Fantastic Metropolis

I first read Les Guérillères almost a quarter of a century ago. The beauty of its language and imagery so stunned me, the fierceness of its depiction and enactment of war on the gendered category of “woman” so inspired me, its formal inventiveness so excited me, that Wittig’s work would have remained indelibly stamped on my memory had I read it only that once.

GOLDEN SPACES LACUNAE
THE GREEN DESERTS ARE SEEN
THEY DREAM AND SPEAK OF THEM
THE IMMOBILE BIRDS OF JET
THE WEAPONS PILED IN THE SUN
THE SOUND OF THE SINGING VOICES
THE DEAD WOMEN THE DEAD WOMEN (5)

Les Guérillères is often called a “feminist utopia,” but although it is feminist, utopia it most definitely is not, unless “utopia” is taken for something other than a place.

“One is not born a woman,” Simone de Beauvoir famously declared, contending that the characteristics associated with women and their oppression are not essential to human society, but learned. Two decades later, Monique Wittig envisioned a war in which those characteristics, which she called an “imaginary formation,” would be overthrown. Such a war, her work implies, would not be against men per se but against the structures of culture—entailing a struggle with language, with historical narrative, with myth, a struggle with how both women and men hypostasize “woman.” Although David Le Vay’s translation uses the phrase “the women” repeatedly, both la femme and les femmes—signifiers of the imaginary formation that is the designated enemy in Wittig’s war—are almost entirely absent from the French text. Repeatedly Wittig uses the expression elles dissent, which Le Vay often translates as “the women say,” to indicate the gender that the third-person plural pronoun in English cannot inflect. “The women say” this and “the women say” that in a constant litany, hailing the creation of new myths, new historical narratives, a new material reality.

When I first read Les Guérillères, I had just begun writing fiction myself. The very idea of making war on language and narrative forms through the invention of new forms and the ideological subversion of language fired my imagination. “There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied… You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But Remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent” (89). Without question, Les Guérillères profoundly influenced my very approach to writing.

My passion for Les Guérillères naturally led me to seek out every word by Wittig I could get my hands on. I read, next, The Lesbian Body. I understood from the author’s preface to the translated edition that I would be unable to experience the work’s full, radical impact, using as it does the French language’s relatively heavy inflection of gender against itself. And yet reading Le Vay’s translation, I could scarcely imagine language and imagery more radical. Here I heard the voices of women celebrating the fiercest physical love in astonishingly visceral language and imagery.