Wittig, Monique
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: partial (the transcript covers the commentary and three or four passages of the reading, in English, with some garbled words; the planned "Limbo" and "Paradise" passages are largely unread)
Core ideas
Wittig introduces her reading by comparing the first passage to a film, Cocteau's "Orphée", in which Orpheus's helper moves in slow motion against the wind, and by referring to a remark about rewriting a fable: when one transforms an existing fable (the "matrix", here Dante's "Inferno"), one cannot upset it; one must follow it point by point, and only then can the transformation take place. In "Virgile, non" (the title refers to the guide of Dante's poem), a narrator named Wittig (the transcript spells the guide's and narrator's names in garbled ways) travels through a desert of wind and sand into a modern hell guided by a woman named Manastabal, sent to lead her to the beloved who awaits her in paradise. The first passage shows the hesitation of the narrator, who feels her knees give way at the threshold of a hell whose lost souls are "alive despite their fervent wish to be dead", suffering "not caused by the ignominy of their deeds", and who is reassured by the flask of ether sent by the loved one and by her guide's laugh.
In the second passage, "the eagle", an eagle of the desert that attacks the narrator turns out to be a broken robot ("automaton voice") that repeats clichés ("a rolling stone gathers no moss, silence is golden"), with an allusion to Shakespeare's line about "slavery" (Wittig adds that she disagrees with the line, which she borrowed already in an early political paper) and to the sandstorms she knew in New Mexico. The third passage, the "laundromat" chapter, stages in a laundromat of San Francisco (Valencia Street, 24th Street) a hostile confrontation: the narrator, speaking in a "noble style" to give glamour to the "enslaved sex", is insulted and attacked by women who cry "rape", while she strips naked to show she is "made of the same stuff"; she is then transformed with hair, scales and a protruding organ in the screams of her accusers, until her guide covers her with a cloak and drags her away, to be told that it is "really hell". Wittig explains that the references are to Dante, to Judy Grahn (a poet named in the transcript as "Judy Graham"), to the book of "repulsive women" ("Juniper" is mentioned in garbled form), and that the insults in the passage were ones she had heard shouted at her by a neighbour every night, from the top to the bottom of the building. The session ends with an organizer announcing that the graduate school closes at 10 p.m.; Wittig had planned "Limbo" (the lesbian bars of San Francisco), "Paradise" and a third passage, and chooses to go to "Paradise".
Excerpts
“When you take a fable already existing, if you want to transform it, you cannot upset the fable or the text, the matrix. Immediately you have to follow it point by point, and that's what I did in that text: before the transformation can take place, you have to move along with the original fable.”
“The desert sand flattens out into scythe blades forming and fading into continuous regular waves. I struggle against the wind to keep my balance.”
“All the insults that you have heard in that passage I have heard myself, said by a neighbor of mine who was shouting at me so loud that the whole building could hear these insults, from the top to the bottom, every night, almost.”