Aller à la mer

Aller ala merI HELENE CIXOUS translated by Barbara Kerslake How, as women, can we go to the theatre without lending our complicity to the sadism directed against women, or being asked to assume, in the patriarchal family structure that the theatre reproduces ad infinitum, the position ofvictim? Who is this victim? She is always the Father's daughter, his sacrificial object, guardian of the phallus, upholding the narcissistic fantasy which helps the Father to ward off the threat of castration. Like Electra or Antigone, she is eliminated. Or, like Ophelia, she is three times condemned to be buried alive by the three jealous father-figures - Polonius, Laertes and Hamlet - who are in agreement only in laying down the law to her: "Be thou woman, be mad about me, get thee to a nunnery." Locked up and put away. Ifshe is Ophelia, her body banned and her soul violated, she will never have lived. And if, like Cordelia, she finds the strength to assert a femininity which refuses to be the mirror ofher father's raving, she will die. For in every man there is a dethroned King Lear who requires his daughter to idealize him by her loving words and build him up, howeverflat he may have fallen, into the man he wishes to appear: "Tell me that I am the greatest, the me-est, the most like a king, or I'll kill you." With even more violence than fiction, theatre, which is built according to the dictates of male fantasy, repeats and intensifies the horror of the murder scene which is at the origin of all cultural productions. It is always necessary for a woman to die in order for the play to begin. Only when she has disappeared can the curtain go up; she is relegated to repression, to the grave, the asylum, oblivion and silence. When she does make an appearance, she is doomed, ostracized or in a waiting-room. She is loved only when absent or abused, a phantom or a fascinating abyss. Outside and also beside herself. That is why I stopped going to the theatre; it was like going to my own funeral, and it does not produce a living woman or (and this is no accident) her body or even her unconSCIOUS. Aller ala mer 547 This "Vieux Jeu" (Old Hat/Old Game) still involves playing the Role, maintaining the ancien regime ofperformance and mirror-gazing;.it encourages the double perversion of voyeurism and exhibitionism, and the division of labour and of "jouissance" (pleasure) (who is "in" the theatre, who works, who is exploited by whom?), and it reinforces the opposition between the real and the imaginary which benefits those in whose interests the pretence exists. Appearing in all the circuses, courtrooms and other scenes of society where men are going to put themselves on display and revel in the sight, the Old Man is overdoing it these days; this is the heyday of directors indulging in ostentation, with too much reliance on elaborate sets, glitz and clever props. If I go to the theatre now, it must be a political gesture, with a view to changing, with the help of other women, its means of production and expression. It is high time that women gave back to the theatre its fortunate position, its raison d' etre and what makes it different - the fact that there it is possible to get across the living, breathing, speaking body, whereas the cinema screens us from reality by foisting mere images upon us. I say "Women," not "daughters." Le Portrait de Dora was the first step for me in a long journey; it was a step that badly needed to be taken, so that a woman's voice could be heard2 for the first time, so that she could cry out, "I'm not the one who is dumb. I am silenced by your inability to hear." Again, this is a scene with the Father, but it is a scene in which the relationship is broken off; in the end Dora walks out, leaving the "Vieux Je" (Old Ego/Old Hat) behind her. This journey takes her from dependence, through suffering, until she exits onto...