Across the Acheron - Monique Wittig

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Across the Acheron

by
Monique Wittig

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

Title:	Across the Acheron
Author:	Monique Wittig
Genre:	Novel
Written:	1985 (Eng. 1987; rev. 2025)
Length:	144 pages
Original in:	French
Availability:	Across the Acheron - US
	Across the Acheron - UK
	Across the Acheron - Canada
	Virgile, non - Canada
	Virgile, non - France
	Virgile, non - Italia

	directly from: Winter Editions

French title: Virgile, non
Translated by David Le Vay with Margaret Crosland
With an Introduction by Sophie Lewis
With a Note by the author

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Our Assessment:

B : quite the wild ride

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Publishers Weekly	.	1/12/1987	.
Women's Rev. of Books	.	(5:8) 5/1988	Christine Froula
World Lit. Today	.	Winter/1986	J.L.Greenberg

From the Reviews:

"A Guernica of the human (feminist) condition, a blacker, bleaker, more vengeful Alice's tea party, this is a novel as graphic as a painting, whose brilliance its translators have creditably preserved." - Publishers Weekly

"Wittig reworks every aspect of the epic convention that she appropriates. (...) Across the Acheron, richly imagined as it is, is nothing if not provocative. Some readers may reject Wittig's confrontational linguistic and philosophical premises; some may find it difficult to accept the rhetorical necessity of her militant separatism; some may object to her portrayal of the heterosexual world, with its broad strokes and narrow range. But Wittig has chosen to write not a realist novel but an allegorical lesbian apocalypse, in words powerful enough to reshape her readers' sense of social reality" - Christine Froula, Women's Review of Books

"She is, one imagines, preaching to the convinced (or convicted ?); this is not exactly mainstream reading. For the noninitiate, a good part of the book is alternately nauseating and soporific. (...) Perhaps the best imaginable use for the text is as the basis of a dramatized proclamation from one of the leading floats in a commemorative parade, held in New York, San Francisco, and other aware locations, one weekend in early June." - J.L.Greenberg, World Literature Today

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

Across the Acheron is a Dantesque journey through Hell, Limbo, and Paradise, but does not move neatly through the circles as Dante's work did: Wittig and her guide careen between them in this rough ride. As the guide explains:

(I don't know, Wittig, whether the circles of Hell have been enumerated. But never mind that, I've no intention of making you visit them in order.)
It takes all my energy to reply:
(Let's go there in disorder, then.)

       (Yes, dialogue is set between parentheses rather than quotation marks throughout.)
       Disorder, then, it is.
       The original French title of the novel is: Virgile, non, and Wittig mentions in her Author's Note that this refers not to: "the poet I love, but it says 'no' to Virgil as a guide, since in this book the guide is Manastabal". Manastabal and Wittig do, indeed go their own, very different way -- beginning with the fact that Wittig follows her guide with a rifle slung across her back (and she'll use it on occasion, too -- smashing with the rifle-butt as well as firing it).
       The setting is, sort of, San Francisco, with the two surfacing in familiar parts of it ("once more we cross the avenues of the Golden Gate Park", etc.), but only in occasional aspects is the locale depicted as we know it; mostly, the two travel through a Boschian alter-vision of it and the larger world. Much is hellish -- even beyond Hell (even in the "intermediate zone" of Limbo: "hunger reigns here" and those crowded there: "might kill each other in their exasperation and impotence"). Among the horrors Wittig and her guide encounter are women at the mercy of hunters, subdued and leashed; mass mutual suicides who: "strangle each other until suffocation and death follow"; and: "Lost souls whose feet have been cut off and then bandaged like the rounded ends of posts" (with others having: "had their Achilles tendons cut; they can be seen crawling along the ground").
       Male domination of "our enslaved sex" is the condition author Wittig has her characters confronted with -- and rails against. Paradise and redemption are not possible with them -- Wittig lashes (literally as well as verbally) against the dominating sex:

(Get out of here, enemies of love, go and shake your danglers somewhere else and rid the temple of them, they're a nuisance here just as they're a nuisance to you, so much so that you're in constant fear of treading on them, and you have to stuff them into anything that will take them. Even a drawer will do, I've heard it described as a glorious exploit.)

The angel-filled Paradise (some arriving on motorcycles ...) is one without the loathsome masculine; author Wittig's lesbian ideal does without them. And Across the Acheron does have a happy ending, Wittig managing to find and stake her claim in Paradise: "Jubilantly I say: (Who would have thought it would be so simple to enter Paradise ?)"
It is a strange, dark, and often confusing ride (but then the world is a strange, dark, and confusing place ...). Manastabal at one point notes:

(What will you do with a horse in Hell, Wittig ? Remember, we're not in a western. Your confusion of styles is sometimes quite barbaric.)

That goes also for author Wittig's writing -- not least in trying to find words to describe and express all this. And, as Manastabal tells her:

(Don't make excuses to me, Wittig, you do what you must. But I, Manastabal, your guide, I tell you, don't let yourself be carried away by words, for you won't get away with it.)

       Part of the appeal of the writing is how carried away the author sometimes gets -- but the jerky, twisting journey is certainly also challenging to read. Wildly imagined, Wittig's vision is extreme but also not simply programmatic; in the best and worst senses it is all messy. The Paradise her Wittig reaches isn't one for everyone, and, readers be warned, Across the Acheron is definitely one of those your-mileage-may-vary-greatly reads -- less for its message(s) (blunt, yes, but in keeping with everything else about the work) than the all-over-the-place story and style..

       Note that the original English translation -- admirably published by Peter Owen in 1987, not long after the French original came out, has been slightly revised here -- most notably, as a Note on the Translation explains, with the words: "woman" and "women" removed, as well as "lost souls" substituting for "damned" and "condemned".
       Sandra Daroczi's interesting piece on the Publication and Reception of Virgile, non (1985) discusses some of the issues with the original translation, including quoting Peter Owen in a letter explaining that: "David Le Vay did a translation which unfortunately was not satisfactory and it has had to be revised by Margaret Crosland" (explaining her 'in collaboration with'-credit), while Beacon Press declined to publish a US edition because: "the translation was so poor that we rejected it". The 2025 revision deals with some of the problematic issues of the original translation -- but in any case, it's a complex work to render in translation: Daroczi also quotes Ballantine Books (!) editor Robert B. Wyatt as admitting: "At present, we’re not prepared to publish something as difficult as this book. Perhaps in a few years when I am better established here and have found a way of publishing work of such high imagination, it will be possible".

- M.A.Orthofer, 16 December 2025

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Links:

Across the Acheron:

Winter Editions publicity page
Les Éditions de Minuit publicity page
Il Dito e la Luna publicity page
Publication and Reception of Virgile, non (1985) by Sandra Daroczi

Reviews:

Monique Wittig:

Monique Wittig site

Other books by Monique Wittig under review:

Les Guérillères

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of French literature at the complete review

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About the Author:

French author Monique Wittig lived 1935 to 2003.

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