Fantastic Metropolis

What Wittig’s novels share with the supposedly dichotomous works listed above is, in a word, imagination: an imagination that delights in the fantastic, an imagination that challenges arrangements in our world that most consider fixed and inevitable, an imagination that will invent new forms when it is necessary to do so to tell new stories never before related. Imagination, I would argue, defies the dichotomy that presumes that literature and language have nothing to do with people, with history, with politics. And the fantastic imagination frequently illustrates that the two systems of signs are not parallel, but communicating. Wittig’s own novels are in this respect exemplary.

Works by Monique Wittig

• The Opoponox. Tr. Helen Weaver. Plainfield, Vt: Daughters, Inc, 1976.
• Les Guérillères. Tr. David Le Vay. New York: Avon, 1973.
• The Lesbian Body. Tr. David Le Vay. New York: Avon, 1976.
• Across the Acheron. Tr. David Le Vay and Magaret Crossland. London: The Women’s Press, 1989.
• The Straight Mind. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

On first reading Les Guérillères and The Lesbian Body I eagerly shared my copies with friends—just as I did with The Female Man, Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, Dhalgren, and other such “war machines.” Such sharing, as I’ve noted elsewhere, has always been a characteristic of the feminist sf community. I’d therefore like to conclude by quoting from Jeanne Gomoll’s Guest of Honor Speech at WisCon, a materialization of that community, in May, 2000:

Feminism, for me, has always been about making the largest number of choices available to everyone, regardless of sex. For me, science fiction and feminism came together beautifully in those days. There is a line in Monique Wittig’s classic SF novel Les Guérillères that still raises goose bumps on my skin. Wittig urges women who lack historical precedent or role models for their choices to use their imagination. Her phrase is, “. . . and failing that—invent!” To me that’s always embodied the thrill and value of speculative fiction. I interpreted that to mean that writing and reading science fiction could have as profound an effect on people as actual experience—that we could try out a myriad of virtual futures, that we could choose and more importantly REHEARSE the ones that seemed most promising. It meant to me that this process could change our own lives and world around us; and what better place to imagine different selves and worlds than with science fiction?

I remember Monique Wittig today in a spirit of gratitude. Her fantastic fiction and brilliant imagination inspired my own fiction almost from the beginning. Like Gomoll, I, too, will always be moved and guided by her war cry:

Or, failing that, invent.