Love and Mourning in Duras’ Aurélia Steiner

Love and Mourning in Duras’Aurélia Steiner Catherine Portuges I wanted to tell you that if I were young, if I were eighteen, if I knew nothing yet of the separation between people and the nearly mathematical certitude of this separation between people, I would do the same thing as I am now doing, I would write the same books, make the same movies . . . if I had died yesterday I would have died at eighteen. If I die in ten years I would also have died at eighteen. —Marguerite Duras, Les Yeux Verts1 IN 1979, MARGUERITE DURAS PUBLISHED three “textes” entitled Aurélia Steiner, as well as two films, Aurélia Steiner, dite Aurélia Melbourne, and Aurélia Steiner, dite Aurélia Vancouver. The text of Aurélia Steiner, dite Aurélia Melbourne closes with the spoken words of the unseen subject: My name is Aurélia Steiner. I live in Melbourne. My parents teach school. I am eighteen years old. I write.2 In this, one of her most formalistically experimental, minimalist films, the desire for reparation with a lost love is meshed with the phantasm of the holocaust, implicating the spectator as both voyeur and eavesdropper by means of the director’s sustained use of a woman’s speaking voice. An encounter between word and image (joining to the same incantatory and hypnotic effect initiated by Hiroshima mon amour), Aurélia Steiner, dite Melbourne takes place—if indeed one can speak of it in such narra­ tive terms—on and around a river, just as Hiroshima mon amour is both linked and divided by the temporal crossings of the Loire River in France and the Ota Estuaries in Japan, and L ’Amant is marked by the young girl’s passage on the delta ferry. A woman’s voice (Duras’s own, in the original French version) reads letters to her imaginary (or lost) lover, object of her impossible desire, while the camera records the varying moods of the Seine as a boat makes its way from Bercy to Passy, under vaulted bridges and changing skies. This disembodied voice speaks from that nameless place where image, voice, text, and memory converge: I write you all the time, always, you see, nothing but that, nothing. Maybe I will write you a thousand letters, give you letters, give you letters about my life now. And you will do with 40 S p r in g 1990 PORTUGES them what I expect you to do with them, by that I mean exactly as you please. That’s the way I want it. That it should be meant for you. Where are you? How can I reach you? How can the two of us draw ourselves nearer to that love and erase the illusory fragments of time that separate us from each other? In this zone of visual and auditory pleasure and pain, that privileged ter­ rain which is also the space of autobiography, both subject and reader/ spectator may experience what Lacan has called “correct distance,” and Winnicott “potential space,” the safety of apprehending the desired object without fear either of the suffocation of excessive closeness or the detachment of too wide a separation.3Through these words echo those ofHiroshima mon amour: “Tu me tues, tu me fais du bien,” the opposi­ tions of pleasure and anguish, and the process of reconstruction in time and space that is the occasion of cinema.4 Of the making of Aurélia Steiner, dite Aurélia Melbourne, Duras writes: I think there is no hiatus, no blank between the voice and what she speaks. In a sense, when I am speaking, I am Aurélia Steiner. What I pay attention to is less, not more. It is not to convey the text but rather to be careful not to distance myself from her, from Aurélia, who is speaking. It demands extreme attention, every second, not to lose Aurélia, to say with her, not to speak in my own name. To respect Aurélia, even if she comes from me.5 This fusion of speaking subject with writing self is familiar enough to readers of Duras, and to viewers of her films...