When World War II began, Eve Cixous, the mother of French writer Hélène Cixous, stopped saying Jew. As Cixous recalled in her essay “My Algeriance” (1997), “the word that begins with ‘j’ was not spoken it was a forbidden, dangerous poisonous word …” The refusal to speak Jew was the refusal of a toxin. And at the same time, Cixous wrote, this refusal was a form of “self-mutilation.” It was at once protective and violent, a paradox that encapsulated Cixous’s understanding of writing. “All literature is scarry,” she claims in the preface to her essay collection Stigmata (1998). A scar: an embodied contradiction, a presence which simultaneously signifies and heals, memorializes and erases, the injury which occasions it. Or, in Cixous’s definition, a scar is “a visible or invisible fibrous tissue that really or allegorically replaces a loss of substance which is therefore not lost but added to, augmentation of memory by a small mnesic growth.”
Well-Kept Ruins, Cixous’s newest book, translated into English by Beverley Bie Brahic, is less a book than a verbal scar. “Your body must be heard,” Cixous wrote in her most widely-read essay, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1997). In Well-Kept Ruins, she demonstrates what it means for a dead body to be heard — not despite but through its mortal injuries. Two dead bodies animate the book: the body of Eve, Cixous’s mother, who passed away at the age of 103 in 2013, and the body of the synagogue in Osnabrück, Germany, whose wreckage Cixous refers to as “the Carcass.”
These deaths are irrevocable. But “every language artist is an artist of the struggle against the condemnation to death,” Cixous said in the preface to Stigmata, and through the writing of Well-Kept Ruins she works to reclaim what she can from these corpses. “I am the Archaeologist of Eve’s Earthly Body,” she announces while cleaning her mother’s apartment after her death. The body is an archaeological site, filled with obscure and broken artifacts, demanding excavation. It cannot be brought back to life, but the act of writing may recover something of its past.
Well-Kept Ruins describes Eve’s biography, alongside Cixous’ own journeys to her mother’s hometown. Along the way it traverses continents and centuries, including Osnabrück’s 17th century witch hunts, which saw the torture and murder of hundreds of women; the city’s 20th century ethnic cleansing of Jews; the Cixious family’s flight from Algeria; and the rubble of Osnabrück’s synagogue, the book’s eponymous ruins, which form a tidy monument within the city’s 21st century architecture.
I’ve put these events in chronological order, which is easy to do, but Well-Kept Ruins denies its readers a facile structure. For Cixous, no timeline is truly linear. “Time is timeless and hourless,” she writes on the book’s first page. This is a story that cannot be said even to begin or to end. “[T]he Story beginsends,” Cixous insists. “Everything is yesterday.” The past is the present, and the future is the past.
Christian theology celebrates the miracle of incarnation, the idea that in Jesus Christ the word has been made flesh. Hélène Cixous’s writing inverts that miracle: she is concerned with how the flesh can be made word. This leads her beyond the strict conventions of genre — Well-Kept Ruins is at once a memoir, a history, and a work of philosophical theory — as she seeks forms of writing to describe the embodied and inherited traumas of the 20th century. Alternatively lucid and fugue-like, Well-Kept Ruins includes both clear narrative descriptions of Cixous’s travels to Osnabrück and also disorienting passages in which speakers shift and narratives collapse into each other.
This is apt for portraying the bodies Well-Kept Ruins discusses, which also shift and collapse. Yet it is precisely through their wounds and vulnerabilities that these bodies transcend the times and places in which they live and die. Consider the question of Eve’s nationality, after a lifetime of flights and displacements. “I am no more French than German,” a speaker says who seems to be Eve. “They flayed me of both my skins. I am universal.” Through the violence that destabilizes her, she finds an identity beyond the contingencies of birth and citizenship.
In its destruction, Osnabrück’s synagogue also transcends its particular, parochial function. Cixous compares the wreckage of the synagogue to Rembrandt’s 1655 painting The Slaughtered Ox, which she discussed in the essay “Bathsheba or the Interior Bible” (1993). “Why do we adore The Slaughtered Ox?” that essay asked. “Because without our knowing it or wanting it, it is our anonymous humanity … Behold the portrait of our mortality.” The ox and Osnabrück’s ruined synagogue are both mirrors for humanity, emblems of our universal fate.
What sort of mirror do these ruins provide? Today they comprise a neat memorial, heaps of cleaned rubble wrapped in wire like “a calcified chicken coop.” One speaker, perhaps Cixous’ son, comments on the artificial tidiness of this monument: “they show the stones they hide the destruction. Death is absent. There’s no ruin. They removed it. What is heartrending in a ruin, they removed, sterilized …” The too-fastidious and manicured attempt at memorialization conceals the brutal messiness of the violence it claims to remember.
“These neat remains, labeled and caged,” Cixous writes, “are a portrait of my inner ruins.” It is not clear what she means by this. Perhaps she sees the synagogue’s wreckage, and the subsequent attempts to artfully arrange it, as a metaphor for the work of writing, of transforming suffering and bodily vulnerability into language. Just as the act of shaping the synagogue’s rubble, its “carcass,” necessarily hides the carcass’s viciousness from view, so too does finding words for embodied experiences obscure those experiences’ wild ambiguities.
“Poor little synagogue they burned it alive,” Eve says. Its elegantly displayed corpse, its “well-kept ruins,” are easy to miss on a walk through Osnabrück. Once she finds them, Hélène Cixous visits those ruins again and again. But she does not return to them. “This is not a ‘Return.’” Cixous insists. “I’ve never wished for a Return. In my opinion there’s no Return anywhere, ever. No one will ever return to Osnabrück.”
Return is impossible not because the past remains the past, sealed and inaccessible, but because the opposite is true: time does not pass at all, and Osnabrück’s history of violence has never really ended, and has never been confined to Osnabrück. The ruined synagogue there is an icon of Cixous’s inner life, which is at once her inner death. And of ours: in Osnabrück’s synagogue, Cixous provides a symbol of the vulnerability and destruction which is our human birthright, and of the scars that form to simultaneously protect us from and mark the places of our pain.
Some 300 kilometers north of Osnabrück lies the town of Würzburg where in 1924, when Eve was a young teenager, a Jewish boy named Ludwig Pfeuffer was born. Decades later, after emigrating to Palestine and changing his name to Yehuda Amichai, he would write a “Poem Without an End.” In Chana Bloch’s translation this poem reads, in its entirety:
Inside the brand-new museum
there’s an old synagogue.
Inside the synagogue
is me.
Inside me
my heart.
Inside my heart
a museum.
Inside the museum
a synagogue,
inside it
me,
inside me
my heart,
inside my heart
a museum
“There’s a place where the Story beginsends,” as Cixous says. That place is a ruin and a monument to which nobody returns. How can one return to where one has been living all along?
[Published by Seagull Books on December 6, 2022, 156 pages. $21.00 hardcover]
