Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Kind of an Introduction
- 1 Acculturation, Otherness and the Loss of Jewish Identity in Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky
- 2 Aesthetic Otherness in Woolf's “Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens” and “Lappin & Lappinova”
- 3 The Prose of Otherness in Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles
- 4 D. H. Lawrence and Ranamin: Otherness and Visions of a Fascist American Utopia
- 5 The Aesthetics of Otherness in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropisms
- 6 The Square, The Lover and Hiroshima, Mon Amour: Fiction, Film and Duras's Notion of the Other
- 7 Otherness and Sexual Alterity in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères
- 8 Mystery, Authority and the Patriarchal Voice in Dacia Maraini's Voices
- Index
7 - Otherness and Sexual Alterity in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2019
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Kind of an Introduction
- 1 Acculturation, Otherness and the Loss of Jewish Identity in Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky
- 2 Aesthetic Otherness in Woolf's “Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens” and “Lappin & Lappinova”
- 3 The Prose of Otherness in Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles
- 4 D. H. Lawrence and Ranamin: Otherness and Visions of a Fascist American Utopia
- 5 The Aesthetics of Otherness in Nathalie Sarraute's Tropisms
- 6 The Square, The Lover and Hiroshima, Mon Amour: Fiction, Film and Duras's Notion of the Other
- 7 Otherness and Sexual Alterity in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères
- 8 Mystery, Authority and the Patriarchal Voice in Dacia Maraini's Voices
- Index
Summary
I discovered Monique Wittig quite by accident in the 1980s while on a trip to Northern California. Actually, I think it was at Nepenthe's in Big Sur where they had a selection of “new age” trinkets and books. I picked up a copy of Les Guérillères and began perusing the pages and was immediately taken by the way she wrote, stylistically. I subsequently found her other novels and read them all. At a PMLA convention in Minneapolis I attended a lecture on feminist fiction. Curiously, no one mentioned Wittig throughout the session; during the question and answer portion I asked a question about her. I recall that no fewer than three women turned and looked at me. After the session was over, the same three women approached me and asked me if I'd have a coffee with them to talk about my interest in Wittig's writing. What I recall of that coffee klatch was that we were all in agreement about the brilliance of Wittig's prose, even in translation—how she reinterprets tradition, creating a kind of alternative symbolism that, as Lucy Sargisson writes, “positively represents the female body” (208). At the same time, her work also explores notions of the masculine, if only through their absence.
Wittig herself describes the structure of Les Guérillères as
composed of fragments distributed in three parts; each part is preceded by a thick circle in the center of a white page. There is also a list of first names, written in capital letters, which appear every five pages, always on the right hand page and situated like the circles in the middle of a white page. This list is opened and closed by a poem written in the same letters. Finally, the title of the book is a neologism. (qtd. in Shaktini, 38)
The title may or may not be a neologism, but that's not the point. What is more to the point is how the novel establishes certain notions of the masculine: “the collective hero elles fight a revolution against ils and, having vanquished maledominated society, proceed to create a new civilization” (Shaktini, 72).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Notions of OthernessLiterary Essays from Abraham Cahan to Dacia Maraini, pp. 71 - 76Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2019