post-colonial_translation

154 Rosemary Arrojo
to be in the mother’s position: ‘Write I was dying of desire for it, of
love, dying to give writing what it had given to me. What ambition!
What impossible happiness. To nourish my own mother. Give her, in
turn, my milk Wild imprudence’ (ibid.).
In order for such an appropriation to be consummated, the dialogue
with the text must obviously take place without its author’s potential
opposition, a practice which seems to be typical of Cixous’s reading
habits. As Verena A. Conley points out, living female writers are
conspicuously absent from Cixous’s reading enterprises:
Cixous is not often kind to living women or contemporary women
writers. Their works are singularly absent from her seminars and
texts. As she puts it herself in L’ange secret, she wishes she could
write on the living with the same talent and ease with which she
writes on the dead. Neither Heidegger nor Lispector talks back.
Other proper names can be associated with them without any
sign of protest.
(Conley 1992, p. 83)
Borrowing from Roland Barthes’s theorization, we could say that
Cixous’s productive reading not only involves the ‘death’ of the author
but turns her into a ghostly guest that is rarely invited to the scene of
interpretation (Barthes 1977). From such a perspective, how can one
possibly reconcile Cixous’s explicitly transformative reading practice
with her own proposal that contemporary theories of reading as
production be ‘resisted’ in order to leave room for ‘the adoption of a
state of receptivity’, in which the reader is supposed to carefully ‘hear’
that which the text is saying (Sellers 1988, p. 7)
In Cixous’s undoubtedly powerful and highly influential project,
which presents itself as an ‘ongoing quest for affirmation of life over
death and power in all its forms, including those of academic institutions
and practices’ (Cixous 1990, p. xii), the construction of a Cixousian
Lispector compromises that which in Lispector’s texts is perfectly
distinguishable not only from Cixous’s but also from the Brazilian
writer’s proper name. Although Cixous’s transformation of Lispector’s
first name into a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb that is repeatedly
interwoven into her own writing has been viewed as a feminine strategy
‘to avoid both patronymic and paternal genealogy’ (Conley 1994, p.
83), it certainly suggests the ultimate appropriation, i.e. the
transformation of Lispector or, rather, of ‘clarice’ into a mere sign within
Cixous’s own text, as the following excerpts from Vivre l’orange (Cixous