Fiction and the Photographic Image in Duras’ The Lover

Fiction and the Photographic Image in Duras’ The Lover Susan D. Cohen Le seul sujet du livre [L ’Amant] c’est l’écriture. L’écriture, c’est moi. Donc moi, c’est le livre. —Marguerite Duras M OST OF MARGUERITE DURAS’ WORK focuses on the ref­ erent’s essential absence. Duras writes this absence with visual metaphors, but in ways that deconstruct the dominant, central­ izing primacy of seeing as documentation. Although much critical com­ ment has been made about her cinematic innovations, on the one hand, and about vision as a theme in her books, on the other, critics have rarely situated seeing with regard to absence and to language in her work. Fur­ ther, this has not been linked to a form of intertextuality that crosses from one genre to another, which might be called “inter-genre.” In her films, Duras disconnects the sound track from the screen images, which causes the viewer to reconsider a coincidence hitherto largely unquestioned. With Duras, this dislocation deemphasizes the visual in favor of the verbal. Directed towards the invisible and the unknown, unstuck from concrete objectai representations, the gaze becomes a verbal instrument productive of open-ended imagination and textuality. Often the narrative structures play on several levels of visual absence. In the films India Song and La Femme du Ganges, for example, speakers who never appear on screen narrate a mixture of the story and their personal reactions to it and to each other. We “hear” them “see,” since we know they are looking only because they say so, and we know what they are “seeing”—the story—only because they tell it. The en­ visaged tale is not enacted on the screen, which simply shows people dancing or lying down (India Song) or people walking (La Femme du Ganges). Thus no direct visual representation is provided, either to the public or to the speakers. For the latter recount events that occurred in the past, events they not only did not themselves witness, but the “original” narrative of which they have largely forgotten. The fact that what they are reconstituting is, most probably, a text, places the visual at an even further remove. These films consist, then, mainly of verbal 56 S p r in g 1990 C ohen embroidering on an absent textual referent. Visual evidence is replaced, both for the speakers and the spectators, by imagination understood primarily as linguistic. This basic valorisation of the verbal over the visual occurs in many of Duras’films, with various interesting structural variations. The protagonists of the film Le Camion never appear. We do see the speakers, one of whom isthe author. They do nothing but read aloud, on and off screen, the text of a possible film, from manuscripts they hold in their hands. A “stage direction” in the published text specifies that the room in which Duras and Depardieu read the text is called a “reading room” (chambre de lecture)—a term evoking verbal rather than visual images.1Sort Nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert and Aurélia Steiner show no human figures at all. Spoken words evoke the absent characters while unpeopled images fill the screen. Finally, during a lengthy segment of L'Homme atlantique the screen remains completely blank. The nar­ rating voice, identified as that of a woman writer and film-maker aban­ doned by a man, articulates the absence of her lover and films it as such, filling the void with her words. She defines her cinematic undertaking as primarily verbal, actually predicated on visual absence. The narrator relates how, after her lover left, she cleaned her house, ridding it of all “signs.” 2This cleared a space, metaphorically a blank page on which, first of all, she could write: “Everything was cleaned of life, exempt, emptied of signs, and then I told myself: I am going to begin writing, to cure myself of the lie of an ending love. . . . And then I began to write” (17-18). Filming, the visual medium, came second, after the written text: “You remained in the state of having left. And I made a film of your absence” (ibid., 22).3 Considered eminently cinematic, these techniques hark back never...