Cardinal's The Words to Say it: The Words to Reproduce Mother

The Words to Say it, an autobiographical novel by Algerian-born Frenchwoman Marie Cardinal, earned praise for the accuracy with which it documents a classic psychoanalysis. Quickly sketched, the plot seems to suggest that the separation from an overpowering mother is effected by paternal language and phallic law—the normal, normative psychic itinerary of the human subject. In its reconsideration of the Oedipal, this essay explores Irigaray's idea of the ambiguities of separation from mother and the possibility that the story of (feminine) subjectivity begins with the mother, begins with affiliation and affirmation even as it speaks of separateness. From this perspective, the protagonist's cure comes about when she associates with her mother's belated madness and sees it as a revolt against the phallic laws of their bourgeois class and against the colonial laws of their Algerian homeland. In the last stages of analysis, the protagonist remembers the language her mother taught her to evoke all the particularities of Algeria; this maternal tongue connects the protagonist both to mother and Motherland. The image of a nurturing Algeria calls for a re-analysis of the cultural drama of the unnamed Algerian war. If the book models an investigation of other psychic versions that challenge what otherwise might be too readily assumed as psychoanalytic law, the book also suggests re-articulating what otherwise might be too readily assumed as cultural law and order. This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol21/iss2/8 Cardinal's The Words to Say it: The Words to Reproduce Mother Eilene Hoft-March Lawrence University In 1976, Algerian-born Frenchwoman Marie Cardinal, already an established novelist, garnered the Prix Unit for Les Mots pour le dire (The Words to Say it), an unusual autobiographical novel in that it filters the protagonist's life story through the lens of a seven-year psychoanalytic treatment. In fact, the novel appears to stand as the crowning achievement of her psychoanalysis; it "documents" a successful talking cure that reproduces, articulates, and definitively contains the sources of madness. Broadly summarized, the protagonist of the narrative progresses from illness to health, from uncertain to clearly delineated subjectivity, from mental and physical moribundity to what the narrator calls a birth of herself. Bruno Bettelheim, who wrote the preface and afterword for the English language translation of the book, gives generous praise to what he deems a true-to-life representation of the psychoanalytic process; he offers plaudits as well for the agent of this process, the analyst, "a compassionate guide who possessed the requisite wisdom to steer [the protagonist] along the right course of self-discovery" (viii). Indeed, he aggrandizes the analyst's power, noting that "a few words uttered by a psychoanalyst stopped a somatic symptom," indicating further that such occurrences are not that rare in clinical practice (305). Polarized, as Bettelheim sees it, against this positive, healing power is the source of the protagonist's madness in the person of her mother, whose "stranglehold of . . . hate" relaxes only upon her death, making her at last loveable (308). The narrator herself seems to subscribe to this notion of two competing forces when, at the end of her analysis (and the book), she thanks her doctor: "[m]y mother gave me the Thing [her term for 1 Hoft-March: Cardinal's The Words to Say it: The Words to Reproduce Mother Published by New Prairie Press 434 STCL, Volume 21, No. 2 (Summer, 1997) madness], you have given me the analysis, it's a perfect balance."' From this summary, one can gather that mother's insanity is held in check by the analyst's language, the "words to say" and to exorcise "it," the unspeakable madness. Bettelheim's near-allegorical scenario-which I have intentionally simplified-recalls an earlier psychoanalytic account of the Freudian father who severs the relation between mother and child.' Or, in Lacan's refinement of Freud, of the imposed paternal, phallic law which reveals the subject as split (off).' Theoretically, the movement from mother and her territory to father and his territory represents the normal, normative psychic itinerary of the human subject. From this perspective as well, Marie demonstrates dramatically the risks of (nearly) not maneuvering that rocky passage away from the mother. However, this predictable plot line accounts only partially for the narrative.' In the reading that follows, I propose an alternative in which Marie very purposefully investigates the so-called pre-Oedipal, maternal domain not only to put an end to subjective disintegration-simply put, madness-but also in order to remedy or complete the process of subject construction by reconnecting with the mother.' Marie's cautious reaffirmation of the maternal eventually serves to reaffirm her profound, personal bond to her native land, Algeria, equally conceptualized as a "mother" from whom she has been unhealthily alienated. It would certainly be difficult to deny that the narrator's earliest descriptions of her madness at its most severe point suggest that Cardinal's Marie has never really gone beyond a pre-Oedipal existence.' Language doesn't appear to control her mental processes any more than it appears to rule her body. Indeed, the language/body relationship operates quite the opposite way: Marie's body constantly "expresses" itself as female through incessant and prodigious menses, a condition that completely overruns her mental reality. I am not making an argument here that woman can be equated with the body, that the hysterical is the "naturally" female condition; instead, I contend that Marie embodies the specifically female problematic of separation from the Maternal Body as exacerbated by the process of reproduction. Perhaps nowhere in the book is this problematic more evidently displayed than in the narrator's distanced self-portrait as a folk mired in the near-autistic depths of mental illness: It was between the bidet and the bathtub that she felt the safest when she could no longer control the thing inside. It was there 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 21, Iss. 2 [1997], Art. 8 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol21/iss2/8 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1427