Fantastic Metropolis

I discover that your skin can be lifted layer by layer, I pull, it lifts, it coils above your knees, I pull starting at the labia, it slides the length of the belly, fine to extreme transparency, I pull starting at the loins, the skin uncovers the round muscles and trapezii of the back, it peels off up to the nape of the neck. (15)

The prose poems of The Lesbian Body deconstruct and reconstruct the images the lover holds of the beloved’s body, often speaking in the name of “lesbianized” figures of history and myth: Orphea and Euridice, Ulyssa, “Christa the much-crucified,” and others, all repeatedly singing the praises of Sappho.

The Western tradition of love poetry presumed that men desire the beloved, while women desire only to be desired (by their lover). In that tradition, only men, in other words, can assume the subject-position and speak their desire of the beloved. Wishing to insert herself into that tradition, Wittig began with de Beauvoir’s premise that one is not born a woman and theorized that lesbians, by refusing and defying the heterosexual contract elucidated by Claude Lévi-Strauss, are not “women” by reason of their having refused to be objects for exchange by men. “Invent,” she urges in Les Guérillères. And so she did. In her preface to The Lesbian Body, moreover, she observes that the desire to write from a position previously not allowed to someone not male is a desire “to do violence to the language which I [j/e] can enter only by force.” Throughout The Lesbian Body, therefore, Wittig writes “je” as “j/e”—because “je” “conceals the sexual difference of the verbal persons while specifying them in verbal interchange… J/e poses the ideological and historical question of feminine subjects” (x). A lesbian may not be a woman, in Wittig’s reckoning, but neither is she a man. Writing the poetry of love from the hitherto exclusively male subject-position, she uses a typographically fractured “I”—j/e—to reflect that lack of fit and identity of a woman (or lesbian) adopting that position.

Shortly after I found The Lesbian Body I discovered that Daughters, Inc. had published a translation of Wittig’s first novel, L’Opoponax, which I then ardently and tenaciously hunted down. Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Alain Robbe-Grillet selected this innovative bildungsroman for the Prix Médicis in 1964. Although my acquisition of The Opoponox left me with no new literary work to seek out until later, when Wittig published Across the Acheron, her revisioning of Dante’s Divine Comedy, throughout the 1980s I actively sought out her essays, many of which came to me by way of the Anglophone Feminist Issues and all of which were eventually collected in The Straight Mind in 1992. As a feminist, I found the clarity of Wittig’s theorization of gender and the politics of sexuality extremely helpful; as a writer, I especially valued her discussion of the significance that literary forms hold for content and that the enormous body of works, past and present, has for the writer. “The Trojan Horse” and “The Site of Action” (on the fiction of Nathalie Sarraute), both first published in 1984, stimulated and provoked my thinking about literary form, while “The Point of View: Universal or Particular?” published in 1980, enriched my understanding of the difficulties faced by authors of work classified as “minority literature” in their efforts to insert themselves into the “privileged (battle)field of literature.”