Rêvoir

by Hélène Cixous

"Comment font les gens qui ne disposent pas d’un Rêvoir de rêves, les malheureux, je n’arrive pas à imaginer une existence maintenue sous la coupe implacable du Cauchemar. J’ai connu un temps la liberté. Quand une liberté est pure et libre on ne s’en aperçoit même pas. On va, on vient, se couche, se lève, immortellement pendant des années, on ne les compte pas, on n’est ni savant, ni ignorant, on est distrait, on respire, on entre dans des magasins, puis dans d’autres, il y a des calendriers pour tout un chacun. Je fais appel à toutes mes forces mentales, pour deviner l’état du cerveau de ceux qui n’ont jamais connu, jamais aspiré l’air de la liberté, un air légèrement sucré, légèrement salé, discret, agréable, ceux qui à peine nés ont été déposés dans une cage, voués du premier au dernier souffle au cachot de l’esclavage, toutes ces créatures qui n’ont connu de la liberté que le regret greffé dans tout le corps par le mystère de l’héritage."

180 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 7, 2021

About the author

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974.

She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Reviews

[noémie]

j’ai moins aimé que ève s’évade
j’arrivais pas trop à m’accrocher au texte mais c pzut être un problème de concentration

[Alan M · Rating 4 out of 5]

'hence is me, hence is every inch of this body of mine that bears your imprint, this book whose every page was written, barred, corrected, inspired, weighed, revised by you, your hands, your lips'

Hélene Cixous writes like a dream; her prose has always inspired me, from her early work and her more academic pieces on language and sexuality, to the present. This lockdown novel, in which the central character HC decides to escape Paris and flee to the countryside, becomes a meditation on womanhood, on being a writer and on being a human being. Comparing her life with the lives of those who have come before - Defoe, Camus, Kafka - Cixous has written a compelling yet challenging piece. Not to everyone's taste, probably, but the work of a colossal talent and a giant of literature:

'Despite everything I'll write. The verb despitewrite, Kafka says.'

[Eden · Rating 3 out of 5]

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