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THE FRENCHREVIEW,Vol. 63, No. 2, December 1989 Printedin U.S.A.
FictionandAutobiography/Language
and Silence:L'Amant
by Duras
byJaniceMorgan
Ecrirece n'estpascommentercequel'oncroit
savoirdeja,maischerchercequ'onnesaitpas
encore.
-Viviane Forrester1
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 ac-
count 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 carried events forward as relentlessly as
the Mekong River current, the girl being embarked with the man in what
she calls "l'histoire de tout le monde"2, the knowledge which she says she
already possessed, "en avance sur le temps" (16). 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 apartment" (49) and later confides to
him that she enjoys the idea of being curiously "parmi ces femmes, con-
fondue [avec elles]" (54). No names are mentioned in the narrative; Duras
refers to the man and to herself through third-person epithets: "le Chinois"
(68), "l'homme de Cholen" (92), "la petite blanche" (121), "l'enfant" (46)-
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
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 oc-
cupy. Their affair is characterized, from the first night they are together,
by an unbridgeable solitude: "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" (48). 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 evoca-
tion 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 merchants mingled with the rich aroma
of roasted peanuts, soups, the sudden mountain fragrance of woodsmoke,
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 "silence
g.nial" (45). After their first evening together, the
narrative flickers back and forth from the nights in Cholen to the remem-
bered days in Sadec. Thus, at the same time that Cholen inaugurates her
FICTIONAND AUTOBIOGRAPHY 275
separation from the family in Sadec, it also curiously confirms that original
experience: both Sadec and Cholen share the identity of "un lieu irrespira-
ble, il c6toie la mort, un lieu de violence, de douleur, de d6sespoir, de
d6shonneur" (93). Gradually, the nights in Cholen, 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, "C'est dans son aridite, sa terrible durete, sa malfaisance que je suis
le plus profond6ment assur&ede moi-m me, au plus profond de ma certi-
tude essentielle, A savoir que plus tard j'6crirai"(93). 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 per-
forms 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 emo-
tional intensities and ambiguities of life as she experienced them.3 Her
desire here is not to resolvethese 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 oscilla-
tions 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 Cholen are the remembered
images of certain women: Marie-Claude Carpenter, Betty Fernandez,
Helen Lagonelle. L'Amantis a hymn to these women-to the desire they
evoked in those around them, to their mystery, their beauty, and also to
their peculiar absence, their silence. Among these women, one reigns su-
preme in memory, referred to here as "la Dame" (109), the wife of the
French ambassador in Vinhlong, the one whose young lover committed
suicide in Savannakhet 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 feminin-
ity-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 Le Vice-Consuland
India Song-this woman 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 "ce
pouvoir de mort, de prodiguer la mort, de la provoquer" (Lieux,65).5
Duras's use of the third person (elle) to introduce and frame her own
erotic initiation, that curious fusion of she/ll, 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
276 FRENCHREVIEW
Notes
1This epigraph by Forrester is borrowed from a book about writing by Suzanne Lamy
with the suggestive title, Quand je lis je m'invente.
2This 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 28 September 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 abbreviation (Apos) in
parentheses.
3For a sensitive and highly perceptive discussion of this subject, see the chapter "Ambival-
ence et sentiment de contradiction" in Continuite/Discontinuite by Guers-Villate: "Toute
l'evolution artistique de Duras est dirigee vers une organisation esthetique des contradic-
tions ressenties si vivement en elle et autour d'elle, qui sont peut-&tre a la base de toute vie
et que L'Amant expose en pleine lumiere" (57).
4Duras 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).
FICTION AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY 279
5Farfrom being merely an idiosyncratic obsession, the eight-year-old's fascination with this
particular woman's story seems to connect with a deep, 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.
6Though 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 for
some vague future romance (26-28). Duras's own story in L'Amant, 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.
7These observations are made by Duras herself in an interview with Marianne Alphant in
Liberation.
8These themes permeate the book but see particularly the passages on pp. 34-35, 124-26.
9Quotation from the interview with Marianne Alphant, Op. Cit.
1'Onthe above-cited interview with Alphant, Duras suggests that this same brief period in
her life may well give rise to two or three other autobiographical books, each of them
different. Speaking of the pleasure of writing, she says: "J'aienvie de me retrouver avec le
deuxieme tome." Further on, she quotes Stendhal, saying that no other time period in her life
holds as much meaning for her as a writer: "interminablement, l'enfance."
WorksCited