Corinne D. Mann-Morlet, Pennsylvania State University
Speaking of his initial encounter with one of Hélène Cixous's early manuscripts--which would become her first book, Le Prènom de Dieu--Jacques Derrida qualifies it as an "unidentifiable literary object" and poses several perplexing questions, one of which is: "Who could ever read this?" The issue of accessibility has indeed plagued the Cixousian text from its inception. As one of the main guiding principals of this work is memory--for it nourishes the textual form and content--it is toward the study of this complex human phenomenon that I propose to remedy the conundrum. That is, I intend to demonstrate how and where the inaccessible becomes accessible through the lens of scientific memory studies. Within the fields of cognitive psychology and neurology the existence of multiple memory structures has been established. Three defined spheres of memory are recognized: procedural memory, episodic memory and semantic memory. The last of the three, considered the "youngest" within an evolutionary perspective, dominates the modern mind. The more "primitive" systems, procedural and episodic, remain functioning; however are often undermined by the semantic. An application of these memory systems onto the writing/reading of the Cixousian poetic text will illustrate the origin of its problematic accessibility: Cixousian narrative finds its substance‹expressed through both its form and content‹in the more primitive, ignored memory systems. To access, then, this highly poetic text, one must constantly "forget" the processes and content of the dominant semantic memory system in order to access, or rather to "re-member," those of the more primitive, forgotten or ignored systems, the procedural and the episodic. [C.D.M.M.]