The Opoponax, I suspect, is the result of an accidental discovery in the laboratory of the novel. The young Monique Wittig … may have been experimenting with the problem of the narrator in a fictional work: what we call or used to call the point-of-view. The Jamesian problem. Most western novelists today accept as a matter of course the Jamesian solution. James's formula ('Dramatise, dramatise!') has meant the end of auctorial description, including the analysis of motives and behaviour-'psychology'….

The obligation we feel to dramatise or mediate … has made the novel a cumbersome affair. It has seemed to impose the ugly flashback, since the past, by present convention, can only exist in someone's memory—not objectively in history nor in the author's private knowledge….

In France, the nouveau roman is using the flashback too, though in a somewhat more arty way, borrowing from films, the zero point being reached by an amnesiac narrator. But there is one modern French novel that has got rid of the flashback without 'regressing' to earlier modes. I am thinking of Nathalie Sarraute's Les Fruits d'Or, which tells the story of a hero—in this case a book—starting with the beginning and ending with the end. It is pure linear narration, and yet the author is absent; the reader gleans what is happening from a series of, as it were, overheard conversations…. By perfection of form, concordance of means and ends, the book (in my opinion) became a classic the day it was published. Here the convention of the hidden author and the mystifications surrounding the point-of-view suddenly make sense. (p. 90)

With Monique Wittig, something similar seems to have happened. A technical experiment, asking an epistemological question about the nature and limits of memory, has led to a genuine finding. At first sight, The Opoponax can be placed in a familiar category: the autobiographical novel of childhood…. There are no flashbacks. It is all, you could say, a flashback, since the author is not recounting the story but reliving it sharply in memory. But she is reliving it as if it had happened to somebody else, which in fact is the case. Catherine Legrand is not a fictional alias or transparent disguise for Monique Wittig: she is a conjecture about an earlier Monique Wittig. It is clear that between 'I' remembering and my previous self, there is a separation, as in the Einsteinian field-theory, so that if I write 'I' for both, I am slurring over an unsettling reality. But how to state that uncertainty in narrative terms?

Monique Wittig's solution was to desubjectify Catherine Legrand to the limit of possibility, so that she would become a kind of on dit, a generally accepted rumour. If 'I' is ruled out as the appropriate pronoun, 'she' is not wholly exact either for an indeterminate being who is not the author any more and not, on the other hand, a fictional heroine. The Opoponax meets the difficulty by opening a cleavage in Catherine Legrand, between a 'she' and an 'on'—an indefinite pronoun.

Unfortunately, this word is not translatable into English, and the translator's 'you' could hardly be more wrong most of the time. 'You' is personal and familiar; it is the word you use when talking to yourself…. On is impersonal, indefinite, abstract, neutral, guarded. It is myself and everybody in a given collective at a given time. (pp. 90-1)

The short French sentences of L'Opoponax often sound like a glum Sunday letter written home to parents. Or like a laborious school essay—a requirement. Monique Wittig uses the present tense throughout (cf. the child's letter), which again has no English equivalent…. A third peculiarity of the original is the absence of paragraphing or dots or adverbial phrases to denote the end of one time-sequence and the beginning of another: these dissolves and juxtapositions without apparent logic correspond (though this may not have been intended) to the lack of punctuation and oddities of punctuation in a child's letter…. The reader, obliged to paragraph this almost uninterrupted march of sentences, becomes more aware than he would be normally of lacunae, breaks, shifts of subject, indicating often—though not always—fear, as in a dream….

The discovery made in The Opoponax is a new insight into childhood and the educative process. The indefinite pronoun proves to be a key that unlocks more doors than may have been expected on the first try. The on not only marks a neutral relation between author and material: it marks a neutral relation of the child to herself. Combined with the static present and the monotone of the run-on paragraphs, it reveals that to be a child is not at all a simple, spontaneous thing. To be a child is something one learns, as one learns the names of rivers or the kings of France. Childhood, for a child, is a sort of falseness, woodenness, stoniness, a lesson recited…. Playing children is a long boring game with occasional exciting moments. It is obvious that children imitate adults and other children: that is known as learning. But the full force of this has not been shown, at least in fiction or autobiography, until The Opoponax. (p. 91)

Some readers have objected that The Opoponax is not true to their childhood, because it contains only discrete sensations—no thoughts or emotions. But first of all these discrete sensations are the universal data of childhood. Second, it is doubtful that children think: they reason. Third, the emotions of early years are either indistinguishable from sensation (Proust's madeleine) or they are attached to an individual psychology whose character, beyond a crude outline, cannot be verified by a later self….

In the novel, the opoponax is a creature, bird or animal, invoked as a powerful agent by Catherine Legrand, who loves the boarding-pupil, Valerie Borge….

The opoponax is an incantation. His source is probably the herbarium Catherine Legrand is making, but from being a medicine he turns into a pain—the pain of love, for which a balm is sought. The identity of the opoponax is the reverse of a civil identity: in the first place, it is a secret. The opoponax is power and defiance. He may also be the love that dares not speak its name—a creature found in convent boarding-schools sitting on the window-sill at dawn. When Valerie Borge consents to love Catherine Legrand, who is now a boarder too, the opoponax, soothed, is no longer heard from: the panacea has been applied.

In the convent, the magical rote of poetry has been replacing the lists memorised in geography drill and nature study in primary school. Individualities among the girls are becoming more distinct, and yet sensation is becoming more blurred and dream-like. Faces, figures, are beginning to 'stand out'. In primary school, the chief distinction for a classmate was to die or to have a little brother or sister die—a mysterious important thing that usually only grown-ups are allowed to do. (p. 93)

Death, for a child, is a pure on dit, even when studied at close range, and the emotion of grief—one of the least contagious of human emotions—is embarrassing to watch. It is more interesting to think about dead people being put into holes in the ground—children are interested in holes. There are a great many funerals and viewings of corpses in The Opoponax; adults for some reason act as if death ought to be a lesson to children. Yet in the presence of death children are unable to 'school' their features or to feel the required emotion; they look for a distraction.

The Opoponax ends as they ('on') are putting old Mlle Caylus into a hole in a village cemetery. The pupils, who have already been taken to view the body, have now been conveyed, by bus, to the remote mountain graveyard…. Catherine Legrand is saying poetry to herself…. The reader shivers, for Catherine Legrand is not thinking of Mlle Caylus: she is thinking (though she may not yet know it) of Valerie Borge. 'Tant je l' aimais qu'en elle encore je vis.' 'So much I loved her that still in her I live.' The past tense (in French it is the imperfect) is spoken for the first time, among the derelict grave mounds and wet field poppies, together with the pronoun 'I'. (pp. 93-4)