ON LAUGHTER AND OTHER SACRIFICES

Abstract

This paper unfolds a textual history of laughter and sacrifice through an examination of Hélène Cixous's figure of Isaac, Caroline Bergvall's doll-centric poetry in Goan Atom, and Hans Bellmer's mutilated dolls. In tracing the genealogy of Isaac from Genesis to Cixous's Déluge to Derrida's Gift of Death, it becomes evident that the role of author as sacrificer is primal and yet always evolving. By following the trace of Isaac, the text survives its own sacrifice; by examining and contrasting Bergvall and Bellmer's work, this paper proposes that this form of sacrificial laughter allows a text to move within and against the Enlightenment tradition of linear narrative.

Keywords:

• Cixous
• Bergvall
• laughter
• sacrifice
• narrative
• authorship

Notes

I would like to thank my reviewer Sarah Wood for her extraordinary comments, which brought great structure to this piece. I also extend many thanks to Peggy Kamuf for her support and direction.

All biblical citations are from the King James version.

Oxford English Dictionary. See the first entry for the noun “Doll” and its five sub-sections.

See, for example, “UbuWeb Contemporary” at <http://www.ubu.com/contemp/>. Bergvall is not the only poorly described contemporary poet; she is in good company with others such as Jason Nelson.

These and other images are available online on Caroline Bergvall's website: <www.carolinebergvall.com>. Reprinted with the author's permission.

The original:

Un texte féminin ne peut pas ne pas être plus que subversif: s'il s'écrit, c'est en soulevant, volcanique, la vieille croûte immobilière, porteuse des investissements masculins, et pas autrement; […] ce n'est qu'à tout casser, à mettre en pièces les bâtis des institutions, à faire sauter la loi en l'air, à tordre la “vérité” de rire.

The original:

Il est le nom propre de sa moitié mystérieuse; ou le nom de son existence; ou bien le nom de son pays personnel; ou Isaac est Ascension? Plus loin. Homme ou Femme? Alors là vraiment, qui peut répondre? Isaac est toute la différence … toujours d'une femme amoureuse, mais l'être peut aller jusqu'à celui d'un grand-père ou d'une fillette de cinq ans.

For more on this use of the law, see Jacques Lacan's work on the Law (of the father) and the symbolic order in Ecrits and The Seminars of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Book VII).

The first photograph comes from Bellmer's series “Unica,” and the second is his Untitled.

You can see the event of her child's death reenacted in a multitude of Cixous's works, and in particular in Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory.

A common reading of the book's title, Goan Atom.

The sound of this children's song comes out in the poem based on Cindy Sherman's feminist reinterpretation of Bellmer's dolls, “Cindy United #250,” available online at <http://homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/fall04/images-sherman/pages/250untitled250.html>.