The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Hélène Cixous Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing by Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-GruberMary Lydon
Hélène Cixous and Mireille Calle-Gruber. Hélène Cixous Rootprints: Memory and Life-Writing. Routledge, 1997. 254 pp. Paper: $17.95.
Rootprints is an excellent introduction to the multifaceted work of Hélène Cixous, who has written more than thirty books of poetic fiction, countless critical essays, and eight plays. The format, no less than the content of this unusual book, reflects the great diversity of Cixous’s oeuvre, combining as it does an extended interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber, excerpts from Cixous’s notebooks, photographs from her family album, extensive bio-bibliographical information, critical essays and a contribution by Jacques Derrida.
The dialogue between Cixous and Calle-Gruber provides the occasion for Cixous to develop the themes of sexual difference, self and other, life and death that are omnipresent in her writing, while at the same time allowing her to insist that she is primarily a poet. This is a useful corrective to the tendency in the United States to regard her as a feminist theorist on the strength of the celebrated essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” and her contributions to The Newly Born Woman. Yet “To have an upright position, analogous to that of a theoretician, is not my intention,” Cixous declares, emphasizing that “ ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ and other texts of this type were a conscious, pedagogic, didactic effort on my part to classify, to organize certain reflections, to emphasize a minimum of sense. Of common sense.”
Rootprints brings out clearly that it is the pursuit, through poetry, of uncommon sense that is Cixous’s project. For her, “To write is to have such pointy pricked-up ears that we hear what language says (to us) inside our own words at the very moment of enunciation.” [Mary Lydon]