The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  What, in your view, was the most useful thing May ’68 taught us?

  May ’68 and the Prague Spring were political failures which profited us much more than any victory, by virtue of the ideological vacuum they created. Not knowing where we were going, as happened to us in the street in those days, but knowing only that we were going, that we were on the move, so to speak, without fear of the consequences and the contradictions—that’s what we learnt. But can you be a writer, I wonder, without running up against contradictions? No, at the very best you can be a good storyteller. Clearly, to propose that ideologies be abolished completely isn’t easy in a country like France which, from time immemorial, has resisted the idea of any historical period that doesn’t bear its own definition within itself. From childhood on, we’ve been compelled to order our lives, to the point of expunging all disorder from them.

  And it’s in this fear of the void, in the desire to curb the tiniest risk that might ensue from it, that power roots itself.

  Can a Marxist consciousness survive in the current state of things?

  I start out from the principle that all political discourses are alike. There’s no point in becoming politically committed— Europe is in the grip of sham revolutions and Marxism is now a conceptual, cerebral and, as such, corpse-like doctrine.

  The heroine of one of your political texts, Le Camion [The Lorry], says: ‘Let the world go hang, let it go hang, that’s the only policy.’4

  I no longer believe in anything and not believing can perhaps lead to that ‘[creative] act against all power’, the only possible response to the oligarchy of the banks and the false democracy that governs us.

  But at the last elections you voted Socialist all the same.

  A sort of non-vote indicating the desire to find a solution between two oppressors. And I say that despite the great esteem in which I hold my friend [François] Mitterand. Yet, after the Communist Party I’ll never be able to commit myself to a political party line again.

  You and François Mitterand have known each other for many years.

  Yes, since Resistance days. He’s one of the rare—and one of the first—people I send all my books to. I’m sure he’ll read them and call me to talk about them together. He’s a man who loves life very much, Mitterand. Of course, as long as he’s president, he won’t be able to say all that he thinks about the Communist Party and about today’s France.

  Whenever I’ve seen [Jacques] Chirac and him on television in recent years, the difference between them has been striking. The one is open, ready to accept change and dialogue, the other is hidebound by an outdated language, the defender of an egocentric nation and a society closed in exclusively on itself and fearful of everything from outside, whether it be intellectuals, Jews, Arabs, Chinese, Argentinians, Palestinians . . .

  The transcript of some of these interviews and encounters between the president and yourself on topical matters was published in L’Autre Journal a few years back.5

  He enjoyed these discussions and even pressed me to carry on with them. We spoke, most often at my home, then I transcribed the discussions, he corrected them, I corrected them again and he let me have my way. We would howl with laughter . . .

  With regard to journalism, from the late 1950s onwards you took an active part in the political and social life of your country, commenting on various subjects in the pages of weekly or daily publications, from Le Monde, France-Observateur (later Le Nouvel Observateur) and even women’s magazines such as Vogue or Sorcières, to your more recent writing in Libération and in L’Autre Journal.

  It’s something I’ve always liked, the urgency of journalistic writing. The text has to have in it the force—and why not, also, the limitations—of the haste in which it was written. Before being consumed and thrown away.

  After begging me to comment on some event or other, the editors of Le Monde often didn’t actually have the courage to publish my article . . .

  As for L’Autre Journal, which is one of the left-wing literary magazines I like best, they said that if I wrote for them, it would push up sales.

  What were your reasons for taking up this journalistic career?

  I suddenly found it necessary to set out publicly what I thought about certain subjects. It was a need to come out into the open, to see what I was capable of outside the four walls of my room. I began to write articles in my empty moments, during the pauses in my daily writing. When I was writing a book, I didn’t even read the newspapers. But the articles took me a lot of time—you can’t imagine how long. I felt a great deal of pressure, even though I’d been doing it for years.

  What should the function of journalism be?

  To create public opinion around events that would otherwise pass unnoticed.

  I don’t think there can be professional objectivity: I prefer a clear position to be taken. A sort of moral stance. Something writers can very well do without in their own books.

  You’ve always had—and still have—a passionate interest in certain news stories. Often your positions—taken up on TV or in the daily papers—don’t go down well with public opinion.

  The temptation to say what I was thinking—to denounce the social injustice of French people’s reluctance to reflect on the Algerian war, on the rise of totalitarian regimes, on the militarization of the planet and a forced moralization of society—that’s something I’ve always felt.

  What interested me most was the impact all that had on individuals in terms of the madness or randomness within them, their harbouring of crimes of passion or of desperation. Or simply my interest in certain aspects of human beings which the legal system feels it can treat like any other, as something irreversible, as natural events.

  Four years ago, in a long article in Libération,6 you turned your attention to the case of Christine Villemin, who was presumed to have murdered her son in a village in the Vosges. You told how you yourself went to Lépanges-sur-Vologne and, without having been present at the crime, you were able to imagine the exact course of events; taking on the totality of the case—without too much verisimilitude perhaps—to the point where you made Christine Villemin a ‘necessarily sublime’ heroine. The very emblem of writing as an irreversible and total process, insofar as it is driven by obscure alien forces. The woman’s crazed act could therefore be said to have been, as you saw it, the ultimate attempt (hence innocent and not blameworthy) to find herself and free herself, with her destiny, through the murder of an unwanted child.

  Christine Villemin’s crime is the offence of someone who was above all, like every woman, a victim—reduced to the materiality of existence, incapable of surmounting that condition, condemned to live out a hollow, unwanted life.7

  Your unconditional defence of Christine Villemin caused a scandal: many intellectuals and showbiz personalities, including Simone Signoret, joined forces against you.

  Christine Villemin was the prototype of a femininity subjugated by men, it being men who lay down the laws of the couple, of sex and desire. There are women like her everywhere, incapable of expressing themselves and exhausted by the emptiness that surrounds them—children are nothing but a further shackle on their self-realization.8

  Anyway, your reportage would include journeys to the fringes of society—ghettos, prisons, the street or, by contrast, convents—to meet prisoners, murderers, Carmelites, proletarians, Africans, Jews.

  What I wanted to do was to give a voice to people we simply knew nothing about in the economic boom years. To lend such impact to certain kinds of testimony—a harrowing case of self-defence by an Algerian worker, the horrendous intellectual emptiness of the life of a Carmelite nun—that they could no longer be ignored by the bourgeois class or used by them for their own ends.

  What image do you have of the future and of human progress?

  Robotization, telecommunications and computerization
are relieving humanity of the need for exertion but ultimately blunting its creative capacities. The danger is that we’ll see a one-dimensional man, a humanity without memory. But to talk of the problems of humanity means nothing—the constant battle, day after day, is the battle one fights with oneself in the attempt to resolve the unsolved problem of oneself. Or in finding oneself, as ever, up against the problem of God.

  Do you believe in God?

  To know that, if there’s a divinity, it can only be within us, seeing that there’s only emptiness around us, is no help in solving the problem. Not believing in God is just one more credo. I doubt whether it’s possible not to believe at all. That would be like removing all meaning, all eternity from the great passions of our lives. Everything would become an end in itself, with no consequences. Though we can’t rule out the future of humanity being just that, either.

  Can we, in your view, speak of human happiness?

  That’s a word—happiness—we should never pronounce. The very meaning we give to the word would be warped, so to speak, and its scope would be exceeded—it’s inaccessible, extraordinarily mysterious.

  Do you believe in chance?

  I like feeling myself part of the great game of life, incapable of controlling or foreseeing how things will work out. I think the general unease people feel comes from that, from the tragic consciousness that they aren’t in control of the outcome of their own lives to the extent that they’d like.

  Does the idea of death frighten you?

  I realized that it did the last time I was in hospital.9 I was told that if I had another drink, it would kill me. At that point I was gripped by a strange fear, the fear of a hunted animal.

  As a youngster, for more than thirty years, I feared madness more than death. I was always being told I was mad or illogical. But inside me was merely a semblance of disorder or contradictoriness. In the end, they induced a minor neurosis in me and I had to make great efforts to free myself from this sense of madness that men managed to conjure up in me.

  There’s a lot of talk, on this threshold of the third millennium, of the end of the world.

  The fear of the year 2000 and of the end of the world is fanciful. Everyone’s saying it’s to be expected, but no one’s saying why. By comparison with the mystical anxiety surrounding the Apocalypse of the year 1000, our fear is a cool one, a fear empirically aware of the danger of irreversible decline. There’s no longer any idea of a ‘sacred’ death behind this, as in the past, but, at best, the idea of nothingness.

  Episodes like the explosion of the nuclear power station at Chernobyl10 testify to the reality of a gradually advancing collective end to humanity, as yet incalculable in its scope. Everyone should have decided to shut their nuclear power stations down, but no one’s done it. The countries of the Third World will always need to have them operating. And then, what would be the point of shutting down the power stations if they would still be dangerous even when closed? The nuclear zones will never be turned back into cornfields.

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  • • • TRAJECTORIES OF WRITING • • •

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  .

  For what reasons did you choose to write?

  The need to put on the blank page something I felt to be urgent without having the strength to do it completely. I was reading a lot at that time and, inevitably, I was in such a hurry to write that I wasn’t always aware of all the influences on me. It’s only with the second book that you begin to have insight into where your writing is going, through slow detachment from the fascination that the idea of literature exerts on us.

  How did you begin?

  At eleven I was living in Cochinchina, where it was thirty degrees in the shade every day. I wrote poems—that’s where it always begins—about the world and life, which I knew nothing about.

  Your first book, Les Impudents, dates from 1943. You were twenty-nine years old.

  It was about the hatred I felt for my elder brother. I sent the manuscript to Queneau—I didn’t know him—who was working at Gallimard. I was nervous when I walked into his office, but sure of myself. The book had already been rejected by all the other publishers, but I was sure that this time it would be accepted. Queneau didn’t say it was good. He simply looked up and said, ‘Madame, you are a writer.’ The next year he published La Vie tranquille. It was so badly constructed, so insistent and naive in its realism.

  Up to Moderato Cantabile, it was as though I didn’t recognize the books I wrote. The Sea Wall or The Little Horses of Tarquinia are still books that are too full, books in which everything—too much—is said. Nothing’s left to the reader’s imagination. There may be some connection with what I now regard as my mature phase. At a pinch, I can see one with some aspects of The Sailor from Gibraltar: a woman is caught up in an endless wait for a sailor, an inaccessible love. It’s something very similar to what I’m writing at the moment.

  For years I had a social life, and the ease with which I met people or spoke to them was reflected in my books. Up to the point where I had relations with a man and gradually all that worldly-mindedness disappeared. That was a violent, highly erotic love affair, and, for the first time, I felt it was beyond my control. It even made me want to kill myself and that changed the very way I produced literature—it was now about discovering the gaps, the blanks I had within me, and finding the courage to express them. The woman in Moderato Cantabile and the one in Hiroshima mon amour were me. Exhausted by that passion and unable to talk about it, I decided to write about it, almost coldly.

  In 1950 came The Sea Wall, the real book about your adolescence.

  And also the most popular, the easiest. Five thousand copies sold. Queneau showed a child-like enthusiasm for the book. He did a great deal of promotion and I came very close to winning the Prix Goncourt. But it was a political, anti-colonialist book and in those days they didn’t give prizes to communists. I got it thirty-four years later for The Lover, which takes up the same themes as it happens: a life of poverty in the colonies, sex, money, a lover, a mother and brothers.

  What did you feel writing The Lover?

  A certain happiness. The book had obscure origins—it had come out of the obscurity to which I’d consigned my childhood—and it lacked order. A series of unconnected episodes which I found and abandoned without lingering over them. Episodes I didn’t flag up in advance or bring to a conclusion.

  What induced you to tell this story which you refer to yourself as inexpressible?

  The illness and tiredness I was recovering from had left me with a desire to get back to being myself again after such a long time. I see it as the product not so much of inspiration as of a feel for writing. The Lover is a wild text, and it was Yann Andréa with his book M. D. who showed me this savage side I have in me.1

  Are there characters and situations in the novel that are taken from reality?

  I’d had to lie for years about so many stories from the past. My mother was still alive and there were some things I didn’t want her to know. And then one day I was alone and I said to myself, why not tell the truth now? Everything in the book is true: the clothes, my mother’s anger, the sickly sweet food she made us eat, the Chinese lover’s limousine.

  Even the money he gave you?

  I felt it was my duty to take it from a millionaire and give it to the household. He gave me presents, dragging us around in his car and inviting us all to the dearest restaurant in Saigon. When we were eating, no one spoke a word to him; they were a bit racist in the colonies and my family said they hated him. Of course, when it came to money, they turne
d a blind eye. At least we wouldn’t have to sell or pawn the furniture in order to eat.

  What other memories do you have of the man?

  I didn’t like his Chinese body, but he knew how to pleasure mine. And that was the thing I discovered with him—only then.

  The force of desire?

  Yes, total. Beyond feelings, impersonal, blind. It was inexpressible. Where that man was concerned, I loved his love of me and that eroticism, inflamed on each occasion by our deep ambiguity.

  You sold a million and a half copies of The Lover in France alone. It’s been translated into twenty-six languages. How do you explain this enormous success?

  To think that Jérôme Lindon, my publisher, had only printed five thousand! It was out of print within a few days. Within a month, the print-run had gone up to twenty thousand and I gave the book no further thought. I didn’t open it again—that’s what I always do. Love, I’m told, is a subject that guarantees success. But that wasn’t what I was thinking about as I was writing it. In fact, I was more or less certain I’d bore my readers or irritate them with themes I’d actually covered already. Obviously, I hadn’t foreseen that, in coming along with me in these pages, people were going to make it a sort of popular novel.

  What might the other ingredients have been that brought such resounding success?

  I believe the book conveys the enormous pleasure which I felt for ten hours a day as I was writing it. Normally French literature mistakes tedium in a book for seriousness. And indeed, if people don’t finish the books they read, that’s because the books are highly pretentious—stupidly pretentious in wanting to refer on to something beyond . . .