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James Joyce
Ginette Michaud
BETWEEN CIXOUS & JOYCE: A MOST PLUMITIVE AFFAIR (EIGHT ALL-TOO FINITE REMARKS ON A DOUBLE INFINITE WORLD-AS-BOOK)

Ulysses arrives like one novel among others that you place on your bookshelf and inscribe in a genealogy. It has its ancestry and its descendants. But Joyce dreamt of a special institution for his œuvre, inaugurated by it like a new order. And hasn’t he achieved this, to some extent? When I spoke about this as I did in “UlyssesGramophone,” I did indeed have to understand and share his dream too: not only share it in making it mine, in recognizing mine in it, but that I share it in belonging to the dream of Joyce, in taking a part in it, in walking around in his space. Aren’t we, today, people or characters in part constituted (as readers, writers, critics, teachers) in and through Joyce’s dream? Aren’t we Joyce’s dream, his dream readers, the ones he dreamed of and whom we dream of being in our turn?
Jacques Derrida, “‘This Strange Institution Called Literature...’: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Jacques Derrida. Acts of Literature. Edited by Derek Attridge, New York and London: Routledge, 1992, p.74.
... for everything is plurasaid in one go, how a city is like another one a language always speaks more than another language, that Babel is not bababbeaten...
Helene Cixous, “Promised Cities,” in Ex-Cities, p.29.

1

Joyce’s dream: it is impossible to begin imagining Cixous and Joyce without returning to, or allowing the return of these questions raised by Jacques Derrida in Ulysses Gramophone, questions of inheritance (how to inherit a dream?) to be taken most seriously indeed in the case of Helene Cixous who is not your common Joyce scholar nor your docile follower by any means. Nothing average here, no simple inspiration or, even less, imitation (we will come back to this issue, but let us say at least this from the start: Helene Cixous’s mode of reading Joyce has little, if anything, to do with imitation, borrowing, influence (anxious or not), parody, allusions, and so on). Of her writing not so much on Joyce (as subject) than in him, it could be said that it plays out the story of the hen, who in Finnegans Wake, “start[s] from scratch (1), which is in itself already a way of writing. In his recent book, Imagining Joyce and Derrida, Peter Mahon has a chapter entitled “Following the Hen,” which caught my eye upon rereading Cixous’s essay about the famous “baby tuckoo” scene in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Mahon notes: “Writing from scratch not only names the hen’s style [...]. If the hen makes these marks (from scratch) in the text, she can be understood to ‘produce’ without model. [...] If the reader imitates the hen’s example of imitation without model, the reader can also be understood to imitate a model of writing without model.” He adds: “Thus, to follow is to imitate a model that withdraws itself in writing. / It is difficult to contain the effects of the hen’s withdrawal within the letter”(2). No, indeed, this “between” between them is no simple joke, or yoke (3), and Imagination-for example, a syntagm such as “Imagining Joyce and Cixous”-is likely to take an unexpected twist, as the catachresis effects within their body of works affects not only words, the “chanching letters for them vice o’verse,” (FW, 288, 1) as Joyce puts it, but everything in the “stolentelling,” (FW, 424, 35), the “funnish facts” and “doublecressing twofold stories” (FW, 288, 3, 9) taking place between them and leaving no priority unturned, be it that of truth, meaning, or thinking (did I just say “thinking”? I meant “tingling,” of course!). The recasting induced by the operation of catachresis in both their writing is of such amplitude that it makes any dwelling on “proper” and “borrowed” most improper indeed. “Let us change the subject” of imagination then, and speak, in Wakese, of “immargination” (FW, 4, 19), a sort of unlimited imagination, one of the first effects of which consists of extending, in an extraordinary fashion, the usual intertextuality issue, no longer restrained in Cixous’s œuvre to texts explicitly addressing Joyce (4). One of Cixous’s most provocative ways of “following” Joyce is to bring into question what is called “literature,” if, as they both have it, it is no longer sufficient to presuppose it copies “a pre-existent reality” (I, 6, 31). Presence, appearance, being, the precedence of the imitated, all of this order is displaced in a way “that prevents one from considering the Wake as literature in any simple sense” (I, 6). The same could be said of any “fiction” by Cixous. Suffice it to say, then, in the time given here, that the relation between Cixous and Joyce-whose proper names I playfully decapitalized in my title so as to jut out another kind of type, typography, or even chromosotypography taking place between the two middle letters in their names, X and Y, letters pointing less to a straight line traceable from one point to the other than to some short circuit or unpredictable chain of events irrupting between them-is at its most complex, and would require no less than a thorough reconception of reading them together altogether.

2

Cixous has often commented on the fact that she was never so much drawn to writing itself, or literature as such for that matter, as to the “inscription-conscious or unconscious-of the origin of the gesture of writing” (5): what is most striking in a text, she says, is its “audacity to let itself be written close to the very drive to write” (WL, 1). Therefore, she always remains cautious, if not on guard, in regards to the mastery of form or language, the question of art that is still quite evidently displayed in Joyce’s work, but also constantly overthrown by another kind of germination, the touch of something savage, “near to the wild heart” as is said in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It is difficult, if not impossible, to delve here at length, as it should be done, into the genesis of Cixous’s rapport to Joyce. But then, should it really be done by way of genesis, genealogy, genre, etc.? Is that the best way to go about it? Maybe not, if genesis, as it inevitably entails a return to a so-called beginning, is precisely, in her eyes, a path to be avoided: “the return to the beginning is the end, the pilmigrage on one’s own grave” (6). And, as we know, she only believes in “round or almost round books” (7), she only dreams and immargins of this “round book, or a river-book, without beginning or end,” be it Proust’s Recherche or Joyce’s flowing riverrun, Montaigne’s librerie or Derrida’s “philanalysis” (8), or her own. Again, what comes first ? The hen, or the egg? What she astutely observes of her friend artist Roni Horn could also be applied to her: she “sets down the curvature: curvature of the eye, of the amphitheater, of the fan, of the footstep. She would always have had a preference for circles that is the without beginning and without end. But does the circle have a chicken? Is it absolute?,” she asks. The answer is as curt as they come: cut. She cuts short. “She cuts what’s cut. She cuts it again. She cuts over that. The minute she cuts, out of the cut grows another beginning or an end which begins all over again.” (F, 41) Who/what came first ? Out of a chicken, a chick is born: the chicken and egg dilemma, the beginning and end story may not be solved, but its riddle, “allruddy with us,” (FW, 274, 2-5) suddenly springs a tongue-in-chick smile.

3

If such a genealogical task cannot, then, begin to be tackled here, one could nevertheless ponder indefinitely on the kind of authority Cixous sought and found in Joyce from the start-an authority best summed up in the homonyme embodied in it: the Author as Other (here already, one of the A’s and O’s phonic exchanges that will so fascinate her in Joyce’s idiom...)-, an otherity then, that will lead her to stands where the author’s sovereignty is in the same wink preserved, absolutized even, in a hyperbolized way, and disseminated, pulverized, blown sky high, as this passage shows: “‘The author’ is nowhere and everywhere, the author is each part each whole, the author does not construct, he or she receives and blends in. One has no idea whether the author is man or woman, and it doesn’t matter, the author is in it, the author is part of the flow of the text.” (F, 12) These last words-flow of the text-say it all, plunging into what matters most to both these writers (to what matter is to them): the running waters of language, all its jets and streams, spurts and springs, gusts and wirlpools, not-yet crystallized liquids-from this stream of writing, they expertly hook sentences, their bodies still glistening, gleaming, not yet stilled in forms (F, 14)...

This said, it might still, perhaps, be of some pertinence to outline a few traits in this double “Portrait of the Artist” (by double, I do not only mean, despite remarkable similarities/affinities shared, a mimetic, mechanical double, but a doubling relationship between the Joycean and Cixousian texts, such as their writing, as Mahon suggests in Derrida’s and Joyce’s case, would be “open-endedly ‘selfpenned to one’s other, [...] neverperfect everplanned’ (FW, 489, 33-34).”). What Cixous and Joyce partake in is nothing superficial, or merely intertextual, in the classic sense of the term; it is both of graver and lighter consequence, feather-like wordliftings holding to nothing and everything, to the Joycian ethics/aesthetics condensed in the well-known motto, “Silence, Exile, and Cunning” (9), of course, but more deeply, to a certain relationship to grammar (10); to a relentless, vigilant tuning to something that happens “between the body and the world” (WL, 1); to “orthography playing infinitely” (WL, 6): “In the Beginning, the letter,” might we say, the letter and not the word (in Joyce, “The letter plays with the letter, from the very beginning” (11WL, 6). Everything they care for holds to a delicate, barely audible displacement through rythm and music (giving rise to a little poem within any phrase) by which “we can say, notes Cixous, that the artist is being born” (WL, 7). As Jacques Derrida observed in “A Silkworm of One’s Own” where he pays homage to the great lineage of blind, prophetic poets and graces it by giving rank and place to Cixous as the only woman in this exemplary cortège, alongside Homer, Milton, Nietszche, Joyce, and Borges, a profound kinship between Cixous and Joyce lies in this couple, eye and ear (12), as the artist, seeing or not, is defined as “somebody who has problems with his eyesight” (13). (I would be tempted to hear also in this word a silent sigh, insisting on the way these writers both strive to put “something into language, into grammar from the register of breathing”). “Joyce theorizes this problem early in his work,” says Cixous, he “writes to the ear, whose secret he tries to surprise” (WL, 9), “he analyzes his relation to language in relation to his myopia. A tremendous ambivalence is put in place” (WL, 7). This last statement should indeed be taken at its word, for Cixous, as no other writer since Joyce, has pushed this “tremendous ambivalence” to such an uncanny limit in her own writing. As Marta Segarra underlines in her “Critical Introduction” to Joyful Babel. Translating Helene Cixous, Cixous’s work is not only about

changing the grammatical structures of the French language but a much “larger and complex strategy,” involving also syntax, rythm, sound and sense. [...] Cixous writes in French as if it were a “foreign” language to her, thus enlivening it, treating it as a ‘living’ material in continuous movement and not petrifying it in definitive and stable choices. [...] This plural is explained by the fact that Cixous definitely operates in various languages, from her “m’other” language, German, to the multiple intertextual inferences from the authors she reads. But the intrusion of other languages into French is not here a violent disruption or conscious ‘babelisation’ such as Joyce’s in Finnegan’s Wake [sic]. It is more likely an unconscious and poetical reference to this “m’other” language, “more voice than grammar,” made of rythm, music and breath (14).

Cixous’s text does not take place in just one language, it is always plurasaid (pluridit), as is the case in Finnegans Wake: “It is told in sounds in utter that, in signs so adds to, in universal, in polyguttural, in each auxiliary neutral idiom, sordomutics, florilingua, sheltafocal, flayflutter, a con’s cubane, a pro’s tutute, strassarab, ereperse and anythongueathall.” (FW, 117, 12-16) This constant attention to the letter (what used to be called a few decades ago the logics of the signifier) “sums up,” according to Jean-Michel Rabate, “a whole literary life,” holding true for Cixous as well as for Joyce, “the metamorphic power of language” being the main effect of a writing, in both cases, “always double, punning, in the wake of innumerable idioms and locutions, which, to be translated in other languages, will request similar feats of the linguistic imagination” (15). And, of course, this rapport to language, this never-severed tie to a poetic register also opens for the reader a fresh, always renascent mode of reading where one, in constant contact with the interval, the in-between in each word, the spacing enfolding them, simultaneously “understands everything and nothing; everything because there is really nothing obscure, nothing because there [...] [is] something of a coup d’ecriture, with many signs of the ruse of the artist.The text is presented in an apparent naivete [...] but nothing is more condensed, or more allusive. It is already a cosmos.” (WL, 4) This poetics of reading, more and more threaded into the very fabric of Cixous’s recent texts (see in particular her Insister of Jacques Derrida), would call for a whole book at least in itself, for how is one to read the words (if a book is a thing made of words...), but also

in sentences of thoughts, in the thoughts of before thought and in the thoughts behind thought, the sentence-things that had [...] the freedom and the necessity of migratory animals, schools of fish, flights of birds, half thought ricochets, quarter thoughts, all that was alive, each coming moment was alive but there wasn’t any road leading from point to the next, nor any point of departure nor port of arrival, none of the things that usually make one calls a book, no story, no yarn, no thread no direction, no order, no whole, only the hammering pulse, the moments. (F, 11)

4

What was, then, the first coup de plume (stroke of the pen) between them?

Maybe it took the form of a sound, an A or an O, as she so aptly reads in the formative plumitive scene of the eggshell breaking little by little in the baby tuckoo scene of the Portrait of the Artist... . Maybe it was all about the taste of phonemes, and onomatopeia, as she later writes in “Promised Cities”: “Just as Babel sounds well in all languages. Osnabrueck: unpronounceable in French. Like Cixous. Osnabrueck Cixous, what a name! More and more foreign, brutal, brueck, cix scissors... O Phonemes. Onomatopoeiae!” (PC, 36)

One of the most striking features of the JoyCixous’s idiom pertains no doubt to their perpetual sideglance to homophony, to their most singular taste for the word, the vocable, “allvoyous, demivoyelles, languoaths” (FW, 116, 28): their jouissance, one could say, has to do with tact and taste, it passes through the mouth, it is utterly, in its uttering, an oral thing. The taste of something unknown to be known only by mouth... (16) One would be tempted to elect this trait as their most prized angle, angle on what Lacan called “lalangue, in this case a certain way of angling English (de faire angle avec l’anglais). This, one would think, is their common ground. But then again, this is not quite so, as the story never ceases to tremble and gets to be told in an evernew light, as in “Promised Cities,” where one notes a discreet displacement from Joyce to her father regarding her “initiation” (her word, no less...) into homophony and homonymy. She writes:

My father, a marevelous speaker of French, set about learning an invented German language, a kind of hilarious, pantomimed Aliengerman [autreallemand]. It is not Joyce but he who initiated me into embodied wordplay [jeu de mots incarnés], into transsubstantiation, into signifying acrobatics. 
[...]
And so I was initiated into homophony and homonymy by the sweat [sueur] of my father, sweating it out as he was translating himself in my mother’s language.
[...]
Ich weiss nicht, I do not know how this primal scene of acrobatranslatability which inaugurated my eyes of writing, how I could decide which of my languages was the most motherly, that of my father great specialist of tongue in cheek or that of my mother. (PC, 61, 64)

Why do I find this latest touch-up in the rewriting of her numerous beginnings so interesting? It is not only because the question of paternity, “legal fiction” as Joyce has taught us, resurfaces, and that Cixous adds a new twist to the whole genealogy/genetics issue, making way for another precedence in the succession on this most significant matter regarding the gift, or the giving of language(s); it is also because of the way she had previously insisted, in her inaugural reading of Joyce’s formative novel, her reading of the “nuclear” or “embryonic scene” which engenders and engineers all of Joyce’s work, Finnegans Wake included she said, on the importance of the passage from the genetic parent to the symbolic father: “In this story of the eye and of birds, she wrote, not the real but the symbolic father marks the artist as genetic parent.” (WL, 4) In giving her real father the full credit for this initiation into homophony (this very operation of substitution was the one elected, we will recall, by Derrida in H. C. for Life, That Is to Say... , as the “main thread”(17). of Cixous’s writing), is she simply retracing her steps and returning to a position prior to the philopsychoanalytical stance where the symbolic father overpowered the genetic one? Is this a re-appropriation into the sublimity of the father, or a split reading, a disseminal position, a redoubled doubleness? My question is surely foolhardy and hasty, but it is worth noting how Cixous, in the telling of her native entanglement with languages, with always more than one language, is keen on paying tribute to Joyce while, at the same time, keeping him at a distance. On the one hand, she speaks of the way

[...] languages, so much alive and droll, were for me first refused to let itself be spelt. I thus started and ended up by always having two languages to play with, one having come to me by air the other shemblable and freer arriving by letter. (PC, 52)

On the other hand, she marks a difference from Joyce who did not, perhaps, really “speak Wakese” at home, wiping his feet “apologetically” - a very loaded word, echoing the primitive rhyme “apologize... pull out his eyes” - on that treshold whereas she never did, apologize in any way: Babel was (at) home with her, “we were Babel,” she never was “properly speaking” in any case - which would make her “freer” than her “shemblable.”

I feel nostalgia for a language which would speak several languages freely, without apologizing, according to my whim, unexpectedly. It is a dream: this language, we would be several to speak it, this would mean or want to say [voudrait dire!] that the players would have several equally foreign and familiar languages at their disposal. This hardly exists. This is not done. Save for exceptions, of course, like Finnegans Wake, but I do not know whether Joyce spoke Wakese at home. One wipes one’s feet apologetically when one feels one is borrowing a word from the neighbors. One is committing one feels a breach of hospitality.
[...]
To tell the truth I do not feel any nostalgia properly speaking. On the contrary. Using the word nostalgia bothers me, betrays me. What I meant was “yearning.” (PC, 65. Cixous underlines.)

Thus, through the reframing of this primal scene, she is, in a way, taking precedence over Joyce, who seems to be following in her footsteps, “both my hunter and my prey for so many years” as she portrayed him so accurately, inversing again in a most chiasmatic manner their role and order in the succession (“We are heirs and haunted, unknowingly” (PC, 70): this eXchange, might we say, bears the X (18) of her countersignature). Replacing a father by a father (the Art du Remplacement was the title of her doctorate thesis on Joyce), she keeps the feather flying in the air; she is at the same time inheriting/inventing Joyce’s dream, reaffirming it in a provocative way not only by substituting a father (with sueur: soeur?) (19) for another, Joyce being less a father figure to her than a freer (frere?), but also by substituting one word for another, forfitting nostalgia for “yearning” (20). (the very choice of this word-instead of “desire” for instance-is interesting as it is significantly left untranslated by Cixous in the French version of this text, and has a certain Joycean ring to it, inscribing within itself a certain “yes”).

No, there is no nostos there, or anywhere for her, no return, no “properly speaking,” or otherwise, Dublin remains “the inhabitable,” the “Dyoubelong” (21) for her: no belonging ever, only, as Echo (22) would rephrase it in her artful/heartfelt cut, “longing”.

5

Clearly, another link between Cixous and Joyce concerns the way their respective primitive scenes cross one another. This experience, Cixous has related in unforgettable terms in Dans un jardin (In a Garden), and what she says in this passage of Joyce’s primitive scene pertaining to eyesight and the threat of enucleation could very well describe her own situation, in political, but more, in aesthetic terms, that is, at the core of her relation to form, to the shaping of form, and to otherness:

 They are the first inscriptions of a threat of castration, of an exclusion inscribed spatially. We are on the edge, at the outer limit, which is going to be the metaphor of something that will be the exclusion caused by inverse reasons. He is excluded as corporeally weak. But he is on both sides of the barrier. Intellectually stronger, he is the one who is most threatened. He who is below can be looked at, he who is above cannot be seen. He disappears, becomes invisible. He who knows more, who has a greater score, cannot be understood. Literally, he cannot be included since he is in excess. When he is below, he can be caught and understood by images in the order of representation. But he becomes unrepresentable when he begins to exceed the limit. (WL, 14)

This affect about being outside, about “exinclusions” as she names them in her Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint (23), stays within her at all times. It is related to her myopia in a way: “As one can see, she cannot see where she is.” But then again, it goes far beyond that. “She is so lost that she is in the third person of herself, far from me and I. She is lost in the lost city. Of the whole city there only remains a remainder of Gold [Or]. She is outside [dehors] inside. And it will always be like that.” (PC, 32)

A grinning Joyce asks: “You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?” (FW, 111, 3) Are we lost in a “jungle of woods” (FW, 111, 2), or in a “jumble of words”? We could indefinitely juggle with this question. With them, to err is not to err. Cixous gives this infinnish definition of the work: “To lose and to find, to lose to find, to find to lose to find the losing. [...] To find without losing, to lose without finding, doesn’t make a work of art. [...] It is finding and losing, losing the object found, finding the lost, and only the lost that makes the work.” (M, 25) Did you see, feel (see-feel, a new way of reading without losing the thread, the vital lead running off here) how, through this hesitant insistence, this deft fumbling, this quivering palpation of words, the “lost-part of the finding” is given to us? Somewhere she depicts herself in this image: “ ... on a balcony, a hen by my side...”. She immediately rectifies: “the hen and its egg” (PC, 43). Joyce and Cixous have a way, each differently their own (after all, “Distinctly different were their duasdestinies” FW, 92, 11), of getting lost, of beating about the bush of words until the bouche of language gives way, opens up and blooms, “until the soul of thing has ripened, until the hatching of you and me, until the light lights up”. (M, 22)

6

Portrait: since her reading of the Portrait... as a “portrait of the primitive portrait,” (WL, 2) this word certainly appears as one of the most evident passwords to Joyce in Cixous’s thought as its revenance is obvious in many of her texts: when I say this, I am thinking of her Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, and also of numerous re-inscriptions of Joyce in recent works-for example, in Insister. A Jacques Derrida (where the play on the “a” in the title, untranslatable in English, again lets it be heard what a minimal differance, a liaison can open: a detail not unrelated to the graphic and phonic workings of the O’s and the A’s that fascinated her in Joyce’s writing); in Si près, to which I will return in a moment; or again, in a different manner, in “Faire voir le jamaisvu/Make see the never-before-seen” from which I have already quoted some passages.

If, without a doubt, the question of the portrait is one the most ancient, lasting traits shared by Joyce and Cixous, what would lie at the heart of this portrait? The very first feature she retains while reflecting on Joyce’s Portrait is that, in her eyes, it has to do with “the portrait of someone abnormal-that is, of someone who is outside norms and who continuously gathers moments of the real” (WL, 8). In “Writing and the Law,” she also underlines how

The story of a Portrait of the Artist is both that of a portrait being made and that of a finished portrait. The title indicates this kind of permanent duplicity. The reader is told that it is the portrait of an artist, not of a young man, which raises the question of the self-portrait of the artist, of the coming and going of the look, of the self, of the mirror and the self in the mirror. (WL, 4)

This aspect of the mirror embedded into the portrait will go a long way in Cixous’s writing, as it is most obvious in “Make see the never-before-seen” where she will comment on the fact that there is nothing less visible than a mirror, quoting (with invisible quotation marks) Joyce’s famous definition about reality as what gets to be reflected by the cracked mirror held by a maidservant.

In general, we don’t see the mirror, we look at ourselves in the mirror. Nothing is less visible, more used than a mirror. The mirror is the servant of my self. The mirror is the thing from which I begin. I don’t respect the mirror, I make use of it. The mirror, so to speak, is nothing, the Nothing from which everything makes its way to me. To the me. (F, 60)

As we can see, she is reflecting here on the mirror from two points of view, conversing with at least two, if not three, Jacques at the same time, Lacan and Joyce, with Derrida overlooking them both. Reflecting on the mirror, she is returning it to its running waters, not yet frozen, she sees through “its sources and resources” (M, 61), its liquid living being. As soon as she “reflects. [She] [has] to reflect [herself].” Everything trembles. Is the portrait a mirror, or the mirror the portrait itself, with no self ever in sight? She only has to ask herself “What is a mirror?,” and the iced-over object slips by. She catches glimpse of the mirror thing in another way, a thing one cannot see face to face, a thing “so first that we cannot witness it and it cannot itself bear witness to itself, since already nothing or nobody comes before it, right away it is already the remains of its passing, its wake in the mirror”. (M, 35) The mirror is the unfathomable starting point, mirroring infinite words (mir, or, hors, moi, moire) that look at her, that look her in the eye as nothing, or no one else could. “ ... perhaps, she writes, the mirror is the primal scene of everything” (24) (M, 60). If it is so, it is because one cannot decide where, or to whom it belongs. It is disbelonging at its barest.

7

In “Promised Cities,” she evokes her awakening to foreign languages, and to English in particular, in erotic terms. This is how she speaks of this “Primitive Scene,” for there is more than one in Cixous’s work:

I should tell you later about the first destroyed bombard-gutted city I saw, it was London in 1950, it was still eviscerated. There I felt my first emotion of a foreign language in my mouth. First kiss: to speak the other language, to suck its phonemes, to appropriate and snap up, the most common idioms, to enter a language whose walls have collapsed without the effort of knocking at the door. I entered the English language as an innocent conqueror and I helped myself, without plundering. (PC, 66)

In Si près (So close, but also homonymically speaking, cyprès, cypress), there is a fabulous scene, nearing the moment where she will find her father’s tomb and embrace him, where she meets with the Book (we do not know if she is dreaming or awake in this scene); she follows him (this Book-to-write disguised as an Algerian lover) silently, without asking any questions, into the Jardin d’Essai, sitting beside him on the same bench, as she did forty years ago to write down “les états d’âme que me causa mon premier livre”. She recognizes him immediately and yet sees that he is not quite the same, he is wholly other, yet “Without recognizing [she] recognizes” him. The whole scene has that air of déjà vu and jamais vu, “already seen but never before seen” (M, 27). And then, the scene suddenly takes flight, unraveling, expanding in an unexpected turn, soaring wildly.

But you are not the same [the book]. Forty years ago I evaded you a little, I feared you or feared not inventing you truly enough, not believing in you powerfully enough so that you might come into being. I glance around me, there is no one there save the eucalyptus and the magnolias so I dare, if you exist, since you exist, I sign, I kiss your mouth, my tongue on your mouth. We retreat into the alley. This time we kiss passionately this time your tongue in my mouth nothing is as close to a resurrection as the passion of a book, why not say so?  Body to body, we are wild with passion, the book is like that, your tongue in my mouth, two months [deux mois: untranslatable homonymy again...]. I say you are going to stay in my mouth? Yes. You say yes in my mouth. It’s only an apparition, although the deceitful forces of the dream snatch me away at once, although to escape from infinite sorrow I must awaken. This time it is four o’clock in reality. I write you up close. Not to forget that the kisses were real, I  jotted down. What touched me most: your Arab air, sombre, the sombre fire, the tidy sombre suit, the sense of style of men from Algiers (25).

What a wonderful kiss, so deep and real indeed, both impetuous and tender, soft and hard, touching the desire to touch in a way that keeps alive, through the “fingers of imagination and reminiscence,” (M, 45) one of the most beautiful scenes of Ulysses, that of Molly’s Yes. Of course, Cixous, rewriting/remembering this scene, touches also time with her tongue, and with great delicacy, making the kiss flower again, “ephemeral but perceptible” (M, 46), “specks on her eyeux, and spudds on horeilles”  (FW, 102, 12). This embrace is the very form of her signature, “on the eyelids, on the lips of thought, on the eyelashes of the ears,” (M, 21) it is one which in many ways affirms her Joycean inheritance and her vibrant claim, her invention, as she might be whispering in secret to him “This is you, this is me”. She catches the in and out of breath, and, yes, this feels like a resurrection. Here, again, she is taking a step out of literature, writing into immortality, and into the secret place where one only breathes breathlessly, “the no-place where everything is going to exist” (M, 23). “... je craignais de ne pas t’inventer assez vraiment, de ne pas croire en toi assez puissamment pour que tu sois”: that she does know how to immargine without limits, that, yes, you can believe.

8

When this word “plumitive” first landed on my table as I was frantically searching for a title that would link these few stray remarks, I thought that this “scribbler,” this “penpusher” could at last lose, in this JoyCixousian vicinity, the somewhat negative connotation it bears in French, and be heard through English, in-between French and English, with the light, appealing, feathery-like quality I felt fluttering in it. There was also something plum and round in it, and maybe even a little menace, “pluck” never being far off, as soon as a bird is in sight... It was above all connected for me to the pen, and to all the coups de plume between Cixous and Joyce. “Plumitive” was to be a feather in her cap... But above all, I also took a liking to the word because, I must admit,  it sounded a bit strange, not yet arrived in any language, in flight, in mid-air, as though another word-the word primitive-was being pronounced with a heavy foreign accent (a Chinese, or oriental one...), in such a way that it became completely altered, barely recognizable. Furthermore, I thought it could suggest a little theater scene where the puppets would be named Plum and Pen, in homage to Shem the Penman and Shaun the Postman. But, of course, I was, unknowingly at that moment, being already read over, or overread, by Cixous, who recalls in “Promised Cities” (which I had not yet read), Wilhem Busch’s tale (litteral translation: Vilaine Bouche, Naughty Mouth), her chilhood’s “other Bible” which was translated by her mother, and pantomimed by her father, when she, aged only six years old, was learning every trick in the book through this “theater of cruelty” “Doing silly things with language” (PC, 61). On this occasion, she introduced her reader to the “fellow four-legged creatures” by the names of... Plisch and Plum. So, as is so often the case with her, she had already anticipated my little play and taken the words right out my mouth (26). And so, plucked I was.

oo

A little dialogue, to mimic a kind of exit, in the form of the “Questions and Answers” catechism played out in Ulysses’s penultimate chapter:
Joyce’s question:

For what creature was the door of egress a door of ingress?
For a cat. [In French: “Pour une chatte.”] (27)

Cixous’s reply:

I could add that this movement of a needle which pricks passes enters exits pricks again, or of a fish, is my destinal signature. I will always be found at the door. I know all the secrets of doors. Keyholes. (PC, 44)

There it might be said Joyce had well anticipated in this catechesis scene his cat Cixous reader. Between them it is indeed all about the without beginning and without end. Better leave the last word to him, then, as he has foresigned us all again in advance (28): “Leave the letter that never begins to go find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.” (FW, 337, 6-9)

 

 

* A first draft of this paper was presented at the “JoyCixous: Between H. C. and HCE,” Re-Nascent Joyce, XXIst International James Joyce Symposium,  Université François-Rabelais, Tours, June 15-20, 2008.

1 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake. 3rd Edition, London: Faber and Faber, 1964, p.336, l.15-18. Hereafter FW.
2 Peter Mahon, Imagining Joyce and Derrida. Between Finnegans Wake and Glas. Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2007, p.79. Hereafter I.
3 No pun here; I am thinking of Jacques Derrida’s comment about “betweeness” in Dissemination, where he notes that it affects “all other signs which, like pharmakon, supplément, différance, and others, have a double, contradictory, undecidable value that always derives from their syntax, whether the latter is in a sense ‘internal,’ articulating and combining under the same yoke, huph’ hen, two incompatible meanings or ‘external,’ dependent on the code in which the word is made to function. (3a)
3a But the syntactical composition and decomposition of a sign renders this alternative between internal and external inoperative.” (Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson, London: Athlone, 1981, p.221, quoted by Peter Mahon, I, 41.)
4 “Rather, in setting itself the task of creating a theoretical framework that will enable readers of Joyce and/or Derrida [let us add Cixous to this twosome] to theorize and negotiate a broadened conception of Joyce-Derrida intertextuality, and to unlock the rigorously deconstructive potential of the Wake’s textual practice, this study, writes Mahon, can usefully be seen as an attempt to address the situation that Laurent Milesi has also recently noticed in his collection James Joyce and the Difference of Language: (4a)
4a ‘the strategic pervasiveness of the Joycean approach to language in Derrida’s style has received numerous treatments, among which see especially Alan Roughley, Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, and, to a minor extent, Sailer, On the Void of To Be [...]. Although these are more commendable than Lernout’s unsympathetic, nit-picking summaries in The French Joyce, I feel that a greater degree of analytic sophistication is still required to approach the vast topic of Joyce’s “influence” on Derrida.’” (I, 5)
5 Helene Cixous, “Writing and the Law. Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, and Lispector,” in Helene Cixous,  Readings. The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva. Edited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, “Theory and History of Literature,” Volume 77, 1991, p.1. Hereafter WL.
6 Helene Cixous, “Promised Cities,” Translated by Laurent Milesi, in Helene Cixous, Ex-Cities. Edited by Aron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabate, Foreword by Eric Prenowitz, Philadelphia: Slought Books, “Contemporary Artist Series,” No. 5, 2006, p.47. Hereafter PC.
7 Id., “Faire voir le jamaisvu/Make see the never-before-seen, Translated by Eric Prenowitz, in Roni Horn, Rings of Lispector (Agua viva). London: Hauser & Wirth Steidl, 2004, p.51. Hereafter M.
8 Helene Cixous, Insister of Jacques Derrida. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Original Drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007, p.94.
9 Regarding this ruse of the artist, we can bear in mind Cixous’s statement, which applies to Joyce as much as to herself: “The first œuvre of the artist [‘Apologize... Pull out his eyes’]: a funny little poem based on exploiting a system of sounds. He was given a fabulous treasure, it is the word: apologize. Signifier with a succulent ending for an anglophile ear, with a play on I and eyes, on je and les yeux, on the fact that when one says ‘I’ in English, one can hear either I, or the eye; the place in which it takes place is the possible substitution between the subject I and the eye. But all this is ruled out by the work of subversion consisting of sending the threatening words onto the side of music, the side of sound. [...] / This is the veritable ruse of the artist, which consists in becoming a sound thief, a sound taker. He is a thief of signifiers, someone who ruses with words, and the law can chase him in vain, for all that matters at that moment is the sound the word makes.(9a)
9a If any threat crops up, he immediately brings it to fruition.” (Helene Cixous, “Devant le pome,” in Cahier de L’Herne. Joyce, no 50, Paris: Éditions de L’Herne, 1985, p.201. Cixous underlines. Translation mine.) In “Writing and the Law,” she returns to this primitive “Apologize” scene in which the artist, though afraid of the law threatening him, still “feels an auditory pleasure” in it. From this displacement, she says, “the system of thought of the young artist is put in place”: “If one reflects on words, if one warms them like a hen, one ends up understanding them.” (WL, 9. I underline this hen image, which I am following here in some of its zigzags.)
10 “I find it important to work on foreign texts, precisely because they displace our relationship to grammar. I will use caution too in relation to what I call trap-words (mots-cages).” (WL, 3)
11 In “Devant le pome,” she gives a slighlty different definition of this“jeu de la loi” for Joyce. She writes: “The play of the law is: in the beginning there are words, there is word-ness, but it is not the Verb. It is the phonic word; to go even further, I would say that it is the word-pome.” (“Devant le pome, loc. cit., p.197. Translation mine.)
12 “Odd couple” would be more appropriate in this case, as ear and eye interact more like incestuous siblings, in a never ending rivalry/jealousy of semiattachment/detachment. Peter Mahon offers this most insightful remark about the eye-ear (con)fusion, so important in JoyCixousian writing: “In agglutinating the eye to the ear, the eye or ear can no longer hear or see each other outside of différance,” therefore interfering “in the easy recognition of a proper signatory” in the différential X of the letter. Mahon traces this complicity of the ear-eye to a site of originary theft  in the Wake: “The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. (482. 31-6).” (I, 151)(12a)
12a “Odd couple” would be more appropriate in this case, as ear and eye interact more like incestuous siblings, in a never ending rivalry/jealousy of semiattachment/detachment. Peter Mahon offers this most insightful remark about the eye-ear (con)fusion, so important in JoyCixousian writing: “In agglutinating the eye to the ear, the eye or ear can no longer hear or see each other outside of différance,” therefore interfering “in the easy recognition of a proper signatory” in the différential X of the letter. Mahon traces this complicity of the ear-eye to a site of originary theft  in the Wake: “The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That’s the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can’t be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. (482. 31-6).” (I, 151) Further along, he insists on the fact that both the eye and the ear are “phonemanology” impaired (in the paradigmatic figure of Earwicker), the author seeing “only through the ‘undeleted glete [with] glass eyes for an eye’ (183. 36)”: “Once impaired, seeing and hearing are only possible through the delay or interposition of a device (an ‘eyetrompit’) that simultaneously helps and impairs vision.” (I, 153)(12b)
12b Both ear and eyes, then, lack any present-ness, a deconstructive feature that disrupts “the circular complicity of the eye and ear of metaphysics” and that is close to the Derridean “earpiercing” of the philosopher’s tympanum in Margins of Philosophy (and elsewhere in Derrida’s work). Joyce’s Wake is all “Fickleyes and Futilears” (FW, 176, 13); Mahon also quotes the passage in which Earwicker is said to be a “Dufblin” (FW, 447, 23)-“deaf” and “blind” (not to mention a certain “dumb” mutely heard also) being indissociately inscribed in the word-as “he can only speak a redubbed dialect of Irish since he has ‘learned to speak from hand to mouth till he could talk earish with his eyes shut’ (130. 18-19)”.  (I, 156)
13 Helene Cixous, “Apprenticeship and Alienation,” in Readings, op. cit., p.78.
14 Marta Segarra, “Critical Introduction,” in Joyful Babel. Translating Helene Cixous.Edited by Myriam Diocaretz and Marta Segarra, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004, p.17.
15 Jean-Michel Rabate, “Eight Paragraphs for Helene Cixous,” in Helene Cixous, Ex-Cities, op. cit., p.141.
16 In “Make see the never-before-seen,” she makes“taste” and “tact” twins, blending in the different ways senses have of “touching” one another in a remarkable way: “But tâter, can your hear? is the twin of taste. Who gropes at length with his hands-or feet in order to know by the skin, also tastes from the English taste, tastes therefore; tastes what? The taste water has for Roni’s feet, the taste of the fabric for my hands, the taste of wine on my tongue, the taste of the word on my fingers-tongue of my thought. The taste without savor of the word intangible. / English taste, which was formerly Latin tastare, an offspring of tangere, reminds me that it all begins with the tongue.(16a)
16a As a nursling I take my first lessons in the world with my tongue as a hand. I put everything in my mouth, it is my tongue that tastes and thinks and keeps or rejects everything that approaches me in the world. Is it good or bad, friend or enemy? asks my tongue of the objects that approach it. Including my feet and the toes I suck. For my toes are also ‘thou’ during this period of my life. / French invented tact. Tact touches with such great delicacy that it seems not to touch what it grazes at all, to speak only in a roundabout way and in a murmur. One doesn’t feel the weight of tact. Tact thinks and isn’t ponderous. Tact is so rare and so precious that it becomes an intangible treasure. One says that someone ‘has tact’, as if one could possess this virtue which consists in not-having, in not-taking, in being-careful-not-to-alter or disturb.” (M, 45-46)
17 “Well, if I already insist on the homonymy, as I will again and again, it is because I would like, much later, I do not exactly know when, during the course of this session, to select this question of homonymy and therefore of untranslatability as a main thread. For homonymy is, as you know, the crux of translation; it is what, in a language, signals and signs the untranslatable. [...] if I was given the time, I could demonstrate [...] that the entire work of Helene Cixous is literally, and for this reason, untranslatable, therefore not far from being unreadable, if reading still remains a kind of translating [...]”. (Jacques Derrida, H. C. for Life, That Is to Say... . Translated, with additional notes, by Laurent Milesi and Stefan Herbrechter, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006, p.65.)
18 There would be much to say on the writing effect of this letter, X, which, of course, is much more than a letter. Reflecting on these Xs in Derrida’s Glas and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Peter Mahon notes how “they function as différential icons and figures for an entirely non-eidetic strategy for reading-and-writing” (I, 77). About this “crisscross” way of signing with “four crosskisses” (FW, 111, 17), used by the hen in her letter writing, Mahon notes: “The hen’s zig zag marks also recall Joyce’s method of crossing out the material he incorporated and reincorporated from his notebooks into the drafts of the Wake.(18a)
18a / But these Xs do not sign or mark the letter-writer’s identity in any simple sense: they also cross out identity, giving it over to the forces that can blur any simple identity. It is precisely this blurring of identity that is illustrated by the letter insofar as it is understood to be written by an amalgamation of mother and son through a sort of ‘dictation’ (420. 17-19).” Further along, he adds: “The zig-zagging that signs the letter with ‘four crosskisses’ (111.17) is also a form of writing. But the Xs do not figure the letter’s writing iconically simply because they sign the hen’s writing.(18b)
18b The Xs that sign the letter are capable of expansion insofar as they also figure the auto-affective antagonistic criss-crossing of the two reader-writers as the actual writing of the letter, which is itself scripted ‘boustrephodontically,’ by a ‘writing’ that travels ‘thitaways end to end and turning, turning and end to end hithaways writing and with lines of litters slittering up and louds of latters slettering down, the old semetomyplace and jupetbackagain from tham Let Rise till Hum Lit’ (114. 16-19).” (I, 116-118. I underline.) This X writing-reading scene criss-crosses itself constantly in this “between” between Joyce and Cixous.
  
19 “I was initiated into homophony and homonymy by the sweat [sueur] of my father, sweating it out as he was translating himself in my mother’s language”: this passage operates a genealogical folding of consequence as Joyce becomes the freer frère, and the father is insinuated, or impregnated with the sueur/sœur, as an in-sister, that is, in Cixousian terms, the most interior figures of all.
20 In the French version of the text, “yearning” is not translated, suggesting that, while replacing nostalgia, it remains itself irrepleacable.
21 “ ... of words forever foreign in the place they belong, of the true-false Jew Bloom put in circulation, in simulation, in Dyoubelong the uninhabitable Joycian Dublin, doubling for Paris.” (Helene Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint. Translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p.2-3.)
22 Limitless echoing between them on this ongoing autoheteroportrait: Joyce: “Echo, choree choreco! O I you O you me!” (FW, 584, 33-34). Cixous: “Elle s’attend toujours encore à un autre de ces You absolument singulier, imprévisible, qui viendra répondre à son cri : / Are you too one of my othermes ? / Come ! you co-me !” (“Portraits de portraits. Le jour même de Roni Horn, in Roni Horn. Málaga: CAC Málaga, 2008, p.4.)
23 Helene Cixous, Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, op. cit., p.2.
24 In her recent text on Roni Horn’s work, Cixous writes: “Portrait of an Image (with Isabelle Huppert) will thus have deconstructed each unthought traditional approach of the thing so-called Portrait, the use that we make of the word Portrait, in referring it back it to persons.” (“Portraits de Portraits. Le jour même de Roni Horn, loc. cit., p.4. Translation mine.)
25 Id., Si près. Paris: Galilee, “Lignes fictives,” 2007, p.160. “Mais tu n’es pas le meme [le livre]. Il y a quarante ans je te fuyais un peu, te craignais ou bien je craignais de ne pas t’inventer assez vraiment, de ne pas croire en toi assez puissamment pour que tu sois. Je jette un coup d’oeil, il n’y a personne sauf les eucalyptus et les magnolias alors j’ose, si tu existes, puisque tu existes, je signe, je t’embrasse la bouche, ma langue a ta bouche. Nous reculons dans l’allee. Cette fois nous nous embrassons passionnement cette fois ta langue dans ma bouche rien ne ressemble autant a une resurrection que la passion d’un livre et de meme l’etreinte d’un livre est comparable a une resurrection, pourquoi ne pas le dire ? nous sommes corps a corps, nous sommes fous de passion, c’est comme ca le livre, ta langue dans ma bouche, deux mois. Je te dis tu vas rester dans ma bouche ? (25a)
25a Oui. Tu dis oui dans ma bouche. Ce n’est qu’une apparition, meme si tout de suite les forces sournoises du reve m’enlevent, meme si pour echapper a un malheur sans fin je suis obligee de me reveiller. Cette fois il est quatre heures en realite. Je t’ecris de pres. Ne pas oublier que les baisers etaient reels, notais-je. Ce qui m’a emue : ton air arabe, sombre, le feu sombre, le costume soigne sombre, ta coquetterie d’homme d’Alger.” (Translation mine.)
26 Apres coup: reading a few weeks later the proofs of Helene Cixous’s latest book, Ciguë, to be published in September 2008, I find, put in her mother’s mouth, Eve, this advice (a most often repeated reproach regarding her daughter relentless writing): “– Arrete cette plumerie, dit ma mere. Plumerie vit, se tortille, me fait rire. Encore. Plus tard je me demanderai le mot, je verrai la scene, la table, la toile ciree, la derniere trouvaille de ma mere, je l’aurai oubliee.” (Ciguë. Paris: Galilée, “Lignes fictives,” 2008, p.107). How, indeed, not to laugh at such a remarkable and delightful Einfall?
27 James Joyce, “Episode 17,” in Ulysses. The Corrected Text, Edited by Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe and Claus Melchior, and with a new Preface by Richard Ellmann, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books/The Bodley Head, 1986, p.573, l. 1034-1035. (“Pour quel être la porte de sortie fut-elle une porte d’entrée ? / Pour une chatte.” In James Joyce, Ulysse, II. Translation by Auguste Morel revised by Valery Larbaud, Stuart Gilbert and the author, Paris: Gallimard, “Folio,” 1957, p.416. Who decided, in French, that the cat was to be a she and not a he? We can only marvel at the génie of this suppleminventive translation...)
28 Following Jacques Derrida’s words: “Yes, everything has already happened to us with Ulysses and has been signed in advance by Joyce.” (Ulysses Gramophone. Two Words for Joyce. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington, in Post-Structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, Derek Attridge and Daniel Ferrer (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p.XX.)