Fantastic Metropolis

Wittig, of course, specifies “literary work” in her essay and does not claim to be talking about all media of art, nor about art with popular appeal. She cites Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past as “one of the best examples” of a “war machine.” Proust, she points out in an earlier essay, risked being categorized as a “minority” writer, and yet his grand opus became a triumphal, monumental “classic.” Djuna Barnes, she noted in the same essay, took a similar risk—only far more daringly—with the consequence that her work is in constant danger of disappearing. Despite—or perhaps because of—this discrepancy in the respective reception of their work, Wittig judges Barnes’s work more important than Proust’s. Curiously, Wittig is adamant in maintaining that the greatest disaster that could befall Barnes (or, earlier, Proust, who is now well past the point of the danger of being labeled a “homosexual writer”) is for her work to be categorized as “lesbian.” Once categorized as “lesbian,” she writes in “Point of View,” the text then “sees one of its parts taken for the whole, one of the constituent elements of the text taken for the whole text, and the book become[s] a symbol, a manifesto” (62). That Barnes’s work has not been pigeonholed into the “lesbian” category is more significant, in this view, than its risk of oblivion. I find this ironic, since although Barnes continues to have a literary following, such that the Dalkey Archive Press recently reprinted some of her work, to a large extent that work’s visibility over the last quarter century has been largely due to the interest of feminist and lesbian literary critics. When a friend of mine recently took a course on modernist fiction at the Evergreen State College, Barnes’s work did not rate inclusion on the syllabus and was only briefly mentioned in passing (with Woolf, Richardson, and Mansfield). Even now, the study of modernists who happened to have been female can seldom be found in non-feminist courses on modernist literature. Wittig herself taught in the Women Studies Department at the University of Arizona. It would be interesting to know whether her view of the risks of a writer’s being pigeonholed had changed since she addressed the problem in these essays.

Wittig emphasizes in “The Trojan Horse” that “committed” fiction would not qualify for her image of a work of literature operating as a “war machine.” “Literary work cannot be influenced directly by history, politics, and ideology because these two fields belong to parallel systems of signs which function differently in the social corpus and use language in a different way… In history, in politics, one is dependent on social history, while in one’s work a writer is dependent on literary history, that is, on the history of forms… History is related to people, literature is related to forms… The fact is, that in one’s work, one has only two choices—either to reproduce existing forms or to create new ones. There is no other” (69-70). I wonder if Wittig’s concern for the risk of a work’s being characterized as “minority writing” hasn’t, here, created a false dichotomy. Revolution in literature, she is arguing, can only be the creation of new forms, not writing that explicitly addresses political issues; writers revolt not against the material conditions of their world but against the traditional forms of their craft. The two “parallel systems of signs” should not, Wittig insists, be conflated. By this reasoning, Joanna Russ’s formally innovative The Female Man is revolutionary, while her more conventional narrative The Two of Them is merely an example of “committed” literature, and Samuel R. Delany’s stylistically experimental Dhalgren is revolutionary, but his Trouble on Triton is not.