No male figure is more traditional—literarily, psychologically, historically—than the epic hero. Thus it is all the more surprising and stimulating to see the heroic mode used in Les Guérillères to express the feminist point of view, and to see, moreover, that the work succeeds brilliantly on several levels….

Ignoring or flouting literary fashion, the book combines atemporal anachronism with anthropological description and epic pastiche with dead seriousness of tone. Add such themes as bloody warfare between men and women and poetic celebration of the female genitalia, and the mixture is, for some readers, too rich and strange. The central problem, however, remains the simple fact that many readers cannot take with genuine artistic seriousness a book whose only male characters are at best of tertiary importance. (p. 71)

And yet a good deal happens in this book without benefit of male presence. We observe the collective, tribal activities of a large number of women who live in a beautiful and colorful setting, never completely described, that is sometimes a Greek island, sometimes, perhaps, a seaside resort, sometimes a futuristic city. The women's existence is both primitive and sophisticated. Their myths, legends, and heroes are entirely female, like their deities. Where female children come from is not clear—whether they are stolen or born to tribal members impregnated in unspecified ways—but a ritual does mark their appearance. Songs, stories, wanderings, are the events of their lives, in the first half of the book, and their guides and histories are little books called feminaries. (pp. 71-2)

Anachronisms make it impossible to say when the events of the narrative take place in our time scale, or even to say how much time elapses…. (p. 72)

To confound further the reader whose conception of the novel's possibilities for confusion does not extend beyond those of the now middle-aged nouveau roman, there is not just a lack of traditional character development; there are instead many (female) characters who play brief parts in short, brilliantly drawn scenes and then disappear. Thus it is the group, the tribe, the mass of women, who form the (collective) protagonist. If there is one continuing individual character it is the narrator, but we are not aware of her as character until the last page.

This lack of a single human existence and consciousness by which to measure time and custom, the confusions of spatial and temporal orientation, and the absence of clear causal relationships, all allow the succession of scenes—the rapid succession of very many brief scenes which is the form of the book—to achieve a timelessness and universality of implication which is ultimately responsible for at least a part of the narrative's gravity of tone and effect. If they were set in any identifiable period in history, or even a clearly indicated future time—some post-holocaust twenty-fifth century—the events depicted would lose the mythic quality they possess, the atmosphere of archetypal forces at work. But the disorienting effects of the anachronisms and overturned societal conventions, the mixture of classical and twentieth-century lexicons, make us understand that Wittig is offering a time outside of time…. (pp. 72-3)

Although the book has no discernible plot as we define it, there is a kind of organic rhythm and change, a progression in the series of descriptive and narrative scenes which at first appear to be strung together in no strict order. (p. 73)

This book quickly convinces us that it must be taken seriously but must not be taken literally. Ultimately it turns out to be not so much a novel as a poem, not so much a story as a long metaphor for women's situation, for women's rage and loving good intentions. The rage is directed against a world of repression and ridicule; the good intentions look toward a freer and fairer time for both women and men. Although satire and pastiche are always with us as we read, Wittig keeps her balance between the ridiculous and the pretentious and falls into neither pit. She achieves and maintains her chosen level of seriousness, at least in part, by the use of the present tense (a part of the atemporal effect which is so important overall) and a very tightly-reined, simple sentence structure. The use of series—adjectives, nouns, phrases—without commas varies the rhythm and the pitch of the restrained narrative voice without in any way investing it with personality. (p. 74)

The traditional and centuries-old use—by both Montaigne and Pascal among many others—of [the infinite sphere] as a metaphor for God is well-known. To use it as a symbol of the women's entrapment in a closed pattern suggests irony, though the passage as a whole does not seem ironic. Far more so is the fact that the circle is the tribe's symbol of the sex of the female, and that it appears as a pictorial, whole-page sign as well as in the text in terms specially invented for tribal significance. Given this tribal view of the meaning of the circle, any circle, the tribe's discussion of the Grail search and the Round Table offers new perspectives on legend and history.

Irony is in fact the only kind of humor to be found in Les Guérillères, and it is usually fierce. (p. 75)

Because of the violence and blood in parts of the book, and because of its depiction of warfare between women and men, the work has seemed ominous or threatening to some readers. But when we are told, "Women have turned hate into energy," for instance, or when the guérillères torture their tormentors, this is not a literal promise of physical vengeance but the working out of the central metaphor; this is the language of feminism when it turns from reportage, from sociology and statistics, to portrayal of the female condition through poetry and metaphor: this is the feeling of women's rage and frustration, communicated by a gifted and original writer. The use of violence to shock the reader into awareness of this rage reinforces the sense of the violence of the emotion. (pp. 75-6)

Wittig does quite a number of things for the first time…. She praises the beauty of women in ways that are "unfeminine" and for qualities that are "unfeminine," and she does not thereby destroy either their femaleness or their beauty. She shows us women as gods—not immanent goddesses but transcendent gods—in tribal and religious myths, uses women's names in incantations running throughout the book…. In her metaphor for women's situation, for the complexity, frustration, difficulty, and ambiguity of that situation, she has chosen perfectly: she takes "feminine" attributes and uses them in the supremely male epic tradition so as to mock the concepts of both and to show the singleness of being human.

The substance of the book is the portrayal of the emotion that the metaphor of war translates: that stifling feeling of angry frustration for which feminism provides a sane and constructive outlet. That is why a book of warfare and ritual is so profoundly proper to the subject. The ritualization and the anachronisms put us at a distance from the threat of violence in warfare and yet portray that which is most denied to women, unequivocal self-assertion. (pp. 76-7)

One really stunning effect is reserved for the end: the switch in pronouns in the last paragraph of the book. The final scene is the guérillères' celebration of triumph and the coming of peace, and the feeling of a mass meeting is captured with surprising vividness considering the brevity of the passage and the restrained tone that has prevailed throughout. The narrative has been strictly and restrainedly third-person and the reader is accustomed to an anonymous and omniscient narrator; but suddenly, at the climax and conclusion, it is not "they" who sing but "we": suddenly the invisible narrator is revealed as a woman and a participant as well as a recorder of events….

Wittig's effects in Les Guérillères are low-key and cumulative, eventually powerful. It is an intelligent and sensitive fiction, and it offers hope for the growth of a feminist literature that is truly, artistically literature while remaining profoundly feminist. Dulce in its literary achievement, it is most utile for those women and men who are indifferent or hostile to feminism: no work of art could be less didactic or more instructive. (p. 77)