Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory
Helene Cixous
Language: English
Pages: 228
ISBN: 0823227758
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University's Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual's first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same.Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous's fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the omnipotence-otherseductions of literature; a family's flight from NaziGermany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with, as Jacques Derrida writes, a counterfeit genius.
Les rêveries du promeneur solitaire
Crown Hotel. Why have I never tossed out the ‘‘evidence’’ I wonder, I wrote this question down as it occurred to me, I noted the expression ‘‘the evidence’’ and I didn’t touch it. This is a question, it’s a fact. Or ought I perhaps to have asked why I had or have kept the ‘‘evidence’’? This is a question which requires careful consideration an analysis to which we must devote ourselves some other time. To say that I have kept is an exaggeration, I haven’t saved, protected, that’s never crossed my.
In a little synagogue, and each of his poems is like a stone deposited on the century’s tomb. It’s him to a T I said to myself he was talking about Mandelstam his father had known him it’s a self-portrait I was thinking, he was extraordinarily gifted he was saying, I was thinking, at such interpretation-evocation acts. I didn’t look at him. I was struck by an onomastic resemblance between his name and that of my son the dead but I promptly pushed aside this semblance of a resemblance, what could.
Myself back in the Clos-Salembier’’ I know he is lost, surrounded and embattled, and me too consequently for the one drags the other down with him and vice versa. The minute I say ‘‘I find myself back in Manhattan’’ we are prey to exaltation. We say ‘‘I find myself,’’ this means I am lost, lost in the unfathomable depths of some incarceration whose keys we cannot locate. But in another way it is only fenced in the Clos, in the jagged confinement, in the Salembrian bites and lacerations that my.
Almost Lutheran to which I subscribed enthusiastically, that’s what worries me— You must picture the Room 91 of January 1, 1965, in shades of black, black curtains, dingy wallpaper traces of New-Yorkblack grime in the little black tub where degenerate New York cockroaches squirmed, their long spidery legs the black vestiges of the good old cockroaches of yore, skeletal semblances of once-plump scarabees, black roaches honed to a thinness, blacks of the unconsciousses whose scratched tubs spawn.
Shuddering, tears come to my eyes at the thought of this smashing of the icon, at the thought of this cruel inflicting but courageous but cruel I picture myself throwing down my pen, the one I am gripping between the three live fingers of my right hand right here right now which I love like the flesh of my pet cat, this pen which waits for me and breathes life into me and vice versa I picture myself as my brother flinging it to the ground, deliberately, and cutting it off from me along with the.