Coming to Writing and Other Essays by Hélène Cixous

Coming to Writing and Other Essays Reviews

• 
  Jonfaith

  If Kafka had been a woman. If Rilke had been born a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger had been able to stop being German, if he written the Romance of the Earth.
  
  Thus Cixous waxes on Clarice Lispector. Lispector is a recurring theme throughout this collection of essays. Her first bane becomea becalmed verb. I have always wanted to read Lispector and these essays didn't really affect that. I liked Stigmata much more than Coming To Writing, though the titular piece does reach the incredible. Cixous broaches other arts here, music and painting and I was left unable to prosper. Underfunded and footsore. So it goes. When you're down and out.
  
  There appears to be two thrusts of Cixous' work: the "fictional" narrative pieces and these more abrupt meditations. I am not sure where to place her works on Derrida: somewhere outside of genre walls, clinging to hyphens entwined in great vats of distilled bliss. That would be my technical assessment, anyway.
  
• 
  Vicky

  somewhat exhausted from reading this for like ten hours straight and the effect was this lyrical but repetitive meditation on writing, on clarice lispector, etc. thus i feel drained: blind underwater when will this be over but oh wait i think i like this: the whole time. to know how to not know. yes. will come back to this later.
  
  meditation needs no results. meditation can have itself as an end, i meditate without words and on nothingness. what tangles my life is writing.
  
  
• 
  and

  Coming to Writing is a wonderful and inspiring essay, a little like The Laugh of Medusa, published only a year before (1975). It's a cosmogony of love. Love as a force, language and source of self-expression, resulting from an alienating reality: intimately, the experience of the author as a jewish german expatriate in Algeria, universally, as being a woman.
  

  "There is a language that I speak or that speaks (to) me in all tongues. A language at once unique and universal that resounds in each national tongue when a poet speaks in it. In each tongue, there flows milk and honey. And this language I know, I don’t need to enter it, it surges from me, it flows, it is the milk of love, the honey of my unconscious. The language that women speak when no one is there to correct them."

  
  The other essays instead are a little less evocatively strong, even if written with the same hypnotical prose, I found them a bit confusing. A great variety of themes are analyized in all the texts: religion, music, writing, medioeval epics, painting, bodies and sexuality; some of which I have a rather small knowledge of. For exemple: Clarice Lispector and her works are frequently cited, not only in the essay dedicated to her, Clarice Lispector: The Approch, but also in By the Light of an Apple and The Author in Truth, and since I haven't read her yet I doubt I grasped all the references rightly. Although, I greatly appreciated the latter essay cited, which offers an interesting comparison between the different but almost interchangeable entities of the writer, the reader and the character, and The Last Painting or the Portrait of God, which compares figurative art, in particular, citing the works of Rembrandt, Monet, but also Van Gogh, with the art of writing, in a quest for fidelity and the pure not-idealistical rappresentation.
  

  "Reading, I discovered that writing is endless. Everlasting. Eternal. Writing or God. God the writing. The writing God. I had only to break in and train my appetites."

  
  Cixous truly is THE Goddess of formally disrupted feminist essays!
• 
  David Haws

  “This is our problem as writers. We who must paint with brushes all sticky with words. We who must swim in language as if it were pure and transparent, though it is troubled by phrases already heard a thousand times. We who must clear a new path with each thought through thickets of clichés.” (p. 114)
  
  Reading Cixous is a dialectic experience; unfortunately for every gem such as the above, one has to wade through turgid quagmires such as:
  
  “So the truth, which appears inside of the night, in the warm depths of a dream, and then only, peacefully undresses before me and smiling comes slipping I do not know how over my innermost body, and caresses my heart, and—then—the sweet softness of her breasts—and this is what absolute knowledge is—(it isn’t surprising if what I am writing is not sufficiently clear, since not a single word ever returns from the luminous depths where our truth lives. The few words that come close are transformed into sighs)—so the truth which only lives in the shelter of silence is forced to appear, and then is like a fish pulled from the water, thinking in a final convulsion of the sea, then, the end.” (pp. 99-100)
  
  I admire Cixous’s willingness to take chances with her writing, and I’m sure she works marvelously for what she sees as her audience, but writing is one-way communication, achieved one reader at a time, and as Nietzsche seemed to prove, the line between enlightenment and insanity is not always apparent. Cixous’s style is too heavy on the rant.
  
• 
  Nicholas

  Writing is to die/Writing is to live.
• 
  Dana

  this woman has changed the way I read and see forever, there is no turning back after this.
• 
  Myrthe Meester

  Ontvankelijkheid is de toestand vanwaaruit Cixous probeert te schrijven en die ze hoopt op te roepen bij haar lezers. Ontvankelijkheid voor de parelachtige schoonheid van de gewone dingen des levens. Clarice Lispector, aan wie ze twee essays heeft gewijd, is daarin haar grote voorbeeld.
  
  Heideggeriaanse filosofie met een feministische insteek.
• 
  sara

  Bro, I'm dumb DUMB.
• 
  Caitlin

  swoon.
• 
  Dave

  When in France...
• 
  Sarahc Caflisch

  I had to clear the decks and just focus all of my teeny brain on Cixous' "Coming to Writing."
• 
  Carole

  will write something later, maybe.
• 
  Kate Davis

  rec'd by Jes Kast-Keat for women's history month
• 
  Ann Bogle

  The best paper I wrote is about this book. I bought it again recently to have it on the shelf.
• 
  Iosune García

  «Que la carne escribe y es dada a leer; y a escribir».
• 
  Carrie

  Gorgeous. Brain-breaking. Lyrical. Life-changing.