Jamieson Webster in The Paris Review:
In her 1977 novel Angst, Hélène Cixous names the quarter hour of Great Suffering—“straight away,” “never again”—when the mother lays the child on the tiles and does not return. Angst divides us: either to remain in unending anguish, or to move to the anguish of an unendingness. This is the threshold into which the text plunges the reader.
Suddenly what we never knew is known: we are tossed out to the no place that no one ever leaves. To the unending … This is exactly what I feared, the worst. Towards which corridors were sweeping me at growing speed, and I couldn’t slow down, and I didn’t dare wake up, I was so afraid to find that what it was going to say would be forever true.
We come to a woman who has lived this angst to the final hour. There was no relief for her, having lived in and through hopelessness and no-hope, a radical expulsion and the solitude of “facing a faceless wall.” Yet from either side of this fault, one can continue loving, there where it perishes again and again—this is the hand Cixous holds out to us. In her postscript, she writes: “So there was a woman who had taken women’s suffering and their fear upon her without giving way to despair; a woman capable of confronting the Law and its pawns, without letting herself be caught by their sleights of hand, their mirror games, their ivory towers.” Because she was able to be present to herself, there may be “another writing.”
More here.
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