NTUT Undergraduate
Duras and Her Fiction
Very early in life it was too late. At eighteen it was already too late. At eighteen I aged. This aging was brutal. This aging I saw: It spread over my features one by one. Instead of being frightened by it, I saw this aging of my face with the same sort of interest that I might have taken, for example, in the reading of a book. That new face, I kept it. It’s kept the same contours but its substance is destroyed. I have a destroyed face.
(When she says that its “substance” has been destroyed I think she is referring to the girl we meet in the film, a girl who no longer exists, a girl who the narrator once was. But in this destruction she discovered another thing that is indestructible, which I will talk about today: Love. “Destruction” is a key word for our writer. One of her best known novels is translated into English as Destroy, She Said. In Duras, love is indestructible, and, in practical terms, that means that love destroys everything (and everyone) except itself. Duras always remained fascinated both by destruction and by impotence.)
The film L’amant is based on the novel of the same name by the esteemed French writer Marguerite Duras, author of more than 30 novels, as well as various plays and screen plays (including the well-known Hiroshima Mon Amour). The novel and film we saw are very nearly strictly autobiographical of the writer’s life.
Duras was born in Gia Dihn, (then) Indochina (today Vietnam). Her father, a mathematician and teacher, died when she was four years old leaving her mother to raise three children as in the film. Her mother—intelligent, hard-working, manic-depressive, and obstinate—was unsuccessful in attempting to manage a rice paddy. In reality, she would have had to bribe local officials in order to have them supervise the construction of a proper dam; but she did not understand how the corruption system worked. She was unable, year after year, to prevent the monsoon flooding from nearly ruining her crop, just as she was unable to prevent the hatreds, jealousies, and passions from erupting in her family. She played piano at a cinema to earn money for her children’s education, but eventually the family went bankrupt. The events of the film are set during this period of Duras’s life.
At fifteen years of age, the impoverished Marguerite Duras from a troubled family had an affair with the wealthy, twenty-seven year-old Chinese man named Li. The novel and film are a recreation of what actually happened, as Duras remembered it. Some years later she wrote a longer and more detailed remembrance of the same affair entitled The North China Lover. That she wrote the same story again is part of my evidence that this forms the cornerstone of any serious understanding of Marguerite Duras—the woman and the writer. (In real life, long after the affair was ended, Li became a born-again Christian who loved his family very much and who died in Vietnam in the city where he had loved the young Marguerite so many years before.)
At seventeen, Duras moved to France to study law and political science at the Sorbonne. She graduated in 1935. From 1935 to 1941 she worked as an administrator; she joined the French Resistance; and later she became a Communist. She married the poet Robert Antelme, also a member of the Resistance. Antelme was captured by the Nazis and survived three notorious concentration camps. When he returned he wrote an important and essential memoir of the experience, L’espece humaine [The Human Species]. Duras had lost her love for him, but she nursed him back to health when he returned from the camps nearly starved to death. She then divorced him and immediately remarried. She became a communist—a citizen of no country, a citizen of the world—in protest to the insanity of the Second World War.
In 1942, Duras’s first novel appeared. She began to acquire a reputation as a writer in the 1950s and was included in a group of writers who were referred to as “the new novelists”. They were characterized by writing in an extremely stripped down style—short sentences, near absence of various stylistic techniques (such as I teach in Advanced Writing)—giving the effect of impatience, obstinacy, and sometimes, in Duras especially, oracularity. [Oracularity meaning like an Oracle speaks: very few words, very obscurely, yet supposedly the words contain a great truth.] The great themes of Duras’ life appear again and again in these early works: impossible love, memory, destruction, troubled families, colonialism, and cross-culturalism. Her works are marked by characters whose lives are basically aimless and whose only escape would be love affairs, madness, and alcohol. Marguerite Duras was a life-long alcoholic, beginning at an early age (“Beginning with my first drink,” she said in an interview). She was also a life-long smoker and insomniac. These are the things that began to ravage her beginning when she was eighteen years old. (“These things”, and, in my opinion, the memory of that clandestine affair, which, again in my opinion, was the event that marked Duras’s entire life. I believe that it was something she never could truly escape and imprison in a harmless “past” or confine to sheer “fiction”. In Duras fiction and reality always blur into each other.)
In the 1980s and 90s Duras’s reputation soared. She was simply adored by everyone. She was the toast of French Letters, won all the major awards (except the Nobel), and was seriously and at length discussed and written about by every major French essayist or philosopher. The effect of her mature writing style is truly spell-binding, and, when that oracular style is combined with her themes, the effect on readers is impossible to underestimate. (At my university a professor of French said, only half-jokingly: “Every French PhD student in the world is doing their thesis on Duras!”) I myself succumbed to her literary charms. I have read every word she (as far as I know) ever wrote. Some works, like L’amant, I have read several times without ever knowing exactly what to say about her writing. I was mesmerized but essentially speechless.
Her fame grew and at the same time she continued to write, continued to drink and smoke, continued to destroy her life (and its haunting memories). In this period she attracted the attention of one Yann Anrdréa Steiner who, in one of the strangest cases in 20th century literature, became her “companion” for the rest of her life. He was a homosexual, and he was merely a reader who had become so attracted to Duras through her writing that he was simply determined to “be with her”. She admitted him into her life. He became her secretary and it was he who got her to admit to her alcoholism and got her to recover (temporarily anyways) at an alcoholism-treatment hospital after she had, one day, nearly committed suicide-by-alcohol-consumption. It was immediately after her recovery that Duras wrote L’amant. This is another fact that leads me to think that this affair and its aftermath became Duras’s destiny. This my other reason for seeing this sexual relationship which she had had at too young an age—“...very early in life it was already it was too late…” she wrote—to be centrally important to her (destructive) life.
Duras’s relationship with M. Steiner was destructive, tumultuous. She would often hate him, drive him out of her apartment, say things like “I don’t know who you are!!! Get out!!!” Yet, he withstood the abuse, always returned, and remained with her up to the very moment of her death. His love for her was apparently absolute and unconditional (perhaps exactly like Gallimard’s ideal as we saw in the film M. Butterfly). He wrote two books about these years, Duras’s most brilliant, most celebrated, and most tormented years, years during which she even sometimes had hallucinations: seeing strangers in her apartment who weren’t there!
(Was M. Steiner—a homosexual—another “impossible love” for Duras? And thus her attraction to him as well as her hatred for him? Perhaps, but he would not allow her to destroy him or their strange love relationship. He was with her, at her bedside, up to the moment of her death.)
During this period she wrote a very brief novel (somewhat) addressed to her “companion”, M. Steiner, but also (perhaps) addressed to her lover, the Chinaman, from our film. The enigmatic novel is entitled La maladie de la morte [The Malady of Death]. In that short, intense, dense, and dolorous [means; sad and melancholy] novel she refers to the man merely as “You” and to herself merely as “She”.
Duras died November 3, 1996 very soon after completing her final book entitled C’est tout [meaning “That’s it!” “No more!” “That’s everything!” “I’m finished!”, “There is nothing more to do/say!”, “Goodbye!”] With this brutally curt statement, she left her readers destitute, just as she had left her Chinese lover—and ultimately herself—destitute so many years before. Destitute in spite of the fact that she surrendered so many words to her readers, just as she had offered herself without reserve to her Chinese lover. But the paradox is, again, this: the more she gives, the more is withheld. Reading Duras is not at all an enriching experience as is the reading of Joyce, Shakespeare, Dante, or Chaucer. It is an impoverishing experience, which has long been my own reaction as I mentioned. But this is also the amorous experience Duras writes of. In Duras love impoverishes, it does not enrich; but in this impoverishment something essential is approached, and I don’t know exactly how to put it into words. One becomes sort of inexhaustibly impoverished; or one wants even more impoverishment as if one were really being stripped down to one’s very core passion which the other, one’s lover, draws out of oneself. (A ‘core passion’ which, in fact, may not even exist; but which one feels does or might exist if only it could be exposed completely unguardedly by one’s lover.)
Her novels are all remarkably similar. There is a man who is reduced to being the witness to a woman in aguish, and he can do nothing for her or for himself. He is tormented; the woman is an enigma. In our film, the girl seems to have no emotional interest in her older lover’s life or feelings for her except with regard to money, and she seems not even to have any regard for her own feelings, for her own possible emotions (until the very last scene, when she has to acknowledge that she did feel something for him—but already too late, already only in memory.) Lovers in Duras never coincide, they occupy two distinct dimensions. They see each other but somehow cannot reach each other; they are bound to each other but cannot rejoice in each other’s presence. They do everything lovers do with each other, and at the same time they become dead to each other. In Duras, love is lethal. Love brings about the death of feeling. Durasian love is apathetic, and it is a form of torture. In Duras, love brings the lovers to the limit of what they can bear.
At the same time love, or a certain desire to love, destroys boundaries: The girl is only fifteen, the man adult; the girl is poor, the man wealthy; the girl is French, the man is Chinese. Hiroshima Mon Amour and other of her works have a similar pattern.
Generally, as in our film, it is the man who pursues love, who wishes the woman to give her love to him while she refuses, subtracts herself while at the same time making herself completely available to him, for him. The woman only offers herself to be loved; she does not offer her own love, her own passion. This is what torments the man who is her lover. This is the dissymmetry that is so characteristic in Duras. This dissymmetry becomes an irreducible boundary, like a desert that the two lovers lose themselves in. Eventually, the woman (or the man in other novels) simply disappears. The affair simply and abruptly ends. The last sentence to La maladie de la morte: “Soon you give up, don’t look for her anymore, either in the town or at night or in the daytime: Even so you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.” These words could apply to the lover in our film after the girl returns to France.
In our film, the lovers are bound by a contract—money. But it is not pure and simple prostitution; it is more complicated, as it is with the ‘Geisha’ phenomenon which we have discussed. It is, has been, only by means of money that the man has ever loved, or “had women”. He has power and the girl suspects (perhaps) that this is the only way he can love—by means of his wealth/power. Or (she perhaps suspects) that he has in fact (it amounts to the same thing) always used his money and power to avoid love while retaining it but only as a possibility, thus preserving his freedom from love. She is poor, young, inexperienced, fragile, exposed to him and his power ceaselessly. Yet in their relationship, his wealth becomes a measure of his impotence—he cannot “get” her to give her love to him. She becomes what power has no power over, what power has no power to make happen. Her very weakness, her very availability creates a void that the man cannot master. He can give her all the money she asks for; he can beat and rape her after he sees her apparently offering herself to another man—but he cannot reach her; she remains separate from him and his power precisely in powerlessly offering herself to him for whatever he wants. (After the beating the girl does not even offer him her anger, indignation, hatred. She apathetically solicits money.) But at the same time their very inaccessibility to each other becomes an other relationship. They never can forget each other because, from the very beginning, their love was a deja vu: something lost in the desert of memory before it ever happened, memory of a present that is never present as present, something that is (and simultaneously already was) only ever present as already-having-been (because it—love between them—never would happen as a romantic union of two desires desiring the love of each other).
In Duras, love is always a ‘missed encounter’ and a lengthy and destructive aftermath.
The symbolism of the ferry crossing deserves some attention. The ferry crossing symbolizes the crossing of boundaries: from innocence to experience, from youth to maturity, from West to East, from poverty to a taste of wealth, from powerlessness to the exposure to power, and so on. In Western mythology (both Greek and Roman), ferry crossings also represent the passage from life to death. In Duras love, beauty, and erotic desire are intimately related to death. You remember that Aphrodite (or, in Roman mythology, Venus) was the goddess of beauty and eroticism. Her husband was Hephaestus (or, in Roman mythology, Vulcan) who lived in Hades (Hell) and who was ugly, misshapen, lame, and mocked by all the other gods. But he was also the god of fire (passion) and the arts. Thus, for the West (in a way that is still mysterious), beauty and eroticism are intimately bound to death, and death is intimately bound to artistic creation. Why? For one thing, for the simple, practical reason that the artist must withdraw him or herself from life in order to write about it (or paint it, or set it to music, etc.). A deathly solitude is an elementary requirement for artistic creation. Likewise, a certain kind of passionate and erotic love requires solitude, requires a withdrawal from society. Duras’s lovers are, like Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliette, Anthony and Cleopatra, doomed and entombed—outside of any society, any community—within each lover’s catastrophic and mysterious claim on the other.
We must also give attention to the title of the novel and the film: L’amant [The Lover]. In both French and English the definite article is used. Who is the lover? Is it he? Is it she? Why not title the thing The Lovers (plural)? Is the Lover one or the other? Or is ‘the Lover’ exactly someone who does not, cannot exist—because love is always, in Duras, impossible?
Post-Colonialism
Duras’s fiction and our film are often discussed in the context of post-colonialism. As the term implies, post-colonial studies are concerned with a nation or a people 1) who are trying to establish their own identities after the departure of their colonial “masters”; 2) who both want to abolish the past and their past identities as the “colonized” or the “servant”, but 3) who also must preserve the past and study the effects of it on themselves in the present. For the post-colonized, memory and history are the same. For Duras, and other writers of the 20th century, women began to see themselves as the “colonized”, as colonized by men, and they began to search for their own specifically feminine voice. “I think ‘feminine literature’ is an organic, translated writing…translated from blackness, from darkness. Women have been in the dark for centuries. They don’t know themselves. Or only poorly. And when women write, they translate this darkness,” Duras said in an interview, and the words she speaks here could be said by any people who have or had been colonized and are now in quest of their own identity. Duras is critical of the popular French writer Colette: “Colette wrote like a little girl, a turbulent and terrible and delightful little girl. So she wrote ‘feminine literature’ as men wanted it. That’s not feminine literature in reality. It’s feminine literature seen by men and recognized as such. It’s men who enjoy themselves when they read it.” This is precisely the issue with the “colonized”: they may tend to see themselves as their former “masters” saw them. (In our film the Chinaman is the colonizer; ha has always had power over women; he buys them with his money. The young girl then becomes his “ideal woman”: he can have her whenever he wants, he has power over her, but she will not love him.) Women, according to Duras, had been created by men and saw themselves as men see them. The new task would be to change that. Duras wanted to unlearn everything she had learned from men about women, and about everything else. Her fictions were a progressive attempt to unlearn masculine writing and to discover in herself specifically feminine writing. That is one reason that her distinctive writing style emerged. You can get a bit of a sense of this style from the film which contains speeches taken directly from the novel, like the speech that begins the film: “Very early in life it was too late.” Also, in the novel as in the film the characters are known only as ‘the young girl’, ‘the Chinaman’, ‘the Mother’. This is very often the case in Duras’s fictions. The characters are anonymous, in darkness; they do not know themselves or what they want or how to be happy.
Frequently, the way out of this darkness is through destruction, even self-destruction. But this must be understood very carefully. What Duras’s characters want to destroy is the self that had been created by the master, the “Woman” that had been created by “Man”. Thus, one element of cross-cultural communication is destruction, but only so that something new—a new perspective—can organically emerge. This destruction is what Duras is speaking of when, in the novel the young girl says “I went mad in full possession of my senses.” The girl in the film and the novel is obviously unhealthy and unhappy, yet Duras neither condemns her nor simply pities her; Duras affirms the girl’s unhealthy relation with the Chinaman as a fidelity to destruction that may eventually lead to self-knowledge. But this self-knowledge, as it is progressively sought in post-colonial literature, begins with the discovery of the not-I.
The not-I is the anonymous person who has never defined him or herself. That is also why so many of Duras’s character have no names. In L’amant the not-I is a young woman who does not (yet) exist. In broader terms it is Woman who does not yet exist, who does not know herself organically, because she had always been created by Man. This is the case for many if not all in a post-colonial situation. They have never described themselves. Hegel may have thought he was merely being descriptive of the Chinese people, but when a description is repeated (as we have seen in many films) it becomes an identity which is effectively imposed on another people. To discover the not-I is to discover someone who does not exist in the eyes of the colonizer, to discover someone still unknown, someone who does not know him or herself. That process of memory, destruction and discovery is what Duras spent her career as a writer contemplating: “Reverse everything! Make women the point of departure in judging, make darkness the point of departure in judging what men call light, make obscurity the point of departure in judging what men call clarity”, she said.
She, whom we know as Marguerite “Duras”, was not born Marguerite Duras but Marguerite Donnadieu—a name that in French could possibly mean “to give goodbye”. In 1943, during the war, she changed (or destroyed) her family name and gave herself the name of a small town, Duras. She was already freeing herself from her given identity and beginning a new identity of her own, an anonymous identity. Late in life she said (when asked to say something about her life and how she wanted to be remembered), “I am a writer. Nothing else is worth remembering.” Her final written words:
Je vous aime.
Au revoir.
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