post-colonial_translation

152 Rosemary Arrojo
through a certain magic and love, that which would be retention,
weight, solidification, an arrest of the act of writing. That is why
she ends by dropping the subject pronoun and saying: What am I
saying Am saying love’ (Cixous 1990, p. 69; quoted in Peixoto 1994,
p. 49). What Cixous sees as a meaningful deviation, as a special device
used by Lispector is nothing but the norm in Portuguese. Therefore,
as Lispector’s text is forced to mean that which Cixous sees in it,
Portuguese has to behave as if it were French or English.
As in the case of the Indian boys begging for English texts, the Cixous/
Lispector affair can be understood from the perspective of the
Lacanian notion of ‘the subject presumed to know’. If transference
cannot be distinguished from that which we generally call ‘love’ and
from the main gestures that constitute any act of interpretation,
Cixous’s treatment of Lispector’s texts is certainly exemplary of the
radical revision of the reading plot as proposed by Felman via
psychoanalysis (Felman 1987, p. 86). In her ‘therapeutical’ encounter
with Lispector’s work, Cixous invests the Brazilian writer with the
authority and prestige of ‘the subject presumed to know’, of the one
whose writing harbours all the answers and all the insights that could
validate the defence of a feminine way of spending. As in any successful
psychoanalytical encounter, the dialogue between Cixous and her
‘subject presumed to know’ allows the former to recover her longlost
‘orange’, that is, to reread herself and to translate that which she
already knew and was able to rediscover into a new productivity and
a new writing. It is certainly appropriate that, for Cixous, ‘the subject
presumed to know’ is also a positive ‘mother figure’. As Toril Moi
points out, in Cixous’s writings, the mother as the source of good is
‘clearly what Melanie Klein would call the Good Mother: the
omnipotent and generous dispenser of love, nourishment and
plenitude’ that is obviously endowed with ‘infinite power’ (Moi 1985,
p. 115). In Cixous’s association of this power with writing, Lispector
becomes the one who not only has the strength to ‘unveil us’ and ‘to
open our windows’ (Cixous 1979b, p. 98), but also the capacity to
find the essential meaning of every word, as Cixous declares in her
very first text about the Brazilian writer, ‘L’approche de Clarice
Lispector’ (Cixous 1979a, pp. 412–13).
However, in order for Lispector to be invested with such authority
and prestige and with such power to nurture and even to cure, she has
to be ‘saying’ precisely that which Cixous needs and wants to hear. In
this truly asymmetrical dialogue, while Cixous practically does all the