Mundane interruptions: The insignificance of Hélène Cixous's Le Jour où je n'Étais Pas là

Although Cixous's writing would certainly not be described as "common" or "ordinary," her theories on writing emphasize the importance of the everyday, the unnoticed instants and passages that make up life and that are not in fact insignificant simply because they are quotidian in nature. "We want to draw the instant," she explains in Stigmata, Escaping Texts, "that instant which strikes between two instants, that instant which flies into bits under its own blow, which has neither length, nor duration, only its own shattering brilliance, the shock of the passage from night to light" (Stigmata 29). The instant between main plot points, just before the confession or just after the murder: these are the moments that interest Cixous and that make up an essential part of what she considers ecriture feminine. She explains in Photos de racines that a story's most intense moments occur between the scenes: "La richesse d'une histoire se situe dans les interstices. Dans le grand theatre, les moments les plus bouleversants sont toujours les apres ou avants. Avant le crime, apres la trahison, apres la separation" (77). These impermanent instances are crucial to ecriture feminine because, like the "feminine" itself, they are generally repressed or covered over and left unnoticed. Cixous describes sexual difference in terms similar to those used to describe the passage of the text, as an infinitesimal passage from one moment or being to another. Referring to la difference sexuelle by its initials (read also la deesse), Cixous explains that "La >--n'est pas une region, ni une chose, ni un espace precis entre deux, elle est le mouvement meme, le reflechissement [...] l'insaisissable qui me touche, qui venant du plus proche me donne par eclairs a moi-meme l'impossible moi-autre" ("Contes" 56). This imprecise moment of encounter between the "masculine" and the "feminine" either within one person or between two people is, she explains, what ecriture feminine attempts to translate into language: "C'est ce que l'ecriture essaie de faire : le compte rendu de ces evenements invisibles" (Cixous and Calle-Gruber 57). It is these "invisible moments" of language, emotion, and life, otherwise taken for granted, that Cixous unearths in her theory and fiction. In her recent work on these moments of passage, Cixous has not abandoned the project of ecriture feminine that she first proposed in the 1970s. The language of this project has changed somewhat, however, and it is in this light that I am approaching this study, as an exploration of Cixous's current discussion of ecriture feminine and its relation to the literature of the twenty first century. In this perspective, I would like first to emphasize an important shift in her vocabulary. While maintaining the fundamental understanding of the "feminine" as that which has been repressed, Cixous tends at present to discuss "sexual difference" rather than "feminine writing," and in place of the "disruption of the binary," an effort continually crucial to the project, she seems to concentrate more on the notion of "passage." While shifting terms, Cixous insists on the basic goals of her project: to reveal the "feminine" by unearthing what has been repressed without in turn repressing the "masculine," to work on the interaction between the "masculine" and the "feminine" in order to allow for exchange rather than a struggle for superiority. In terms of this study, the repressed is approached not in terms of the "feminine," but rather as those passages, those off-stage scenes, those moments in which language and text are seemingly overlooked simply because they are ordinary. In the 1990s, Cixous began to use a term that aptly describes this imperceptible moment of passage: the entredeux. She employs this term in her 1998 work, Deluge, a fiction depicting the raw charge of one particular emotion. mourning. She explains the term entredeux in Photos de Racines, an extensive interview with Mireille Calle-Gruber: Le mot > : c'est un mot dont je me suis servie recem ment dans Deluge pour designer veritablement un entredeux--entre une vie qui s'acheve et une vie qui commence. …