The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  Do you remember The Princesse de Clèves?1 In that book the silences of the princess and the Duke of Nemours might genuinely be called silences of love. The words that will never pass between them are merely a spurious, inadequate means of expressing desire. But the ambiguity of that silence amplifies and suspends every moment of passion. It’s the same with Robert Musil. A book like The Man Without Qualities could only ever remain unfinished.

  Look at the relationship between the brother and sister, in which sex, though spoken about, never materializes: as though it were only like that—on the threshold of the sayable—that literature could be produced.

  Could you define the narrative techniques you use?

  Everything starts from the spoken word. The meaning of the language I use doesn’t concern me as I’m writing. If it has a meaning, that will unfurl within the text, as it does in Baudelaire’s poetry.

  With The Lover, you spoke about a ‘flowing writing’.2

  That’s this way of showing things on the page, moving from one to the other without emphasis or explanation, from the description of my brother to describing the tropical forest, from the depth of desire to the deep blue of the sky.

  Memory, digressions and flashbacks have always been an integral part of the narrative structure of your works.

  It’s often thought that life is punctuated chronologically by events. In reality, we don’t know their significance. It’s memory that restores their lost meaning to us. And yet all that remains visible and expressible is often the superfluous, the mere appearances, the surface of our experience. The rest stays inside, obscure, so intense that we can’t even speak of it. The more intense things are, the more difficult it becomes for them to surface in their entirety. Working with memory in the classical sense doesn’t interest me—it’s not about stores of memory that we can dip into for facts, as we like. Moreover, the very act of forgetting is necessary—absolutely. If eighty per cent of what happened to us wasn’t repressed, then living would be unbearable. True memory is forgetting, emptiness—the memory that enables us not to succumb to the oppression of recollection and of the blinding pain which, fortunately, we have forgotten.

  Citing Flaubert, and with him a large part of the contemporary literary tradition, Jacqueline Risset has spoken of your work as an uninterrupted series of ‘books about nothing’.3 Novels built precisely on nothingness.

  To write isn’t to tell a story, but to evoke what there is around it; you create around the story, one moment after another. Everything there is, but everything which might also not be or which might be interchangeable—like the events of life. The story and its unreality, or its absence.

  Is that how you explain your recurrent, unusual use of the conditional?

  The conditional is better than any other mode at rendering the idea of artificiality that underlies both literature and cinema. Each event appears as the potential, hypothetical consequence of something else. When they’re playing, being thoroughly conscious of the fiction and, at the same time, of the frivolity of play, children are constantly using verbs in the conditional tense.

  Often—I’m thinking of examples like Suzanne Andler and The Square— instead of coming to a conclusion, your novels end on the adverb ‘perhaps’, connoting the random character of their endings.

  I’ve always distrusted stories that suddenly ‘end’.

  Your non-stories might be said to resort to a sort of zero degree of the novelistic imaginary. And yet you simply maintain a single discourse, which is both epic and already somewhat hackneyed—the discourse of love.

  Only a certain idiotic avant-garde believed they could renew literature by racking their brains to explore unknown places.

  Rather than employing recondite, refined formulations, the language you use seems to draw on a certain vigorous everyday speech.

  An automatic process of paring and shrinking down the raw material of language goes on inside me. An aspiration to stylistic economy, to a geometric space where every word stands bare.

  In your most recent novels, Blue Eyes, Black Hair and Emily L. (and even more so in your films thanks to the use of voice-overs) you use the technique called ‘double narration’. The narrator is someone who, while being involved in the story in the first person, is watching another story that’s unfolding simultaneously. Hence, the point of view is offset or split off from the core narrative.

  What reaches the reader is never the direct story, the plain account of what happened. At the very most it is the emotion, the sublimated residue. Isn’t that how it is when we tell our dreams?

  The gaze, the endless intersection of gazes melting into one another, remains the true cognitive instrument to which the reality of characters and history unveils itself. Gazes superimposed on one another. Each character looks at someone, and is looked at by someone, who in turn is observed by someone else. All without it being possible for the whole to be reduced to the supreme, omniscient gaze—that of the narrator in this case—who would encapsulate and express them all. The plot of Lol V. Stein is highly representative: a real story of voyeurism. The heroine shows a particular interest in the course of the other events. Just as, at the beginning of the narrative, Lol had been present when her fiancé Michael Richardson had met Anne-Marie Stretter, so, subsequently, in the unconscious desire endlessly to perpetuate the scene of the two lovers, who more or less relegate her to the role of eternal spectator, she is present at the meeting between Jacques Hold and Tatiana Karl.

  Voyeurism—there are numerous examples, from certain triangles in L’Amour to what happens in Destroy, She Said, Moderato Cantabile and Emily L.—is a constant theme of your work. As if in a desire to confirm the hypothesis of the continuous presence of a third party watching passion arise within a couple.

  I’ve always thought that love was a three-cornered affair—one eye watching on while desire circulates from one person to the other. Psychoanalysis speaks of a compulsive repetition of the primal scene. Personally, I would speak of writing as the third element of a story. And, indeed, we never coincide entirely with what we do; we are never entirely where we believe we are. There is a gap between ourselves and our actions, and everything happens outside. Characters look, knowing they are themselves being looked at. They are excluded and, at the same time, included in the ‘primal scene’ which unfolds before them once again.

  Your films and novels don’t obey linearity or succession in the temporal dimension. Just as the unity of time has disintegrated—which through flashbacks and foretastes of what will be narrated later turns cyclically on itself—so the unities of place and action collapse too.

  The criterion you follow is that of simultaneity—not one, but three actions at once are taken apart and reassembled in parallel, compressed montages.

  Corresponding with each event is something happening elsewhere. The time of the story coincides, then, with the immediate restoration of an inner time for the individual characters and the—liberated—flow of an action in terms of various spatiotemporal coordinates.

  The events of our lives are never unique, nor do they succeed one another unambiguously, as we would wish. Multiple and irreducible, they echo infinitely in consciousness; they come and go from our past to the future, spreading like an echo, like circles rippling out in water, constantly exchanging places.

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  • • • LITERATURE • • •

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  Why, as you see it, do people begin to write?

  I have in mind here my last novel, Emily L. Emily reads, she writes poems. Everything, in fact,
began with literature, as suggested to her by her father; everything begins with some poems by Emily Dickinson that are the—distant—inspiration for the book. I don’t really know what pushes people to write except, perhaps, a lonely childhood. For me, as for Emily, there was a father or a book or a teacher or a woman lost in the paddy fields of Cochinchina. Do you know what, I don’t think I’ve ever got to know anyone without asking myself this question: When people don’t write, what do they do? I have a secret admiration for people who don’t and yet, as a matter of fact, I don’t know how they’re able not to.

  What relation is there between writing and the real?

  All writers, whether they wish to or not, are talking about themselves. About themselves and the main event in their lives. In the very places where we seem to be telling of things alien to ourselves, it’s ourselves and our obsessions that are in play. It’s the same with dreams, as Freud says—it’s simply our egoism showing through.

  The writer has two lives: one, on the surface of the self, which makes him talk and act day by day. And the other, the real life, which follows him everywhere and gives him no rest.

  To what extent is the autobiographical element important to you?

  The beginnings of a story you write always lie with others, with the people you meet, love and observe closely. It’s stupid to think, as some writers do—even great ones—that we’re alone in the world.

  In With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey, Marguerite Yourcenar claims ‘When I write I am carrying out a task, writing under my own dictation, as it were. I am performing the difficult and exhausting labour of putting my own thought in order, straightening out my own dictation.’1

  One fragment after the other, little by little, without trying to find direct correspondences between the different periods—I let the connections form unwittingly.

  Writing, consequently, as passive gestation, the revelation of something one already knows . . .

  It’s about deciphering what exists within us already in a rudimentary state, indecipherable to others, in what I call the ‘site of passion’.

  Could you define the actual process of your writing?

  It’s an incorrigible inspiration that comes to me more or less once a week, then disappears for months. A very ancient injunction—the need to sit oneself down to write without as yet knowing what. The writing itself attests to this ignorance, to this search for the shadowy place where the entirety of experience is gathered.

  For a long time I thought writing was a job of work. I’m now convinced that it’s an inner event, a ‘non-work’ that you accomplish, above all, by emptying yourself out, and allowing what’s already self-evident to percolate through. I wouldn’t speak so much about economy, form or composition of prose as about balances of opposing forces that have to be identified, classified, contained by language. Like a musical score. If you don’t take that into account, then you do indeed write ‘free’ books, but writing has nothing to do with that kind of freedom.

  So that would be the ultimate reason you write?

  What’s painful is having to perforate our inner darkness until its primal potency spreads over the whole page, converting what is by nature ‘internal’ into something ‘external’. That’s why I say that only the mad write absolutely. Their memory is a ‘holed’ memory, addressed totally to the outside world.

  Writing to exorcize one’s fantasies? You yourself argue that writing is therapeutic.

  As a child, I was always afraid of contamination by leprosy. It’s only afterwards, writing about it somewhere, that leprosy lost its terror for me, if that can explain things for you.

  I write to be coarsened, to be torn to pieces, and then to lose my importance, to unburden myself—for the text to take my place so that I exist less. There are only two ways I manage to free myself of me: by the idea of suicide and the idea of writing.

  Yourcenar claims that a writer ‘is useful if he clarifies the reader’s thinking, rids him of timidity or prejudice, or makes him see and feel things that he would not otherwise have seen or felt’.2

  Yes, real writers are necessary. They give form to what others feel in a shapeless way—that’s why totalitarian regimes banish them.

  What, as you see it, is the task of literature?

  To represent what’s forbidden. To say what isn’t normally said. Literature must be scandalous—all the activities of the mind today must have some risk and adventure in them. The poet himself embodies this very risk, as someone who, unlike us, doesn’t put up defences against life.

  Look at [Arthur] Rimbaud, [Paul] Verlaine . . . But Verlaine only comes afterwards. The greatest is still Baudelaire—it took him just twenty poems to achieve eternity.

  You alluded in an interview to precise features that might be said to distinguish masculine writing from feminine.

  There’s a close, natural relation that has always linked women with silence and, hence, with knowledge of themselves, with self-awareness. That leads their writing towards that authenticity which male writing lacks, its structure relating too greatly to bodies of ideological or theoretical knowledge.

  In short, men can be said to be more connected to knowledge, understood as cultural baggage?

  And hence to power, to authority, which are not in themselves related to genuine writing. Look at what Roland Barthes has written on love. Fascinating fragments—meticulous, intelligent and literary, but cold. The words of someone who knows love only by reading about it or seeing it from afar, without knowing its transports, its impulses, its pain. There’s nothing in what he writes that isn’t extremely controlled. It was only thanks to his homosexuality that Proust was able, by being thrust into the twists and turns of passion, to make literature out of it at the same time.

  Don’t you think you’re going a bit far there?

  By masculine writing, I mean writing that’s too weighed down with ideas. Proust, Stendhal, [Herman] Melville and Rousseau have no sex.

  Talking of your relations with Raymond Queneau, you’ve told how you quarrelled with him over a judgement he’d passed on your book The Square, criticizing it for its excessive romanticism, when you’d wanted to leave a highly materialistic imprint on it.

  On that occasion, he really didn’t get it. Any more than those who read the book only as a love story . . .

  What other memories do you have of Queneau and your meetings with him?

  I liked him. I think Zazie in the Metro’s an extraordinary book. But I ask myself this: Who knows how Queneau would have ended up if he hadn’t been afraid of himself, of the deep recesses of his thinking?

  Did you talk about writing in those days when you had dealings with him?

  He had his own way of going through the manuscripts that came in to Gallimard. He claimed it only took a few pages to form an idea of them—not so much to know if the book was well executed or not, but whether the author was an egocentric amateur splurging across the page like a girl writing her diary, or whether you were dealing with a genuine—if not necessarily good—writer. The writer, he used to tell me, is someone who realizes they’re not alone as they confront the text.

  What relations did you have with the authors of the Nouveau Roman—Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Ollier, Claude Simon?

  All too intellectual for me. With a theory of literature to keep to and all imagination to be subordinated to it. Personally, I’ve never had ideas in that regard, never had anything to teach . . .

  Nathalie Sarraute is one of my very dearest friends. Of course, I’ve always thought her essays—on Dostoyevsky, for example3—were better than her novels, which are always too cerebral. A few years ago she also started to write in an autobiographical style. But who among us has read Childhood? Word has it she sold very few copies.4 Robbe-Grillet’s got to the third volume of his family saga.5 But tell me, do they
still talk about his books in Italy? Agreed, he’s a very brilliant man, an enthusiast . . . I remember one time when, a little bit confusedly, as was his way and no doubt with no ill intentions, he accused me of being repetitive.6 As though dwelling on certain subjects, from one book to another, necessarily meant lacking imagination. Every new text I produce replaces the old one, amplifies it, modifies it.

  There was talk in the 1950s, at the time of novels like The Sea Wall or Moderato Cantabile, of some stylistic and thematic affinities between yourself and the École du Regard.

  That’s not a topic I like to discuss. I simply say that my masters are and always will be other writers: Hemingway’s dialogue, Mme de La Fayette’s and Benjamin Constant’s analyses of love, and then Faulkner, Musil, Rousseau . . .

  What do you think of some contemporary French writers, such as Philippe Sollers, Michel Tournier, Michel Leiris, Michel Butor?

  Who reads them? My suspicion is that they’re boring. When it comes to people like Butor, after La Modification I don’t think he had much to say. Sollers is too limited:7 someone like him, who does all he can to attract the general public and get himself talked about by scandalizing the bourgeoisie with subjects that don’t actually shock anyone any more, can’t have much confidence in himself.

  And then, I believe, those people can’t stand me any more. They’re envious, like most of the critics, who are up in arms every time I write in the newspapers or appear on TV, ready to attack me as they did last year when [Jean-Luc] Godard and I talked about books and cinema on TV.8