“L’affaire Gregory” and Duras’s Textual Feminism

“L’affaire Gregory” and Duras’s Textual Feminism Verena Andermatt Conley “T1 eminism and text,” the copula appears to reconcile a paradox: t ”’ feminism on the one hand, with its constitutive ism, its possibility of a community of women, of a “positivistic” notion of woman and, on the other hand, the current notion of text with its insistence on gaps, fissures, the imperceptible and the unseizable. Duras, it is well known, positions herself on the side of the text. Her texts are not claims or protests for women’s rights, nor denunciations of current social injustices. Duras does not develop positive heroines. In fact, her “women” are curiously devoid of flesh and blood, of sub­ stance, though, ironically, one always talks about Duras’swriting in rela­ tion to the body. Women are pronouns, elles, stripped of identity, sin­ gularities losing themselves in the universal. They are simple markers or marks of the feminine text. “Elle marche, écrit Peter Morgan,” reads the opening sentence of Le Vice-consul.1The feminine pronoun elle end­ lessly tropes, walks, marches, as margin, marks throughout the text, leaving behind, abandoning (still-born) children. Much has been written by clinical psychoanalysts (Lacan, Montrelay and others), about the concept of feminity in Duras, about its inscription and signification. One could shift the emphasis, without disclaiming the truth of those analysts’findings, and raise the question of a (re)-distribution of gestures, in terms of giving and receiving, of masculine and femi­ nine. One of the major questions will be that of absence, presence. How are life and death, separation and reparation inscribed? Who leaves where and how? Who arrives where and how? If the text makes an open­ ing gesture toward feminism, how is some form of “liberation” written? I will have recourse to the French délivrance with its overdetermination, its promethean echoes of shackles undone, its insistence on giving birth, on sortie through excess or transgression as well as an opening from the commodity of book into text. Monolinguism does not fare well with Duras. How does she, we can ask ourselves, weave the thread of her spool, of her fort/dal Does she write with? without? With whom does she identify? Are her texts turned toward life? Toward death? What are the consequences of her signifying practice for the feminist reader? This Vol.XXX, No. 1 69 L ’Esprit C réateur ultimately is a political question which is related to an être-là, a being there, of woman, and to a question of exchange. Since Freud it has been commonly accepted that there are only effects of life and death, and causality has been relegated to archaic thinking. Theoreticians, writers, mostly men, sneer at any philosophy of life belonging to positivistic thinking and prehistory. Most contemporary theories (psychoanalytical, philosophical) insist on the importance of death, on death opening the movement of life. It is common for many thinkers (a certain Freud, Hegel, Bataille, Blanchot) to associate woman with darkness, night, death and negativity. This is not all that different from Duras, in whose texts female figures—from the early more repre­ sentational Marin de Gibraltar to Le Ravissement de Loi V. Stein to more recent narratives—dressed in black, function as carriers of death, are at the very locus of separation. Let us re-read this key passage from Le Ravissement: Loi, frappée d’immobilité, avait regardé s’avancer, comme lui, cette grâce abandonnée, ployante d’oiseau mort. Elle était maigre. Elle devait l’avoir toujours été. Elle avait vêtu cette maigreur, se rappelait clairement Tatiana, avec un double fourreau de tulle également noir, très décolletée. Elle se voulait ainsi faite et vêtue, et elle l’était à son souhait, irrévocablement. L’ossature admirable de son corps et de son visage se devinait. Telle qu’elle apparaissait, telle désormais, elle mourrait, avec son corps désiré. Qui était-elle? On le sut plus tard: Anne-Marie Stretter.2 Loi is in ecstasy in this scene of desire and death. The scene, as always in Duras, is visual. The ravished Loi watches, witnesses, the impersonal advance of a sublime “grace.” The woman figure who advances...