SOURCE: “The Drive for Power in Marguerite Duras' ‘L'Amant,’” in Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. XXX, No. 3, July, 1994, pp. 204-18.

The nature of power has not been discussed in relation to L'Amant.¹ Power evokes desire, obedience, the forbidden, terror and fear, especially the fear of suffering and death; it is rendered still more powerful when those who provoke desire do not entirely reciprocate it; when there is conflict with the pleasure principle; when the forbidden is no longer kept secret but deliberately rendered public. It is on the basis of these thoughts that I propose to examine L'Amant and the power relationships in this autobiographical novel.² I shall focus first on the origins of the heroine's drive for power, seen in the complex nature of her relationships with her mother, her brothers and her Chinese lover. I shall then explore the heroine's power itself: how it is exercised over others and over society; finally I shall examine her violence against herself.

Let us begin with the appalling silence in the heroine's family. It expresses hatred and is the result of fear.

Jamais bonjour, bonsoir, bonne année. Jamais parler. Jamais besoin de parler. Tout reste, muet, loin. C'est une famille en pierre, pétrifiée dans une épaisseur sans accès aucun. Chaque jour nous essayons de nous tuer, de tuer. Non seulement on ne se parle pas mais on ne se regarde pas. Du moment qu'on est vu, on ne peut pas regarder. Regarder c'est avoir un mouvement de curiosité, c'est déchoir. Aucune personne regardée ne vaut le regard sur elle. Il est toujours déshonorant.

(A 69)

Silence is seen as expressing hostility to the other members of the family. She notes the absence of what Malinowski called “phatic communion”. This he defined as “meaningless” verbal gestures, such as words like “bonjour”—which in fact rather express ordinary human goodwill. Communication, even at the visual level, has reached absolute zero. The absence of reciprocal gaze implies that (1) to allow someone close is to become perilously vulnerable, (2) one must be self-sufficient to prevent shame, and (3) one must feel indifference for others. But it must also be added: if being looked at dishonours you, then there is an implicit challenge here which might lead to a reaction.

The family, and particularly the mother, are depicted as having victim status. But why should the evil done to the family from outside it necessarily tear the family apart, rather than binding it closer together? The explanation is insufficient. On investigation of the family relationships one sees that they are imbued with cruelty, violence and contempt. The children thieve from their mother, which is usually a sign of unmet need, of lack of love. It is love which is being, symbolically, stolen (A 32).

The two sons continually fight each other with alarming savagery. The elder brother

dit au petit: sors de là, tu gênes. Aussitôt dit, il frappe. […] Quand ils se battaient on avait une peur égale de la mort pour l'un et pour l'autre.

(A 74-5)

[La mère] a toujours parlé de la force de ses fils de façon insultante. […] Elle était fière de la force de ses fils […] Comme son fils aîné elle dédaignait les faibles.

(A 71-2)

The mother's failure to intervene when they fight, her melodramatic shrieking while they do so, points to her basic incapacity to cope. The noise she makes encourages their behaviour, since it effectively makes them the centre of attention. Her weakness is therefore in part responsible for the violence of her sons. So is her overt favouritism. It is only of the elder brother (Pierre) that the mother says “mon enfant” (A 75). This of the most violent member of the family, who terrorises his younger brother (Paulo). She says of him

Que s'il avait voulu c'était le plus intelligent des trois. Le plus “artiste”. […] Et aussi celui qui a le plus aimé sa mère. […] Je ne savais pas, disait-elle, qu'on pouvait attendre ça d'un garçon, une telle intuition, une tendresse si profonde.

(A 98)

On her request, he ends up buried with her. “L'image est d'une intolérable splendeur,” writes Duras (A 99). One almost suspects incest, one of the locuses of silence and secrecy in this family. But, incest or no incest, the complicity between mother and elder son is an enormity. To single Pierre out as “her only child” constitutes a cruelty practised by the mother against her younger children. The indictment is clear, the implications tragic.

Not only are relations with the living impossible, so also are relations with the dead. It is explicitly said that no death is celebrated in the family (A 72). This refers most obviously to the dead father, and the fact that he is not mentioned in so many words is an act of concealment which demonstrates that the failure to celebrate his death has particular significance. Perhaps this is the resentment of his wife against him for his death, more probably for something else (for she failed to return with him to France [A 41]). Here is yet another unforgiving silence, likely to have had an important effect upon the 15[frac12]-year-old narrator.

No situation could be more full of dramatic suspense than this theatre of silence interrupted occasionally and unpredictably by an angry and hysterical screaming. The very fact that the family does not look, does not speak, does not listen, paradoxically shows that attention, watching, speaking, reveal hidden sources of power—which will in due course be used by the heroine.

Because both younger son and daughter know themselves to be unloved, this is a likely source of inferiority feelings, which may lead to a desire for compensatory power. In Alfred Alder's psychology, the Inferiority Complex arises from continuous humiliation (whether real or merely perceived). “The neglected, the hated, the undesired and the ugly” may, as children, contract the Inferiority Complex very easily (Orgler 69-71).³ Adler writes:

When the feeling of inferiority is intensified to the degree that the child fears she will never be able to overcome her weakness, the danger arises that […] she will not be satisfied with a simple restoration of the balance of power. She will seek to tip the scales in the opposite direction. In such cases the striving for power and dominance may become so exaggerated […] that it must be called pathological, and the ordinary relationships of life will never be satisfactory.

(UHN 71)⁴

The members of the family are deprived of love, care, concern and approval. They will therefore try (as Adler suggests) to compensate for this lack by seeking weapons of power. There is a power-vacuum in this family, and the children seek to fill it. The weapons of the elder brother (Pierre) are crude: sudden explosive anger, physical brutality. The heroine's tussle with her mother, however, takes subtle, unexpected paths, which ultimately bring a terrifying potency.

The mother takes care to demean the heroine. She takes pleasure in her daughter's dressing, not merely badly, but absurdly: the man's hat, the gold lamé shoes, the cheap prostitute's get-up: “Elle me regarde, ça lui plaît, elle sourit. […] Elle doit trouver que c'est un signe réconfortant cette imagination de la petite, d'inventer de s'habiller de cette façon. […] Cette inconvenance lui plaît” (A 32-3). In other words she finds the clothes make her daughter a laughing-stock; and she herself is amused and delighted by this. The heroine, however, uses this absurd dress to take vengeance on her mother. Wearing it with panache, she openly flaunts the whore-status her mother has imposed on her. She goes further, she acts out this accusation, using her outlandish clothes to land the Chinese millionaire's son. At only 15[frac12] it shows some power to turn the insult round and transform it into a victory! Moreover this adds doubly to her self-esteem, because it is she and she alone who turns the clothes to her advantage, she who achieves it through her own personal magnetism. Besides, the narrator uses this episode as revenge in her novel to underline the mother's lack of taste, lack of social know-how, lack of concern for her children's (and daughter's) welfare, thereby asserting her superiority over her mother after the latter's death.

When the mother interrogates her daughter about her relationship with the Chinese, she repeatedly beats her (A 72-4). Physical violence is here (as so often) a sign of weakness, and of fear: it stems from the terror of being unable to control the world. She elicits no confession, and her daughter is still denying at the end of the book that she actually sleeps with the Chinese (A 114). Duras writes:

Derrière les murs de la chambre fermée, le frère.

Le frère répond à la mère, il lui dit qu'elle a raison de battre l'enfant […]

(A 73)

The mother's complicity with Pierre's violence is again confirmed. As with the scene where she accompanies her sons' fighting with “un opéra de cris” (A 75), so in this case the mother is incapable of anything but a hysterical, noisy fuss, which simply underlines the power of her daughter, and her freedom to do what she likes. When she strips her, this emphasises how exciting and important her body is! The daughter's sense of power is reinforced. Here are (1) parental authority, (2) anger, (3) physical violence, helpless before “l'enfant/la petite”. The elder brother's threatening presence outside the closed door also constitutes attention, and provides the heroine with an exciting feeling of power. The mother's behaviour, both in respect of this interrogation of her daughter and of her sons' violence, is in fact contradictory: it is calculated to have an effect opposite to its ostensible purpose, and harmonises with the later claim (A 114) that the mother has “une connaissance si profonde de ses enfants”. I deduce that the mother's true desire is (1) for her sons to continue to fight, and (2) for her daughter to continue her affair. For the mother knows very well, and may even enjoy, the damage she is inflicting on her younger children. If Duras is sincere in thinking she had a “connaissance si profonde”, it could be only this (perhaps unconscious) knowledge.

The mother's interview with the directress of the boarding school confirms this reading (cf. ACN 119). Such complicity on the mother's part with her daughter's behaviour points to other powerful, concealed emotions:

La mère parle, parle. Elle parle de la prostitution éclatante et elle rit […] je parle, dit-elle, […] de cette jeune enfant qui […] tout à coup arrive au grand jour et se commet dans la ville au su et à la vue de tous, avec la grande racaille milliardaire chinoise, diamant au doigt comme une jeune banquière, et elle pleure.

(A 113-4)

The mother's tears at the end of this sentence are the cloak and the clue to her motivation, whether conscious or unconscious. She is envious of her daughter's daring, delighted by the money she can pass on from her Chinese lover (33-4), awed by her blatant sexuality and brazen flaunting of her affair. It is the daughter who has the upper hand.

In regard to the mother's attitude, Adler's remarks about criminal negligence are alarmingly apposite:

In law, the fact that the criminally negligent act is not consciously intended is considered an extenuating circumstance. There is no doubt, however, that an unconsciously hostile act is based upon the same degree of hostility as a consciously hostile one.

(UHN 186)

If one applies this sort of thinking to the problem, one may conclude that the mother's lack of concern for her daughter is equally a reality.

Later in this scene the mother-daughter relationship might be interpreted more positively: “Elle a attendu longtemps avant de me parler encore, puis elle l'a fait, avec beaucoup d'amour: tu sais que c'est fini? que tu ne pourras jamais plus te marier ici à la colonie?” (A 114). Perhaps for once Duras wishes to assert her mother's status as an authority, because at this point the mother is explicitly acknowledging her daughter's magnetism, charisma and sexual allure. This is why her words are described as “inoubliables”: “Elle me regarde et elle dit les choses inoubliables: tu leur plais? Je réponds: c'est ça, je leur plais quand même. C'est là qu'elle dit: tu leur plais aussi à cause de ce que tu es toi” (ibid.). These unusually tender statements could be interpreted, that is, as a cry of triumph: “At last she acknowledges my power!” However, this episode provides clear evidence that the mother's approval is normally never given, for it is presented as a unique occurrence. It is from the mother's self-hatred and self-doubt that everything stems. Having no self-confidence herself, she is neither able nor willing to provide any for her children. This is totally disabling to them.

The mother's hostility to her daughter is also directed at her intellectual ability:

Le proviseur lui dit: votre fille, madame, est première en français. Ma mère ne dit rien, rien, pas contente parce que c'est pas ses fils qui sont les premiers en français, la saleté, ma mère, mon amour, elle demande: et en mathématiques? On dit: ce n'est pas encore ça, mais ça viendra. Ma mère demande: ça viendra quand? On répond: quand elle voudra, madame.

(A 31)

The mother's resentment of her daughter's brilliance in French is, however, not because she would rather it were her sons, but rather because she cannot bear her daughter to succeed. This little episode is a double mark of the daughter's power. For (1) she proves her intellectual ability—a quality her mother desires her to have. She cannot therefore despise her daughter. But (2) she demonstrates this ability in precisely the way her mother doesn't want it shown, thereby becoming her superior. This observation leads naturally to a further point: the ultimate expression of her power over her mother is her writing of this novel. Furthermore, in writing it she has the novelist's liberty to demonstrate her contempt for her mother, even going so far as to allege that the latter had always been mad: “Elle l'était. De naissance. Dans le sang. Elle n'était pas malade de sa folie, elle la vivait comme la santé” (A 40).

In addition, the narrator claims (A 50) that her mother “n'a pas connu la jouissance”. Since she cannot know this, why does she wish to believe it? (1) In what is for her possibly the most important of all areas, namely the female sexual experience, it asserts her superiority over her mother. Equally importantly, (2) she wishes to deny that her mother was a complete adult.

The narrator's achievement (both social and literary) is, however, at the terrible cost of never establishing a proper relationship with her mother.

We turn now to the other members of her family, to her Chinese lover, and to society. Are the power relations here any different?

The key to the elder brother (Pierre) is anger: verbal and physical brutality. Anger among children is often a response to feelings of loss, abandonment, or to needs not being fulfilled.⁵ He terrorises the younger brother (Paulo). Indeed the narrator calls him a “murderer” (he is not literally one) and asserts that, when Paulo dies young (A 37-8), this is because Pierre had stolen his life-will during childhood (A 13-14).

We have already seen Pierre's violence, and his overt sexual sadism when he encourages the mother to beat the narrator. But maybe Duras understands him all too well in this respect. We shall return to the subject of sado-masochism in a moment, but, as she says, she is most like her elder brother, even physically (A 68). She takes care never to dance with Pierre, on account of the implicit, incestuous sexual threat (A 68). We may connect this detail perhaps with his attempt to rape the Vietnamese servant Dô (A 28). On p. 13 she refuses to disclose the facts about a later episode (“lorsque j'ai eu dix-huit ans”) about which a possible guess is that her elder brother attempted to rape her:

Non, il est arrivé quelque chose lorsque j'ai eu dix-huit ans qui a fait que ce visage a eu lieu. ça devait se passer la nuit. J'avais peur de moi, j'avais peur de Dieu. Quand c'était le jour, j'avais moins peur et moins grave apparaissait la mort. Mais elle ne me quittait pas. Je voulais tuer, mon frère aîné, je voulais le tuer, arriver à avoir raison de lui une fois, une seule fois et le voir mourir. C'était pour enlever de devant ma mère l'objet de son amour, ce fils, la punir de l'aimer si fort, si mal, et surtout pour sauver mon petit frère, je le croyais aussi […].

(A 13)

The use of ellipsis here, the suppression of any explanation, leaves room, however, for any number of hypotheses. In L'Amant de la Chine du nord we learn nothing more about this episode. We are however told something that is not hinted at in L'Amant, namely that Paulo used to come into the heroine's bed, and that when Pierre saw this, he tried to beat up Paulo (ACN 54-5). It would seem that this incest does not involve the defloration of the heroine (since in both books she is still a virgin when the Chinese makes love to her for the first time [ACN 77, A 50]), but expresses her domination of her brother:

L'enfant l'appelle tout bas: Paulo. Paulo était venu dans la salle de bains par la petite porte du côté du fleuve. Ils s'étaient embrassés beaucoup. Et puis elle s'était mise nue et puis elle s'était étendue à côté de lui et elle lui avait montré qu'il fallait qu'il vienne sur son corps à elle. Il avait fait ce qu'elle avait dit. Elle l'avait embrassé encore et elle l'avait aidé. Quand il avait crié elle s'était retournée vers son visage, elle avait pris sa bouche avec la sienne pour que la mère n'entende pas le cri de délivrance de son fils.

(ACN 200)

In this scene of incest, once again the powerful heroine (“the child”) is the instigator. Her fear of the elder brother is less a fear for herself than for her younger brother: “Il l'a battu (Paulo). C'est là que ça a commencé, la peur qu'il le tue” (ACN 55). In fact, “La seule personne que craint le frère aîné […] c'est moi” (A 68). It seems that “the child” exercises a universal ascendancy over the other members of her family, and particularly its most violent member.

From an Adlerian perspective one must point above all to Pierre's anger. Anger is a reaction to feelings of helplessness and deprivation (UHN 213-14). That this anger is most violently directed against Paulo is suggestive. The novel provides no evidence on which to found a theory, but Pierre's jealousy of his younger brother must be due to his feeling rejected, and to his seeing Paulo as the competitor for his mother's love.

The elder brother's ineffectuality as a criminal can also be elucidated by Adler: “Criminals are in fact cowards. They do not dare to follow the straight path, but choose instead crooked ways, dark, secret paths to their goal” (Orgler 112). Criminals are often spoilt children, says Adler. This explains Pierre's weakness, dependent as he is to her life's end on his mother.⁶

In L'Amant the heroine's lover too is afraid of Pierre. When he is ignored by her brothers at the “Source” nightclub, he is on the verge of tears (A 68).

En présence de mon frère aîné il cesse d'être mon amant. Il ne cesse pas d'exister mais il ne m'est plus rien. Il devient un endroit brûlé. Mon désir obéit à mon frère aîné, il rejette mon amant. Chaque fois qu'ils sont ensemble vus par moi je crois ne plus jamais en supporter la vue. Mon amant est nié dans justement son corps faible, dans cette faiblesse qui me transporte de jouissance. Il devient devant mon frère un scandale inavouable, une raison d'avoir honte qu'il faut cacher.

(A 66-7)

This evidently has incestuous overtones. Mainly, however, the heroine must always measure herself against strength. Her lover is a “weakling”, and this is a source of sexual triumph to her when she is with him, but when she sees him with her brother she immediately transfers her competitive power-instinct from her lover to the latter. It is now he who must be overcome, he against whom she must measure herself.⁷ Her competitive power-impulse appears to be of the classic male variety.

In the affair with the Chinese, she does not have to fight for dominance as with the elder brother, but emphasises her ascendancy from the outset:

au moment où il est descendu de la limousine noire, quand il a commencé à s'approcher d'elle, et qu'elle, elle le savait, savait qu'il avait peur.

Dès le premier instant elle sait quelque chose comme ça, à savoir qu'il est à sa merci. Donc que d'autres que lui pourraient être aussi à sa merci si l'occasion se présentait. Elle sait aussi quelque chose d'autre, que dorénavant le temps est sans doute arrivé où elle ne peut plus échapper à certaines obligations qu'elle a envers elle-même. […] L'enfant maintenant aura à faire avec cet homme-là, le premier, celui qui s'est présenté sur le bac.⁸

(A 45-6)

Though he is an experienced lover and knows how to give her pleasure, it is she who exercises the supreme power in the bedroom: “Il dit qu'il est seul, atrocement seul avec cet amour qu'il a pour elle. Elle lui dit qu'elle aussi elle est seule. Elle ne dit pas avec quoi” (A 48). Indeed, because he is “un homme qui a peur, il doit faire beaucoup l'amour pour lutter contre la peur” (A 53). His fear of losing her is much greater than hers of losing him: “Il vit dans l'épouvante que je rencontre un autre homme. Moi je n'ai peur de rien de pareil jamais” (A 79). His fear of her at the outset of the affair is still there when he speaks to her on the phone years later: “Il était intimidé, il avait peur comme avant. Sa voix tremblait tout à coup” (A 141).

As for that other principal, but impersonal, “character” of the novel, the Grand Passion—it may overpower him, but not the dominating 15[frac12]-year-old heroine. Her tone, as she speaks of her destiny and duty as a femme fatale, is full of pride and power (A 45-6, quoted above). As far as passion is concerned, she knows and possesses the power of that knowledge. We have seen her asserting that, if it were not the Chinese, it would be another. We have seen her prudent refusal to protest undying love in response to her lover's protestations. She is just as determined as the Chinese father that she will leave her lover: “Alors je lui ai dit que j'étais de l'avis de son père. Que je refusais de rester avec lui. Je n'ai pas donné de raisons” (A 103). She feels pity rather than contempt. But pity too is the emotion of a “superior”, as he recognises; for, despite the fact she gives no reasons, he submits without argument to her decision:

L'homme de Cholen sait que la décision de son père et celle de l'enfant sont les mêmes et qu'elles sont sans appel. […] [Leur histoire] n'est pas de la sorte qu'il faut pour être mariée, qu'elle se sauverait de tout mariage […].

(A 119)

The decisions of both father and mistress are thus spoken of in the same breath, as if both have equal authority. He hears and obeys. Now for a young man from this kind of society to put his mistress' authority on the same level as his father's is indeed a striking instance of her power!

The one respect in which—superficially—the heroine might not seem to be so powerful is that (in public) she is regarded as a prostitute—and in private (or in fantasy) accepts at times the prostitute's role:

Elle devient objet à lui, à lui seul secrètement prostituée. Sans plus de nom. Livrée comme chose, chose par lui seul, volée. […] diluée dans une généralité pareillement naissante, celle depuis le commencement des temps nommée à tort par un autre mot, celui d'indignité.

(ACN 96)

Il devient brutal, son sentiment est désespéré, il se jette sur moi […]. Il me traite de putain, de dégueulasse, il me dit que je suis son seul amour […].

(A 54)

From the man's point of view, it seems to me that he is seeking power: the power to influence the woman's view of herself by calling her names. At the end of the name-calling he thinks he will lift her into gratefulness by calling her “mon seul amour”.

From the woman's point of view the situation is more interesting. Her images of rape, of prostitution, of becoming an anonymous sexual object, are nonetheless an unmistakeable expression of sexual pride and joy. The fact is that sexual pride and sexual self-abasement are not so easy to separate from each other. In view of Adler's claim that prostitutes have a deep sense of inferiority (Orgler 135), do they therefore crave the contempt of others? Lack of self-esteem, as we have seen, is the source of the heroine's power-struggle. As we shall see later, her sex-drive is deeply infected with self-hatred. It is also, however, well known that prostitutes despise the men who seek their services. Could this explain a part of the heroine's motivation in L'Amant? She seeks self-abasement so as to abase the supposedly superior male sex and be able to despise them. One might ironically hypothesise, therefore, that fantasies of raping are an expression of sexual inadequacy, while fantasies of being raped are an expression of sexual dominance. A power which dares to fantasise its own loss is perhaps power indeed.

I would link all this with the lack of names. Why, for instance, is the Chinese lover anonymous? Why, for that matter, is the heroine's own name never once pronounced throughout the novel? The explanation is that anonymity is erotic. French lovers may sometimes address each other as “vous”, playing at not knowing each other, adopting the roles of a couple who have picked each other up in the street, mimicking the immediacy of an overpowering lust. The absence of names indicates the immediate compulsive power of the sexual impulse, and its ability to override social conventions.

Furthermore the traditional power-trick by which the male, by sleeping with a woman, turns her into a “slut”⁹ is here reversed. The young Chinese sleeps with a white woman. She according to the racist mores of the time would consider herself racially superior, though he naturally, being Chinese, considers her racially inferior. But she turns the tables on him, for this is at least equally her conquest of him; she will love him and leave him, as male Don Juans are supposed to do.

At times indeed she appears more than superior: she is superhuman or supernatural. She claims he sees her as a many-dimensional Super-Being:

Il respire l'enfant […] cet air chaud qui ressort d'elle. Il discerne de moins en moins clairement les limites de ce corps, celui-ci n'est pas comme les autres, il n'est pas fini, dans la chambre il grandit encore, il est encore sans formes arrêtées, à tout instant en train de se faire, il n'est pas seulement là où il le voit, il est ailleurs aussi, il s'étend au-delà de la vue, vers le jeu, la mort, il est souple, il part tout entier dans la jouissance comme s'il était grand, en âge, il est sans malice, d'une intelligence effrayante.

(A 121)

Here, like a Hindu divinity, her body is expanding into the universe. She is air, warmth, life. She is “à tout instant en train de se faire”, like the continuous creation of the world out of Brahma. Her body has no limits, it is infinite, and infinitely expandable, it is not only here but everywhere else as well, it is linked with the secrets of death (and therefore of life), it is all-power, and all-wisdom!

Is there a countervailing touch in the fact that she feels she is his child? Perhaps it is the lost father she finds in him, also the lost (because inadequate and threatening) mother. In him she finds the tenderness which her mother never gave her. But let me emphasise this: for her he is not an incarnation of the godhead; he is merely one of the concrete manifestations behind which the shadows of her desires lurk. There is nothing metaphysical about him.

The young Chinese may remain anonymous, but his race is frequently mentioned. This again is a constant reminder that social conventions of power are being flouted. This transgression reaches a further peak when the affair becomes public—when everyone, French, Chinese and Vietnamese, knows that “la petite prostituée blanche” is sleeping with her Chinese lover. A disgraceful passion, seen in public as disgraceful, and gloried in, is all the more powerful. It might be thought that society can operate at least one powerful sanction on transgressors of this sort: ostracism. But to the heroine, this is but another ordeal to be victoriously overcome. She will have the power to be alone in triumph (though others think she is alone in suffering). Thus: “La même différence sépare la dame et la jeune fille au chapeau plat des autres gens du poste. […] Isolées toutes les deux. Seules, des reines” (A 110-11). The dangers of solitude are clear; this passage terminates with a mention of them: “de la peur, de la folie, des fièvres, de l'oubli”. But this is no contradiction: without such dangers, the courage and strength of her who surmounts them would be less remarkable! The heroine, then, is not seeking that conventional but elusive state called “happiness”. On the contrary, it is power that she is seeking, and at no point does she describe her affair with the Chinese in terms of “happiness”:

Mes cheveux sont lourds, souples, douloureux […].

(A 24)

C'est un lieu de détresse […] Je lui demande si c'est habituel d'être tristes comme nous le sommes.

(A 56)

[…] c'est toujours terrible. […] cette tristesse […] je pourrais presque lui donner mon nom, tellement elle me ressemble.

(A 57)

Rather, her desire is a tyrant. It operates in and through pain. The pleasure of the heroine and her lover seems almost to vanish and be engulfed by pure suffering. The strength of passion is seen as all the greater because it overcomes even the obstacle of suffering. And to the extent that the heroine has this passion at her command and under her control, then it is her power which is vaunted as supreme.

We have seen that not only does she assert her power against these principles of (1) crude force, (2) desire, (3) prohibition, (4) suffering. She has become herself the object of desire; herself that which is forbidden; herself that for which one must suffer. In raising herself to this status, she avenges herself against mother and elder brother. “The child” has satisfyingly turned the tables upon those different forms of violence which she had suffered—the violence of brute force, of love rejected, of actions disapproved, of aspirations despised, of tears unnoticed.

Her transgression of social taboos, however, is not without its cost, and we have already spoken of the suffering in the bedroom. Her childhood experience had been one in which violence was done to her by others, in the interests of making her appear weak. Now she continues the process “under a different sign”, doing violence to herself and her emotions in the interests of her own strength. We see that the quest for power may have its self-destructive side, and may entail violence against herself.

The heroine's childhood created in her a need for attention, a hunger for importance. Now, the more elements of a person's psychic needs are embodied in an emotion, and the more fundamental they are, the more powerful it will be. When many needs converge, giving this emotion explosive power, there emerges that most exciting of states, “passion”. In her case her needs can be most excitingly achieved when she manages to provoke sexual desire, anger, violence, incomprehension, social disapproval, even danger (when her lover fantasises about sex-murder). These are precisely the reactions which constitute for her the most satisfying triumph over her past experience, because (1) they reflect and repeat that experience, but (2) in doing so they turn her former weakness in those similar situations into present active power. “Therefore” (as Adler would say) her emotions throw her into a relationship which will provoke these various reactions.¹⁰

Pleasure is aroused by the overcoming of fear (as when she overcomes her fear of the elder brother). Fear is aroused by danger, and above all by the danger of death. The pleasure of orgasm is heightened by the thought of, or the closeness of, death. Thus, when the heroine mentions other women who have disgraced themselves by taking lovers, she links sex and death, talking of “une jouissance à en mourir […] de cette mort mystérieuse des amants sans amour. C'est de cela qu'il est question, de cette humeur à mourir” (A 111). A passion which incurs the danger of death is more powerful than lesser passions; most powerful of all is a passion which leads to actual death. Hence the fascination of the heroine with the unfaithful “Dame de Sadec” and with her lover who commits suicide in public in the great square at Savannakhet (A 109, 112). The scandal thereby created is another example of passion transgressing (transcending) the social proprieties. In L'Amant the heroine has a fantasy about watching her lover make love to her friend Hélène Lagonelle (A 91-2, cf. ACN 92-3). Can this be understood as a wish to have power over Hélène? A vicarious rape of her friend by her lover? We must not, however, overlook the remark: “Hélène Lagonelle donne envie de la tuer, elle fait se lever le songe merveilleux de la mettre à mort de ses propres mains” (A 91). The extremities of desire, for Duras, push towards sex-murder.¹¹ Anything, to be really powerful, must be really dangerous, so that overcoming it, controlling it, or even merely playing with it, becomes a mark of one's own power. A monstrous love is more powerful than a normal love because it projects fear—which is in turn a challenge which has to be overcome, because, once overcome, it confers a sense of enormous power. Passion reaches the zenith of its power, and of its ability to confer power on those who feel it, when it becomes an overwhelming threat to the self, to consciousness, to life. The dark undertow of this threat accompanies all Duras' work. Thus, to briefly illustrate this point, we read in La Maladie de la mort:

Le corps est sans défense aucune, il est lisse depuis le visage jusqu'aux pieds. Il appelle l'étranglement, le viol, les mauvais traitements, les insultes, les cris de haine, le déchaînement des passions entières, mortelles.

(MM 21)

In Les Yeux bleus, cheveux noirs the anonymous woman puts a black silk scarf over her face and when the man questions her, she replies:

La soie noire, comme le sac noir, où mettre la tête des condamnés à mort.

(YBCN 34, 37)

Elle lui demande si cette nuit-là l'idée lui est venue de la tuer. Il dit:—L'idée m'est encore venue, mais comme celle d'aimer.

(YBCN 135)

In L'Homme assis dans le couloir, we find: “Il lui dit qu'il voudrait ne plus l'aimer […] Il lui dit qu'un jour il va la tuer” (HAC 31-2).

On the basis of this kind of evidence, Danielle Bajomée in her excellent Duras ou la douleur argues that “Il n'est, pour Duras, de désir que sadique […].”¹²

I suggest therefore that Duras sees sado-masochism and the urge towards sex-murder as marks of passion's all-conquering power. In view of her belief that women are stronger than men, how can one understand this obsession with the female as victim? It should be noted that, in the quotations given above, the woman often incites the man to contemplate sex-murder. Duras' heroines are delighted when their men have thoughts of this kind, and give every encouragement to them.¹³ It shows that they have inspired a genuine grand passion; it proves the power of their female sexuality, creating in men a desire so great that it cannot be satisfied, and whose agonised insatiability therefore tempts them towards murder. It is not that the man is violent; it is that he is driven to violence by his love for the woman. She therefore is the source and origin of his violence, which is doubly an evidence of her power, for (1) she has inspired this murderous emotion; and (2) she is able to face it, face it down, or welcome death. Sex-murder is thus in Duras not so much a mark of metaphysical frustration, but rather of woman's invincible power and thus of a kind of metaphysical triumph.

It is here that the logic of power can be admired in its full perversity. How can the desire for power (whose source is originally the need for self-protection) lead to a desire for one's own destruction? But, let us ask, “What is the greatest conquest of fear? Is it (1) to conquer your fear of X by defeating X? No, for then you eliminate fear by defeating the cause of it. Is it (2) to conquer your fear of X by defeating fear? No, for if you no longer feel fear, then its power has been reduced to a nullity. Is it (3) to know your fear justified, yet to willingly continue to experience it, feeling it ever more acutely (like the heroine of L'Homme assis dans le couloir, wilfully submitting to obscene brutality [HAC 32-3, 34-5])?”

Logically, the last is the greatest conquest of the demon Fear—for it neither reduces nor dismisses him, it stares into his face and, as he expands like a night darker than the night, till he covers the last glow of horizon, the last glimmer of starlight, her grim determination still refuses to flinch. The brutalities to which the woman submits in L'Homme assis dans le couloir cannot be understood except in these terms. Namely that what she seeks is—by an extraordinary paradox—power: that supreme power which is constituted by welcoming the ultimate threat to her own survival in all its extremity. Here it can be seen how the drive for power may lead to someone's committing the ultimate violence against herself.

Leslie Hill writes:

It is misleading to argue that Duras. […] is somehow endorsing violence against women or automatically linking heterosexuality with oppression. […] Rather, the disturbing intensity of Duras's text lies in its refusal to moralise sexuality or normalise the excessive nature of desire. Sexuality […] falls beyond meaning and cannot be rationalised or contained within recognisable limits. […] Desire, it seems, is like some kind of radical disaster that cannot be held within bounds; and it comes into its own when it pushes humans to the very limit of what they are.

(Hill 63)

I agree with Hill that this is indeed very close to what Duras believes she is doing. But is this not to present sado-masochistic transgression as something particularly revelatory and profound? It would seem that to understand sex as fundamentally sado-masochistic is being held up as privileged knowledge.¹⁴

Moreover, I would question whether it is really sexuality which is the source of the “radical disaster” of which Hill speaks, which “pushes humans to the very limit of what they are”. No, sexuality and the sexual act are merely its occasion in Duras. The true motive of the drive to death is the loss of self-esteem and tenderness in infancy. Furthermore, since the woman who feels desire is killed, her desire is killed, and this shows an unconscious hatred of desire. Duras' sado-masochistic sexuality does not fall beyond meaning or morality. It is entirely meaningful, once it is seen as the tragic result of (1) a childhood loss of love and (2) the consequent drive to power. It does not fall beyond morality because we must, as we should, feel pity for its perpetrators and horror for what they perpetrate. Duras obsessively shows us women who fall helplessly at the feet of murderous violence, worshipping it. The impulsions described in these novels are singularly dark: they are akin to the psychology of suicide. For her this suicide is exciting only if it involves, as wielder of the death-blow, a male executioner-accomplice. The crucial moral question therefore is: is she presenting this to us as the ultimate meaning of sexuality? If she is, then Duras is endorsing violence, and we must condemn her doing so. Duras' transgressive sex is “revelatory”, “apocalyptic” only in the sense that it reveals the hidden roots of such transgression—the fact that her understanding of sex was crippled during childhood, and overlaid with the power impulse. For Duras, I believe, it is normal tender sex that would take her outside her own psychological limits, and therefore be “revelatory” and “apocalyptic”.

Adler is again valuable here: for him, sexual perversion is a sign of frustration, of distance between the sexes, but it is important to point out that he does not accept that such distance is inevitable: healthy sexual relationships are possible:

1. Every perversion is the expression of an increased distance between man and woman.

2. A perversion indicates a more or less deep revolt against the acceptance of the normal sexual role and expresses itself as a planned though unconscious trick to raise the lowered self-esteem.

(Orgler 146, my italics)

Thus, for Adler, sado-masochistic “triumphs” of this kind are the tragic outcome of damaged self-esteem. There is no surer sign of damaged self-esteem than wilful self-destruction, the desire for which is the projection of a tragically misunderstood self-interest.

In L'Amant, the heroine does not use her power to satisfy her sexuality. She uses her sexuality to express and exalt her own transcendent power, to make it public and manifest to all. In some of Duras' novels, this drive to power becomes so wanton that it threatens the survival of the woman herself. And this psychological process is probably masculine in kind, deriving from that childhood period when, in a family that was not merely fatherless but contained a power-vacuum, she and her elder brother competed for the dominant role.

There is little love in Duras' novels—there is only that lesser, though fiercer thing, passion, and the drive for power.

Notes

1. As far as I can see, the question of power has not been discussed in relation to L'Amant. It appears as a momentary tangent in Yvonne Givers-Villate's perceptive “M. Duras's La Maladie de la mort: feminist indictment or allegory?”, in: Sanford S. Ames, Remains to be Seen (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), pp. 127-35.

2. But of course, to what extent is it fiction, to what extent autobiography? These questions perhaps are not entirely soluble. Its consistency, however, both with itself and with other works by Duras, show its closeness to the roots of the author's psychology.

   Works by Marguerite Duras are referred to by the following initials (the place of publication is Paris in each case):

   A=L'Amant, Minuit, 1984;

   ACN=L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, Gallimard, 1991.

   BCP=Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Gallimard, 1950.

   DDE=Détruire, dit-elle, Minuit, 1969.

   HAC=L'Homme assis dans le couloir, Minuit, 1980.

   MC=Moderato cantabile (1958), 10/18, 1962.

   MM=La Maladie de la mort, Minuit, 1982.

   YBCN=Les Yeux bleus, cheveux noirs, Minuit, 1986.

3. Hertha Orgler, Alfred Adler, the Man and his Work (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 4th ed., 1973).

4. UHN=Alfred Adler, Understanding Human Nature (Oxford: Oneworld, 1992). The first version of this essay mentioned Adler, but I had not returned to him as a source, and I am grateful to Mary Orr for encouraging me to consult him properly: he turns out to be a potent ally. While this will not be an Adlerian reading, such an approach unlocks interesting connexions which I will in part be following up.

5. E.g. Claudia Jewett, Helping Children Cope with Separation and Loss (London: Batsford, 1984), pp. 65-6.

6. Confronted with strength, he is helpless. During the episode where the Chinese offers the mother money, he does his best to create a scene, to prevent it happening, using the ineffective weapons of rudeness, anger, insult (ACN 125-32). The Chinese lover simply treats him as if he were not there. In this scene in L'Amant de la Chine du Nord he appears particularly ineffectual, even pathetic.

7. The passage ends, “Autour du souvenir la clarté livide de la nuit du chasseur. ça fait un son strident d'alerte, de cri d'enfant.” Again these enigmatic references to “the hunter's night”. Is this the night of the attempted rape? (Frankly, despite A 13, I suspect that this took place well before the age of 18.) Leslie Hill claims in his Marguerite Duras, Apocalyptic Desires (London & New York: Routledge, 1993; hereafter referred to as MD) that this refers to Charles Laughton's film The Night of the Hunter, in which a murderous preacher pursues two children. However, as both Mary Orr and I have independently noticed, there are references to the brother as hunter in BCP, which antedates the film by several years.

8. In L'Amant de la Chine du Nord she is perhaps the more active instigator of the affair. For, once “L'enfant” is in his limousine, the young man does most of the talking … but during a long initial silence, she picks up his hand and turns it over and over, as if fascinated (ACN 42).

9. If an academic reference is needed, let me suggest David G. Winter, The Power Motive (London: Macmillan, 1973), p. 170.

10. As Duras carefully explains, the scene with the Chinese has recurred in most of her books in one way or another; around it her imagination has obsessively revolved. It is clear why: this was the moment when her emotional needs came together for the first time, in the most satisfying combination. Passion resulted.

11. Cf. L'Amant de la Chine du Nord where the lover proposes to take the heroine to Long-Hai:

    Elle se retourne, se blottit contre lui. Il l'enlace. Il dit qu'elle est son enfant, sa sœur, son amour. Ils ne sourient pas. Il a éteint la lumière.

    —Comment tu m'aurais tuée à Long-Hai? Dis-le-moi encore.

    —Comme un Chinois. Avec la cruauté en plus de la mort.

    Elle récite la fin de la phrase comme elle ferait d'un poème.

    (ACN 110)

12. D. Bajomée, Duras ou la douleur (Bruxelles: Éditions Universitaires, Université de Boeck, 1989), p. 180.

13. Of the woman murdered by her lover at the opening of Moderato cantabile:

    —Son consentement à elle a été entier?

    —Emerveillé. (MC 110)

14. E.g. Hélène Lagonelle in L'Amant “ne saura jamais ce que je sais” (A 91). There is in DDE a privileged group of the sexual elite—Alissa, Max Thor and Stein—who truly grasp the transgressive and tragic nature of sex.