In her 1976 essay "The Laugh of the Medusa" Cixous envisions and exemplifies "women's writing" which is one devoid of phallogocentric tropes, free from the restrictive logic that governs Western literary texts, and most of all a writing which reflects the female unconscious, an infinite mental realm, "the place where the repressed managed to survive," which to sublate will incur, "the emancipation of the marvelous text of her self," (Cixous 880). Conceptualizing what this kind of writing might look like, other than that which is exhibited by Cixous, is difficult as it is supposed to function as an "antilogos weapon" that, "will always surpass the discourse that regulates the phallocentric system," (883). However, Cixous does provide some authors who have approached this hypothetical idea, namely Genet and Joyce1 ,the latter of whom will occupy my focus, since Cixous claims that Ulysses's Penelope episode has carried Joyce's magnum opus, "off beyond any book and toward the new writing," (884). Hopefully by comparing the stylistics of Cixous' essay and Molly Bloom's transcendent meditation2 , as well as considering the criteria put forth by Cixous in her essay, I'll be able to demystify what an Écriture Féminine might look like, or at least divine some essential features.
The most striking resemblance between Cixous' essay and Joyce's heroine might be termed their "stream of consciousness" styles, which is likely an injudicious use of the term in the case of the former, but I assume it was necessary for Cixous to be less freely associative and use actual punctuation since the essay intends to be primarily expository. The real point here being that both texts share a similar atmosphere brought on by their structure; both have a cyclic nature about them, alluding to an idea then leaving the thought unfinished until many pages later which establishes a certain repetition of key phrases. For instance in Joyce we see Molly musing at various points over Andalusian girls and the slow build up of her affirmative refrain (perhaps representing the female orgasm?), and in Cixous we have at first the subtle allusions to women as monsters culminating in the Medusa comparison, as well as the motif she establishes between women and various fluids like blood, water, oil, amniotic fluid, and vaginal discharge. Additionally neither are particularly concerned with sentence-by-sentence cohesion, which is to say that both are markedly bereft of transitions, although peculiarly this lack does not effect the overall "logic" or more accurately, semantic intentionality of the texts. Furthermore both texts display an unabashed representation of female sexuality at times engendering an intentional discomfort in the reader due to the text's lack of censorship/euphemism, if only to bring the reader face-to-face with their own misconceptions. The effect of this is two-fold: on one hand it's an extremely effective middle-finger to phallocentric psychoanalysts, to quote Molly Bloom, "O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care," (Joyce 749), and more abstractly this preoccupation with the feminine mystique gives the writing its characteristic rhythm, its musicality, its lilt, which for both Cixous and Molly, is a latent quality of femininity - "my body knows unheard-of songs," (Cixous 876) - this is how both texts ebb and flow, both rising toward ebullient ecstasy yet also sustaining a composure during stasis.
These considerations bring me to the most notable and seemingly essential quality of a female writing - the fact that it seems necessary for it to pour out from the unconscious, for apparently Joyce felt it imperative to invent an entirely new kind of writing in order to do any justice to his surprise heroine. It should also be noted that the primary trope in Ulysses up until the Penelope episode is pastiche i.e. mimetic art, which Joyce felt was adequate for Leopold and Stephen Dedalus, although clearly insufficient for Molly. Likewise Cixous proclaims "infinite woman" who has detached her self from the finite world, the world of the body, fearing, "the fantastic tumult of her drives," for to embrace that which stirs inside her would be suicide. The only way to regain this unique empire is to inscribe the Écriture Féminine, to replace the phallus with the omphalos and break the surrogate syntactical umbilical cord that threads together the fragile masculinist logocentrism.
The most striking resemblance between Cixous' essay and Joyce's heroine might be termed their "stream of consciousness" styles, which is likely an injudicious use of the term in the case of the former, but I assume it was necessary for Cixous to be less freely associative and use actual punctuation since the essay intends to be primarily expository. The real point here being that both texts share a similar atmosphere brought on by their structure; both have a cyclic nature about them, alluding to an idea then leaving the thought unfinished until many pages later which establishes a certain repetition of key phrases. For instance in Joyce we see Molly musing at various points over Andalusian girls and the slow build up of her affirmative refrain (perhaps representing the female orgasm?), and in Cixous we have at first the subtle allusions to women as monsters culminating in the Medusa comparison, as well as the motif she establishes between women and various fluids like blood, water, oil, amniotic fluid, and vaginal discharge. Additionally neither are particularly concerned with sentence-by-sentence cohesion, which is to say that both are markedly bereft of transitions, although peculiarly this lack does not effect the overall "logic" or more accurately, semantic intentionality of the texts. Furthermore both texts display an unabashed representation of female sexuality at times engendering an intentional discomfort in the reader due to the text's lack of censorship/euphemism, if only to bring the reader face-to-face with their own misconceptions. The effect of this is two-fold: on one hand it's an extremely effective middle-finger to phallocentric psychoanalysts, to quote Molly Bloom, "O let them all go and smother themselves for the fat lot I care," (Joyce 749), and more abstractly this preoccupation with the feminine mystique gives the writing its characteristic rhythm, its musicality, its lilt, which for both Cixous and Molly, is a latent quality of femininity - "my body knows unheard-of songs," (Cixous 876) - this is how both texts ebb and flow, both rising toward ebullient ecstasy yet also sustaining a composure during stasis.
These considerations bring me to the most notable and seemingly essential quality of a female writing - the fact that it seems necessary for it to pour out from the unconscious, for apparently Joyce felt it imperative to invent an entirely new kind of writing in order to do any justice to his surprise heroine. It should also be noted that the primary trope in Ulysses up until the Penelope episode is pastiche i.e. mimetic art, which Joyce felt was adequate for Leopold and Stephen Dedalus, although clearly insufficient for Molly. Likewise Cixous proclaims "infinite woman" who has detached her self from the finite world, the world of the body, fearing, "the fantastic tumult of her drives," for to embrace that which stirs inside her would be suicide. The only way to regain this unique empire is to inscribe the Écriture Féminine, to replace the phallus with the omphalos and break the surrogate syntactical umbilical cord that threads together the fragile masculinist logocentrism.
1 It should be noted here that while Cixous favors a feminine essentialism which would later incite its own criticism, that she does not however exempt male authors from the ability to accurately portray women. She just thinks it's quite rare.↩ 2 For lack of a better term. Like many episodes in Ulysses this episode evades simplistic description.↩
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