Le Livre de Promethea

by Hélène Cixous

"J'ai un peu peur pour ce livre. Parce que c'est un livre d'amour. C'est un buisson de feu. Mieux vaut s'y jeter, une fois dans le feu, on est inondé de douceur. J'y suis : je vous le jure." Voilà ce que dit "l'auteur" de ce livre ; mais qui est l'auteur, Hélène Cixous ? H ? ou Promethea ? "D'ailleurs c'est le livre de Promethea. C'est le livre que Promethea a allumé comme un incendie dans l'âme de H." Il s'agit du journal immédiat, urgent, brûlant, d'une passion en train de prendre élan, éternité. Cette "chronique" n'a aucune autre technique que la plus ardente fidélité : elle a un rythme, musical, inégal, celui du coeur. A travers ces cahiers, ces chapitres, inscrits sur le vif, se dessinent les portraits de deux créatures qui se vouent à aimer comme au temps des légendes ou des quêtes épiques. Tout véritable amour n'est-il pas épique ? Ce livre est simple et compliqué comme l'amour, douloureux comme la peur de la mort, joyeux comme la confidence absolue. Parfois on verse les larmes brûlantes de la jalousie, parfois on pleure de rire. Ce livre a un goût de sel et de miel.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, Queer, Philosophy, LGBT, Lesbian, Feminism

252 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 1983

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]

No, we do not speak at all the same languages. Things she lets bubble up in a shower of sparks, I would like to collect and bind. She burns and I want to write out the fire!

This 200 page prose poem again allows fiction, philosophy and memoir to blend in an aching harmony. Often maddening, this is a departure for Cixous. Usually her sensuality maintains a literary edge, not here, this is tactile and lustful. This is a dreamish account of affair between two women with images from the caves at Lascaux to a refugee camp in Lebanon. It is often was captivating, at times frustrating. We should heed the advice offered: Because Promethea asks me for a bowl of words before she goes to sleep.

[Jimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Seeing all these 5-stars for a Cixous book makes me so happy... and yet sad that I can't do the same. But I have to be honest here. This was not up to par with the rest of her books that I've read.

Like her other novels, this is a blend of fiction, nonfiction, memoir, myth, and literature. But here Cixous tackles the topic of love, the problem of loving and being loved, and it's probably the most purely personal book I've read by her. Thus a lot less of the literature than usual. She transcribes the experience of her relationship with Promethea into her notebooks, and that's sort of how it feels to read it... like reading someone's unedited journal. And along with that journal-esque style come the high points: soaring prose as good as anything I've read by her. Often passages that reach their height in a breathless obsessive energy of rhythmic release.

As far as war is concerned I am truly a woman: I do not want to win, if I were victorious I would be the one defeated, I only want to make my desire to encircle you triumph, my desire to fly over you, to flood you, to observe you from way up high and then through a microscope, I want to know you by means of every science and every art, but I want you to keep yourself intact, you my still-brutal and imposing civilization, I want you purely Infidel if my origins are in the Faith. If I am a Jew, be an Arab and let me love you, let us love each other with our two different innocences

Unfortunately, the passages that don't reach such heights often fall to cliche. The impossible of this book is to set down Promethea as she is, but Cixous knows as well as us that this act of writing changes what's written. And that the thing she wants most to capture is the uncapturable quality in her lover that does not translate to literature. It fascinates because it is impossible. She even admits this in the early pages of the book, which I enjoyed more as it was more about the writing process and the ideas behind the book. But if the goal was to capture the impossibility of the task, she was able to at least illustrate it in the rest of her experiment-book.

When it doesn't work, it falls back down to earth in cliche after cliche:

Under my very nose it is all so beautiful. It makes me want to sing. With words? Yes. Sometimes I think a moment is so beautiful. I want to toss it handfuls of delicious words so gluttony will keep it there.

Does it help that this was in the context of a turtle POV? Not completely. Context matters to a degree and can rescue cliches from their tired moorings, as the translator tries to convince us in the introduction. But only to a degree. And maybe it's the translation's fault, because I found the cliches insurmountable no matter how many contextual leaps were made. Mostly, it's because the book is completely in the deep end of emotions. There is no specific reality for the reader to grab onto. The emotion cannot attach itself to anything concrete, so I was left aswim in a sea of generalities and vagueness.

I think Cixous can and has done much better in her other books, although glimpses of her genius show through in this book as well.

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a restless book!

I read this over the course of 7 whole days, which is so long, and so this is what the experience was like:

1. The very first page, I thought: ooh, I love this already & I am going to love this more when I read it: I am a little afraid for this book. Because it is a book of love. It is a burning bush. Best to plunge in. Once in the fire one is bathed in sweetness. Honestly: here I am, in it.

2. Pages ~5-40-60, I thought: I like this introduction, hm, this introduction is quite long [flips ahead to scan for the next "chapter" only to find there is no next chapter, then thinks, oh yeah, remember you've read Hélène Cixous before. This is probably going to be one massive intense unapologetic streaming prose text that will make you feel like you are both swimming and drowning. Oh, boy. But oh, wait, this is going by smoothly so far. I might finish this tomorrow.]

3. [I do not finish it "tomorrow."]

4. Pages ~60-180, I thought: oh my god, I think I am going to give up on this book. The text is so frustrating. Who can possibly read through all of this? It feels like reading a dream. I don't know if I will even be able to recall anything afterward so it will be as good as not reading it at all. Maybe I can stop now and just pretend I've finished this book, but ugh, I can't, I can't seem to stop reading it, and I don't understand what's moving me forward, but how funny, this has never happened to me before, and I feel almost proud of myself for not giving up, so ok, Must Force Myself to Read This, and ooh: it is finally acknowledged the question of whether Promethea is a mare or a woman, and ooh: underline this, it seems to be the only, the most erotic paragraph of the book as if she was saving it for now.

5. Interlude thoughts: I am so glad to be reading this book after Promethea the comic series and after Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse. These books all go together, especially the difference in style and approach to love by a man and a woman, like some paragraphs correspond to each other. Very nice.

6. Interlude thoughts: This feels like a two-star book. Is it the fault of Goodreads or my own that I think about giving stars to books. Maybe I should delete all the stars all together. This book is rather short, so why does it feel so long. Because time is imaginary, that's why. I am in another dimension in this text.

7. Final pages 210-211: This is a five-star book. I love it, I love it, but I can't stand reading it at the same time. I like that, I think... Oh, the song of consolations! Oh, H and I and Promethea: Promethea: ♥

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the sort of writing that exists in the breathless instant of creation. The thrumming energy of words themselves as they struggle construct the shifting phantom architectures of meaning. And so it is, Cixous herself admits to disallowing herself the luxury of revisiting and editing the material, privileging immediacy, that thrumming energy, over refinement, staid literary construction. Though she has doubts, fears the rawness, the exposure, even as she cultivates it. Though there may be no other way. These are ephemeral words trapped in place in the act of holding a seance with ones own interior spaces. Which would seem to suit Cixous subjects, those of passion, of love. In particular, the violence of emotion as something essential to the experience of true full feeling. And so she renders her sensations in the instant of felt experience, shaping raw emotion into a shifting exploratory theoretics that aim continually build and rewrite themselves as she grapples with them.

Given the force of thought here, and with the sheer raw beauty of Cixious' language, it's hard to admit reservation, but I cannot do otherwise: I just think this sort of immediate text may function best in shorter bursts. Here, in page after page, she pours out words in configurations that attempt to map similar ideas on the mutual violence of passion again and again. The words are a discovery process, watching them in a rare observation of the point of self-understanding, but the only person for which they can have the full meaning of experience is Cixous herself. As an outside observer my mind wanders, I compare my own experiences, I drift along parallel tracks into other understandings that only exist somewhere in my own shadowy spaces. Which is not without value, of course.

[anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

it's tall and skinny and i just read a line at the beginning where she suggest i lick her shoulder to taste the atlantic ocean. goodness.

[Blanche · Rating 5 out of 5]

je ne sais par où commencer pour essayer de décrire ce que fut mon expérience de lecture lors de la découverte de ce magistral ouvrage.
Livre sur la voix, sur le feu, sur la passion, ai dégusté chaque phrase, ai frissonné de bonheur et de froid avec H. et Promethea.
déclarer que ce livre a quelque peu changé ma vie grâce à sa beauté et sa description du tourment amoureux est un fait auquel il faut que je m'habitue.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 2 out of 5]

this book is really not for me. The book doesn't actually start and doesn't really end either. Like life itself, you are thrown into the middle, catching the author themselves in the act. One gets a feeling that Promethea is a stand-in(metaphorical or metonymical?) for the author's autoerotic love of/for writing without which she/they cannot live. There is a kind of cosmogonical quality to the book that does grow on you, with the way Promethea metamorphosizes into different facets of creation, now a horse, now an entire continent. Still, I had a very difficult time trying to enjoy the book for what it is.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lush, rich and beautiful. I am head-over-heels obsessed with Cixous.

[lilith · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is how i want to write about love || “I am a little afraid for this book. Because it is a book of love. It is a burning bush. Best to plunge in. Once in the fire one is bathed in sweetness. Honestly: here I am, in it.”

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

ohhhh i am drinking it up, i am so thirsty and i am drinking it up

[Anna loves books · Rating 4 out of 5]

A novel in verse about obsessive, lustful lesbian love. I had very high expectations. While this work was lush and beautiful, I found that it lacked the contextual structure that would have made this work blow me away.

As I was reading this book, I also did some research on the author Helene Cixous whose family life connected to the Algerian Independence movement fascinated me, and wished that she had incorporated more of her life experiences more explicitly in the novel.

I will say that maybe she alluded to her experiences and maybe I just didn’t pick up on it? It was very metaphorical and hard to follow at times since the book did not follow any kind of linear timeline.

I don’t regret reading this book but I regret not purchasing a copy with annotations.

[Bei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this book was like looking into the starry night. Her language sparkles, gems everywhere. A book that would whistle down the stars and send them dancing around you all night long.

[carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

2,5 estrellas. Mucho me temo que hacía tiempo que un libro no se me atragantaba así... Y no es porque me haya sorprendido su propuesta, de hecho creo que he leído muchos libros del estilo (escritura pasional, casi automática, fragmentaria, escritura-retrato, escritura-sensación...) como digo, los he leído, los disfruto e incluso los busco (lo buscaba, también, aquí), pero en este caso me ha fallado. Realmente ves la dificultad de lo experimental y lo abstracto cuando alguien lo lleva tan al límite que se te cae todo.

Prometea trata de un amor lésbico pasional, lujoso, febril, a veces incluso codependiente y mimético; trata de Prometea, que es una amante, pero también el amor mismo, tal vez incluso la humanidad entera en su infinito amar. Hay muchas reminiscencias, a Clarice Lispector (a quien, si no he entendido mal, incluso menciona), a Jean Genet, a la escritura rizomática; también me ha recordado a ciertos momentos de Anne Carson, a El bosque de la noche de Djuna Barnes o incluso a La passió segons Renée Vivien de Maria-Mercè Marçal.

El problema es que encuentro que todos estos autores resuelven el texto muchísimo mejor que Cixous. El texto me ha cansado. Y me ha cansado porque no paraba de distraerme, pese a que la autora recreaba continuamente el instante efímero, y pese a la belleza del lenguaje. Me ha cansado por dos razones: por repetitivo y por largo. Incluso Clarice Lispector (a quien adoro), en su magistral exploración literaria experimental de las sensaciones y el presente, sabe que debe estructurar incluso sus textos más abstractos (como Agua viva) con algún tipo de lógica, que no necesariamente debe ser narrativa-linear, obviamente. Y, sobre todo, maneja el texto corto; fragmentos cortos, capítulos cortos, libros cortos. Creo que si vas a introducir personajes, por muy high concept que sea el libro, tiene que "pasar algo", o hablar de diferentes sensaciones o aspectos de ese amor en diferentes fragmentos; es decir, tiene que haber algún tipo de punto de referencia. Me da rabia, porque hay reflexiones interesantes en el libro, como la presencia de la mujer en la escritura, la vivencia del amor y la generosidad, la inocencia y el lesbianismo... pero esto es, tal vez, el 10% del libro. El resto, durante cientos de páginas, es una repetición de los mismos conceptos y expresiones una y otra vez, hasta que ya no resultan sorprendentes ni originales. No bromeo cuando digo que la mitad del libro o más podrían cortarse y seguiría diciendo lo mismo; me doy cuenta de que no es que el libro no tenga puntos de referencia o temas, sino que los agota pronto y luego los repite decenas de veces hasta la saciedad. Unas veinte veces las amantes han sido asedidadas, otras cincuenta se han muerto de amor o han matado por él, el presente se ha abierto como una perla una centena de veces y se han revolcado en el instante aterciopelado, y han tenido unas ochenta variaciones de este diálogo: -¿por qué me quieres? (no se sabe quién de las dos dice esto) -te quiero tanto que podría morir. -entonces muere, muere. (es muy difícil decir esto, es la máxima de las generosidades). -pero si muriese sería verdaderamente la muerte, porque ya no podría volver a morir por ti y yo lo que quiero es morir a cada segundo para darte mi sangre, mi leche, mi corazón ardiente y todos mis dientes para experimentar la sensación de mi mordida sobre tu piel.

Es una pena, porque en esta obra se ve un talento para encontrar palabras sinceras y hermosas y combinarlas como quien hace collares suntuosos, se adivina una intuición interesante para encontrar el corazón de las relaciones humanas, pero, por desgracia, creo que sufre mucho de despilfarrar el lenguaje. Estamos ante un caso de "autor a quien le gusta demasiado el sonido de su propia voz".

[Linde Stevens · Rating 5 out of 5]

waaaawawawaw

Ik heb geen woorden voor hoe dit boek in mij is gekropen.

[Maria]

Demasiado monologo interior intelectual para mi 😞✊🏻

[spoon · Rating 4 out of 5]

made me feel really intense about codependency and the gay tendency to ~ merge ~ together but also was so beautifully written & helped me realize, in my own writing, my tendency to ignore the fact that i am so deeply, irrevocably loved.

anyways, i didn't get to finish this because i had to return it to the library. i would recommend it to anyone who has been reading a lot of dry-mouth sleepy historical narratives or legal documents and wants to taste a new way of languaging that encompasses the stark reality of miracle and the oftentimes excruciating result of love-and-loss-and-love.

[Alicia Grega · Rating 5 out of 5]

I discovered this book in college and was fascinated. I bought it a few years ago and continue to page through it periodically. I will never be done reading this book. I am enamored. I am mystified by the depth of its intimacy. It is not merely telling a story, it is the story it breathes, writhing in the juices of its own life. Allowing us to bear witness, to feel that breath on our cheek.

[Red · Rating 4 out of 5]

theory syncing up w/ life. or at least mine.
books are where tattoos come from.

[Connor McCarthy · Rating 3 out of 5]

shoot me

[Derek Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If I am a Jew, be an Arab and let me love you.”

I’m not sure how to review this book. It’s literature, it’s affecting, it’s sad, I have no idea what happened. I am happy that I read this, and will be happy to not read another Cixous for a while.

[Aaron · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an important book that contains some very powerful passages. However, it's also exhausting to read because there's no narrative, no consistent themes, and no characters, and the focus shifts constantly for no logical reason. As I read this book, my mind was constantly wandering.

[moon · Rating 5 out of 5]

*shivers feverishly*

[Katrinka]

Finally gave this one up halfway through; nonstop effusion going nowhere. A real disappointment compared to Cixous's Double Oblivion of the Ourang-Outang, which was stellar.

[prisca💋 · Rating 4 out of 5]

j’ai ADORÉ l’écriture, c’est juste exquis mais mettre 10 jours pour lire un livre de 270 pages ???? je manque vraiment de temps et d’énergie, et la fin m’a semblé un tantinet longue

[ne]

page after page of luscious, luscious prose. love, love, love.

[Amrita Ghosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

OH MY GOD THIS BOOK TORE MY HEART STRING BY STRING AND PUT IT BACK TOGETHER.

[Linnéa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two ladies going absolutely insane in love. Cixous takes around 70 pages to even start the book. 5 stars

[daci · Rating 5 out of 5]

writing Is

[cleo · Rating 5 out of 5]

storing this in my heart as my own memory

[Julieta Ornelas · Rating 4 out of 5]

i had never read something as beautiful as héléne’s writing