Cover of the first English edition
(Peter Owen, London, 1971) [a]
Opening Remarks
I wouldn't go as far as Larry David and call myself a friend o' lesbians [b], but I certainly have no animosity against them and still find the murderous hatred expressed by Oliver Mellors one of the most shocking aspects of Lawrence's final novel [c].
Further, I have read quite a lot of lesbian fiction and queer theory - from Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness (1928) to Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts (2015), via Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967) and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990).
However, one of the books I have only very recently finished reading is Monique Wittig's novel Les Guérillères (1969) [d], and it's this work I wish to reflect on (and summarise) here. That is to say, offer a vaguely philosophical consideration of a work that I admire for its poetic feel and fragmentary structure [e], rather than write a straightforward commentary or review.
I have to confess that I found the book difficult to follow at times due to its rejection of a standard chronological plot in favour of looping and shifting back and forth in time. That said, it's conveniently divided in three parts (like this post): part one appears to explore the lesbian utopia that follows victory in the war against men detailed in part three. The middle part deals with myth and memory.
The fact that the novel has no single protagonist and instead relies on a collective voice - Wittig uses the feminine plural pronoun elles ('they') - is also something one has to get used to (even in an age in which pronoun use has become a regular topic of discussion) [f].
Fragments from a Lesbian Utopia
(i)
The novel opens in a lesbian utopia: a golden space of pissing in public, laughter, and lacunae in which fragrant females frolic amidst the foliage. Some of the women swim in the sea, but this doesn't sound much fun as it induces vomiting. Some of the women hunt. Some like to play hide and seek.
There are gardens and fields and a market with stalls selling all kinds of fruit that attract the wasps. No one seems bothered if the insects land on their bare arms, partly because they are too busy thinking about their own genitalia: the women seem to navigate through daily life thanks to their vulva and they like to expose their sex to the sun, capturing its brilliance.
In this way they feel themselves illuminated. Were D. H. Lawrence telling their story, he would doubtless write of cunt awareness.
(ii)
Interestingly, the women carry small books which they call feminaries [g].
These essentially consist of a few pages printed with fragments of myth, capitalised words, and biology lessons on the size, shape, and function of the clitoris. There are also a number of blank pages in which to write and experiment with (non-patriarchal) language - only don't call this écriture féminine [h].
(iii)
Each morning, after the sun has risen, they anoint their flesh with aromatic oils until their limbs are glistening and their naked bodies gleam. Sometimes they massage one another.
If it's raining the women prefer to stay indoors. On particularly overcast days they shed warm tears.
(iv)
The only thing that smells worse than the sea are the vapours given off by the peat bogs above the hills. And perhaps the mummified body kept by the gipsy women which they carry outside and expose to the sun.
Sometimes the river floods - and that too stinks of putrescence, but that doesn't stop the women swimming in it and making the flying-fish leap into the air before falling back with a splash.
(v)
The little girls are particularly fond of birds and search in the bushes and trees for goldfinches and green canaries, which they can catch and cover with kisses and cherish until they accidently hold the little birds too tightly and they die.
(vi)
Of course, even in paradise, there is still work to be done: though this mostly seems to consist in gathering fruit from the trees. And construction work on a dam which may or may not have been sited in the wrong location (too far upstream).
Cherry picking is so much easier than engineering!
(vii)
In the evening, when the full moon has risen, a drum is sounded in the main square and the women drink until they fall dead-drunk or lose self-control. So not that different from a Friday night out on the Toon, no matter how lyrically described.
(viii)
Are there any readers out there who know what glenuri are? I have to confess, I didn't.
They seem to be imaginary creatures that the women like to keep as pets and take for walks:
"Their long filiform bodies are supported on thousands of feet. [...] Their innumerable eyes are grouped round an enormous orifice that serves them as a mouth as well as taking the place of a head. It is filled by a soft extensile membrane that can become taut or relaxed, each of its movements producing a different sound. The harmony of the glenuri may be compared to [...] the croaking of toads the miaowing of rutting cats the sharp sound of a flute." (12)
Unfortunately, the excursions with the glenuri on their leashes are not without difficulty, because they "constantly endeavour to move away to some place other than where they are" (12) and often get trapped in openings that afford passage to their bodies but not their large heads.
When this happens, "they begin to utter frightful shrieks" (14) and have to be freed.
Surely it would be easier to get a dog - though I can see why the descriptor man's best friend might be problematic in a feminist utopia.
(ix)
As well as a sun-goddess who illuminates the sky, the women also worship a pin-headed goddess with yellow eyes and an ancient Greek name - Eristikos [ἐριστικός] - she who is argumentative and fond of discord [i].
They also have a machine used to record divergences or disagreements. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is in constant use
(x)
Little birds and glenuri are not the only animals dear to les Guérillères - they also like to breast-feed baboons.
Once they have finished suckling, the women throw the dog-faced monkeys to the ground and chase them back into the forest "until they have disappeared in the trees" (17).
I guess this striking and surreal idea is intended to be a subversion of the so-called natural order which all too often reinforces and reflects the patriarchal order. By choosing to breastfeed baboons rather than human babies, Wittig's warrior women decouple the lactating female body from its role within the traditional family.
In other words, it transforms an act traditionally associated with domesticity and passive motherhood into an act of radical autonomy.
(xi)
Apart from breast-feeding baboons, the women share several tales involving animals: frogs, cats, and wolves, for example. They seem to suggest that women should stop interpreting themselves in terms of a mythical (and allegorical) model of nature that has been written by men.
Such a model not only denigrates the animal, but it has nothing to do with the reality of lesbian identity existing not merely beyond the phallocratic (and heteronormative) order, but womanhood which, for Wittig, only exists in binary opposition to manhood - i.e., is a political and linguistic category, not a natural fact [j].
(xii)
It seems that in a lesbian utopia you have to make your own shampoo, using walnut oil, poppy seeds, and the crushed petals of macerated flowers.
When they have enough of this home-made concoction, the women let down their hair and soak it in aromatic baths: "Their hands and arms
glisten, their breasts are bare." (22)
(xiii)
Some of the women like to look at coloured engravings of women in royal blue uniforms marching.
They also enjoy looking at photographs from the old times: particularly pictures of women taking industrial action - there's nothing sexier than striking textile workers on a picket line, or leading a street demo: "The faces are remarkable for their beauty." (24)
(xiv)
Some of the women remember an old joke that had a punchline about the bird of Venus taking flight towards evening. Unfortunately, they can't quite remember the rest of it - only that it had something to do with the lips of the vulva (labia apparently resembling the wings of a dove).
(xv)
According to Greek mythology, the Golden Fleece is the magical wool of a winged, golden-haired ram (named Chrysomallos) that became a supreme symbol of authority and kingship.
But Wittig's warrior women claim to know nothing about this patriarchal myth and use the term to refer to their pubic hair (suggesting that they are all natural blondes - or perhaps I'm being overly literal in my reading here).
(xvi)
The feminaries give pride of place "to the symbols of the circle, the circumference, the ring, the O, the zero" (27). The women seem to relate this to the Holy Grail (i.e., the sacred chalice used by Jesus at the Last Supper).
For Nick Land, however, zero marks the ultimate thermodynamic and ontological destination of human history - but perhaps that's just saying the same thing?
(xvii)
If I'm not mistaken, Prometheus hid the stolen fire inside the hollow stalk of a giant fennel plant (with their dry, slow-burning, pithy interiors, fennel stalks are ideal for this).
But les Guérillères seem to believe that it was a woman who stole fire from the gods - and hid it inside her vagina (which, I would imagine, is just about one of the least suitable places, being lined with extremely sensitive - and naturally moist - mucous membrane).
(xviii)
The warrior women scorn Sleeping Beauty and regard her comatose condition as ugly passivity.
Snow-White they have a slightly more favourable opinion of, but only after having reframed her story so that she becomes an active agent of female rebellion (rather more like her energetic and outgoing sister Rose-Red).
What they don't see - rather surprisingly - is that to value aggressive activity over gentle passivity is to fall back into a classical form of patriarchal thinking.
One assumes that Wittig was aware of the problem here: that she is merely flipping terms in a binary, whilst still leaving the structure in place (i.e., only fulfilling the first - but absolutely necessary - step in a more radical deconstruction).
(xix)
As a rule, I'm not in favour of book burning as the words of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine still resonate in my imagination: 'Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well.' [k]
So, this passage towards the end of part one of Les Guérillères rather surprised me:
"The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. [...] They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations." (30)
I know that defenders of the novel and of revolutionary utopias will tell me that while, yes, books are being burnt this is not advocating such a practice in the real world - that it must be understood as a symbolic act contained in a work of fiction, blah, blah, blah.
But, even so, it troubles me and I'm not convinced that in order to create a genuinely free society or a brand-new world one must destroy the old ways of thinking and knowing and speaking - the myth of Year Zero only ever ends in tears and genocide, does it not?
(xx)
The name of where the women live is never mentioned.
But we do know they live on a series of islands situated in the equatorial region, so it's hot and wet and not great for the lungs.
And we know that there are sharks swimming in the tropical blue seas that surround the islands.
And we know that sometimes the women like to leap about in the manner of kangaroos and sleep in the trees.
[a] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères, by Monique Wittig, was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vey's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007).
Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avante-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. For those who are interested, see the guest post by Simon Solomon on Goldsmith (14 Dec 2016), titled 'Magical Realism Without the Magic' - the first part of a three-part series of posts by Solomon on the (displaced) task of the translator.
[b] Curb Your Enthusiasm [S5/E2]: 'The Bowtie' (dir. Larry Charles, 2005). To watch the scene in which Larry explains to Jeff why lesbians love him and he has been completely embraced by the lesbian community, click the link provided.
[c] See D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 205. I discuss Mellors's hatred of lesbians in the post titled 'Lesbophobia' (30 June 2013).
[d] I was inspired to do so after discussing Nick Land's reading of this work in his essay 'Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity' (1988), which can be found in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987 - 2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Urbanomic / Sequence Press, 2011), pp. 55-80.
Wittig clearly had an important influence on Land - particularly the idea of Amazonian women leading a violent revolution. Also, for Land, heteronormative lifestyles are one of the major brakes on capital and so Wittig's lesbianism is valued in and of itself. See my post on this titled 'Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026).
[e] Les Guérillères is divided into three parts consisting of seven sections (I'm not quite sure we can call them chapters). Each part is opened by a thick black circle printed in the centre of a blank page: a symbol which - like all true symbols - suggests many different things at once - a full moon, eternal recurrence, the female sex, or the mathematical value of zero. It might also make some readers think of Pauline Réage's Histoire d'O (1954).
[f] In Les Guérillères, Wittig uses the collective feminine pronoun elles as the absolute universal subject. In other words, she used it to represent all of humanity - including men - thereby stripping the masculine pronoun of its claim to the universal.
[g] Wittig invented the literary concept of un féminaire to mean a small book or journal carried by women. In Les Guérillères, it is carried by warrior women in their lesbian utopia and contains a mix of historical fragments, private symbols, and entirely blank pages where the women can periodically write and record their own lives, thereby reclaiming language and narrative outside of patriarchal structures.
The term became so influential that a real-world second-wave radical feminist publication in the United States officially renamed itself Feminary: A Feminist Journal in 1974 to pay homage to Wittig’s novel.
[h] Wittig rejected the concept of écriture féminine because she viewed it as rooted in a form of biological essentialism that trapped women within the very patriarchal categories (and binary system) they sought to escape. Instead, Wittig seeks to construct a post-patriarchal language instead that did away with grammatical structures that enforce gender and heterosexuality.
[i] Having said that, Wittig's warrior women also claim that, ultimately, they have no need for deities, myths, or religious symbols. It could be that they initially utilise goddess myths as a necessary fiction and tool for liberation, but abandon such once the war against men has been won.
However, I'm more than a little sceptical about their atheism: their whole way of life has a quasi-spiritual feel to it, even if what they choose to worship is their own genitalia - the cunt "regarded as the emblem of fecundity and the reproductive force in nature" (19) - and even if they reject the hierarchical structures that most religiously-minded people like to erect.
[j] Although Wittig still holds to a socio-political (but non-essential) concept of woman in Les Guérillères, in her later theoretical writings she will insist that lesbians are not women.
Wittig first publicly asserted this in 1978 at the Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conference in New York, during her delivery of the paper 'The Straight Mind', which can be found in her 1992 essay collection The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Beacon Press, 1992).
[k] Heine wrote the line in his tragic play Almansor (1823). The original German line (in full) reads: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen."
Heine was prophetically referring to the burning of the Quran during the Spanish Inquisition, though the line tragically foreshadowed the Nazi book burnings in Germany over a century later.
