II
To destroy the categories of sex in politics and in philosophy, to destroy gender in language (at least to modify its use) is therefore part of my work in writing, as a writer. An important part, since a modification as central as this cannot happen without a transformation of language as a whole. It concerns (touches) words whose meanings and forms are close to, and associated with, gender. But it also concerns (touches) words whose meanings and forms are the furthest away. For once the dimension of the person, around which all others are organized, is brought into play, nothing is left intact. Words, their disposition, their arrangement, their relation to each other, the whole nebula of their constellations shift, are displaced, engulfed or reoriented, put sideways. And when they reappear, the structural change in language makes them look different. They are hit in their meaning and also in their form. Their music sounds different, their coloration is affected. For what is really in question here is a structural change in language, in its nerves, its framing. But language does not allow itself to be worked upon, without parallel work in philosophy and politics, as well as in economics, because, as women are marked in language by gender, they are marked in society as sex. I said that personal pronouns engineer gender through language, and personal pronouns are, if I may say so, the subject matter of each one of my books—except for Le Brouillon pour un Dictionnaire des Amantes (Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary), written with Sande Zeig. They are the motors for which functioning parts had to be designed, and as such they create the necessity of the form.
The project of The Opoponax, my first book, was to work on the subject, the speaking subject, the subject of discourse—subjectivity, generally speaking. I wanted to restore an undivided ‘I,’ to universalize the point of view of a group condemned to being particular, relegated in language to a subhuman category. I chose childhood as an element of form open to history (it is what a narrative theme is for me), the formation of the ego around language. A massive effort was needed to break the spell of the captured subject. I needed a strong device, something that would immediately be beyond sexes, that the division by sexes would be powerless against, and that could not be coopted. There is in French, as there is in English, a munificent pronoun that is called the indefinite, which means that it is not marked by gender, a pronoun that you are taught in school to systematically avoid. It is on in French—one in English. Indeed it is so systematically taught that it should not be used that the translator of The Opoponax managed never to use it in English. One must say in the translator’s favor that it sounds and looks very heavy in English, but no less so in French.
With this pronoun, that is neither gendered nor numbered, I could locate the characters outside of the social division by sexes and annul it for the duration of the book. In French, the masculine form—so the grammarians say—used when a past participle or an adjective is associated with the subject on, is in fact neuter. This incidental question of the neuter is in fact very interesting, for even when it is about terms like l’homme, like Man, grammarians do not speak of neuter in the same sense as they do for Good or Evil, but they speak of masculine gender. For they have appropriated l’homme, homo, whose first meaning is not male but mankind. For homo sum. Man as male is only a derivative and second meaning.4 To come back to one, on, here is a subject pronoun which is very tractable and accommodating since it can be beet in several directions at the same time. First, as already mentioned, it is indefinite as far as gender is concerned. It can represent a certain number of people successively or all at once—everybody, we, they, I, you, people, a small or a large number of persons—and still stay singular. It lends itself to all kinds of substitutions of persons. In the case of The Opoponax, it was a delegate of a whole class of people, of everybody, of a few persons, of I (the ‘I’ of the main character, the ‘I’ of the narrator, and the ‘I’ of the reader). One, on has been for me the key to the undisturbed use of language, as it is in childhood when words are magic, when words are set bright and colorful in the kaleidoscope of the world, with its many revolutions in the consciousness as one shakes it. One, on has been the pathway to the description of the apprenticeship, through words, of everything important to consciousness, apprenticeship in writing being the first, even before the apprenticeship in the use of speech. One, on, lends itself to the unique experience of all locutors who, when saying I, can reappropriate the whole language and reorganize the world from their point of view. I did not hide the female characters under male patronyms to make them look more universal, and nevertheless, if I believe what Claude Simon wrote, the attempt at universalization succeeded. He wrote, speaking about what happened to the main character in The Opoponax, a little girl: “I see, I breathe, I chew, I feel through her eyes, her mouth, her hands, her skin. . . . I become childhood.”5
Before speaking of the pronoun which is the axis of Les Guérillères, I would like to recall what Marx and Engels said in The German Ideology about class interests. They said that each new class that fights for power must, to reach its goal, represent its interest as the common interest of all the members of the society, and that in the philosophical domain this class must give the form of universality to its thought, to present it as the only reasonable one, the only universally valid one.
As for Les Guérillères, there is a personal pronoun used very little in French which does not exist in English—the collective plural elles (they in English)—while ils (they) often stands for the general: they say, meaning people say. This general ils does not include elles, no more, I suspect, than they includes any she in its assumption. One could say that it is a pity that in English there is not even a hypothetical plural feminine pronoun to try to make up for the absence of she in the general they. But what is the good of it, since when it exists it is not used. The rare times that it is, elles never stands for the general and is never the bearer of a universal point of view.6 An elles therefore that would be able to support a universal point of view would be a novelty in literature or elsewhere. In Les Guérillères, I try to universalize the point of view of elles. The goal of this approach is not to feminize the world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language. I, therefore, set up elles in the text as the absolute subject of the world. To succeed textually, I needed to adopt some very draconian measures, such as to eliminate, at least in the first two parts, he, or they-he. I wanted to produce a shock for the reader entering a text in which elles by its unique presence constitutes an assault, yes, even for female readers. Here again the adoption of a pronoun as my subject matter dictated the form of the book. Although the theme of the text was total war, led by elles on ils, in order for this new person to take effect, two-thirds of the text had to be totally inhabited, haunted, by elles. Word by word, elles establishes itself as a sovereign subject. Only then could il(s), they-he, appear, reduced and truncated out of language. This elles in order to become real also imposed an epic form, where it is not only the complete subject of the world but its conqueror. Another consequence derived from the sovereign presence of elles was that the chronological beginning of the narrative—that is, the total war—found itself in the third part of the book, and the textual beginning was in fact the end of the narrative. From there comes the circular form of the book, its gesta, which the geometrical form of a circle indicates as a modus operandi. In English the translator, lacking the lexical equivalent for elles, found himself compelled to make a change, which for me destroys the effect of the attempt. When elles is turned into the women the process of universalization is destroyed. All of a sudden, elles stopped being mankind. When one says “the women,” one connotes a number of individual women, thus transforming the point of view entirely, by particularizing what I intended as a universal. Not only was my undertaking with the collective pronoun elles lost, but another word was introduced, the word women appearing obsessively throughout the text, and it is one of those gender-marked words mentioned earlier which I never use in French. For me it is the equivalent of slave, and, in f
act, I have actively opposed its use whenever possible. To patch it up with the use of a y or an i (as in womyn or wimmin) does not alter the political reality of the word. If one tries to imagine nogger or niggir, instead of nigger, one may realize the futility of the attempt. It is not that there is no solution to translating elles. There is a solution, although it was difficult for me to find at the time. I am aware that the question is a grammatical one, therefore a textual one, and not a question of translation.7 The solution for the English translation then is to reappropriate the collective pronoun they, which rightfully belongs to the feminine as well as to the masculine gender. They is not only a collective pronoun but it also immediately develops a degree of universality which is not immediate with elles. Indeed, to obtain it with elles, one must produce a work of transformation that involves a whole pageant of other words and that touches the imagination. They does not partake of the naturalistic, hysterical bent that accompanies the feminine gender. They helps to go beyond the categories of sex. But they can be effective in my design only when it stands by itself, like its French counterpart. Only with the use of they will the text regain its strength and strangeness. The fact that the book begins with the end and that the end is the chronological beginning will be textually justified by the unexpected identity of they. In the third part, the war section, they cannot be shared by the category to be eliminated from the general. In a new version the masculine gender must be more systematically particularized than it is in the actual form of the book. The masculine must not appear under they but only under man, he, his, in analogy with what has been done for so long to the feminine gender (woman, she, her). It seems to me that the English solution will take us even a step further in making the categories of sex obsolete in language.
Talking about the key pronoun of The Lesbian Body (Le Corps lesbien) is a very difficult task for me, and sometimes I have considered this text a reverie about the beautiful analysis of the pronouns je and tu by the linguist Emile Benveniste. The bar in the j/e of The Lesbian Body is a sign of excess. A sign that helps to imagine an excess of ‘I,’ an ‘I,’ exalted. ‘I’ has become so powerful in The Lesbian Body that it can attack the order of heterosexuality in texts and assault the so-called love, the heroes of love, and lesbianize them, lesbianize the symbols, lesbianize the gods and the goddesses, lesbianize the men and the women. This ‘I’ can be destroyed in the attempt and resuscitated. Nothing resists this ‘I’ (or this tu, which is its same, its love), which spreads itself in the whole world of the book, like a lava flow that nothing can stop.
To understand my undertaking in this text, one must go back to The Opoponax, in which the only appearance of the narrator comes with a je, ‘I,’ located at the end of the book in a small sentence untranslated8 in English, a verse of Maurice Scève, in La Délie: “Tant je l’aimais qu’en elle encore je vis” (I loved her so that in her I live still). This sentence is the key to the text and pours its ultimate light upon the whole of it, demystifying the meaning of the opoponax and establishing a lesbian subject as the absolute subject while lesbian love is the absolute love. On, the opoponax, and the je, ‘I’ of the end have narrow links. They function by relays. First on completely coincides with the character Catherine Legrand as well as with the others. Then the opoponax appears as a talisman, a sesame to the opening of the world, as a word that compels both words and world to make sense, as a metaphor for the lesbian subject. After the repeated assertions of Catherine Legrand that I am the opoponax the narrator can at the end of the book take the relay and affirm in her name: “I loved her so that in her I live still.” The chain of permutations from the on to the je, ‘I,’ of The Opoponax has created a context for the ‘I’ in The Lesbian Body. This understanding both global and particular, both universal and unique, brought from within a perspective given in homosexuality, is the object of some extraordinary pages by Proust.
To close my discussion of the notion of gender in language, I will say that it is a mark unique of its kind, the unique lexical symbol that refers to an oppressed group. No other has left its trace within language to such a degree that to eradicate it would not only modify language at the lexical level but would upset the structure itself and its functioning. Furthermore, it would change the relations of words at the metaphorical level far beyond the very few concepts and notions that are touched upon by this transformation. It would change the coloration of words in relation to each other and their tonality. It is a transformation that would affect the conceptual-philosophical level and the political one as well as the poetic one.
THE SITE OF ACTION
1984
What has been taking place in Nathalie Sarraute’s work since Les Fruits d’or (The Golden Fruit, 1963) is so total a transformation of the substance of the novel that it is difficult to grasp it as such. As it has the volatility of spoken words, I will call the material with which she works—in order to establish a comparison with what linguists call “locution”—“interlocution.” By this word, infrequently used in linguistics, I imply all that occurs between people when they speak. It includes the phenomenon, in its entirety, which goes beyond speech proper. And as the meaning of this word derives from interrupt, to cut someone short, that which does not designate a mere speech act, I extend it to any action linked to the use of speech: to accidents of discourse (pauses, excess, lack, tone, intonation) and to effects relating to it (tropisms, gestures).
In this perspective, Sarraute’s characters are interlocutors: More anonymous even than Kafka’s K., they have the tenor of Plato’s Georgias, Crito, Euthyphro. Called forth by dialogue and the same philosophical necessity, they disappear like meteorites or like people we pass in the street, people who are neither more nor less real than characters of a novel and who are bedecked with a name to satisfy the needs of our inner fiction. But what matters here over and above those interlocutors who, for the reader, are ordinary characters, ordinary propositions, is Sarraute’s philosophical matter, the locution and the interlocution, what she herself, with regard to the novel, calls “l’usage de la parole” [the use of speech]. Unlike linguistics, which has but one anatomical point of view on language, the point of view of the novel does not have to impose limits on itself for it can collect, gather, in a single movement, causes, effects, and actors. With Sarraute, the novel creates phenomena in literature which as yet have no name, either in science or philosophy.
It must first be noted that all those problems relating to character, to point of view, to dialogue, which Sarraute developed in L’Ere du soupçon (The Age of Suspicion, 1956), have been resolved by the fact that the use of speech has become the exclusive theme of her books. The character, totally changed in its form, was still too cumbersome for the needs of the text. This form itself has disappeared. The spatiotemporal universe, which generally constitutes a pregnant element in fiction (description of places, of buildings, of precise geographical spaces) and which was already very restricted in the novels of Sarraute preceding Les Fruits d’or, is now the most abstract that it can be: it is any unspecified place where one speaks, or else, perhaps, a mental space with imaginary interlocutors.
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