The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  10 The explosion and fire at the Chernobyl Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine, which occurred on 26 April 1986, is generally regarded as one of the worst nuclear disasters in history. [Trans.] [Back to text]

  • • • TRAJECTORIES OF WRITING

  1 The book by Yann Andréa, whose real surname was Lemée, is, as mentioned above, an account of Duras’ treatment for alcoholism. [Back to text]

  2 Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community (Pierre Joris trans.) (Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988), p. 44. [Back to text]

  3 Jérôme Lindon was the head of the Éditions de Minuit publishing house from 1948 until his death in 2001 when his daughter Irène succeeded to the post. [Trans.] [Back to text]

  4 Jacques Lacan published a homage to this novel in Cahiers Renaud-Barrault 52 (December 1965): 7–15. Among other things, he writes:

  Is this not enough to reveal to us what has happened to Lol, and what it says about love; that is, about this image, an image of the self in which the other dresses you and in which you are dressed and which, when you are robbed of it, lets you be just what underneath? What is left to be said about that evening, Lol, in all your passion of nineteen years, so taken with your dress which wore your nakedness, giving it its brilliance?

  What you are left with, then, is what they said about you when you were a child, that you were never all there.

  But what exactly is this vacuity? It begins to take on a meaning: you were, yes, for one night until dawn, when something in that place gave way, the centre of attention.

  What lies concealed in this locution? A centre is not the same on all surfaces. Singular on a flat surface, everywhere on a sphere, on a more complex surface it can produce an odd knot. This last knot is ours.

  Because you sense that all this has to do with an envelope having neither an inside nor an outside, and in the seam of its centre every gaze turns back into your own, that these gazes are your own, which your own saturates and which, Lol, you will forever crave from every passerby. Let us follow Lol as she passes from one to the other, seizing from them this talisman which everyone is so eager to cast off: the gaze.

  Every gaze will be yours, Lol, as the fascinated Jacques Hold will say to himself, for himself, ready to love ‘all of Lol’.

  There is in fact a grammar of the subject which has taken note of this stroke of genius. It will return under the pen which pointed it out to me.

  You can verify it, this gaze is everywhere in the novel. And the woman of the event is easy to recognize, since Marguerite Duras has depicted her as non-gaze.

  I teach that vision splits itself between the image and the gaze, that the first model for the gaze is the stain, from which is derived the radar that the splitting of the eye offers up to the scopic field.

  The gaze spreads itself as a stroke on the canvas, making you lower your own gaze before the work of the painter (Marguerite Duras by Marguerite Duras, pp. 125–6). [Back to text]

  5 Le ravissement—this word is enigmatic. Does it have an objective or a subjective dimension—is it a ravishing or a being ravished—as determined by Lol V. Stein?

  Ravished. We think of the soul, and of the effect wrought by beauty. But we shall free ourselves, as best we can, from this readily available meaning, by means of a symbol.

  A woman who ravishes is also the image imposed on us by this wounded figure, exiled from things, who you dare not touch, but who makes you her prey.

  The two movements, however, are knotted together in a cipher that is revealed in a name skilfully crafted in the contour of writing: Lol V. Stein.

  Lol V. Stein: paper wings, V, scissors, Stein, stone, in love’s guessing game you lose yourself.

  One replies: O, open mouth, why do I take three leaps on the water, out of the game of love, where do I plunge?

  Such artistry suggests that the ravisher is Marguerite Duras, and we are the ravished. But if, to quicken our steps behind Lol’s steps, which resonate through the novel, we were to hear them behind us without having run into anyone, is it then that her creature moves within a space which is doubled; or is it rather that one of us has passed through the other, and which of us, in that case, has let himself be traversed?

  Or do we now realize that the cipher is to be calculated in some other way: for to figure it out, one must count oneself three (ibid., p. 122). [Back to text]

  6 In 1989. She had not yet published Summer Rain (1990), The North China Lover (1991), Yann Andréa Steiner (1992) and Writing (1993). [Back to text]

  7 On the album Ha! Ha! Ha! (1977). The group consisted of John Foxx (vocals), Stevie Shears (guitar), Warren Cann (drums), Chris Cross (bass) and Billy Currie (violin and keyboards). [Back to text]

  • • • TOWARDS A TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

  1 La Princesse de Clèves was published anonymously in Paris in March 1678. There seems little doubt that its author was Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, Comtesse de La Fayette, a member of the minor French nobility. See Madame de Lafayette, The Princesse de Clèves (Terence Cave trans.) (London: Oxford University Press, 2008). Other translations use the English title The Princess of Cleves and variant spellings of the author’s name. [Trans.] [Back to text]

  2 In an interview with Bernard Pivot on the Apostrophes programme of 28 September 1984, two months before she was awarded the Prix Goncourt for The Lover. She said she was sure she had now achieved this ‘flowing writing’, having tried for a long time to do so. She defined it as follows: ‘an almost absent-minded writing that flows, that’s more intent on grasping things than speaking them, you see—I’m talking about the crest of words—that runs along the crest, so as to go quickly, so as not to lose things.’ [Back to text]

  3 On Duras’ death, Jacqueline Risset borrowed this expression for the obituary she published in L’Unità in March 1996.

  She has gone to that ‘wild land’ that writing was for her. Perhaps Marguerite Duras was the one to fulfil, better than the other writers of the twentieth century, Flaubert’s desire to ‘write a book about nothing’, to submit the possibility of the act of writing to the utmost scrutiny, to define what might be called the primary cell, the atom of literature. In her books, fiction comes to life, not as it might seem at first sight through the fullness of the novelistic imaginary, with its rich flourishes, its composite, exotic spaces, but through the thoroughly pared-down, almost totally rarefied basic elements. And each time, it is about the exploration of an unknown space—often love as a site of emptiness and absence. [Back to text]

  • • • LITERATURE

  1 Marguerite Yourcenar, With Open Eyes: Conversations with Matthieu Galey (Arthur Goldhammer trans.) (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), p. 121. [Back to text]

  2 Ibid., p. 195. [Back to text]

  3 Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel (Maria Jolas trans.) (New York: G. Braziller, 1963). [Back to text]

  4 Nathalie Sarraute, Childhood (Barbara Wright trans.) (New York: G. Braziller, 1985). This was, in reality, Sarraute’s first true popular success. [Back to text]

  5 Robbe-Grillet was, in fact, in process of writing that volume, Les Derniers jours de Corinthe [The Last Days of Corinth], since it would not appear until 1994. The first two volumes, Le Miroir qui revient (1985) and Angélique ou l’Enchantement (1988), had already appeared, both published by Éditions de Minuit. [Back to text]

  6 In a later interview with Irène Frain published in the magazine Lire (July–August 2000), Robbe-Grillet was to say: ‘At the beginning, she was a funny, warm, lively woman. Towards the end, she became the character swollen with pride that has often been described. Every normal writer has to be convinced he is the greatest. Marguerite Duras was no exception to that rule, but she was simply unable to imagine that other writers than her were too . . . ’ [Back to text]

  7 Philippe Sollers was to publish an article in Le Nouvel Observateur
of 3–9 February 1994 entitled ‘Duras médium’. This was reprinted in Sollers, Éloge de l’infini (Paris: Gallimard, 2001) and in the special dossier of Le Monde entitled Marguerite Duras, la voix et la passion [Marguerite Duras, Voice and Passion], p. 85. He wrote:

  Duras’ books are incantations, litanies, gnomic utterances, divine afflatus. And afterwards, on the stage, who is spellbinding whom? Television? Marguerite Duras? Where is the truth? Where is the power?’

  Some years later, he will grant a fascinating, very frank interview to Jean-François Kervéan on the antipathy that had developed between Duras and himself in L’Événement du jeudi of 2 September 1998 on the occasion of Laure Adler’s biography of Duras being published. Among other things, Sollers says:

  The Duras problem interests me because she is the character emblematic of a France I don’t recognize myself in . . . With her we are, at the beginning, in the first great French problem which is that of colonialism—in this case in Indochina. And we have a Marguerite Duras who, under the name Donnadieu, presents herself as the champion of French colonialism. Her book at the time is explicit on this . . . She’s an able writer, with considerable powers of revelation in the sense in which a medium makes ‘revelations’. Her literature is more of the order of a soothsayer’s utterances than a conscious exercise of language. There’s a force in her, from which she derives her hypnotic hold which, when transferred to the screen in India Song or Hiroshima mon amour, reaches such a degree of ridicule and pathos that a mere child could jump up and point out that the emperor has no clothes. I’d suggest a relationship here between a hieratic style of behaviour and a way of hypnotizing oneself and a whole country that’s quite something . . . What I hear in Duras is something powerful, very insistent, authoritarian and instrumentalized, but something which, to my ear at least, sounds bogus . . . I’ve always wondered where this sense of the bogus comes from. Let’s go on . . . Then she got into what shocked me most, which I shall call pseudo-Judaism. I’m very sorry that I hear it this way, but in her proclaimed philosemitism, you can detect an over-commitment which, in my view, is due to an intense sense of guilt on her part for not having recognized the scale of the Holocaust. That guilt induces a self-terrorization that consists in trying to play the Jew in the Jews’ stead. That was how it was with Duras . . . In the 1970s we used to see each other. Tel Quel was near the rue Saint-Benoît and we’d go for a coffee at the Pré-aux-Clercs. She was quite positive towards me. That was the period of feminism too . . . She was relatively nice. She must already have been drinking a lot, but no matter. Then came the explosion, with the publication of [Sollers’s novel] Women. The book made a big impact. That was the point when she was about to hit the headlines, a year later, with The Lover. Mitterand came to power and she became the Sybil of the Elysée Palace, its prophetess . . . She embarked on her extraordinary ministry, in which she pronounced on Africa, the French provinces, the sex organ of the recumbent statue of Victor Noir in the Père Lachaise cemetery . . . This is the time of the Duras–Mitterand conversations in L’Autre Journal. She congratulates Mitterand on having built the submarine Richelieu, to which he politely points out that it’s an aircraft carrier. But no matter, these were the days of the soar-away Duras act . . . In an interview she did with Pierre Bergé for Globe, I was portrayed as the monk on the ‘Chaussée aux moines’ cheese label—tonsured, risible, vile with women, a talentless novelist, etc. From that point on, her attacks became systematic. After Women, she saw me as a blight on the landscape and hence to be destroyed . . . There’s a coldness and hardness in her, personally, I find her sham transcendence forced. I think it’s sad that someone who describes herself as a specialist in love should ask herself the question Laure Adler reports: ‘Why am I so nasty?’ . . . I find her books powerful and hypnotic. But I think they will age badly. Her films are already nowhere to be seen. The books will meet the same fate some day or other. It’s a literature that, with all its repetition, seems artificial and bloated. I always sensed a will to dominate in her, even on the telephone. I don’t like that. I can’t imagine Kafka was like that. [Back to text]

  8 Colette Fellous organized a meeting between Jean-Luc Godard and Duras on 2 December 1987. That one-hour conversation was filmed by Jean-Daniel Verhaeghe and broadcast as part of the Océaniques programme on FR3 on 28 December 1987. They talked about Emily L. and Godard’s film Soigne ta droite. Part of the conversation was published in Le Magazine littéraire of June 1990. [Back to text]

  9 Duras also bore a grudge against Sartre because, as she relates in an interview with Edda Melon that was published as a preface to the Italian translation of L’Amante anglaise, he had criticized ‘Madame Dodin’ which she had sent him for publication in Les Temps modernes.

  Sartre called me in to tell me the subject was interesting, that it was a good story, but I didn’t know how to write. And he added, ‘It’s not me saying that, but a woman, a woman I trust implicitly.’ It was, of course, Simone de Beauvoir. And to think that she was such a lousy writer, without the slightest grace, writing things in which everything is stated, is already present in the words on the page.

  But Les Temps modernes did actually publish Duras’ short story in May 1952. And it appeared two years later in Des journées entières dans les arbres, published by Gallimard. [Back to text]

  10 The publisher of the three aforementioned writers. He would, in fact, also be Duras’ Italian publisher. [Back to text]

  11 Elsa Morante’s novel appeared in Italy in 1974, but only in 1977 in France. Morante died on 25 November 1985. [It was published in English translation as History in 1977. —Trans.] [Back to text]

  • • • A GALLERY OF CHARACTERS

  1 Yourcenar, With Open Eyes, p. 48. In her text, Yourcenar speaks of Hadrian and Zeno, the central protagonist of The Abyss. Later, arguing along the same lines, she will say of her own father, Michel, as depicted in How Many Years: A Memoir:

  I am not Michel any more than I am Zeno or Hadrian. I tried to recreate him—as any novelist would—out of my own substance, but that substance is undifferentiated. One nourishes one’s created characters with one’s own substance: it’s rather like the process of gestation. To give the character life, or to give him back life, it is, of course, necessary to fortify him by contributing something of one’s own humanity, but it doesn’t follow from that that the character is I, the writer, or that I am the character. The two entities remain distinct (ibid., p. 176). [Back to text]

  2 Male characters from The Vice Consul, The Sea Wall, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, Moderato Cantabile and the cycle L’Amour, La Femme du Gange and India Song, respectively. [Back to text]

  • • • CINEMA

  1 On 29 May 1985, a few minutes before the beginning of the European Cup final between Juventus of Turin and Liverpool, a wall on the terraces and metal fencing collapsed under pressure from Scottish hooligans attacking the Italian supporters, resulting in thirty-nine dead and six hundred injured. Duras wasn’t the only one in front of her television. The whole of Europe watched this barbarism live. [It isn’t clear why the Heysel disaster is ascribed by the French translator to Scottish hooligans, nor indeed why he fails to mention that the Belgian courts attributed blame for this event in a more complex way. —Trans.] [Back to text]

  2 Nine years later, on 4 March 1996, the footballer confided to the journalist Patrick Leroux, also in Libération:

  That interview felt completely unreal, or rather surreal, insofar as I didn’t know who Marguerite Duras was, I wasn’t aware of her intellectual reputation. No, I wasn’t overawed since I’d no idea of the importance of this person in a literary world I knew nothing or virtually nothing about. On the other hand, I was very interested to meet her, since I’ve always loved getting to meet people from outside the football world. She fitted the bill, because I’m sure she’d never been to a football match. What I remember of the interview is her approach to me as a player. S
he kept talking about angelism, she’d even invented a word, angélhomme [angel-man], to describe footballers. She saw me as a blue angel . . . It was funny, it was new, and it was a completely different way of seeing sport. She talked to me a lot about atmosphere, about the relations between man and ball and about my family. Her questions were often affecting. When I played in Italy, a number of writers had written long articles on me, but they were all intellectuals who were interested in football. I was never questioned before by someone who knew so little about the game. [Back to text]

  3 ‘Duras-Platini, le stade de l’ange’. This was a meeting organized by the journalist Jean-Pierre Delacroix to coincide with the publication of Michel Platini’s book Ma vie comme un match (in collaboration with Patrick Mahé. Paris: Laffont, 1987). It was filmed as a two-part televised interview, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ce jeu-là. Démoniaque et divin’ (14 December) and ‘Le Stade de l’ange’ (15 December), the two parts being broadcast as part of the programme Des idées et des hommes. Among other things, Duras said:

  My job in the world is to look at it. The football pitch is a place where the other is the equal of yourself. On an equal footing . . . The football pitch, that place where the players play, to which they are confined, is a theatre the spectators watch, a place of confrontation and hence a place that’s already political. As soon as you have something at stake, even something like a banal victory, then defeat is also at stake, which is already less banal—and its justification through the use of insult: you’re no longer playing for the sake of playing, you’re playing against an enemy. And all’s fair in trying to do them down and give grounds for their defeat. No one escapes this abomination. Of course, there’s no translation into politics of what happens in a stadium. But already there’s a reflection, a racism—any words are OK. But you’ve never rejected anyone, I’m sure of that.