The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  Do you realize that you’re now known throughout the world for having written The Lover—and sometimes only for that?

  At last no one can say now that Duras writes ‘intellectual stuff’ . . .

  Would you like to point to some particular key to the interpretation of The Lover?

  It’s a novel and that’s all there is to it. Which doesn’t lead or go anywhere. The story doesn’t conclude, it’s just the book that ends. Love and sexual pleasure aren’t ‘stories’ and the other—deeper—reading, if it exists, isn’t immediately evident. Everyone can choose to glimpse it.

  What, as you see it, have been the most radical changes to your style from the time of The Lover onwards?

  None. My writing is the same as it’s always been. In that, at least, I can give myself free rein without fear. People now are no longer afraid of what, in appearance at least, seems incoherent.

  Since The Lover, your writing has become more and more rarefied.

  It’s the sound of the words that’s changed from what it was before—like something that might be said to have acquired a kind of involuntary simplicity.

  Explain that more.

  The Lover is a book so full of literature that it seems, paradoxically, very far removed from it. You don’t see—you aren’t supposed to see—the artifice, that’s all.

  You’re stubbornly determined not to speak of ‘style’ with regard to that novel.

  It’s a ‘physical’ style, if we must talk about that. The Lover came out of a series of photographs that I rediscovered by chance and I began it with the idea of subordinating the text to the images. But the writing gained the upper hand, it ran out of my control, and it was only when I reread it that I noticed how it was built on metonyms. There are words like ‘desert’, ‘white’ and ‘pleasure’ that stand out and connote the whole of the narrative.

  To take another of your successes, what do you think is the strength of a book like The War: A Memoir?

  The fact that I chose, as point of view, the state of fear of a woman who has to speak about war, and not just general themes. That some tiny facts are recounted, even relating to human physiology in its most animal aspects, such as the shrivelled body of my husband when he got back from Dachau or the story of the Gestapo man Pierre Rabier who wanted to sleep with me, a story I exploited to the full, so as to be able to show his guilt. Or the even more atrocious story of the interrogation I inflicted on the man who was informing on us to the Germans.

  The War: A Memoir is a brave text, a mix of the horrific and the sacred, one of the most important I’ve written. The writing is harsh, it’s modern in the sense that it narrates all the events with precision. I’m told it reminds people of [Georges] Bataille. But I’ll say again that it isn’t literature. It’s something more and something less.

  Did you really get the material for the book from notebooks you kept during the war, which turned up miraculously in a cupboard?

  A lot of critics in France didn’t believe me. I can show them my diaries if they like. I can’t remember at what date I began them. I only know we’re talking about drafts, fragments, notes about novels I was planning at the time—The Sailor [from Gibraltar], The Sea Wall. And then, you see, you can lie about lots of things, but not about that, not about the actual substance of pain.

  To come to one of your more recent publications, between the lines you claim that a book like Blue Eyes, Black Hair—a story of the impossible passion between a woman and a homosexual man—is autobiographical in its content, though in fact it reproduces the kernel of one of your other stories, The Malady of Death.

  A real-life story, yes. And from not so very long ago, if that’s what you want to know . . . Peter Handke and Luc Bondy had asked me to adapt The Malady of Death for the Schaubühne in Berlin. Two days after I’d sent it to them, I called to ask them to send it back. In writing the text for the stage, I realized I’d fallen into all the traps I’d been trying to avoid. In other words, I’d given a ‘constructed’ form to a text which shouldn’t have had one, which will never be ‘finished’, and that it was from precisely this incompletion that it derived its strength. I felt as though I was the victim of an enforced formal failing and I rewrote the adaptation three times without finding a solution. I spoke about it with Yann, I told him I couldn’t write any more. Knowing my way of working—crises, second thoughts, revisions—he didn’t believe me. And then one evening in June—it was in 1986 at Trouville—I began to write just like that, about the heat, about the summer evenings. And the story came.

  Yann Andréa was involved in reading the text?

  He was going through a great crisis. He was driving round trying to pick up men for up to ten hours a day. When he stopped, he wept and blamed me. He seemed to want to scream something at me that he couldn’t explain, even to himself. Then he went out again. I never knew where he was going. To nightclubs, I suppose, in search of men, to bars, to the lobbies of the big hotels, all dressed in white. While I was writing the story of a woman in love with a man who, without wishing to, detests his own desire.

  In 1985, Peter Handke filmed the story.

  On my advice and following Blanchot’s assessment, he re-worked the text. Indeed, he made it his own. The film is much, much more romantic than the way I’d presented the story. The true malady of death, for Handke, between man and woman is simply the lack of feeling.

  In The Unavowable Community,2 Blanchot speaks at great length of The Malady of Death. On the subject of passion, he writes: ‘The latter pledges us fatally and, as if in spite of ourselves, to another who attracts us all the more in that he seems beyond the possibility of ever being rejoined, being so far beyond everything that matters to us.’ And, further on, he writes: ‘Assuredly, as time passes, and his realization that with her time no longer passes, and that thus he is deprived of his small properties, “his own room,” which being inhabited seems empty—and it is the emptiness she sets up which makes it clear that she is supernumerary—as time passes he happens upon the thought that she ought to disappear and that everything would be easier if she returned to the sea (from which he believes her to have come), a thought that does not reach beyond the stray impulse to think . . . But he makes the mistake of talking to others about it or even of laughing about it, as if that attempt made with utmost seriousness, ready to give his whole life to it, left in his memory but the derisiveness of the illusory. And this is exactly one of the traits of the community, when that community dissolves itself, giving the impression of never having been able to exist, even when it did exist.’ We would like to take, to steal in contravention of all laws. And to steal something which will, in reality, always be beyond our grasp. The accomplishment of all love is achieved only through the loss of what, in reality, we never had: it is precisely the alterity between man and woman that creates this ‘eternally provisional and always already deserted community’. It is indeed ‘unavowable’: like all communities, that of lovers will never be able to speak itself or give itself; and, in dissipating itself, it will leave the trace of something which, while already having taken place, has never existed.

  Yes, that’s it exactly.

  What prompted you to publish Practicalities, that faithful transcription of autobiographical interviews—or, rather, of certain associations of ideas from your memory—that you granted to Jérôme Beaujour?

  Wanting to be able to say things that I think but have never written at any time in my life, things that have gladdened or troubled me and which no one in the general run of my interviews has ever asked me about.

  There was talk not so long ago, with regard to [Alain] Robbe-Grillet and the last book of his memoirs, Angélique ou l’enchantement [Angélique, or Enchantment], of the ‘new autobiography’, the way we talk of the ‘New Novel’. Claiming inspiration from [Marcel] Proust’s Contre Sainte-Beuve [Against Sainte-Beuve] and repeatedly citing the ca
se of The Lover, Robbe-Grillet adopted that expression to refer to new styles of autobiographical writing based not so much on stable or coherent facts of memory as on these series of ‘shifting, floating fragments in the text that might be said, precisely, to render the instability and unreliability of memory.’

  Look at a text like Savannah Bay: An old woman on the stage who is reliving a confused past, of which only the image of a scorching, white rock remains. A past that mingles with the present, so unreal that it may have been transfigured—or even invented.

  And your last novel, Emily L, also had a difficult gestation.

  Indeed, it did! And yet there’s something diabolical in me that enabled me, at times, to write a book in a week . . . The same ease with which I wrote essays when I was at school.

  I sometimes feel as though Emily L wasn’t written by me. That I simply looked on as it was being written. It was Irène Lindon, Jérôme’s daughter,3 who insisted I finish it. She came round to my flat almost every day to pick up the pages. She had them typed up and brought them back to me for correction.

  You’ve said yourself that the book was like The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein in some respects.

  The difference is that in this case, there’s a woman observing another woman’s story without being directly involved in it—unlike what happens with Lola Valérie Stein, nothing of what happens here is influenced by the reality of the other woman, Emily, sitting in the cafe.

  The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein is regarded as your most complex novel—both from the stylistic viewpoint and because of some of its thematic implications. Lacan himself devoted some pages to you in his seminars.

  I was in rehab when I wrote it. And I’ll always associate the book with the fear of living without alcohol.

  The Ravishing is a novel in itself, the story of a woman driven mad by a latent love that never declares itself, that’s never played out. In other words, from the moment at the S. Thala ball when Lol sees her fiancé Michael Richardson leave with another woman, Anne-Marie Stretter, her whole life will unfold around that very loss, that very void. Lol is a prisoner, mad with an existence she can’t manage to live.

  The void you just alluded to is that ‘lack’ which Lacan sees as the origin and end of all existence.4 The lack of an order, of a centre where the— irremediably disconnected—self could find itself.

  It’s true, all my books are born and move around just such a point that’s always evoked yet always missing.

  It’s exactly that. A character who doesn’t speak and isn’t there (Anne-Marie Stretter, the Chinese lover, the sailor from Gibraltar, the woman in The Malady of Death) or an event that doesn’t occur (as in The Square, Le Navire Night, Moderato Cantabile, The Little Horses of Tarquinia) are what trigger the story. The longing for a story.

  To come back to The Ravishing . . . , what sort of relationship did you have with Lacan?

  He talked about Freud right away. About the period in which he was arguing that artists are always ahead of analysts in the pursuit and analysis of the object. I tried to explain to him that I was unaware myself how Lol came about.

  He thought highly of me, no doubt, with that attitude typical of men—and even more of male intellectuals—that’s judgemental about women.

  As for me, I don’t read him. Quite honestly I can’t understand much of what he wrote.

  Did you meet often?

  We met up one evening, I remember, in a cafe in central Paris. He fired questions at me for two hours. I barely got an answer in. I couldn’t always follow him. Lol, he said, was the classical example of a clinical delirium—the drama of evoking the primal scene between the two parents and the child—because he was convinced the key to everything was to be found in this name which he believed I’d devised wittingly for the little madwoman: Lol V. Stein. That is to say—and here I decode—‘wings of paper’, plus the V that indicated ‘scissors’ (in deaf-and-dumb language) and Stein, which meant ‘stone’. Scissors, paper, stone in French is le jeu de la mourre, which led him to the direct association with le jeu de l’amour—the game of love. You are, he added, a ‘ravisher’ and we readers are the ‘ravished’.5

  Do you believe in psychoanalysis?

  Freud’s a great writer, a facile writer if you like. As for Freudianism, it’s an embalmed, self-absorbed discipline. It employs a language that’s at odds with the normal code, with a diminishing purchase on the outside world. All in all, psychoanalysis doesn’t interest me much. I don’t believe I need it—perhaps also because I write. But I don’t think it’s enough for the mental patient to be aware of his own neurosis to be cured of it.

  Since 1943, you’ve published fifteen novels, not to mention the plays and screenplays.6 What do you feel each time a book is about to come out?

  Until it sees the light of day, a book is something shapeless that’s afraid of being born, of coming out. Like a creature you carry within yourself, it demands fatigue, silence, solitude and slowness. But once it’s out, that will all disappear in a flash.

  To become what?

  Something that belongs to everyone, to all those who, taking it in hand, wish to make it their own. You have to free the book from the cage of writing, give it life, make it capable of circulating, of allowing people to dream. They tell me Hiroshima mon amour has inspired a song.

  Yes, it’s an English group, Ultravox, who sing it.7

  I’m pleased about that. I like people to take my things for their own.

  For L’Amour, you’ve changed publisher in Italy. You’re not with your usual publishers (Feltrinelli and Einaudi) but with Mondadori.

  I’m always happy when someone pays me more.

  The title isn’t original.

  I decided on it after I’d finished the book, as a reaction against all the books with that same title. It isn’t a story about love, but about everything in passion that remains suspended and incapable of being named. The entire meaning of the book lies there, in that ellipsis.

  Speaking of writing, Graham Greene says every writer, sooner or later, falls victim to a real ‘writer’s block’. Can you remember any moments of that kind?

  I’ve already spoken about the crisis I experienced over the adaptation of The Malady of Death. Before 1968, as it happens, I wrote regularly every day, sitting at this table, exactly like going to an office. Then, suddenly, at that point came a crisis. For almost a year my imagination was blocked.

  And then, finally, Destroy, She Said arrived like a bolt from the blue. I didn’t spend more than five or six days working on it. Since then, it’s always been like that—the books come out after long, infinitely long silences.

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  • • • TOWARDS A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS • • •

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  The suspension of syntactic underpinnings, the abolition of a certain expressive linearity and the triumph of narrative analysis impart a sense of the unsayable to your text.

  The empty spaces between one fragment and another—what you call ‘typographic blanks’ (similar, in fact, to the black screens that punctuate some of your films)—and then the silences which follow the dialogue, both on the page and on film, and the intermittent nature of the discourse detach speech itself from its habitual context, creating a new semantics.

  It’s a break in the automatic mechanisms of language, a cleansing of the wear that time inflicts on it.

  Being no longer imprisoned or saturated by the structure of the narration, the reader’s imaginary, his desire, what you call his ‘nostalgia for fiction’, will be freed up—not
so much by an exaggerated accumulation of details as by their very absence.

  It’s only out of what is missing, out of the blank spaces that appear in a sequence of significations—out of the gaps—that something can be born.

  It is silence, exactly. Discretion in both dialogue and love affairs—what is left unsaid or merely alluded to—takes up a large part of your work. The only activity that identifies your characters seems to be the activity of speech.

  They speak as though they are giving up definitively on life, attempting to find ersatz solutions for the inconstancy of existence. Take the woman in Le Camion—when the lorry driver asks her what she normally talks about with the people she meets, she merely answers, ‘I talk.’ As if to say that it’s precisely the things one speaks about that have now lost their importance. With the man and the girl in The Square, the lovers of Hiroshima or of The Malady of Death or La Musica, Navire Night and Moderato Cantabile, all they have left is speech, which is needed, we might say, by all the world’s lovers as a very confirmation of their ‘being-there’, as a last crutch of incommunicability. However, discourse is internally self-defeating, given the intrinsic impossibility of getting through to the other person. In stubbornly going on speaking, we might say, your characters just go on lying to themselves. As if in imitation of the rhythms and rites of a sacred, metaphysical ceremonial, their dialogues, like the refrain of a song, possess a hieratic rhythm that comes from the sentences themselves. The flow of speech is interrupted by a great many silences: the value of these—and what they communicate—is greater than the value of any words.