(Trans)Mutations : Alchemy as undercurrent in Hélène Cixous's Le jour où je n'étais pas là

Abstract

"À la place de l'écriture: mon fils, le commandant fantôme de l'écriture ." Taking the phantom of her first-born son, a Down's syndrome child and his phantom writing as the premise of her autobiographical fiction, Le jour où je n'étais pas là , Hélène Cixous prepares the reader for an uncanny and turbulent journey. The underlying force of the narration is found in the "absent presence" of this child, who in his absence (in life and in death) haunts the narrator and the text itself. This "absent presence," as well as, the opposed "present absence," echoes the central endeavor of the ancient hermetic science of Alchemy, which is to render what is invisible visible and vice versa. Indeed the tenets of alchemy prove to be an ideal theoretical framework through which to follow the phantom text. This article, then, proposes a reading of the autobiographical fiction through the lens of alchemical doctrines and by doing so, echoes the work of the alchemists in attempting to reveal the intangible—the phantom writing—within the tangible. The essential concept of "transmutation" as it collides with that of "mutation," in all its senses, is revealed not only as a dominant theme of the text, but describes the very processes of Cixousian production.