La Cosmogonie d'Hélène Cixous by Claudine Guégan Fisher (review)

246Rocky Mountain Review The patronage system, Evans argues, was a psychological one grounded in hierarchical assumptions and consequently on high-pressure competition. In such a world the clashes of personality must be made to seem conflicts of values or ideals; flattery must be made to seemjustly deserved praise; self-promotion must seem concern for the best interests of the other party. As Evans submits, this image ofthe poet is at odds with the Romantic version ofpoet as "self-discoverer, as self-presenter, as maker and wearer of masks" (38). He adds chapters on the masques and plays, also depicting Jonson as a self-promoter, always aware of the micropolitical circumstances of the presentation. May we congratulate ourselves for having come a long way since such benighted times? Contemporary poets, especially in the United States, can get away in their work with a recklessness bordering on libel and slander that would probably have astounded Jonson and the other patronage poets of the seventeenth century. Unhappily, this fact does not imply that poetry thrives in our time; rather, it suggests that the poet no longer matters. Even the most vitriolic and vituperous poem levelled at a public figure in the U.S. today is most likely to be neglected, to be shrugged off with even greater indifference than that reserved for political cartoons, or worse, to be unread. RONALD E. McFARLAND University ofIdaho CLAUDINE GUÉGAN FISHER. La Cosmogonie d'Hélène Cixous. Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 1988. 382 p. Hélène Cixous is one ofFrance's best known contemporary authors. Read mostly by women, who know her for her theoretical work on women's writing, she contributed in developing the concept of "écriture féminine" to designate the specific relationship between gender and literature, the specific influence of the feminine body on writing. Co-founder of Poétique with Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov, founder and director ofthe Centre de recherche et d'études féminines at the University of Paris-Vincennes, she is often referred to for her feminism and, as a writer, she has been the object of very few studies, perhaps because ofthe difficulty of some of her writings, or perhaps because ofthe peculiar traditions ofFrench studies concerning living authors. So it is of no surprise that the first comprehensive study of Cixous's works would come from the United States, although published in Amsterdam. Claudine Guégan Fisher's La Cosmogonie d'Hélène Cixous is a thematic study well inspired by the works of French theoreticians such as Gaston Bachelard and Maurice Blanchot. Though I usually have reservations about this kind of study I must admit that in this case, the study allows for an unusual reading of the author's fiction from Le Prénom de Dieu (1967) to Pour Nelson Mandela (1986). Fisher does not content herself with repeating well known opinions on Cixous's theoretical or feminist thinking. Nor does she repeat well known ideas Book Reviews247 about the importance of "écriture féminine" in literary works by women. She goes beyond theories, into the text, to find out how these ideas translate into images or themes, and to analyze the particular ways in which these images and themes evolve from one text to another to create a very specific universe or "cosmogonie." Fisher is well informed of Cixous's life as a child and young girl in Algeria before independence, as a "pied-noir" in French universities, as a writer in academia , and of her ascendance as a German Jew. She uses this material well, not to explain, but as a key in her interpretation of specific cultural elements. She reflects on Cixous's interest in the works ofJames Joyce, Jean Genêt, and Clarice Lispector as a clue to intertextuality even though she does not indulge in a specific study of such exchange. Her aim is to show the specific experience a woman writer goes through. Themes and images are therefore researched first for their value in representing origins, birth, and eventually death, and as clues to a movement going through maternal and paternal bodies. Fisher then studies images of love and sexuality as well as sexual...