Oxford Essays
Writer of the Dark: Fiction and Fact in Women’s Writing
At the outset, it is always dark. The final moments before slumber is broken, the pages within the closed book, the television screen prior to the picture-show, the theatre before the performance commences. Any subsequent reception of stimulus, artistic or otherwise, is ever preceded by a period of darkness. Such is so in women’s writing – the life of women, for that matter. For it is a constant hocus portraying ourselves. It is a perpetual fallace relaying our truth. Writing, as an act, is a creative gust from a limitless place, in the realm of Hélène Cixous. Onto the writer it blows. But from where does this wind pick up? What is this limitless place? What is the ‘truth’ and how do we write it? ‘We,’ in the preceding phrases and all those hereafter, refers to women and those in fundamental opposition to the patriarchy and its confidants. From the darkness our life-song comes. It is in the darkness we were born, and from this place, we create. To configure the woman, the writer, the world, let us begin at the start, when all is set in dark.
Hélène Cixous – French feminist theorist, literary philosopher, poetic sorceress – lays the groundwork for women in writing, of all genres, in all languages. Her prose interlaces the singularities of a gendered existence with an expansive poetic charm. The opening passage of her 1986 collection, Coming to Writing and Other Essays, depicts an act of genesis,
“What had reached me, so powerfully cast from a human body, was Beauty: there was a face, with all the mysteries inscribed and preserved on it; I was before it, I sensed that there was a beyond, to which I did not have access, an unlimited place […] A desire was seeking its home. I was that desire. I was the question” (Cixous 1).
Cixous presents writing as an intrinsic desire, something thrust upon her from an “unlimited place” as well as from a human body. She names it Beauty, illustrated as a figure standing opposite. This writing has agency, in that it cast onto her. Such a portrayal is interesting in that it differs from what language and writing have conceived themselves to be: an act sprung forth from the consciousness of the writer. When we flip this notion on its rear, the writer is exposed, left to experience the writing. In this fissure, where the meaning strikes the soul, one can perhaps retain the truth. It is there, in the living of the moment. Translating this rusk, this creative blow, into written words, involves turning over the notion, setting it right side up, and thus altering it from its true form. Though we can record what is true, some sliver along the process is wrixled. And so, (a multitude of questions unfurl before us), is writing intrinsically separate from truth? Or is the act of writing enmeshed in truth, delivering the message of that limitless place? And the question of the woman? Cixous imparts on this inquest of subjectivity as she goes on,
Write? but if I wrote ‘I,’ who would I be? I could pass for ‘I’ in daily life without knowing anything more about it, but write without knowing I-Who, how could I have done that? I had no right. Wasn’t writing the realm of the Truth? Isn’t the Truth clear, distinct, and one? And I was blurry, several, simultaneous, impure. Give it up! (29).
Passing for ‘I’ is a feminine pre-requisite. The individual presented to the public sphere is a coat of many colours hung at our doorway tagged with a capital ‘I.’ We wear it well. But to write from inside of our study, to study inside of the self, entails a swindle of immense proportions. Cixous is correct; when one writes about themselves, we expect to read a diary, scrupulous and true. We expect answers to the question “Who are you?” Cixous first questions the writing. The repetition of “Write?” within her essay reinforces a frequent questioning – both of writing and the self. Perhaps here, woman is the question, and writing a means of asking.
Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own plays with this conundrum beautifully. She proposes that perhaps the question that we are, as women, is not able to be answered, as “one cannot hope to tell the truth” (Woolf 1178). The ‘truth’ as we know it is just that – substantiated by the public, the perceiver, the reader. The woman’s story is only made true if the receiver believes it to be so. In this case, why not have some fun?
Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is work keeping…call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please – it is not a matter of any importance… (Woolf 1178).
Woolf begins her essay by denouncing any fixed truth. She places ‘truth’ in the hands of the reader to be molded. Her identity as author is trivial, as is our nature as women, as writers. Calling her by name is of no importance for your conception of truth will not change. Shapeshifter and woman-writer are synonymous, as Cixous’ identity of “several” would evoke. In her chapter The Character of ‘Character’ from Volleys of Humanity, she defines ‘character’ as “the servant of a certain order that parades itself across the theatre of writing” (43). In the same manner, writing as a woman involves masquerade. Joan Rivière’s discussion of layering the “womanliness” in order to conceal woman’s fundamental masculinity involves placing on the mask of “woman” (Rivière, Womanliness as a Masquerade 306). The truth at the core of woman is disguise. We each assume multiple roles in the making of this performance. When we are asked to write our truth, we must write a fable. For the idea of woman in every sphere is a fabrication. What Woolf does so well, and what all women mechanically excel at, is fiction. Overlaying the woman. The more honest our writing, the darker it is, the more questions it raises. It brings forth the beast while simultaneously concealing it. Women’s writing can likewise be defined according to Cixous, in part “a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss” (Coming to Writing 3).
“Without it – my death – I wouldn’t have written” (Cixous, Coming to Writing 36). Cixous illustrates death – the tearing of the throat, the decomposing of the body, and the revival of the self – as a process that writing can and cannot reproduce. Her texts, she says, are “born” of her death (36). What occurs during death is unspeakable, yet there are certain “universal traits in our passage to death” (37) that writing can convey. In these universal traits perhaps, the ‘truth’ is buried deep. At our core lies the harmonious song of humanity. Looking upon truth in this way – the collective experience of death – then Cixous is correct in saying that “life is fragile and death holds the power.” (24) Death does indeed hold the power, the power that fastens Humanity to itself, Cixous and Derrida would argue. Jacques Derrida’s influence on Cixous and her writing manifests in her chapter Volleys of Humanity, when she comments on Derrida’s discussion of reading. She says, “(‘to read is always to read in the absence of the author’ adds Jacques Derrida. To which I add that to write is likewise to write in the absence of the author) […] one will have to enter into a living-dead, absent-present relation with the presumed signatory scene of this text” (Cixous 264). Derrida’s comment connects to Cixous’ discussion of binaries in the sense of the writer being absent, dead, in the dark, while one reads. Cixous’ addition complicates this, in that the writer is dead as she is writing. She is present as absent, dead and yet living. The figment of herself haunts herself as she writes. Her true self, inhabiting the spectral realms, is present at the time of creation. In this way, fact floats among the fiction, haunting it, ever so closely. Fiction can resemble the fact as easily as a woman’s ghost resembles her. The physicality is what appears the same, but the interior, the metaphysical, is slightly altered. Thus, writing fiction actively pursues the experience of death, the ever-present fellow we know so very well.