Remains to be Seen: Essays on Marguerite Duras by Sanford Scribner Ames (review)

Book Reviews Sanford ScribnerAmes. R emains to be Seen : E ssays on M arguerite D uras. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 1989. Pp. 298. Price: $44.00. This is a timely book, the first collection of essays on Marguerite Duras in English. It provides perceptive readings of the texts which established Duras’ reputation as a “post­ modern” writer, while offering an excellent introduction to current issues of French post­ structuralism. Scholars and critics explore Duras’ mythologies of desire and loss and analyse her narrative voice, underscoring her vital importance to contemporary textual practice and critical theory. The volume is divided into seven parts with brief introductory notes by Sanford S. Ames. The reasons for grouping certain essays together are not always clear and the themes chosen sometimes redundant, but most essays present provocative and informative com­ mentaries on the texts. Marguerite Duras writes of our “addiction to love and death”—to quote Tom Conley, one of the essayists—love, forgetfulness and death. Her distinctive feminine voice elicits from her readers a response that is never indifferent; it is either “love at first reading” or violent rejection. One can also read, not “entre” but very much “dans les lignes,” a pas­ sionate indictment of racism and imperialism, and a sometimes ambiguous but nonetheless powerful defense of femininity if not of feminism. The question of the link between textual practice and a certain femininity is skillfully analysed by Susan D. Cohen in her essay: “From Omniscience to Ignorance: Voice and Narration in the Work of Marguerite Duras.” Cohen establishes “ignorance,” defined as a rejection of “the pretense of objectivity founded upon ultimately metaphysical premises,” as “Duras’ fundamental narrative position.” This “ignorance” or “incapacité de saisir,” destroying “the paternalistic belief that the world can be constituted in one way only,” pro­ duces textual plurivocity and ambiguity. Cohen offers an illuminating reading of the func­ tioning of plurality in Le Vice-Consul as well as additional remarks on Duras’ narrative voice in several other texts. Eleanor Honig Skiller proposes another, very different but equally compelling, reading of Le Vice-Consul in her essay “Le Vice-Consul: On Leaving Lahore.” She perceives the “Oedipal desire to know” coupled with the “impossibility of possession” as central to the novel, which she finds “eerily reminiscent of Greek tragedy.” Through an analysis of names, letters (the absent “H”) and intertextual “rappels” (Proust, Maupassant), Skoller tries to approximate the haunting character of the vice-consul, which she sees inscribed as absence against “the deserted tennis courts,” the white rectangles of the pages where writing takes place. Among other successful essays, I would include Tom Conley’s “A Malady of More,” a provocative analysis of Duras’ minimalist esthetics. Conley comments perceptively on the willed poverty of a language which Duras “is relentlessly stripping of its affect” and on the “bilingual and hieroglyphic status” of place-names chosen to conjure up images of “the British Empire, the American filmic imagination and the French colonial condition.” Also noteworthy are Yvonne Guers-Villate’s "La Maladie de la morí: Feminist indictment or allegory?,” Verena Andermatt Conley’s study of L'Amant, Catherine Portuges on Nathalie Granger and George H. Bauer’s “Culinary Textuality in the Writings of Duras.” S onia A ssa SUNY College at Old Westbury Vo l . XXX, No. 1 99 ...