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A carregar... Le corps lesbien (edição 1973)por Monique Wittig
Informação Sobre a ObraThe Lesbian Body por Monique Wittig
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On a fictional Sapphic island where women live exclusively among themselves, the narrator-protagonist, in a series of invocations to her lover and descriptions of the island's life, celebrates the contours, contents, and satisfactions of the lesbian body. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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Google Books — A carregar... GénerosSistema Decimal de Melvil (DDC)843.914Literature French and related languages French fiction Modern Period 20th Century 1945-1999Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos EUA (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia:
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In the introduction, Wittig writes of "The desire to bring the real body violently to life in the words of the book (everything that is written exists), the desire to do violence by writing to the language which I (j/e) can enter only by force." The urgency with which she was writing and the impossible scale of what she considered her mission are affecting. In a certain mood, the excitement could be contagious. You could picture the author, flushed and frantically writing, trying to push language to its limits, as though if she could just be brave enough, bold enough, violent enough, the whole compromised world might come down and a new one come up in its place, the distance between the self and the desired finally transcended.
Unfortunately it seems that trying to amp up the language as much as possible ends up having the opposite effect and much of The Lesbian Body is repetitive and even boring. The language is so ceaselessly, insistently erotic that it becomes unerotic in its predictability. Here is a passage that I think is pretty representative: "Your hand followed by your arm have entered into m/y throat, you traverse m/y larynx, you arrive at m/y lungs, you itemize m/y organs, you make m/e die ten thousands deaths while I smile, you rip out m/y stomach, you tear m/y intestines, you project the uttermost fury into m/y body, I cry out but not from pain, I am overtaken seized hold of, I go over to you entirely, I explode the small units of my ego, I am threatened, I am desired by you. A tree shoots in m/y body, it moves it branches with extreme violence with extreme gentleness, or else it is a bush of burning thorns it tears the other side of m/u exposed muscles m/y insides m/y interiors, I am inhabited, I am not dreaming, I am penetrated by you, now I must struggle against bursting to retain m/y overall perception, I reassemble you in all m/y organs, I burst." There is something frustratingly literal about all of this.
Still, I ended up reading the whole thing although I didn't expect to. There were moments when sudden unexpected images were really arresting, and then the rawness of it did, I think, add to the impact. But I would have to disagree with the jacket blurb "the art and the courage are of the highest level." I couldn't really speak to the courage without sounding, maybe, ungrateful and inconsiderate. Perhaps it's that The Lesbian Body did its work so well that the message seems a little tired to us today. I certainly imagine it was fresher in the climate in which it was originally published. As far as the level of the art, well, I think it's pretty clear that aesthetic considerations weren't the writer's primary concern. I have to say, a little bit apologetically yet, that, though I admire them in a way, strength of feeling and rawness aren't enough to trump aesthetic merit. All the same, I found myself reaching for this book at a time of night that I wasn't exactly reaching for the Henry James, so it did offer both pleasures and merits not always found in works that might be aesthetically better. ( )