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When I read Monique Wittig book Across the Acheron I was immediately captured by it's dazzling prose. Both cruel and aggressive but also with a lot of warmth and empathy at the same time, it was so unlike anything I had ever read before and it brought back many almost forgotten memories I had myself; the book sort of created knew ways of knowing, new ways of conceiving about the story of my own life and of other women around me. These new ways of knowing, this newly created universe by Wittig were so intriguing that I just said to myself: Wittig is what I am going to write about. But I really did not have any plan at all at first.
The purpose of this essay at this point will be to use Wittig's prose, namely the novels Les Guérillères and Across the Acheron as well as some of her essays from the collection The Straight Mind, together with some of the recollections of my own past in order to reconstruct or rewrite parts of my own history as well as to make a feminist stand that is applicable to this very moment of the history of our society. I sincerely think that if you want to make a political statement you really need to say 'I'; that is, you need to see yourself as a cross-roads of discourses and make these explicit as a means to show how social structures are oppressive and to make the need for change obvious. Only by making yourself and how you are constructed as an individual visible you can argue for a change in a specific direction. Furthermore, the discourses that constitute you are there also in others, althought maybe in a different constellation or hierarchy, for they are an integral part of our society. Appropriating Wittig's prose for making my specific subjective feminist standpoint is therefore not so subjective as it seems on first sight as it concernes discourses that simply are there in may people and institutions in our specific culture at this specific moment in history.
Anyway, we need new stories, we need to rewrite mother-daughter and woman-woman relationships and constitute a new (female) subjectivity. We need new images for womanhood and deconstruct the old ones. And I found that Wittig does an absolute brilliant job on that. So there.
A feminist reading of Across the Acheron.
Wittig's novel Across the Acheron is a most peculiarly written one. It is set in a sort of cruel fairytale-like world and the main character of the story bears the name 'Wittig' which is a direct and obvious reference to the author herself. The story is told in separate parts which don't seem to be in chronological order and all spoken words are put between brackets whereas all thoughts, ideas and descriptions are just written down as plain 'normal' texts. The title of the book refers to an old Greek myth in which the dead had to cross the river Acheron with a small boat in order to get to the Hades, the Underworld, where among other places the Elysean Fields (the Greek equivalent for Paradise) were situated. The crossing of the Acheron according to the Greek myth was only possible with the company of a (male) guide; the guide in this story is called Manastabal and is a woman. She accompanies Wittig throughout most of the novel. Actually, the title of the book is not the same as the original French title which is Virgile, non.
The story starts off with an Overture which introduces Wittig and Manastabal walking through a desert-like landscape. Wittig carries a rifle. In Dialogue Manastabal prepares her for a painful journey through Hell in order to get to Paradise. Wittig encourages herself by saying that once in Paradise she will 'meet again the woman whose loving deeds have given me the taste of Paradise'; thus it is lesbian desire here that will give the female hero the agency and power to make her journey. I refer to the main character as a 'female hero' and not as a 'heroine' here because the word 'heroine' is often used to describe the woman in a story who is a mere by-product of a plot that unfolds as a result of the desires of the male hero; in traditional stories that are dominant in our patriarchal culture a (male) hero is on a quest in order to achieve transcendence and give meaning and value to his life and the woman or women in this plot structure are usually mere objects on his road to fulfilment. In this case however the character whose desires set out the plot structure is a woman. Therefore Wittig here immediately deconstructs a very common dichotomy of our culture that consists of the opposition of masculinity-activity-transcendence versus femininity-passivity-inertia which was so lucidly described by Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex. This putting on one line of femininity and weakness/passivity gets broken down further by the description of Wittig; she is a woman and at the same time the story refers to her as strong, angry, muscular, dressed in cool jeans and carrying tough-guy items as a metal cigarette-lighter and weapons (and using them as well). She even takes pride in showing off as a real macho might do.
The image of Wittig brings back several memories to me. When I was a young kid, I often wanted to be a warrior, a tough fighter. I played soldiers and cowboys in the streets with other boys, I made small fires, climbed trees and went on long quests along the shore of the river near my parent's house. Showing off to both boys and girls was a thing I regularly did as I found myself pretty muscular as a child; there is even a photograph of me lifting two stools when I was about eight years old. I always perceived of myself as being a boy and being 'one of them', although I knew my body told me otherwise. Nevertheless, when I was still a small kid other children indeed often took me as a boy because the difference between girls and boys had not been yet well-established in their minds. So for years I got away with it and was a happy child. Dressing up as a girl seemed to me a most stupid, silly and uncool thing to do; hence, I never ever wore skirts or dresses any more since I was three years old. Wearing girl's clothes felt to me as a loss of power and what sensible person would want to put herself in a inferior position?
Wittig's weapons bring back another phantasy to me. When I was an adolescent and I was going through a tough time I used to evoke
this image of a woman with whom I strongly identified who stands in full armour and who slowly takes a big, sharp and shiny sword out of the pocket connected to the leather belt around her waist. She then points the sword towards the sky, thriumphantly, while casting an angry look to the powers above. As she moves the sword up and down above her bright spells of white and yellow light drop from it, like fireworks. Her strong arms, legs, shoulders and belly are covered with shiny metal for protection. She is in a conquering mood.
and indeed after indulging myself in this image I felt much stronger and ready to fight for myself again. But let us go back to Wittig.
Patriarchy as a social construction.
In The Eagle a mechanic eagle tries to attack Wittig. An eagle can easily be read a sign of an 'oppressor' as it bears connotations to Nazi-Germany, to the capitalism of the United States of America and even to Saint John, one of the writers of the gospel in the utterly patriarchal christian Bible. This eagle turns out to be a machine, repeating the same message over and over again. I read this as a sign to show that patriarchy, and indeed any oppression, is a construct and therefore not a natural thing inherent to any relationship between living creatures.
A rather complex thing is going on in The Laundromat; a space that can be read as one that is traditionally connected to women. A heterosexual woman is talking here and she completely ridicules lesbians while saying that it is better to choose 'the lesser of two evils' in getting screwed by 'an enemy who has got what it takes' than by a dyke who hasn't. This refers to the traditional binary of men having the phallus (patriarchal power) against women (and thus also lesbians) who have not. However, when Wittig starts to behave in a 'masculine' way getting angry and shouting, they falsely perceive her as male and start crying 'rape, rape!' They can only think within this male versus female dichotomy. Wittig, showing signs of phallic power (her hair, scales, muscles and gun) cannot be a woman at the same time for the women and despite her saying 'we belong to the same army!' they see her as an enemy. The whole scene painfully reminded me of how other girls and women in my everyday life condemned and ridiculed me for being a dyke and how it gets to me more when women do this instead of men who I take less seriously anyway. Later on the novel, in the part called Strike Force, again a heterosexual woman is given speech. She also condemns and insults Wittig for being a lesbian and asks her what for god's sake she is doing here in this heterosexual space. The women here are totally battered and beaten up by men, a rather horrid scene. This could be an actual reference to real-life wife-battering by men as well as to how women are mentally being knocked down by patriarchy.
A similar hatred of lesbians from heterosexual women appears in The Temple of Love part in which heterosexual 'love' making is crudely described of man reducing love-making to penetration with his penis (referred to as 'tail' which makes the organ rather ridiculous) and woman being engaged in passively taking all this, as if she is dead. But here some understanding is created for these women; it is work for them, a means to survival in a society were women are dependent on men. And although the novel concentrates far more on women than on men, the men that are described are being portrayed as 'colonial occupiers' and oppressors (see for instance The Occupiers), they take advantage and enslave women, they have it all while the women are forbidden to achieve or take anything (The Great Gorge). All men in this story are horrible, pathetic and opportunistic creatures which makes it look like as if it is inherent to men's nature to be an oppressor; an ideological standpoint which I personally cannot quite follow throughout. The situation is slightly different in Les Guérillères where a few good men appear on the scene, but here they are always young - therefore not yet spoiled by patriarchy - and have 'feminine' features like long hair and soft bodies.
Creating a woman-centered universe.
In Paradise 1 Wittig sees angels who have sexual organs, namely vulva's. This is a nice turning upside-down of the patriarchal idea of God and the angels being male. Wittig exclaims that 'they tried to make me believe they were invisible.' The latter 'they' now could refer to both 'angels' or - and I think this is more interesting - to 'vulva's'; therefore you could read this line as telling us that patriarchal society tries to make us see a woman as lacking a sexual organ, namely the penis, and thus lacking power. Think for instance of Freud's absolutely appalling article "Medusa's Head" on the female genitals which he describes as 'not there'(!) and thus fearsome for men... Freud is here almost literally cutting off the female sexual organs of women in order to construct the idea of 'men as having (a penis) and thus having (phallic) power'. I have never read an article that made me so angry in my entire life. And this crap is what psychoanalytic discourse is based on! In Parade 2, in line with Freud's mutilation of the female body, the women are called 'castrated' (a word which is usually only used to describe taking away the male sexual organ); their clitoris and labia have been taken away and their vagina's have been stitched. The part also concerns how women are being reduced to their bodily parts when they are represented; in the parade women have cut-off limbs.
The idea of a society based on the vulva as a symbol for power also appears in the novel Les Guérillères; throughout the story an 'O', symbol of the vulval ring, is appearing and a lot of detailed talking goes on about the female genitals such as the labia and the clitoris. Also, there are a number of pages which have just female first names on them which alltogether creates a really woman-centered universe. Equal to what happens in Across the Acheron, paradise - an oppression-free society - is conceived of here as some space that is the opposite in all respects of today's society as the Ulliphant explains. It cannot be seen, it cannot be described by words (as the language of patriarchal society is a phallic one); in Paradise 2 therefore the 'beggar's opera' is without words, Wittig cannot reach paradise just with 'figures of speech' and words in Paradise 3 and cannot speak to the angels in Paradise 4. Worthy to note here is also that the angels are 'gold and black' as opposed to the racist representation of angels with white skin-colour in christianity.
The horrors of heterosexuality and traditional motherhood.
Some responsibility for their oppression is however put at the women; it is not just the men who are evil. For instance, many women are together in Leashes but they take no effort to help eachother; thus, the men can take advantage of them. Also in The Auction they are 'unconcerned', as if they lack any will-power. The men use them as exchange-goods here. This is a direct reference to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss on the origin of society; Lévi-Strauss saw conceived of all civilization being built on the principle of women as exchange between the men of society, which is again another immensely misogynistic theory by a 'great' scientist although you could also read Freud and Lévi-Strauss as merely describing patriarchal society. Women in such a society are being deprived of any subjectivity and thus the women in The Central Station can't give themselves any direction in which to go and run around like hens without heads. Furthermore, typical female clothes like a pantyhose, dress and high-heels makes women mere game for male hunters in Count Zaroff's Hunt which reminds me of why I did not want to wear girl's clothes when I was young; the connotations of weakness, passivity and being a mere object of desire did not quite appeal to me.
Playing-cards also makes clear how women in a patriarchal society have no real volume, no subjectivity; the women are two-dimensional and people therefore just walk over them. They are nothing but carers and mothers as The Appendages (I take the 'appendages' as referring to children; you can almost see them hanging and yearning at their mother's skirts) shows us; the women don't know what to do when their children are gone. Indeed, it is often described how women in our society can feel useless after their children have left the parental house. Furthermore, we could think of how Jacques Lacan described the route into adulthood starting with the stage of being a baby: there has to be a third party in the family apart from the mother and the child which in Lacan's patriarchal view is thus obviously the father to disconnect child from mother, to give the child a handle to get out of the symbiotic relationship with the mother. The mother in Lacan's theory is here a mere 'minus', a person lacking power and subjectivity and the 'positive' subjectivity of the father is therefore required to bring the child into adulthood. In Appendages therefore, the relation of mother and child in a patriarchal society is therefore portrayed as a symbiosis; child and mother are grown together and you have to cut through 'living flesh' in order to release them both. I will not go into depth about how he theorizes the difference between boys and girls, but it is sufficient here to remark that as is the case in Freud's theory Lacan puts his patriarchal and misogynistic view of how a child becomes an individual as the only one existing and makes it look as if patriarchy is inherent to nature, although it is a construct.
Wittig often speaks of the women as if they are being drugged. Take for instance The Treasure Fair which speaks about how capitalism with its promise of all kinds of material goods (the banknotes and precious stones here) works together with patriarchy in order to keep the women dependent of men. Patriarchy makes women being cut off from eachother, from sisterhood, and prevents them from communicating and bonding together. This all is symbollically being described in The Walls. The most sad and grim scene appears in The Lake were women are seen killing suicide since they are mentally already dead.
The main character, Wittig, goes through all these 'stages of Hell' with increasing anger, aggressiveness (she blows some men to pieces with her laser-beam in The Free-for-All) and a not-understanding, but as the novel goes on she gains a certain degree of understanding for these women and the structures of the patriarchal world. She comes to mourn and lament over all the sadness, oppression and cruelty; in The Lake for instance she cannot bear any more and sobs away. It is interesting how the novel argues for a combination of understanding and mourning over the loss that has been afflicted onto the concept of woman in our society gives way eventually for paradise, a world free of oppression. The necessity of mourning becomes very clear in Acheron 3 where Wittig's guide Manastabal explains to her that 'we must follow the tears ...' and how Wittig herself exclaims while understanding the importance of lament: 'in this way the tears shed for the dead will pay for the liberty of the living!' The tears solidify at the end of the river which signifies how a new solid world can be made out of them.
The lesbian subject is seen by the author as a big threat to patriarchal society and as a means to move to a world without an oppressive hierarchy between men and women. As she claims in her article "One Is Not Born a Woman" ('but one becomes one', is the famous phrase by De Beauvoir in The Second Sex): 'A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one and shows that we have been ideologically rebuilt into a natural group'. She argues that lesbians, in their refusal to become heterosexual, refuse to become a woman in the traditional sense of the word but that to refuse to become a woman does not mean that one has to become a man. Therefore a lesbian has to be something else, both not-woman and not-man, and thus poses a threat to patriarchy as it dissociate 'real-life women' from the 'myth/concept of Woman'. 'Lesbianism', she says,' provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely.'
Throughout all of Across the Acheron, heterosexuality leaves the women engaged in it with less than nothing. In "The Straight Mind" the author argues how 'the discourses which particularly oppress all of us, lesbians, women, and homosexual men, are those which take for granted that what founds society, any society, is heterosexuality'. As is the case in all the big theories of Freud, Lacan and Lévi-Strauss, heterosexuality and the idea of men as being superior subjects than women, the underlying ideology to their generalisations on the becoming of culture or an adult. The function of this creating of an unequal difference between man an d woman, and heterosexual and homosexual, is therefore to mask at every level the conflicts of interest.
I would like here to return to all the aggression in the novel. The journey that Wittig takes in this extraordinary narrative is one that goes from anger and aggression through a stage of understanding and lament over the loss to, eventually, 'paradise'. As I argued before, active aggression, sadism and anger connected with femininity is a rather subversive one. I would like to draw some attention to a phantasy from my adolescence here; a very sadistic story that gave me some sort of pleasure when I was about twelve years old. (Do I dare to type this down? This is a memory which filled me with disgust only a couple of years ago and which still, up to today, causes enough reason for embarrasment. Sitting here in this big room in the computer building surrounded by all sorts of students who appear to be oh so straight and decent makes me nervous. I cast a look over my right shoulder every once in a while, I stop typing when somebody passes and try to keep them from looking at my screen. The worst case scenario that presents itself to me in my imagination is that they will catch a glimpse of what I wrote and laugh at it when later telling it to their friends. And I know they would if only they saw. But now, all this nervousness actually keeps me from writing it down. And o yes, I want to write it down. A voice keeps ringing in the back of my head: let's be a bad girl once again, let's shock the world, let's tear down this image of the soft, gentle, cultivated, romantic, nice, lady-like, well-bred woman who has no subversive erotic desires at all!) So there I go:
Deep down in a grey, cold and humid basement a man sits against a wall. There is mould on some of the stones and water keeps dripping down from the ceiling. A small lightbeam coming from a tiny window near the ceiling cuts the damp air. The man, who is stark-naked, is tied with strong, thick rope to the wall against which he is sitting. His bum must be very cold. His head is bended. Then somebody, it's not clear whether it's a man or a woman, enters the basement through a black gap in the opposing wall. S/he is carrying a seringe in one hand and piece of string in the other. Slowly s/he approaches the man who is trembling with fear and hardly dares to look up to her/him. Suddenly, s/he ties the piece of string tightly around his penis near his balls and injects the fluid that is in the seringe directly into the small opening at the end of his penis. The man cries mercy although he gets very much sexually aroused by the whole act. But he can't come, for the string is too tight and the seringe, which is left in by the wo/man, also prevents him from ejaculating. Nevertheless he is crawling and moaning out of sheer pleasure.
I have always wondered where I am in this story; it keeps intriguing me. Am I the person entering the room? Am I the man tied to the wall? In a way, I remember I was both of them. The story filled me with a sense of power and erotic desire. I had this phantasy until I was about fourteen years old; all the phantasies coming after that age were much softer and nicer, which is maybe a relief as these new phantasies are much less connected to embarrasment but then is also a pity. As if I lost a means of gaining power. Although I must admit that while I'm writing this at this very moment I feel like regaining some. No matter from what angle you look at it, the phantasy is my own and nobody can take it from me. So let's keep on writing, then.