In the opening pages of Hélène Cixous’ Manhattan, she repeatedly writes that she’s “forever doing what [she] didn’t want to do.” Such a contradiction seems prescient to my own experience of reading Cixous’ novel. I first read Cixous in my second year Literary Theory course, where we read “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Though I remember not really loving it, when I was at The Rizzoli in Manhattan, I found Cixous’ novel on the shelf and, not realizing that she wrote novels, felt I needed to pick it up. Essentially, I did what I didn’t want to do because Manhattan is fine, but I didn’t love it.
The idea of The Letter looms over these passages, with an implicit connection to Jacques Lacan made explicit when Cixous has a conversation with him. Naturally, the idea of madness arises—Cixous tries to express the inexpressible—and Lacan diagnoses a kind of schizophrenia. Likewise, Deleuze and Guattari and their rhizomatic approach to analysis, where multiple meanings are simultaneously true, seems to be the shape of Cixous’ nonlinear storytelling: events both happened and didn’t, references to other literary works guide the understanding of experiences, simultaneous and uneasy interpretations of events persist, and so on (think Freud’s conception of the uncanny and his evocation of fort-da! (gone-there!)).
As a result, as engaging as some passages are, there isn’t really a lot to latch onto by way of plot. It’s something about the death of Cixous’ father (Oedipus, Harold Bloom’s “The Anxiety of Influence”, etc.), something about the death of her child, something about researching literature in famous libraries, something about falling in love (?) with a dying man of whom her mother disapproves and who has maybe lied about his illness, and something of trying to write about these experiences some thirty five years after the fact. The story takes place in a series of confined spaces: Room 91 at a hotel that no longer exists (or never existed?), a hospital room with an iron lung, and a reading room at a library. The fact that Cixous latches onto Kafka makes me think too of Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis, confined to his room as a vermin. There’s something to be said, too, of the similarity in names between Gregor Samsa and the other key losses of the novel: G(eorge), G(eorge), and G(eorge)—father, son, and beloved?
These linguistic plays are in constant stream throughout the novel in typical deconstructionist fashion. I can only assume that this book reads somewhat better in its original French than it does in translation. At times, I would be reading Cixous’ repetitive phraseology and it would occur to me that, in the French, she’d be exploring the echoes and hidden layers of a word. For example, New York becomes NY becomes n’y becomes not-there: the slippage of a Deconstructionist shell game. The translator’s notes point out several pun-ish-ing examples: “Nous n’avons d’yeux que pour Lui” (186), which plays on the aural similarity of d’yeux (eyes for) and dieu (God), or “ça crie: fils! Sacrifice!” (186); it’s a breakdown of the sounds of words to find implicit connections, threads that hide beneath the surface. One particular phrase stands out for its aural repetition: “tuer le tu qui me tue”, where “le tu” is “the unsaid” but also “you.” It translates to something like “killing the unsaid/you that kills me.” The translator, Beverly Bie Brahic, offers one translation note that helps to explain a key motif in the text, a place called Certes: “It is certainly true that: Certes. Certes is purportedly the name of a place; it is also an adverb, meaning ‘certainly,’ and an anagram for the word secret” (186). It’s that kind of multiplicity that leads the text. The language takes the wheel rather than any attempt at linear storytelling.
At this time, I’m torn on whether these explorations are meaningful in any particularly discernible way. On the one hand, since language is invented rather than discovered, identifying these moments of connections doesn’t seem especially groundbreaking. On the other hand, the unlikeliness of the connections do have a strangely organic quality. Perhaps Cixous is mining an interesting undercurrent; I just can’t decide whether it’s productive to do so. I might be making too many demands here, given that this is a novel and not a theoretical work—when was the last time I forced poetry to be ‘productive’? What does it mean for language to be productive, anyway?
To examine the work a bit more closely, let’s take a look at the title. The book is called Manhattan but has the subtitle Letters from Prehistory. This idea of prehistory encapsulates the nature of Cixous’ exploration. At least in part, Cixous is on the hunt for origins: when do things actually start? This is another common trope in deconstructionist thinking, most memorably encapsulated, for me, in the title and project of of Edmond Jabès’ Desire for a Beginning, Dread of One Single End.
In this way, Manhattan serves as the perfect setting, since nothing is ever finished. Cixous writes, “‘Every day, road construction crews, State and Federal transportation authorities and local developers are working to make your maps and atlases out of date,’ American Map states. Only in America could you make such an apocalyptic statement” (50). I love the apocalyptic ‘reading’ Cixous finds here, and the idea of maps and atlases being “out of date” is representative of this ambiguous search. It’s impossible for Cixous to find a beginning because the locale is always shifting and “out of date”---I read this not only as obsolete but also the apocalyptic “out of joint” in Hamlet or more modern “out of sync.”
The relationship between time and space is critical here, even and especially when it comes to writing. In crafting the work, Cixous writes, "Don’t drive today with yesterday’s map. Which means: don’t write today with yesterday’s memory. One cannot write yesterday today. One cannot write yesterday” (20). Once again, there’s a kind of impossibility to writing—to capture the moment. We are always out of sync with time, but that finds its embodiment in the map motif.
The idea of trying to anchor oneself to a place escalates in the motif of banishment, which is one of Cixous’ most comprehensibly wrought themes. She offers one paragraph that explores the relationship between space and distance from home. It reads as follows:
“I took the boat as soon as I could in my life so as to put some distance between me and one shore (and not to get to the other shore the very idea of reaching the other shore horrifies me, I never wanted the other shore except lost in advance, except vanishing, as disquieting and fascinating as it was desirable and repellent just like the dream shores of Lake Averno in which the unreal landscape with its veil of sulfurous fumes is merely the hint of imaginary countries) for once and for all I took a ticket for getting away from, not for getting close to and at this I was a big success, the getting away I got it and I never again lost it on a boat I had no port of arrival in view even when I took the giant boat for the USA it certainly wasn’t for the USA but for the Liberty thus secretly for my home base at no permanent address where those whose gift is for banishment are wholly embraced and taken in, the idea of banishment being respected there without being capitalized on, there is no professional banishment, nor is there any enrichment, only a tent roof over the campsite.” (61)
The book shifts from a wilfully chosen exile (“I took the boat as soon as I could in my life so as to put some distance between me and one shore”) to a more oppressive feeling. The dread of reaching the end, of excluding possibilities, takes over. Cixous admits that she “never wanted the other shore except lost in advance, except vanishing.” There’s a kind of tension in desire; that which is desirable is often also repellent. Cixous here identifies the USA as welcoming those who have a gift for banishment. It appears to be the annulment of banishment, and yet she still feels adrift (which ends up being the same as oppressively moored).
Formally, the book explores these ideas partway between novel and poem, yet Cixous also references the idea of a play, or rather two plays: a Shakespearean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy (towards the end, she suggests that the revelation of the scar symbol is the midpoint). Cixous is illuminating on the nature of Tragedy: she suggests it is defined by the Detail. I find her commentary insightful in its own right, as well as a key for some of the key motifs in this text. To explain, I’ll break up a key passage to outline Cixous’ project. First, she offers the following:
“The Detail makes the Tragedy. No atrocious Tale possible without the frail crack in the wall that surrounds the unspeakable. Othello is contained in a handkerchief. This Handkerchief turns anyone who touches it into a monster. The Detail is this seepage and this handkerchief, which hides-shows, gives on the scene impossible to behold. The Detail is the representative and representation of the act of mutation that turns people like you and me into the monsters of Tales” (30-31).
I’m fascinated with this reading of Othello in particular where a symbol is so central to the tragedy from a plot standpoint. However, I tend to read the handkerchief as a rather static symbol of betrayal, but here there’s a notion of contagion (or at least “seepage”) and the “hides-shows” of the handkerchief seems appropriate. There are a number of comparable “hides-shows” in Manhattan—for instance, Cixous continually returns to a half-dead / half-buried squirrel in Central Park. And, particularly because Manhattan deals with disease, the intimation of contagion here is striking. Continuing on the notion of the Detail, Cixous elaborates:
“Generally, when you enter the Tale for the first time, you pass over the Detail without noticing it. It gets lost among the host of signs. It was only many years later I noticed the Detail that gives us access to “The Metamorphosis” (“Die Verwandlung”) though it is perfectly obvious in the entryway where it vegetates and stinks, the eternal cadaver posted as a warning to the reader. But as it doesn’t call out or moan or squeak the avid visitor sweeps indifferently past the prophetic vignette and throws himself into the front room from which he didn’t emerge alive. If only you’d read the warning Nothing wouldn’t have happened. But by definition the Detail hides what it shows. You can always look at the engraving Gregor Samsa cut out and deliberately framed in gilt on page one of the Tale, but it just so happens you still don’t see it you never will. The law of Details, how to think of its tricks? It hits you in the eye” (31).
This further elaboration on the Detail is compelling: it reads as a short literary analysis embedded in the text, drawing connection between Shakespeare and Kafka. The unlikely connection there is exemplary of Cixous’ work. It’s also interesting to me that the Detail is posited here as hiding what it shows. I suppose this emerges most often in symbolism, which is both surface and depth. In Cixous’ story, there are a few such Details: an eye-patch, a scar, an iron lung—all kinds of injury-based symbols that recirculate throughout. The final line of this passage that the Detail “hits you in the eye” (31) also surfaces elsewhere. In the preface to the book (which part of the book is not preface, really?), Cixous writes, “The fateful primal scene, the ‘evil eye’ scene, happens in reality (just as if it had been written by Edgar Poe) in a tombstone of a library at Yale. Sometimes for a speck of dust in your eye the world is lost” (viii).
It’s notable to me that the speck of dust in your eye is framed as a loss of the world. Of course, we have a layer of perspective here—a tiny molecule is the same size as the world when held close to the eye—but I also sense an allusion, perhaps, to Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. In it, he writes that the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass, which I suspect Cixous agrees with. In one section, Cixous explains how living life devoid of suffering is detrimental to thought—a concerning premise, if true; a concerning premise if not. In turn, it seems that suffering is an illuminating factor in the work, and that that gets centered on eyes.
Plot-wise, this inability to recognize the Detail seems integral to the experiences recounted. With great uncertainty, I note that, for instance, there’s a seeming Detail (or clue?), that would indicate that her love interest is not really sick (?) and hence her experience is a sham. Yet, she does not recognize the Detail when her mother does. All the other symbols in her life never seem to gel into a single ‘point.’ Instead, the images linger without being made intelligible or rendered cohesive to one another. The speck of dust is in the eye is blinding, the splinter is illuminating.
To return, for a moment, to the notion of disease that emerges in the text, let’s discuss some of the thoughts on the relationship between disease and literature. In one section, Cixous writes that “A Letter is a poisoned weapon. A Theater of obscenities” (91). This notion of poison, and disease, gets carried out following discussions of famously sick authors. Notably, Proust and Kafka make appearances. She criticizes the romanticized jealousy people experience for these authors—to want to be Proust, for example, is an offensive notion to anyone sick who does not want to be, a rejection of the gift of good health. In elaborating on that romanticization, she examines the relationship between literature and disease as follows:
“The reader locked up for months with the works and sometimes the manuscripts of beloved authors suffering from incurable illnesses ends up confusing the work the sick man and the disease the work as disease the disease as work the disease as author, the Library as transfigured Hospital. The reader enters the work via the disease, enters the disease as into a precious neurosis, tuberculosis is now his one and only love, he reads Keats for Koch, no longer can he wish or hope for the author’s cure for this would be tantamount to choking off his genius. In the Library he heads for where the books cough. Inside the Beinecke what’s more is cruelly like a brand new hospital room. It reeks of sterilization. I entered the great Yale University Library as into one of those great halls where the hospital adversary waits to pounce the minute I enter the Beinecke I’m in a hospital I remember I thought embarrassed and ill at ease was it because of the way the windows were disposed, the shadows meant to be welcoming for a fleeting moment I believed and feared I’d glimpsed my father in them cut off from the world the living by a vast and luxurious pane of glass, I enter the Beinecke right away a mirage of Mustapha Hospital comes to meet me, the images of the dead who are part of us and have departed from us do not die and they start flashing whenever a setting lends itself, so the Beinecke reminded me of my father’s last days and that moment when not yet dead already he wasn’t on the same side of life as me and was drifting off without moving like a ship in a dream.” (73-74)
There’s a lot to parse here. The entrancing circular sentences here are hypnotic: “the work as disease the disease as work the disease as author.” It creates a framework here where the core of authors’ geniuses relies on their suffering—the same problem that she challenges, somewhat, regarding the romanticism of such disease. Over time, she conflates the Library and Hospital. It’s as though reading is its own disease, but also as though it inspires a kind of morbid endorsement of disease, a kind of masochism towards sick authors. I see an early-twenties version of myself really resonating with this characterization (especially “he heads for where the books cough”).
In fact, despite all the frustration the deconstructionist style might be when it comes to narrative, I have to admit it yields some wonderful poetic lines. When it comes to setting, Cixous compares taking a taxi “to drive for a long time down the spinal cord to go and knock at the appointed address” (54) and, in describing the no-longer-extant hotel, she notes, “I think that I would never again set eyes on the brightly lit sign whose naive shape was more neon cake than crown” (57). “More neon cake than crown” is a truly unique phrase; I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a comparison before and there’s something light and airy in the description that reads beautifully.
As with so much that I’ve been reading lately, many of the thematics revolve around time. In one poetic line, Cixous says, “They are coming to see the year die of fear” (99-100). Gorgeous. Alongside time: memory. She notes that there’s an “upsurge of totally forgotten details. Details dramatic in their day but borne away by time never to reappear, without sequel in my story” (24). This pulls us back to the idea of involuntary writing with which the book starts. These memories that we forget come back out of control; memory is one of our faculties that we don’t control (is memory a sneeze?). Cixous combines words to help encapsulate this experience. She refers to “the common grave of forgetmemory” (25)---”from the bottomless vault where images and repudiated events repose in a grotesque and macabre pell-mell” (25). If we judge Manhattan on its truth value, I think Cixous gets the description of memory exactly right.
In that respect, memory links several of the themes together. Due to its involuntary nature, it connects to the unseen forces within us that govern our actions. While Cixous is always doing what she does not want to do, memory, too, is always doing what we do not want it to do. It also links to the idea of trying to find origins: from where does memory spring? Additionally: time. Memory, for Cixous, often appears like a wound, as well. She partners memory and regret: “On the topic of regret for what might have been, therefore everything, and was not to be, I shall say that against this backdrop of oblivion the smallest moments immediately and in the present acquire the heart-rending loveliness of memory” (109). Regret is a specifically painful facet of memory, and so it’s nice to see at least a little optimism where small moments offer loveliness—even if we can’t exactly decide which memories are worthwhile. Moreover, small moments seem to encapsulate the present moment, despite the disconnected time we generally experience.
The referential nature of Cixous’ work ties it together thematically, as well. The plot involves Cixous visiting libraries to do research and she often refers to older writers (Kafka, Shakespeare, John Donne, and Montaigne in particular), which seems to be another way of her bringing context to her own experience—as though her story started before she was even alive. I found her experience in that regard resonant. I’d like to believe the following is true of me, as well: “I open a book, the light is, right away the tongue begins its tale, I’m forever remaking myself with these literary molecules I told myself” (59). The idea of remaking oneself through literature is reading at its finest, and it also reminds me of the introductory remarks of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus that we are all already multiple. Each character in the book seems similarly doubled-tripled-and beyond. Characters are both dead and not. They are different before-and-post tragedy. Each character embodies several characters, some of whom are authors.
As for Cixous’ experience? Well, she says,
“I was cracked I cracked open each gaze each and every vision that I saw each sentence that I said each word that I heard everything is maybe its opposite everything is opposite / everything: its contrary / I was saying to myself I say the contrary will be said / I had no subject any more / What remains are the objects (the imitation squirrel skin slippers thirty-five years asleep in the armoire, the fake crocodile suitcase on January I, 1965) I didn’t send them away” (182).
She notes her internal division at being “cracked open.” Here, the motifs of eyes and vision and language all coalesce. Language breaks her—”each sentence that I said each word that I heard.” We return to the final indeterminability of interpretation: “everything is maybe its opposite,” though that pesky “maybe” in the middle suggests that even the final indeterminability is not necessarily final. Cixous advocates that the “contrary wil be said.” This passage also seems critical for the identification of symbols and objects. Cixous admits that she “had no subject any more” and rather it’s the objects that remain. It’s all external, rather than interior. The division between surface and depth either diminishes or becomes illegible to the eye, like the Detail Cixous analyzed.
Overall, Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory is one of the most challenging books I’ve read so far this year. I’d be hard pressed to give it a full endorsement, but if you’re into cerebral texts and you’re okay with perpetual uncertainty, then dive into Manhattan. I had the privilege of reading—well, at least starting—this book in Manhattan, and specifically at Book Club in Manhattan, a late-night bar where people go to read.
May your reading be equally novel, even when the text is not as compelling as you might have hoped.
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