It even upsets me that the critics come to see my plays, mistaking the ferocious clashing of memories and passion for mawkish sentimentalism.
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• • • PASSION • • •
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All your books are love stories in one way or another. Passion as last and necessary recourse for transcending that powerlessness and that immobilism which paralyse your characters. As axis of the whole Duras world.
Love remains the only thing that really counts. It is stupid to think of it as confined to what happens between a man and a woman.
Yourcenar criticized French literature for the dominant, obsessive character of the love theme.1
I don’t agree. Even if it’s the main subject of all the arts, nothing has ever been so difficult to express and describe as passion: it’s the most commonplace and, at the same time, the most ambiguous thing.
There’s a line in Hiroshima mon amour which perhaps sums up what you regard as the deep, contradictory nature of all love: ‘You destroy me. You’re so good for me.’2
It was when, as a poor, wayward creature, I met the Chinese lover that I discovered the ambivalence nestling in every passion. Love as desire to possess the other to the point of wishing to devour him.3
Speaking of The Lover, you’ve described the affair with the rich Chinese as one of the most important of your entire life.
All the other ones followed on from that—all the declared, codified love affairs. In the attempt to name it, lifting it out of its original, sacred obscurity, language kills all passion, contains it, diminishes it. But when love isn’t spoken, it has the force of the body, the blind, undiminished force of jouissance: there remains the miraculous vision of the lovers, haloed in shadow. In The Lover, I could tell this story only from afar, speaking about the Chinese town, the rivers, the sky, the plight of the whites who lived there. About love I said nothing.
A total love, which fascinates and frightens at the same time, is searing. In The Square, the girl says: ‘Things happen like that. Things that cannot be avoided, that no one can avoid,’ to which the man replies: ‘Nothing is so worth living as the things which make one so unhappy.’4 Something like the amour fou of the Surrealists, a passion that carries lovers beyond the prosaic nature of the everyday. As a search for the absolute, that alone can combat death, evil and tedium vitae. ‘There is no love affair in the world that can take the place of love. Nothing can be done about it,’ says Sara, the heroine of The Little Horses of Tarquinia.5
And it can only find peace or resolution in absence or death: ‘I wish you were dead,’ says Chauvin to Anne Desbaresdes in Moderato Cantabile.6 A total love precisely because it is, ontologically, impossible. In your short texts, L’homme assis dans le couloir, L’Homme atlantique, La Pute de la côte normande and in Blue Eyes, Black Hair, this aspect swells to the point where it becomes the metaphor for passion itself.
Love exists for only a few moments. Then it disperses—into the very impossibility, the real impossibility, of changing the course of a life.
The love theme refers on to another, the inability of the sexes to communicate with each other. Your characters love one another and struggle constantly, only to fail in the end.
It isn’t sex—what people are in a sort of sensual discolouration—that interests me. It’s what lies at the origin of eroticism—desire. What one can’t—perhaps what one shouldn’t—allay with sex. Desire is a latent activity, in which respect it resembles writing—you desire the way you write, always.7
And, in fact, when I’m moving towards writing, I feel myself more invaded by writing than when I’m actually doing it. Between desire and jouissance there’s the same difference as between the primal chaos of the written—which is total and unreadable—and the final result of what, on the page, is simplified and clarified.
Chaos is in desire. Jouissance is just that tiny part of what we’ve managed to attain. The rest—the enormity of what we desire—stays there, lost for ever.
Don’t you believe this image of desire belongs to typically feminine worlds?
Perhaps. Male sexuality revolves around very precise models of behaviour—excitation, orgasm. Then you start again. There’s nothing that remains in suspense and unsaid. Obviously, not all women, restrained as they are by ancestral principles of sterilizing faithfulness, are capable of living out the totality of desire without being made to feel guilty.
You’ve often argued that, even at the age of fifteen, the traces of desire were already visible on your face.8
As a young girl, from my first adventures, with strangers, between beach huts and in trains, I knew what desire meant.9 With the Chinese lover, I felt the whole force of that and, since then, my sexual encounters have always been numerous—and even violent.
How did you manage to combine your countless passions with what might be called a real obsession with your work?
Each time in my life I stopped living with a man, I rediscovered myself. I wrote my finest books alone—or with passing lovers. Books produced in solitude, I would call those.
What do you think of men?
That they live in a sort of state where life is opaque to them—to the point where they don’t notice most of the things around them. Caught up in themselves. In what they’re doing—sometimes to the point where they never know what’s going on noiselessly in a woman’s head. There’s still, I believe, a phallic group of men that take themselves so seriously . . .
How would you describe your life with men?
I’ve always followed them—on journeys, everywhere. Sharing the happiness they derived from the leisure they forced on me, which I couldn’t bear. Otherwise, they would have been mad with rage. The men I’ve had found it hard to endure my incessant comments on my difficulties with writing, my moaning when the critics slated me. They wanted me to take care of the housework, the cooking and, if I really had to write books, to do it on an occasional basis, in a hole-and-corner way.
In the end I was always elsewhere—writers are never where others would like them to be.
I’ve known men of all kinds. They would, of course, all have liked me to write a bestseller. But not before the year 2000.
What faults do you find in men?
That you have to love them a great deal to put up with their need to wade in and have their say, to interpret everything that’s happening around them.
You’ve often stated that ‘men are all homosexuals’.10
Incapable of living the potency of passion to the full, I would add. Only prepared to understand those who are like them. A man’s true life companion—his real confidant—can only be another man. In the male world, woman is elsewhere, in a world which man chooses to be part of from time to time.
What do you think of homosexuality?
Love between members of one’s own sex lacks that mythic, universal dimension that belongs only to opposite sexes: even more than their lovers, homosexuals love homosexuality.11 That is why literature—you only have to think of Proust—has had to convert homosexual passion into heterosexual—Alfred into Albertine, to be clear.
As I’ve said before, this is why I can’t regard Roland Barthes as a great writer: something always limited him, as though the most ancient experience of life had passed him by, the sexual knowledge of a woman.12
Are you familiar with female homosexuality?
Of course. The pleasure another woman gives is something very intimate, which will always bear the stamp of an absence of dizzying passion. The stunning event, the one th
at can overwhelm us, is an encounter with a man.
In texts like The Malady of Death and, even more so, in Blue Eyes, Black Hair, you take on dramatically and, at the same time, with great clear-sightedness the theme of male homosexuality. The two books tell the story of a love that will never be able to happen between a woman and a man who finds himself incapable of deriving pleasure from her body.
That’s a question I know well. Like death, homosexuality is the exclusive domain of God, an area in which neither man nor psychoanalysis nor reason can intervene. And, indeed, the impossibility of procreation makes homosexuality very much akin to death.
You’ve even stated that you’ve known and loved many homosexuals.
I thought they were like other people before I knew them. But, in reality, they’re not. The homosexual is alone, doomed to forego the company, except sporadically, of the person who is like him. The woman who lives alongside him will be alone at his side. And yet it’s precisely at that point, where it would seem impossible—a radical, physiological impossibility—that love can be experienced. As happened in our case.
You’ve been living with Yann Andréa for nine years.
He sought me out. For two years he wrote me some beautiful letters. That wasn’t a surprise. After reading my books, a lot of people did that.
I wasn’t feeling well the day I decided (who knows why?) to reply to him. Then he phoned and, without having ever seen this student from Caen, I told him to come over. We quickly began drinking together and that’s how our folie à deux began. Once again, I discovered, with Yann, that the worst thing that can happen in life is not to love.
I was overwhelmed by his presence. His friends were critical of him for staying with a woman far older than himself, but Yann paid no attention to that.
I still ask myself how it’s possible. Our passion has been tragic, like all passions. And it was born out of that non-coincidence, that non-fulfilment of our desire.
Yann Andréa is the author of a book entitled M. D.—its syncopated style is very reminiscent of your recent literary production—in which he recounts the horrors of the detox and hospitalization you decided to undergo some years ago.13
I very much recognize myself in that book. Studies of my films and books are published, but never books about myself, just as I am.
In what particular respect do you see yourself in it?
In that sense of exhaustion, dissatisfaction, emptiness. That self-destruction by the mere thought of no longer being capable of living without drinking.
When was the first time you stopped?
I knew alcohol the way you know a person. I’d begun drinking casually in political meetings or at parties. Then, at forty, I really hit the bottle. I stopped first in 1964, then I started again ten years later. I’ve started and stopped three times so far. Until I went into the American Hospital at Neuilly where, after three weeks of hallucinations, delirium and howling, they managed to pull me through.
Seven years have gone by since then and yet I know I could start again tomorrow.
Why, in your opinion, do people begin drinking?
Alcohol transfigures the ghosts of loneliness. It replaces the ‘other’ who isn’t there. It stops up the holes that have opened up in us at some point, long ago.
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• • • A WOMAN • • •
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You once defined your life as a ‘film that’s been dubbed . . . badly cut, badly acted, badly put together. In short, a mistake. A whodunnit without either murders or cops or victims; without a subject; pointless.’1
At times I feel porous, spongy, permeated indiscriminately by everything going through my head.
There’s a woman, the heroine of Le Camion, with whom perhaps you identify, who says she has a ‘head full of wind’.2
Like the writer, this woman is a thing of availability to the outside. Ready to receive sudden bursts of strong sensation, as I am when I’m walking along the beach or in the countryside.
How would you define yourself?
As joyful. I like a laugh. I laugh because I find myself funny sometimes, or at stupid things that other people don’t even notice. Of course, I can then fall back suddenly into that anxiety from when I was eight years old—fear of things, people, the vastness of the forest. When you’re young, unsure of yourself and your existence, you set out in life lacking confidence. It’s only later that you learn to trust in yourself, as though ‘yourself’ were another person.
Often in life, I’ve had the sense of not existing—having no models, no reference points—always looking for a place, never finding myself where I’d have liked to be, always late, always unable to enjoy the things other people enjoy. Nowadays, I like the idea of that multiplicity—we’re always forcing ourselves to reach a oneness that’s our lot, whereas our strength lies in this very exceeding of oneness.
If, today, at seventy-five, you were to take stock of your life overall . . .
Without my childhood and adolescence, the desperate history of my family, the war, the Occupation and the concentration camps, I don’t think there’d be much to my life. Working in Mitterand’s department when he was minister for war veterans, I became aware of Hitler’s atrocious crimes, Auschwitz and the extermination of seven million Jews.3 I was thirty years old and it was only at that point, it seems to me, that I woke from a long sleep.
Do you see yourself as being alone?
Like everyone, I feel that ultimate loneliness which we all, from fear, try to cover up to the very end. But a day without being alone would seem stifling to me.
They say you still like to be among women and young people.
I’ve always enjoyed female company. I’ve always found it stimulating. I can remember whole afternoons chatting with my women friends. We laughed a lot and drank together.
With young people, it’s different. I like them, though I have the impression I don’t have much to teach them. Not even a theory of the novel . . . I prefer them to some old friends that I’ve stopped seeing, now that I don’t have the same ‘look’ I once had. I’d had my fill of hearing myself being told, ‘Marguerite, shut up please.’
Talking to me about your mother, you said, though you’d forgotten many things you’d read, many analyses and arguments, you hadn’t forgotten her extraordinary stories.
That’s just it. I often have the impression of forgetting the most urgent things—those I know I ought to keep in mind for one reason or another—and remembering nonsense or insignificant detail. A voice, a dress material . . . I’ve forgotten the articles I’ve written, the things I’ve said, the daily life I led for years. As though that was a host of events that had passed through my head on some parallel path, without leaving any trace. It’s involuntary memory, not our will, that decides for us.
How has the fact of being a woman affected your work?
I’ve lived pain more or less as a state inherent in being female. Like all women, I’ve been bored or wearied living with men who either wanted me by them to help them rest from their work or wanted to leave me at home. And it was there, at home, in the kitchen that I often wrote. I grew to like the empty space left by men when they went out. It was only then I could think—or not think at all, which amounts to the same thing.
What you say there is reminiscent of certain states of mind of Sara in The Little Horses of Tarquinia.
Sara’s never alone. There’s always the child with her or Jacques, her husband or the maid, or the ‘other’, the man who can—and won’t—be her lover. In spit
e of that, her loneliness is the implacable loneliness of someone who stays silent. And in those silences everything happens.
What do you think is specifically feminine about your work?
I don’t ask myself the question what it means to have a feminine sensibility when I’m working.
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf says the normal, perfect condition of every human being is one where the male and female principles live in harmony.4
The great mind is androgynous.5 To aim to feminize art in certain ways is a great mistake on the part of women. By creating that specificity for themselves, they limit the very scope of their remarks.
What do you think of feminism?
I’m wary of all these rather obtuse forms of activism that don’t always lead to true female emancipation. There are counter-ideologies that are more codified than the ideology itself. Of course, a conscious, informed woman is already in herself political—provided that she doesn’t confine herself to a ghetto by making her body the prime site of martyrdom.
Are we to understand, then, that silence, the practice and understanding of silence, are the very measure of feminine being?
Instead of eliminating silence or fearing its ambiguity, women express and embrace the wholeness of silence in the words they speak. Where men are concerned, they feel the imperative need to speak, as though they couldn’t bear the force of silence at all.
This different use of the spoken language between the sexes would seem to bring us back once again to the comparison you often allude to between women and witches.
The Suspended Passion Page 9