“I think we ought to only read the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.
He wrote this letter because his friend reproached him for not having answered his letters. Kafka answers him by saying: excuse me, but I was reading (17).
Hélène Cixous
Three steps on the Ladder of Writing, 1993
Natasha Morley (left) and Jessie Winter Mudie in Kissed, 1996
I would like to transcribe more from Cixous, except that I wouldn’t know where to stop. Her writing is so incredibly whole. There are no preexisting segments. No parts. I would inevitably wind up keying in the whole book.
“What do we do with the other when we create? What does the author do? What does the painter do? That is, what do we do? This is our portrait, the portrait of the artist done by himself or herself, the portrait of you by me: it is oval: the Egg of Evil. What do we do with the body of the other when we are in a state of creation — and with our own bodies too. We annihilate (ourselves) (Thomas Bernhard would say), we pine (ourselves) away (Edgar Allen Poe would say), we erase (ourselves) (Henry James would say). In short, we institute immurement. It all begins with walls. Those of the tower. Those of the chateau we enter as we follow a seriously wounded narrator. ‘The Oval Portrait’ starts like this: (27)
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