It’s Not Too Late: On Hélène Cixous’ “Well-Kept Ruins”
Hélène Cixous, transl. Beverley Bie Brahic | Well-Kept Ruins | Seagull Books | 2022 | 156 Pages
Of ruins there are two kinds.
In 2016, a friend and I took a trip to Vietnam. As we traveled south to west along the country’s verdant, stippled landscape, she took the opportunity one sultry June morning to wrestle my reluctant self (ruinous, hungover) into an early-morning bus to Mỹ Sơn, a protected complex of Hindu temples from the Kingdom of Champa, dating back to the fourth century. We drifted amidst the earthen structures, their partial elegance beaten by weather, by time, by humanity’s terrors. The brick and sandstone were hemmed with tropical vine, toning the ancient buildings into harmony with the tufted grasses and the thin-trunked forest that branched out in its peripheral. It was as if this space had grown from the earth, or had rippled out from the trees—from a realm that should not belong to us, that we had trespassed into. The past was inextricably, absurdly, knotted with the present; I could not see the places where the two joined.
Within the confines of the sanctuary, away from the most outstanding remains—which still held, by solemnity if not by opulence, a mark of their sanctity—was a diminutive and almost accidental scattering of stones. There, our guide, a perky man with a penchant for melodrama, had just finished waxing poetic about the constitution of mortar-less architecture. What used to be here? I asked him, gesturing towards the nowhere-structure. This? His eyes opened wide. Nobody knows.
I asked another question, equally superfluous, And what was it for?
Nobody knows, he exclaimed. His hands, in front of him, beckoned upwards, seeming to throw my words, invisible, into the skies.
•
The titular ruins of Hélène Cixous’ Well-Kept Ruins are pronounced after the author’s son utters a quiet sentiment: “It requires explanation if you don’t know what it is.” The year is 2018, and the family—Cixous, her son, her daughter, and a friend—are standing in front of the incinerated synagogue in a northwestern German town, Osnabrück. This netted, neatly contained rubble is all that remains of the holy building after November 9, 1938—Kristallnacht—and the surrounding town is the childhood home of Eve, the author’s mother. Having left Germany in 1928 for Algeria, Eve was not, as she states, “driven away” from the town: “I’ve always managed to escape before I was expelled… I’m free.” With this simple, radical dissonance, Eve excises herself from the greater blueprint of terror, charts her own serrated personhood upon the wide maps, relegates her youth to memory, and the perhaps-future she might’ve had to the sleeping recesses of impossibilities. It is these dark spaces, these ruins, that her daughter pursues at a running pace: to examine Ostnabrück with one sharp eye on its documented horrors, and another on invisible records, those written not in stone but engraved in consciousness, in echoes, incalculable resonances. Stemming out from the pile of stones (which Cixous succinctly, heartrendingly describes as “in perfect condition”) is a genealogical site from where a stranger, more amorphous monument emerges: one that pays tribute to the burden of time we each carry on our backs, which constitute the grander edifice of human history. This monument searches ever outward, gathering more and more questions, more and more momentum, grasping at remnants, delusions, annotations, apparitions—all for an explanation. Not the what-used-to-be-here or what-was-it-for, but an explanation of gone-ness itself. The testament of Well-Kept Ruins is of anti-closure, of how we rebuild imaginary palaces, vast and tenuous estates of maybe, around the fragments that lie still before us, but that which we know are not at rest.
To read Cixous, one must first unburden language from any absolutism. She has been novelist, critic, playwright, philosopher, and her authorship insists on the multiplicity of not only genre but of identity. Her writing is porous, her I is numerous. As such, the landscape that she paves on the page is not static; it shifts, startles, bends the bars of time and grammar. The page is a rippling course of fabric, billowing and catching the shape of the wind as it comes from any direction, from outside the mind or inside it. The words upon it, then, are also made suppler, more pliable. They are conscious of their ability to create. They do not serve to pin down any discrete moment, emotion, or vision, but to fray at the edges of all those purportedly solid things, to represent the reality of writing, which is always stealing little elements from the past and the future, the dreamed and the factual, the embodied and the phantom, in order to collage together something new that resembles the experience of the present, or, as she once called it, “the movements of the soul.”
Knowing this, one can say that Well-Kept Ruins is “taking place” in Osnabrück, to mean that the text is pushing at the boundaries of Osnabrück, testing its limits, defying its definitions. Instead of operating within the rules of place as a clearly defined location, Cixous is delineating the vast and delimited capacities of placeness using the tool of Osnabrück. Three pages in, she says as much: “Osnabrück is a fiction.” When she travels to the town (for what is now the third time), she walks its streets, she considers its signs, the “immortal blue” of the sky. She treads the narrow paths along which the theatre of the past plays itself to her: the sixteenth-century witch trials, the replacement of a family home by a modern café, the Swedish exodus, the scenes of her mother’s youth. The past explodes the present; it is no different with place. We see Cixous’ consciousness bringing her whole world into the endless capacity that is here-ness. She says that Osnabrück is a telephone:
I listen! I lift the receiver and my memories are on the line, they crowd in, populous, not just the one keeping the line open, which isn’t easy, needless to say, but a throng of borrowed memories grafted onto mine, cutting in, entangling me.
This first section of the book is entitled “To the Centre of the Centre of the World,” and this center, she explains, is where one stands in order to look at everything. To ascertain the authority of a storyteller, one has to take ownership of the middle: to be equidistant from every subject, to become the intersection. In refracting these hollow tunnels and voiceless facades with her myriad life, her prismatic projections, in using her own language to talk to its ghosts, Osnabrück itself is transposed into the center, metamorphosed into a moon from where Cixous looks at the whole world, attempting to make out the distance. We are given glimpses at the horrors, this “Hanoverian city historically watered by a few rivers of blood.” We are made aware of the frame that encloses this private portrait, but we are also constantly propelled onward by the writing’s urgent need to transgress the records, the archives, the articles of destruction. The past is dead, but Cixous is alive, and she resurrects only what she thinks of, what incites her, what comes to her mind. Through this persistent act of journeying, the grand gesticulations of the twentieth century come to be concentrated in the beloved, diaphanous figure of a woman: her mother.
In the first book she wrote about Osnabrück, published in 1999, Cixous’ mother was still alive, and in that text, the writer was hyper-conscious of what instilling an autonomous presence onto the page would mean: “I cannot write about my mother alive,” she ascertains, and immediately follows, “or dead… writing about her is to walk over her body while she sleeps all busy taking her dream trains but not writing about her is to forget her deliberately under a leaf of paper, how not to betray her there is only betrayal.” For a writer who is sensitive to the variousness of things, there is a violence in trying to depress a vibrant, complex being into impressions—especially the maternal being, for which there is no position to write from except that of the daughter. There is a risk too in bringing the mother’s past selves—when she was not a mother—back to life, for it would only provoke an annihilation between the extant and the no-longer. In Cixous’ ethics, one can write about oneself in the third-person, with distance, with even a bit of provocation, but to do the same to another is an act of robbery. The overpowering gigantism of the mother figure, inseparable from the child and the child-feeling, dampens the power of words to stand alone, to fantasize, to collude with the universe and invent the unknown. For Cixous, the love she has for her mother presents a confounding dilemma: How can she write about her mother’s past without obliterating the present-version of her? How can she write about Eve without writing about Mama?
In Well-Kept Ruins, Eve has died. And it does not take much effort to exhume the grief that gives rein to the lyrical flood of prose—but there is also a distinct note of liberation; Cixous is able to write about her mother without the agony of dividing her into pieces. At the beginning of the book, Eve walks ahead of her, telling her to follow, and one almost sees Cixous smiling as she ruminates: “It’s strange how in dreams and on our magic walks she is forever trotting along in front of me despite her one hundred and three years of age.” It’s a passage at once casual and brutal; Eve can only walk now by way of magic. And throughout the flurry and discursions of Well-Kept Ruins, such lines and emotional currents thread the constellating words into a force: of compassions, of remembrance, of the preservations that we exact through imaginings. No longer theorizing about the consequences of writing about her mother, Cixous reaches across the divide. In the text, Eve speaks. She answers questions that her daughter never asked in her lifetime. She recounts her time as a midwife, as an exile, as a prisoner. She explains her choices. Her memories are transcribed in her voice. Mother and daughter are mesmerized in this eternal conversation, one that spans as widely and as ambitiously as life itself. One of Cixous’ imperatives is that writing should always act against finality, against death; now, with that most difficult and ungathered subject, she evokes that power.
As the poet Alan Feldman wrote, “The pleasure, if there is one, is knowing we have the dead inside us / where they have to make peace with us, and never leave us.”
Cixous often wrote for the theatre, and that oratory enmeshes the text into chorus. Passages are left without full stops, fluidly feeding into the next thought, divagating into anachronous insights, the page rife with incompletions and interruptions. When the author catches herself doing this, she explains her logic with a flourish: “Viewed from the Moon the times touch.” Beverly Bie Brahic, Cixous’ longtime English translator, deftly controls the topology of these words by thinking the author into this other language, transposing this hailstorm of intuitions and suspensions into a confident voice that acknowledges meanings. Cixous’ penchant for wordplay and linguistic curios has made it famously difficult to translate her, yet the exuberant dynamism and musicality of this iteration is sensitive to humor, to outburst, to the sheer joy that the stylist commands. There is no doubt in these pages, no stuttering hesitation; Brahic’s long career as a poet heightens her ability to convey the unfurling, sentence by sentence, that is so enchanting about Cixous’ transformative craft.
In the latter sections of the book, Cixous is cleaning out her mother’s apartment, sifting through the ephemera and testaments of her life. One can read the whole book contained within the microcosm of this event, as she reaches for one artifact then another, ushering Eve’s aliveness back onto the stage, replaying the memories—embellishing here and there, and treading water upon the deep oceanic turbulence that has been, by any definition, an extraordinary life. “In her own way she sends me her autobiographies, by telepathic mail. . . she sends me them via an unusual delivery system: in drawers, cardboard boxes, suitcases, files.” Unlike the politely amassed wreckage of the synagogue, this leftover physicality is disarrayed, vivid: a manifestation of the hidden presence within absence. Cixous calls them “Well-Kept Tales.”
What haunts us about ruins, of course, is that they remain just human enough for us to recognize the cruelty of time’s funeral march. They disquietly beckon us towards death, towards the unknowable, towards the limits of our actions. A ruin is the antithesis of freedom, proudly exhibiting the reality that our brilliant inventions are doomed to be interpreted by their obsolescence. But this, too, is what draws us to them—us alive in the now, us with all our grand possessions of choice; when we look upon ruins, we feel the decadence of the past. We feel glorified to look, to wonder, to fabricate—from our privileged position of the future.
When facing Osnabrück’s demolishment of its Jewish population, Cixous’ son remarks: “The shoes on the Danube’s edge, fished up and cast in bronze, I was on the edge of tears… This sack of stones doesn’t make me cry.” But the author disagrees: “That’s what brings tears to my eyes.” The cleanness of the ruins is a camouflage, a sedation of the spectacle that is obliteration; between two beautiful houses, a whole genocide coalesces. The sorrow is in the ruin’s inability to evoke sorrow, its tacit un-mystery. With Eve’s tokens and keepsakes, however, there is so much to contemplate, to think about. A catalogue of items and elements sparks a fireworks of ponderings—Cixous and her children debate the scribble: What could she have possibly meant by “salt in soup?” They search their memories, they breach the past in search for an answer, they dissolve the unsayable strait between the living and the dead. “No one can persuade me my mother no longer exists,” she writes.
•
And the other kind of ruin?
Upon the islet of Palatia, which connects to the Cycladic island of Naxos, there stands the portara of Apollo’s temple. Never completed, the gate, a tremendous marble doorway, is the only thing that remains of a perhaps-majestic monument. I arrived on the island by way of an amorous fascination with Naxian marble, and, still vibrating from the jolt of Athens, I settled by this great outline of this crystalline geometry, carved from the island’s ancient quarries. Enclosed in a parentheses of churning waters, I watched a file of people wander by it, streaming down from the port’s bleached facade. Visitors were prohibited from passing through the doorway itself, so the crowd walked counter-clockwise around, entering its frame not from the center, but from right to left. On that October evening, the sun was casting its last ochre-crimson around the ceramic rim of sky, dipping further downward blue. The small figures went right to left, right to left as the light softened, enclosed for brief moments in the stark rectangle of stacked stones. It was a suspended mid-air painting, a cinema of removed reality. What mattered was not the gate so much as what went on in its hollows, its vacancies, its negative arenas. The building was not there. It never was. In the configuration of this freestanding doorway, one passed from the world back into the world, though only an illusion of entrance.
I followed my sightline through that perfect angular eye. Passing through. Coming out the other side. There, it was not history that greeted me, but someone smiling—looking back.