Destroy, She Said

by Marguerite Duras

  Max Thor comes back into the room.

  “I've told them to call us just before six,” he says.

  “You take N 113,” Stein says without moving, “and turn off at Narbonne.”

  Max Thor stretches out in the other chair. He points to Alissa.

  “She's resting,” Stein says.

  “Yes. My love.”

  “Yes.”

  Max Thor offers Stein a cigarette. Stein takes one. They talk quietly.

  “Perhaps we oughtn't to have gone into the whole thing?” Max Thor says. “Elisabeth Alione?”

  “It wouldn't have made any difference.”

  Silence.

  “What could have come of it?”

  Stein doesn't answer.

  “Desire?” Max Thor asks. “And erosion by desire?”

  “Yes. By your desire.”

  Silence.

  “Or death by Alissa,” Stein says.

  Silence.

  Stein smiles.

  “We don't have any choice now,” he says.

  Silence.

  “Would she have gone into the forest with Alissa?” asks Max Thor. “What do you think?”

  Stein strokes Alissa's legs and presses her to him.

  “She belongs to whoever wants her. She feels whatever they feel. Yes.”

  Silence.

  “It would have taken a few more days,” says Stein, “for her to yield to Alissa's desire.”

  “It was a strong one.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “But not clear.”

  “No. Alissa would have found out in the forest.”

  Silence.

  “The place they're going to is very small,” says Stein. “It will be easy to find them in the evening, in the streets or in the cafes. She'll be glad to see us.”

  Silence.

  “We'll say we've stopped in Leucate on our way to Spain. We'll say we like it and have decided to stay.”

  “It is on our way.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “Let's rest,” Stein says.

  Silence.

  “I can see it all,” Max Thor says. “The square. The cafes. It's so easy.”

  “Yes, very. She's gentle, cheerful.”

  “Let's rest, Stein.”

  “Yes"—he points to Alissa—"she's resting.”

  Silence.

  “She's having a wonderful sleep,” says Stein.

  “Yes. Our sleep.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “Did you hear anything?”

  “Yes. A sort of crack in the air?”

  “Yes.”

  Silence. Alissa moans, stirs, then is still.

  “She's dreaming,” says Stein.

  “Or did she hear it too?”

  Silence.

  “Someone beating a gong?”

  “Sounded rather like . . .”

  Silence.

  “Or was she dreaming? She can't choose her own dreams?”

  “No.”

  Silence. They smile at each other.

  “Did she say something?”

  Stein looks at Alissa closely, listens to her body.

  “No. Her lips are parted but she isn't saying anything.”

  Silence.

  “How old is Alissa?” asks Stein.

  “Eighteen.”

  “And when you met her?”

  “Eighteen.”

  Silence.

  “There it is again,” says Max Thor. “Muffled this time.”

  “Like someone hitting a tree.”

  “Or as if the earth trembled.”

  Silence.

  “Let's rest, Stein.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence.

  “Alissa isn't dead?”

  “No. She's breathing.”

  They smile at each other.

  “Let's rest.”

  Stein is still holding Alissa. Max Thor leans his head back in the chair. There is a long moment's rest. The grey lake grows darker.

  Only when the darkness is almost complete can it be heard clearly. With immeasurable strength, sublime gentleness, it enters the hotel.

  They laugh without moving.

  “Oh,” says Stein. “That was it . . .”

  “Yes . . .”

  Alissa doesn't move. Nor does Stein. Nor does Max Thor.

  With infinite pain the music stops, begins again, stops, repeats, starts again. Stops.

  “Is it coming from the forest?” Max Thor asks.

  “Or from the garage. Or from the road.”

  The music begins again, loudly. Then stops.

  “It's a long way away,” says Stein.

  “Perhaps some child playing with a radio?”

  “Probably.”

  Silence. They don't move.

  Then the music begins again, louder. It lasts longer this time. But stops again.

  “It is coming from the forest,” says Stein. “What pain. What immense pain. How difficult it is.”

  “It has so far to travel, so many barriers to get through.”

  “Yes. Everything.”

  The music begins again. This time majestically loud.

  It stops again.

  “It's going to do it, it's going to get through the forest,” Stein says. “Here it comes.”

  They speak in the intervals of the music, softly, so as not to wake Alissa.

  “It has to fell trees, knock down walls,” Stein murmurs. “But here it is.”

  “Nothing to worry about any more,” says Max Thor. “Yes, here it is.”

  Yes, here it is, felling trees, knocking down walls.

  They are bending over Alissa.

  In her sleep Alissa's childlike mouth widens in pure laughter.

  They laugh to see her laugh.

  “Music to the name of Stein,” she says.

  Note for Performance

  For the theater, a single set consisting of the hotel dining room and the grounds outside, separated by a window that can be raised and lowered.

  An abstract décor would be best.

  The whole depth of the stage should be used. A plain tarpaulin backcloth could represent the forest.

  No attempt should be made to represent the tennis courts. Only the sound of the balls.

  No need for any people but the main characters. The others can be suggested by the light falling on various objects: chaises-longues in a circle, or separate, or facing each other, empty. In the dining room, white cloths on the tables supposed to be “occupied.”

  The music at the end is fugue no. 15 (in some recordings 18 or 19) of J. S. Bach's “The Art of the Fugue.”

  The play should be performed in a medium-sized theater, preferably a modem one.

  No public dress rehearsal should be held.

  Alissa is of average height, petite if anything. Not childlike: she is a child. Very easy in her movements. Blue jeans and bare feet. Thick untidy hair, blonde or brown.

  Stein and Max Thor are both about the same height, and both wear ordinary suits. Neither is careless in his dress.

  Stein has a long rapid stride.

  Max Thor walks slowly, and talks much more slowly than Stein.

  Stein is transfixed with knowledge. Knowledge comes to Max Thor only through Stein and Alissa.

  No one actually “cries out,” even when the words are used: the words indicate an inner reaction only.

  DESTRUCTION AND LANGUAGE

  Many of Marguerite Duras’ novels, including Destroy, She Said, have been made into films. In the following interview, Jacques Rivette, Jean Narboni, and Mme. Duras discuss the two media and also the content of Destroy, She Said.

  An Interview with Marguerite Duras by Jacques Rivette and Jean Narboni*

  Translated by Helen Lane Cumberford

  1

  JACQUES RIVETTE: . . . it seems you want more and more to give successive forms to each of the things—let's not use the word stories—that you write, for ins
tance The Square, which had several versions, or La Musica, which also had several forms, or L'Amante Anglaise. This corresponds to . . .

  MARGUERITE DURAS: To the desire that I always have to tear what has gone before to pieces. Destroy, the book Destroy, is a fragmented book from the novelistic point of view. I don't think there are any sentences left in it. And there are directions that are mindful of scripts: “sunshine,” “seventh day,” “heat,” etc.; “intense light,” “dusk"—do you see what I mean? These are usually stage directions. That is to say I would like the material that is to be read to be as free as possible of style; I can't read novels at all any more. Because of the sentences. . . .

  RIVETTE: . . . when you wrote these stage directions, was the idea of a film hovering on the horizon? Or was it simply because you could only write in this form?

  DURAS: I had no idea of a film, but I did have the idea of a book—how shall I put it?—of a book that could be either read or acted or filmed or, I always add, simply thrown away.

  RIVETTE: In any case you had theater in mind somehow, since the last two pages of the book . . .

  DURAS: Yes, yes, Claude Régy was to stage it, and then I made the film first, I couldn't help it . . . I believe it necessary to create things that are more and more time-saving, that can be read more quickly, that give the reader a more important role. There are ten ways to read Destroy; that's what I wanted. And ten ways to see it too, perhaps. But, you know, it's a book I hardly know at all. I know the film better than the book; I wrote the book very fast. There was a good scenario, called The Chaise-Longue, which we tried to film; but it came out of a certain kind of psychology, maybe a searching one, but psychology nonetheless; and Stein wasn't in it . . .

  RIVETTE: Did the scenario come before the writing of the book?

  DURAS: The Chaise-Longue, yes. There were only three characters. Still, as a story it was obviously classical. When I found Stein, the scenario wasn't any good at all any more, and we threw the whole thing out that same day.

  JEAN NARBONI: I was struck by an interesting contrast between the film and the book. The directions for the characters are very brief in the book, but a certain number of acts and gestures in the book are omitted from the film: in the end, it is a sort of mechanical process that is exactly the opposite of the one whereby a bad filmmaker who adapts a book keeps the events, the facts, the physical acts and leaves out everything which would seem, on the contrary, to belong to the writing properly speaking. And here one has the impression that you took out everything that would seem to stem directly from “cinema,” and that you kept what would seem to belong to the realm of literature.

  DURAS: That is correct; I had a feeling that this was so. Are you thinking of any special gesture?

  NARBONI: I'm thinking of several: the moment, for example, when Stein strokes Alissa's legs. In the film the only part of this passage that is left is the conversation.

  DURAS: It so happens that during rehearsals I realized that it was impossible, because of Michael Lonsdale, who is gigantic. He was too important, if you like, sitting there at Alissa's feet, close to her legs. I had to keep him away from the other two, so that they wouldn't be completely overwhelmed. So it was really for practical reasons that I came to omit this gesture. I worked on this gesture—on the possibility, that is, of keeping this gesture—for a long time. I wasn't able to do so, and I'm sorry.

  RIVETTE: But these were rehearsals that took place before . . .

  DURAS: That took place at my house. For a month and a half.

  RIVETTE: Did you rehearse everything before shooting?

  DURAS: Yes.

  RIVETTE: But wasn't it also true that Stein at that juncture was too much on the same plane as the other characters? Or was it just this one gesture that was impossible?

  DURAS: Yes. Oh, it's very hard to say why it was impossible. It wasn't possible; it obviously wasn't possible. Or else it would have been necessary for him not to say anything. It was a choice of either the gesture or the dialogue. . . .

  NARBONI: Even though at the beginning Destroy seemed to be a sort of potential work, that might just as well have been thrown away, or filmed, or played onstage, or read, a potential work that was made real by the use to which it was put, so to speak . . .

  DURAS: Yes: the use to which it was put by the reader or the spectator. This is the only perspective I can work within now.

  NARBONI: So at this point a question arises. Destroy is made up structurally of people watching each other at different levels. One of the major axes, for example, runs along like this: someone is watching the tennis court and is watched by someone else, who in turn is observed by a third party, and the narrator, or whatever plays a narrative role, more or less takes up these stories and sees what these watching eyes see . . .

  DURAS: You see a narrator . . .

  NARBONI: No, no. There is no narrator, actually . . .

  DURAS: It's the camera.

  NARBONI: There is a sort of perpetual “gliding” that goes beyond a narrator—or the absence of a narrator. What I meant to say is that in a film there is always one last watching eye, which is none other than that of the camera, which overarches all these people who are watching each other. I would like to know, then, in what terms this necessity of having one last seeing eye dominating the rest—that is to say the camera—presented itself as regards the structure of Destroy.

  DURAS: Does it exist, in your opinion?

  NARBONI: Does it exist as a watching eye?

  DURAS: Yes: in Destroy, in the film.

  NARBONI: No, because the expression “watching eye” is not the right one—let's say, then, a last determining factor, a last court of appeal.

  DURAS: As if someone wanted to tie the whole thing together?

  NARBONI: No, no, not at all like something tying the whole thing together. Not a “gaze,” something static, but a watching function, so to speak.

  DURAS: Yes, but this watching function can also be called identification with the character. Do you agree with that? With the sacred law that Sartre laid down in an article answering Mauriac, I believe, about twenty years ago, in which he said that one could identify only with one person. To reach the other characters it is necessary, therefore, to do so through the character with which one identifies: if there are A, B, C—A being the spectator and the character with whom one identifies, one must go through him in order to reach B and C.

  RIVETTE: Yes. Sartre accused Mauriac of taking himself for God the Father and dominating all the characters.

  DURAS: That's right. But this is a law that has applied to spectacle for centuries now. And to novels too. I attempted to break this law; I don't know whether I succeeded. There is no primacy of one character over another in Destroy. There is a gliding from one character to another. Why? I think it's because they're all the same. These three characters, I believe, are completely interchangeable. So I went about things in such a way that the camera is never conclusive as regards the way one of them acts or the words that another pronounces, do you see? What either of the men says could also be said by the other. What the other says, the third person, Alissa, might say as well. The men are slightly different from Alissa, it is true, since she doesn't speak of the men, whereas the men speak of her. She never judges. She never goes on to think in generalities. So—wait a minute; I'm lost . . .

  NARBONI: You've ended up giving us a perfect answer. That is to say that you confronted the risk that the camera might become God as Mauriac conceives Him, so to speak . . .

  DURAS. This is a nineteenth century prejudice that still holds sway in film-making . . .

  NARBONI: Exactly. You therefore refused this sort of closure that always makes the camera enclose a space or imprison a character by making it assume multiple roles, in the same way that the characters are interchangeable.

  DURAS: Yes, that's it. At any rate, that is what I tried to do.

  RIVETTE: This is strikingly evident from the very first shots: shots that I saw in t
he beginning as representing the watching eye of a character and then in the end, within the very movement of the shot, focusing from the outside on this very character whose eyes the spectator thought he was seeing through.

  DURAS: In my script, moreover, there are many directions that point to what you are saying: “So and so is seen watching someone else.”

  RIVETTE: This was in the book too, but it was indicated by other means—the means of the book.

  DURAS: But it is the relation between the people that isn't right, perhaps, in Destroy.

  RIVETTE: In any case it is a film in which the spectator is obliged to pay close attention (even if he isn't a critic with the typical traits of his profession) to the way in which the camera behaves toward the characters. . . .

  DURAS: From the point of view of the camera, I'm not sure quite what I did; you're teaching me things . . . When I planned it, it seemed to me that that was what had to be done, but I did so almost without thinking it out beforehand.

  NARBONI: What one finds in it (and what one also finds in a certain number of “modern” films, beginning with Chronicle of a Love Affair), is the successful variation of the roles played by the camera, which no longer is content to play a single role as in a certain type of classical tradition, where it dominates the event and where it has an “objective” point of view, but rather has a sort of flexibility in its function, and as a result one never knows whether it is taking up the point of view of a character—for at the very moment that the spectator believes that it is dominating the event, it is taken up by a character, and the point of view thus changes inside a shot or a sequence. This, I believe, is one of the great contributions of modern cinema: a camera that does not have a single fixed role during the entire film, or during an entire sequence, but instead constantly changes.

  DURAS: But what would be the equivalent of what you have just mentioned in writing? The role of the author in his book, for example . . . No: the role that the author would like the reader to have.

  NARBONI: This takes place between the reader and someone who is not the narrator but the speaker. I'm not quite sure, but perhaps an interaction between the two, on the level of the writing itself, in an interaction between the reading of the book and the function of the speaker; I don't use the word narrator, which I find too fixed a term. That, in fact, is why I asked you the question, because it seems to me to answer preoccupations that in the end are all of the same type: what role does the camera have today?—just as one day people began asking: what role does the narrator have? Who in fact speaks in a book? And who sees in a film? . . . And I asked you this question so as to find out what equivalence, or what fundamental difference, or what research of the same type you did on the two levels, the film and the book.