Across the Acheron     by Monique Wittig, Translated by M Crosland and D Le Vay Original title: Virgile, non Original language: French Published by Peter Owen Publishers Pub. Date: 1987 Format: Hardcover, 119 pages ISBN: 0720606640 List Price: $31.95, £10.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £10.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $31.95 Published by Women's Press Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: UK Format: 119 pages List Price: £3.95 Not available for ordering

In Across the Acheron Monique Wittig mines Dante’s Divine Comedy to present, in a series of short tableaux, a dystopian vision of a world in which women are ruled by rapacious men. Mixing science fiction with autobiography and ideological polemic, she hops from a San Francisco laundromat in which servile women who wash their men’s clothes are shocked by her nudity to the Golden Gate Park, where women are hunted as game by the evil Count Zaroff and his men, then through the bars and cafés of limbo and, finally, on to Paradise, which is full of lesbians on motorbikes. Throughout her journey she’s accompanied by a guide, Manastabal, who, like Dr. Faustus’ guide Mephistopheles (who when asked exactly where hell is replies ‘This is hell, nor are we out of it’), tells her at the outset that she’ll see ‘nothing you don’t know already’ — Wittig’s way of stressing that the inferno and it’s customs are already with us.


The irony of Wittig’s set-up is that, while casting herself in the role of observer, she is also — as author — playing God, dogmatically imposing moral codes which condemn everybody except, well, herself. Heterosexual women are written off as masochists (‘But I like being on a leash,’ says one; another ‘is utterly delighted because she’s been given a good kicking’; these women form the mass of ‘the damned’). Undercutting this rather bigoted outlook is the voice of Manastabal, who occasionally warns Wittig against making judgements (in Jean Cocteau’s moral cosmogony the lowest of the damned were those condemned to judge others).


Manastabal’s interventions, though few and far between, open up Across the Acheron to ambiguity, a type of dramatic playfulness which saves it from becoming mere tirade.

‘They are forced to put on a uniform which marks them out immediately in a crowd as those to be brought down. A registration number is not required. For as soon as high heels, bare legs and thighs, as well as dress and handbag, are seen, the ensemble identifies them as game. And it is true there are hunts organised against them in the Count Zaroff style that last the whole night. I attend one of these with Manastabal, my guide, in the Golden Gate Park, where we are on guard duty, she with her laser-beam like the angel at the exit from Paradise and I with a sub-machine gun.’ p36