In La Sorcière, Michelet states that it was women’s solitude that lay at the origins of their use of language.6 Left to their own devices by men who’d gone off to the Crusades, the contention is that, once alone, they began to speak a primal ancestral, language with nature. Consequently, it’s argued, to prevent the spread of non-codified speech, they were punished. Women—and children—have always been closest to transgression and madness.
In an essay he wrote on you, Dionys Mascolo has spoken of ‘an extreme imprudence of which only a woman is capable, a penchant for risk-taking different from the kind that heroes of the “spiritual” life have accustomed us to, and the ability to question all certainties, our acquired sense of security, in a high-stake game which seems guided only by an inconceivable (unable to be conceptualized) confidence in the unknown as such.’7
I’d add the ability to face up to the experience of pain without being destroyed by it. A certain weakness on men’s part renders them unprepared to such a degree that they shy away from the very substance of suffering by mythifying it, by expelling it from themselves with anger and physical violence.
The courage to get to the unvarnished truth doesn’t prevent your female characters from also resorting to lying. They dissimulate almost as a matter of course. I’m thinking of Suzanna Andler, Sara, Anne Desbaresdes, Lol, Anne-Marie Stretter . . .
They are victims of passions within them—as in the case when, because of the Chinese lover, I began to lie to my mother. They are, above all, torn by a personality split that they don’t understand.
How does a woman who, like you, writes, look back on the way she experienced motherhood?
A man will never be able to know what it means to put one’s body at another’s mercy to the point where one’s energies are exhausted. With the awareness of the violence every act of giving birth has within it, by the very fact of knowing already what pain the person we are bringing into the world will go through.
What’s your relationship with Jean Mascolo, the son you had on 30 June 1947 with Dionys Mascolo?
We’re friends, Outa and I. He’s one of the very few people who really know me. He knows my neuroses and my many hysterias.8 And then he’s an excellent travelling companion. We’ve never seen very much of each other when we’ve been in Paris, though we’ve sometimes met up in the evenings, but we’ve often travelled together in Europe. He was my escort, he protected my isolation. We complement each other—what with my obsession with work and his relaxed attitude to free time.
Jean Mascolo has often played a part, though indirectly, as cameraman or photographer, in the making of your recent films, such as The Children, a story inspired—and this is no accident—by him.
Up to now, he’s been a jack of all trades, without ever finding anything that entirely absorbs him. Neither his father nor I have ever pushed him to find something. The money I have now belongs to him. I share it with him, like the times when I’m given something special to eat.
At the time of May ’68, your son was involved in politics.
He was a real hippy. Gentle, indifferent, distant.
A bit like the indefatigable Alissa of Destroy, She Said.
If I hadn’t learnt certain things from Outa, perhaps I’d never even have written that book.
How did you react to your son’s commitment?
He went round to his father’s to tell him that there was nothing he wanted to do or could do. Then he went away. For years, we’d see him coming back from Africa and going off there again, each time thinner, more emaciated. Yet we were happier knowing he was broke and workless than an anonymous prisoner of some office, waiting, like millions of people, for the alarm clock to ring in the early morning and send him off to the daily grind.
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• • • PLACES • • •
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You produced a fine book of photos called Les lieux de Marguerite Duras [Marguerite Duras’ Places] devoted to your favourite locations—a sort of album of the mythic places of your personal geography.1
There are places in my memory which, more than others, trigger very strong passions in me: places I know even now that I couldn’t pass through unscathed. The body recognizes them instinctively. The house at Vinh Long near the lake is, and always will be, linked to the discovery of pleasure, a discovery I’d never have been able to share with my mother.2 It would have killed her.
In almost all your books, the presence of the sea is always perceptible, even if not always directly. It even makes an appearance as the subject of a slim diary-style narrative entitled L’Été 80 [Summer ’80].3
The sea is one of the images, one of the nightmares that recurs most frequently in my head.4 Few people, I think, know it as I do, having spent hours observing it. The sea fascinates and terrifies me. I’ve been horrified since childhood by the idea of being swept away by water. But the real sea is the North Sea. And only Melville in Moby Dick has put its terrible threatening power into words.
Many of your characters, from Lol V. Stein onwards, live in seaside resorts or, at any rate, speak often of the sea.
The sea’s an unlimited force that engulfs the ‘self’ and the gaze, each first losing themselves before they recover their own identity. At the end of the world, all that will be left to cover the earth’s crust will be a single immense sea. All the feeble traces of humanity will have disappeared.
You spend a large part of the year in your flat in Trouville, alternating brief stays in Paris with spells at Neauphle-le-Château.
The Trouville flat’s in an enormous, empty old hotel with large windows and a floor that’s a chequerboard of black and white slabs. I associate a certain clear, cold light with the place, a light I find only there. And also the wind, the first moons of autumn and even the smell of the petrol refineries of Le Havre.
As for the house at Neauphle, I fell in love with it from the first. After so many wanderings, I was joyous, when I bought it, at the thought of having a house of my own for the first time. Living in it subsequently, as in a theatre that would in itself have demanded that stories be written for it, I thought of Lol V. Stein and Nathalie Granger.5
Resnais came to pick me up from there one day and opted to use it for Emmanuelle’s flashbacks at Nevers in Hiroshima mon amour. Together we realized it is places that contain the image of future films. But there’s no point determinedly seeking them out. You have, rather, to start from nothing and let the places speak to you, without any pre-existing idea.
And your current flat in the rue Saint-Benoît in Paris?
It’s only changed once in forty years. Now I suppose it’ll stay as it is.
The house is a receptacle you enter to be reassured and, at the same time, to be influenced, fundamentally and dangerously, by its occupants. It belongs to woman—man is happy just to use space—as a sort of extension of her womb. That’s why it mustn’t be cluttered with fetishes which, separating it from the outside world, render it unliveable. For me, the home has always been an open place, and the outside air has to be let into it. My whole life, though I was living alone, I never closed the door until late in the evening.
For years, your flat was a meeting point for a tight circle of friends.
Ah yes. Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Martinet, Edgar Morin and Elio Vittorini came here. They were friends, but when I wrote I wasn’t thinking about them or what we discussed in the evenings.
I’ve always separated the two spheres: for them, I may perhaps have merely been a chatty, hospitable friend, inclined to let them sleep on t
he sofa and make them meals at any hour.
Your flat still gets a lot of visitors today.
People who call or come straight up and ring the doorbell. They say they want to see me. Personally, it never interested me to get to know the artists I liked. What they did was enough for me. So if I’d been asked, ‘Do you want to meet Picasso?’, I’d have said no.
A large proportion of artists haven’t the slightest notion of the greatness or importance of their work. The sublime ignorance, as we might say, of Bach or Velasquez . . .
Do you like Paris?
It’s become almost impossible for me to live there. The traffic horrifies me—I’ve stopped driving—and the city seems like a gigantic lethal, commercial labyrinth that’s squandering its beauty day by day to conform to the norms of a supposed ‘new architecture’.
Even the working-class areas are changing, such as Pigalle and the Marais. As are the suburbs, which used, at least, to teem with life. They’ve been transformed into enormous blocks of concrete where the isolation’s even more atrocious, if that’s possible.
The Paris I like is the deserted Paris of summer Sundays or the night, but that hardly exists any more.
Do the places you find yourself in at a particular time influence your work?
Yes. I’m finding it harder and harder to work in Paris. And not only because, opposite my windows—just over from my desk—they’ve knocked down a nineteenth-century printworks and put up a four-star hotel, a white hotel in the Broadway style.
The fact is that if I stayed in Paris, I’d probably be overwhelmed by the chaos and withdraw into my lair. Whereas what you need when you’re writing is to smell the air, hear the sounds and be aware of everything that’s alive—the outside world.
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• NOTES •
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• • INTRODUCTION
1 A former photographer of German origin, Inge was the widow of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and one of Duras’ publishers in Italy. (All footnotes to this volume are the work of the French translator, unless otherwise stated.—Trans.) [Back to text]
• • FRENCH TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
1 Michel Tournier, Célébrations (Paris: Gallimard, Collection folio, 2000), p. 305. [Back to text]
2 For a list of Duras’ main interviews, see p. 180. [Back to text]
• • • A CHILDHOOD
1 Duras left Vietnam in 1932 and never returned. [Back to text]
• • • THE PARIS YEARS
1 Margeurite Duras, Le Camion, suivi d’Entretien avec Michelle Porte (Paris: Minuit, 1977), p. 115. [Back to text]
2 In an article in the Nouvel Observateur dated 12 January 1970, Sollers stood out against an overly political interpretation of May ’68 and offered not a ‘literary’ but a psychoanalytic interpretation of the film (though not of the novel) around the theme of castration and (male and female) homosexuality:
A woman is undergoing a sort of wild analysis from the three others and it might be said that she’ll be symptomatically ‘cured’ at the end of the film—there’s a very fine token of this in her vomiting—but it is a cure that resolves nothing since it runs up against a social impossibility represented by the arrival of the ‘husband’. And it is at that moment, I think, that the very impossibility of the outside of the closed analytical space arises or, in other words, the dream of a sort of impossible community within that closed space. I find this interesting ideologically, because it is a problem that relates to something very topical, that is to say, the possible—or impossible—articulation between analytic discourse and its outside, which would be political discourse. But it seems that the film remains suspended at that point and can’t achieve a resolution of that question. [Back to text]
3 Maurice Blanchot’s text ‘Détruire’ on Destroy, She Said appeared in the special issue of Ça/Cinéma on Duras published by Éditions Albatros in 1975:
Where do they come from? Who are they? Certainly beings like ourselves; there are no others in this world. But, in fact, beings already radically destroyed (hence the allusion to Judaism); yet, in such a way that far from leaving unhappy scars, this erosion, this devastation or infinite movement toward death, which lives in them as their only memory of themselves (in one, as the flash of lightning which finally reveals an absence; in another, as a slow, unfinished progression of time; and, in the girl, through her youth, because she is fully destroyed by her absolute relationship to youth), these things liberated them through gentleness, for attention to others, for a non-possessive, unspecified, unlimited love, liberated them for all this and for the singular word that they each carry, having received it from the youngest, the young woman of the night, the one who, alone, can ‘say’ it with perfect truth: destroy, she said (Maurice Blanchot, ‘Destroy’ in Marguerite Duras by Marguerite Duras. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987, p. 132). [Back to text]
4 Duras, Le Camion, pp. 25 and 74. [Back to text]
5 Reprinted by Gallimard in 2006 as Le Bureau de poste de la rue Dupin et autres entretiens. [Back to text]
6 Marguerite Duras, ‘Sublime, forcément sublime, Christine V.’, Libération, 17 July 1985. The body of the child Grégory had been discovered on 16 October 1984. [Back to text]
7 Duras wrote, among other things:
No man in the world can know what it’s like for a woman to be taken by a man she doesn’t desire. The woman penetrated without desire is in murder [dans le meurtre]. The cadaverous weight of virile jouissance above her body has the weight of the murder she doesn’t have the strength to deliver back—the weight of madness . . . And that she didn’t see the progress of her misfortune is certain; she would have less and less idea where she was going: into a night that would close in on her, the innocent Christine V., who perhaps killed without knowing it, as I write without knowing, her eyes pressed against the windowpane trying to see clearly in the deepening darkness of that October day.
Following the publication of this article, Françoise Sagan, Benoîte Groult, Simone Signoret, Régine Desforges and Angelo Rinaldi were to protest fiercely, while Edmonde Charles-Roux defended her. On 14 November 1986, during an interview with Pierre Bénichou and Hervé Le Masson that appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, she declared: ‘I don’t give a damn about her crime. The judges don’t give a damn about it, I’m sure! At any rate, no one has dared to attack her since my article.’ Christine Villemin would refuse to meet Duras and would sue her and the newspaper for defamation, on the grounds that Duras had implied that Villemin was actually a murderer, something she denied. That civil action against Libération would fail only in 1994. But the murder charge against Christine Villemin would be dismissed on 3 February 1993 for lack of evidence. In the ensuing years, DNA tests provided no conclusive results, but they resumed again in September 2012 due to the development of new methods of technological investigation. On the very evening that the murder case was dismissed, the France 3 TV channel broadcast on its evening news programme an interview with Duras by Christine Ockrent, recorded a few days before, at a point when dismissal already seemed the virtually certain outcome. Duras persisted with her idea that her analyses in every respect found Christine V. innocent, attributing her murder to her condition as a woman deceived. She also argued that any woman would have found her innocent. But she added that, in order to avoid any misunderstanding and scandal, her article ought to have begun with the precautionary remark, ‘If we are in fact talking about a criminal in this case.’ She was insisting, then, that her article be read as a mere hypothesis, which retrospectively gave it a quite different meaning. Ockrent asked: ‘As you see it, is the affair closed?’ She replied: ‘This affair is over. I don’t know if it is closed. French is a fine language sometimes. It is over.’ [Back to text]
8 In 1993 Duras will write a self-defence that employs the same line of argument with regard both to her article and to the affair in ge
neral:
The problem of this crime is a women’s problem. The problem of children is a women’s problem. The problem of men is a women’s problem. Men know nothing about it. So long as men are deluded about the free use of their muscular, material force, deep intelligence will not be a masculine thing. Only women will be aware of men’s mistake about themselves. There is something much worse than a slapping for a badly cooked steak, there is daily life.
This text [entitled ‘Lettre à Isabelle C.’] was to remain unpublished until it appeared in Laure Adler, Marguerite Duras (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), p. 588. [It does not appear to figure in the English translation published in 200o.—Trans.]. Other texts relating to the affair are to be found in the special dossier ‘Marguerite Duras, la voix et la passion’ [Marguerite Duras, Voice and Passion], edited by Jean-Pierre Martin and published by Le Monde in August–October 2012. That dossier also contains the text by Jacques Lacan, an interview with Hélène Cixous and Michel Foucault that had appeared in the Cahiers Renaud-Barrault 89 (1975), and contributions from Laure Adler, Jean Vallier, Yann Andréa, Philippe Sollers, Julia Kristeva, Peter Handke, Jeanne Moreau and Didier Eribon. [Back to text]
9 On 17 October 1988, Duras underwent a tracheotomy and remained in hospital for almost a year, after being put into a medically induced coma. Her first detox had taken place in October 1982. It is probably this episode she is alluding to, which was described by Yann Andréa in M. D. (Paris: Minuit, 1983). [Back to text]
The Suspended Passion Page 10