The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Waterweed in the Wash-Houses by Jeanne Hyvrard
Irving Malin

Jeanne Hyvrard. Waterweed in the Wash-Houses. Trans. Elsa Copeland. Columbia Univ. Press, 1997. 136 pp. Paper: $16.95.

This text, distributed by Columbia University Press, is a wonderfully occult meditation on women, language, politics, and philosophy. It is, in many ways, a novel or better yet, an antinovel which attempts to stress that we must somehow move beyond traditional binary oppositions of “man” and “woman,” “master and slave.” Hyvrard resembles Cixous—whose work is also distributed by Columbia—in trying to subvert the notion of separations, to fuse opposites into some kind of third being.

Thus when we read this text, we notice that the language itself is fractured, confused. There is a woman narrator who is “mad”; she believes that she is an “agent,” some mysterious being who has been given the task to be “I” and “she” and even “self” and “process” (she is also the text!). She offers a stream of consciousness which doesn’t progress; the stream is circular. At one point she writes (to herself and to the reader): “They say she knows a language that can say earth and water at the same time.” Of course, the sentence defies reason. Are not earth and water different? And she has trouble with traditional syntax: “A subject. A verb. What for? What do they want to move?” The sentence is, in effect, a death sentence because it fixes movement; it stops fusion: “But they have been confounding opposites and negation.”

This occult text, although it attacks the traditional acts of reading and writing, is a murderous, creative event. It uses the Tarot cards and alchemy as frames of reference. Although there is use of alchemy—a series of metallic transmutations in the odd texts of Yeats, Merrill, Bloom, Gaddis, and the “surrealist” boxes of Joseph Cornell—no critic has really attempted to see all these works as part of a desperate movement to find a new language. Although this text by Hyvrard has come to me “out of the blue,” I have the uncanny feeling that it was meant for me. And now I offer it to you as a gift and/or curse. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Waterweed in the Wash-Houses by Jeanne Hyvrard Irving Malin Jeanne Hyvrard. Waterweed in the Wash-Houses. Trans. Elsa Copeland. Columbia Univ. Press, 1997. 136 pp. Paper: $16.95. This text, distributed by Columbia University Press, is a wonderfully occult meditation on women, language, politics, and philosophy. It is, in many ways, a novel or better yet, an antinovel which attempts to stress that we must somehow move beyond traditional binary oppositions of “man” and “woman,” “master and slave.” Hyvrard resembles Cixous—whose work is also distributed by Columbia—in trying to subvert the notion of separations, to fuse opposites into some kind of third being. Thus when we read this text, we notice that the language itself is fractured, confused. There is a woman narrator who is “mad”; she believes that she is an “agent,” some mysterious being who has been given the task to be “I” and “she” and even “self” and “process” (she is also the text!). She offers a stream of consciousness which doesn’t progress; the stream is circular. At one point she writes (to herself and to the reader): “They say she knows a language that can say earth and water at the same time.” Of course, the sentence defies reason. Are not earth and water different? And she has trouble with traditional syntax: “A subject. A verb. What for? What do they want to move?” The sentence is, in effect, a death sentence because it fixes movement; it stops fusion: “But they have been confounding opposites and negation.” This occult text, although it attacks the traditional acts of reading and writing, is a murderous, creative event. It uses the Tarot cards and alchemy as frames of reference. Although there is use of alchemy—a series of metallic transmutations in the odd texts of Yeats, Merrill, Bloom, Gaddis, and the “surrealist” boxes of Joseph Cornell—no critic has really attempted to see all these works as part of a desperate movement to find a new language. Although this text by Hyvrard has come to me “out of the blue,” I have the uncanny feeling that it was meant for me. And now I offer it to you as a gift and/or curse. [Irving Malin]

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