If the French writer Marguerite Duras was an acute analyst of sorts (Jacques Lacan declared her the unwitting embodiment of his theories), she was also a one-woman Shock Doctrine, moving into sites of catastrophe not for the sake of extracting profit but in order to build narratives from her trademark materials of passion, grief, and silence.
In the opening montage of the movie Hiroshima mon amour, whose script she penned, the film camera glides through Hiroshima’s Peace Memorial Museum, pausing before various reconstructions of horror—masses of anonymous hair, a gnarled, heat-blasted bicycle, a photograph of the bombed city reminiscent of Guernica—before moving on to a pearl-encrusted gift-shop model of the Palace of Industry, a symbol of the city’s once-thriving military-industrial production, and then to a bus with the words “Atomic Tours” printed on its side. An attractive young tour guide speaks cheerfully through a microphone to passengers as the bus motors through “New” Hiroshima, which is spare, modern, angular, clean. The subtext of director Alain Resnais’s montage is barely sub: industrial capitalism, urban culture, and eternal war are not just interrelated but on some level indistinguishable.
True enough, but not quite the desublimation that Duras was after. Over Resnais’s montage, we hear the voice of an unnamed French woman, played by Emmanuelle Riva, claiming to have “seen everything” of the catastrophe at Hiroshima. An unnamed Japanese man, played by Eiji Okada, rebukes her claim (“you’ve seen nothing”). The French woman and Japanese man have met in Hiroshima, the site of an erased catastrophe where they carry on a brief and intense love affair.
As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that the woman’s claim of having witnessed the nuclear holocaust is a fantasy along the lines of a screen memory—in strictly Freudian terms, a false or insignificant memory that defensively masks a real and traumatic one, in this case the fatal shooting of her German lover at the liberation of occupied Nevers, an episode she speaks of for the first time to the Japanese man, a cultural Other who enables her to revisit the original traumatic event. We shift, indirectly, from those masses of anonymous hair to the image of the woman’s shaved head; from the atomic-baked bicycle to her own bike ride into Paris, as she emerges from a state of emotional death, madness, baldness. She is finally well enough to venture out. Her hair has grown. The night is warm. The war has officially ended, a denouement brought on by the dropping of atomic bombs. She joins the delirious crowd pouring into the streets.
Mysteriously, Marguerite Duras gave her friend Georges Bataille her share of windfall profits from Hiroshima mon amour. It isn’t clear why. In 1957, she’d interviewed Bataille on the subject of “sovereignty,” a theme he’d addressed in a 1949 essay on Hiroshima, in which he wrote that the instant of the nuclear blast was the only sovereign truth Hiroshima offered us. He’d gone on to declare that instant, that blast, “a vanishing splendor.” Duras was herself not such a sick puppy as Bataille, but the common interpretation of her script for Hiroshima mon amour as “anti-nuclear,” a treatise on peace, is not quite correct. It’s more accurate to say that Duras both condemned human suffering and then again framed it as the only vital condition for the possibility of meaning.
A lot happened to Marguerite Duras. She lost a child while giving birth, and in that experience lost God and gained unwanted knowledge of death. Her husband Robert Antelme was deported to Dachau, came back, but weighing eighty pounds. Duras worked for the Occupation, and later joined the Resistance, then the Communist Party. Was expelled from the Communist Party but remained a Marxist. Duras had public dialogues with President François Mitterrand and Jean-Luc Godard, and for several years she hosted episodes of the French television show Dim Dam Dom, on which she interviewed a prostitute, a female prison warden, and a seven-year-old boy. Aspects of her life are legends, like the destitute poverty of her childhood in Indochina. In some writings, her mother’s ailment is madness. In others, menopause. Or financial ruin. Sometimes, the mother’s madness is her strength. Maybe these are not contradictions.
Things happened to Duras “that she never experienced,” as she put it. The story of her life did not exist, she said. The novel of her life—yes. She obsessively read Proust, Conrad, and Ecclesiastes. She pursued a poetic absorption in the sacred and secret. She may have engendered a trend called autofiction, but she dismissed trends, and more important, she was adamant that the genre of autobiography was base, degraded. Same with “essayistic” writing. She resisted the anti-novel rhetoric of the practitioners of the Nouveau Roman, whom she called “businessmen.” Literature was her interest, that kind of truth.
Marguerite wasn’t always Duras. She was born Donnadieu, but with the publication of her first novel, Les impudents, in 1943, she went from Donnadieu to Duras and stayed that way. She chose as her alias the village of her father’s origins, distancing herself from her family and binding her to the emanations of that place-name, which is pronounced with a regionally southern preference for a sibilant s. The village of Duras is in Lot-et-Garonne, an area south of the Dordogne and just north of Gascony. The language of Gascon, from which this practice of a spoken s derives, is not considered chic. Educated French people not from the region might be tempted to opt for a silent s with a proper name. In English, one hears a lot of Duraah—especially from people who consider themselves Francophiles. Duras herself said Duraas, and that’s the correct, if unrefined, way to say it. With an s.
Proust, whom Duras admired a great deal, modeled the compelling and ridiculous Baron de Charlus on Robert de Montesquiou, of Gascony. Some argue that on account of Montesquiou’s origins, Charlus should be pronounced Charluss. In Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust himself makes quite a bit of fun of the issue of pronunciations and how they signify class and tact, and specifically the matter of an s, of guessing if it’s silent or sibilant. Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin experiences a sort of rapture the first time she hears a proper name without the sibilant s—Uzai instead of Uzès—and suddenly the silent s, “a suppression that had stupefied her the day before, but which it now seemed so vulgar not to know,” becomes the proof, and apotheosis, of a lifetime of good breeding and “smartness.”
So vulgar not to know, and yet what Proust is really saying is that it’s equally vulgar to be so conscious of elite significations, even as he, too, was entranced by the world of them. Mme de Cambremer-Legrandin is, after all, a mere bourgeois who elevated her station through marriage, and her self-conscious, snobbish, silent s will never change that, and can only ever be a kind of striving, made touchingly comical in Sodom and Gomorrah. Duras is something else. No tricks, full s. Maybe, in part, her late-life and notorious habit of referring to herself in the third person was a reminder to say it the humble way, Duraas. Or maybe it was just an element of what some labeled her narcissism, which seems like a superficial way to reject a genius. Duras was consumed with herself, true enough, but almost as if under a spell. Certain people experience their own lives very strongly. Regardless, there is a consistent quality, a kind of earthy simplicity, in all of her novels, films, plays, screenplays, and notebooks, and in the dreamily precise oral “telling” of La Vie matérielle, which is a master index of Durassianisms, of s-ness: lines that function on boldness and ease, which is to say, without airs.
Her assertions have the base facticity of soil and stones, even if one doesn’t always agree with them, especially not with her homophobia, which gets expressed in the section of La Vie matérielle on men and seems to have gotten worse as her life fused into a fraught and complicated autumn-spring intimacy with Yann Andréa Steiner, who was gay.
La Vie matérielle was translated as Practicalities by Barbara Bray, but might be more felicitously titled “material life” or “everyday life.” The book began as recordings of Duras speaking to her son’s friend Jérôme Beaujour. After the recordings were transcribed, there was much reworking and cutting and reformulating by Duras. In terms of categories, the book is unique, but all of Duras’s writing is novelistic in its breadth and profundity, and all of it can be poured from one flask to another, from play to novel to film, without altering its Durasness. In part, this is because speech and writing are in some sense the same thing with Duras. When she talks, she is writing, and when writing, speaking. (Some of her later work was spoken first to Yann Andréa, who typed her sentences, and the results were novels, such as The Malady of Death.) The English-edition flap copy describes La Vie matérielle as “about being an alcoholic, about being a woman, and about being a writer.” And it is about those things—and more or less in that order—although drinking is woven throughout. Her discussions of it are blunt. They are also accurate, spoken by one who knows. When Duras made this book, in 1987, she had suffered late-stage cirrhosis, quit, started again, and lost her mind in a detox clinic, an episode she refers to, in the book, as a “coma.” In 1988, her drinking put her in a real coma, for five months. “It’s always too late when people tell someone they drink too much,” she writes. “You never know yourself that you’re an alcoholic. In one hundred percent of cases, it’s taken as an insult.”
Her talk of women and domestic life is of her era, although she was her own sort of early feminist, who felt that pregnancy was proof of superiority over men, which she constantly reminded the men around her while pregnant with her son Jean. In a section called “House and Home” she provides a list of important items with which she stocked Neauphle-le-Château, the country place where she wrote and where many of her films were made. The list includes butter, coffee filters, steel wool, fuses, and Scotch-Brite. Only frivolous women, she says, neglect repairs. For the “rough” work that men do, in counterpart to domestic chores, she is unimpressed: “To cut down trees after a day at the office isn’t work, it’s a kind of game.” And even worse, she adds, a man thinks he’s a hero if he goes out and buys a couple of potatoes. “Still, never mind,” she finishes off, and in the next paragraph announces that people tell her she exaggerates, but that women could use a bit of idealizing. From there she is on to the burning of manuscripts, which makes the house feel virginal and clean, and her next topic, rolled into seamlessly, is the phenomenon of “sales, supersales, and final reductions” that drive a woman to purchase clothing she does not want or need. A woman ends up with a sartorial excess that is new to her generation, and yet this ur-woman, a figment of typicality, maintains the same role, in the home and in the world, that has persisted for all women in all times: a “theatre of profound loneliness that has constituted their lives for centuries.”
At the end of La Vie matérielle, she is home from the hospital after a detoxification cure. She sees things that are “brighter than reality, as if lit from within.” A woman in her bathroom holds a dead child. Every night Duras is “attacked by the ‘people’ lurking in the apartment.” She describes an encounter with a “terrifying” man, a hallucination, as if this man is perfectly real, and he is: he is part of her fictive universe, the primal scenes she spent her life rendering and reworking, telling, and telling again.
Much of her publishing career was an encounter with misogyny: in the 1950s, male critics called her talent “masculine,” “hardball,” and “virile”—and they meant these descriptors as insults! (This kind of confused insistence on gendered literary territories has still not gone away, sadly.) The implication was that as a meek and feeble female, she had no right to her aloof candor, her outrageous confidence. And it’s true that you’d have to think quite highly of your own ideas to express them with such austerity and melodrama, but that is the great paradox, and tension, of the equally rudimentary and audacious style of Duras. “People who say they don’t like their own books, if such people exist, do so because they haven’t learned to resist the attraction to humiliation,” she wrote in one of her journals. “I love my books. They interest me.”
Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, who adapted a short story by Duras into a film called En rachâchant, said of their own work that it was best understood by cavemen and children. In fact, their work is difficult to understand by anyone not versed in literature, philosophy, and art, and moreover anyone not trained to watch difficult films, but their intentions in making such a claim seem clear enough: if you don’t get it, you’re judging it through an adapted set of ideologies and traditions that are obstacles, and once you unlearn your bad training, you will understand our movies. Their caveman is a kind of negative, the inverse shadow of cultural bias, an innocent. Fittingly, the Duras story they adapted is about a boy who learns without being taught, who knows things without the corruption of intellect.
Unlike Straub and Huillet, Duras might actually have a decent chance with cave people and children. Receiving the full impact of her work has little to do with education, erudition. You either relate to it or you don’t. She could talk to anyone, and replicate any kind of voice (while somehow maintaining that tone, her s), like those of the curt but philosophical concierge and street sweeper who both feature in Madame Dodin. The moments of truth in her work are elemental and felt, not synthetic or abstruse. She told the actress Delphine Seyrig she might give up writing and open a service station for trucks along the highway.
Meanwhile, she was much loved and admired by many twentieth-century intellectuals, such as Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, both of whom wrote about her work (“I never understood much of him,” she said of Lacan). Samuel Beckett credited hearing her radio play of The Square as a significant moment in his own creative life. She had what both Beckett and the filmmaker Alain Resnais admired as “tone.” Durassian. Everything she made was marked by it, and the distinct quality of that tone is certainly what led to the accusation, fair enough, that she was at risk sometimes, if inadvertently, of self-caricature. But every writer aspires to have some margin of original power, a patterning and order that comes to them as a gift bestowed and is sent to no one else. If Duras wasn’t so lucky, if she wasn’t such a natural writer, her critics would have no object for their envy, their policing of excess, as well as the inverse—a suspicion of her restrained economy with words.
Her early writings, from her notebooks, evince her gift for fiction. None of it reads like a diary, even when the experiences are ones we know are close to her biography. Much of it is in third person, as if she were already controlling the levers of character, and the entries include crafted dialogue, artful gaps, compression. “At one time,” she writes of childhood, “we used to feast on the pickled flesh of young crocodiles, but in the end we tired of everything.” In an early draft of The Sea Wall, the sea, “making itself at home, would come in and scorch the crops.” In an unpublished story called Theodora, a knack for insinuating authorial intrusion, metafictional, but not distancing, is already present: “Her eyes are green and shining, her dress is red, that’s the situation.” In the early drafts from the notebooks of The War, she powerfully conveys the chaos of waiting to learn of her husband’s fate in a concentration camp. “I know everything you can know,” she writes, “when you know nothing.” A woman waits to get news of her daughter, chattering that she’s had new taps put on her daughter’s shoes, but then blurts that her daughter has probably been gassed. “With her stiff leg,” the mother says, “they’ll have gassed her.”
In a section about losing her own baby in childbirth, a nurse says to her, “When they’re that little, we burn them.” The piece ends, “People who believe in God have become complete strangers to me.” The notebooks are full of that tone, that s: high stakes and brute experience.
By the time she wrote The Lover, Duras was seventy years old. The book, some may forget, begins with a man telling her he prefers her face “as it is now. Ravaged.” But she remained, according to men I’ve spoken to who knew her, devastatingly sexy, even in her advanced age. My surprised reaction makes one of these men, the film director Barbet Schroeder, laugh. It suggests a hopeless ignorance of the force of Duras. Does it matter that she was sexy? In a sense, yes, because it allowed her to feed her insatiable need, so her biographers report, for erotic attention, and to understand her way around desire, which is to say, around writing.
The Lover begins with that comment about her ravaged face and then corrects for the ravaging of age by presenting childhood, and experience, as ideals that continue to glow through the haze of history. The Lover is not an autobiography, but was received as disclosure. Duras became a huge star. Readers were eager to wade into a steamy vision of a colonial adolescence and to presume it was her life. As a novel it is no more conventional than her others, but its vivid compactness, the way it marbles and integrates the close and distant sensations and memories of a single consciousness, makes it a kind of artistic zenith.
The girl in the novel, never named, the “I” and the “she,” is a little white “child prostitute,” dressed in a man’s fedora and gold lamé shoes, wearing a millionaire’s diamond. The millionaire is a handsome Chinese landowner who takes her to a secret apartment in Cholon, the Chinese quarter of Saigon. Their liaison is forbidden, since he’s not white, and all the better; a forbidden love is more urgent.
The first instance of a lover had appeared in the notebooks of Wartime Writings. He’s called Léo, and he’s not Chinese, but Vietnamese. He is ugly, scarred, and repulsive to her, but because of his wealth, and the pressure of her family, the young Duras pursues a relationship. She describes him as “truly pathetic” and “profoundly stupid” (which is how all suitors seem, whose affections are not requited). At one point Léo kisses her, and she’s revolted. The scene is described almost like a rape.
In The Lover, the young girl has transformed into a pleasure doll. The lover bathes her, dries her, carries her to the bed. She’s worshipped and adored and enjoys it, as power and as sensual rapture, and the reader feels the author’s pleasure in this too. The child prostitute is gloriously self-possessed; her humiliations are society’s hang-ups, not her own, and they only make her shine brighter, for the author and reader both, who collude in whoring her out. It’s the “good” whoring, not the bad whoring—which may or may not have taken place but, either way, came first.
Later, Duras said the depiction in The Lover was her actual childhood, but those who knew her best suggest she had begun to confuse her fiction with reality. The affair in the novel is a “structure,” as Lacan might say, a triangle of narrator, child, lover. Even Alain Vircondelet, the most credulous of her three biographers, calls the story a legend she invented, which, “having ripened during her whole life, finally became true.” In La Vie matérielle she offers a corrective that seems only further embellishment: she says the lover didn’t actually dry her after he bathed her with jars of water, but instead set her down on the bed still wet.
Rainwater. Bathwater. Rice paddies flooded by the Pacific: these are reflecting pools of an interior universe. Later, Duras poured the volume from The Lover into a new jar, The North China Lover, a new telling. But The Lover, a wisp of a book you can read in an afternoon, is the primal scene around which the other myths and reveries revolve.
Alcoholic, woman, writer—these identity-acts, the one who drinks, who lives as woman, who writes, seem to relate, all three, to a more fundamental, primordial action: the production of fiction, of experience woven into language. If we associate fiction with writing, what about with women? With drinkers?
The scene in La Vie matérielle when Duras encounters the “terrifying” man, who, she says, is living in her apartment and doesn’t understand why she is afraid of him, was no mere daydream, but a full-blown hallucination brought on by delirium tremens from alcohol withdrawal. The man wears a black overcoat. She wonders if maybe he is there to remind her of “some immemorial connection” that has been cut but had been her “raison d’être” ever since she was born. She calls him a “master apparition.” He’s been in her house a fortnight, looking at her, unaware she can’t understand him, and unwavering in his plea, whatever it is. This man presents to her a true nightmare, in which a lifetime of expression falls finally on deaf ears.
Eventually her hallucinations broke. When the man departed, Duras wept for a long time. Three years later, she found a way to speak of him, to Jérôme Beaujour.
Probably she even embellished the account a little, who knows, but in any case, how do you straighten the facts of a phantasm?