[In the following excerpt, Lionnet suggests parallels between the struggles of Cardinal's female protagonists to achieve autonomy within patriarchal society and the striving of Algeria to achieve self-rule after years of colonization.]

PROSPERO:
…
MIRANDA:
But how is it
That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?

—William Shakespeare, The Tempest

… Mais je rêve, j'utopographe, je sais.

—Annie Leclerc, Parole de femme

To read a narrative that depicts the journey of a female self striving to become the subject of her own discourse, the narrator of her own story, is to witness the unfolding of an autobiographical project. To raise the question of referentiality and ask whether the text points to an individual existence beyond the pages of the book is to distort the picture. As Picasso once said about his portrait of Gertrude Stein, although she was not exactly like it, she would eventually become so. The ability to “defamiliarize” ordinary experience, forcing us to notice what we live with but ignore, has long been considered an important characteristic of art. Such is the Russian formalists' notion of ostraneniye, or “making strange,” the Surrealists' dream of a heightened level of awareness, Nathalie Sarraute's “era of suspicion.” New ways of seeing can indeed emancipate us. Literature, like all art, can show us new means of constructing the world, for it is by changing the images and structures through which we encode meaning that we can begin to develop new scripts and assign new roles to the heroines of the stories we recount in order to explain and understand our lives.

The female writer who struggles to articulate a personal vision and to verbalize the vast areas of feminine experience that have remained unexpressed, if not repressed, is engaged in an attempt to excavate those elements of the female self which have been buried under the cultural and patriarchal myths of selfhood. She perceives these myths as alienating and radically other, and her aim is often the retrieval of a more authentic image, one that may not be ostensibly “true” or “familiar” at first, since our ways of perceiving are so subtly conditioned by our social and historical circumstance and since our collective imagination is so overwhelmingly nonfemale. Having no literary tradition that empowers her to speak, she seeks to elaborate discursive patterns that will both reveal the “hidden face of Eve”¹ and displace the traditional distinctions of rigidly defined literary genres. Formulating a problematics of female authorship is thus an urgent task for feminist writers and one that they approach with much ambivalence.

Theorists of autobiography have traditionally assumed with Roy Pascal that we read autobiographies “not as factual truth, but as a wrestling with truth.”² In their attempt at a selective grouping of first-person narratives, however, theorists have largely failed to “take hold of autobiography's protean forms,” as Avrom Fleishman puts it.³ And feminist critics in particular have been quick to suggest that, in the words of Nancy K. Miller, “any theoretical model indifferent to a problematics of genre as inflected by gender” must be regarded as suspect.⁴ Since it is notoriously difficult for us as women to recognize ourselves in the images that literature and society (sometimes including our own mothers) traditionally project or uphold as models, it should not be surprising for an autobiographical narrative to proclaim itself as fiction: for the narrator's process of reflection, narration, and self-integration within language is bound to unveil patterns of self-definition (and self-dissimulation) which may seem new and strange and with which we are not always consciously familiar. The self engendered on the page allows a writer to subject ordinary experience to new scrutiny and to show that the polarity fact/fiction does not establish and constitute absolute categories of feeling and perceiving reality. The narrative text epitomizes this duality in its splitting of the subject of discourse into a narrating self and an experiencing self, which can never coincide exactly. Addressing the problematics of authorship,⁵ the female narrator gets caught in a duplicitous process: she exists in the text under circumstances of alienated communication because the text is the locus of her dialogue with a tradition she tacitly aims at subverting. Describing the events that have helped her assume a given heritage, she communicates with a narratee who figures in a particular kind of relationship both with her as narrator and with their shared cultural environment. By examining the narrative structure through these constitutive relational patterns, we can elicit from the text a model of reading which does not betray its complicated and duplicitous messages. For example, Marie Cardinal dedicates her novel to the “doctor who helped [her] be born,” and he is the explicit listener of her life story.⁶ As such, his role is clear. But as I will discuss later, the text encodes his presence as a catalyst whose function is not only to facilitate access to the narrator's effaced, forgotten, joyful “Algerian” self but also to mediate the reader's understanding of the story being told in the book, the “histoire racontée à du papier.”⁷

Marie Cardinal and Marie-Thérèse Humbert are contemporary women writers who have lived and worked in France. They present us with new ways of reading the heroine's text, new ways that they perceive as emancipatory. Their cultural backgrounds and creative roots reach far beyond the confines of France's hexagone; they were both born and brought up in former colonies of France (Cardinal in Algeria; Humbert in Mauritius). Finding themselves at the confluence of different cultures, they must sort out their loyalties and affiliations on a personal as well as social and political level, and their predicament is analogous to that of any woman writer who tries to come to terms with her own sexual difference in a male-dominated society. They draw heavily on their personal colonial experience but publish their works as romans, first-person narratives of young women who are determined to make sense of their past and to inscribe themselves within and outside of the cultures that subtend that experience. They take their readers on a journey of personal discovery where the silent other of sex, language, and culture is allowed to emerge and is given a voice. This process of discovery thus becomes the source of rebirth and reconciliation, the mode of healing the narrating self.

Both Cardinal's and Humbert's tales center on the debilitating sexual and racial stereotypes of their colonial past and the degree to which their narrators have internalized them. Indoctrinated into a blind acceptance of these values (which at the time seem the only possible course for survival), the protagonists become progressively unable to cope with “reality” as presented and depicted in the master narratives of colonization.⁸ They are thus alienated from something at once internal and external to the self. It is at that precise moment of disjunction that the narrative text articulates a dialogue between two instances of the self, the “I” and the “she,” the “I” of the here and now, who reconstructs the absent, past “she,” the emancipation of the “I” being triggered and actualized by the voice of the “she” taking shape on the page. These two instances of the self figuratively alternate roles as narrator and narratee in the context of different narrative segments.⁹ The interaction between the narrator's self-image and her interlocutors (the reconstructed “she” as well as the various other protagonists of the story in their role as [virtual] narratees)—what she focuses on and what she omits—gives dynamism to the unfolding of the narrative and elicits a particular response arise from a dialectical relationship between showing and concealing—in other words, from the difference between what is said and what is meant.”¹⁰ The topos created by this interaction is the privileged textual space where initially unquestioned assumptions about self and other, sex and language, belief and culture can be examined in a dramatic mode: this is where autobiography acquires a meaning and a function not unlike those of fiction with its mythmaking and myth-deflating power.

The novels have numerous formal and thematic similarities and offer a critique of colonialism from two different class perspectives. In Les Mots pour le dire the narrator belongs to the French landowning bourgeoisie, whose stance toward the Algerian Arabs is one of benevolent paternalism laced with Catholic missionary zeal; in A l'autre bout de moi the narrator's family lives on the margins of the rich white settlers' world, which scorns them because their imperfect pedigree (“some Hindu great-grandmother who was all but forgotten since we carefully avoided talking about her”¹¹) is not offset by any redeeming form of financial success. Despite this important class distinction, the childhoods of the protagonists benefit from a similar cultural diversity (a mothering of sorts by the natural environment and the nonwhites who are part of their daily lives, in the absence of a truly nurturing biological mother, in the presence of a flamboyant and indifferent father). They both come to identify with the non-European, Third World elements of their “alien” cultures. For Cardinal's narrator, it is the acceptance of a privileged difference that is a métissage of the heart and mind; for Humbert's, it is a more telling trajectory back to her “mixed-blood” origins after a murderous confrontation with subjectivity in the guise of her twin sister, the mirror image, the “monster” who steals her illusory individuality.

J'appartiens à un pays que j'ai quitté. … il faut qu'une fois encore j'arrache, de mon pays, toutes mes racines qui saignent.

—Colette, “Jour gris,” Les Vrilles de la vigne

The structure of Les Mots pour le dire parallels Cardinal's experience of Freudian psychoanalysis. Having reached a point of dislocation and madness after resettling in Paris with her family, she decides to enter analysis. The combined influence of her church and class, along with the traumas of a difficult relationship with her rejecting mother, have made her completely aliénée, folle (insane—or alienated—mad). After years of analysis, she succeeds in unlocking the source of the pain, and the process of writing becomes the process of rebirth: “I must think back to find again the forgotten woman, more than forgotten, disintegrated. … She and I. I am she. … I protect her; she lavishes freedom and invention on me. … I have to split myself in two” (8). This is the most complete and radical sort of rebirth: “self-engendering as a verbal body,”¹² the discovery of language and its infinite possibilities, the realization, the surfacing of an enormous creative potential: “I and the words were both on the surface and clearly visible” (239); “words were boxes, they all contained living matter” (239, tr. m.). Not so much the story of an analysis as an investigation of the analogies between the dialogical analytic process and the healing, self-directed exchange that allows the unmasking of the woman, the novel belies all attempts to label it as a social document about psychoanalysis.¹³ It enacts a coherent staging of that process but, in so doing, subverts it.

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is emotionally comatose, chemically tranquilized, silent, obedient, and submissive; her body, however, is hysterically alive, constantly generating more blood, more fibroid tissue, anarchically feminine. She is her fibro-matous uterus, and when her surgeon decides to cure her physical symptoms—constant hemorrhaging—by the “aggressive” method of hysterectomy, she knows that this would be a mutilation, an amputation of the madwoman who is a part of her and with whom she must learn to live: “I began to accept [the insane one], to love her even” (10). She escapes into the dark office of the analyst, where for the next seven years, she will come at regular intervals to lie on the couch “curled up, like a fetus in the womb”; she feels herself to be a “huge embryo pregnant with myself” (12, 13, tr. m.). The imagery she uses to describe the location of the office is particularly suited to the birthing metaphor; it is in an island of surprising calm and tranquility in the midst of Paris, at the end of a narrow cul-de-sac (2), a “ruelle en impasse” (7), just as her life is lived in an impasse, in limbo, while she undergoes analysis. She is only enduring until she can be strong enough to survive without the protection of the womblike room with its mirroring presence of the “little dark-skinned man” (2), who never judges and will remain impersonal and masked till the end of the book. In this he is the opposite of the tall, dynamic surgeon, who wears white and examines his patient in a glaringly lit room with a ceiling “white as a lie” (7).

How are we to understand this contrast between the surgeon and the analyst? Clearly, the surgeon stands for a patriarchal society intent on annihilating the disturbing signs of a feminine difference flowing out of control. But more important, in the textual context of the narrative situation he is an antimodel for the critic, whereas the analyst figures as an ideal other. The analyst's silent, invisible (she cannot see him from the couch), but very attentive presence casts him in the role of a midwife who helps the narrator pregnant with her effaced self. The text constructs him as an ideal listener-reader, one without preconceived and Procrustean notions of literary or autobiographical canon. It is in this implicit contrast between the two doctors that the narrative signals itself as a “communicational act,” as Ross Chambers formulates it, and provides us with the model of reading most appropriate to the “point” it is trying to make.¹⁴

This is a model, needless to say, that would neither amputate the text of meaning nor fit it into a preexisting theoretical framework: here, the text figures as the female body of the writer and the critic, as the midwife of its meaning. What is being advocated is a female reappropriation of the best form of ancient Socratic maieusis, not surprising for a feminist author who was trained as professor of philosophy. The metaphor of “physician of the soul” is, of course, well known to readers of Augustine's Confessions (10:3: “medice meus intime”), in which God, the transcendental addressee, is the model of Augustine's ideal reader, the one who can help the narrator transcend his own corporeality, so that his soul may be reborn. In a reversal of this mind/body dichotomy and of the traditional quest of spiritual autobiographers for a transcendent self, Cardinal aims at rediscovering the body in its female specificity as the source of her own discursive practice.

The specular relationship created between writer and reader (or critic) in the analytical situation suggests that, for the writer as well, there is an antimodel of creativity; her inability to write without constant reference to a rigid code and pious reverence for the great masters stifles her completely:

That's what writing was for me: to put correctly into words, in accordance with the strict rules of grammar, references and information that had been given to me. In this area improvement consisted in expanding vocabulary in so far as it was possible, and learning Grevisse almost by heart. I was attached to this book, whose old-fashioned title, Good Usage, seemed to me to guarantee the seriousness and suitability of my passion for it. In the same way I loved saying that I read Les Petites Filles modèles when I was little. In Grevisse, there are many doors open to freedom and fantasy, many goodnatured winks, like little signs of collusion, meant for those who do not wish to be confirmed in the orthodoxy of a dead language and a tightly corseted grammar. I felt that these evasions were, nevertheless, not for me, but were reserved for writers. I had too much respect, even veneration, for books to imagine that I could write one. … Writing itself seemed to be an important act of which I was unworthy.

(215, 216, tr. m.)

Such a thorough internalization of the repressive rules of the symbolic order puts the writer in the role of a surgeon operating a ruthless censorship on her own text, asphyxiating any free play of subjectivity.¹⁵ It is not surprising that when she does start finding her own “mots pour le dire,” she hides herself to write and then hides her notebooks under her mattress as though this transgression of the symbolic order can be effective only if it is not subjected to the judging eye of the literary law.

This eye is also the one she sees in her hallucination (chap. 8), which terrorizes her: it is the eye behind the camera of her father, who had attempted to photograph her as a toddler while she was urinating on the ground. This experience, lived by the child as a violation of her secret desires, unleashed a formidable anger against this peeping father: “I strike him with all my strength. … I want to kill him!” (152). Her hatred is then promptly repressed by the shame she is made to feel for her violent impulses: “You musn't hit mama, you mustn't hit papa! It's very wicked, it's shameful! Punished, crazy! Very ugly, very naughty, crazy!” (152, tr. m.). Once the “eye” of the hallucination is exorcised she can begin to deal with her fear of being “a genuine monster” (165). This is the combined fear, as Barbara Johnson puts it, of “effecting the death of [her] own parents” and of being creatively different, free, and successful.¹⁶ To overcome this fear, which paralyzes her writing, she has to learn to let the words flow freely, without regard for grammatical rules or objective reality: the flow of words must mimic the anarchic flow of blood and eventually replace it. Describing her apprenticeship at self-portrayal, she explains: “With pencil and paper, I let my mind wander. Not like on the couch in the cul-de-sac. The divagations in the notebooks were made up of the elements of my life which were arranged according to my fancy: going where I pleased, living out moments I had only imagined. I was not in the yoke of truth, as in analysis. I was conscious of being more free than I had ever been” (215, my emphasis).

The distinction between the analysis and the book we are reading is clearly established. Later on, allowing her husband to read her manuscript, she confesses with some trepidation: “I should have thought of it before; I should have stopped to consider that I was writing, that I was telling a story if only to the paper [que je racontais une histoire à du papier (266)]; I should have spoken about it to the doctor” (226). The freedom to write, and to write secretly, is yet another transgression, a transgression of the rules of psychoanalytic practice. But the risk she takes of being judged by Jean-Pierre, her husband, the agrégé de grammaire, is not a gratuitous one: the book exists in a homologous relationship to her analytic discourse, and just as analysis has changed her perception of herself, so reading her text will change Jean-Pierre's perception of his wife: “How you've changed. You intimidate me. Who are you?” (228). The invitation to read/know her anew is thus an invitation to love again after the long estrangement caused by her “illness.” Sharing in the power of language to redefine reality, to name the woman who had become effaced under her social role as wife and mother, “model young wife and mother, worthy of my own mother” (219), Jean-Pierre now sees the new/old face of the narrator, the one that conveys a harmonious relationship to Mediterranean nature, where the sea, the sand, the sun, the sky are one continuous whole, interacting in their difference to allow the free play of meaning. The female is again the equal partner of the male, who needs her to assume her difference so he can become capable of a genuine act of love, an act of loving/reading. The staging of Jean-Pierre as the receptive reader par excellence can be interpreted as a mise en abyme of the reading process and of its effect as it is encoded in the narrative structure.¹⁷ The power to be read on her own terms is thus inseparable, for the female writer, from a genuine “suspension of disbelief” on the part of her audience, whereas her right to be a narrator is acquired through an arduous effort at self-emancipation from the laws of preexisting and distorting master discourses (such as the literary tradition and psychoanalytic practice).

Not surprisingly, this newfound freedom results from her understanding and acceptance of the specificity of her female experience, a specificity that stretches her beyond the personal to the political and historical context of Algeria. Along with the discovery of what it means to be a woman and a victim comes the realization that her victimization as daughter coexisted with her mother's inability to assume and legitimize her own lack of sexual and maternal love and to face her own fear of sexual difference. This fear caused the mother's complicity with the repressive, paternalistic colonial order, despite her qualities of intelligence, sensuality, and integrity (see chap. 16). Although the narrator rejects her as mother, she can see the woman and relate to her as victim. Like Algeria during the war of independence, the mother's agony is the scene of a civil war between conflicting ideologies. Rather than reexamine all the values she lives by, the mother prefers to let herself go completely, to give in to the profound distress that had inhabited her psyche all along. She loses all self-respect, is drunk and incontinent, and subsequently dies. Her daughter finds her, “on the floor. She had been dead for ten or twelve hours already. She was curled up in a ball. Rigor mortis had fixed horror on her face and body” (289). It is the mother now who is the monster, the fetuslike creature whose posture mirrors that of the fetus-daughter she had unsuccessfully tried to abort; that daughter, now safely beyond her nefarious influence, can at last say, “I love you” (292), and make her peace with the past.

It is during a visit to her mother's grave that the daughter is able to recall with poetic tenderness the moments of genuine joy she had experienced when walking on the beach or gazing at the stars with her mother. Looking for shells washed ashore by the waves, looking at the stars in the warmth of the Mediterranean night, together, they had been “in contact with the cosmos” (202). Her mother knew the names of all the shells—“the mother-of-pearl shells, cowries, pointed sea snails, ear shells and the pink razor clam shells” (291)—and of all the stars—“the shepherd's star … the Big Dipper … the Charioteer … the Little Dipper … Vega … the Milky Way” (202, tr. m.). This naming of the universe is her most precious maternal legacy, and the daughter is able to insert herself, her book, her words into that universe. The daughter thereby erases the narrative of hatred and unsuccessful abortion which her mother had divulged to her when she was twelve. They were both standing on a sidewalk of Algiers, “the same sidewalk on which later would run the blood of enmity” (132). The recounting of these secrets had been the mother's saloperie (131), her villainy (105), to her daughter, and the words fell on the young daughter “like so many mutilating swords” (135). This information about the girl's gestation (that prehistoric time of her life) thwarts her feminine development. She does not start menstruating before the age of twenty. The doubly archaic revelation—reproduction as a “female problem” and excavation of her prediscursive past—is lived by the narrator as the murder of her femininity. Indeed, a story can kill, it can be what Peter Brooks calls “un acte d'agression,”¹⁸ and to counter it, another story, more powerful in its enabling, nurturing, or life-affirming characteristics, is needed. Such are the tales and legends that the old Algerian woman Daïba tells to the children on the farm while feeding them “pastry dripping with honey” (98) and unleavened bread. Hers are mythic tales with a powerful, positive, imaginary content, “sudden flights on winged horses prancing all the way to Allah's Paradise … adventures of black giants who shook mountains, fountains springing up in the desert, and genies inside bottles” (98). Such was the magic of those days on the farm: contact with an archaic civilization, games with the Arab children, freedom from French reason and religion. The richness and diversity of her early experiences give the girl a strength to draw from when she is forced to leave Algeria and to cope with the psychic wounds that both her mother and the war inflicted upon her.

Talking to her dead mother in the cemetery, she recalls trips to another cemetery in Algeria, where her dead sister lies and where her mother, inconsolable over the loss of that “exceptional” child, the absent daughter who can never be replaced, used to take her. This loss is the original cause of the mother's profound and murderous contempt for the second daughter. The death of the mother, then, frees this daughter, who can simultaneously terminate her analysis and end her narrative: writing is symbolic matricide. Writing is the act of self-emancipation which allows the narrator to reach autonomy, despite her painful bleeding, much as Algeria won independence through its own bloodbath.

The novel contains two parallel chapters (6 and 16), which describe the Algerian tragedy and the mother's demise in much the same terms: “French Algeria lived out its agony” (87) and “During this last year of my analysis, my mother was living through her final agony” (270); “While lacerated Algeria showed her infected wounds in the full light of day, I revived a country of love and tenderness where the earth smelled of jasmine and fried food” (88) and “On the contrary, she [the mother] didn't give a damn, she exhibited herself as if she took pleasure in exposing her wounds” (280). Colonialism, like sexism, is thus degrading and abject: it is their combined forces that kill “the mother and the motherland”¹⁹ and give the narrator the opportunity to discover what femininity really means in that context. The role of women is to be mothers of future soldiers, who will fight wars and perpetuate inequality and injustice. The only way to break the cycle is to start sharing in the power of men to make decisions that affect all of our lives, to become an active participant in society. In fact, it is her feeling of impotence in affairs of the state that provokes the narrator's major attacks of anxiety: “It seems to me that the Thing took root in me permanently when I understood that we were about to assassinate Algeria. For Algeria was my real mother” (88). The way out of the impasse is a heightened political awareness of the complicated structures of domination that amputate freedom and self-determination from people and countries.

In a direct confession of the apolitical nature of her life before she started to write, the narrator admits that she never even used to read the newspapers. She had first seen the Algerian was as a sentimental family affair of fraternal enmity. Her life had been “thirty-seven years of absolute submission. Thirty-seven years of accepting the inequality and the injustice, without flinching, without even being aware of it!” (264). But with self-integration comes a raised consciousness. The book ends on the historical marker: “Quelques jours plus tard, c'était mai 68.”²⁰ We have come full circle; the personal and the political are inseparable.

Notes

1. I borrow the phrase from the book by Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (London: Zed Press, 1980).

2. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 75. But see also Elizabeth W. Bruss, Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literary Genre (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975); and Lejeune, Je est un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

3. Avrom Fleishman, Figures of Autobiography: The Language of Self-Writing in Victorian and Modern England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 37.

4. Nancy K. Miller, “Writing Fictions: Women's Autobiography in France,” in Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography, ed. by Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 45-61.

5. And its anxieties, as brilliantly analyzed by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979), 45-92.

6. “Au docteur qui m'a aidée à naître,” in Marie Cardinal, Les Mots pour le dire (Paris: Grasset et Fasquelle, 1975). English translation by Pat Goodheart, The Words to Say It (Cambridge, Mass.: VanVactor and Goodheart, 1983), is cited hereafter in the text. Occasionally, I will modify the translation and indicate “tr.m.” When I do so. When necessary, reference to the French edition will be given in the text or in the corresponding notes. Permission to cite from the French and English editions was granted by Editions Grasset, Paris, and VanVactor and Goodheart, Cambridge, Mass. I gratefully acknowledge this here.

7. Les Mots pour le dire, 266 (“the story as told to some paper”). The phrase recalls Montaigne's “mémoire de papier” and his well-known need to “parler au papier.” See Michel de Montaigne, Essais, 3:1, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1962), 767.

8. I use this term in the sense of Jean-François Lyotard's “grand récits” in La Condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979). It is translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

9. For a comprehensive approach to narratology, or general theory of narrative, see Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978).

10. Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Esthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 45.

11. Marie-Thérèse Humbert, A l'autre bout de moi (Paris: Stock, 1979), 28. Hereafter all references will appear in the text, as will references to any work cited more than once. All translations will be mine. Permission to quote the work of Humbert, granted by Editions Stock, Paris, is gratefully acknowledged here.

12. Rodolphe Gasché, “Self-Engendering as a Verbal Body,” MLN 93 (May 1978): 677-94. This study of Antonin Artaud is relevant here for two reasons: madness, language, and writing are central to Cardinal's understanding of her access to the status of subject of discourse; furthermore, the plague, Freud, Marseilles (Artaud's birthplace), and Algiers would figure as the scenes of dédoublement for both writers: the plague being at once a fléau like Cardinal's hemorrhaging and psychoanalysis, as Freud once put it.

13. See in particular Bruno Bettelheim's Preface and Afterword to the English translation; Marilyn Yalom, Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985), chap. 5; Elaine A. Martin, “Mothers, Madness, and the Middle Class in The Bell Jar and Les Mots pour le dire,” French-American Review 5 (Spring 1981): 24-47; and the following reviews: Diane McWhorter, “Recovering from Insanity,” New York Times Book Review, 1 Jan. 1984, 15; and Fernande Schulmann, “Marie Cardinal: Les Mots pour le dire,” Esprit 452 (Dec. 1975): 942-43.

14. Cf. Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3-15. My own critical method in this paper owes much to Ross Chambers's seminar on narrative at the University of Michigan.

15. The rules are the règles, the female menstrual cycle, which “may provide a near-perfect metaphor for Cardinal's dialectic … of subversion and conformity,” according to Carolyn A. Durham in her excellent study of another work by Cardinal: “Feminism and Formalism: Dialectical Structures in Marie Cardinal's Une Vie pour deux,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 4 (Spring 1985): 84.

16. See Barbara Johnson, “My Monster/My Self,” Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 9. In this review of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self, and Dorothy Dinnerstein's Mermaid and the Minotaur, Johnson suggests that these “three books deploy a theory of autobiography as monstrosity” (10).

17. See Lucien Dällenbach, Le Récit spéculaire (Paris: Seuil, 1977): Chambers, 18-49.

18. Peter Brooks, “Constructions psychanalytiques et narratives,” Poétique 61 (Feb. 1985): 64.

19. See Marguerite Le Clézio, “Mother and Motherland: The Daughter's Quest for Origins,” Stanford French Review 5 (Winter 1981): 381-89. This is a study of Marie Cardinal and Jeanne Hyvrard.

20. The last chapter of the book, which consists of this single line, “A few days later it was May 68,” is inexplicably missing from the English version. I take this textual “mutilation” as an ironic and unfortunate instance of the kinds of distortion that reductionist theories—psychoanalytic or otherwise—can perform on historical context. The irony, of course, lies in the fact that the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire sees herself as narrowly escaping a similar amputation at the hands of her surgeon, but it is also clear that just as the narrator's mother tries to abort her, certain Western theoretical traditions would rather deny (abort?) the historical realities that subtend the experiences of marginal (women) writers. Thus Bruno Bettelheim in his Preface and Afterword does not once mention the word Algeria and effectively succeeds in silencing that geopolitical dimension of the text.

I thank Ronnie Scharfman and Celeste Schenck for encouraging this project. I am also indebted to Michal Peled Ginsburg, Keala Jewell, John McCumber, and Sylvie Romanowski for their incisive comments on an earlier version of this essay. Parts of the essay were read at the Third Colloquium on Twentieth-Century Literature in French, 6-8 March 1986, at Louisiana State University.