post-colonial_translation

150 Rosemary Arrojo
make. Cixous had found ‘women’ as a political problem, and
‘feminine writing’ as a political solution. In Lispector she tries to
construct the unity of these two terms.
(Shiach 1989, p. 161)
In this context, Cixous and Lispector are not merely a reader and an
author but a pair, or a couple, in which Lispector’s position as a major,
internationally recognized writer has been almost totally subject to
Cixous’s reading and writing. Thus, Lispector’s ‘value’ as a major writer
basically depends on the degree to which her texts can illustrate and
validate Cixous’s theories, functioning as a key to the understanding
of feminine writing and as ‘an indication of the further development of
Cixous’s own texts’ (Ambruster 1983, p. 155).
In the kind of ‘dialogue’ which Cixous establishes with Lispector,
Cixous’s self-attributed ‘privileged critical discourse’ about the Brazilian
author ‘ultimately gives the false impression that Lispector is a sort of
Cixousian twin’ (Peixoto 1994, p. 42). Thus, for Susan R. Suleiman,
Cixous and Lispector are ‘two authors who are not one, but who are
very, very close’ (Suleiman 1991, p. xv). As a consequence, one can find
unexpected references to Lispector – who never wrote a single paragraph
on theory – even in introductory textbooks such as Sarup’s An
Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, whose
chapter on ‘French Feminist Theories’ devotes a few lines to Lispector
which appropriately synthesize the peculiar role she has been made to
play in contemporary critical thought:
Having established the political importance of feminine writing
for women, Cixous found a woman practising such a writing.
This is really quite remarkable. Having theorized the limitations
and dangers of dualist thought, of subjectivity based on the
obliteration of the Other, Cixous discovered another woman
writer who was exploring the same issues in fictional form: Clarice
Lispector. To understand this fully, one has to remember that
Cixous’s theorization of feminine writing had taken place almost
entirely in terms of the texts of canonical male writers such as
Joyce, Kleist or Hoffmann. And her theoretical vocabulary had
been largely derived from male theorists such as Lacan and
Derrida. And then, suddenly, she came across a writer who was
largely unknown in France, who was Jewish, who was a woman
and who shared many of her philosophical and stylistic
preoccupations. [ . . . ] Lispector embodies many of the ideas which