Book Review: The Opoponax

Title: The Opoponax

Author: Monique Wittig

Translator: Helen Weaver

Date: 1964 (French), 1966 (English)

Publisher: Les Editions de minuit (1964), Simon & Schuster (1966)

ISBN: 0-913780-15-4

Length: 256 pages

Quote: “She writes...OPOPONAX and a colon and then, can change its shape. You can’t describe it because it never has the same form.”

For Catherine LeGrand, “opoponax” is not a plant but the word that sounds like the name for her adolescent rebelliousness. Apparently, in Wittig’s mind, her fictional antiheroine Catherine is going to grow up to be one of Les Guerillères, the de-individuated collective protagonists of her more famous novel. However, Les Guerillères is a fantasy; L’Opoponax is a realistic story about not-very-nice Catholic middle school girls.

Since I generally prefer nonfiction to novels anyway, it’s only fair for me to tell you that people who like and respect fiction said good things about The Opoponax. From a literary viewpoint, what the book accomplished is “to use nothing but pure description conveyed by purely objective language.” Within the narrow constraints of this writing-exercise form, Marguerite Duras pronounced it “a masterpiece”; Natalie Sarraute saw it as evidence of a real talent that “in ten or twenty years” the world would recognize.

What about Catherine and her little friends? If you think that “the violence of the girl underworld” is either natural, or a healthy reaction to the oppressive convent school rules, Catherine is a heroine because she “refuses to give up her violence.” If you think that the children’s abnormal violence and nastiness is an unhealthy symptom of overcrowding, Catherine is a horrible little brat and her story is an uninspiring, even degrading, study of brutalization.

Wittig chose the form of this novel in order not to take sides. We share Catherine’s perceptions of sight, sound, sensation, a healthy delight in French poetry, and the hormonal mood swings that prompt her to write “I am the Opoponax,” identifying herself with a symbol of perversity, sin, and Satan. For a child who instinctively loves the discipline of classical poetic form, we may feel, a happy ending must involve outgrowing this sense of perversity, but Wittig refuses to show any suggestion of how, when, or whether Catherine will ever succeed in defending her ego boundaries well enough to become a poet or a friend, much less a wife or mother. At the end of the book she’s still a child, perceiving other children and sometimes going along with what they’re doing, but forming no bonds and having nothing to give.

This ending leaves me with an unpleasant suspicion that the story is autobiographical, that Wittig was still stuck in adolescent rebellion when she wrote it, and that that’s why she wrote those annoying long lists without commas.

Nevertheless, it’s recommended to anyone interested in placing Sartre and de Beauvoir in their historical context, or in reading the original French text with an approved translation on hand for reference.