A Singular Adventure: The Writings of Marguerite Duras

A Singular Adventure: The Writings of Marguerite Duras Germaine Bree T h e su c c e ss o f th e se m i-a u to b io g ra p h ic a l th e LOVER, compelling and mythical and, for some, a controversial text, which received the Goncourt Prize, made of 1985 a Mar­ guerite Duras year. Since 1980, a steady stream of interviews, colloquia and articles have underscored the importance of her writing. New works by her have been coming out as well as old ones hitherto unpublished: the film “Les Enfants,” the play Savannah Bay starring the now aged Made­ leine Renaud in the role of an aging actress named Madeleine (which introduces a very Durassian kind of ambiguity at the core of the spec­ tacle); two narrative scenarios, attacked by some as “pornographic”— The Man Seated in the Corridor, in relation to which the other, The Malady ofDeath, seems to stand as a kind of negative. Then Duras Out­ side, a collection of texts, many of them, like those collected in Summer 1980, a particular brand of Duras “reportage,” the former written main­ ly in the late fifties for the leftist weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. In 1985 Duras published La Douleur, a book so stark, so startling, so uncompromisingly true to an experience at once personal and collective, that it obliges readers to look with new eyes at all her work. These pages, Duras tells us, were written in 1944, in a quasi-hypnotic state, and then forgotten. Years later she found them in “the blue cupboard” of her house in Neauphle-le-Chateau, which has become part of the Duras legend. With the possible exception of Proust, no contemporary writer has so intricately woven together life and writing, offering her life “to be read,” as Mary Lydon has put it, in a gesture that confirms the etymol­ ogy of the word “legenda.” Perhaps a little too patly, the manuscript was rediscovered in time for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the Liberation. The first section of La Douleur records the anguished vigil kept by Duras in 1944 as she waited for her deported husband to return, while the Allied armies swept through Germany, and the stark reality of the concentration camps, until then only suspected, was con­ firmed. In its unfolding, the text mimes successive waves of emotion: horror, despair, disbelief, that Duras experiences in an uncontrollable imaginary enactment of Robert L.’s agony. Those pages are followed by 8 Sprin g 1990 Brée an obsessive, almost minute by minute description of his return to life, his physical plight. A text written how? written when? rewritten, re­ transcribed? edited? We do not know. It is a paradoxical example of a linguistically sustained and controlled text that communicates to the reader in its full force the sense of uncontrollable emotion. Three of the other texts in the volume describe episodes in Duras’ activity as a member of a small Parisian resistance group led by President Mitterrand, under the name of François Morland. So great is the force of the imaginary in Duras’ writing that one might have felt inclined to classify these stories as fiction, were it not that President Mitterrand cor­ roborated them in conversations with Marguerite Duras in 1985 and 1986, in the weekly L ’Autre Journal. I do not refer to these texts for their anecdotal value, although they do fill a major gap in a biography as yet fragmentary. I mention them because of the light they throw on an experience so rigorous and disruptive that it has to some extent defined Duras’ relation to writing. In a particularly disturbing scene a young woman (Thérèse) oversees a brutal operation of coercion: physical violence wreaked on an “in­ former” she must make speak. “Thérèse,” Duras flatly asserts, “is me” (134). She means it literally. In the telling of the incident, one feels the strange mixture of repulsion and attraction, the shameful complicity that binds the torturer to the victim. “You will look at what you see. But you will look at it absolutely. You will try to look at it until the...