SOURCE: “Fiction and Autobiography/Language and Silence: ‘The Lover’ by Marguerite Duras,” in Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction: An Essay Collection, edited by Janice Morgan and Colette T. Hall, Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991, pp. 73-84.

To write is not to comment on what one already knows but to look for what one doesn't know yet.

—Viviane Forrestier¹

In 1984, Marguerite Duras surprised the French literary world by producing L'Amant (The Lover), a lyrical, darkly-candid autobiographical book about her adolescence in Indochina during the late 1920s. The book, which opens with the young Duras crossing the Mekong river on a ferry and closes one and a half years later with her departure on an ocean liner for France, traces the young woman's passage from childhood to adulthood. In many ways, The Lover—written toward the end of what has been a long, distinguished career as an author—is the retelling of events described earlier in a novel called The Sea Wall (1950). More than thirty years separate the two works, more than thirty years of relative silence on this evidently formative part of Duras's life. It is as if until just recently, Duras wished to forget—both publicly and privately—about this very different childhood she experienced in what remains for Westerners an alien land. Gradually, however, the past has re-surfaced in Duras's writing—first in fiction, as in the Indian cycle beginning with The Vice-Consul (1966), then later in the growing number of photographs, interviews, and frankly autobiographical texts the author has published during the last few years.

In re-reading The Sea Wall, it is clear what Duras would have wished to forget—the poverty, isolation, and the lack of opportunity endemic to the remote, tropical outpost where the family, a widowed mother and her two children, lives. Informing the whole is the legend of how the mother, in a heroic but doomed attempt to become a wealthy landowner for her children's benefit, suffers one legal defeat after another at the hands of a corrupt, colonial administration. With their mother living afterwards in despair and close to madness, the son and the daughter have no one to turn to for consolation but each other and their romantic fantasies of a better life. An erotic liaison with a wealthy lover becomes for both of them the preferred avenue of escape.

Though The Sea Wall is based on personal situations and events that actually occurred, the novel is nonetheless a very public narrative: the story is told in the third person (yet closely tied to the daughter Suzanne's point of view) and develops in a conventionally linear, chronological fashion. Throughout, its realistic settings and terse dialogue recall the American novel style à la Hemingway so fashionable in France during the 1950s.

The Lover, while covering the same brief period in the author's life, differs dramatically from the earlier version. Narrated largely in the first person, the text is composed of fragments taken from shifting time frames, fragments that are related not in an external, linear way, but in circular, associative patterns that convey the more intimate, psychological rhythms of that experience. At times etched with a sharp sense of realism (the strident sounds and exotic mixture of smells in the night streets of Cholon, for example), yet at other times, passing with a dream-like fluidity beyond any set boundaries of place and time, The Lover creates a distinctive style all its own.

It is clear that Duras assumes the two different texts to be complementary, for each provides a certain content that the other leaves out. In this way, the first text becomes a kind of narrative repoussoir for the second, a foil against which the new text, this new interpretation of events, will be played. “Before, I spoke of clear periods, those on which the light fell. Now I'm talking about the hidden stretches of that same youth, of certain facts, feelings, events that I buried” (8). In thus characterizing the interdependency of the two texts, Duras asserts her need to clarify what had been written before, to re-discover a remembered vision of her past life and self that had previously been disguised. The author tells her readers that she now feels free to tell the true story of how things happened, now that her mother and her brothers are dead, now that the moral strictures governing literary culture (and women's writing in particular) have been unbound.

Yet though Duras pursues the past with a relentless candor, it would be naive to conclude that she is writing the book merely to settle accounts or that she is uncovering the past in an effort to reveal all. Estelle Jelinek, in her introduction to Women's Autobiography, speaks of a dual or conflicting intention in the writing of autobiography. While on the one hand authors “wish to clarify, to affirm, and to authenticate their self-images” (15), a writer will also tend to camouflage or in some way distance herself from intimacy in the projection of that self-image. Certainly, the psychological tension between intimacy and distance, self-revelation and self-effacement accounts for much of the fascination and allure The Lover exerts upon its readers. Central to this issue is the enigma of Duras's feelings for the man who first became her lover and with that, the sense we have of how much the author reveals or conceals, first from the lover and secondly, from the reader. For perhaps the real subject of this autobiography, unlike the earlier version in The Sea Wall, is writing—that is, the origins of Duras's desire to write and with that, her means of access to that writing.

To begin, many readers are struck by her tendency to slip from a predominantly first-person narration to a more distant third-person narration and to do so precisely in those scenes with the man from Cholon, scenes which are among the most intimate in the book. The more obvious explanations for this are not at all satisfying. For example, the split between the first person (1) and the third person (she) does not seem to convey, as one might anticipate in an autobiographical work, the distinction between the young girl of then as she lived her experiences and the mature woman of today looking back on those experiences. For the narrative, rather than shifting back and forth from the present tense to the past, is written very dominantly in the present tense (regardless of the particular time period being evoked) and with a high degree of vividness and immediacy that effectively erases the very distinction between past and present. Rather, the appearance of the third person seems to mark the deliberate intrusion in autobiography of a fictional artifice; that is, Duras, the public figure and author narrating, becomes Duras, a literary character, narrated, in her own story.

For some critics, this fictional intrusion compromises the transparency of Duras's early statement that this book is one of self revelation. Sharon Willis, for example, views the narrative split consciousness in The Lover as a kind of literary smokescreen, one highly characteristic of Duras's tendency to décevoir (in the dual sense of the French word to deceive; to disappoint) her public (4). The author would seem to stand accused, then, of intentional duplicity, “given the text's strategy of veiling and unveiling, where ‘I’ veils herself as ‘she’, but where ‘she' just as frequently masquerades as ‘I’” (6). In other words, one may well gain the suspicion that Duras, the writer, is playing the same game of seduction and evasion with her readers that the young girl played, then, with her lover.

As compelling as this interpretation might seem, I would like to propose another—namely, that is precisely through a certain artifice and duality that Duras's narrative is able to achieve its authenticity. Moreover, the tension that exists in the written text between intimacy and distance, deception and sincerity, language and silence is, in fact, intrinsic to the experiences as she lived them.

From the outset, Duras describes her erotic adventure as “the experiment,” revealing already not only a taste for pleasure but a taste for speculative distance on that pleasure. From her opening statement about what constitutes a woman's beauty, her seductiveness, Duras shows a keen awareness of women's iconic value, their particular quality of (in Laura Mulvey's words) “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 11). Having identified that quality in herself (through a somewhat elaborately detailed description of her clothing and makeup), she goes on to describe the Chinese man's approach, his interest—but also his apprehension because of the racial difference, her youth. It is at the moment when he approaches her that Duras slips into third-person narration, and thereafter, a dual awareness infuses the narrative. From the moment she describes her gaze going out to the man on the ferry, there is another gaze, beyond the couple, looking back—Duras consciously watching herself being watched, being enchanted by the phenomenon, writing about it. When Duras slips into the third person, she effectively transposes the transparency of the first-person account of an individual experience into a more complex kind of theater, one which transcends the limits of the personal.

The rhythmic force of the prose carries events forward as relentlessly as the Mekong River current, the girl being embarked with the man in what she calls “everyone's story,”² the knowledge which she says she already possessed, “in advance of time and experience” (9). Clearly, the balance of passion is weighted on his side, while the balance of power (the passive power of a desired woman) is on hers. Far from stressing the uniqueness of her experience—as we might expect—the young girl insists instead on maintaining almost an enforced impersonality with her lover. Alone with him for the first time, she asks the man to do with her what he “usually does with the women he brings to his flat” (37, 38) and later confides to him that she enjoys the idea of being curiously “one of them, indistinguishable [from them]” (42). No names are mentioned in the narrative; Duras refers to the man and to herself through third-person epithets: “the child” (35), “the man from Cholon” (74), “the little white girl” (83), “the Chinese millionaire” (91)—terms which not only convey the way each is viewed by a certain segment of society, but also the way the lovers inevitably view each other; they are attracted to and defined for each other by their separateness, their difference.

The young girl never equates the undeniable pleasure she receives from him with love for the man she meets each night; part of her is always outside the room where they are, beyond the space their two bodies occupy. Their affair is characterized, from the first night they are together, by an unbridgeable solitude: “He says he's lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she's lonely too. She doesn't say why” (37). Because of this solitude, her intense physical pleasure with him seems abstract, austere—almost brutal. The first person narration resumes suddenly in the memory of her mother, then in the vivid evocation of the particular atmosphere of the room where they are—so open to the Chinese streets outside its windows. In the midst of their lovemaking, the young girl hears the sounds of wooden clogs on the crowded streets, the strident sounds of merchants mingled with the rich aroma of roasted peanuts, soups, the sudden mountain fragrance of wood-smoke, and it is as if all the individuality, the unforgettable particularity of the event lay there, strangely outside herself.

Between the ebb and flow of physical desire, the girl tells the Chinese about her family in Sadec; soon surrounding the lovers' bodies alone in the room grows the shadowy presence of the mother, the two brothers, and their familiar “inspired silence” (34). After their first evening together, the narrative flickers back and forth from the nights in Cholon to the remembered days in Sadec. Thus, at the same time that Cholon inaugurates her separation from the family in Sadec, it also curiously confirms that original experience; both Sadec and Cholon share the identity of “a place that's intolerable, bordering on death, a place of violence, pain, despair, dishonor” (75). Gradually, the nights in Cholon, with their distinctive mixture of pleasure-in-pain, in their essential ambivalence, seem to parallel with the lover the same silent relationships of desire and difference, pride and shame, power and fear that existed within her family. It is undoubtedly to the intensity of this ambivalence—in recognition of these silences—that Duras owes the uniqueness of her vision as a writer. About Sadec she writes, “It's in its aridity, its terrible harshness, its malignance, that I'm the most deeply sure of myself, at the heart of my essential certainty, the certainty that I'll be a writer” (75). Here, in the powerful comfort Duras takes in the knowledge of her destiny as a writer, one can only conclude, as does the critic Yvonne Guers-Villate, that writing performs a very important and specific function for this author: it is through the writing of books that she will be able to transpose—in an aesthetic form—the wealth of contradictions, the polarities and distances, the emotional intensities and ambiguities of life as she experienced them.³ Her desire here is not to resolve these conflicting tensions, but rather—as in death—to free herself from them, to transcend them.

All these elements participate in the distances established by the oscillations in the narrative, of which the shift between she and I is but one indication. Yet there is another facet to this layered consciousness in the story. For also intertwined with the nights in Cholon are the remembered images of certain women: Marie-Claude Carpenter, Betty Fernandez, Helen Lagonelle. The Lover is a hymn to these women—to the desire they evoked in those around them, their mystery, their beauty, and also their peculiar absence, their silence. Among these women, one reigns supreme in memory, referred to here as “the Lady” (89), the wife of the French ambassador in Vinh Long, the one whose young lover committed suicide in Savanna Khet when she left there to join her husband in Vinh Long. This particular woman, first encountered by Duras at the age of eight, seems to have incarnated for her an unforgettable model of femininity—one strongly implicated in a precocious obsession with death.⁴ The model also for a literary character, Anne-Marie Stretter, who dominates several of Duras's most well-known works—notably The Vice-Consul and India Song, embodies for the young Duras a dual power and possesses a dual identity: first, as a wealthy woman of society, wife and mother, an elegant sustainer of the status quo and then, underneath that identity, a woman who contained within the sensuality of her body “this power of death, to create death, to bring it on” (Lieux 65).⁵

Duras's use of the third person (she) to introduce and frame her own erotic initiation, that curious fusion of she/I, works to connect her own individual story to this other myth of passion. In fact, the author draws a clear parallel between that other woman, then almost forty, and the fifteen-year-old girl; both alike “doomed to discredit because of the kind of body they have, caressed by lovers, kissed by their lips, consigned to the infamy of a pleasure unto death, as they both call it, unto the mysterious death of lovers without love” (90). The nights spent with the lover in Cholon repeat, too, the litany of “a pleasure unto death” (43, 90), and one senses strongly that Duras's account of this experience represents, for her, a personal access to a legend; one senses that the narrative enacts her own entry into the necessarily impersonal myth of passion and desire.⁶ It is this quality of the relationship that accounts, no doubt, for the externality of its narration: in the text, for example, Duras refers to the man as “the” not as “my” lover; and further on, she writes about him using once more the definite article where the possessive would be more customary, “I can still see the face, and I do remember the name” (44).⁷ This same externality, this implicit allusion to a legend of erotic passion that exists curiously beyond the two lovers also provides the essential dimension to the young girl's previously expressed wish with her lover to be among all the other women “he'd had,” to be “‘mixed in’ with them, indistinguishable” (42). In this wish, the lover becomes her accomplice (and, to a certain extent, her victim): “He understands what I've just said. Our expressions are suddenly changed, false, caught in evil and death” (42). “It was as if he loved the pain, loved it as he'd loved me, intensely, unto death perhaps, and as if he preferred it now to me” (110).

Nowhere does the force of this myth seem more striking than in the closing pages of the book when, again, the fictional register resumes in the telling of her departure on the ocean liner and, with that departure, the young girl's sudden realization one night—after their separation—that perhaps she had loved him after all, “with a love she hadn't seen because it had lost itself in the affair (l'histoire, the story) like water in sand” (114; L'Amant 138). The distanced, fictional mode here, the story, becomes a way of revealing the depth of illusion behind the experience as she lived it—a way of unveiling the self-deception that informed (or perhaps better, de-formed, concealed) the emotion contained within that experience. Thus, as in Duras's novels, even as the narrative weaves its spell of fantasy or illusion, it also reveals a lucid awareness of the central delusion it depicts. The text's duality, its “duplicity”—far from compromising the validity of the fundamental experience—becomes, in fact, the hallmark of its genuineness. Ultimately, for the writer, it is the “story” that triumphs: years afterward, through the man's phone call, we hear once more in the book's final pages the echoing testimony of a mythic love undiminished by time, of a passion that would endure until death. Here, personal event has been fully transposed into literature: autobiography has passed into legend.

We began by observing that The Lover is a work of revelation. In Duras's avowed intentions in writing the book, to tell those parts of her experience that were not expressed before, the text assumes the role of a testimonial or a confession. Yet in comparing this later book to the earlier Sea Wall, we note a peculiar irony: it is the earlier novel that is filled with movement, character, event, and dialogue—speech that passes even into invective and diatribe—whereas the later autobiographical book remains largely a record of silences. In effect, the text is saturated with silence, silences that exist at the level of the experience itself: in speaking of the family in Sadec, for example, “Never a hello, a good evening, a happy New Year. Never a thank you. Never any talk. Never any need to talk. Everything always silent, distant. It's a family of stone, petrified so deeply it's impenetrable” (54); about the subject of marriage between herself and the Chinese, “They never speak of it any more” (97); about their nights together in Cholon, “He scarcely speaks to her any more. Perhaps he thinks she won't understand any longer what he'd say about her, about the love he never knew before and of which he can't speak” (99); or at the moment when the young girl nearly confides her story to her mother: “I almost told her about Cholon. But I didn't. I never did” (93).

But silences occur also in the gaps and fissures of the narration, in the fragmentation and dislocation of memory as the text slips from one time-place to another. One cannot avoid the impression—confirmed even on the printed page, punctuated as it is by blank spaces—that a mysterious content must have been left out. Curiously, however, in comparing The Lover to The Sea Wall, one discovers that this later book is, at once, more fragmented yet more thematically coherent than its fictional predecessor, more elusive, yet more complete. Clearly, there is something here that goes beyond the contingencies of youthful reticence, the accidents inherent in either willful or unwillful failures to communicate; for the silence at the heart of Duras's childhood experience lies also at the heart of her aesthetic practice. One need only compare the style and structure of the text to those of her mature, fictional works: Moderato Cantabile, Hiroshima mon amour, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, The Vice-Consul—to recognize that the writing of silence represents for this author a deliberate, aesthetic choice. Both the fiction and the autobiography are based on a central conviction deeply held by the author, that language (the spoken) exists precisely to suggest, to evoke that which remains unspoken in life; that writing serves, therefore, primarily to render the substance of things imagined, the evidence of things not said.

Duras's own comments on the complex, hidden filiations between desire, silence, and writing in this autobiographical work make this conviction evident (25, 75, 103). Furthermore, in an interview, the author states that the intense, youthful affair in Cholon about which she has written “has eclipsed the other loves of my life, those that were declared, married”⁸ and has done so precisely because it was “unspoken, undeclared” (Apos). In its silence, then, Cholon and all that it represents rejoins the imaginary photograph that opens the book, the one of the seductive young girl on the ferry crossing the river, the one that was never taken. Because it was never taken, she says, never “detached or removed from all the rest” (10), the tenuous, remembered image holds a great power, that of representing an absolute: it is precisely because their content was never expressed, never acknowledged or fixed in either image or words that both the absent photograph and the silent nights in Cholon have come to hold—much later in the author's life—an inexhaustible richness.

Here, a certain suspicion of language prevails, one shared by other contemporary writers (notably Maurice Blanchot, whom Duras admires)—a belief that language, even as it calls into being and names our past experience, can also betray that experience, can contain and kill its sensuous strangeness, its unrepeatable magic. The goal of the writer, then, is to create a style that does not attempt to directly express its ever-elusive content but only to suggest the contours, the dimension, or the shadow of that content. It is this quality that gives a literary text (like a memory) the power to resonate beyond itself, to engender other texts, other forms.

And this can be true, it seems, of autobiography as well as of fiction. In this way, Duras would not have us view this particular book as an endpoint or a conclusion to the past but rather as another possible point of departure and re-discovery of that past.⁹ In its elusiveness, its fluidity, its ritual imperative of looking again, of saying again, The Lover asserts the re-performing of a self in writing that ultimately cannot be fixed, seized, rendered captive or named in words and images. Paradoxically, then, it is through a certain artifice, through the use of fictional registers, and through the shaping of silence that the writer is able to evoke a composite portrait of herself, one that in its complex facets of event and illusion begins to attain the fullness of authenticity.

Notes

1. This epigraph by Forrestier is borrowed from a book about writing by Suzanne Lamy entitled Quand je lis je m'invente (When I Read, I Invent Myself). Translation my own.

2. This citation is from a special interview with Marguerite Duras conducted by Bernard Pivot on the French television program Apostrophes. This particular program, broadcast by Antenne 2 on September 28, 1984, is available on video upon request from the French Cultural Services in New York (FACSEA), 972 Fifth Avenue, NY 10021. Further references to this particular interview will be indicated in the text by the abbreviated (Apos) in parentheses. Translations are my own.

3. For a sensitive and highly perceptive discussion of this subject, see the chapter “Ambivalence and sentiment de contradiction” in Continuité/Discontinuité by Guers-Villate: “Without a single doubt, literary creation was the means chosen very early by the novelist to permit her to exorcise her own conflicts through transposing them” (58). Translation my own.

4. Duras speaks at length about the influence of this mysterious red-haired woman in Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras, an interview with Michelle Porte (61-69).

5. Far from being merely an idiosyncratic obsession, the eight-year-old's fascination with this particular woman's story seems to connect with a primal reverence and fear of the power of women's bodies that reaches back into the mists of recorded time. The dual feminine identity that the young Duras found so compelling touches upon ancient myths and rituals where “woman became recognized as both benign goddess and mysterious power, both a life giver and life destroyer, to be feared and desired, loved and scorned” (Arms 11-12). Even today, a deep ambivalence regarding the myth of “Woman” is very much in evidence, taking many curious forms in popular culture: the role of women in advertising, in film noir, in the presence of cult personalities such as Madonna, for example.

6. Though Duras's affair (as well as her fiction) is steeped in the mystique of “Woman,” she nonetheless reveals a sardonic awareness of how women are often betrayed by this mystique. She describes the not-to-be-envied plight of the upper-class colonial women she knew of, cloistered in their mansions, saving their fragile white beauty through the tropical seasons while waiting for some vague future romance to change their empty lives (26-28). Duras's own story in The Lover, though it participates fully in this romantic mystique, also asserts a much bolder, more controlling approach to the satisfaction of feminine desire within that mystique.

7. These observations are made by Duras herself in an interview with Marianne Alphant in Libération.

8. Citation from the interview with Marianne Alphant, op. cit.

9. In the above-cited interview with Alphant, Duras suggests that this same brief period of her youth may well give rise to two or three other autobiographical books, each of them different. Further on, she quotes Stendhal, saying that no other part of her life holds as much meaning for her as a writer: “interminably, childhood.”

Works Cited

Arms, Suzanne. Immaculate Deception: A New Look at Women and Childbirth. New York: Bantam/Houghton-Mifflin, 1975.

Alphant, Marianne. “Duras à l'état sauvage” and interview with Marguerite Duras. Libération (4 September, 1984).

Duras, Marguerite. L'Amant. Paris: Minuit, 1984.

———. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique. Paris: Gallimard, 1950.

———. Hiroshima mon amour. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

———. India Song. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

———. et Michelle Porte. Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras. Paris: Minuit, 1977.

———. The Lover. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: Perennial, 1986.

———. La Maladie de la mort. Paris: Minuit, 1982.

———. Moderato Cantabile. Paris: Minuit, 1958.

———. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

———. The Sea Wall. Trans. Herma Briffault. New York: Perennial, 1986. c. 1952.

———. Le Vice-Consul. Paris: Gallimard, 1966.

Guers-Villate, Yvonne. Continuité/Discontinuité de l'oeuvre durassienne. Brussels: Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1985.

Jelinek, Estelle C. “Introduction: Women's Autobiography and the Male Tradition.” Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism. Ed. Estelle Jelinek. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Lamy, Suzanne. Quand je lis je m'invente. Montréal: L'Hexagone, 1984.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16: (1975): 6-18.

Willis, Sharon. Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.