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.”

There have always been⁠—and here I prefer to turn to my accomplice and friend Stendhal⁠—writers without readers. In The Life of Henry Brulard, which was written in the 1830s and which is an absolute masterpiece, Stendhal quite rightly acknowledges that he will probably have to wait until 1880 before his books are finally read. Maybe there will be readers in 1935. Maybe the crying baby next door is his reader. Finally, quite late in life, he did find a reader, a great reader⁠—Balzac, who wrote him a long letter, from one writer to another. I’ve always loved that story. Stendhal had no readers, whereas Balzac was extremely popular. Now, I would add that there has always been a certain universe that reads. There has always been Balzac for Stendhal. But it is unusual for a writer whose oeuvre is powerful, and therefore destabilizing for the reader, to be recognized. This is part of the destiny of writing. You must wait.

In my seminar, I am teaching students how to read, though not the way I read, because my way of reading is entirely singular. I read the texts in such a way that the students will discover the secrets of reading. For one thing, I historicize. This is vital, because a part of what one does when one writes is clearly a way of receiving and reworking the current, the contemporary, what’s in the process of happening. Our times are mixed into us. You can’t understand Balzac, Flaubert, or Stendhal without their historical periods⁠—the wars, the conquests, the colonialism, everything that causes humanity to constantly transform. One cannot read Tsvetaeva without reading the admirable generation to which she belonged⁠—Pasternak, Akhmatova⁠—who suffered from Stalinist persecution, and corresponded with and read one another. One can’t read Dostoyevsky without trying to learn about the Tsarist world and revolutionary infiltrations.