The Des Lewis Gestalt Real-Time Reviews
A fearless faith in fiction — Employing, since 2008, a Jungian sensibility and an ‘intentional fallacy’ consciousness — Various passions of the reading moment — Walter de la Mare, ELizabeth BOWen, ROBERT aiCKMAN and many others old and new — Please click my name below for this site’s navigation and my backstory as intermittent photographer, writer, editor, publisher & reviewer.
Hélène Cixous — by Nicholas Royle
Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, realist, analyst, writing.
Manchester University Press 2020
My previous reviews of Nicholas Royle here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress. reviews-of-nicholas-royle/
PLEASE SEE THE COMMENT STREAM BELOW…
My review in 2015 of the complete stories of Clarice Lispector:
From the ‘fits and starts’ of The Uncanny to the ‘cuts’ of Cixous, I hope I am a ‘creative reader’, too!
Royle: “To read Cixous: cut off into another thinking of space and time and history. Her writing is a new kind of science fiction or poetic science criticism.. It has to do with nanoments, narratoids, omniscience and ornithophony, with ‘literature’ as a land as much of the ancient past as of the unforeseeable future.”
[See my gestalt review of SOLAGE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2023/12/02/solage-nimbus-ashley/ ]
My review in 2015 of Edgar Allan Poe’s LIGEIA:
****
LIGEIA
“Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. — JOSEPH GLANVILL.”
A sumptuous, rhapsodically textured text, deceptively ‘slender’ or agile like Ligeia herself perhaps when in full health, but decadently and morbidly tapestried throughout otherwise. Like Ligeia, there is a ‘strangeness’ in this text but one that is hidden in Plain Sight, like Poe’s purloined letter earlier. But, here, it is the Sight itself, her eyes, the most thrilling eyes in all literature, I claim — followed in time’s due accretion by a “Saracenic” tapestried undulance, a literally textured vision of her soul wrestling with shadow… In the end, the Eyes Have It, the Eyes Have It. Eyes with the glance of pervasive foreign, oriental cultures…
A subsuming of one’s second false love with a revivification by one’s first true love. The hope of transcending Death through the narrator’s (or is it Ligeia’s?) wilful amorality? Like today’s battling Saracenic wills in Iraq and Syria? That Conqueror Worm? Poe at his undidactic best. Or with a didacticism hidden in Plain Sight?
cf ‘The Giaour’ by Lord Byron, about Leila… This review of mine seems to be the very first connection between ‘The Giaour’ and ‘Ligeia’. Poe was a fan of Byron. And there are similar Islamic connections in ‘The Giaour’ (and, by the way, a vampire)…
Royle calls some of ‘Ligeia’ revelirious writing and also states:
“Cixous encourages us to ‘write by dream’. This injunction or solicitation would concern the composition not only of poems or plays or works of fiction but also of critical essays.”
Ah.
My review of THE WAVES by Virginia Woolf:
My reviews of the complete fiction of ELIZABETH BOWEN:
“…Nick, you were a mole.”
— Hélène Cixous
CONTENTS PAGE OF THIS ROYLE BOOK: