Nouvelle Nouvelle Autobiographie: Monique Witting's "Le Corps lesbien"

Abstract

This double project, outlined and begun in the earlier work, is fully carried out in Le Corps lesbien. Creating and defining the relationship between self and world, between je and tu, has been the central concern of autobiography since Saint Augustine. The choice of a language is no less a question of autobiography, To consent to speak a language is to assume an identity. (One need only consult the works of Franz Fanon, Aimr6 Cdsaire and many others grappling with the problem of self-expression in the language of a colonizer.) Refusal of a language is therefore tantamount to denial of a law, rejection of a ready-made self, which, in its turn, requires the construction of a new langauge and a new identity. Autobiography has traditionally been defined as someone's own (auto) life (bio) presented in written form (graphie). With the subject outside of and separate from the text, historicity has been a central issue in defining the genre. An autobiography must be, or at least pretend to be, about a real person. Self provides the content and writing adds the form. But when self and language are two faces of the same project for reform, a new meaning emerges: the subject outside the text disappears and is resurrected and comes to life (bio) as a new self (auto) in and of writing (graphie). Writing becomes the subject of autobiography rather than the mode. In Le Corps lesbien, conflict, disarticulation and reconstruction produce a new identity of self and language (in both meanings of the phrase). Dismemberment and resurrection are the focus of the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, which organizes Le Corps lesbien. Isis, goddess of curing and of spinning and weaving, and Osiris, god of death and reincarnation (and as such associated with the tides, the sun and vegetation) were the primal couple, children of the earth and sky. Osiris was murdered by his jealous brother, Set, placed in a closed coffer and cast into the Nile. His faithful wife Isis recovered the body and buried her husband. However, Set stole the corpse, chopped it into fourteen pieces, and threw the fragments into the river. Isis gathered together the dismembered body, all but the phallus which had been eaten by a crab, and reconstituted it, proceeding to have a child by her resurrected husband. Osiris then retired to rule the underworld as the god of death. Certain material from the Osiris stoiy can be readily recognized in Le Corps lesbien: the theme of death and resurrection; the water motif; the couple neither of whom is technically male (although one wonders about the neo-freudian implications