Marguerite Duras: A “W/Ringer”’s Remarks

Marguerite Duras: A “W/Ringer’”s Remarks Catharine R. Stimpson I BEGIN, NOT WITH FRENCH, but with a messy English word: “w/ringer.” If it begins with the letter “r,” it has contradictory meanings. On the one hand, a “ringer” has a genuine role. He or she makes a bell toll, a sound of authenticity, at least in churches. On the other hand, a “ringer” is inauthentic. S/he enters a competition under a false identity or pretends to be somebody other than s/he is. If the word begins with the letter “w,” it has more coherent, but painful, meanings. To wring an object—clothes, a sponge, a neck—is to twist that object until it dries or dies. To wring one’s hands is to publicize an anxiety that harmfully twists the yarn of life. I am a w/ringer. I wish to ring a bell of praise for Marguerite Duras. I am not a Duras scholar. Yet, I will twist my tongue and write of The Lover.1So doing, my reading of Duras will be that of a feminist critic who cultivates these methods: a skeptical empiricism; distrust of seeing Oedipus as the Universal Child in models of human development; sus­ picion of binary oppositions; and a faith in reading the world as many networks of differences, only some of which peacefully co-exist with each other. The Lover is an act of memory. Because the self-image that the nar­ rator recovers is the only picture of the past she says she likes, her remembering is nostalgic as well as historical. With the clarity and vio­ lence that intelligent presentations of once-buried, but now-unearthed, obsessions tend to have, The Lover explores the narrator’s surge of growth as she ceases to be a child and becomes a “woman.” The Loveris a bildungsroman in which society matters less than sexuality and specula­ tion. The narrator marks the beginning of her initiation into sensual femininity through her adoration of a man’s adornment, a hat, the flatbrimmed , brownish-pink fedora.2 Deceptively systematic, the narrator’s memories juxtapose women who fascinate her. Each an emblem of the female, they together compile a spectrum of the feminine. The first is Hélène, another young white woman. Stupider than the narrator, but more beautiful, Hélène repre­ sents the flesh that the narrator would like to watch and, in a streak of Vol.XXX, No. 1 15 L ’E sprit C réateur desire, at once lesbian and narcissistic, to possess. The second figure is the much-beloved mother. Later, the narrator, repetitively, will herself become the mother of a son. In an act of cultural memory, The Lover rewrites the myth of Demeter, Kore, and Hades. However, this Demeter is as perverse as this Kore. For the mother loves her vicious, diabolic older son more than her daughter. Moreover, Indochina blurs the realms of the living and the dead. The narrator meets her rich Chinese lover in a black limousine on a ferry that crosses a branch of the Mekong. Either bank of the river might be the edge of the underworld. As the story approaches its final quarter, the narrator recalls a third figure: “. . . a very tall woman, very thin, thin as death, laughing and running . . . the local lunatic, the madwoman of Vinh Long” (84). Mocking, begging, the madwoman becomes no less than a mythic spirit of the Orient. As such, she is the Other as Woman. For the woman nar­ rator, she is the Other as Sacred Force. Significantly, the two scenes about the Beggar Woman frame a third in which the narrator sees her mother, sitting in the garden, as smother creature, with the blank abstract beauty of a goddess, whom she can never control. The maternal and the divine blur together, as the paternal and the divine do in current mono­ theisms. For the European narrator, the Beggar Woman is also the Other as Oriental. Her rivers are neither the Seine nor the Rhine, but the Mekong and the Ganges. Inseparable from the sacralized Asian are the secular women whom the narrator can watch, or imagine, but never know: her mother...