“There’s a place where the Story beginsends, that is, the story of a story, a narrow, raised stage from which height you see the future of the past approaching, as the past accumulates in a dense heap at the base of the ramparts. From this place you see the sum of what is, was and will have been equally present, equally inaccessible yet distinctly visible. Here, you tremble with emotion. And with regret.”
So writes French novelist, critic and philosopher Hélène Cixous in the opening pages of this fluid, meditative memoir that sees her travel to Osnabrück, in northwestern Germany, a city from which her mother, a German Jew, was forced to flee in 1936 as the Nazis came to power. Today, no Jews remain in Osnabrück, and it has taken Cixous herself many years (she is now in her 80s) to begin interrogating this nightmarish aspect of her family history, almost never spoken of when Cixous was a child. Over the past two decades, however, her writing has increasingly turned in this direction, with this book the fourth, since 1999, in which she has engaged with her family’s past by means of a series of “return journeys” to the place where the story both begins and ends simultaneously.
The Osnabrück of Cixous’s inquiry is a space of ghosts and hauntings, of memory and oblivion. She revisits the house once inhabited by her mother’s family, the Jonases of Osnabrück, which is now occupied by a tall, handsome man, who, notably, does not have a Jonas nose. She wonders: “Where are Mama and Omi my grandmother?”
Eradicated Jews
But, of course, they are gone, eradicated along with the rest of the city’s Jewish community. She climbs the city ramparts, where she contemplates the “trembling relationship of the past in the present” underneath a sky that is an “immortal blue”. She goes to the site of the Old Synagogue, burned to the ground during Kristallnacht, where four engraved tablets tell the story of that horror.
From Baby Reindeer and The Traitors to Bodkin and The 2 Johnnies Late Night Lock In: The best and worst television of 2024
100 Years of Solitude review: A woozy, feverish watch to be savoured in bite-sized portions
How your mini travel shampoo is costing your pocket and the planet - here’s an alternative
My smear test dilemma: How do I confess that this is my first one, at the age of 41?
Osnabrück had other horrors, even before the Nazis. During the 16th century, hundreds of women living in the city were executed on charges of witchcraft. Cixous walks the Street of Witches, thinks of the violence and the women’s cries. It’s an excavation that is particularly poignant, because Cixous’s own mother, who trained as a midwife after she was widowed in the 1940s, was also accused of being a witch, and expelled from her adopted home of Algeria in 1971.
In the English-speaking world, Cixous remains best-known as a prominent feminist theorist, whose call for the creation of an “écriture feminine” revolutionised female writing in the 1970s. In truth, however, she is a broad and diverse writer, the author of over 70 works of literary criticism, poetry, plays and fiction, too few of which have yet been translated to English. All the same, her insistence, in the The Laugh of Medusa, her famous essay from 1975, on the necessity for a feminine practice of writing that moves outside of the conventional rules in patriarchal systems, represents a template for how she continues to approach her craft. Well-kept Ruins, translated here by Beverley Bie Brahic, is a book that leaps about the centuries and continents, that glides from experience to imagination, from dream to reality. Cixous digs into Osnabrück’s history and archaeology at the same time as she intersects with myth, with literature, with Montaigne, with Shakespeare, with Hamlet’s ghost father’s death, with Dante’s Hell.
Glimpses and fragments
The author’s mother, the central figure of Cixous’s life, accompanies her daughter on her journey, even though Ève Klein Cixous died in 2013, aged 103, six years before this particular pilgrimage. Above all, this is a book that delights in language, in what it can be, as it melds poetry and prose, as it forms glimpses and fragments, as it pauses, suddenly, to allow for the white space on the page.
To read Cixous here is to feel oneself pulled along, engulfed, really, amid a torrent of words, a cascade of sentences, as if one has drifted inside of a tumbling, beautiful, confusing, dream. A reader, too, must let go, must allow that we will not always know which of the book’s many voices are speaking, that we cannot always be sure where we are in time and space. The point was never to be so securely fastened, and anyway, such a condition is impossible, for Cixous at least.
“Osnabrück is a fiction,” she writes in the book, “as soon as I find myself there I am lost again.” The story beginsends. The future of the past approaches.
