I just finished reading another book by a feminist author, Monique Wittig. Her novel, Les Guérillères, was written in French in 1969, and translated to English in 1971. The main story line of the book follows a war that women of the world started against the men. Wittig employs a prose poetry style, featuring short vignettes of scenes that do not seem to follow each other in sequential order, though are loosely placed in order of how things happened.
According to a critic in The Times Book review: “perhaps the first epic celebration of women ever written.” An opposing view in The New York Review of Books says, “the book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull.” Maybe a little harsh to feature this quote in her obituary in The New York Times, I unfortunately agree with the latter review.
Wittig creates a story that has potential to be groundbreaking, but the writing style does not do the story matter justice. As I read the book, I felt like I was going in circles, without learning much. Maybe some of Wittig’s meaning was lost in the translation from French to English, but I feel like Kathy Acker’s in-your-face style of writing was much more effective in getting her point across: women have been mistreated and must rebel against men.
If you want to see how you read Wittig’s style, the first thirty three pages of the book are available here.
According to a critic in The Times Book review: “perhaps the first epic celebration of women ever written.” An opposing view in The New York Review of Books says, “the book itself turns out to be, sadly, oddly, at times almost maddeningly, quite dull.” Maybe a little harsh to feature this quote in her obituary in The New York Times, I unfortunately agree with the latter review.
Wittig creates a story that has potential to be groundbreaking, but the writing style does not do the story matter justice. As I read the book, I felt like I was going in circles, without learning much. Maybe some of Wittig’s meaning was lost in the translation from French to English, but I feel like Kathy Acker’s in-your-face style of writing was much more effective in getting her point across: women have been mistreated and must rebel against men.
If you want to see how you read Wittig’s style, the first thirty three pages of the book are available here.
I really enjoyed Kathy Acker too, and like with Kathy Acker, I feel Wittig's style coordinated more with where she was coming from too. It is important to look at the context in which Les Guerilleres was written to understand where it was coming from, and also to explain some of the stylistic choices that Wittig made that leaves one feeling like "I was going in circles," because that is EXACTLY what she was going for! Hahaha.
ReplyDeleteA good way to look at Les Guerilleres is in how its structure is parallel to the three feminist movements in the US, with each movement separated by the giant O pages. The structure is indeed circular, which relates to the idea that was going on at the time called Ecriture Feminine, that the style of writing for women is different from the male approach (whose plot structure resembles the male orgasm, quite linear, peaks, and then cuts off shortly after the climax). The women's style would be non-linear and cyclical in nature, and you can definitely see that in Wittig's book.
Wittig's point is not just that women have been mistreated and must rebel against men, but her point is, what must women do AFTER they've rebelled? After each movement in which women fought for SOMETHING and achieved some rights or acceptance such as voting and civil rights, there was a period of complacency that came afterward in which women were encouraged to be nice, go home and "enjoy" their rights and stop bothering everyone else. Part 3 of Les Guerilleres deals with that. Some women want to relax but others speak up and point out that this sort of complacency is like enjoying servitude (p. 135).
Unlike some female writers of the feminist writing movement like Helene Cixous, who saw the world in a binary, two-gender view due to inherent, biological differences between men and women, Wittig wanted to focus more on how gender is a SOCIAL construct designed to oppress women under the patriarchy. So women are oppressed under the SOCIAL structure, but also, just as importantly, the LANGUAGE structure that we grew up on.
The translation from French to English does lose some in this aspect since French is a very gender-oriented language. Everything has a gender, and a group of men and women would have a masculine "they," even if there is just one man in a group with five women. This shows how the language places a higher priority on the masculine. Language has a huge and often invisible power of how we perceive the world. Because the structure of the French language places such an emphasis on there having TWO genders, many grow up seeing the world as polarized only between two gender and places all other genders into the "OTHER" category. Therefore, her prose-poetry and non-linear structure of writing DEconstructs the language and society that have shaped our minds in how we see the world and categorize people.
I hope this helps you understand it better and it would have been nice if the book came with a short intro on the historical/feminist context of the novel. :)