Across the Acheron

by Monique Wittig

In "Across the Acheron" Monique Wittig, prize-winning author os some rightly acclaimed novels, describes and extra-ordinary journey through the infernal regions towards a paradisaical land. Angels ride motor cycles and cruety and suffering are unknown on tyhe other side of the Acheron, the legendary river of sorrows. Translated from the French by David LeVay in collaboration with Margaret Crosland. ISBN #0720606640

Genres: Feminism, Queer, Lesbian, Fiction, France, 20th Century

119 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Monique Wittig was a French author and feminist theorist particularly interested in overcoming gender and the heterosexual contract. She published her first novel, L'opoponax, in 1964 . Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

Reviews

[Subilia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Monique ce génie je t’aime reviens nous

[Marissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wittig is one of my all-time feminist heroes and Across the Acheron just reinforces that. Incredibly entertaining, extremely clever take off on Dante's Inferno on a feminist premise with some really hilarious and insightful passages. Women in the feminist movement could still learn a lot from Wittig's wisdom about our current political situation.

[ouliana · Rating 2 out of 5]

idk maybe reading is not for me anymore

[Laura S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ci sono quelle che vanno in giro con inciso sulla fronte il tipo di minaccia che esse rappresentano.

Ed è bene misurare con la parola la portata del torto che vi è stato fatto.

[David Grundy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The hell to Les Guérillères' victorious utopia, 'Across the Acheron' (originally 'Virgile, Non') is Wittig's Divine Comedy. But the Dantean progress from hell through limbo to heaven, with 'Wittig' led by 'Manastabal, my guide', is criss-crossed, not in linear order, but with alternations of all three realms, supplemented in turn by interludes in a desert with sands cut to 'sycthe-blades', where Wittig waits for her guide and encounters giant butterflies, dragons, ferocious sand-storms, and trips to the Acheron in order to cleanse the mind of the horrors it's witnessed, replenishing it for the next stage of the journey. Here, progress to paradise is not a progressive movement from A to B (though the long march of escaped women is a recurring image), but a process of political, ethical and sexual learning, of learning a language with which to speak to the angels of future liberation, of channeling and overcoming anger. Set in a realm that's at once fantasy world and a recognisable extension of the urban present--San Francisco, where Wittig and Sande Zeig had relocated, is referenced several times--limbo is a bar where women dance, shoot, pool, plans crimes as a kind of guerrilla warfare of survival; hell is a world of beauty parades, hunting, competitions, and overwhelming physical torture enacted on the bodies of feminised persons, 'The Lesbian Body's invocation of love through viscera and dismemberment here the index of patriarchal violence; paradise a realm of companionship and feasting. If the paradisal section is the least developed of all the realms that's perhaps because, as Wittig suggests, we don't yet have the language to speak it, to sing its 'beggar's opera' of triumph over adversity and into a land of communal plenty. Even at its most outlandish moments, Wittig's hell is more recognisably our world than the angels, trumpets and feast tables with which the text ends.

[Blanche · Rating 4 out of 5]

"then she must be a dyke"

[elle est au nord · Rating 5 out of 5]

dans une réécriture de La Divine Comédie de dante, monique wittig nous raconte son aventure pour traverser les terribles enfers avant de rejoindre le paradis

d'une écriture légère, poétique et onirique, wittig fait de Virgile, non un véritable éloge du lesbianisme, en témoignant la violence subie dans l'hétérocismonde et, de fait, le détachement lesbien de celui-ci, auquel il est totalement étranger

des références évidentes à ses articles et à ses Guérillères, un condensé du génie wittigien qui devient aujourd'hui mon livre préféré je crois

trop beau

[xoxo · Rating 4 out of 5]

that damn butterfly is something i still think about

[Clémence Burcker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quel bonheur de lire l'écriture si singulière et vive de Monique Wittig.
Ce livre court est nécessaire pour dénoncer le patriarcat.
Ici, Wittig visite les enfers non pas accompagnée de Virgile comme Dante mais de Manastabal. Et l'on comprend assez vite qui sont les âmes damnées et qui les torturent et les contraignent. On retrouve en substances ce que les hommes infligent au femme comme violence, ce que les femmes acceptent comme souffrance sans s'en sembler en être consciente la plupart du temps.
Et quand bien même, on peut ne pas être d'accord avec la seule issue possible proposée pour sortir de cet enfer, il en reste quand même de magnifiques passages. Terriblement bien écrit, effrayant de caricature sous laquelle se cache une vérité, il est plus que temps de redonner les lettres de noblesse que mérite Wittig. C'est un.e grand.e écrivain.e du 20ème siècle .
À lire, absolument.

[Michael Wheldon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decent read with some really fun, vivid and fantastical imagery. At times it feels like a facsimile of a modernist poetical style and not so much a unique voice and (a fault of time I suppose) some of the themes and stereotypes don’t hold up too well. If this was also a little subtler I’d have enjoyed it more.

The middle is pretty weak and repetitive but those first and last 20 or so pages are really really good with some of the best stuff I’ve read in a while.

[heyyonicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mon Wittig préféré à ce jour. C'est assez court et très bien fragmenté donc "facile à lire" même si ça requiert quand même de l'attention et un peu d'imagination, mais on a vu bien plus complexe chez le même auteur ! J'ai l'impression que là où la Divine Comédie de Dante nécessite beaucoup de référence au contexte historique de l'époque, ce n'est pas vraiment le cas pour cette réécriture, ou alors je ne m'en suis pas rendu compte.

[B. H. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmm, I get what she was trying to do but I did not enjoy this in the slightest. For a book that was barely 140 pages it took me foreveeeer to get through. I love Wittig's feminist writings. This felt too on the nose.

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

I too feel like I’m in heaven in San Fransisco and then in hell also in San Francisco.

Weirdly relatable for a book so dense. Loved the chapter where the damned souls were chained. That got to me. Also soup uniting lesbians in heaven is real asf

[Glynna]

Kind of… boring SORRY SORRY

[Léo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Banger sur banger rien ne l arrête la Monique a part la mort… rest in peace…

[Val’ · Rating 4 out of 5]

She's crazy for that

[Evelyne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Note: this review is especially harsh because I have high expectations for this author.

The overall action is the following: the heroine, who starts from the limbo, a desert, wants to join her lover in heaven, lover who sent someone to guide the heroine through hell, as it is the only way to heaven. This is based on when the author went to San Francisco; the book is a symbolical retelling of that, through a feminist lense. The issue the heroine has to work through is her shortsightedness and cockiness in how she reacts to women who allow themselves to be oppressed.

An issue I have is how the main theme — the symbolization of women's (especially the poor ones) oppression — is disconnected from the overall action and the heroine's goals. The main theme makes the heroine act based on arguably altruistic motivations, but her goal is only to be reunited with her lover. Either this is a massive failure to bring two mostly unrelated things together, or there's something more.

The book parodies the epic: there are heroic actions of a single person against many, absolute and opaque enemies, a lot of blood and gory descriptions... What if this was, besides the basic feminist theme, a deeper critique against harebrained feminism? This book was published after the publication of The Straight Mind after all, so you'd expect her to be a bit more subtle than what's in her worldbuilding. Moreover, if the heroine is named like the author, she's constantly criticized and nuanced by another character, her guide. Therefore it appears more like self-criticism, and a generalization of it to people who take a simplistic feminist stance — like the essentialists she criticized a lot —, and those who think that her ideas are some sort of lesbian imperialism — like someone she had a disagreement with in a french feminist journal and accused her of that. That would explain the disequilibrium between the universalist and altruistic theme and the egoistical action: the heroine is very much imperfect, and should be seen as such.

Despite the cleverness of that parody, and despite how the style is very readable despite its many literary devices that modify syntax, the main theme takes far too much place: it repeats itself a lot. Moreover, the symbols can hardly be interpreted in many different ways; their meaning is given directly in the text. The result is a lack of literary and interpretative depth that some of her other stories have. Worse, the main theme is basically the same as an older but more subtle short story called "Un jour mon prince viendra" (One Day my Prince will Come). So, while it has many qualities, this book isn't really one of her masterpieces.

[Mimonni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Di questo libro ho apprezzato molto prima di tutto il suo potere di evocare immagini. Ogni capitoletto ci porta nuove, spesso atroci visioni sulla condizione femminile e il fatto che il punto di vista sia quello lesbico, sottolinea ancor di più questa condizione subalterna della donna. Sebbene la simbologia sia spesso cruda, l'ironia con cui l'autrice, che è anche il personaggio principale, affronta questo viaggio dantesco dagli inferi al paradiso, riesce ad alleggerire il tutto introducendo anche personaggi fantastici (come l'indimenticabile burlababu!)
Notevole che le definizioni di genere "uomo" e "donna" non vengano mai usate in tutto il romanzo, ma siano sostituite da altri nomi che ci suggeriscono il sesso senza esserne sinonimi.
Sento il bisogno di una rilettura per concentrarmi di più sulle sfumature e non rimanere così abbagliata dalle immagini.

[Corinne Blackmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

An experimental novel in almost the worst sense that uses a postmodern mock epic style as the presumptively appropriate vehicle for representing lesbian lives. I, for one, do not believe that lesbians, by virtue of their sexual orientation, necessarily need to be located outside the purview of well developed realist fiction, as numerous, albeit mainly British, authors have proven. A dull and tedious experience that is not recommended for people who like to enjoy their literary experiences of lesbian and gay characters and society.

[cristiana · Rating 4 out of 5]

this made me definitely want to read more of wittig's work.

there's a section towards the end, where she repeats the phrase "just like that." it's quite nice.

interesting that she chose for hell to be san francisco?

[Mir]

Originally published as Virgile, Non, this recasts the Inferno as a feminist fable, set in a San Francisco dyke bar.