Lesbianizing English: Wittig and Zeig Translate Utopia

Lesbianizing English: Wittig and Zeig Translate Utopia Kristine J. Anderson T HE IMPORTANCE OF MONIQUE WITTIG as a utopian writer cannot be overestimated. She is “ utopian” in the broadest inter­ pretation of the term, which embraces “ dystopian” as well as “ eutopian,” “ anti-utopian” and “ counter-utopian.” In fact, her work could be characterized as what Edith Clowes terms “ meta-utopian” : “ the meta-utopian imagination searches out the linguistic . . . and polit­ ical structures that inform the process of generating and realizing social dreams. Skeptical toward all distinct valences of utopian writing, it entertains a variety of utopian scenarios and seeks to expose their com­ mon, underlying motivations and assumptions.” 1 Wittig’s radical writing simultaneously critiques language while inventing it anew to suit the utopias she creates. As a lesbian feminist, she shares her vision with readers by defamiliarizing heterosexual habits of mind. Only by giving these up can we glimpse the worlds she reveals. Wittig’s first recognized utopian work, Les Gu^rilleres, was embraced by feminists internationally as an expression of their own revolution. Wide­ ly discussed, it has influenced later feminist writers of utopias like Joanna Russ and Sally Miller Gearheart. Wittig’s next book, Le Corps lesbien, narrows its focus to a subjective lesbian point of view within a utopian context. Following this, her collaborative work with Sande Zeig, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes, widens the scope once again to include the whole world, its past and future history. Finally, her most recent novel, Virgile, Non, portrays the juxtaposition between dystopia and eutopia in its parody of Dante’s Divine Comedy. In these utopian works,2 syntax and lexicon are interrogated, revised, reconceptualized and rewritten. In addition to being a lesbian-feminist utopist, Wittig is a bilingual nouveau romancier in exile. Residing in the U.S. since 1976, as a theorist she has been more influential on the North-American feminist movement than on the French. For example, Carol Anne Douglas’ Love and Poli­ tics, 3 a survey of radical feminist theory in the U.S., cites Wittig fre­ quently, and Toril Moi’s brief mention of her in Sexual/Textual Politics4 is found in the section on “Anglo-American Feminist Criticism” instead 90 W in t e r 1994 A n d er so n of under “ French Feminist Theory.” Wittig is nevertheless a solidly French writer who has translated a number of works into French, most notably Djuna Barnes’ Spillway, which she titled La Passion.5The focus of this essay, however, will be on the translation that she and her co­ author Sande Zeig made of their own Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes as Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary.6 This work is a metafiction posing as a dictionary referring to a lesbianized alternate reality. Together with Wittig’s theoretical writings, Brouillon is an important contribution to the current international dis­ course we might call “the feminist critique of language,” which tends to be voiced from two distinct positions: the Anglo-American and the French. The goal of this critique, of course, is a utopian one which, in short, seeks to better the position of women through linguistic analysis. But Wittig’s own critique of language adheres to neither the French nor the Anglo-American position. Although it shares some common ground with both, it is more radical than either. The feminist critique of language in general has until recently ignored the differences among languages.7 The mostly French feminists whose critiques presuppose a Lacanian explanation may posit women as prelinguistically condemned either to be silent, or to parrot a tongue that does not belong to them. Adhering to this point of view, some feminists have exhorted women to find or invent their own “ feminine” language, seeming to ignore that there are already many languages in the world, each of them different from all the others, with different capabilities, different flexibilities, and differing conventions regarding gender. On the other hand, the mostly Anglo-American feminist linguists with a Whorfian orientation, like Dale Spender,8for instance, also ignore the distinctions among languages in their critiques of male-dominated language. Yet, when one of them, Suzette Haden Elgin, actually tried to create a “ women...