Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory

by Hélène Cixous

Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University's Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is
lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual's first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a
book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside a journey into memory in which everything is never the same.Traveling from library
to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous's fiction and essays are rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects
Cixous has spent her life reading, writing, and the omnipotence-otherseductions of literature; a family's flight from NaziGermany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with, as Jacques Derrida writes, a counterfeit
genius.

Genres: France, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Theory, French Literature

190 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

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 4 out of 5]

In-love-in-anguish you really feel that (had you known) you could never had never loved the being you-love-forever, all along you feel love threatening you, but you don't know it. The more you feel, the more instinctively you ward it off by increasing the love therefore the anguish.

It would be unwise to call it a health scare. My experience earlier this week was nevertheless a novel one. I awoke in the night and my body didn't feel right. My imagination soon colored between the lines. I read nearly all of this at the doctor's office. Physically I think I'm fine. I'm glad I had Cixous to lean on there. This masterful work concerns Cixous' time in the States in 1964-65. Her journey appears in the refracted lens of memory to be from library to library. She met someone at the Beinecke at Yale, the bond was one of letters, one of possibility. Her faded thoughts collect and gather, the mold of time and other loss leads to further association and puns. The floating theme appears to be Loss. It is a bold editorial decision, there are no footnotes, so the reader is free to race and revel. I am glad I did.

[Renee Leech · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this in a used bookstore in Northampton, MA (Raven Used Books) for $7.50, and I am glad I did, because it seems to be quite rare. This is my first Cixous, though I have been curious about her for some time. I know that she coined the term "ecriture feminin" and I can see how Manhattan could be an example of that. The prose is many things that are considered "feminine" in writing: stream-of consciousness, recollection in reverie, and non-linearity. It felt similar to reading Anais Nin (Diaries) or some Virginia Woolf (The Waves).

Cixous looks back in time at one of the events which formed her personal mythology and wonders why. She looks back at other events in time, but mostly as they bracketed this one experience, meeting a man who turns out to be a sheep in wolves' clothing. Cixous is trying to figure out - I think - which version of the man she loved and why. Why him? Why then?

Like other good stream-of-consciousness/reverie writing, you do not need to worry about reading every word; just float along with the language until it interrupts you with beauty. That was my approach to reading this, as one dips in and out of a calm sea. That the sea is calm is a feature of age and its ability to analyze and forgive both self and other.

[Marcia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are many wonderful passages in this book, enough to keep me reading even though the the fragmented nature of both its structure and my time made it nearly impossible for me to really get immersed in it. There is no story or plot to speak of -- or rather, there is one, but it is so obliquely related as to be all but impenetrable (to me). I think if I had spent more large chunks of time with this book, I would have understood the whole of it better.

[Padgett Ratings · Rating 4 out of 5]

Think of the possibilities.

[Alexandra]

it just feels like an injustice to read this in anything other than french but still beautiful

[Édouard · Rating 4 out of 5]

« Et si tu avais fait le contraire
Exactement de tout ce que tu aurais dû faire
Si tu avais dans ton coeur un autre coeur
Autoimmunitaire »

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Manhattan is not a book that one can read to understand. The more you read, the more opaque everything becomes. The chapters are not letters, essays, or stories. The only way I can describe them is as an assortment of memory fragments from different time periods, half journal entries, scribbled notes, and passages of emotional reflection, which taken together, feel more like poetry to me without looking like poetry on the page (the only way I can begin to make sense of what I cannot is through genre). I've never read anything like it. I admire the experimental nature of the book and at the same time, without the familiarity of sentence structure or chronology, struggled to hear the author's voice and get what she was getting at.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the circumlocution typical of Cixous which she employs to create only a spectre of the events she describes. However, I have a difficult time with the level of vulnerability of Cixous in relation to the 1968 relationship she describes as Cixous is someone I need to "be strong" in her writing.

[Colettemariehayes · Rating 2 out of 5]

not particularly my cup du the.

[cass krug · Rating 2 out of 5]

had a very difficult time following this one but i'm still interested in trying another book by cixous