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White + black = red
Question marks about the paradigms of the human spirit, the structure of time and the naming of things in ‘Third Body’
By Diego Costa
Cixous seems to be searching for these links between entireties — these invisible bridges that hide themselves in the in-between-ness of solid things.
There is probably more than one answer to the questioning of which body Helene Cixous is referring to in “The Third Body.”
We could list a few possibilities: the resulting body after the junction of two lovers’ bodies; the idealized, utopian body; the constant sensation (need?) of a body that is never really there to nurture and protect you; the abandoning physicality of a parental presence. Or even the book itself, the translation of whatever history develops between a first and a second set of limbs.
Cixous’ book serves as a direct “victim” of her own obsession with the plasticity of language and its capability for emotional somatization.
Algerian-born Cixous (age 69), the daughter of a French-colonialist father and an Austro-German mother, went to school in France, but her first language was German. And it is this confusing, multi-faceted relationship between female identity and linguistic disarray that gives body to this intimate account of what it is like to wonder too much.
“The Third Body” is a collection of question marks about the paradigms of the human spirit, the structure of time and the naming of things, along with a series of incredibly poetic neologisms.
Basic questions such as “Why would someone desire my body?” and “What doesn’t have a limit?” surface. As well as syntactically defying moments of personal epiphany: “I forgot my forgetting,” and “My disappearance disappeared.”
The narrative allows itself no structural paradigm. Cixous pours her sentiments on paper unabashedly and amorphously, like they had been contained in a flask for too long, and that she purposely let shatter on the ground, as if saying “why not change things?”
There aren’t that many characters in the book (a mother, a lover and herself — and the father, of course), but it’s just delightfully hard to keep track of who is who; where one ends, where the other begins.
“It happens sometimes that we would be looking at ourselves lying on the ground without moving, eyes opened and stupefied at being two people in a state of exchanging beings: that someone whom I see is more me than myself,” she writes.
There is also a beautiful lack of concern regarding realism, literary tangibility — a liberating sense of disrespecting form and convention. The way she weaves her words — haphazardly, with no commitment to linguistic responsibility — mirrors her own emotional moment. Her text becomes a somatization of her psychological malaises. An extension of her existential grief. An extra limb, an extra body.
So S’s suddenly become Z’s, even if the words end up being misspelled. Words become never-ending commas. Ending letters get repeated for a few sentences like she had set her elbow on a keyboard button for a while. She manages to create meaning out of orthographic “errors” (“le nour et la juit,” “dight and nay”) and even develops a mathematically emotional way of thinking of colors (“white + black = red,” “night + day = blood”).
Much of her wondering is about that which lies between Sunday and Monday (“samedimanche,” “saturdaysunday”) and what links and separates other days of the week. They obviously cannot be stuck together without gaps. They need knuckles and joints like body parts, since they aren’t completely independent entities. They form a whole too.
Cixous seems to be searching for these links between entireties — these invisible bridges that hide themselves in the in-between-ness of solid things — only to surreptitiously divert our being without showing their faces or letting themselves be named. And that which doesn’t have a name, that we should fear.
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