post-colonial_translation

Cixous, Lispector and fidelity 157
develops her reflection which culminates with her alleged
transformation ‘into herself’.
As she approaches the room, G.H. finds her most radical other in her
blurred recollections of the black maid who has just left, but whose name
and appearance she has difficulty in remembering. As she enters the
surprisingly clean room – which she was expecting to find dusty and untidy
– G.H. is confronted with her own ‘inexplicable’ rage towards the way
in which the maid, with a boldness appropriate only for the actual owners
of apartments, had actually taken possession of the space that did not
belong to her, not only by keeping it in order, but also by having drawn a
mural in black charcoal, which G.H. sees as a sort of writing on one of
the white walls. The enraged G.H., who is a sculptor precisely because
she likes to arrange things with her own hands in order to take possession
of her surroundings, sets out to reconquer the room. As she feels like
‘killing something’, G.H. violently begins ‘to erase the maid’s traces’ from
the usurped room in order to reinstate the familiar oppositions she
constructed within her own world (in which the maid is of course to be
kept in her subaltern place and perfectly distinguishable in every possible
way from her mistress and opposite). The vehemence of G.H.’s anger as
she attempts to repossess the room finally makes her recall (without any
pleasure) the maid’s ‘silent hatred’, her facial features – ‘fine and delicate
like a queen’s’ – and her proud posture. Frenetically moving furniture
around, G.H. is all of a sudden faced with an even more radical version
of otherness: a cockroach. The vision of the insect coming from behind
the maid’s bed triggers a different trail of ambivalent feelings divided
between the disgust the narrator feels towards the cockroach, and a certain
admiration for the resilient insect’s ancient ‘wisdom’ which allows it to
‘concentrate on living in its own body’. After a long, tortured struggle ‘to
depersonalize herself’, and, implicitly, to acquire that which constitutes
the cockroach’s wisdom, G.H. kills it and finally manages ‘to transform
herself into herself’ by swallowing the white substance issuing from the
crushed insect.
Having dared to simplify Lispector’s narrative to its bare
bones, I shall not even try to go into its complex metaphysical
implications and I will limit myself to commenting on Cixous’s
reading of the ‘same’ text. First of all, after reading Cixous, it is
not difficult to imagine why she would find Lispector’s work so
appealing. We can definitely recognize echoes of Cixous’s
idealized conception of the feminine in the independent and
sophisticated G.H. Like Cixous’s Eve, who is not afraid of tasting
‘the fruit of the tree of knowledge’, and who does not fear the