post-colonial_translation

Cixous, Lispector and fidelity 153
‘talking’, Lispector is inevitably forced not only to be saying ‘the same
thing everywhere’, as Cixous explicitly declares in an essay on Água
Viva, but also to agree unconditionally with her powerful reader: ‘if
Clarice herself reread Água Viva, she would reread it the way she wrote
it and as we read it, without a gathering point of view that allows to
carry one and only one judgment’ (Cixous 1991b, p. 14). If what
Lispector has written must coincide with what Cixous reads into it,
there is no room for any other point of view, in an exclusive relationship
that consistently ignores not only all other readers of Lispector but
everything that in her texts does not comply with the principles of
feminine writing. Moreover, it also requires the protection of Lispector’s
texts and image even from the author herself, as well as ‘from her
historical context and her class’ (Peixoto 1994, p. 52). In a passage from
an earlier version of ‘Extreme fidelity’, for instance, Cixous unabashedly
declares:
I would never have another seminar if I knew that enough people
read Clarice Lispector. A few years ago when they began to divulge
her, I said to myself: I will no longer have a seminar, you only need
to read her, everything is said, it’s perfect. But everything became
repressed as usual, and they have even transformed her in an
extraordinary way, embalmed her, stuffed her with straw in the
guise of a Brazilian bourgeoise with polished fingernails. So I
continue to accompany her with a reading that watches over her.
(Cixous 1987, p. 26; quoted in Peixoto 1994, p. 52)
The transformation of the bourgeoise Lispector – whose pictures
actually show a very attractive woman obviously wearing makeup and
nail polish – into an androgynous Cixousian twin points to the other
side of Cixous’s passionate love for the Brazilian writer’s work. Instead
of a supposedly feminine, non-violent approach to difference, Cixous’s
transferential relationship with Lispector’s texts shows that there is
definitely more to this textual affair than sheer admiration or gratitude.
The celebration of the text that is chosen as ‘the subject presumed to
know’ implies not only love but also a violent desire to possess that
which allegedly belongs to such a privileged authority. Using Cixous’s
own imagery, we may say that the daughter/reader, nurtured by the
mother/author’s milk/writing inevitably wants to be in the mother/
author’s position. In ‘Coming to writing’, for example, as she describes
her early passionate dedication to the texts she ‘ate, sucked, suckled,
kissed’ (Cixous 1991a, p. 12), Cixous confesses her ‘transgressive’ desire