The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Third Body by Hélène Cixous
Tara Reeser

Hélène Cixous. The Third Body. Trans. Keith Cohen. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 161 pp. $24.95.

This novel, originally written in 1970, examines the narrator’s relationship with her lover, one consisting of many binaries—separations and connections, appearance and disappearance, life and death. This examination takes on the form of a third body, a body consisting of the narrator’s knowledge of self and of her lover. As this body becomes an almost physical reality and as the narrator presents memories of her mother, dead father, mythology, and fairy tales, Cixous takes the reader through a textual journey with stops at Gradiva (Wilhelm Jensen), “Delusion and Dream” (Sigmund Freud), and “Earthquake in Chile” (Heinrich Kleist).

The Third Body allows Cixous to refer to her own critical work—the French feminist theory of writing the body. Within this theory, writing comes from the body; it is a writing of the physical being. The created third body is also the body of the text. As the narrator describes absence and its physical feeling, she states: “A new homonymy was born for them, through his voice or mine, without distinguishing: ‘My arm!’ also meant my arm hurts (yours, mine). ‘Oh my mouth, my lips, my teeth, and my tongue!’ meant rescue my mouth which is for you and moisten my dry lips, and separate my tongue from my teeth that are biting it so it won’t cry out yet. . . .” Cixous is once again writing the body, taking a fourth body (the reader) on her own sensual journey.

As the reader travels through this novel, I suggest using body parts during the reading: the lips and tongue to say the words aloud because the language reads like poetry, the hands to linger over pages in order to spend time with the images, and the feet (and mind) to take you on a search of your own for a third body. [Tara Reeser]