MARGUERITE DURAS: TITLE COMMENTARY

The Malady of Death

SHARON A. WILLIS (ESSAY DATE 1989)

SOURCE: Willis, Sharon A. "Staging Sexual Difference: Reading, Recitation, and Repetition in Duras' Malady of Death. "In Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights, edited by Enoch Brater, pp. 109-25. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Willis examines Duras's treatment of sexual difference as a site of resistance within her novel Malady of Death.

Duras is hardly a "new" woman playwright. She first published in 1943; her accelerated output in recent years has roughly coincided with her first widespread popular reception in the United States as well as in France. Nor is she primarily known for her dramatic productions, at least in the English-speaking world. Rather, her theater has tended to arise as a consequence of her other literary work, in critical reformulations that change the stress of problems and scenes already presented in narrative form. Further, some of the earlier plays are more widely known in the form of published scripts that prolong them after they are no longer theatrically produced. Most recently, however, Duras' texts have appeared under a rubric which blends genres, as in texte-théâtre-film or, simply, récit, a term which has no exact English equivalent but is used in textual studies to convey the sense of "story" as opposed to "discourse": what is told, what is narrated. It is this mixing of textual categories, this refusal of boundaries, that may be Duras' point of insertion in postmodern textual and reading formations, a grounding she may share with "new" woman playwrights.

As complicated as Duras' relation to textual boundaries is, her relation to constructions of "Woman" and to recent theoretical discourses surrounding women's literary production is even more complex. While she contends that there is a specificity to feminine writing, for her this specificity is an essential one. This essentialist position may be the basis of her antagonistic stance with respect to feminist theoretical discourses and their political implications. Nevertheless, her interest for and influence upon overtly feminist literary, critical, and theoretical enterprises is powerful. It resides in her compelling and often disturbing textual work on sexual difference, upon its figurations as a site of textual conflict and resistance. This site of resistance, then, is the focus of this essay.

Duras' texts always remember. Disjunctive and repetitive, they insist on reproducing uncannily accurate, though fragmentary, memories drawn from previous texts; these "remembered" fragments from somewhere else produce the choppiness and hesitancy in the narratives. To read them one must sift through layers of interference; one must reconstruct the narrative in more than one register. Recalling other occurrences of the repeated scenes and figures that interweave her texts, our readings both reconstruct past texts and build another narrative of this memory; there is a story between the texts.¹ On the other hand, our reading process also segments the narrative according to its interferences, moments of repetition, similarity, and recall; that is, the narrative's memory dis-members the text. Reading, then, both dis-members and re-members.² It would be possible to say that a reading of more than one of Duras' texts necessarily entails this double labor of recognition and distinction, of reconstructing, or reproducing and separating, keeping apart.

In a sense Duras' texts are always based in an irretrievable absence, another space beyond their boundaries—a previous text partially recalled, another genre or form, or the scene of reading itself—a scene the writing can never fully embody, articulate, or occupy. At the same time, her texts tend to thematize this absence as loss or violent separation and to do so on a particular ground, that of sexual difference. In their obsession to figure the absence and the loss in which they are "grounded," Duras' texts of the eighties operate performatively to stage absence and disappearance. They produce particularly compelling intersections of "sexual difference" with "remembering" and "reading," since all three terms are staged as both delirious repetitions and obsessive efforts to differentiate. Meanwhile, these recent works steadfastly erode the integrity of genre. As novel, récit (this is the most recent designation which appears on the title pages), film, or theater, each text appeals to another scene of representation, another genre, often mixing one in with another. That is, each text exhibits a fundamental dependence on an outside against which it defines itself, while refusing consolidation within a particular genre. Consequently, the instability of differentiations and borders is reproduced at the textual boundary itself.

The Malady of Death, presented as a novel written in the second person, opens with the line, "You wouldn't have known her, you'd have seen her everywhere at once" (p. 7). This narrative recounts nothing but the sexual interactions of a woman character and a man character, "you," who pays her to spend a set number of nights with him. The text ends with a kind of "post-face" in which Duras provides some suggestions about staging this text as a play.

The Malady of Death could be staged in the theater.…Only the woman would speak her lines from memory. The man never would. He would read his text, either standing still, or walking about around the woman.

The man the story is about would never be represented. Even when he speaks to the young woman, he does so through the man who reads his story.

Acting here is replaced by reading. I always think that nothing can replace the reading of a text, that no acting can ever equal the effect of a text not memorized.

(p. 56)

Je crois toujours que rien ne remplace la lecture d'un texte, que rien ne remplace le manque de mémoire du texte, rien, aucun jeu.

(La Maladie de la mort, p. 59)

As Duras envisions it staged, this play would be split between theatrical performance and reading—the young woman's part would be acted while the man's story would be read by an actor whose very act of reading, in its literalness, would figure the absence of that character. So reading and acting would coexist, split the stage, constituting two mutually interfering registers. Reading and acting would both support and resist each other. On the level of the two bodies before us on-stage, however, a question arises: what is the status of the actors? Which one would call attention more compellingly to the art of acting? And how would we calculate or stabilize the space between acting and reading? How would we describe the difference?

Yet there is another equally fascinating question involving memory and reading. Careful attention to the English and French versions of the text yields a slight but powerful difference of sense here. The French could be translated as "I still think that nothing replaces the reading of a text, nothing replaces the text's lack of memory, nothing, no acting." On this reading the text is taken to replace acting's memorized recitation. But as a substitute for memory in the form of memorization, the text here is a memory with no memory of itself; that is, it is memory only when actualized, figured in the literal reading that is staged. On this level the staged event would be organized as a coexistence and conflict between two kinds of spoken text, recitation and reading, and between two kinds of memory, memorization and writing.³

At the extreme, memorization might be opposed to writing in the following way. Memorization would imply a prior reading internalized, now independent of the text, which it reproduces entirely in the mental images it stores for repeated restoration in oral performance. Writing, meanwhile, would look like an externalized form of memory, replacing "natural" recall. However, memorization itself remains a technique with a long history (as in the classical opposition between writing and oratory). As examined by Ellen Burt in "Poetic Conceit: The Self-Portrait and Mirrors of Ink," it constitutes a metonymic displacement on the level of the signifier:

An orator who wants to remember a speech memorizes neither the words, nor yet the argument. Instead, by means of an elaborate and apparently uneconomical process, he recodes the words or res (things or subjects of his speech) in a series of images.… These images, like dream images, are formed as rebuses, as riddles, to be read off.… The images themselves get their content by a process of semanticization of the signifier.…The displacement of meaning away from the signified, and the subsequent construction of an image from the signifier, is what allows each image to be read so easily.

(pp. 23-24)

Considered this way, memorization would be itself a work of writing, inscription, as well as perpetual rereading. The coexistence of writing and memorization in Duras' text, then, figures a memory autonomous of the subject's recollection, autonomous of a relation to the past. It thus maintains the simultaneity of memory and the event or discourse it recalls. Within this conjunction it is impossible to distinguish original from copy, production from reproduction. Furthermore, Duras insists that "the two actors should speak as if they were reading in separate rooms, isolated from one another. The text would be completely nullified if it were spoken theatrically" (p. 57). In other words, the dialogue read and recited would be staged as autonomous monologues. There is no exchange between these levels of reading/acting; there is only separation and interference. This radical separation of competing "interpretations" (in the sense of an actor's interpretation of a role), or readings, is staged on the axis of sexual difference, by a woman and a man.

But if this text is designed to stage radical separation and interference effects, it also stages absence. "You" is never onstage. He is replaced by a partial stand-in, another man who reads the story for him. Or is it to him, since "you" necessarily evokes the sense of direct address, posing as the addressee of the speech? This unseen protagonist also figures a whole set of absences: the absence of memory from the text, the actor's necessary absence from the scene in which he is cast as a reader, the actress' absence from his reading, the characters' absence from themselves. Finally, there is the written text's absence to itself at the moment it is staged. It is never entirely there where it is read and performed simultaneously; indeed, it is this simultaneity that renders both versions of it partial and supplementary.

We might find the same "absenting" effects in the conditional mode that opens the text and continues to haunt Duras' concluding intervention, as well as my own writing here. How, we might well ask, could one stage the conditional mode? Isn't this mode profoundly alien to theatrical representation? Is the stage perhaps even hostile to the conditional, on the level of its representation, if not its dialogue? The conditional, it seems to me, can be spoken onstage but never acted, owing to the resistant presence of the actor before us.

This text's highly unstable figuration would be founded on two unfigurable elements. Hovering between two nonsituations—as the future of the past and the mode of wish, hypothesis, and desire—the conditional mood destabilizes the temporality of both stage and reading. Similarly, the sheer resistance of the stubbornly nontheatrical reader, the literal reader onstage, signals an unfigurable absence. But these instabilities call up others: the reader/spectator's position is disrupted by several competing appeals. "You," to whom the reading addresses itself, is absent, just as we are. How can we avoid slipping into the posture of the addressee from time to time? On the other hand, how can we coincide with that position, particularly if we remember our own gendered bodies and if we are female? How can we determine the space and the temporality of our absence from this scene when one actor performs exactly as we have performed or are performing—as readers?

Such destabilization of reader/spectator position is coherent with and implicated in this text's shifting and contradictory framing effects. These range from the splitting of the stage between reading and recitation, to the unanchored direct address, to two contradictory, mutually exclusive positions, and to the intervention of the author's discourse which prolongs the text's work beyond its ending, both by repeating its conditional mode and by reframing it as a play. Thus, the text we have just read as a novel demands an immediate rereading that casts it in another frame altogether.

This kind of intervention is an effect repeated and transposed in most of Duras' recent work. Savannah Bay, a play organized around a conversation between two women, questions one character's inability to remember and opens with a brief author's preface written in direct address to "you." Madeleine, an elderly actress, remembers almost nothing; memories of her life have been replaced by the memorized scripts she has played, and even these are only partially recalled. The other character is an unnamed young woman whose role consists in trying to restore Madeleine's story. She recites bits of the récit of Madeleine's life, telling the story as, we presume, Madeleine had once told it to her. Memory, then, comes back to the actress not as proper to her or continuous with her lived life but from elsewhere, from outside, as already "told," read, and memorized by another.

But here the conjunctions and distinctions between repetition of a story and its recitation are impossible to establish. We never know if the story that is being told is that of the "life" or of a "role." The "originary" moment already seems to be representation and performance. Further, because Madeleine was originally played by Madeleine Renaud, the actress as acted became overly coincident with the actress acting. The "Madeleines" were both too close together and too far apart. The character was too close to the historically bound actress who played her. Meanwhile, the speech of the real, historical actress betrayed the figure she played; her good memory was essential to this staging of theater's nightmare, the failure of memory. Oblivion seemed to have a memory, one that was quite explicitly supplied through an elsewhere, beyond the stage, which nonetheless constantly invaded the scene.

Invasion is also the text's point of departure since, before any staging, there is the author's discourse about it, posed in direct address.

Tu ne sais plus qui tu es, qui tu as été, tu sais que tu as joué, tu ne sais plus ce que tu as joué, ce que tu joues, tu joues, tu sais que tu dois jouer, tu ne sais plus quoi, tu joues.

[You no longer know who you are, who you have been, you know that you have played, you no longer know what you've played, what you play, you play, you know you must play, you no longer know what, you play.]

(p. 7)⁴

This play opens with a description addressed to the main character/actress concerning the inability to distinguish between the playing and the role. She is told she cannot remember what she plays, only that she plays it. But then the status of acting is as unstable as the distinction between the two Madeleines; for to play a role demands a differentiation (between one's private memory and the script, between the acting subject and the subject acted) as well as a recognition of that difference, which is the space of interpretation.

Here we are confronted with a text whose frame is ruptured by this authorial intervention, one that simultaneously reframes, preinterprets the text, and produces interferences which constitute a space of interpretation. And where are we in the space of interpretation? Once again, direct address is split between us, the real actress Madeleine Renaud, and the actress staged. At the same time, this preface becomes a sort of memory that will haunt the play, a memory whose recall will persist within our interpretation. Our reading, then, occupies the space of interpretation opening into the text. Because it is disturbed by reframing, by a discourse that is both inside and outside it, the scene of representation is dependent upon and conditioned by a voice from elsewhere, by another scene. Similarly, our reading is haunted by this voice, by a direct-address "you" that is aimed elsewhere, and by its own construction as the play's absent space—an outside incorporated.

When framing effects focus on the incorporation of an absent outside space, that absence evacuates interiority, dissolves a stable border separating inside and outside. Such a gesture conditions L'Homme atlantique, a novel that narrates the making of a film in the future, future anterior, conditional, and past tenses. Not only is the film's temporality distorted, destablized, but its character is addressed only as "you" and is unequivocally designated as a man. The opening lines inscribe absence and forgetting as future events, but in a future tense that can also be read as injunction: "Vous ne regarderez pas la caméra.…Vous oublierez.…Que c'est vous, vous l'oublierez.…Vous oublierez aussi que c'est la caméra" ("You will not look at the camera.…You'll forget.… That it's you, you will forget.…You'll also forget that it's the camera" [p. 7]).

The scene to be filmed is nothing but the process of forgetting—the self-forgetfulness of the subject viewed. "Vous regarderez ce que vous voyez.…Vous essaierez de regarder jusqu'à l'extinction de votre regard" ("You will look at what you see. You will try to look as far as the extinction of your gaze" [p. 8]). Here the text splits its address in a radical disjunction. "You" is the subject framed, but it is also the potential spectator who is invited into a split look: one that is looking both at what she/he sees and at the gaze itself. This splitting produces stunning coincidences: "Vous êtes le seul à tenir lieu de vousmême auprès de moi dans ce moment-là du film qui se fait" ("You are the only one to take the place of yourself for me in that moment of the film that is being made" [p. 10]). Here the text's insistence on the unity and specificity of the "you" only serves to underline its impossibility. "You" is divided by the process of taking the place of itself as its own stand-in and by its coincidence with an ambient, anonymous, floating addressee constructed through the direct address and the unsituated phrase "that moment of the film."

Our implication emerges fully at a slightly later point in the text: "Vous êtes sorti du champs de la caméra. Vous êtes absent. Avec votre départ votre absence est survenue, elle a été photographiée comme tout à l'heure votre présence" ("You have left the camera's field. With your departure, your absence has occurred, it has been photographed as your presence just was" [p. 15]). We are indeed outside the frame, held beyond it, but pulled into it, as the text speaks of a film that might be/might have been—a film of passage outside the frame. It is impossible to situate our own relation to the frame, to refuse fully or to occupy fully the "you," determined textually as a male lover. Here again the text depends upon the absences it perpetually evokes. First, it stresses the absence of a visual level—the work is characterized as a récit; it is a purely imaginary film, a blind film. It also obsessively recalls the subject's absence from the visual field. But who is the subject? The character "you" or the spectator "you"? It is impossible to separate or distinguish our absence from his.⁵ The spectator position, then, is split, ruptured, contradictory, caught between two appeals in the lure of an impossible sight—our own look. At the same time, the film inscribes the passage of a subject and a look beyond its frame.

If L'Homme atlantique thematizes a passage beyond the frame, a passage which then reverberates on the performative level through this disconcerting plurality of the lure posed by "you," The Malady of Death performs its "passages" in quite another way. The primary textual event, breaking the repetitive series of the indistinguishable nights, is the young woman's departure. Previously the text has repeated the fragmented dialogue, the man's explorative looking at the woman, his demands, and their lovemaking in such similar terms that we can only punctuate the flow of erotic exchanges through the text's long silences. Duras writes in her post-face: "There should be great silences between the different paid nights, silences in which nothing happens except the passage of time" (p. 58). Consequently, we must endure the passage, the loss of voice, where our desire is suspended in an anxiety structured around these repeated, premonitory losses, each of which might prove to be final. The differentiation between nights is produced as absence, loss, a break in the theatrical passage which burdens us with the passage of our own time as well.

The final loss, the one event of the text, is told as follows: "One day she isn't there anymore. You wake and she isn't there. She has gone during the night. The mark of her body is still there on the sheets" (p. 51). It is to be performed, according to Duras' suggestions, in such a way that we as readers/spectators experience the same abrupt break as the man does, the same sudden loss: "The young woman's departure isn't seen. There should be a blackout when she disappears, and when the light comes up again there is nothing left but the white sheets in the middle of the stage and the sound of the sea" (pp. 59-60). Like the man, we miss the moment of her passage off-scene, the passage that changes everything. As Duras envisions it, the young woman should be lying on the same white sheets as when the play opens: "The stage should be low, almost at floor level, so that the young woman's body is completely visible to the audience" (p. 56). We have been placed, then, at the man's level, investigating this body before us. As we have shared the privilege of sight with him, we now share its loss.

The exchanges between these two figures are now organized around the question of love and death. The man hires the woman to pass these nights with him because "he cannot love," because he has never been with a woman, and, he implies, he wants to see if he can love. What he discovers instead is his malady. Rather than produce love in him, the woman will produce only the recognition of his illness, his death, and his difference.

Death and difference are inextricably bound here, but in a curious way. "You stop looking. Stop looking at anything. You shut your eyes so as to get back into your difference, your death.… You don't love anything or anyone, you don't even love the difference you think you embody" (pp. 32-33). While death might be constructed as what is most alien to, most utterly, radically different from life, it is also bound to the indifferentiation of death and life—too much or too little difference. But the complexity of this problem lies elsewhere as well. Death and difference share a trait; neither can ever be embodied. The malady of death that the woman first sees in the man without naming it, and which she later names, continually circulates in discourse, as if it exceeded character boundaries. It is in her look that he sees his own death, in his look that she sees his death, and, finally, in her body that he sees death inscribed. Which is to say that death is nowhere but is bound to the look of the other, bound into the gaze upon the other.

There is more to the malady, however. "You ask: 'why is the malady of death fatal?' She answers: 'Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's likely to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that's what he's doing'" (p. 19). It is as if death were separated from its own fatality, at the same time that it can not be fully separated from life. Thus, the text arrives at an unresolvable problem: how can these terms be differentiated?⁶ Can one fix their difference in representation?

When the woman is gone, "the difference between her and you is confirmed by her sudden absence" (p. 52). A difference, then, only gets established by an absent term, in and through representation. This loss generates a story, but one we do not hear, told in a bar the following day. Only its telling is described; the story is never told. "At first you tell it as if it were possible to do so. Then you tell it laughing, as if it were impossible for it to have happened" (p. 53). Indeed, this whole text is founded on the impossibility of telling: telling the story, telling the difference, telling a death.

Love, difference, and death, all unsituated, seem to emerge only as passages through a space that confuses "before" and "after," in which no punctual event can occur, no narrative is possible. "Even so, you have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened" (p. 55). This whole text is founded on the reading and recitation of what cannot be narrated or even held in view, held in frame, since the text is reframed immediately in the post-face.

The impossibility of love, which would depend on a sufficient or stable difference between these two figures, is replicated in our inability to attain a stable differentiation from the "you." But how, within this space of indifferentiations, are we to account for the sexual difference that organizes the whole textual scene—the exchange between the man and the woman? How are we to account for the weight of sexual difference as it imposes itself in our reading? In a text which demonstrates that neither death nor difference can be punctually or permanently embodied, the body nevertheless remains in the resistant presence of actors' bodies and in the site of reading itself. The "identificatory" lure of the direct-address "you" meets resistance or interruption when it is occupied by the gendered body of the reader, who might find her body interfering here. Or, should she separate her reading from her body, she does so only through a gesture that then forces her to recognize a division within reading—either she reads from and through a gendered body or her reading is disembodied.

Finally, there is another crucial difference to be accounted for: that of the actor reading the text and of the silent, unseen man whose story is told. Since his place onstage is occupied by a stand-in, the man is also split, utterly noncoincident with himself. He is both the central figure and an absent third. But the spectator is also an absent third: the absent, abstracted addressee and voyeur exploring the woman's body staged for our look and for the man's story read alongside it. But this problem of differentiation is contagious on the larger textual level, for this sexual scene is repeated in several other texts. This drama of failed exchange between a man and a woman, where the man dominates a nearly silent, abandoned woman, first appears in a short text, L'Homme assis dans le couloir (written in the late fifties or early sixties and later rewritten and published in 1980). At that time, Duras writes, she made a number of discoveries about her text. That is, the new text is a completely redone version based on what she read in the old text. "Then I found out that the lovers were not isolated, but seen, doubtless by me, and that this seeing ought to be mentioned, integrated into the action" (Lydon, p. 269).

Here again is a third term, another subject whose ambiguous voyeurism haunts the text. This text is a short narrative of a sadistic sexual scene in which the woman performs fellatio on the man, who then urinates on her, steps on her, kicks her, makes love to her, and finally, at her request, beats her. During the first sequence of events, the narrator makes her only intervention in the scene: "I speak to her and tell her what the man is doing. I tell her what is happening to her. What I want is for her to see" (Lydon, p. 270). We are made aware that our view of this scene is focalized by an "I," who is a woman ("I see that other people are watching, other women" [Lydon, p. 275]). But the relation of this woman narrator to the scene observed is impossible. Her voyeuristic distance is undermined by the movement of narrated discourse. Yet even here, entering the scene, she only does so to narrate, to tell the woman what we already know—what is happening to her. The relation between knowing and seeing is rendered ambiguous. At the end she says, "I see nothing of her except her motionlessness. I haven't a clue; I don't know a thing; I don't know whether she is sleeping" (Lydon, p. 275). In this discourse that inverts and destroys the equation of seeing with knowing, what is the place of the partially absent third for whom the scene is staged? What is our place as readers?

This question has gained a particular urgency, given that the text has been disturbing to many feminist readers because it figures a fantasy of a woman voyeur watching the beating of another woman. Consequently, it operates on a split feminine identification. But even this split identification is unstable, since the text implies a circulation of positions akin to that of the fantasy structure Freud examines in "A Child Is Being Beaten." In this regard, Mary Lydon's contention that L'Homme assis produces a "linguistic subversion of sexual identity," where "the 'pure' sexual difference, the difference between the sexes that the narrative of L'Homme assis dans le couloir might be thought to impose is contaminated, subverted at the textual level, the level of the signifier," is crucial to a reading that would be equal to the text's complexities (Lydon, 264 and 265, respectively). Not only are the referentially gender-bound words used in the text undermined by their linguistic genders in French, but the text's recapitulation of Freudian fantasy structure indicates that position and gender do not remain fixed or coherent with each other.⁷

A reading of Freud's essay on the sadistic fantasy, "A Child Is Being Beaten," reveals a circulation of positions through grammatical structures of pronouns whereby the subject of the fantasy is not fully inside it, not fully outside, not permanently located in active or passive position, and not bound to gender position. (Freud's remarks reveal that the girls' fantasies about a child being beaten are composed of several phrases between which subject and object are transformed. Genders are conferred upon them in the following sequence: a child is being beaten; my father is beating the child, who is a boy; I am being beaten by my father). What is crucial in this reading of fantasy structure is that gender is circulating, constructed in the telling or representation. It cannot be anchored to activity or passivity, since even these are seen to be positions, postures established in relation to each other.

L'Homme assis is conditioned by a structure whose circulating positional effects are reproduced in The Malady of Death, a text than can be read as its reenactment, its rereading of L'Homme assis. The Malady displaces these positions to locate a third term offstage as the central one, while playing on a structure of voyeurism whose mediation through reading is literalized here.

This reenactment itself becomes a grounding, a kind of original trauma repeated in a later text, Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, which once again stages a series of paid nights between a man and a woman. Again there is an absent third male, but this time he is the lover the man has lost—and, as the text will later reveal, the one the woman has lost also. The discursive exchanges of these nightly encounters are organized around repeated récits and descriptions of this missing lover as well as of another man the woman sees during the daytime. What the "lovers" in question exchange, then, is stories about departed lovers. Again the woman is nude, this time veiling her face in black silk; again the man hits her. Again the figures are brought together and held apart by a story exchange.

The reenactment that has been so central a feature of Duras' work strikes a resonance with Freudian psychoanalytic studies of recollection and repetition, specifically, as detailed in "Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: Recollection, Repetition, Working Through." In Freud's later work on therapeutic technique, he recognizes that what the analysand cannot recollect will be acted out in repetition which does not know itself as such; that is, in repetition which replaces remembrance. In the analytic situation the goal of "working through" is achieved through the construction of an artificial repetition, the transference of the forgotten past onto the current analytic scene.

Repetition, then, is reframed when it is inserted into the analytic situation. Within this frame the analysand can read his own memory, lost to him, in the unconscious reproduction or replaying which has replaced it. Ideally, then, one remembers by reading one's own performance in the analytic situation. It is the reproduction which is supposed to revive memory—that is, the reproduction generates the "original" memory as its own production. Thus, the scene of psychoanalytic interpretation is also a stage. The analytic situation is the theater in which the subject's drama of repetition is reframed, set off from life, so that it may be read and analyzed. Transference effects, then, include the transfer of repetitions of the unremembered past into the analytic space as well as the performance of past conflicts upon the relation with the analyst, as in transference love and hate. Transference is a matter of performance, reading, and interpretation.

Duras' works ask us to consider the metaphoric and metonymic relays of transference which may be at work in our reading and interpretation of the reading and performance that they stage. Grounded in the fundamental imbrication of production and reproduction, where reproduction/repetition is posed as the "originary" moment, Duras' work confuses internal and external textual boundaries. It dissolves the borders between repetition as memory and repetition as forgetting, between reading as interpretation and reading as performance. Within the performative space itself, it rejects a division between the performance on the stage and the spectator/reader's performance.

Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs textually actualizes the problem of confused borders between narration and performance. This text begins and ends with a discourse attributed to l'acteur, "the actor," someone whose situation in (or in relation to) the text and its story is never specified. He operates as a kind of internal gaze from elsewhere, an incorporated frame. "'Une soirée d'été,' dit l'acteur, serait au couer de l'histoire" (p. 9). This is the first line of the text, which will end with several passages spoken by the actor:

C'est la dernière nuit, dit l'acteur. Les spectateurs s'immobilisent et regardent dans la direction du silence, celle des héros. L'acteur les désigne du regard.…Leur regard est effrayé…toujours coupable d'avoir été l'objet de l'attention générale, celle des actuers sur la scène et celle des spectateurs dans la salle.

[It's the last night, says the actor. The spectators are immobilized and look in the direction of the silence, that of the heroes. The actor indicates them by a look.… Their gaze is frightened … still guilty of having been the object of general attention, that of the actors on stage and of the spectators in the house.]

(pp. 159-60)

In this continuous undifferentiated look, shared by spectators and actors, it is impossible to separate the house from the stage. Such indifferentiation is reproduced in the continual reenactment of the text's performance:

La salle serait dans le noir, dirait l'acteur. La pièce commençerait sans cesse. A chaque phrase, à chaque mot.

Les acteurs pourraient ne pas être nécessairement des acteurs du théâtre. Ils devraient toujours lire à voix haute et claire, se tenir de toutes leurs forces exempts de toute mémoire de l'avoir jamais lu, dans la conviction de n'en connaître rien, et cela chaque soir.

[The house would be in the dark, the actor would say. The play would begin continually. At each phrase, at each word.

The actors might not necessarily be stage actors. They should always read loudly and clearly, making every effort to remain free of all memory of having read it, with the conviction of not knowing anything about it, and this, each evening.]

(p. 49)

This theatrical reading asserts a radical separation between repetitions that do not know themselves as such, and which is articulated as a separation of staged reading from knowledge and memory. The status of reading here is always in question and under transformation, as is evident in the final indifferentiation, established in several registers: those of the reading, the performance, and the gaze surrounding this scene:

L'écoute de la lecture du livre, dit l'acteur, devrait toujours être égale. Dès qu'entre les silences la lecture du texte se produirait, les acteurs devraient être suspendus à elle et, au souffle près, en être immobilisés …

Les acteurs regarderaient l'homme de l'histoire, quelquefois ils regarderaient le public.

Des événements qui seraient survenus entre l'homme et la femme, rien ne serait montré, rien ne serait joué. La lecture du texte se proposerait donc comme le théâtre de l'histoire.

[Listening to the reading of the book, says the actor, should always be the same. When, in between the silences, the reading happens, the actors should be suspended upon it, and except for their breathing, completely still …

The actors would look at the man of the story, sometimes they would look at the audience.

Of the events which would have occurred between the man and the woman, nothing would be shown, nothing would be acted out. The reading of the text would offer itself, then, as the story's theater.]

(p. 38)

This maneuver supports the overall textual strategy, which inverts conventional relations of reading to script, where the script is conceived as outside of and prior to theatrical performance. Here the narrative is the theater of its own performance; it is thus split by the intrusion of an elsewhere. Its destabilized boundaries are replaced by perpetual reframings which produce a mobility of address that entails continual reconstruction of the spectator/reader position.

In their obsessive restaging of a scene of sexual desire and violent separations, Duras' recent works suggest that sexual difference is never stable nor in place; indeed, they suggest that it has no place. Rather, it is perpetually staged and restaged, read, reread, and constructed, just as it is constructed on the sites of reading mapped by these textual performances.

Notes

1. Indifferentiation is contagious. It is obliquely connected to critical issues surrounding these texts. It would be fair to say, I think, that Duras' critics frequently suffer from an inability to separate their discourse from that of the texts. This inability is expressed through meditations on her texts which mimic their style, which reproduce, in an attenuated form, the textual gestures they attempt to analyze. As such, Duras' texts threaten to leave us speechless or reduced to the "already said."
2. I want to express my appreciation to my colleague David Pollack for reminding me, in reference to a different subject, of the possibilities in the pair remembering/dismembering. He suggests this might provide an interesting opposition from which to consider structures of the gaze, particularly as it is organized around sexual difference.
3. Such conflict between levels and modes of discourse has long been thematized within Duras' work. More recently, however, these resistances have been increasingly produced on the performative level. One of the earlier emergences of such a struggle appears in Le Camion (Paris: Minuit, 1977), a film-text which stages a conversation between a long-distance truck driver and a woman passenger as they follow his highway route. In this case the actors are never photographed in the truck. Rather, we see shots of a truck rolling down a highway, crosscut with scenes of the two actors, Duras herself and Gérard Depardieu, as they sit in her house and read their lines from scripts. The film itself is framed by Duras' discourse about it, a discourse which often enters the diegesis and which is cast in the conditional.
4. Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. Here I have tried to maintain the repetitive minimalism of the passage by using only one verb, however awkward, for acting. "Jouer" and "to play" are roughly correspondent in that they are both more normally connected to the noun "role," as "to play a role."
5. I have considered these issues and some of these texts in somewhat sketchier detail and within a different framework in the last chapter of Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987).
6. See Jacques Derrida, La Carte postale (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), for an explanation of Freud's writing on the repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where the theoretical enterprise dedicated to distinguishing and mapping the interactions of the pleasure principle and the death drive founders on its own discovery that these two principles keep turning into each other. They remain inextricable from one another, an imbrication which is replicated in the relation of representation to the unrepresentable.
7. The comments which follow were inspired by Mary Lydon in a conversation following a reading of her translation of L'Homme assis and of a critical analysis of the text. It was she, I believe, who originally suggested that I look at "A Child Is Being Beaten" in relation to this text.

Bibliography

Burt, E. S. "Poetic Conceit: The Self-Portrait and Mirrors of Ink." Diacritics 2, no. 4 (1982), 17-38.

Duras, Marguerite. L'Homme atlantique. Paris: Minuit, 1982.

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

——. The Malady of Death. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Grove Press, 1986.

——. Savannah Bay. Paris: Minuit, 1983.

——. Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs. Paris: Minuit, 1986.

Freud, Sigmund. "A Child Is Being Beaten." In Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, edited by Philip Rieff, pp. 107-32. New York: Macmillan, 1963.

——. "Further Recommendations in the Technique of Psychoanalysis: Recollection, Repetition, Working Through." In Therapy and Technique, edited by Philip Rieff, pp. 157-66. New York: Macmillan, 1963.

Lydon, Mary. "Translating Duras: The Seated Man in the Passage." Contemporary Literature 24 (1983), 259-75.

Hiroshima mon amour

DEBORAH LESKO BAKER (ESSAY DATE 1998)

SOURCE: Baker, Deborah Lesko. "Memory, Love, and Inaccessibility in Hiroshima mon amour. "In Marguerite Duras Lives On, edited by Janine Ricouart, pp. 27-37. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1998.

In the following essay, Baker reviews Duras's representation of forbidden love in her screenplay Hiroshima mon amour and its relationship to the Tristan story.

The classic French film, Hiroshima mon amour (dir. Alain Resnais, 1959), explores several critical obsessions that traverse the life and literary career of screenwriter Marguerite Duras as she has risen to the stature of one of France's most eminent female writers. As the psychoanalytic investigations of critics like Julia Kristeva and Sharon Willis have suggested, these obsessions involve densely-layered and richly-connected notions of inaccessible love, of mourning, and of individual memory.¹ What I want to outline here is how these issues relate to several aspects of the mytho-literary tradition concerning forbidden erotic passion—specifically the Tristan story—in the particular context of the heroine's personal history. In Part V of the screenplay, for example, during an interior monologue before a bathroom mirror in the hotel room to which she has returned alone after telling her story to the Japanese lover, the French woman utters these words: "Quatorze ans que je n'avais pas retrouvé…le goût d'un amour impossible" (90) ["For fourteen years I hadn't found … the taste of an impossible love again" (73); my italics].² The impossible love evoked here and rendered more powerful by its dual repetition within the woman's psychic itinerary is a fundamental figuring of the Tristan myth, whose complex configuration of erotic passion dominates so much of Western love aesthetics from the Middle Ages to our own time. Certain tropes connected with this myth in fact operate in both the thematic and structural composition of Hiroshima mon amour. The most blatant and yet ultimately, perhaps, the most complicated of these tropes is that of unattainability itself, which translates psychically into the dissociation of desire and possession, such that the perpetuation of desire is fueled and intensified by interdiction and separation.

The unattainability trope is reflected in the text and film in a series of obvious obstacles impeding the intertwined love relationships of the French woman and the Japanese man and, previously, the French woman and her German lover. On the social and moral plain, both relationships exist outside of marriage, with the force of the prohibition coming on one hand from the adulterous interracial love affair of the Hiroshima couple and on the other hand from the societally-prohibited love affair of the Nevers couple. Yet, if the fourteen-year time span since the war somewhat attenuates the cultural or political taboo visà-vis the Hiroshima couple, this taboo nevertheless subsists, and is implicitly marked by the obstacle of their imminent and definitive geographical separation.

In the film, the presence of obstacles which feed the inaccessibility crisis of the two couples is highlighted symbolically by a series of striking visual and auditory images. For example, as the conversation of the French woman and the Japanese man moves toward emotionally intimate territory before they part in front of the hotel the morning after their first tryst, their dialogue is drowned out by traffic noise. Later that afternoon, as they leave Peace Square to be together once again, they are physically pulled apart in the crowd at the parade being filmed for the movie which has brought the heroine to Hiroshima in the first place. In the middle of that same night, after the climactic confessional scene in the café and just hours before her departure to France, he follows her down a darkened boulevard, but with slackening steps which gradually lengthen the distance between them. Finally, in flashback scenes portraying the Nevers love story, the French girl is seen stumbling over obstacles on the terrain as she hurries to meet her German lover. The obstacle marking definitive separation in the Nevers sequence, of course, is the German lover's death, an obstacle in itself constituting a key figure in the Tristan myth which is centrally problematized and exploited in the film.

A second crucial trope of the Tristan myth is the characterization of love itself as a profoundly ambivalent and paradoxical experience. The source of this contradictory impulse is found in the word passion itself, where the connotation of intense (and pleasurable) erotic love coincides with the etymological sense of intense suffering (Lt. patior, pati, passus sum), the limit of which is death, as in the passion of Christ. The passion of the lovers in the Tristan myth is thus oxymoronically defined as "l'âpre joie et l'angoisse sans fin, et la mort" (Bédier 51) ["bitter joy and anguish without end, and death" my translation]—that is, a perpetual overlap of conflicting emotions whose only authentic resolution lies in death. However, the positive and negative poles of each feeling are experienced as an interim series of figurative deaths and rebirths within the lovers, such that actual death, following the model of Christ, is differed and elevated as a means to attain an ultimate transcendance of suffering.

Like the rhetoric of the Tristan myth, the text and film of Hiroshima mon amour are structured according to the paradoxical juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory words, concepts, and images referring to love, death, and rebirth. Nowhere is this paradoxical rhetoric more apparent than in the title, in which the seemingly de-individualized place name and historical referent of Hiroshima, calling forth an image of global destruction and death, is juxtaposed to a purposefully vague yet intimate invocation of love attributed to a privatized "I." Moreover, the title insists not only on the brutal conjunction of love and death, but on the profound ambiguity of that relationship, since, semantically, love might refer either to the affective concept or to an erotic object and since, grammatically, as Sharon Willis has pointed out, "mon amour" may be taken either as a vocative or as an appositional structure of uncertain reference (34). Julia Kristeva reads the duality of the title in two ways, suggesting these possible paraphrases: "Mon amour est un Hiroshima" ["My love is a Hiroshima"] or "J'aime Hiroshima car sa douleur est mon eros" ["I love Hiroshima, for its pain is my eros"] (240-41). The first of these might be interpreted as metaphorizing a tragic love experience as massive trauma inflicting unimaginable suffering and loss; the second, rather, might be seen as ironically valorizing the pain of the trauma as the paradoxical catalyst for a rebirth or reperpetuation of eros—where eros is associated not so much with erotic pleasure, but instead with the impeded and therefore intensified desire alluded to earlier. The female protagonist participates in both these scenarios; psychically, she lives this unchangeable ambiguity inherent in the paradoxical unity of love and death.

The images as well as the language of the film reproduce and expand the apparent contradiction and the ambiguities of its title. As Kristeva reminds us, the initial image we see on the screen is that of an as-yet unidentified, intertwined couple whose ash-covered bodies at first strangely appear to figure the agonizing throes of a nuclear death before passing through a kind of renewing liquification that illuminates their movements as love-making (239). This passage from the couple's embrace of death to a regrasping of life through the agency of desire is doubled in the subsequent opening images of Hiroshima itself projected on the screen and described by the French woman. These images juxtapose the most graphic evidences of human destruction and deformation after the bomb to the amazing resurgence of nature observed, for example, in the re-emergence of flowers which the heroine says "renaissaient des cendres avec une extraordinaire vigueur" (21) ["rose again from the ashes with an extraordinary vigor" (19)]. We see a kind of mirroring of this persistent organic rebirth after destruction in the flashbacks to Nevers, where inevitably the longer light of spring enters the dark cellar in which the French girl is sometimes banished and where her own metaphorically cataclysmic deformation—her shaved-off hair—uncontrollably grows back to decent length: "Mes cheveux repoussent. A ma main, chaque jour, je le sens. Ça m'est égal. Mais quand même, mes cheveux repoussent" (76) ["My hair is growing back. I can feel it every day, with my hand. I don't care. But nevertheless my hair is growing back" (61)].³ Likewise, a sense of cyclic repetition and renewal is captured affectingly across the entire spectrum of the film in the movement between the Loire River, whose beautiful light emerges from the heroine's long-blocked childhood memory but on whose quay her German lover died, and the River Ota, whose daily drainings and refillings she invokes in her incantatory opening description of Hiroshima and next to whose banks in the café dialogue her past in Nevers is reborn.⁴

But this inexorable renascence of the natural—the continuation of life after trauma and destruction—further complicates the ambiguities of the love-death paradox. For the French woman, the pull away from death, from loss, and from disfigurement entails an accompanying increase in the difficulty of accessing that center of pain from which erotic love and desire can be re-experienced in its most intense form. It is the fear of this sort of detachment that makes the young heroine cling to the disfigurement constituted by her head-shaving and by the self-imposed scraping and bloodying of her fingers against the cellar wall. In telling her Nevers story she says, "Je ne suis attentive qu'au bruit des ciseaux sur ma tête. Ça me soulage un tout petit peu … de … ta mort … comme … comme, ah! tiens, je ne peux pas mieux te dire, comme pour les ongles, les murs" (77) ["All I hear is the sound of the scissors on my head. It makes me feel a little better about … your death … like … like, oh, I can't give you a better example, like my nails, the walls" (62)]. However, at the same time, the revelation of natural renewal through cyclic repetition becomes powerfully linked with the reiteration of the impossible love experience through the Japanese man, a reiteration which allows her to re-seize her psychic pain, thereby catalyzing the rediscovery of her past and its necessary and heretofore unaccomplished mourning.

It is, finally, this entire complex of ambiguities and contradictions engaged by the love-death duality that emerges in the haunting paradoxical language of the French woman's first, recitative-like interior monologue:

Je te rencontre.
Je me souviens de toi.
Qui es-tu?
Tu me tues.
Tu me fais du bien …
Déforme-moi jusqu'à la laideur.
(27)

[I meet you.
I remember you.
Who are you?
You destroy me.
You're so good for me …
Deform me, make me ugly.
(24-25)]

Here, in the barest yet most provocative form, we perceive the power of repetition, the simultaneous annihilation and affective renewal engendered by erotic trauma, and the demand to rein-scribe the disfiguring marks of suffering. These three phenomena define the dynamic of the "I" and the "You" from the psychic vantage point of the desiring female subject, in the face of an already blurred and doubled erotic object.

The French woman's declaration of "Je me souviens de toi" ["I remember you"] in the monologue excerpt just quoted serves to introduce the other rhetorical duality that dominates the depiction of love as paradoxical and ambivalent experience in Hiroshima mon amour —that of memory and forgetting. The compelling juxtaposition of these two notions dominates the dialogic itinerary of the Hiroshima couple as well as the internal battle of the French woman to assimilate and preserve her own history. Memory and forgetting are first thematized, like their rhetorical counterparts of rebirth and destruction, in terms of the Hiroshima disaster. As the Japanese man at first almost cynically refutes her self-proclaimed knowledge of what remembering and forgetting truly mean in respect to a trauma of Hiroshima's magnitude, the French woman cryptically betrays their absolute centrality to her own analogous, but thus far unrevealed traumatic experience:

Comme toi, moi aussi, j'ai essayé de lutter de toutes mes forces contre l'oubli. Comme toi, j'ai oublié. Comme toi, j'ai désiré avoir une inconsolable mémoire, une mémoire d'ombres et de pierres. J'ai lutté pour mon compte, de toutes mes forces, chaque jour, contre l'horreur de ne plus comprendre du tout le pourquoi de se souvenir. Comme toi, j'ai oublié.… Pourquoi nier l'évidente né cessité de la mémoire?

(24-25; my italics)

[Like you, I too have tried with all my might not to forget. Like you, I forgot. Like you, I wanted to have an inconsolable memory, a memory of shadows and stone. For my part I struggled with all my might, every day, against the horror of no longer understanding at all the reason for remembering. Like you, I forgot.…Why deny the obvious necessity for memory?

(23; my italics)]

Especially starting from the key moment the morning after these words are spoken, when she observes her sleeping lover's trembling hands and has an involuntary flashback to the twitching hands of the dying German soldier, the role of the Japanese man will be to lead the heroine back through the multiple layers of forgetting and to build a bridge back to her "inconsolable memory" of brutal death, of irretrievable loss. During the central café scene in which he symbolically takes on the identity of the German lover through a role-playing process resembling psychoanalytic transference, the French woman is finally able to verbalize her traumatic personal history and so to begin the active mourning that the silencing imposed by her social and familial stigmatization did not allow her to undertake.⁵ One partial effect of this social silencing which becomes a defining mark of her grief and a fascinating element of her story is how the actual Nevers crisis of separation and death is almost immediately doubled by a parallel crisis of memory: an obsessive desire to remember and an obsessive fear of forgetting the love, the pain, and the death to which she could not give voice.⁶ This crisis of memory is revealed at a number of junctures in her story and further illuminates her embrace of her own disfigurement, since it is her only weapon against the terror of oblivion. When talking about bloodying her own hands against the cellar walls, she cries: "C'est tout ce qu'on peut trouver à faire pour se faire du bien … et aussi pour se rappeler" (72) ["That's all you can find to do, to make you feel better … and also to remember" (55) my italics]). Later, when she recalls emerging from her madness, she laments: "Ah! C'est horrible. Je commence à moins bien me souvenir de toi … Je commence à t' oublier. Je tremble d'avoir oublié tant d'amour" (78-79) ["Oh! It's horrible. I'm beginning to remember you less clearly … I'm beginning to forget you. I tremble at the thought of having forgotten so much love" (64) my italics]. These statements function as a kind of insistent metatext which suggests that in one sense the most powerful image left by the resurrected memory of Nevers is that of how excruciatingly difficult it is to remember, and thus, truly to mourn.

Indeed, not surprisingly, it is this memory of the failure of memory that remains with her when she re-emerges from her almost trance-like visitation of the past. Movingly, she unravels the layers of the process of forgetting across the fourteen years that separate her from her lover's death in Nevers: "Même des mains je me souviens mal … De la douleur, je me souviens encore un peu … Oui, ce soir je m'en souviens. Mais un jour je ne m'en souviendrai plus. Du tout. De rien" (81-82) ["I don't even remember his hands very well … The pain, I still remember the pain a little … Yes tonight, I remember. But one day I won't remember it anymore. Not at all. Nothing" (67) my italics]. This passage from the disappearance of visual imagination of the Other, to the disappearance of affective feeling within the self, to the disappearance of everything, is construed, finally, not only as the ultimate fate of the past, but the ultimate fate of the future, since it will prospectively contaminate the current love affair in Hiroshima. When the French woman has finished her story, the Japanese man responds to it precisely in terms of his own projected loss of her identity over time; in this vision the woman herself will be forgotten, and the act of recall for him, as for her this night in the café, will paradoxically turn around the remembering of forgetting: "Dans quelques années, quand je t'aurais oubliée, et que d'autres histoires comme celle-là, par la force encore de l'habitude, arriveront encore, je me souviendrai de toi comme de l'oubli de l'amour même. Je penserai à cette histoire comme à l'horreur de l'oubli" (83) ["In a few years, when I'll have forgotten you, and when other such adventures, from sheer habit, will happen to me, I'll remember you as the symbol of love's forgetfulness. I'll think of this adventure as of the horror of oblivion" (68) my italics]. And, at last, in a culminating act of textual closure, the heroine moves through a series of interior monologues beginning with a reinvocation of the "I meet you, I remember you" recitative that we have discussed, but relentlessly replacing both past memory and present experience with a discourse of anticipated forgetting and an actual conferring of both loves to an oblivion seen as total and inevitable:

Petite tondue de Nevers je te donne à l'oubli …
Comme pour lui, l'oubli commencera par tes yeux.…
Puis, comme pour lui, l'oubli gagnera ta voix.…
Puis, comme pour lui, il triomphera de toi tout entier, peu à peu.
(37)

[Little girl with shaven head, I bequeathe you to oblivion …
As it was for him, oblivion will begin with your eyes.…
Then, as it was for him, it will encompass your voice.…
Then, as it was for him, it will encompass you completely, little by little.
(80)]

I would like to close by expanding my discussion of the duality of memory and forgetting in the context of the paradoxical depiction of love that I have suggested is a fundamental trope of the Tristan myth taken up in Hiroshima mon amour. The interplay between remembering and forgetting in the text and film is all the more crucial, I would argue, because of its striking metaphorical relationship to the contradictory impulses of death and rebirth that sustain the tension of unattainable love. Indeed, in the psychic drama of the French woman in Hiroshima both memory and forgetting are paradoxically double phenomena, because each of them is a metaphor for a certain kind of renascence and a certain kind of death. For the heroine, oblivion is an obvious analogue of real death, since it figures a disappearance or an effacement of impossible love from the mind and renders the sought-after intensity of both desire and suffering inaccessible to conscious experience. Nevertheless, although the rebirth it effectuates is a sterile one, forgetting is connected with the resumption of a so-called "normal" life and a deliverance from the exquisite pitch of anguish and longing that is incompatible with regular daily existence.

The act of remembering that constitutes the central focus of the film has a similarly oxymoronic force. For the heroine, it, too, is a death not because it effaces, but because it reinscribes, however briefly, the images of the actual death of her German lover and of her own figural death—that is, the madness, the loss of self which his murder provoked. Additionally, it reactivates both the desire and pain of inaccessibility and motivates a wish for death as the only authentic vehicle of transcendance. Yet memory does conquer one kind of death—that of oblivion, and it does catalyze a rebirth, although what it resurrects here is nothing other than the profound human experience of death in love. In allowing the French woman to go back and confront momentarily that intolerable, unresolvable experience, the act of remembering engenders a renascence of the loss that defines her as a person, that which, to paraphrase the words of her Japanese lover, has made her begin to be what she is today ("C'est là, il me semble l'avoir compris, que tu as dû commencer à être comme aujourd'hui tu es encore" 64). To be able to know and define the self through suffering in love is Tristan's legacy of unattainable passion; and in the space between the lived forgetfulness of the past and the inevitable oblivion of the future, the heroine arrives at a glimpse of this knowledge.⁷

Notes

1. For these two important critical discussions of the screenplay and film, see Julia Kristeva's "La maladie de la douleur: Duras" in Soleil noir and Sharon Willis's "Hiroshima mon amour: Screen Memories" in Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body. Translations of quotations from Kristeva are my own.
2. All French quotations from Duras's screenplay are from the original edition, Hiroshima mon amour (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). Translations from the English edition are by Richard Seaver (New York: Grove P, 1961).
3. Duras emphasizes the remarkable destructive proportion of the heroine's head-shaving in her synopsis statement accompanying the screenplay text: "Tondre une fille parce qu'elle a aimé d'amour un ennemi officiel de son pays, est un absolu et d'horreur et de bêtise" (7) ["To shave a girl's head because she has loved—really loved—an official enemy of her country, is the ultimate of horror and stupidity" (12); my italics].
4. The musical score also accentuates the river's evocation with its haunting "Ota theme."
5. As Freud says of transference in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: "In this way we oblige him (the patient) to transform his repetition into a memory" (444; my italics).
6. The obsessive character of the French woman's quest to unearth her past experience through this psychic repetition is of course enhanced by the act of drinking in the café. In Crack Wars, her book exploring addictions and their relationship to patterns of obsessive, repetitive behavior in literary texts, Avital Ronell imagines Marguerite Duras herself discussing the café scenes which stimulate the addictive propensities and psychic crises of her characters: "… I'd saturate my couples, watch them dissolve in cafés. Yes, maybe they would know fusional desire but without all that operatic noise. You know what I mean? I like to alcoholize my texts, turn down the volume and let them murmur across endless boundaries and miniscule epiphanies" (155). The catalytic role of drinking in Duras' screenplay is not without relationship to the topos of the philtre in the Tristan myth.
7. This fundamental idea of self-knowledge accrued through the experience of inaccessible love is part of the thesis of Denis de Rougemont's classic work on the Tristan myth in the Western literary and cultural tradition, L'amour et l'occident (trans. Love in the Western World):

   Passion veut dire souffrance, chose subie, prépondérance du destin sur la personne libre et responsable. Aimer l'amour plus que l'objet d'amour, aimer la passion elle-même … c'est aimer et chercher la souffrance … Pourquoi l'homme d'Occident veut-il subir cette passion qui le blesse et que toute sa raison condamne? Pourquoi veut-il cet amour dont l'éclat ne peut être que son suicide? C'est qu'il se connaît et s'éprouve sous le coup de menaces vitales, dans la souffrance et au seuil de la mort.

   (41; my italics)

   [Passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate over a free and responsible person. To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake … has been to love to suffer … Why does Western man wish to suffer this passion which lacerates him and which all his common sense rejects? Why does he yearn after this particular kind of love notwithstanding that its effulgence must coincide with his self-destruction? The answer is that he reaches self-awareness and tests himself only by risking his life—in suffering and on the verge of death.

   (50-51); my italics]

Works Cited

Bédier, Joseph. Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1981.

De Rougemont, Denis. L'Amour et l'occident. Paris: Plon, 1939. Trans. as Love in the Western World by Montgomery Belgian. New York: Harper & Row, 1956.

Duras, Marguerite. Hiroshima mon amour. Paris: Gallimard, 1960. Transl. by Richard Seaver. New York: Grove P, 1961.

Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Ed. and trans. by James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1977.

Kristeva, Julia. Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard (Folio), 1987.

Ronell, Avital. Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1992.

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