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TDR: The Drama Review 45.3 (2001) 174-176



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Book Review

Stigmata:
Escaping Texts


Stigmata: Escaping Texts. By Hélène Cixous. New York and London: Routledge, 1998; 198 pp.; illustrations. $19.99 paper.

We never reach a goal hoped for. But we can reach a goal unhoped for. (Cixous 1998:145)

I am weeks behind deadline, struggling to alight upon the right metaphor for this book. Its singular universe demands a metaphor. Words unfurling like flowers--too romantic. Theme and variations, or fugue--too intellectual. I begin to write now because I realize that Cixous supplied her own metaphor from the beginning:

Daedalus revealed the secret of the labyrinth's exit to Ariadne to help her save Theseus, who had been sent to confront the Minotaur in the labyrinth no one can leave. All it takes is not letting go of the thread.

This is also a lesson in reading, when you are in the labyrinth of a text, and a text is a labyrinth, a text which was not a labyrinth would not be a text, a labyrinth has its coherence, the rooms communicate with one another, and as a rule one cannot escape, which is a good thing, one must enter the labyrinth of a text with a thread. (105) [End Page 174]

Stigmata is a text that I alternately desired and loathed to escape. At times that thread was woven closely around me like a blanket, and at other times it was a suffocating fit. A delicate warp and woof, a magnificent texere. Cixous is at once Ariadne, the reader who enters the text, and Daedalus, the writer who offers her reader a thread.

My body preferred to read the book when alert but not wide-awake, resting but not drowsy. It required a certain receptivity, gathered in twilight rather than the afternoon's glare. I wrote that before reading this: "To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions. I do not want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the skin of the light" (139).

Cixous's labyrinth is built out of essays, in the truest (French) sense of the word, "to try." The essays make their way in intricate pas and sudden turns, without apparent order, imprinting the contingent twists and turns of Cixous's limber and cavorting mind. Her reading of Rembrandt is not just a reading of a painting but a portrait of her own reading--a series of connections, reconsiderations, refractions, reflections. Movements, in other words. As seductive to me on the page as on the stage. "It's not a question of drawing the contours," Cixous writes, "but of what escapes the contour, the secret movement, the breaking, the torment, the unexpected" (24). What escapes is the very instant we're trying to render. "This is why we desire so often to die, when we write, in order to see everything in a flash, and at least once shatter the spine of time with only one pencil stroke. And with only one word draw God..." (31).

The dozen essays, originally published in French from 1991 to 1997, cohere around the ideas of mortal wounds and writerly resurrection, and stretched between them is the thread of departure. Departure from home, self, life, other, and lover. Cixous reads myths, paintings and drawings, novels, and autobiography in order to make sense of death, the ultimate departure, which is much on her mind after reaching 50.

So to stave off time and death, Cixous embraces the passing show:

I have the feeling that I always write from the perspective of what passes away. [...] This is why I've always had a passion for a particular kind of book: books that get away. Understand this by letting language resonate: books that get away, that escape on every page the fate of books. That can't be closed, that leave us behind, that can't be finished. (44)

If we are located...

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