Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002
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Julia
Dobson, Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing.
Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002. 166pp, ISBN 3-906766-20-9, pb. £ 21, $32.95.
Reviewed by
The intention behind Hélène Cixous and the Theatre: The Scene of Writing, Julia Dobson’s informative and original monograph of the influential French feminist thinker, Hélène Cixous, is explicitly polemical and revisionist (in the larger sense of the word). She notes in the ‘Introduction’:
This book was conceived as a response to the apparent gaps and blinds spots of Cixous’s œuvre which result from the predominantly partial accounts of her work in the theatre. The main aim of this book is to attempt to begin to redress the balance through a presentation of Cixous’s theatre as a coherent and important body of work, and to assert her status as one of the most important playwrights working in France today. (9-10)
The blind spot Dobson is most anxious to remove has been produced by the Cultural Studies branch of Anglo-American criticism. For her, feminist critics concentrate, too often, on Cixous’s theoretical writing at the expense of her ‘fictions’. This uneven approach fails to grasp, Dobson contends, the organic quality of Cixous’s work. That is to say, the way she conceives of fiction and theory as mutually enriching processes, and not as two separate entities.
The lack of attention most critics (Morag Shiach is cited as a notable exception) pay to Cixous’s rich dramatic output has proved particularly myopic. As Dobson explains in a persuasive thesis, notions of theatre and theatricality occupy a crucial position in her aesthetic and political project to celebrate difference:
The central role of the theatre in Cixousian aesthetics is its status as the site par excellence of alterity, a textual and physical space in which writer, actor and spectator can engage in an unproblematic relationship to the other. (49)
One of the great merits of Dobson’s holistic study is to show how Cixous’s theoretical thought, in particular the key concept of écriture féminine, has always depended on metaphors of performance and performativity for its conceptual energy. Tracing this fluid interchange between theatre as metaphor and practice allows Dobson to argue:
that theatre and philosophy in Cixous œuvre (as Deleuze and Guattari also recognize) are, and always have been, interdependent.
that Cixous’s decision to write for the theatre (with increasing confidence and enthusiasm from the 1980s onwards) was a natural extension of her interest in exploring alterity and multiplicity through writing.
In keeping with its critique of the partiality of existent Anglophone commentary, Hélène Cixous and the Theatre refuses to ‘embark upon an exploration of Cixous’s theatre which approaches her plays in glorious isolation from her theoretical writing’ (10). Nevertheless, despite Dobson’s taste for dialectics, the focus is very much on the plays: ‘The plays themselves remain the starting point and main focus of this study’ (12). Dobson ought to be congratulated on her choice, here. Not only because her study is the first book in English to deal with Cixous’s drama in any depth, but because, unlike much contemporary writing about theatre, she never loses sight of the fact that theatre is an concrete practice, with its own specific grammar and vocabulary, and not just an abstract principle, a metaphor for philosophical speculation.
Dobson’s reading of Cixous’s theatre is chronological and thematic. In the first part of the book, she describes Cixous’s initial interest in deconstructing patriarchal myths and dramatic practices in early plays like Portrait de Dora (Portrait of Dora, 1976) and Le Nom d’Oedipe (The Name of Oedipus, 1978), before concentrating on the transformation that occurred in Cixous’s theatre in the 1980s. She does this, initially, by focusing on a cluster of Cixous’s seminal essays about theatre in this period. Essays such as ‘Le Chemin de légende’ (‘The Path of Legend’, 1986) and ‘L’Incarnation’ (‘The Incarnation’, 1987) are vital to understand for anyone interested in the developments of Cixous œuvre. They lay the foundations for her utopian, humanist theatre of the 1980s, which was produced collaboratively with Ariane Mnouchkine’s Théâtre du Soleil, and, in keeping with that company’s agenda, centered on wider political, ethical and ecological issues.
The second half of the book provides a detailed and up-to-date analysis of the themes and structures of the major plays created by Cixous and Mnouchkine. These include: L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk roi du Cambodge (The Terrible but Unfinished Story of Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, 1985), L’Indiade ou L’Inde de leurs rêves (The Indiade or The India of their Dreams, 1987), La Ville parjure ou le réveil des Erinyes (The City of Perjury or the Awakening of the Erinyes, 1994) and Tambours sur la digue (Drums on the Dyke,1999). Though much attention is paid to the politics and aesthetics of these texts, Dobson also explores what she believes are the tensions and contradictions existing in Cixous’s practice of drama. Principally, these are: her representation of difference and alterity; her treatment of history in L’Indiade and L’Histoire terrible ; and her attempts to produce a theatre which would exist as an ideal site for the construction of a poetic identity.
Dobson’s chronological approach works well: it permits her to unveil Cixous’s perennial concerns (the role of writing and its relationship to the body, the construction of alternative possibilities for subjectivity, the importance of difference, etc.), while, at the same time, mapping the changes occurring in her theory and practice of theatre over three decades. The main development which Dobson explores in Cixous’s dramaturgy – and she is surely correct to attribute this to the influence of Mnouchkine – centres on the move from an aggressive feminist attack on theatre as a patriarchal site to a celebration of the spatial and temporal alternatives that theatre can offer:
Cixous’s initial engagement with the theatre was fuelled by a politically motivated desire to challenge and change the traditional structures and narratives of Western theatre […]. This desire, to change the theatre by means of her writing, has gradually been replaced by the realization that her experience of the creative process of writing has been transformed as a result of her contact and engagement with the theatre. (141)
Dobson’s lucid close-readings of Cixous’s major dramas allow a number of fascinating themes and aesthetic issues to emerge and interweave. The principal themes she treats are: feminine desire; post-colonial politics; writing for the subaltern and disenfranchised; exile; the production of a poetic identity; and alterity and difference. Since Dobson is concerned to show how these themes are inseparable from aesthetic questions, she is always sensitive to Cixous’s theatrical methods. For example, her rejection of patriarchal voyeurism in the theatre, and subsequent attempts to create a feminine theatre; her technique for representing contemporary history through myth and epic narrative; her experimentation with Eastern performance modes such as Noh and Banraku in her work with Théâtre du Soleil; and her self-referential quest to represent poetic identity through a theatre which foregrounds the role of the poet and exile. Crucially, Dobson stresses that what unites these themes and evolutions is a political and ethical desire to use to theatre as a means of: ‘donner la parole, of giving voice to subjectivity and of giving voices to others’ (51).
Though Dobson’s book is not intended as ‘an exhaustive study of Cixous’s theatre’ (14), it does provide a thorough and cogent account of the major concerns and developments within that theatre. To this extent, she fulfils her designated task ‘to generate an increased interest and a more comprehensive picture of Cixous’s complex and productive engagement with the theatre’. (14) It should be noted, however, that Hélène Cixous and the Theatre, like most of the books in Lang’s Modern French Identities series (edited by Peter Collier), will be of greater interest to theatre academics than practitioners. No attempt is made to engage with the practical skills actors need to perform Cixous’s work, or the concrete difficulties and possibilities encountered by Cixous and Mnouchkine in their collaborative and collective process with each other and Théâtre du Soleil.
Dobson should also be congratulated on her refusal to adopt a slavish attitude toward Cixous’s theatre, while obviously championing the latter’s case. Like Gayatri Spivak, she is particularly critical of the ethical and political tensions undermining Cixous’s utopian project. According to Dobson, Cixous’s attempt to represent difference positively negates alterity, and her use of allegory and myth damages the historical specificity of the issues she addresses (partition in India and Cambodia’s tragic post-colonial history). While Dobson’s critique is an important one, her conclusions are unconvincing because they lack complexity. She never considers that Cixous’s desire to combine particularity with universality in a historical allegory is a strategy for producing what Walter Benjamin calls ‘a constellation’ or ‘monad’. That is, an artwork which merges past and present in a radically non-mimetic form so that liberation can occur in the future. From this perspective, drama is not a tool for representation, but a machine for liberation, an active device for producing change through the interplay of its own specific elements.
To have fully succeeded in her critique, Dobson would have needed to explore three areas in detail: the aesthetic debates between Lukàcs, Adorno, Brecht and Benjamin over the status of Realism; the politics involved in the allegorical theatres of Kafka, Beckett and Genet; and recent trends in left-wing post-structuralist philosophy. These are not arbitrary areas (and neither are they ‘pet subjects’ of the reviewer). Cixous’s aesthetic and intellectual ideas originate in and develop out of her dialogue with these issues and writers. It is a pity that Dobson overlooked these wider points, for she missed an opportunity to examine the traditions and concerns informing Cixous’s ‘post-structuralist engagement’. In my opinion, this prevents a good book from being the groundbreaking study, it could so easily have become.