Of Three-Legged Writing: Cixous's Le jour ou je n'etais pas la

Like many, if not all, of Hélène Cixous's other texts, Le jour où je n'étais pas là offers a reflection on writing. ¹ The book is part of a recent sequence distinguished by the resurgence of the autobiographical at the forefront of the author's concerns: the three previous fictional texts revisited her relationship with, in turn, her father, her mother and her brother. ² This time, Cixous's narrator returns to the death of her Down's syndrome child forty years previously. At a first reading, the title seems to refer to the fact that she was absent from her son when he died, having given him over to her own mother's care some time previously. In many ways this autobiographical exploration is reminiscent of Rousseau's Confessions, undertaken partly in order to explain why he abandoned his children at the Hospice des Enfants Trouvés. Just as Rousseau's text is fuelled by the memory of wrongs committed many decades previously (notably the famous, or infamous, scène du ruban), Cixous's is dominated from the outset by the return of a distant "faute." The text opens with the following passage:

Comment enfouir le souvenir d'une faute qui revient d'un lointain passé? C'est l'aube, elle revient encore, il faut absolument l'enfouir. Je l'enfermai dans un pot de terre. Puis je creusai à même la terre durcie et froide et bien profondément. Sans bien sûr dire à personne ce qu'il y avait dans ce pot. Puis je l'enfonçai—un pot de la dimension d'une petite marmite d'un kilo—dans le sol et je recouvris longuement le trou de terre, de glaces, et cela malgré la présence de passants et d'enfants qui n'avaient pas la moindre idée de ce que je faisais disparaître dans ce petit cercueil improvisé.

Je me lavai les mains, essuyai sur mes joues des larmes qui m'avaient échappé.

Mes crimes, pensé-je, je les ai tous commis en Algérie. Celui-ci, c'est une faute, et ce n'est pas la mienne. (9)

Given its prefatory status, this passage invites reading metalinguistically, as a metaphor for the writing process. A number of questions immediately arise in relation to the "faute" which dominates the beginning of the text (as well as appearing at both the opening and closing of the passage, it is inscribed, most audibly in "il faut absolument...," but also in the pronounced dissemination of the [f] and [o] in enfouir, souvenir, revient, aube, encore, enfermai, pot, froide, profondément, enfonçai, kilo). On the one hand, the lexemes "enfouir," "enfermer," and especially "cercueil" give the impression that the text is above all an attempt to bury the fault, to prevent its return. In writing, the narrator would thus be (re)burying the burial. On the other hand, the choice of the "pot de terre" (rather than, for example, the "boîte," which, as we shall see, is a key signifier in the text) calls to mind a flowerpot, suggesting that the burial is designed to make the fault grow. Cixous's take on Freud's return of the repressed reads thus that what is buried is planted, and grows all the stronger for its temporary disappearance. The word "recouvris" includes the word "ouvris": viewed from a different angle, the covering over literally reveals an opening up. Towards the end of the text, further metaphors of cultivation reinforce the message that writing represents a process of exhumation, of uncovering:

je ne sais pas ce que je cherche en retournant la terre-natale sous mes propres pages, mais je reconnais que ce que je fouis c'est la terre-natale, celle à laquelle...