the joy of difficulty
Wittig is a challenging and theortically motivated writer, and this is a challenging and theoretically motivated book. In the original French, Wittig writes "je" as "j/e" - in the English, "I" is italicized to achieve the same effect - to, as she describes it, represent both the pain and difficulty of women's refused access to linguistic subjectivity and the exultation of the attempt. The text as a whole largely functions as an effort to posit a universal female subject in a linguistic and and literary context that makes this seemingly impossible, and the contents of the text reflect the pain and ecstasy of this effort. While it is technically a novel, The Lesbian Body is more of a series of vaguely thematically linked prose poems, periodically interrupted by anatomically specific lists of body parts, organs, fluids, and functions, both internal and external. Each section of the text reprents an "I" who is either searching for or interacting with a "you" - these interactions generally take the form of unilateral or mutual dismemberments and unilateral or reciprocal animal trasformations. While they are, as a rule, extremely violent they are also extremely erotically charged and effectively symbolically stand in for the linguistic challenge Wittig is undertaking. Her project is also forwarded by her consistant references to and subversions of various cultural mythologies, reincorporating these systems of myth into a mythology of the lesbian body and the lesbian linguitic subject. It is a beautifully written text, and LeVay's translation is, as a whole, admirably accomplished. Nevertheless, as in all translations, the texts is skewed by the point of view of the translator, and I highly recommend reading the original french as well - I find that reading the original and the translation alongside each other gives illuminating and fascinating insight into the nature of translation in general as well as the specific text.
