Duras-3

Duras by J. S. Porter Memory is important to her. Her characters don’t surrender memory easily. Re-imagining, reconstructing, reliving memory are important to Duras.  If you were drawing her, you’d have a face lined, rutted and potholed, trapped in the act of remembering. There would be a bottle on her desk, eyes looking out to sea, looking for a mother or a lover.  Some things you can’t draw. You can’t draw memory, can you? How it works, how like the Greek word for truth (aletheia) memory contains the word forgetfulness within it. The river Lethe runs through memory because to remember one thing is to forget another.  In a piece of writing, “The Atlantic Man”—is it a short story? an incomplete novella? the beginnings of a novel? a sketch for a screenplay?— dedicated to Yann Andréa, her confidant and caregiver, she murmurs.                                          Forget more.                                         Forget even more. Here she sounds more like Beckett than Hemingway. Her writing is about forgetting and remembering. She forgets very little. She’d like to. She can’t.   She describes her novel The Lover with a phrase from Baudelaire, belle d’abandone: “beautiful in its negligence, in its abandonment, in its loss.” Baudelaire: “Seeing you walk to a soft cadence / Beautiful in your abandonment / You are like a serpent dancing / High on the top of a staff.” Gorgeous phrasing. Beautiful in your abandonment, belle d’abandone. The phrase sums up The Lover perfectly, sums up the child-lover perfectly. What did Duras abandon? Her mother, her elder brother, her Chinese lover, parts of herself.  She finally gave up drinking because she was afraid to lose her clarity, her hardness. If you’ve read only The Lover, you’ve read everything. She’s whole there. The works before and the works after are fragments from the whole, aspects of The Lover, that doomed relationship between a young French girl and a Chinese man. In one of her essays simply called “Men,” she writes: “In heterosexual love there’s no solution. Man and woman are irreconcilable, and it’s the doomed attempt to do the impossible, repeated in each new affair, that lends heterosexual love its grandeur.”  The love between a young French girl and a Chinese man is doomed in all directions. She leans over the railing of a ship and from a car he sees her, he wants her, the young girl with a broad-rimmed hat and loose, cheap clothing, a little rouge on her lips. Duras is drawn to beautiful losers.  There is a line in The Lover – could the mother be a lover, too? – that stays with you: “The way she sees everything through to the bitter end without ever dreaming she might give up, abandon—the cousins, the effort, the burden…It’s in this valor, human, absurd, that I see true grace.” Her mother’s refusal to abandon her children constitutes her grace. Men are like children. That’s why women are drawn to them, Duras says. “Men think they’re heroes…Men love war, hunting, fishing, motorbikes, cars, just like children. … We like men to be innocent and cruel; we like hunters and warriors; we like children.”  Old heterosexual women like young homosexual men; they don’t insist on penetration. Young homosexual men like older heterosexual women; they don’t enwomb. Duras lives with Yann Andréa. She holds him up. He holds her up. Flesh is real in Duras, not made up. This is the flesh of The Lover: a girl, a man, desire, a mother, who, in the memory and perception of Duras, seems to love her elder son more than her younger son and daughter, a family in financial crisis. The Vietnamese servants and workers in the story are flesh, are real, the snobbery of the French is real, the room where the man and the girl make love is flesh, is real. Regret and deep hurt and humiliation, and death: these things are also flesh, also real. The rest is art, embroidery,  mood, music, voice and repetition. Images and sounds recur, disappear for a time, and then re-sound, re-image. A young French girl enters a narrow shuttered doorway on a busy Saigon street to be with an older Chinese lover. Outside are noise and traffic, chickens and rickshaws, women cooking, a woman sewing. (Here the movie version overrides my memory of the novel.) Inside are a table, a bed, two wooden chairs, slatted blinds. The girl leaves one world and enters another. That’s real. That’s flesh. The “I” always convinces in Duras. You believe it even when it lies. In a pair of sentences in The Lover she tells you everything she knows about writing. “Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded, a quest for vanity and void, it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement.”  Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if she writes in sentences and paragraphs; she writes in breaths, long breaths and short breaths. You hear her breathing in her words. Genres don’t exist for her. Plays, screenplays, stories, novels, novellas: these things are writing. These things are reconstructions of voice. Duras is all voice.  She speaks and sees, sees as she speaks.  There is much space in her writing. In her last work, No More, the space—the void—overwhelms her words as if for decades her language has withstood wind-storms, sea-storms, and has finally capitulated. She says that solitude is essential to her writing because writing means "keeping silent . . . screaming without sounds."  How can that be? How can words be silent? How can they scream without making a sound? The silence is the empty space on the page, like a Chinese painting in which the canvas is more empty than full, where a few objects are surrounded by a vast bareness.  Maybe the screams are in the empty space when the words trail off into silence.   [ FORWARD ]     [Distillate © HA&L + J. S. Porter  |  {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life. This article is sponsored by  Pier 8 Group, acknowledged with thanks by the Editor and Samizdat Press.]