The timeless Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras
CAHIERS DE LA GUERRE ET AUTRES TEXTES
Edited by Sophie Bogaert and Olivier Corpet
446pp. Paris: P.O.L. 22Euros.
978 2 84682 156 8


Marguerite Duras’s reputation is largely uncontested today: any history of French artistic and intellectual life in the 1950s and 60s accords her a significant place. She was a leading writer of the nouveau roman, with Alain Robbe-Grillet, provided the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s classic film Hiroshima – mon amour (1960) and wrote more than twenty novels – not to mention the theatre scripts, short stories and screenplays. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), La Douleur (1982) and the Goncourt Prize-winning L’Amant (1984) are staples on student reading lists.

Yet what Duras is most remembered for today is overwhelmingly based on preoccupations with post-Holocaust writing and ideas around trauma and memory, as a glance at the most recent books and journal articles on her make clear: Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, and the Legacy of Mourning (1998); Postcolonial Duras: Cultural memory in postwar France (2001); Enacting Past and Present: The memory theaters (2003); “Coming into being”: Mourning, adolescence and creativity (2005). This focus is not entirely misguided, as her own life was indeed marked by the deportation of her first husband, Robert Antelme. He returned from the camps in 1945; the trauma of the waiting experience, the fear that he must be dead, followed by the slow process of his recovery and her reconciliation with the situation, was chronicled in detail in La Douleur. Although the events of this time – especially the death of her child with Antelme in 1941 – pervade much of her writing, they are some of the least fruitful to explore in her work.

Standard literary histories have tended to bracket Duras together with other intellectuals of the period. But not only did Duras personally dislike Camus, Sartre and Beauvoir, it is unclear what she contributed in terms of ideas, given that she was preoccupied rather with abstract questions of style. Her political role too was sketchy – the first publication she worked on, L’Empire français, was a piece of propaganda for the French Foreign Office that extolled the virtues and greatness of France’s colonial empire; she later described it as a “youthful error of judgement”. During the war she supported the Resistance, became a member of the Parti Communiste Français (in 1944), and in her brief political activism, associated with a different group from existentialist circles, that included Jorge Semprun and Edgar Morin, but this involvement petered out from the 1950s onwards.

Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes is a collection of notebooks that Duras wrote between 1943 and 1949. Diary-like entries recounting important events from childhood are mixed with early drafts of novels, particularly Un Barrage and La Douleur; there are also some mostly unpublished short stories. The editors, Sophie Bogaert and Olivier Corpet, have done a fine job in making sense of what must have been an unruly heap of papers. They have chosen to publish the notebooks in simple novel-size form, rather than reproduce them more faithfully, as a lavish photograph album. What would this encourage, they ask in the preface, but a fetishized engagement with each idiosyncratic scribble of Duras’s pen? Instead we have just a few photographs of the original notebooks and the far more useful textual reprint, completed by a carefully compiled index. This format forces an even more impartial and critical eye on the quality, free from the Duras aura, of the material.

Marguerite Duras’s life story is well known, having provided the material for so much of her fiction. She was born in 1914 in Gia Dinh, Vietnam. Both her parents were teachers; her father died in 1921. Her early years were peripatetic; her mother eventually settled with her three children, in 1925, in Cambodia, building a house on a rice plantation that was four hours away from the nearest village. Subsequent years were spent paying for this house and seeking further funds to build a dam to protect their constantly flooded paddies. Duras went to study in Saigon at the age of fifteen and two years later, in 1931, left for Paris. The “Cahiers rose marbré”, the first notebooks in the collection, provide an account of this adolescence, written like a journal entry. It is notable just how much autobiography is present in her novels, especially in Un Barrage. Like her protagonist, Suzanne, we learn of a first relationship with a rich, indigenous man. There follow the beatings at the hands of her mother and elder brother. It wasn’t an unhappy period, it was savage, and Duras retells it through simple documentation, seemingly in an attempt better to make sense of her frame of mind at the time: “I believed what they called me. I don’t any more. I suffered like I was damned . . . enduring it like it was my fate”. The young Duras seems to have been utterly alone, idolizing her unpredictable mother, indifferent to anyone else. Smiling, she explains, was unknown in their home, where the mood was either hilarity or rage. Not before the move to Saigon did Duras start to see an alternative to this.

After completing her studies in Law at the École de Sciences Politiques in Paris, Duras joined the Resistance, becoming secretary of her local cell in 1944. She sold L’Humanité and was a journalist for Libres, though by 1949 she had terminated her membership of the PCF after unceremonious allegations and internal disputes. In more oblique form, these events also appear in Cahiers de la guerre.

In these notebooks one can observe a nascent writer at work, someone compelled to write in order to make sense of her thoughts and experiences; “the words to describe my feelings seem to me non-existent . . . . I would like to take distance from [my memories], push back their absorbing reality”. Duras is most insightful on motherhood, both her own experience of it and her relationship with her mother. Her account of the death of her first child is retold in two forms: it appears as a short story and as a dialogue between herself and one of the (nun) nurses. We see how one literary style can trump another, as the conversation form presents an especially devastating portrait – “Here, we burn the dead babies. Now you know. Sleep” / “Why did you tell me that? You could have lied, you told me because I said earlier that you could stuff your prayers. You should never have told me that”. Written as dialogue, the experience is even more stark; all one reads is the blunt exchange between two people as the world it existed in is kept out, left as a blank to focus our attention on the horror of the experience and Duras’s cold treatment at the hands of the nuns.

While her father fades away serenely into the background – “his death for me has always had the softness of an afternoon nap” – Duras’s mother and the strange childhood she gave her daughter emerge as the catalyst for Duras’s becoming a writer: “this childhood troubles me . . . it follows me like a shadow, [it is] an adventure, unexplained . . . . And what is left is my mother. It is from her that I want to tell this story”. Combining this with Duras’s own awful first experience of motherhood, the idea of the mother becomes of primary importance to Duras; a subject on which her peers had much less, if not nothing, to say. Cahiers de la guerre shows that Duras’s oeuvre is best taken as an exploration of this, and more broadly of the idea of the family, its strangeness and “unlimited impact”, as the editors appropriately call it. In Duras’s world, family is never entirely positive, never creates straightforward joy, though always an intensity of feeling: “I measure all horror from this perfect love”, Duras wrote after her second child was born in 1947, “Maternity makes us good, they say. Crap. My life is tied to his, it is dependent on his to the finest possible detail. If he dies, the beauty of the world dies and it will be darkness on my earth forever. In other words, if he dies, I die in the world . . . . There is no longer any difference between my fear of his death and death itself”. But intensity of relations is not the only dynamic Duras has written into her presentation of the family, as a final short story in this collection reminds us. “Les Pigeons volés” is a bad joke: an old lady is caught by a relative stealing and scoffing one of the family’s pigeons. She is subsequently rejected and ignored by her relatives, ostracized by the villagers and left to gather dust by the fire until she dies. Family may be characterized by extremes of feeling, so too may indifference dominate relations, as each member lives, waiting for death.

These Cahiers de la guerre will be useful to anyone keen to understand Duras’s oeuvre more fully; the discreet, instructive editing is a bonus. But read in the context of her time, Duras doesn’t quite hold her ground convincingly, at least as a writer of ideas. While she evokes a memorable atmosphere, life in her novels is lived “in a desert-like light, raw and as far away from a dream as possible”. The question remains: where do her characters lead readers? The moment in La Vie tranquille (1949) when Françoise watches a man drown, half aware of the unfolding tragedy, but does nothing to stop it and is treated as an outcast by villagers for her appalling inaction, distils the Duras oeuvre: a detached, half-conscious protagonist looks out on to a world that she is ultimately powerless to affect.

Comparisons with Beauvoir are striking. Duras’s fictions exist in a world dominated by ennui, a sense of otherness from the world, full of intense emotions, but mostly internal experiences. When events and a historical context are required, there is a blandness to the writing that means one layer separates from the other; reality and how that reality is experienced become two distinct things. In Beauvoir’s work, the two remain soldered together because her literary aim was to present her protagonists as actors in the world, to explore where their moment of self-consciousness took them. In “La Femme brisée” (1967), for example, Monique is alone at her dining table: her husband has left her and her children have married. She stares at her abyss: the non-life she created, where she put everything into existing for others. But there is a sense of a beginning here: “I’m scared”, she says, as an introduction to what she might now begin to initiate. History has written Duras with her contemporary existentialists; it is necessary to split them apart. These Cahiers remind us of what is more timeless in Marguerite Duras’s contributions, as well as of her limitations.

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Emilie Bickerton works at New Left Review.