a Feminist Poetics." The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 125-43 Simon, Sherry. L'Hybridite culturelle. Montreal: L'lle de la tortue, 1999 Sellers, Philippe. "Ecriture et revolution: Entretien de Jacques Henric avec Philippe Sollers." Theorie d'ensemble. Paris: Seuil, 1968. 67-79 - Femmes. Paris: Gallimard, 1983 Stanton, Domna C. "Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva." The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 157-82 Steiner, George. After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975 Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990 Les Terribles vivantes. Dir. by Dorothy Todd Henault. ONF, 1986. Videocassette Theoret, France. Entre raison et deraison. Montreal: Herbes rouges, 1987 - Journal pour memoire. Montreal: L'Hexagone, 1993 Tuttle Hansen, Elaine. Mother without Child: Contemporary Fiction and the Crisis of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997 Vandier, Jacques. La Religion egyptienne. Paris: PUF, 1949 Verthuy-Williams, Mair, and Jennifer Waelti-Walters. Jeanne Hyvrard. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1988 Voldeng, Evelyne. "L'Intertextualite dans les ecrits feminins d'inspiration feministe." Voix et images 7.3 (spring 1982): 523-30. Reprinted in Gynocritics: Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Quebecoise Women. Ed. Barbara Godard. 51-8 Von Flotow, Luise. "Legacies of Quebec Women's 'Ecriture au feminin': Bilingual Transformances, Translation Politicized, Subaltern Versions of the Text of the Street." Journal of Canadian Studies 30.4 (winter 1995-96): 88-109 - "Quebec Feminist Writing: Integrating the Avant-Garde and the Political in the Works of Nicole Brossard and France Theoret." PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1991 Waelti-Walters, Jennifer. Fairy Tales and the Female Imagination. Montreal: Eden Press, 1982 - "'Us ont fait de moi la mort': La mere dans 1'ceuvre de Jeanne Hyvrard." Etudes litteraires 17.1 (April 1984): 117-29 - Jeanne Hyvrard: Theorist of the Modern World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996 Watterson, Barbara. The Gods of Ancient Egypt. New York: Facts on File, 1984 Weinmann, Heinz, and Roger Chamberland, eds. and comps. Litterature quebecoise, des origines a nos jours. Ville LaSalle, Que.: Editions Hurtubise HMH, 1996

335 Bibliography Wilcox, Helen, et al., eds. The Body and the Text: Helene Cixous, Reading and Teaching. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990 Wirth, Oswald. Le Tarot des imagiers du Moyen Age. Paris: Claude Tchou, 1966 Wittig, Monique. Le Corps lesbien. Paris: Minuit, 1973 - Les Guerilleres. Paris: Minuit, 1969 Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. 1925. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953 Yaeger, Patricia. Honey-Mad Women: Emancipatory Strategies in Women's Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 Young, Robert. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York: Routledge, 1995

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Index

References to the figures are printed in italics. Major works and themes common to several works are listed separately, rather than under the individual authors. Otherwise, an author's works are listed at the end of the entry for her name. alienation. See madness; women: and madness alterity: and women, 12, 53, 66, 149, 212-13, 263. See also other, the; otherness; self Alonzo, Anne-Marie, 34 Amer ou le chapitre effrite, L': ambiguity in, 173, 178, 189-9; body in, 164, 169, 170-1, 176-84, 189, 191, 194, 198-9, 206; cortex, 183-4; cre" ation in, 163, 164, 175, 189, 194, 207; father in, 170-2, 174; fiction in, 164, 169, 181-3, T-&6' 196; fille-mere-lesbienne, 177,184-5, *96; gaze in,

169-75, 198; gender identity in, 162, 169, 177-80, 185, 188, 192, 194-5, 207; generations of women in, 165, 167, 179-80, 182, 185, 194, 206-7; hybrid genres in, 162, 186-9, 193~4/ !968, 205; "killing the womb" in, 165-8, 184; lesbian subject in, 1623, 176, 177-8, 185, 188, 192, 207; liberation in, 175, 201-2, 207; mauve in, 173-4; "para-strophes" in, 205; plot in, 191; poetic language in, 175, 186, 191, 195, 197205; procreativity in, 165-7, 173/ !/6/ 180, 184, 189, 195; relation to the other in, 164, 170, 176, 178, 180, 182, 192, 194, 196-7, 201, 206-7; selfhood affirmed in, 163, 168-9, 176-7, 181, 185, 192, 194, 196, 207; spatial poetics in, 164, 200-2, 274; theory in, 186,

194-6; title of, 163-4, 186, 199. See also birth images; Brossard; character; chronology; collectivity of women; death; desire; ellipsis; female subjectivity; fiction theory; genre; hybrid genres; intertextuality; maternity; memory; mother: patriarchal; narrative voice; neologisms; non-linear narrative; oppression of women; poetic fiction; power structures; psychoanalytic theory; syntax; writing autobiography. See autofiction; hybrid genres; see also individual authors autofiction, 36, 138, 268, 279. See also hybrid genres avant-garde: aesthetics, 16, 32, 78, 153-4, 186, 199-200, 203, 269-74; communities as necessary to, 32, 158-9, 273,

33$ Index 277; defined, 31-2, 2725; distinguished from modernism, 272; double allegiance of, 34, 40, 41, 162,184, 270, 274, 279; exclusion of women from, 31, 33, 35, 38, 270, 273, 289^59; and feminist aesthetics, 6, 32, 34, 78, 97, 102-3, 130, 139-40, 150-1, 159-60, 198-203, 207, 246, 267, 269-76; and feminist fiction, 32-6, 37-9, 78, 150-1, 269-72, 275-6; ideological dimensions of, 32, 34, 154, 271-2, 273, 276, 278; impact of feminist, 277-81, 3i6n.25; influence of earlier movements on feminist experimental writing, 25, 34, 38-9, 112, 132, 139-40, 144, 151, 153-4' 155' 198-203, 250, 270-1, 274-6; and madness, 273; and postmodernism, 275, 279; specificity of feminist, 34,130,160,187-8, 207, 269-76, 279; and subversive feminist writing strategies, 1617' 32' 35' 37-8, 77-8, 90-1, 96-7, 102-3, 130i, 136, 139, 150-2, 1868, 207, 245-6, 267, 270i, 273-6. See also Borduas; feminist aesthetics; novel Barthes, Roland, 40, 147, 154' 155' 158 Beauvoir, Simone de, 12, 132, 280 Berger, Helene. See Cixous Bersianik, Louky, 19, 21, 23; and gynility, 21 birth images: in Brossard, 164, 176, 180, 183, 193;

in Cixous, 41, 46, 50-1, 54, 61-2, 71-2, 75, 77-9, 87; in Gagnon, 101-2, 104, 106, 116-17, 125-6, 142, 149, 299n.3o; in Hyvrard, 214, 219-22, 223-4, 226-9, 231, 235, 238, 258, 260, 265, 3ion.i6, 311^24. See also maternity; individual authors and titles bisexuality: in Cixous, 51-2, 75-6, 83, 293n_4i body: and/in writing, 20-1, 76, 80-2, 96, 1012, 104-6, 109, 115-18, 121, 123, 125-6, 128-9, 137, 140, 151-2, 184, 186, 270. See also writing the body; individual authors and titles bond, mother and child (esp. daughter), 6, 26870; in Brossard's work, 164-6, 167, 170-1, 174, 177, 179, 181-2, 192, 194-5, 196' 201, 207; in Cixous's work, 49, 702, 73-4; in Gagnon's work, 115-16, 122, 126, 152; in Hyvrard's work, 210, 215-16, 220, 222-4, 235, 248. See also maternity; mother; individual authors and titles Book of the Dead, 44-8, 54-8, 76, 101. See also Egyptian mythology Borduas, Paul-Emile, 153-4 Boucher, Denise, 99-100, 277, 3i6n.i5 Brossard, Nicole, 4, 8, 19, 20, 22, 27-8, 29, 153-62, 268, 270, 272-81; autobiography and, 193-4, 205; avant-garde aesthetics and, 153, 155, 159-62, 186, 194, 198203, 206-7, 278; and ecriture feminine, 22-3,

158-62, 185, 206, 278; and experimental writing' 153' 155' i59-6o, 186, 194, 198-203, 2067, 278; and feminism, 155-8, 162, 184, 207, 278; and feminist theory, 159-60, 166, 177-9, 182, 185-6, 190, 194-5; and fiction, 155, 157, 159-60, 278; on grammar, 156; influences on, 153-61, 174, 177-8, 1945, 200-3; on language, 155, 160, 162, 195; and lesbianism, 155, 196, 278; and modernite, 155, 206, 275; and motherhood, 156-7, 162; on oppression of women in language, 158, 162; and poetry, 156-7, 197205, 278; and political engagement, 155, 185, 196, 207, 278; and solidarity with women, 158-9, 185; spiral diagrams of, xvi, 202, 213, 270, 3o8n.ii4; work compared to Cixous's, 158-62, 178-9, 180, 186, 189, 207, 303n.29; work compared to Gagnon's, 154, 162, 180, 186, 207; on writing the body, 184, 186. See also birth images; bond, mother and child; character; chronology; collectivity of women; desire; difference; dissidence; ellipsis; essentialism; fiction; fiction theory; formalism; Freud; genre; jouissance; language, women's relation to; maternity; memory; neologisms; nonsense; "nous"; oppression of women; psychoanalytic theory;

339 Index reader expectations; sexual difference: in writing; water images; wordplay; writing the body works: L'Amer ou le chapitre effrite, 8, 19, 23, 28, 103, 156-207 (see also separately under title); A Tout Regard, 202; "Aube a la saison," 153; Baroque d'aube, 268, 278; Le Centre blanc, 184; "Le Cortex exuberant," 157, 183; Le Desert mauve, 36, 121, 278, 2899on.65; Double impression, 155-6; L'Echo bouge beau, 206; "L'ficrivain," 157; Elle serait la premiere phrase de mon prochain roman, 153, 185, 278; French Kiss, 155, 186; Journal intime, 156-7, 193; La Lettre aerienne, xvi, 19, 189, 202, 157, 181, 275; Un Livre, 155, 186; "La Plaque tournante" (see La Lettre aerienne); Soldout, 155, 186; Some American Feminists, 157; Suite logique, 154, 168, 304n_53; "Vaseline (see Double impression) Burger, Peter, 272 fa. See Freud: id in Certeau, Michel de, 107 character, 271; in Brossard, 155, 186, 189-93; in Cixous, 53-4; in Gagnon, 109, 114, 122; in Hyvrard, 210, 23940, 264. See also individual authors and titles Chawaf, Chantal, 23 chronology: in Brossard, 190; disturbed, 271; disturbed in Hyvrard's

work, 217, 220, 227, 248, 255. See also nonlinear narrative; individual authors and titles Cixous, Helene, 7, 14, 20, 24-5, 27, 29, 37-41, 99, 130, 156, 158-62, 268, 270, 272-4, 277, 279-81; avant-garde aesthetics and, 37-8, 78, 97; and feminist theory, 15-18, 37-44, 66, 68, 79-80, 95, 96; influences on, 40, 42-4, 56, 58, 64, 79, 296n.8o; lectures by, 14. See also birth images; bisexuality; bond, mother and child; character; collectivity of women; death; difference; dissidence; ellipsis; essentialism; fiction; Freud; genre; inexpressible, the; jouissance; language, women's relation to; maternity; mother; neologisms; nonsense; "nous"; oppression of women; poetic fiction; psychoanalytic theory; reader expectations; sexual difference; Venue a I'ecriture, La; unconscious, the; water images; wordplay; writing the body works: "Castration or Decapitation?" 41, 43, 87, 88; La Jeune nee, 7, 15,17-18, 38, 40, 45, 56, 63, 96-7, 212, 286n.24; La, 7, 24-5, 37-97, 7980, 88, 281 (see also separately under title); "The Laugh of the Medusa" (see "Le Rire de la Meduse"); Osnabruck, 268; Portrait de Dora, 44, 212, 295n_73; Por trait du soleil, 26, 128,

2

95n-73/ "Le Rire de la Meduse," 7, 15-18, 22, 37, 43, 52, 76, 87, 102, 128, 133, 158, 160, 180i, 274, 293n.4i; "Sorties" (see La Jeune nee); Souffles, xiv, 39, 41, 62, 92; La Venue a I'ecriture, 7, 14, 45-6, 87, 2 95n-73/ 296n.8o collaborations in women's writings, 1415, 27, 28, 33, 98, 99, 100, 127, 137, 277, 287^33, 296n.86, 298n.6, 316n.25 collectivity of women: in Brossard, 180-1; in Cixous, 44, 47, 54, 83, 94-5, 96; in Gagnon, 134-5, 137-8, 150; in Hyvrard, 231, 233-4, 238, 241, 264. See also "nous"; solidarity among women coming to writing, 16, 78, 119-20. See also Venue a I'ecriture, La communities: of feminists, 7, 13-15, 30-1, 158-9, 273, 277, 287^33; historical, of women, 13, 285^16 Conley, Verena, 37, 38, 64, 72, 75-6, 79, 295n.65 creativity, women's: and feminist ideology, 5, 44, 134, 138, 276; and writing, 5, 15-16, 36, 130, 207, 276. See also feminist aesthetics death, 268, 312-13^36; in L'Amer, 163, 165, 168, 175; and female sexuality, 45, 214, 221, 236; in Hyvrard's work, 21314, 217, 219, 220, 221, 225, 228, 230, 234, 236, 238-40, 242, 257, 260-1, 265; in La, 44-7, 49-51,

340 Index 54, 58-9, 61-2, 75-6, 78-9, 86-7, 93; in Lueur, 102, 104-6, 115-16, 118-21, 122-3, I25-8, 135, 137, 138; and the mother, 49, 50-1, 74-5, 115-16, 118, 122, 135, 163, 165, 168, 217-21, 228-30, 268; and rebirth, 45-6, 49, 50-1, 54, 61-2, 74-5, 76, 101, 125-6, 238-9, 260-1. See also mother; oppression of women; violence deictics (shifters). See narrative voice; see also (under individual titles) deictics; multiple narrators; split subject Derrida, Jacques, 4-5, 102, 177-8, 187-8, 193, 194, 209, 3O5n.68. See also difference desire: in Brossard, 161, 173-4, 177-8, 180, 1815, 189, 193, 196, 200, 207; in Hyvrard's work, 210, 220, 223-4, 227, 232, 255-6; in La, 50-1, 55, 56, 61, 64-9, 72-3, 75-7, 80-2, 84-5, 89-90, 95-7; in Lueur, 101, 105, 109-12, 116-18, 124, 128, 131, 142, 149-50; male, 75, 173-4; women's, 270, 274, 277, 279. See also lesbian; individual authors and titles difference, 17, 18, 20, 272, 276, 281; in Brossard, 160, 162, 163, 167, 16974, 177-9, 181-5, 187-8, 194-6, 206-7; in Cixous, 94, 97; in Gagnon, 105, 131-2, 136-7; in Hyvrard, 210-11, 226, 233-4/ 237, 243, 245-6, 248-9, 257, 265, 266-7; sexual, in writing, 16-

23, 40, 43, 65-6, 68, 75, 90, 94, 97, no, 131-2, 133, 140, 150, 159-60, 169-70,172, 177-9,183, 187-8, 194-6, 206-7, 269-70, 276, 277, 280-1. See also writing; individual authors and titles differences among feminists, 3, 13, 30, 32-3, 134-5, 269, 276-7, 283n_3, 298n.2, 314i5n.59. See also feminism; feminist dissidence: in Brossard, 178, 185; in Hyvrard, 217-19, 225-6, 228, 230-3, 235, 236, 244, 247-9, 251-2, 256-8,

260, 263, 265-6; in Kristeva, 3, 5, 269; women and, 5, 185, 269, 272, 273-4. See also feminist theory; Kristeva; power structures Dora, 44, 68-71, 113. See also Freud dreams: in La, 53-4, 5864, 68-71, 79-80, 91-3, 101, 273; in Lueur, 101, 106, no, 112, 114-15, 130, 131, 143, 145, 1512, 273, 274. See also unconscious, the Dupre, Louise, 100, 130, 139, 141, 145, 153, 180i, 184, 187, 194, 196, 200, 276, 3Oin.57 Duras, Marguerite, 278 ecriture au feminin, 17, 20, 27, 160, 185, 206, 274, 278, 3i6n.25; distinguished from ecriture feminine, 19-20. See also ecriture feminine; individual authors ecriture feminine, 15-22, 37, 65-6, 81, 97, 99,156, 158-62, 185, 266, 274,

277. See also feminist aesthetics; individual authors Egyptian mythology, 45, 48-52, 57, 61-2, 72, 88, 90, 238. See also Book of the Dead ellipsis, 271; in Cixous, 93; in Brossard, 198200, 202-4 essentialism, 270; and Brossard's work, 160, 180, 184, 196; and Cixous's work, 17-18, 43-4, 81-2, 97, 286n.24; and Gagnon's work, 135,151; and Hyvrard's work, 267; and Lacan's theories, 42-3. See also feminist theory experimental fiction. See avant-garde; feminist aesthetics; individual authors female sexuality, 42-3, 150, 170. See also difference; feminine, the; femininity; sexual difference female subjectivity, development of, 269-71; in L'Amer, 160, 162-73, 188, 192, 194-5; in Hyvrard's work, 208, 213-19, 240-3; in La, 70-2, 76-7, 82, 96; in Lueur, 101-2, 116, 150. See also (under individual titles) gender identity; identity; lesbian subject; self-discovery; selfhood affirmed feminine, the, 42-3, 52-3, 62, 96-7, 125, 133, 143, 160, 162, 180, 184, 1878, 202, 208; and/in language, 6, 17, 21, 43, 77, 82, 84, 90,131, 143, 156, 165-6, 170, 173, 198-9, 208, 272, 274. See also

341 Index female sexuality; femininity femininity, 42, 52-3, 62, 117, 184, 189, 194, 196. See also female sexuality; feminine, the feminism: American influences on Quebec, 18; conflicts in, 3, 99, 129-30, 283^3, 298n.2; and deconstruction, 22, 134, 177, 191; defined, 12-13; m France, 5, 1012, 14, 269; historical contexts of, 7, 10-12, 14, 25, 269, 278, 284n_9; influence of French, 3-4, 15; and language, 12, 129-30, 271; and nationalism, 18, 142, 284^9, 3Oin.59; and postcolonial theory, 29, 160, 208, 222, 271-2, 279; and postmodernism, 33, 36, 275-6, 279, 3i5n.i3; in Quebec, 5, 10-12, 14, 18, 98-100, 298n.2, 3i5n.i3; and queer theory, 279; and race, 134-5, 221-2, 271; transatlantic connections in, 4, 5, 7, 13-15, 27, 30, 44, 98-100, 101, 148, 187, 280, 285^19; and writing, 11-12, 336, 77-8, 130, 132, 134, 138, 151, 268-73, 278See also oppression of women; power structures; individual authors feminist: conferences, 1415, 99-100, 157; fiction, readership of, 35-6, 3940, 94, 134, 150-1, 27981; periodicals, 12, 26, 28, 33, 34, 99, 160, 278, 287^31, 289n.i2, 289^14; publishers, 12, 34, 278; writing, defined, 12, 23; writing,

in relation to literary tradition, 22, 35, 39-40, 131-2, 139-40, 144, 270-1, 273-6, 280-1. See also avant-garde; differences among feminists; feminism; feminist theory; oppression of women; power structures feminist aesthetics, 6, 17, 20, 21, 34-6, 41, 53, 778, 94, 96-7, 112, 116, 129-31, 143, 150-1, 158-60, 187-8, 201, 207, 270-6, 277; and the avant-garde, 6, 8, 30-8, 78, 86, ,112,130, 139-40, 158-60, 207, 270-6; and experimental writing, 8, 30-1, 32, 34-6, 38, 40, 77-8, 83, 86, 90-1, 94, 96-7, 112, 129-30, 1312, 136, 139-40, 143, 150-1, 158-60, 187-8, 198-203, 207, 270-6, 277; related to ecriture au feminin or ecriture feminine, 19-20, 21, 967, 274. See also avantgarde; chronology; creativity, women's; ellipsis; feminism; feminist; feminist theory; language; non-linear narrative; parataxis; syntax; writing; individual authors feminist theory: conflicts in, 3, 129-30, 134-5; debates on women's writing in, 16-22, 12930, 138, 158, 271; and deconstruction, 22, 191, 194; impasses in, 4,151, 158, 194, 252, 265; in Quebec, 18-23, 133/ 135-7, 158-62, 287^31, 287^33; See also avantgarde; differences among feminists; dissi-

dence; essentialism; feminist; feminist aesthetics; oppression of women; power structures ction: Brossard's use of term, 184, 189-90, 307n.88; Cixous's use of term, 39; Gagnon's use of term, 107-8, 115, 150; relation to reality, 107, 115, 139, 159-60, 178, 182-3, 189-90, 196, 203. See also writing fiction theory, 28, 103, 132-3, 139, 145, 186, 189, 193-4, 196, 205, 3o6n.79- See also hybrid genres foremother. See (under individual titles) generations of women; mother formalism, 154, 155, 1567. See also Brossard French feminism. See feminism; individual authors Freud, Sigmund, 17, 25, 87, 68, 79,109, no, 133, 161, 170, 171, 212, 227, 254-5; Brossard on the theories of, 161, 170; Cixous on the theories of, 43, 72, 79-80; Dora in the work of, 68-70, 212; Gagnon on the theories of, 104,109-10; id in, 109-10, 112, 117; influence on Cixous, 64, 79; Leonardo da Vinci in the work of, 72-3, 78. See also Dora; Leonardo da Vinci; psychoanalytic theory Front de liberation des femmes (FLF), 11, 33 Fuseli, Henry, xiii, 44, 59-63, 65, 294n.59, 295n.68. See also Nightmare, The

342 Index Gagnon, Madeleine, 7,14, 22, 25-7, 29, 98-100, 135, 268, 270, 272-4, 277, 279-81; avantgarde aesthetics and, 103, 130-2, 136, 139-40, 143, 151-2; and Chroniques, 99, 298^2; and class issues (see this entry under Marxism); and counterculture, 100, 132; and feminism, 98-100, 105, 130, 132, 138, 151, 277; and feminist theory, 104-6, 111, 130-3, 136-8, 148, 151; influences on, 102, 107, 111, 112, 132-3, 139-40, 144, 148, 151, 30on.37; jowl in, 142; on language, 20-1, no, 129-30, 132, 137, 142, 148; and Marxism, 26, 98-9, 132, 135-6, 138, 142, 150, 273; and poet as visionary, 111-12, 140; on Quebec predecessors, 105, 148; stylistic variations in, 103, 139, 142-3; and syndicalism, 100; work compared to Cixous's, 1014, 114, 127-8, 131, 133, 142, 149, 152; on writing the body, 20, 102, 104, 115-17, 151, 277. See also bond, mother and child; collaborations in women's writings; difference; essentialism; feminism; fiction; Freud; genre; inexpressible, the; language, women's relation to; maternity; neologisms; nonsense; "nous"; oppression of women; psychoanalytic theory; reader expectations; Venue a I'ecriture, La; water

images; wordplay; writing the body - works: "Amour parallele" (see Portraits du voyage); Antre, 139,145, 268; Les Cathedrales sauvages, 277; Le Deuil du soleil, 138, 268; "Dire ces femmes d'ou je viens," 165; La Lettre infinie, 129, 145,152; Lueur, 7, 27, 100-52, 268 (see also separately under title); "Mon Corps dans I'ecriture" (see Venue a I'ecriture, La); Pensees du poeme, no; "Percer le mur du son du sens," 98; Poelitique, 26, 139; Portraits du voyage, 104,128; Pour les femmes et tous les autres, 100,104,142; Retailles, 99-100, 127, 137-8, 3i6n.i5; La Venue a I'ecriture, 7, 19-20, 26, 104-6, in, 117,135, 138,143, 145,148, 150 Genette, Gerard, 187 genre: in Brossard, 185-9, 193-4, 196-8, 205, 207, 278; in Cixous, 38-9; in Gagnon, 103, 107, 109, 132-3, 136, 138-40, 145, 150, 3Oon-54; and gender, 8, 185-9, 2O5/ 27X' 274. See also fiction theory; hybrid genres; individual authors Godard, Barbara, no, 171, 173, 191, 192, 3o8n.in Gould, Karen, 18, 20, 101, 103, 118, 127, 129, 163, 201, 206 gynility. See Bersianik gynocriticism, 34 history, women's exclusion from written, 104, 105, 110-13, 117, 120, 128, 134, 189

humour: as subversive, 57-8, 87-9, 271. See also feminist aesthetics hybrid genres: Brossard's use of, 162, 186-9, *93~ 4, 196-8, 205. See also fiction theory; genre; poetic fiction hybridity, cultural, 279 hysteria. See madness; women: and madness Hyvrard, Jeanne, 8, 2830, 208-11, 242, 248, 268, 270-3, 277-8, 279, 280-1; alchemy in, 238, 312-13^36; ambiguity in, 215-16, 227, 230, 241-2, 250, 258, 265; Antilles in, 29, 208, 223, 313n.47, 314n.50; asylum in, 214, 220, 225, 233, 240, 247, 260; authority in, 215, 219, 220, 225, 227, 236; avant-garde aesthetics and, 213, 244-6, 250, 267; bad mother in, 214-16, 218, 229-30, 239, 248, 254-5, 256; biblical allusions in, 231, 236-7, 241, 243, 244, 266; blood images in, 214, 219, 223, 229, 231, 236, 248, 251; body in, 214, 219-24, 225-6, 227, 229, 231, 233, 23940, 242, 249-52, 255-6, 258-64, 265; and colonialism, 29, 220-3, 232/ 234, 253, 271; connections in work by, 228-9, 230, 235, 236, 240, 261, 263, 3iin.27; contrairation in, 209, 221, 227, 237, 265, 267; contrelangue in, 246, 249, 252, 258, 265; creation in, 220, 258-9, 261, 264-5; exemplary mother in, 215-18, 223, 256; father in, 215, 225, 236, 254-6;

343 Index female ancestry in, 214, 224, 226, 236, 238, 240, 259; and feminism, 208-9, 232~3/ 266-7; and feminist community, 208, 210, 266-7; and feminist theory, 208-9, 217-18, 266-7; la femme en mauve, 262; first-person narrator in, 208, 211, 213-16, 228, 235, 236, 241-2, 3 ion. 18; Fou (see tarot); fusion in, 210, 223, 2278, 237, 243, 254, 265, 312-13^36; generations of women in, 224, 225-6, 236, 238, 240-1, 257, 259; grammar rules contested in, 208, 249-52, 254, 256, 258-9, 261; identity in, 210, 213, 225-6, 233-4, 236, 238, 241-4, 260, 264, 266-7; on language, 208, 209, 219, 225, 229, 239-40, 245-63, 265-7; litany in, 262-3; littoral in, 208, 210-11, 267; logic in, 209, 211, 213, 221-2, 227-8, 237, 239, 244-5, 248-52, 258, 265 (see also nonsense); madwomen in (see madness); Mere Afrique in, 221-3, 227, 263; Mere Angoisse in, 217-19, 221, 225; Mere la mort in, 228-32, 235, 237; mother and daughter in, 210, 21625, 226-7, 229, 231-2, 236, 239-41, 248, 254-7, 259, 265, 3ion.i8; Mother Death (see Mere la mort); motherland in, 222-3, 227; mother tongue in, 255, 256-8, 260, 265; mouroir (see asylum); myth in, 231, 234, 237, 240, 243;

negritude in, 252, 314^50; objection de culture (see dissidence); patois in, 219, 248-50; and patriarchy perpetuated by women, 239, 248, 256, 259; poetic language in, 211, 214, 222-3, 232, 246, 247, 251-4, 262, 267; pressoir in, 238; prison in, 226, 243, 246; procreativity in, 214, 220-1, 226, 230i, 232, 236, 259; race in, 220-3, 248-9, 257, 3i4n.5o; relation to another woman in, 215, 216-17, 221-2, 225, 231, 235-43/ 256, 263, 265, 3i2n.29; relation to the reader in, 235-6, 250-1, 263, 267; Russian dolls motif in, 224, 226, 236; selfhood affirmed in, 218, 235, 241, 249, 260, 264, 266, 3i2n.29; sensual language in, 222-5, 227, 258-9, 261; slavery used as metaphor in, 220-3, 227, 253; solidarity with women in, 221, 225-6, 231, 241, 260, 264; split subject in, 235, 241-2, 247-8, 3i3n_44; sterility in, 214-15, 227, 229, 255; subversive novelistic structure in, 236-7; suffocation in, 219-20, 222, 229-30, 232, 255, 260; syncretism in, 210; syntax, "hidden," 251; tarot in, 243-4; traditional order contested in, 211, 212, 223, 225-6, 227-8, 232, 243-4, 256, 261, 266; womb images in, 210, 219-21, 223-4, 226-30, 232, 239, 242-3; work compared to Brossard's, 208, 210,

213, 216, 233, 261, 266, 3i2n.29; work compared to Cixous's, 208, 210, 233, 238, 254-5, 261, 266, 314^51; work compared to Gagnon's, 208, 210, 213, 233, 241, 261, 266 See also birth images; bond, mother and child; character; chronology; collectivity of women; communities: of feminists; desire; difference; dissidence; essentialism; female subjectivity; inexpressible, the; intertextuality; language, women's relation to; madness; maternity; memory; narrative voice; neologisms; non-linear narrative; nonsense; "nous"; oppression of women; parataxis; power structures; repetition; syntax; water images; writing; writing the body - works: Au Presage de la mienne, 278; Les Doigts dufiguier, 211, 312^35; La Jeune morte en robe de dentelle, 268; Mere la mort, 8, 228-36, 238-9, 240, 241, 253, 254, 2578, 260-2, 264, 267; La Meurtritude, 8, 236-45, 248, 251-4, 257-8, 260, 261, 263-6; La Pensee corps, 208, 212, 227, 246, 247, 252, 253, 265, 267, 277, 3i4-i5n.59; Les Prunes de Cythere, 8, 28, 213-28, 229-30, 232-35, 240, 241, 245, 246-52, 254-61, 263; Ton Nom de vegetal, 278 illogic. See nonsense

344 Index inedit (unheard of), 122, 153-4, 202' 2°6 inexpressible, the: in Cixous, 277; in Gagnon, 122, 129, 130-1, 137; in Hyvrard, 259, 266-7 intertextuality: in L'Amer, 176; in Hyvrard's work, 210,

237,

241,

243-4,

274, 276; in La, 40-52, 54-5, 56, 61-4, 68-70, 72-3, 76, 78, 96-7, 296n.85, 297n.ii3; in Lueur, 101, 112, 132-3, 145-50, 3Oon-37; subversive use of, 48, 58, 61-3, 69-70, 72-3, 74, 96-7, 112, 237, 274;

variants defined, 147, 291n.12

Irigaray, Luce, 111, 148, 174 jouissance, 81, 84, 105, 112, 117, 125, 142, 177, 17980, 183, 201, 224, 227. See also individual authors and titles journals. See feminist: periodicals Kristeva, Julia, 3, 5, 6, 86, 143, 147, 199, 269-70, 276, 301^57. See also dissidence La, 7, 24-5, 37-97, 79-80, 88, 281; association of death and dream in, 58-9, 61-2, 93; belief in language's efficacy in, 57, 76, 86-7, 94-7; boat metaphor in, 50, 54-5, 62 (see also body in; sensual language in); body in, 54-5, 59-60, 65-6, 76, 80-4, 95-6; gaze in, 49, 65, 67-8, 71; humour in, 56-8, 74, 78-9, 87-9, 95-7, 281; images of flight in, 51-

2, 61-4, 73, 96, 281, 295n.64; journey in, 467, 50-1, 54-5, 87, 96-7; language thematized in, 55, 73, 76-81, 86-91, 95-7; language used subversively in, 73, 79, 86-91, 93; liberation through language in, 41, 55, 58, 73, 76, 79, 83, 87, 89-90, 95-7; metaphor in, 82; music in, 41-2, 53, 78-9, 86, 94-6; nightmares in, 58-9, 61-3, 77; on oppression of women in language, 56, 79, 89, 95, 97; poetic language in, 39, 53, 82, 84-8, 90-3, 95-6; portrait de I'inconnue in, 51, 65-7, 78; relation to the other in, 53, 61-2, 64-8, 70-1, 78, 80-1, 84, 96; relation to the reader in, 78, 94-6; renewal of language in, 39, 77, 79, 86-7, 90, 93, 96-7; selfdiscovery in, 44, 47, 512, 54-5, 58, 67-8, 96; sensual language in, 55, 60, 80, 83, 85, 90, 95-6; stylistic variations in, 86-7; title of, 41-2, 44, 67, 86, 96; woman as prisoner in, 56, 63-4, 67; writing as imperative for women in, 66, 76, 78, 94-5. See also birth images; bond, mother and child; character; Cixous; collectivity of women; death; desire; dreams; female subjectivity; intertextuality; maternity; narrative voice; neologisms; non-linear narrative; oppression of women; psychoanalytic theory; syntax; translation; writing

Lacan, Jacques, 42-4, 11011, 133, 161, 168, 170, 171, 192. See also essentialism; psychoanalytic theory language. See symbolic, the; individual authors and titles language, women's relation to, 12, 271, 274, 276, 280-1, 3o8-9n.n6; in Brossard's work, 159-60, 162, 167-71, 192, 195; in Cixous's work, 55, 76-7, 90-1, 95; in Gagnon's work, 110-11, 129-30; in Hyvrard's work, 225, 229, 247-9, 252, 257, 259-61, 265. See also oppression of women; power structures; individual authors and titles Leclerc, Annie, 14, 99100, 101, 148 Lejeune, Claire, 14, 148, 174 Leonardo da Vinci, 44, 72-3, 78, 82, 254, 296n.80, 296n.35,

314^51. See also Freud lesbian: aesthetics, 197, 207, 278; desire, 61, 177, 181, 183, 184-5, !93> 196, 278; feminists, 28, 162, 196, 278; feminists critiqued, 99, 136-7, 298n.2. See also Brossard; desire; feminist aesthetics; Gagnon Levi-Strauss, Claude, 166, 195 Htterature migrante, 136 Lueur: absence in, 119-20, 122, 126-8, 130-1, 144, 146; ambiguity in, 131, 137, 141, 143-5; archaeographical writing in, 100, 102, 106, 107-8, no, 113,

345 Index 117,

121,

123, 125-6,

139-40; authority destabilized in, 133, 146-7, 149-50; belief in language's efficacy in, 130-2, 144, 152; blood images in, 116, 117, 137, 141; body as archive in, 105-6, 118, 121, 129; body as legible in, 115-16, 118, 121, 125; body in, 101-2, 104-6, 109, 115-18, 121, 123, 125-6, 128, 129, 137, 140, 141, 151-2; collective history of women in, 101, 107, 108, 113, 120-1, 124, 127, 129, 139; creative freedom in, 138, 140, 146-7, 151; deictics (shifters) in, 131-2,134, 138; foremothers' legacy in, 118-22, 1256, 128, 145; future in, 127; granddaughter in, 106, 114, 118-23, 126, 128, 145, 149; grandmother in, 106, 114, 117-23, 125-6, 128, 138, 145, 149; identity in, 104, 113-14, 126-7, 129-30, 136-8, 140, 149-50; journey in, 115-16, 127, 141, 150, 152; language thematized in, 115-16, 118, 122, 124, 129-32, 137, 142-3; liberation through language in, 131-2, 139-40, 142; maternal archaeographies, 101, 104-28, 139, 141, 151; maternal language, loo-i, 129, 141, 145, 151-2; memory recovered in, 101, 1078, 113, 118-20, 127-8, 136, 139, 140, 144; memory transmitted in, 101, 106, 118, 120-2,

126, 128, 129, 144; memory work in, 1012, 107-8, 115-16, 121, 124, 131, 139; metaphor in, 140-1; milk images in, 116, 117; mother as ancestor in, 105, 111, 113, 118-23, 126, 128, 139, 152; mourning in, 115-16, 119, 122, 128, 138; multiple narrators in, 106, 107, 112, 114-15, 118, 120, 127, 142; myth in, 111-12, 113, 124, 126, 133; ogre and ogress in, 114, 126, 136; patriarchal logic rejected in, 134, 143, 145; petroglyphs in, 102,106,107, 125, 141; pleasure in, 105, 112, 117, 125, 142; poetic language in, 112, 117, 123, 137, 139, 140, 141-5, 150, 152; on reading, 98, 101, 102, 137; relation to the other in, 117-18, 124, 128, 129, 132-3, 135, 149; relation to the reader in, 106-7, 1:14' 119, 134, 141, 144-5, 149-50; renewal of language in, 130-2, 144; self-discovery in, 108, 112-13, 116, 118, 121, 126-9, 137~8/ a39/ i49~ 50; sensual language in, 117, 129, 142; solidarity with women in, 99100, 104, 105, 107, 11213, 117, 124,128, 134-5, 137-8, 142, 148, 150, 273; split subject in, 109-10, 112, 114; transgression of linguistic codes in, 130-2, 134, 143-5, 150, 152; writing as therapeutic in, 102, 128. See also birth images; bond, mother

and child; character; collectivity of women; death; desire; dreams; female subjectivity; Gagnon; inexpressible, the; intertextuality; jouissance; madness; maternity; memory; mother: figure of; narrative voice; neologisms; non-linear narrative; "nous"; oppression of women; poetic fiction; power structures; psychoanalytic theory; repetition; syntax; translation; writing madness: feminist analysis of hysteria and, 212-13, 225-6; as theme in Hyvrard's work, 212-13, 214-22, 224-8, 230, 232-4, 236-9, 2435, 247-9, 259/ 260-1, 263, 265-6, 273; as theme in Lueur, 102, 111-12, 115-16, 131-2, 134. See also women Mallarme, Stephane, 198203, 274 maternity, 5, 6, 269-71; critique of, 8, 168, 185, 195, 215-18; in Egyptian mythology, 49; as theme in L'Amer, 156-7, 162-9, 177, 179, 181, 184-5, iSS, 192, 194-7, 207; as theme in Hyvrard's work, 21418, 221, 223, 226-7, 230-1, 236, 246, 254, 258, 265, 267; as theme in La, 49, 52, 73, 96; as theme in Lueur, 101, 105, 116, 141-2, 151-2. See also birth images; Egyptian mythology; individual authors and titles

346 Index memory: in Brossard, 185, 192; in Gagnon, 101-2, 106-8, 113, 115-16, 118-22, 124, 126-9, 131/ 136, 139, 140, 144; in Hyvrard, 208, 229-30, 231-2, 234, 237-43, 248-50, 259-62, 264-5. See also individual authors and titles modernite: understanding of in French and Quebec contexts, 289n.6i. See also Brossard mother: associated with death, 49-50, 115-16, 163, 165, 217-19, 22830; conflict with, 73-4, 219, 248, 254, 269-70; critique of, 73-4, 163, 166, 168, 185, 215-18, 223, 257; figure, 49-52, 68-70, 104, 106, 118-19, 121, 126, 129, 163, 165, 172-4, 180, 213, 222-3, 227, 229-30, 231, 232, 237, 240, 246, 254-5, 257-60, 265, 268-9; "°f invention," 5, 9, 207, 268, 272; Madonna as, 68-70; patriarchal, 1667, 169, 176, 177-8, 185, 188, 207, 268; phallic, 72, 178, 254-5; social structures perpetuated by, 5, 8, 74,168-73,*95, 207, 215, 217-18, 248, 256-7; as subversive, 52, 207; as symbol, 6, 165-9, ^7^71 ^4> !86, 195, 271; and water, 50, 54-5, 71, 84, 163, 168, 236. See also bond, mother and child; death; maternity; water images; individual authors and titles Mouvement de liberation des femmes (MLF), 11, 29, 209, 277, 285n.i4

Murphy, Richard, 272-5 narrative voice, shifts in: in L'Amer, 170-1, 182, 192; in Hyvrard's work, 216-17, 220-1, 227, 229-30, 234-5, 241-2, 247-8, 3ion.i8; in La, 5T-' 53-4' 55> 57' 61, 6971, 82-3; in Lueur, 11415, 118-19, 120, 127, 131-2, 142. See also (under individual authors and titles) deictics; multiple narrators; split subject nationalism in Quebec letters, 153-4. $ee a^so feminism neologisms, 271; in Brossard, 163, 171, 186, 203-4; in Cixous, 60, 88-9, 90, 97, 130; in Gagnon, 130, 139, 142; in Hyvrard, 209, 247, 249-50, 252-4, 257, 259, 261, 314-15^59. See also individual authors and titles Nightmare, The (Fuseli), xiii, 44, 59-63, 65, 294n.59, 295n.68

nom du pere, 58, 170, 2954n.57

nonconformity. See dissidence non-linear narrative: in L'Amer, 182, 186, 188-9, 191, 193-4, 197~8, 2002; in Hyvrard's work, 210, 227, 241, 245, 248,

263; in La, 39, 93; in Lueur, 101, 103, 106, 109, 118, 120, 130, 131, 136, 139-41, 143-4, 150, 152. See also chronology; feminist aesthetics nonsense, 270, 273, 281; in Brossard, 202; in Gagnon, 134; in Hyvrard, 209, 211, 213,

221-2, 227-8, 237, 239, 244-5, 248-52, 258, 265. See also feminist aesthetics "nous": in Brossard's work, 153, 170, 174, 176, 180-2, 185-6, 204; in Cixous's work, 43-4, 46, 54-5, 65-6, 73, 81, 84, 94-6; in Gagnon's work, 22, 104-5, 1J1' 113, 119-20, 124-5, 127~ 8, 131-2, 135, 138, 150, 152; in Hyvrard's work, 218, 221, 224-6, 231-5, 238, 240-1, 242, 243, 253, 255, 257-9, 264, 266; in Theoret's work, 19-20. See also collectivity of women; solidarity among women; individual authors and titles novel: nouveau roman, 24, 53; origins of as a hybrid genre, 38-9, 274. See also avant-garde; fiction; hybrid genres oppression of women, analyzed, 271-4, 276, 277, 280; by Brossard, 158-9, 165-8, 171-2, 174, 184-5, 1&9' 196' 202, 207; by Cixous, 44-5, 62, 68, 74-5, 79, 87, 89, 95; by Gagnon, 104-5, 111, 124, 127, 134, 136, 143, 151; by Hyvrard, 209, 212, 217, 225-6, 229, 231-4, 236, 239-40, 242, 246, 253-4, 257-8, 260, 266. See also death; language; power structures; individual authors and titles other, the: relation to, 12, 270, 276, 278, 279; symbolized as an Arab, 56; woman as, 12, 131-2, 160, 171, 185, 212-13,

347

Index

228, 235- See also alterity; self: as other otherness, 84, 212. See also alterity parataxis, 250, 271, 31411.48. See also feminist aesthetics; Hyvrard Parker, Alice, 155, 158, 176, 178, 196, 205, 207, 3O5n.6o poetic fiction, 145, 271, 274; in L'Amer, 197-205; in Cixous's work, 38-9; in Hyvrard's work, 210; in Lueur, 103, 132-3, 138-9, 141, 145, 150-1. See also hybrid genres; individual authors and titles polysemy. See (under individual authors and titles) ambiguity postmodernism, 36, 289n.6i. See also avantgarde; feminism power structures, critiqued, 275-6; in L'Amer, 171-2, 174, 177-8, 184, 201; in Hyvrard's work, 208, 232-4, 240, 266; in Lueur, 130, 133-4, 136, 138, 143, 145-7, 149-51See also dissidence; language, women's relation to; oppression of women Prisoner's Dream, The (Schwind), xv, 63-4 psychoanalytic theory, 269-70, 279; Brossard on, 159-61, 164, 171, 194, 207; Cixous on, 42-4, 58, 64, 70-1, 7980, 88; Gagnon on, 100, 102, 104, 109-11, 130-1, 132, 133, 137, 150-1. See also Freud; Lacan; unconscious, the; individual authors and works

reader expectations, 279, 281; Brossard and, 1878, 196, 199, 201, 205-6; Cixous and, 39-40, 94; Gagnon and, 145. See also individual authors and works rebirth. See birth images Refus global. See avantgarde; Borduas repetition: in Hyvrard's work, 230-1, 256, 2623, 274; in Lueur, 122-6, 141, 145, 147-8. See also Hyvrard: litany in Rich, Adrienne, 268-9; re-vision in, 44 Robin, Regine, 139, 148, 279 Russell, Charles, 31-5 self: loss of, 98, 149, 208, 228, 256, 270; as other, 61-2, 64-6, 67-8, 70-1, 172, 235, 242, 261. See also alterity; Cixous; other, the; otherness; sexual difference sense. See nonsense sexual difference: Cixous on, 17-18, 33, 39, 45, 51-2, 62, 65-6, 68, 75, 77, 82, 277, 293n_4i; in writing, Brossard and, 159-60, 170, 177, 195, 206-7. See also difference; writing; individual authors and titles Sistine Madonna (Raphael), 68-70 solidarity among women, 273. See also collectivity of women; "nous"; individual authors and titles Some American Feminists, 157. See also Brossard split subject, 279. See also narrative voice Suleiman, Susan, 32-4, 40, 92, 270

symbolic, the, 12, 58, 80, 86, 138, 161, 164, 167, 184, 192, 195, 254. See also psychoanalytic theory syntax, disrupted, 271, 273, 274; in L'Amer, 172-3, 193, 198, 200, 204-5, 273, 274; in Hyvrard's work, 24951; in La, 91-2, 274; in Lueur, 103, 121, 130-2, 139' 143-5/ 150, 274. See also feminist aesthetics; individual authors and titles Tel Quel, 3, 25, 154 Terribles vivantes, Les, 98 Theoret, France, 19, 20, 23, 174, 279. See also ecriture au feminin: distinguished from ecriture feminine; "nous" Theorie, un dimanche, La, 277. See also collaborations in women's writings theorie/fiction. See fiction theory tongue. See body; language, women's relation to translation: in La, 83; in Lueur, no, in, 119, 121, 123, 144, 148, 299^-35 unconscious, the: and the avant-garde, 273; libidinal economies and, 17, 56, 58, 79-80, 83, 159, 212; and writing, 17, 21, 53, 79-81, 83-4, 97, 102, 109, 110, 130, 151, 159, 161, 212, 273. See also Cixous; psychoanalytic theory Venue a I'ecriture, La, 7, 14, 19-20, 26, 33, 45-6,

348 Index 87, 99-100,104-6, in, 117,135,138,143,145, 148, 150, 295^73, 296n.8o. See also collaborations in women's writings; coming to writing; individual authors violence: against women by men, 75, 135, 173-4, 214, 219, 253, 269; of women, 49-50, 65-6, 143, 218-21, 230, 231, 255, 258, 270 vol(er) (to fly/steal). See La: images of flight in Waelti-Walters, Jennifer, 28, 218-19, 220' 22^' 237, 3i2n.34, 3i4n.58 water images: in Brossard, 163, 168-9, 196, 204, 3o8n.io2; in Cixous, 50, 54-5, 61-2, 81, 83, 84, 91-2, 294n.62; in Gagnon, 112-13, 124/ 131' X37/ 141; in Hyvrard, 236. See also mother; individual authors and titles "we." See "nous" Wittig, Monique, 23, 174 women: creativity of, 5, 15, 36, 44, 64, 83-4,129, 270; drive to write of, 5, 15-16, 94-5, 96-7,

130, 137' i88, 261, 270, 280; and madness, 8, 21, 102, 105, 109, 115, 131-2, l88, 202, 212-22,

233, 244-6. See also creativity, women's; feminist aesthetics; madness; writing; individual authors and titles wordplay: in Brossard's work, 155, 163, 178, 195-6, 198, 203-4; m Cixous's work, 47, 48, 56, 57, 60, 64, 66, 70, 72, 77, 79, 80, 85, 87-90, 91, 96, 292^36, 294n.6i, 297n.n6; in Gagnon's work, 141-2 writing: against death, 65, 75-6, 78, 119-20, 125-8, 260; experimental, by women, 8, 16-17, 34-6, 90-1, 95, 97, 103, 12931, 136, 139-40, 143, 150-1, 186-7, 2O7' 26970, 273-4, 2?6/ 278-9; in the feminine (see ecriture feminine); obstacles to women's, 56, 58, no, 127, 134, 159, 261, 26970, 280; sexual difference in, 16-23, 33' 45' 65-6, 90-1, 97,131, 133, 139-40, 150, 159-60, 170-1, 177, 183, 187-8, 194-5, 206-7, 269-70,

277, 280-1; social change sought by women's, 22, 35, 37-8, 41, 76, 86, 96-7-, 130-2, 152, 158-9, 185, 196, 202, 206-7, 244~6, 258, 270, 276, 280-1; as theme in L'Amer, 163-4, 169, 171, 175, 177, 1825, 190-1, 194, 197-8, 205, 207; as theme in Hyvrard's work, 242, 259, 260-2, 264-6; as theme in La, 57, 65-6, 76-83, 85, 89, 95, 96-7; as theme in Lueur, 1013, 106-11, 113-17, 11928, 129-34, 136-7, 13940, 141, 143-6, 149, 152; women's, and literary traditon, 31, 289^59. See also avant-garde; difference; ecriture feminine; feminist aesthetics; fiction; sexual difference; individual authors and titles writing the body, 7-8, 20, 270; in Brossard, 184, 186; in Cixous, 80-2, 96; in Gagnon, 20, 102, 104,115-17,151, 277; in Hyvrard, 261-2. See also body; difference; sexual difference; individual authors and titles