The etymology of this “it having been too late” might lie in the writer’s biography but its implications reach throughout her whole way of thinking, all of her writing and living, infecting every corner of her existence like a malicious cancer. The meaning of a sentence, this sentence in particular, reverberates back into the past and forth into the future as in the musical compositions a lot of her works allude to. The meaning of one sentence will therefore not be limited to the context in which it is presented to us. If there are narratives in her novels and films and plays, they relate to each other as tributaries crossing and spilling over into each other on the way to-what else?-the great sea, while the sound of its waves crashing on the beach never ceases. Throughout her works Duras creates her personal echo chamber, a mirror palace in which everything is repeated and resumed, all memories reworked and rehearsed into new constellations. The kind of truth that attests to a personal Hiroshima, a Buchenwald of the self (as painstakingly noted down against all odds in La Douleur, published in 1985), the kind of event wherein desire manifests itself as the great unraveling of everything we like to (need to) pretend about ourselves. “I am simply limiting myself here to noting the impossibility in which I am able to give an understandable account of what happened in Lahore.” scripsit Le Vice-Consul (1966).
But it is the kind of event that defines a person by undoing them, showing us a truth about ourselves we do not want to see. This does not necessarily need to be an event of horror or pain, it can also be the event (in French évènement) par excellence that what we talk about when we talk about love. And the past refusing to become past is an apt definition of what we call trauma if we understand trauma to be an event that punctures one’s sense of time-and thus identity-as something coherent. It is not even past,” as we have come to know. This something bigger more often than not comes from within the woman herself, a memory, a trauma, something she could not forget but did not want to remember and did not want to forget but could not remember. Most of the time the social environments they inhabit are those of wealth and economic security-the French upper class in Moderato Cantabile (1958) (the novel that made her famous and was later adapted for the screen by none less than Peter Brook), the colonial elite in the Calcutta of French Indochine in India Song (1975) -where the drama of their boring, banal lives as wives to their (be it literally or figuratively) absent husbands, is ripped apart by the tragedy of something bigger-both in scale and metaphysically-bursting through the seams of the fancy scenographies against which they had up until now wasted away their lives. Time and time again we see the Durassian women struggle with the plights of their desires.
Elle the lover duras free#
What happened in her life for her to be like this, so free and hunted down at once, so honest and dishonest at once, so ambiguous and so clear? So hungry to live fleeting love affairs? So cowardly before love? The big theme of Duras’s life’s work-as epitomized by the voice that speaks from within us, through us-is the ways in which (our) desire makes us strangers to ourselves. As no other writer I know of (and even her films are manifestations of that writing), Duras excelled in seemingly off-the-cuff sentences about everything and anything, in doing so always walking the almost indiscernible line between the brilliant and the banal.īut, as with most people who will talk about anything imaginable, what really lies at the center of Duras’s prolific and disparate output is the fact she has nothing to say because she cannot say what she would want to. It is precisely this French predilection for overtly meaningful and philosophical bon mots that tends to bury what is really important: the voice itself. The problem with Duras’s voice is how often it has been used to make statements that claim to profess meaningful insights into what the French so gladly like to call la condition humaine. Often staccato, sometimes enchanting but never ceasing to illuminate the page or screen by its sheer presence. Above all else, and in this case ‘the else’ is definitely a lot, Marguerite Duras is a voice.
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