Tomb(e)

by Hélène Cixous, Laurent Milesi (Translation)

“In 1968-69 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides,” wrote Hélène Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic, and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. This tomb became a work that is a testament to Cixous’s life and spirit and a secret book, the first book she ever authored. Originally written in 1970, Tombe is a Homerian recasting of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis in the thickets of Central Park, a book Cixous provocatively calls the “all-powerful-other of all my books, it sparks them off, makes them run, it is their Messiah.”   Masterfully translated by Laurent Milesi, Tombe preserves the sonic complexities and intricate wordplay at the core of Cixous’s writing, and reveals the struggles, ideas, and intents at the center of her work. With a new prologue by the author, this is a necessary document in the development of Cixous’s aesthetic as a writer and theorist, and will be eagerly welcomed by readers as a crucial building block in the foundation of her later work.
   

Genres: Fiction, Philosophy, Poetry, France, Literature

260 pages, Hardcover

First published April 15, 2012

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

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cixous gives us a playful meditation on the subject of love and mortality, she adroitly links the two (with stitches and slander), as she links so many concepts (but what of the objects, both found and fetished?). The title itself is a split image of both the book (memories) and the grave. She begins this edition which a look back (from 2007) to its initial publication in 1970, which in itself is a look forward and beyond, this book beyond the book

Her friend Jacques Derrida (who had passed shortly before in 2004) called Tomb(e) an unidentified literary object and said that, "everything is in it." It's written the philosopher noted, "on the side of life." An amazing accomplishment then, when considering the relentless circling around Eros and Thanatos, the idea that love is a death sentence, that such a bond is terminal--it extends to the passing of one (or both) and yet there are other clamors from the mortal boudoir : Cixous notes she had been reading Celan at the time of the initial composition and was dazzled in the diaspora and we indeed find the black milk. There is also a squirrel in this Garden, another opportunity to build and dissemble, to ultimately disinter.

Cixous has given us a timely gift, a book of deep breaths and sonorous thinking.

[Emily Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tried to read this book last year and found it utterly impenetrable. There is very little punctuation, all the clauses just run one after another, it’s obscenely self-referential, not to mention the difficulties of translating the French polysemy and homophony. Though I could sense it was masterful (I would expect no less from Cixous) I simply had no idea what was going on—I was just reading individual word after individual word—and so I put it down.

Then, a few weeks ago, I woke with a line from the prologue stuck in my head: “In 1968/69, I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides.” I just couldn’t get this line out of my head: it was blocked on all sides. I picked the book up again and for some reason I just knew how to read it. I can’t explain how or why? I think this was simply the book I needed to read right now, in the same way it was the book that Cixous needed to write back then. And now it is a new favourite of mine, though I don’t really have the words to articulate why, only to say that it was a very special and very singular reading experience.

—

Prologue

“I began dreaming of writing a Tomb(e) for myself. This would be a testament.”

“Tombe is a book and a grave. Both. A grave can be a book. A book is a kind of grave which bears within itself the secrets of resurrection.”

“Tombe belongs in my work in general to the species of Books which run away; as soon as I try to write this book, it scurries off in front of me. Perhaps it's me who flees.”

“The desire to say everything and also not to say.”


Text

“because it seemed obvious to me that on this gesture the following one depended, and on the following one the following, and on the following my whole life up to its way of dying and
the story”

“(One day when he had said to me 'remember', no sooner had I taken three steps westward than I was seized with terror: What if already I was forgotten? If I had already forgotten? I retrace my steps running and running on his, and everything changed, and already he no longer is where he had been, I remember he had said 'Remember, but I forgot, I forgot, I forgot or I didn't, how to know from now on and I was surrounded by memory.)”

“Conceive of him on the model of the beloved rather than on the model of somebody who loves”

“The lover and the beloved are the two vases of the sand-glass. The sands flow from one into the other. Love turns the sand-glass upside down. Desire flows from one into the other the beloved exhausts the lover then the lover overturns the beloved in order to love him then the beloved takes back from the lover the product of love in order to exhaust it then the lover overturns love in order to be loved then the beloved overturns love inexhaustibly and there's no present. Desire falls from one to the other body”

“repeating the course of pain at the memory of pain and return of the memory of pain which begets another pain which returns to my heart and so on”

“My voice: sacrificial, red, knowledgeable, ignorant, rings loud and covers the incapable face of its inaudible; the one, before the throat, which bathes amid tears. There was a text from the heart which kept inscribing its silence without breaking it without rest without comma without life therefore without breath therefore without danger unshakeable in sentences poignant no ear no body other than mine orphaned to be which was not written by writing which was not heard by hearing through which writing was written without signs it was a never-heard never-learnt litany written while trembling bearing the complaint from one to the other blank which like non-death I held dearer than life for the simple reason that it inscribed itself in the present without a break by carrying without taking the story into account the present in preternal mood which gives short shrift to memory and a certain unknown regular irregular chained broken incorrigible distance from my lips from my heart from my veins from my fingers:”

“I don't weep I don't weep, for the one who makes me grieve is still alive”

“I am knowable from the point of view of the unknowable only…One day, I think, I will read the book of myself”

“my prophetic body, my body's body, my desire, my arrested source, my living tomb, my archives, this leaf, sensitive, fragrant, to be read without properly dying, to the absolute, where when what I cannot be is what I am”

“I needed years of long ceaseless reflection to piece myself together again, to win back one single second of the thousand I had lost and I was pitifully afraid of remaining bogged down in this fictitious time”

“If I release it I am lost its flight ravishes meaning from me if I keep it I lose it: in my soft ardent fingers it will not find food. If I keep it I don't see it, if I see it I don't have it, it never stops perishing and I miss it ceaselessly. A unique moment among times, I have seen-held-known it and we were gods. It was not surprising for my hand to hold my whole life in its closed grasp.”

“and my life simply the narrative of my life, and I the fragile, perishable product of this narrative, a system of sentences”

“Am I death and the tomb? This sentence kills me.”

“where wanting to live made me feel like dying”

“on the fringe of an abstract body without pain without memory and without body. Or: to take all.
Thus: to write knowing that death is in the text.”

“Why have you already forgotten me have I not remained among real things.”

“Your love falls on me from a place where I cannot be and kills me”

“for I am in the grave of my body”

“but I was afraid: of what, after the comma, would come about
: of the comma, of the pause, of the order of
meaning
: of the weakness of the comma if through mechanical force the sentence happened to carry it away and submerge it, of the force of the comma if it slowed down the movement until in suspense the present enters reality”

“For some time I was subtracted nerve by nerve from myself deprived of meaning, in the vacancy of darkness”

“all this is obscure but I want everything, I want the cut and what is cut plus the place of the cutting and its edges, I likewise want the empty notebook, the full notebook and the exergue, the notes of the textamant and the discordance of all the questions.”

“I weep in order to wipe my tears”

“We are alike in grief, but mine is turned towards what might have been and his towards what ceased to be”

[prashant · Rating 4 out of 5]

everything hurts and i’m dying

[Yates · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hope to understand only a fragment of its genius in my lifetime

[Christina · Rating 4 out of 5]

tomb(e) is a weird-ass book — so up my alley!

the thematic concept is this unique intertwining of love, death, and writing — also very up my alley. this is my first hélène cixous (also did not know who she was at all before picking this up, oops sorry) but, explicitly from her prologue + implicitly through reading/just absorbing the work, it strikes me these are her authorial themes and this is her linguistic style (more on that in a sec); tomb(e) is almost like an artist's statement or manifesto over her entire oeuvre (love this word it looks so stupid french stupid).

i found the translation from french really exciting and successful in approach. laurent milesi in the translator's note references tomb(e) as one of the great "untranslatable" works because of the way cixous uses language (more on that in a sec!) — but i think my guy really put in the work here to make it work! the big line is cixous's usage of french "polysemy, homonymy, and homophony" (which is academic for words with same sounds but different meanings (don't come for me public intellectuals i understand and support the existence of jargon for precise academic study i just have to define this here right now so that i understand it on future reference)), which milesi manages to cover in an astoundingly unobtrusive mix of: just doing the same thing in english (this is insaneee to be clear); square brackets with the original french that map to a glossary but moreover often map to each other in the text such that the polyhomowhatever (im joking) is clear even without consulting the glossary (this is also sick as fuck); and the occasional footnote. i know i said it but it's actually INSANE how unobtrusive and good this is — for a work considered untranslatable for this aspect! the aspect definitely comes across! (obv as a translation i can't access how much it gets across compared to the original because i don't understand french, despite my mother's early wishes, so i'm evaluating this just based off the english depiction of translatorial struggles in the translator's note, which is not immune to bias yk maybe milesi set the goalpost low so he could knock it out of the park. whatever he still knocked it out of the park!)

cixous's language (finally) is strongly poetic — in the sense that i defined in 12th grade AP lang a.k.a. philosophy class as a medium that cares more about exploring language itself than using it to communicate about something, but also in the generic sense of "sounds pretty." this is how i thought about poetry the entire time i was writing it in high school (so yeah the take is probably biased but whateverrr everything is). also why suji kwock kim is one of my fave poets. so obviously cixous's language play — which is very dream-like, as if cixous was rolling over flashes of words in her sleep and connecting them while awake — was speaking to me in tomb(e).

cixous's whimsical language play — veils and sails, mint and female lover and lament — evocative rather than descriptive, generally works quite well for me (not always, but that's the nature of working in this way; it's not always going to work for everyone) in tomb(e), i think because the topic is itself hazy in nature. this is the idea i was thinking about in obit: is death/grief such a big and amorphous thing that clear-eyed specifics can never get at it? cixous explicitly thinks so; this is her intentional approach as laid out in her prologue. makes me think of a convo i had with aurash a long time ago where i believe i held the stance that everything Can be communicated entirely clearly with enough time/space — just that some things are not trying to do that, as sometimes it can be more effective/aligned with artist's intention (so like cixous) to communicate unclearly. i think i still pretty much believe this, and so the rebuttal/synthesis to cixous's approach is like 1) pragmatic: the time/space required to clearly communicate e.g. death as a concept is egregiously massive s.t. people necessarily go for more effective means 2) 2nd clause: clear communication is just not always the goal because there can be interesting effects happening in the mind of the audience when left uncontrolled by the creator e.g. wong kar-wai (lmao sorry to keep beating ur dead horse).

(there's a good tie-in to translation in here: i think the translator exemplifies this, because they can accurately and completely translate any word in 1 language into another (e.g. to cover the connotations you just say more more more) but it becomes cumbersome to the intention — so their difficulty is actually balancing all the things the original work in the original language cared about — which clear communication is probably only 1 of.)

i found reading tomb(e) a delightful intellectual exercise for a couple reasons. 1 being that looseness of cixous's poetic communication — adam recently put out a substack article about thinking v.s. feeling as a framework for media consumption (https://etymology.substack.com/p/feel...) which i don't fully agree with, but i did think thinking v.s. feeling was a productive dichotomy for my reading experience. i think the poetic sensibility is so beautiful and easily washes over you and entrances you and absorbs you into these mental images or sensations or feelings of cixous's making; and also i think i will always want to analyze and break down something to its components and figure out what the fuck is going on. so it's like a battle between me feeling it out riding the wave and me trying to figure out what the squirrel represents and how that connects to the themes. maybe this is also known as the "do i get it?" struggle (which people who are more chill than i am seem to respond to this question with "why do you have to" hmmmm i'll get back to you on that). and so i felt this way in alternating chunks. i think by the end i was more accepting of feeling and letting cixous pull me whichever way (i was also just personally in life tired and so my brain has been bad). and i think, in general, by feeling, eventually we can get to thinking synthesis (but often we cannot think ourselves into feeling? hmmmm). anyways this the 2nd layer of interesting intellectual exercise: the meta awareness of how i am consuming the text.

[Alex Davenport · Rating 4 out of 5]

As with all Cixous's works, Tomb(e) is highly referential to other texts (including Cixous's own works). Cixous's lyricism is in full effect throughout Tomb(e), and in true French post-structural fashion it is in the moments of swirling meaning and destruction of meaning that her messages come through. At its core this could seem to be a love story, but it also hints toward the meaning of what it may mean when Derrida described her as writing "on the side of life." I absolutely love Cixous's works, both fiction and non, however for those who are not used to this style I could understand how the book may become frustrating.

[Justus Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tombe succeeds on so many levels. Cixous' command of both language as it relates to her ideas and the innate playfulness of the shifts she creates in her theories by developing a layered vernacular thick with allusion, as well as her ability to argue self-contained ideas that hold broad implications is unparalleled. The translator of this work takes such great pains to recreate the experience of reading the work in the original language. An exceptional feminist work dealing with the ideas of confinement, decline, death, and transcendence.

[Daniel KML · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cixous calls Tombe (1973) her seminal work, preceding a career of over 70 texts across fiction, essays, and theater. Written shortly after completing her 800-page doctoral dissertation on James Joyce, Tombe bears unmistakable Joycean echoes.

A mythic reworking of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, the book explores themes like Eros and Thanatos through a web of polysemies, homonyms, and homophonies—what one translator called “an infinite orchestration of ever-combining motifs.”

I had thought I came prepared, having read Shakespeare and the prefaces. I didn’t understand a thing though—but loved every page.

[Lourdes · Rating 2 out of 5]

I haven't finished reading this book. Complexity is already a recurring feature in Cixous' work. I know that maybe I shouldn't try to understand everything about this book (although I hope to understand a little more in a future rereading) but rather understand the sensory images and symbolisms, but it was impossible for me. I do think that if it had been a shorter book, it might have been more bearable and I could have finished it.

It's written in a beautiful way but it is difficult to follow up.

[Aditi Somani]

So many emotions, kind of confused and anxious, need to read again in a couple of years.

[Dawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I officially give up.