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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
My aim is to explore what kind of lesbian subjectivity is brought to life in Monique Wittig's play Le Voyage sans fin, and to what extent it fits in with Wittig's project as a whole. Is it consistent with the representational strategies at work in her fiction?
1. Wittig, Monique, Le Voyage sans finGoogle Scholar, supplement to Vlasta, No. 4, June 1985, ‘Avant-Note’, p. 5. All references to the play and its ‘vant-Note’ will be to this edition, and page references will be indicated immediately following the quotation. All translations (with the exception of Wittig and Zeig, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes) are my own: 'The work carried out with Sande Zeig focused on bodily movements and shifts, since in the theatre it is the physical presence of the actors which makes things happen. The second stage brought the awareness that for me at the moment a show could only come into being if words and gestures were somehow split, treated separately.’
2. ‘It's an independent action, the driving force for which is not to be found in the actors' utterances, in the spoken word.’
3. ‘both (of them) regain strength and efficiency’.
4. ‘If it is argued that there never was a Cleite, a Pen-thesilea, nor any of those warrior-women whose exploits are recited to us, then the claim might as well be made that the sun doesn't shine, the frost isn't cold and the earth isn't firm.’
5. L'Opoponax (Paris: Minuit, 1964).
6. Les Guérillères (Paris: Minuit, 1969).
7. Le Corps lesbien (Paris: Minuit, 1973).
8. ‘Avant-Note’ to La Passion by Djuna Barnes (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), pp. 7–21. ‘What we can do in a world where we can only exist as silenced beings, directly in society and indirectly in literature, what we must do, then, whether we like it or not, is to shape our own selves, emerge from nowhere, be our own legends in our own lives.’
9. Virgile, non (Paris: Minuit, 1985).
10. ‘On the Social Contract’, in Dennis Altman et al., eds., Which Homosexuality? Essays from the International Scientific Conference on Lesbian and Gay Issues (London: Gay Men's Press, 1989), pp. 239–49.
11. ‘Paris-la-politique’, in Vlasta, No. 4, June 1985, pp. 9–35.
12. ‘Quichotte can't you see they think you're mad?’
13. Savona, Jeanelle Lailou, ‘Lesbians on the French Stage: from Homosexuality to Monique Wittig's Lesbianization of the Theatre’, Modern Drama, Vol. 39, No. 1, 1996, 132–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14. Zimmerman, Bonnie, ‘What has never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Criticism’, in Greene, Gayle and Kahn, Coppélia, eds., Making a Difference: Feminist Literary Criticism (London and New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 177–210.Google Scholar
15. Savona, , ‘Lesbians on the French Stage’, p. 145.Google Scholar
16. Ibid.
17. ‘It is the actors' physical presence which makes things happen.’
18. Le Corps lesbien, p. 7. ‘Bid farewell … to what they call affection tenderness or graceful ease.’
19. ‘Entretien avec Monique Wittig’, interview by Louppe, Laurence, L'Art Vivant, No. 45, 12 1973–01 1974, 24–5.Google Scholar ‘In my writing, I try out violent, wild representations of lesbian love. We must destroy the image of homosexuality as mawkish and decorative, harmless to heterosexuality and even colluding with it.’
20. Savona, , ‘Lesbians on the French Stage’, p. 143.Google Scholar
21. Haraway, Donna, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s', Socialist Review, No. 80, 1985, 65–107.Google Scholar
22. Wittig, Monique, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (co-authored with Sande Zeig; Paris: Grasset, 1976).Google Scholar
23. Ibid., p. 153. ‘A strong giantess of the Glorious Age, often caught by the lilliputians who attach her, in her sleep, to the ground with invisible bonds to paralyse her. As soon as she is free, Lena Vandrey fabricates a world of frescos. From her an entire people of giantesses are born. They escort her, forcing the quarrelsome lilliputians to retreat from day to day. Her triumph shall continue.’ Wittig, Monique and Zeig, Sande, Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (New York: Avon, 1980), p. 97.Google Scholar