The Suspended Passion

by Marguerite Duras

  This interview was adapted for the theatre by Guy Naigeon in October 2012 at the Nouveau Théâtre du 8ème in Lyon. [Back to text]

  4 Co-directed with Paul Seban. Her first film in the strict sense was Détruire dit-elle in 1969. [Back to text]

  5 Duras, ‘Notes on India Song’ in Marguerite Duras by Marguerite Duras, p. 8 (translation modified). [Back to text]

  6 In reality fifteen, if we count the film that was co-directed, the medium-length films and the companion film to India Song that is Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert, which has the same soundtrack but different visuals. To these should be added four shorts. We may, of course, regard The Long Absence and Hiroshima mon amour as films by Marguerite Duras, since they very much bear her stamp. Her last film, inspired by her text Ah! Ernesto, is The Children (1985). Most of her films have also been published in written form either before or after the film was made. Several have appeared as small volumes. Duras’ stories and novels number somewhere around twenty. [Back to text]

  7 Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike trans) (London: Picador, 1995), p. 709. [Back to text]

  8 Around 200,000 euros in today’s money. [Back to text]

  9 To Michelle Porte, in Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras, p. 94, Duras said:

  But the films that I do make are made in the same place as my books, the place of passion; it’s where one is deaf and blind. At least I try to be there as much as possible. Whereas the films of the Saturday cinema, as I call it, the cinema of the consumer society, which are meant to please, to amuse, are made in the place of the spectator, following precise formulae certain to appeal to him, to keep him there the length of the show. But this cinema, once it is ended, leaves nothing, nothing after it. It is erased the moment it’s through. While mine, it seems to me, begins the next day, like something read (‘The Places of Marguerite Duras’, Edith Cohen trans., Enclitic 7[2] [Fall 1983]: 60). [Back to text]

  10 None of Duras’ films has been as successful as her books. Her son Jean Mascolo bought up the rights to the eleven full-length films for the Éditions Benoît Jacob which he founded in 1998, in order to make available his mother’s forgotten (literary and cinematographic) works or those which had become hard to find. Gérard Depardieu bought the footage of Le Camion. [Back to text]

  11 In Le Monde of 27 November 1981, Duras published a warning—or, rather, an instruction—to the public, aimed at those who might not be prepared to tolerate the half hour of absolute darkness the film contained. It recommended that those viewers ‘completely avoided seeing L’Homme atlantique and, in fact, gave it a very wide berth’. As for the ‘others’, they ‘should see it without fail and not miss it for anything’. [Back to text]

  12 This radical, and in fact caricatural, position probably doesn’t reflect the relationship between the two artists, who have many things in common, as is often highlighted in academic studies. The ignorance of Pasolini which Duras professes here was probably not always so clear-cut. It seems unthinkable that she didn’t see The Hawks and the Sparrows [Uccellacci e uccellini], which ties in with her obsessions about the Communist Party, or Medea, which was so close to her conception of passion and, most importantly, had Maria Callas in it whom she venerated—not to mention such films as Pigsty, The Earth as Seen from the Moon [La Terra vista dalla Luna] or Teorema, which have an aesthetic form and use symbolism in a way that could not but be of direct interest to her. We can only deplore that she did not read Pasolini’s The Scent of India and his political poems from the 1960s and 70s, which coincide with her concerns at that time. Similarly, her peremptory condemnation of Ingmar Bergman below may also seem aberrant. Or Duras’ injunction against the use of speech in the cinema, which is more than somewhat paradoxical coming from her. [Back to text]

  13 ‘L’homme tremblant. Conversation entre Marguerite Duras et Elia Kazan’, Cahiers du Cinéma 318 (December 1980). Reprinted in Les Yeux verts (Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, 1987), p. 193. [Back to text]

  14 Among other things, she told him:

  I am like you. I was born in the colonies. The place of my birth was demolished. And, if you like, that’s always with me—the fact of not living where you were born . . . You had two strokes of luck. Poverty and the distance from the place where you lived afterwards. I view that as two strokes of luck. You were able to go back to Turkey. For me, there was the war, I was married, I had a child, I’ve never been able to go back to my native country and I never will. I’m completely separated from my childhood (ibid.). [Back to text]

  15 Les Cahiers du cinéma 312–13 (June 1980, special issue edited by Serge Daney). Translated by Carol Barko as Green Eyes (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). [Back to text]

  16 In 1987. It was reprinted in 2006. [Back to text]

  17 The Cahiers du Cinéma organized a round-table discussion on the film, in which Godard actually said ‘Let’s begin by saying that it’s great literature’ (without mentioning Duras) and, in reality, concentrated mainly on Resnais’s cinematographic work:

  There’s one things that troubles me a bit in Hiroshima, which also troubled me in Night and Fog and it’s that there’s a certain readiness to show horrific scenes, since we’re quickly beyond aesthetics here. I mean that, whether they’re filmed well or badly—that doesn’t much matter—such scenes make a dreadful impression on the viewer. Whether a film about concentration camps or torture bears the name of Couzinet or Visconti, I find personally that it makes very little difference. Before Brink of Life, there was a documentary produced by UNESCO which showed in a montage with a musical accompaniment, all the people who were suffering on the earth—the disabled, the blind, the infirm, the hungry, the old, the young, etc.—the title escapes me. It must have been called Man or something of that kind. Well, the film was vile. No comparison with Night and Fog, but all the same it was a film that was disturbing to people, just as recently the Nuremberg Trials were. The trouble then, in showing scenes of horror, is that you’re automatically outstripped by your intentions, and people are shocked by these images in more or less the same way as they are by pornographic images. Ultimately, what shocks me in Hiroshima is that the images of the couple making love in the early shots frighten me the same way as the images of the wounds—also in close-up—caused by the atomic bomb. There’s something not immoral, but amoral in showing love or horror with the same close-ups like that. That’s perhaps where Resnais is truly modern as opposed to someone like Rossellini. But I also find that it’s a regression, since in Journey to Italy, when George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman are looking at the charred bodies of the couple in Pompeii, you had the same sense of anguish and beauty, but with something extra (Jean Domarchi, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean-Luc Godard, Pierre Kast, Jacques Rivette and Éric Rohmer, ‘Table ronde sur Hiroshima mon amour d’Alain Resnais’, Cahiers du cinema 97 [July 1959]. Reprinted in Luc Lagier, Hiroshima mon amour: Duras écrit et Resnais filme. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma/SCÉRÉN-CNDP, 2007). [Back to text]

  18 In fact, Resnais went to Japan merely to make the film once the screenplay had been written. It was during the making of the film that he requested one-off changes from Duras, but he sometimes had to make changes without waiting for her agreement. In Luc Lagier’s book (see note 17 above), the article Duras published in France-Observateur is cited (‘Travailler pour le cinéma’, August 1958):

  I didn’t have the time in nine weeks to produce literature, as Resnais very well knew. Just as he knew I hadn’t the time to produce a screenplay, that I didn’t know how. Yet he continued to advise me to be literary. Up to the last day that was his advice. If we had to save the face of something during this period, Resnais had chosen to save the literary face of the enterprise.

  In an interview published in Le Monde on 9 November 1972, Duras is more precise. She wrote a synopsis in a fortnight. Resnais approved it and in the seven weeks preceding his leaving for Japan they
worked together: ‘Each day I developed the synopsis. Resnais came every day or every other day to read what I’d written. Either he “could see” it or he couldn’t and when he couldn’t I started again until he could. Then he asked me to describe the film to him as though it were done.’ [Back to text]

  19 The equivalent of 30,000 euros at today’s rates. [Back to text]

  20 This is the nickname Duras gave to her son Jean. [Back to text]

  21 Respectively in Nathalie Granger (Jeanne Moreau and Lucia Bosè), India Song (Delphine Syrig), Whole Days in the Trees (Bulle Ogier and Madeleine Renaud), Agatha and the Limitless Readings (Bulle Ogier), Le Navire Night (Dominique Sanda), Jaune le soleil and Woman of the Ganges (Catherine Sellers). Isabelle Adjani, the partner of Bruno Nuytten, who was Duras’ cinematographer, was simply a close friend and never worked with her. [Back to text]

  22 The play was premiered at the Odéon on 1 December 1965 in a production by Jean-Louis Barrault and had a second run ten years later, beginning on 14 October 1975, at the Théâtre d’Orsay. [Back to text]

  23 In 1969 Duras published a portrait entitled ‘Delphine Seyrig, a Celebrated Unknown’, which was republished in Outside: Selected Writings (Arthur Goldhammer trans.) (London: Fontana, 1987), pp. 159–63. [Back to text]

  24 Duras also devoted an article/interview to Jeanne Moreau in Vogue in 1965, which is reprinted in Outside (pp. 164–72). Let us remind the reader that Moreau also starred in The Sailor from Gibraltar (1967), that she made a record inspired by India Song and that she played Marguerite Duras in the film that was made by Josée Dayan in 2001 from Yann Andréa’s book Cet amour-là. [Back to text]

  • • • THEATRE

  1 The supplement to the weekly magazine L’Illustration, which contained a stage play. [Back to text]

  2 Dionys Mascolo (1916–97) was married to Marguerite Duras from 1947 to 1956 and is the father of her son. He worked as a publisher with Gallimard. After a brief period in the French Communist Party, he was an anti-colonial activist. He is the author of several works of non-fiction, including Le Communisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1953) and Autour d’un effet de mémoire (Paris: Nadeau, 1998). [Back to text]

  • • • PASSION

  1 In With Open Eyes, Yourcenar deplores, above all, that the European novel ignores the sacred dimension of love, which is almost always presented as ‘love born of vanity’ (p. 54). [Back to text]

  2 Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour and Une Aussi Longue Absence (London: Calder & Boyars, 1966), p. 25. [Back to text]

  3 In Hiroshima mon amour, ‘she’ says on the same page: ‘Devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness’. [Back to text]

  4 Marguerite Duras, A Duras Trilogy (London: John Calder, 1977), p. 91. [Back to text]

  5 Marguerite Duras, The Little Horses of Tarquinia (Peter DuBerg trans.) (London: John Calder, 1960), p. 161. In the same novel, Sara also says: ‘If you only like to make love with one man, you don’t like to make love at all’ (p. 34). Diana says: ‘Any love experienced is a diminution of love’ (p. 84). [Back to text]

  6 Marguerite Duras, Moderato Cantabile in Four Novels: The Square, Moderato Cantabile, 10:30 on a Summer Night, The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas (Richard Seaver trans.) (New York: Grove Press, 1982), p. 118. It is Chauvin’s last line of dialogue in the novel. [Back to text]

  7 In her interview with Pierre Bénichou and Hervé Le Masson cited above (Le Nouvel Observateur, 14 November 1986), Duras declared: ‘It isn’t fucking that counts, it’s having desire. The number of people who fuck without desire, that’s already enough as it is. All these women writers talk about it so badly, whereas it’s a whole world suddenly before you! I’ve known since childhood that the world of sexuality was fabulous, tremendous. The rest of my life has only confirmed that.’ [Back to text]

  8 I acquired that drinker’s face before I drank. Drink only confirmed it. The space for it existed in me. I knew it the same as other people, but, strangely, in advance. Just as the space existed in me for desire. At the age of fifteen I had the face of pleasure, and yet I had no knowledge of pleasure. There was no mistaking that face. Even my mother must have seen it. My brothers did. That was how everything started for me—with that flagrant, exhausted face, those rings round the eyes, in advance of time and experience’ (Marguerite Duras, The Lover. London: Harper Perennial, 2006, p. 12). [Back to text]

  9 We find allusions to these experiences in Blue Eyes, Black Hair, pp. 77–8. [Back to text]

  10 Among other places, in her interview with Jérôme Beaujour: ‘The men are homosexuals. All men are potentially homosexuals—all that’s missing is awareness of the fact, an incident or revelation that will bring it home to them. Homosexuals themselves know this and say so. And women who’ve known homosexuals and really loved them know it and say so too’ (Marguerite Duras and and Jérôme Beaujour, Practicalities: Marguerite Duras Speaks to Jérôme Beaujour. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990, p. 33). This takes up again what the man tells the woman in Blue Eyes, Black Hair: ‘He prophesies: Sooner or later he would have come to us, they all come, all one has to do is wait’ (p. 69). [Back to text]

  11 In Duras and Beaujour, Practicalities: ‘But in homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves, as if it were his lover, his country, his art, his land, is homosexuality’ (p. 35). [Back to text]

  12 Duras has made some very contradictory declarations on this question, which was a very personal concern for her, given her relations with Yann Andréa. Without going back over The Malady of Death and Blue Eyes, Black Hair, at the centre of which is precisely her passion for a homosexual who has come into her life and the way she turns a sense of deep humiliation into excessive pride, we may recall the text in Green Eyes in which she compares feminists and gay activists:

  I see a relation between homosexuality and women’s movements. They are, similarly, first and foremost preoccupied with themselves. Even pointless remarks made against homosexuality have the effect of strengthening their position in this minority separatism, paradoxically painful and desired. Today, one could say that women are intent upon still keeping intact and whole their difference with men. In the same way that homosexuals want to stick to the old tyranny, to keep the whole distance between them and society. To dare to suggest that things are improving for them is to offend them greatly. Like women, homosexuals want to keep open the legal actions brought against man, against society. They institute these actions, they make them the context for belonging, the chosen context of their martyrdom’ (Green Eyes. Carol Barko trans., New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, pp. 140–1). [Back to text]

  13 In 1989 only this book had appeared. After Duras’ death, Yann Andréa published Cet amour-là (Paris: Pauvert, 1999); Ainsi (Paris: Pauvert, 2000) ; and Dieu commence chaque matin (Paris: Bayard, 2001). [Back to text]

  • • • A WOMAN

  1 Duras and Beaujour, Practicalities, p. 125. [Back to text]

  2 ‘It seems she said, “My head’s full of dizziness and shouting. Full of wind. So, sometimes, for example, I write. Pages, you see.” ’ (Duras, Le Camion, p. 35.) [Back to text]

  3 Mitterand held this ministerial post from 21 October 1947 to 19 July 1948 in the government of Paul Ramadier and the first Robert Schuman government, both under the presidency of Vincent Auriol. [Back to text]

  4 It is natural for the sexes to co-operate. One has a profound, if irrational, instinct in favour of the theory that the union of man and woman makes for the greatest satisfaction, the most complete happiness. But the sight of the two people getting into the taxi and the satisfaction it gave me made me also ask whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body, and whether they also require to be united in order to get complete satisfaction and happiness? And I went on amateurishly to sketch a plan of the soul so that in each of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and
in the man’s brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman’s brain the woman predominates over the man. The normal and comfortable state of being is that when the two live in harmony together, spiritually co-operating (Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own. London: Vintage Books, 2001, p. 84.) [Back to text]

  5 Duras is borrowing words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge which follow the preceding quotation in Woolf’s text.

  If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties.

  Woolf herself develops a long analysis of the androgyny of every creative mind. The exact quotation from Coleridge, which dates from 1 September 1832 in his posthumously published Table Talk, is as follows: