post-colonial_translation

158 Rosemary Arrojo
inside of the forbidden fruit, G.H. finds the courage to taste the
cockroach’s inside in order to absorb its wisdom. Furthermore,
also following a Cixousian path, we could probably interpret
G.H.’s final awareness of the fact that her maid did in fact have
an identity and even a need to express herself artistically as the
former’s peculiar, belated recognition of otherness. What is
difficult, if not impossible, to imagine, however, is how Cixous
could possibly justify her interpretation of G.H.’s narrative as a
story about ‘extreme fidelity’ to difference, and the exhilarating
possibility of a perfect communion (and communication) with
otherness which could do away with mastery, supposedly teaching
us that ‘the other must remain absolutely strange within the
greatest possible proximity’ and ‘must be respected according to
its species, without violence, with the neutrality of the Creator,
the equal and undemonstrative love with regard to each being’
(Cixous 1991a, p. 171).
It seems quite clear that what Cixous’s reading of G.H.’s quest
significantly cannot account for is precisely the same basic elements to
which she is utterly oblivious in her own treatment of Lispector’s work
and authorial figure: violence and asymmetry. Lispector’s detailed
description of the asymmetrical relationship which G.H. establishes
with her black maid is not only completely ignored by Cixous, but could
also be instrumental in deconstructing Cixous’s tirelessly repeated
notion that there is something intrinsically good or pacifistic in her
proposal that otherness must be respected at all costs. As Lispector’s
plot undeniably indicates, what moves G.H. in her violent attempt to
‘erase’ the maid’s traces and ‘writing’ from the room which did not
belong to her and, ultimately, what triggers G.H.’s final revelation about
the cockroach’s true wisdom is exactly the outrage she feels towards
the fact that the maid somehow refused to stay put in her subaltern
role. In this particular instance, the respect which should be paid to
otherness – or the ‘extreme fidelity’ allegedly owed to difference – is
undoubtedly also a violent effort to keep the subaltern as the true
opposite of the dominant. Similarly, it is the same ambiguous proposal
of a supposedly pacifistic, feminine economy which seems to allow
Cixous to consider G.H.’s killing and absorption of the insect as a
‘perfect communion’ with otherness. However, considering the actual
plot of Lispector’s text, which seems to suggest precisely the
impossibility of a perfectly harmonic coexistence with the other, how
can we possibly learn from G.H.’s undoubtedly aggressive relationship
with her maid and with the cockroach that the other ‘must be respected