Luce Irigaray and Les fous de bassan : a reading

Abstract

This paper is a reading of Anne Hébert's novel, Les fous de Bassan, following Luce Irigaray's analysis of western culture. The novel through its title, deconstructs the unified subject by bringing into play pairs of binary oppositions for which the underlying opposition is, culture as creation:nature as creation. This foregrounds the role of reproduction in the creation of culture which we then examine through demonstrating the lack of a vertical dimension in the mother/daughter relationship. The novel, at the same time, affords the reader symbolization of two notions, the threshold and mucosity, both of which Irigaray suggests as possible new categories of thought that could allow sexual difference to be expressed in language.