Writing the genius of languages, speaking in languages through the voices of literary geniuses, Hélène Cixous delivers with Ayaï! The Cry of Literature a profession of faith in literature that consoles and disturbs. In the constant oscillation between what kills us and what animates us, the polyphonic and polyglot writer once again tells the story of the rescue of literature. Through an interweaving of letters where the voices of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Derrida, Kafka, and Proust can be heard, along with those of the ancient and poetic heroes themselves, Cixous' writing once again bears witness in Ayaï! to a persistent concern for visiting the dead who inhabit and shape us, from the first stammerings of our (pre-)history: the story coming from the books we read, the heroes we frequent, and our personal minefield, strewn with the loved ones we love and lose.

In the amalgamation of voices that shape the material of Ayaï!, a cry occupies a central place and resonates with all its tragic power. The cry that gives its title to the work is that of Ajax, the hero whose fall and suffering of being left behind is recounted by Sophocles. Ajax's anger becomes that of the grieving being, the eternal loser condemned to survive, and his cry is a prayer addressed to literature as an all-powerful deity: "Ayaï! Raise me from my ashes!" The suffering of the world and the entire literary tradition, from the ancient Greeks to Derrida, are replayed in this cry, and Cixous rewrites the first text: "At the beginnings of beginnings, there will have been the first note of our pain, rising from the diaphragm to the sky, like this: AYAÏ! The universal word, the Call." It is about this first, last cry of Ajax that Ayaï! deals with, its inscription and resonance in the tragedy of Hélène Cixous' existence as well as that of any being destined to survive on a pile of ashes.

The book Ayaï! is also the place of an encounter with the artist Adel Abdessemed. The photographs and drawings of this "artist of pain" frame in the text the motifs of the fire that assails us as mortals. Through the use of these images, the book traces a portrait of Cixous as a "little girl on fire," an "immortal effigy," and an "Ovidian sublimation of a too familiar misfortune" whose "howl" has been "transcribed" by Abdessemed in the form of The Scream, a photo doubling the title of the work and making it resonate more strongly.

The author appears as a grieving girl, "raised from her ashes" by literature like one is lifted from layers: nine times in nine years, Cixous finds herself "at the end of the world," experiencing the disappearance of a loved one, an experience initiated by her father's death when she was ten years old. It is at this moment, she confides, that "literature began its work of plugging the abyss," when "everything [was] lost except the word."

Ayaï! is a plea for impossible mourning. The author defends a refusal of the work of mourning through the recourse to literature, the "genius of metamorphosis" and "Sublime Divinity of Transformation" that never holds the dead as dead, once and for all. In fact, literature constitutes the very world of restlessness, facilitating the frequentation of the dead, as dead and as living.

Thus, Derrida, Shakespeare, Blanchot, and Sophocle—to name just a few—have never been more alive than in Cixous's breath, as she busily makes them speak and questions them relentlessly in their "perpetual dying" through the "anti-death telephone" that is literature, a true magic that establishes a connection between us, the orphaned Orpheuses, and our invisible but present dear ones.

Ayaï! is the work of an orphan of flesh and letters—"orpheligne" (G. Michaud) or "Orpheus-line"—deprived forever of the other but trying nonetheless and by all means to bring back her real and fictitious fathers and mothers, killed by her hands more than once. For from the cry to the crime, there is only a step that literature easily takes. Literature is "the chamber of crime," and writers are "like criminals who are always innocent of their acts," Cixous reminds us.

Readers will forever be unsettled by those who, from Proust to Cixous, through Dostoevsky and Derrida, write "moving forward, under a rain of poisoned questions, spurred on by the first and last questions that humans hurl into the empty space of destiny." Offering no salvation, literature—this "Other All-Powerfulness"—allows for dealing with this unease, incessantly probing it to bring about the possibility of reconciling the present and the past.

For "joining the present to the past" and doing so "in an activity of resurrection" is Hélène Cixous's ambition, as channeled by Proust. However, despite this perpetual transformation allowed by writing, no respite will be given—neither to the living nor the dead—and to the suffering will be added more suffering, in a "double suffering" of the one who, like Ajax, "suffers death from dying of oblivion" (Sophocle).

Cixous will continue to write in the voice of the deceased, always spectralized and seeking solace and consolation, reiterating with Ayaï! the wish that there is a continuation of things, writing in the hope that "memory" is "stronger than death," that "memory" survives "the matter in which it is inscribed."

Inheritor of Montaigne and Rousseau, Cixous chooses literature once again as the witness of her revelation; she never ceases to qualify it, name it, yield her powers to it, and invoke it. In turn, a "prophet of the posthumous life" and a "shield," literature "offers us hospitality," "protects and attacks." Literature is "for screaming long, pushing the cries to music": cries of life and death, cries that lead to a vital breath that feeds the never-ending cycle of creation and destruction, of consolation and anxiety, that is the essence of Cixous's work.

In Ayaï!, the cry of literature, Cixous powerfully expresses her faith in the transformative power of writing as a means of transcending the barriers of time, language, and loss. Through the intertwining voices of literary geniuses and the echoes of the heroes themselves, she explores the depths of human existence and the inherent duality of life and death. In this literary landscape, Cixous emerges as an eternal figure, both mourning and celebrating the human condition, relentlessly seeking to make sense of the world and the ever-shifting boundaries of language and experience.


원문 : La voix des morts / Ayaï ! Le cri de la littérature d’Hélène Cixous, accompagnée d’Adel Abdessemed, Galilée, « Lignes fictives », 91 p. (erudit.org)

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