Inside

by Hélène Cixous

A young girl recounts the passionate love she feels for her father and faces an identity crisis when he dies.

Genres: France, Fiction, Feminism, Female Authors, French Literature, Death

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

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

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is said that love is as strong as death. But death is as strong as love and I am inside.
*
[…] I was discovering the properties and the language of my soul. For the first time I separated myself from everyone else, and decided to change everything. My soul was a solid, both transparent and capable of erupting. It stayed motionless in time and space: it went along challenging itself, always courting what seemed impossible to my reason and inaccessible to my body. I had to aim well above myself if I did not want to be only me.
*
It’s one of those truth for which I don’t yet have words.
*
[…] on one side I am attached to the invisible face of my life, on the other joined to the shadowy head of my race and on the right I hear the booming of amorphous floods summoned up to fill the empty space of the future and on the left I hear the hundred voices of memory stirring the thick substance of time past.
*
You never lose time unless you kill it. And it isn’t easy. In general, even when killed, time will return.

[Kamakana · Rating 2 out of 5]

180311: another very short feminist novel focused on emotion and not plot. maybe i would have enjoyed it if i read french but i do not think so. is this a subgenre of french writing? short poetic fragments of prose, no plot, no incidence, a lot of emotions. in this case an expression of extreme love for her father. maybe i need to read feminist theory to enjoy this...?

[Johan Thilander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Under sitt täta och rätt så svårgenomträngliga språk så är Inuti förvånandsvärt lekfull. Första delen är också en av de finare skildringar av att vara liten som jag läst:

jag var ännu tillräckligt nära marken, på den rätta höjden, växterna och de snälla djurens. Krig, pengar, tidningar, nyheter rullade fram över mitt huvud, utan att beröra mig mer än åskan - - -

För egen del tycker jag dock att en sådan här text kunde varit kortare (även om den om den redan är på endast 130 sidor). Jag har svårt att förankra mig i den - den är väldigt välskriven, men jag blev utmattad.

[Linnea · Rating 3 out of 5]

Svårt att sätta betyg, bitvis en solklar 5a men totalt så tyckte jag att jag inte fick så mycket ut av den...

[Ruben · Rating 3 out of 5]

I Cixous språk finns varken tid eller rum, men jag tycker att det saknas en röd tråd. Något att förankra allt i.

[homoness · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dedans offers a profound abstract topology of the forming of female subjectivity in the face of adversity that comes from the outside, entering and reconfiguring the interior feelings of seemingly lonely wanderers. It's perfect and a deserved winner of the "Prix Médecins".

[Blaze-Pascal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is good, quality, stuff. For individuals. About content not process. About death of the self, and transformation.

[Lovina · Rating 2 out of 5]

poetic and beautiful language. but it's hard keeping up the interest throughout the book and it would have made better as a short story or poems due to the lack of plot.

[Markus Weimer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book alive and elusive, entirely unbelievable if thought too vague. No, the vision is singular and specific and never held but felt in glimpses. Cixous is defining the incommunicable attributes of Him and the grief that's left and what happens in the effort for reclamation. Death is a cow chewing cud over Paris, just a word, surpassed by grammar, not open or shut, the only thing that differentiates us.

"
US. My father and his father, his mother and I, are in a house with no windows and all the doors shut, which my secret father tells me is called : "The hand of God." It is written on the front door, which I have never gone through since I have never been anywhere but inside, in any case my eyes have never beheld anything but the house, which I remember from the bygone days, when I was shorter and my forehead reached my father's waist when he stood up, and when the ceiling was almost as high as the midday sun stuck on a spike of the fence seen through a window. We live in the Hand of God. My father calls me "my daughter," and his father and his mother call me "my daughter," and his father and his mother call me "my daughter" too and they call my father "my son" or "your father."
"

[Mina Widding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Det här är en prosa som mest liknar lyrik i det att den är som en drömskrift. Det är ett språk inifrån, som skriver i bilder, i språkets ur-betydelser och uppdelningar, och det kretsar kring en faders död, kärleken till en fader som fortsätter i dottern, som också i andra delen fortfarande söker sin fader i sina män. Det är mycket jag inte förstår, med drömlogik som ger antydningar åt olika håll men allting är ganska lösligt och poetiskt, öppet för tolkning, ger en känsla i förståelsen som är flytande snarare än precis. Det är något slags tillstånd man hamnar i i läsningen snarare, och jag tror att det är det hon vill åt, ge en känsla snarare än en berättelse. Behöver man veta? Det hade varit lättare att navigera, att hålla fast, men jag tror inte att det önskade resultatet är förståelse, utan upplevelse.

[Anarcouple]

Themes: fluid and collective vs individual subjectivity/unstable/interchangeable sense of self, the undecidability of identity, self vs the other, dedans vs dehors, de-rooted/de-grounded from temporality and space (boundlessness), discovering the limitations of one's agency, gendered socialisation, embodiment, existentialism (?). Being dedans can alienate us from others, from the ‘nous’, who are not dedans.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Opera prima di un'autrice francofona il cui talento non viene assolutamente riconosciuto, forse per la particolarità della sua scrittura che è "femminile" sì, e per questo potente.

[Void. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Loveee the first half. Felt. But not so much for the last half.

[Annabel]

Normally I'm quite taken with the way Cixous plays in and with language, but it's all I can do to muster up enough energy to just try to finish. The daddy-obsession present in this particular book is at the same time cloying and cold. Oh Cixous, you've done so much better.