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My father’s beliefs were so rigid that once, when my parents came to visit me at Barnard, I suggested we walk down Fifth Avenue to look at the shopwindows and he refused. He was almost viscerally offended by the idea of frivolously spending money, and of accumulating wealth. To this day, almost everything he’s earned goes back to impoverished relatives and charities in India. Also, waste was a crime. My father had witnessed the Bengal famine of 1943, when the English starved Kolkata. Growing up, I’d be anxious about inviting my American friends to the house for my birthday parties, because my parents would always comment on all the unconsumed food they’d throw away. When I was a child, almost every purchase my parents made was deliberated over. We arrived in Kingston with a few suitcases, a couple of pots and pans. I don’t want to exaggerate, but there was a frugal, bare-bones quality to my upbringing, and a feeling that we were just passing through.
cool
Night has fallen by the time we reach the service station, and there’s a line for the pumps. It’s a Friday in the busy season, and amid the noise of car doors opening and closing, people talking and shouting, my parents do what they can to keep me from waking. Very slowly, Mom moves out from under me, lays me down on the back seat, and covers me with my yellow blanket.
She leans forward and whispers, “You want some coffee?”
My father turns and looks at her. He gazes at the hair falling long and loose over her chest. After this trip she will always wear it short, and she’ll stop sharing a bed with him, sleeping instead on a mattress on the floor of my room. My father is so tired that he is slow to answer.
“Coffee it is, then,” whispers Mom.
<3 the prolepsis really hits me
Finally, the day he had been so desperately waiting for arrived: October 25, 1995, a Wednesday. At precisely five o’clock, he walked into the Ecole’s packed lecture hall, where thousands of students were talking noisily in all kinds of languages—as though the children of the builders of the Tower of Babel had gathered there. Then came a sudden hush—Hazrat Derrida was about to appear. Puffing on his pipe, carrying a heavy bag, he made his way toward the desk in the middle of the stage. Derrida Sahib was wearing a great many layers, and as he approached the desk he began removing them one by one, hanging them on the back of the chair. He peeled off a raincoat, a jacket, a cardigan, a vest, a jersey, until his muscular torso was clothed in only a light sweater. The act seemed pregnant with meaning—a gesture toward the task before him, the layers of meaning that must be stripped away in the course of the seminar. Then Derrida took his seat, drew his papers from his bag, and lay them down. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, “I assure you that what will be said over these weeks will be nothing other than the sum of the words of fictional people brought to life for a moment, and that their words will not bring us face-to-face with the possible. It is the impossible, instead, that we must confront. We will try to bring about something else, something ‘other,’ through an indefinable course that will be the source of our discussion—its goal—but that will forever remain outside its bounds. We will touch the impossible.”
why do i love this
I’ve kept one for decades—it’s the font of all my writing. I recently taught a class on the diary at Barnard, where we read real ones by Pavese, Woolf, Sontag, André Gide, and Carolina Maria de Jesus, as well as work by Joyce, Ernaux, and others. These days people are more excited about digressive, almost unpresentable writing, the kind that exists in some private, intimate dimension, but for a long time, there was a sense of a literary hierarchy, with the novel at the top and any record of real-time experience, especially women’s experience, at the bottom—you know, “There she goes, pouring her heart out again.” That mode, which involves carving out a space in which no one is watching or listening, is how I’ve always operated. I remember that during an event for Interpreter of Maladies in London—this was before it won the Pulitzer, but it was a pretty big crowd—someone asked me, “Who do you write for?” And I stood on that stage, this incredibly green writer, and said, “I write for myself.” There was total silence.
lol
One day, at Jim Wesson Jr.’s encouragement, Paul and a couple of the agents on his team set up a booth at a community fundraiser at a racquet club. It was vaguely environmental in purpose, raising money for wetland and mangrove preservation while being sponsored by several of the companies responsible for their impending extinction.
this is a little cheap but i did chuckle a bit
“Well, if all else fails I can just become a realtor,” Maya chirped. He stopped wheeling the cart.
“Sorry?” he said.
“I’m kidding. I mean, maybe I will become a realtor, married with two kids in my twenties,” Maya said. “I can see it.”
“No, you will not,” Priscilla said. “You’re too talented for that.”
Both of Maya’s nose piercings glistened in the fluorescent light of the frigid grocery. She looked like an artist, Paul thought.
He was quiet the rest of their time in Publix. Afterward, politely enough, he parted ways with the women and got into his car.
He braked at the parking lot topiary, the automated sprinklers wetting his sedan. Maya was right, he should feel ashamed—not of his hopes and fantasies, but of the self he had developed to deal with their ruinous state.
rough
He decided to write to Steven, whose email he had from the cast list.
“Hey Steven, it’s Gitman from Chalk Circle here, long time. Just wanted to say that I’m really happy you made it. We had something going in Santa Fe, glad one of us got a break. Saw the show in Fort Myers and laughed my ass off, superb work as our repertory director used to say.” When the email didn’t bounce back, he imagined how Steven might reply: “Hey, if I did it, you definitely can,” or “What, you were there? You should’ve emailed me, I would’ve got you backstage,” while also recognizing, in the hope of warding off one more disappointment, that the comedian probably wouldn’t respond.
sad
“I wrote this,” Paul said with the pick in his hand, and proceeded to strum the guitar. He felt deeply moved by this song, “Mother Dear,” the introductory track to his self-titled album. “Mother dear, how I wish, you were here, how I wish, how I wish,” he sang, his voice acrobatic and trembling. Where once he’d felt it was too maudlin, and his crooked label had suggested he move it to mid-album, now this song seemed to him a masterpiece of alternating hesitation and emotion. As he watched his pick move up and down, he could feel how important music still was to him, how he could use chords and lyrics to summon moments of his life that had passed and briefly relive them.
“Thank you very much,” he said at the end, as if he were back at that club in the Keys with his mother approaching the plywood stage. The others applauded. Priscilla said, “That was so great, Paul,” more careful these days not to call him sweet. “Nice job,” Maya added. Then they went on with their evening.
still not sure if the ending is meant to be sad or cautiously optimistic but i always experience it as brutal
INTERVIEWER
How would you describe your own process of invention? Your works of fiction are, of course, intensely autobiographical.
CIXOUS
The problem with the question you’re asking is that it is entirely theoretical. When one writes, one doesn’t ask oneself, Is it fictional? Is it autobiographical? No. Now, another comment. All writing that is strong, alive, is autobiographical. At the same time, everything is invented. Everything Proust wrote has passed through what reality whispered to him. Of course, there are a thousand ways to be autobiographical. Take Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, which is of course entirely invented, but also The Life of Henry Brulard, the autobiography, which does not bear Stendhal’s name. When I read them both, I am transported with admiration. But what makes the autobiography autobiographical? It is already transposed, it is comic, it is tragic, it is poetic. And all that takes place in it happens to someone who is at once Stendhal and not Stendhal. Derrida pointed out, for example, that Nietzsche emphasized that philosophy is autobiographical. Of course, if the philosopher doesn’t say this, we don’t dare suggest it, but nevertheless it’s true. If we know Kierkegaard’s story, we realize that his reflections are the result of what he experienced, his own research, his anxieties.
INTERVIEWER
You’ve written that you didn’t start writing until you were twenty-seven because literature was reserved for “great men.” Is that true? What changed at that age?
CIXOUS
That was the age at which Derrida and I started our endless conversation. And of course it was all about writing. We spoke a mélange of Stendhal, and a bit of Mallarmé, some Rabelais, Blanchot. The thing is that Derrida could read me and I could read him. At first I thought to myself, How extraordinary it is that people like Derrida exist! The world is wonderful! There must be others like him. And so I set out to find the other Derridas. After a while I got the impression that there weren’t many, and finally I realized that there were none. We would talk on the phone very early in the morning. We talked nearly every day—about what we were doing, our work, about current events, political positions. It was a constant analysis. This type of relationship changes over time. When you have been friends for twenty years, you turn around and look back and say to each other, “This is necessary.” And after forty years, you say, “This is life.”
sweet