The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  At any rate, none of them will ever write a book like The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein.

  Do you know the ‘New Philosophers’?

  I don’t dislike them, quite the reverse. But they merely seem to be rather provincial young men, afflicted with Parisianism and Left-wing snobbery. There doesn’t seem to be much else to say about them, particularly for someone like me who lived through times of a completely different order of cultural depth.

  Before Marguerite Yourcenar died, they said that the two of you were the foremost women writers in French.

  Yourcenar was a member of the Académie française, I wasn’t. What else is there to say? Memoirs of Hadrian is a great book. The rest, apart from How Many Years?, are, to my mind, unreadable. I gave up on them halfway through.

  I was sometimes mistaken for her in the street. You’re the Belgian novelist, aren’t you? Yes, yes, I’d reply and then I’d slip away.

  What do you think of committed literature, such as the work of Albert Camus?

  As I’ve said, my contemporaries bore me. In most cases. I worked out that all his books had been constructed the same way, using the same trick, with the same moralizing objective. I find the very idea that literature can be conceived as a way of supporting an argument boring beyond words.

  Let’s come to your relationship with [Jean-Paul] Sartre.

  I think Sartre is the reason for the regrettable cultural and political backwardness of France. He saw himself as Marx’s heir, as the only true interpreter of his thought—that’s where the ambiguities of existentialism come from. If you think of someone like [Joseph] Conrad, you can’t even talk about Sartre as a real writer. Now he’s just an isolated figure, huddled away in a kind of enforced exile. Before the war, the intellectual had to join the Party, as I did myself, but instead of the activism he should have been engaged in, Sartre took issue with the alleged ‘sins of the intellectual’—sins that were primarily his.9

  Among your regular visitors in the 1950s, there was also Georges Bataille.

  We were very good friends, but nothing will ever shake my conviction—or at least my suspicion—that Bataille had something very Catholic in him. There’s a sort of ambiguity runs that through all his work, as though he’d been tormented by a very old sense of guilt that both repelled and fascinated him at the same time. His erotic writings confirm this—and yet they deal with an external transgression. They have more to do with a sterile jouissance on paper, than a living jouissance felt in one’s body.

  As for his use of language, Bataille’s greatness lies in his way of ‘not writing’ while still writing.

  The absence of style in The Blue of Noon has to do with wanting at all costs to blank out all literary memory within oneself. In a sense, restoring a primal value to words, shorn of all their other implications. Similarly, the characters in the book, freed from the dross of bourgeois individualism, are moving towards annihilation, towards the dissolution of the ‘self’.

  You’ve spent a lot of time with Italian writers and intellectuals like Elio Vittorini, Italo Calvino, Cesare Pavese and Giulio Einaudi.10 You know Italy well from having spent a large part of your holidays there in the 1950s and 60s. What do you think of contemporary Italian literature?

  I stopped reading it in the mid 60s. Obviously, there was Vitaliano Brancati, Italo Svevo and Carlo Emilio Gadda. To be truly great, Vittorini should have left Italy, should have become less provincial, do you see?

  Your liking for Elsa Morante is well known.

  That’s right. La Storia, that story of a woman walking alone in the bombed-out streets of Rome with her dog and her child—that’s an image I can’t get out of my head. I think I loved Morante for that and just when I’d have liked to have met her to talk about her novel, she died before I could tell her.11

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  • • • THE CRITICS • • •

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  When were your books first talked about?

  In 1958, with Moderato Cantabile. The critics were divided about the book and that’s how it’s always been ever since. Some trotted out the nouveau roman label, speaking of ‘a story that isn’t a story’.

  And then there were years of silence and lack of interest in your work on the part of most critics and a large part of the public. Then, suddenly, in 1984 came the Duras phenomenon: The Lover sold a million and a half copies in France alone. It was translated into twenty-six languages. How do you explain this sudden turnabout?

  Every time a book comes out, the critics make the author feel in the wrong. They make her feel she needs to justify her work—and even her existence. With me, here in France, that’s always how it’s been. We’ve had enough of that now. It isn’t me or my writing that have changed, but the public. Nowadays people also read hard, difficult things. And if they don’t understand them, if they only grasp what’s said, what’s clear in a text, they carry on all the same, they get beyond the obscure passages. You advance by jumps in modern literature, from light to obscurity. And it’s the same with scientific progress. Even if we don’t know where and how far to advance, we advance all the same.

  At the age of seventy, The Lover won you the most prestigious of literary awards, the Prix Goncourt.

  Awarding it to me—simply because there was no valid reason not to—is a political matter: it was the beginning of a new conception of the meaning of that prize, which was traditionally given to young writers to encourage the production of literature.

  Even among those around the Goncourt, you feel the influence of this ‘Mitterand Era’, in which everyone wants to conform . . .

  For almost ten years I lived off my German royalties. Then I moved on to the royalties from Britain. I was a clandestine figure in France. I was subject to a kind of blackout.

  And what brings me closer to the other women who write, who really write—from Colette onwards—is this way of feeling like an enfant terrible of literature. The critics have always been harsh on everything coming from certain female domains: the themes of love, confession and autobiography. For years, women’s transgression was expressed in—and confined to—poetry. I wanted to transfer it to the novel and a lot of what I’ve done is, I think, revolutionary.

  What do you think of literary prizes?

  My ideal would be a prize that put an end to that all-powerful criticism which is, in France, subject to the rules of power, where it’s about the institution even more than the literary value of a work. The prize itself becomes the aim of writing. You would have to be able to judge the prize-jury first, to ensure that innovative intentions were to the fore. That’s why I refused to take part in the panel judging the Prix Médicis when they asked me to. And the prize they awarded to Claude Ollier wasn’t enough to make me change my mind.

  Has the blackout you spoke about just now conditioned how you write?

  No. My literature had an imperative force of its own. Doubts, if I had any, were about the writing itself, not the subject matter of my books. It was enough for me that, without even having to force them on the reader, certain things happened in people’s heads.

  There are readers today who, when they think of you, think first and foremost of your earliest books.

  A host of old readers take me to task for ‘not being so simple as in the past.’ I can’t say they’re wrong. The Lover, The Malady of Death and Emily L. are difficult books, where the text advances by ellipses, silences and innuendo. An almost amatory collusion between text and reader is needed that’s able to go beyond mere understanding of the sentences in themselves.

&nbs
p; Would you like to lay out a set of instructions for how to ‘read Duras’?

  A non-continuous reading which, by contrast with the reader’s normal habits, proceeds by jumps, jumps in temperature. Unlike the classic novel of the Balzac type, which is linear, these are open, unfinished books that are aimed, ultimately, at an evolving world, a world constantly on the move.

  Don’t you think there can be ways of educating people, of orienting them towards certain precise models for reading?

  The best thing is to let certain processes happen on their own.

  Do you think there have been misunderstandings between you and your readers in recent years?

  If that’s the case, they’re over morality, not literature. Take the case of The Lover. What I find extraordinary in the life of the young white girl has been seen as aberrant by a lot of mothers.

  Judging from the precautionary remarks you’ve made in the opening pages of your most recent books or on their back covers—defences, as it were, of the texts themselves—it would seem at all events that you need a lot of attention from the public.

  I’m obsessed by the idea that my books aren’t liked. Once I know that’s not the case I calm down and stop thinking about it, but I don’t find it easy to forget the scathing reviews. In 1964, The Ravishing was criticized and many long years afterwards, when the same newspaper—I won’t say its name—asked me to write for it, I couldn’t get that out of my mind.

  In Destroy, She Said and even in Nathalie Granger, some characters imply that books might be torn up and thrown away, even making downright calls for that to be done—emphatic calls at that.

  I thought it was necessary to destroy knowledge, to free oneself from it so as to be able to recreate it. Now I believe that one should only tear up books after having read an enormous amount. And then accumulate them again straight afterwards.

  And how do you read?

  I read at night, until three or four in the morning. The darkness around you adds greatly to the absolute passion that develops between you and the book. Don’t you find that? In a way, daylight dissipates the intensity.

  What do you read?

  I’ve come back to The Princesse de Clèves, a book that’s always read too quickly. It’s a very fine book that I’d like to have written myself. Its extraordinary modernity lies precisely in that paroxystic play of gazes that cross without ever meeting, those words they exchange without ever really pronouncing them, those interminable silences in which, in reality, the unspeakable depth of the truth is hidden, as in any love affair. Then there are, of course, the books that always go with me: Moby Dick, The Man Without Qualities, the Bible. I’m currently rereading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions and Jules Renard’s Journal—the notebooks of the great writers, summations of a whole life and an entire period, make for an extraordinary read, disordered as they are and untrammelled by narrative structures.

  As for the essay, once the great heritage of French literary endeavour, I find that, even in the case of some great practitioners like Jacques Le Goff and Georges Duby they keep trotting out concepts like ‘ignorance and doubt’ which, in themselves, have nothing creative about them any more. They’re no longer going anywhere.

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  • • • A GALLERY OF CHARACTERS • • •

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  The deepest way to get inside someone, as Marguerite Yourcenar sees it, is ‘to work to hear . . . to create a silence within yourself in order to hear what . . . [a character] would say in a particular situation. And you must take care never to put in your own voice, or at least see to it that what you do put in of yourself is at the level of the unconscious: you nourish your characters with your being as you might feed them your flesh, which is not at all same thing as feeding them your own petty personality with all the idiosyncrasies that make us who we are.’1 What technique do you use in the construction of these recurrent characters in the world of your novels and films?

  The image forms slowly, as though there were faded photographs to reconstitute from the surviving details by looking and imagining. It’s never the whole shape or the expression on a character’s face I manage to see. There are at best a few shreds of detail or just a simple characteristic gesture, as in Cubist painting.

  Your characters lie beyond typologies or objective descriptions. They’re beings disconnected from any reality, contingency or definition. Enigmatic, hovering between madness and normality, screaming and silence, they emerge suddenly on the scene without any of that inevitability and necessity that normally underpin the classic mechanisms of fiction. A form of ceremonial, something ritualistic pervades their actions and the unremitting flow of their speech. But there is no defined psychological framework for the individual character.

  The hero of the traditional, Balzacian novel possesses an identity that’s all his own, a smooth, unassailable identity pre-established by the narrator. But human beings are just bundles of disconnected drives and literature should render them as such.

  Your work is based more on the dismembering of the personality of your protagonists than on their progressive construction.

  I lay hold of them at this unfinished stage of their construction and deconstruction, because what interest me is the study of the cracks, of the unfillable blanks that emerge between word and action, of the residues to be found between what’s said and what remains unsaid.

  More than any other form of expression, it is dialogue that gives the characters their shape. What precedes the essence of their deep natures, the flow of consciousnesses, is the image of an existence evaluated only through spoken words and contingent action. The inner urgency that drives the characters isn’t revealed or even analysed.

  With the result that the reader will never be able to identify with them, contrary to what is usually done, by yielding to a surface psychologism. But the words my characters speak—like the words all characters speak, perhaps— conceals their essence more than it reveals it. All they try to say and think is merely the attempt to muffle their own true voices.

  If the male characters most often embody aspects of a weak, uncertain personality—I’m thinking of the Vice Consul of Lahore, Monsieur Jo, Jacques Hold, Chauvin, Michael Richardson2 and the travelling salesman in The Square—it’s the female roles you endow with strength and with the radical need to experience the full gamut of feelings.

  Yes, women are the true guardians of a total openness to the external world, to life and to the overwhelming force of passion. I think that’s why women are more directed towards the future and forms of life that renew themselves, like the silent heroines of The Malady of Death, Blue Eyes, Black Hair and Emily L. Men are more fossilized in pasts they can’t shake off, they are prisoners of a desire they’d like to indulge but, hopelessly, cannot. By contrast, all the heroines of my films and books are like sisters of Andromache, Phaedra or Berenice—they are martyrs to a love that overwhelms them, to the point where it touches on the sacred.

  The host of men and women that populate your books seem to derive from an archetype that is part of all of them to some extent. Anne-Marie Stretter and Lol V. Stein might be said to represent the genesis of the feminine archetype and the Vice Consul of Lahore the genesis of the male characters.

  Lol is emblematic of a woman brought down by eternal desire, crushed definitively by the weight of her experience and memory. Though Lol goes on living after the ball at S. Thala, she leads an existence that enfolds her only as something alien, something bound up solely with her body or with animal instinct. For her, repressing her pain means acquiring a kind of ne
w virginity, to the point where she has to remember everything each day as though for the first time. As for Anne-Marie Stretter, I truly do believe that I began writing for her—as though what I wrote had been simply the incessant rewriting of the fascination I felt, one day, for the almost deathly languor of that woman. I remember the first time I saw her arrive; she was the wife of the French ambassador at Saigon. She got out of a big black car. In a low-cut dress that revealed her slim, white body and with her French hairstyle, she stepped lightly and slowly along the road. I kept up a watch on her after that. I saw her leaving her home as soon as the sun went down and the heat abated, her beauty beyond my imagining.

  The news that, for the love of her, a man—her young lover—had killed himself in Luang Prabang, Laos, disturbed me greatly. As mother and adultress, the woman became my personal secret from that point on—she was the feminine, maternal archetype that my mother never was, being too crazy to be that.

  In the Vice Consul, by contrast—and, indeed, in many of the other men in my books, from the Chinese lover to the man in The Malady of Death—there was such great pain and weakness, an inability to live, based precisely on the total rejection of self and society. That, at least, is how my adolescent eye saw it. The impossible love affair between Anne-Marie Stretter and him represents, from that moment on, the story of absolute love and of the totality of colonial India.