Marguerite Duras: Sexual Difference and Tales of Apocalypse

Marguerite Duras: Sexual Difference and Tales of Apocalypse
Author(s): Leslie Hill

Source: The Modern Language Review, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 601-614
Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association
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MARGUERITE DURAS: SEXUAL DIFFERENCEAND
TALES OF APOCALYPSE
Elle se promene encore. Elle voit de plus en
plus precisement, clairement ce qu'elle veut
voir. Ce qu'elle rebatit, c'est la fin du monde.
deLol V.Stein)
(LeRavissement
A number of Duras's books are written indifferently as plays, film-scripts, or novels.

In at least two of these texts, India Song and Detruire, dit-elle, there is an enigmatic
passage: if these texts were to be staged in a theatre, declares a peremptory editorial
voice, 'il n'y aurait pas de repetition generale'.1 This apparent distaste for dress
rehearsals is strange, but revealing. Behind it lies a paradox. If no dress rehearsals
may be allowed for these texts, it is most likely so that the continuity between
rehearsal and performance may be preserved. Performance itself becomes a rehear-
sal, or, since the French word, 'repetition', cannot distinguish between a rehearsal
and a repetition, it becomes a rehearsal as well as a repetition. The act of repeating in
Duras's texts turns towards the future as well as facing into the past. From the very
beginning, performance repeats a loss of origin, it is a circular event having no
originating moment.
But even before the question of dress rehearsals arises, self-reflexive repetition and
circular self-rehearsal are already the preferred terms of reference of Duras's
fictions. In the context of her work, the borderline between what is and what is not
fundamentally a repetition becomes difficult to draw, and the idea of repetition or
rehearsal can take in phenomena as diverse as self-adaptation (the reworking, for
instance, at a distance of some twenty-five years, of the novel Un Barrage contrele
Pacifiqueinto the play L'Eden Cinema), self-quotation (as in the figure of Anne-Marie
Stretter, who, 'differemment toujours', travels across texts, as a name, at any rate,
from one fiction to another),2 structural circularity within narrative and the
ritualistic re-enactment of plot events (as, for example, in Moderatocantabile, or Le
Ravissementde Lol V. Stein), and the use of various echoing leitmotifs both within and
between texts. Here, the phenomenon of textual repetition is more than a simple
consequence of the entropy of the signifier. The questions which arise from
repetition can be extended to apply in principle to all Duras's films, plays, and
novels, and it becomes clear that the use of repetition as a structuring device is
central to her whole strategy as a writer and film-maker.
But if in all her texts, repetition, both thematically and structurally, is an
undeniable source of enigma and fascination, what remains unclear (and this is the
1 MargueriteDuras,Detruire,
dit-elle(Paris, 969),p. 39.A similarformulaappearsin IndiaSong(Paris,
where the restriction is lifted for countries other than France.
2 p. xo,
1973),
Anne-MarieStretterappearsin LeRavissement deLol.V.Stein,LeVice-consul,
IndiaSong,SonnomdeVenise
dansCalcutta as well as in the earlypublishedversionof L'Homme
desert, assisdansle couloir.
It is fromthe
1980 version of L'Hommeassis dansle couloir-(Paris,1980), p. 9, that the phrase 'differemment toujours'
comes.(I shallreturnto this textlater.)Anne-MarieStretter'sinitialsarealsothoseof AureliaSteiner.
MadeleineBorgomanomakestheoddbut suggestivepointthatall Duras'sfemalecharacters(including
the womanof Moderato cantabile)seemto be calledAnne(Duras:Unelecture (Brussels,1985),
desfantasmes
p. 178).
602 SexualDifferencein Marguerite
Duras
fundamental disturbance created by all repetition) is what it is that is being
repeated, or what lies behind the apparent compulsion to repeat. Repetition is never
easy to interpret, and readers (and readings) of Duras have in the past diverged in
deciding on the function of repetition in her work: that is, whether it reflects a desire
to recapture the past and thus retrieve it from oblivion, or somehow the reverse. In
the latter case the point of the compulsion to repeat would be to transform the past
into a radical absence of foundation, into a catastrophic loss of beginnings that
would throw into question all the guarantees which derive fromidentifiable origins.3
Part of the fascination caused by repetition no doubt derives from this double
status. In itself (if it were possible to assign an identity to it), repetition isJanus-like.
It is always possible to postulate a dual function for it. On one level, repetition
operates in Duras's work as a memory of origins, and a rehearsal of the past, but at
the same time, it also appears in the guise of a diabolical process dedicated to
destroying the original status of what it is repeating. It disrupts the idea of the
hierarchical primacy of the original time or event. (Not for nothing is it traditionally
associated with death, sexuality, loss of identity, the uncanny, or the music of the
devil.)
The effect of repetition is melancholy, to the extent that it records loss. However,
in Duras's work, it should not be taken to imply monotony, or dreary sameness. It is
also a movement that refuses to be controlled by the past. If repetition tells of a loss of
origins, it also recounts the failure of canonic and binding models of truth to control
meaning. It possesses its own diabolic autonomy, which allows it to steal, purloin,
and usurp effects from elsewhere. Repetition has a multiple identity. It becomes
difficult to set any bounds to what is potentially a repetition. As Gilles Deleuze has
argued, this excess of repetition over itself, which gives it its protean lack of identity
and its capacity for renewal and endless proliferation, is itself another name for the
process of fundamental variation which makes repetition possible (and of which
repetition in the familiar sense is a localized instance) and gives it its creative and
shifting energy (Differenceet repitition(Paris, 1968)). Repetition in Duras's work is
not a changeless reproduction of sameness; rather, as in music, it is an effect of an
underlying movement of perpetual variation. Duras indicates as much herself by her
insistent and repetitive use of Beethoven's Diabelli variations in films such as India
Songand Le Camion.In Duras, as in Beethoven, what is repeated is not identity but
variation and difference. The effect of textual repetition is to bring about, by
adaptation, textual transposition, or internal replication, a constant circulation of
meaning which cannot be arrested by the appeal to an origin or stable model.
If repetition suggests despair and finality, Duras argues, it is a despair which no
longer mourns what it has lost. Rather it affirms the absence of faith, and the
insubordination of despair, a state that she sometimes refersto as a 'gai desespoir'.4
She explains what is at issue most clearly in the text of Le Camion.This is a film which
3 The
diversity of arguments on this and other issues is reflected in the following collections of essays
devoted to Duras's work: MargueriteDuras, edited by Joel Farges and Francois Barat (Paris, I975);
MargueriteDurasa Montreal,edited by Suzanne Lamy and Andre Roy (Montreal, I98I); Ecriredit-elle:
Imaginaires deMarguerite Duras,edited by Danielle Bajomee and Ralph Heyndels (Brussels, 1985); L'Arc,
984 ( 985), a special number devoted to Duras's work, as is the Revuedessciences humaines,202 (1986).
See, for example, the interview entitled 'La Voie du gai desespoir', published in Le Mondein 1977 to
coincide with the release of Le Camion,and reprinted in Marguerite Duras, Outside(Paris, I98i),
pp. 171-79. The term is clearly calculated to echo that of 'le gai savoir', but it also perhaps owes
something to the use of'gai' in the same sense as the contemporary English 'gay'.
LESLIE HILL 603
takes the form of a speculative conversation between Duras and Gerard Depardieu,
seemingly playing themselves. Their dialogue is conducted in the hypothetical
mode, and the two actors perform, by word alone, the story of a male lorry-driver
and a woman hitch-hiker, which in turn is illustrated or sketched in by various
inserted sequences depicting a blue Saviem articulated lorry on its journeys up and
down the Channel coast. Two locales, the outside world of the lorry and the
darkened inside room occupied by the actors, mime and repeat each other, like two
images which reflect each other but refuse to coincide, except as variations on
common possibilities. As a result, Le Camionis a film which, in its own way, can be
seen as entirely unrehearsed, almost improvised by Duras and Depardieu, or,just as
much, to consist of nothing more than a series of rehearsalsfor a film which will not
have been made, but which will have been enacted in the very process of its being
rehearsed and repeated.
Within the world of circular paradoxes explored by Le Camion,where events take
place without their taking place, where the actors both remain themselves and
become the provisional understudies of characters who are spoken about only as
conjectures, the world survives its own finality with a desperate intensity. Duras
explains: 'On croit plus rien. On croit. Joie: on croit: plus rien.'5 Here, as the
audience is invited, in the words of 'la dame du camion', as embodied, quoted, or
rehearsed by the author-narrator herself, to 'regarde[r]: la fin du monde' (p. 21),
Durassian repetition takes on what is properly its apocalyptic dimension. The idea
of apocalypse signifies not only irreversible catastrophe but also revelation: no
doubt, too, here, the one as the other, calamity as illumination, revelation as
disaster. In the context of Duras's work, the apocalypse, as in Biblical tradition,
denotes both an end and a beginning, destruction and resurrection. It implies, for
instance, an end to story-telling, an admission that the world will no longer fit the
bounds of narrative representation, and yet affirms the survival of writing as an act
of discovery and invention. While it challenges all inherited notions of value, it still
asserts the capacity of writing, in the aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of
meaning which Le Camionrecounts, to be a vehicle for revelation, and the ability of
the cinema to cast its own peculiar, apocalyptic, half-light onto the scattered images
and reflections of the world.
Under cover of a radically pessimistic account of politics and meaning in general,
what is being repeated, then, in Duras's work (as in the musical analogy) is an
awareness of fundamental variation, a knowledge of discord, separation, and
incommensurability at the heart of the world. This division and duplicity at the
centre of things, however, is not a secondary or derived phenomenon but a primary
one, and therefore pre-exists the notion of an established universal model, and it
seems clear, in Duras's work, that the originating differencewithin the human order
itself, the division between the sexes, is the prime focus of this awareness of
difference. That difference, which lies beyond the purview of each human, who is
irremediably differentiated as male or female from the outset of life, both figures (as
a metaphor) and embodies (literally) the absolute, the unspeakableor unsayable, on
which Duras's writing, like the apocalyptic revelations of the Bible, is suspended.
5 Marguerite Duras, Le Camion(Paris, 1977), p. 73. Further references in the text are to this edition.
This article was already completed when Julia Kristeva's essay on apocalyptic themes in Duras became
available, published in her Soleilnoir:Depressionet melancolie
(Paris, 1987).
Duras
Writing, Duras argues, is an exploration of this infinity which founds the human
order: 'L'homme', she says to Dominique Noguez, '... est fonde justement sur
l'inconnaissable, l'insondable, l'inconcevable de l'inconcevable de quoi participe sa
vie. Et interminablement, infiniment, l'homme ecrit de cet infini. C'est de cette
difficulte qu'il vit. Dans un monde fini, explorable, l'homme n'ecrirait pas.'6
Downstream of their singular conception and their gender identity, humans, male
and female, can only repeat and vary, in a state of perpetual non-resolution, their
relation to the uncontainable absolute of sexual difference. This relationship to the
infinite, to what escapes boundaries, limitations, or confinement, is fundamental.
This is why, in turn, Duras's stories are so often structuredand staged as repetitions
and rehearsals of absolute passion, as stories of sexual difference, and of the
enigmatic and unstable tracing and retracing of that difference. Like her own texts
themselves, her love stories are tales of repetition and variation, accounts of the
space between the sexes, and the compulsions, enigmas, and divisions which
structure that space.
Of Duras's many stories of love, the novel Moderato cantabileis probably one of the
best known.7 Its plot is characteristicallydual in structure as well as melodramatic,
even lurid. The narrative opens with the murder (by her male lover) of an unnamed
woman, and traces the effects of that crime on two of its chance (and partial)
witnesses: Anne Desbaresdes, the mother of a small boy taking music lessons, and
Chauvin, the man she subsequently meets in the local caf6 and with whom she
questions, explores, reinvents, and, finally, re-enacts the murder in metaphoric
manner. The novel itself is mainly taken up with exploring the parallels, repetitive
echoes, and divergences between these two series of events as Anne's and Chauvin's
amorous encounter is set against the backdrop of the murder which initiates it.
In the first instance, reading Moderatocantabilebecomes essentially a matter of
unravelling the complex network of recurrent motifs running through the text, and
following up its self-mirroringand repetitive plot patterns. Within the book itself (if
one reads it self-referentially), the task of interpretation is presented primarily as a
question of framing: of matching, for instance, the words of the title with the music
(and narrative) they surround. (Subsequently, the challenge will be to relate the
major plot events, those dealing with Anne and Chauvin, to the frame story of the
murder.) It is clearly not by chance that the text begins with an invitation to read
and with the music teacher's question to the boy: '-Et qu'est-ce que Caveut dire,
moderato cantabile?' (p. 7). The boy, rather like the reader at this stage, can only
reply that he (or she) does not know.
Significantly, however, as though to forestall the search for a regular and
recognizable frame, the novel is, from the very beginning, staged in a world of
margins, edges, and border-zones. Locations are rendered indeterminate, and a
sense of otherness becomes everywhere present. Lines of separation are established
in the text only to be suspended and blurred. Within the opening chapter, the theme
of the sea-board works as a powerul source of such effects of 'in-betweenness'. The
music-room, in which the first chapter is set, is itself, characteristically, poised
6 Fromtheinterviewsincludedon thevideocollectionof eightofDuras'sfilms,issuedby theMinistere
des relationsexterieuresin 1984.They are reproducedin the accompanying Duras:
booklet,Marguerite
(Euvrescinimatographiques
(Paris, 1984), p. 58.
7 Marguerite Duras, Moderatocantabile,collection 'double' (Paris, 1958, I985). All references to the
novelareto thisedition.
LESLIE HILL 605
between the town and the sea, and the sounds of both echo within the room, which is
given over to the small boy's struggle to master the Diabelli sonatina of the title. In
much the same way, the young child's attention is wayward: he cannot (or will not)
settle on the matter at hand and is half distracted by the spectacle of the sea and the
sky. Anne, his mother, too, is half reluctant in her commitment to the music lesson
and hesitates between indulgence and strictness. The time of day is mid-afternoon,
and the colour of the sky is poised midway between light and dark, clear and
obscure. (This reference to the half-light of evening as an intensification and
engulfment of light is a constant apocalyptic motif in this novel and elsewhere in
Duras's work, where the reader, or spectator, is continually exposed to the idea that
half-light, like the final rays before nightfall, is a source of peculiarly vivid illumin-
ation. AureliaSteinerspeaks, for example, of the existence of a 'forteclarte,juste avant
l'obscurcissement general que repand le rougeoiement de la nuit' (LeNavire'Night'
(Vancouver), Cesaree,LesMainsnegatives,AureliaSteiner,AureliaSteiner,AureliaSteiner
(Paris, I979), p. 148).)
In this world of indecision and unresolved contrasts, where space, character, and
time echo each other according to an underlying rhythm of repetitive variation,
something happens. Or rather, more appropriately, something takes place which is
also perhaps nothing. For this is how the murder event is first described:
Dans la rue, en bas de l'immeuble,un cri de femmeretentit.Une plaintelongue,continue,
s'elevaet si hautque le bruitde la meren fut brise.Puiselle s'arreta,net.
-Qu'est-ce que c'est?cria1'enfant.
-Quelque choseest arrive,dit la dame.
Le bruitde la merressuscitade nouveau.Le rosedu ciel, cependantcommenqaa palir.
-Non, dit AnneDesbaresdes,ce n'estrien.(p. Io)
One of the central paradoxes of the novel is caught in this exchange. What has
happened is an event which hesitates between being something and nothing,
between a rehearsal and a performance, a quotation and a reality, an event and a
figment of the imagination, and this indeterminacy is reflected in the quality of the
cry itself, which is sustained yet abrupt, as well as in the surroundingsky, as it fades
into pale pinkness and darkness, and in the sound of the sea, which is silenced only to
re-emerge a moment later.
However, even if it seems, when it happens, that the event is almost without
consequence for the protagonists, the scene which Anne now witnesses comes
entirely to dominate the rest of the novel. For the major part of the plot is structured
like a repetitive reworkingof the murder incident, its metaphoric re-enactment and
ritualistic rehearsal, whereby Anne and Chauvin project onto one another the roles
of murderer and victim, and become caught up in a lengthy fictional transferencein
the course of which it is no longer entirely clear what is real and what is fantasized or
imagined. (And I use the term transference in the Freudian sense of a re-
actualization of unconscious material in the relation between Anne and Chauvin.
All transference is repetition, and, at the limit, all repetition is transference.This is
at any rate the case with Duras's two protagonists, and potentially, also with
Duras's readers, who, if the act of reading is repetition and transference, cannot
avoid being drawn into the scene of the text as its witnesses, its martyrs.)
From this point on, the murder scene, in repetitive, diabolical fashion, takes
possession of Moderatocantabile.It does so in two ways. The first is the result of its
inherent impact as a scene viewed by Anne, and, by extension, visualized by the
Duras
reader. This comes about partly because of the violence and potent melodrama of
the scene, which Duras underlines with the use of some readily apparent colour
symbolism (the darkness of the woman's blood, for instance, echoing the dying glow
of the sunset) or by recourse to blood as a sexual motif (blood is dripping from the
mouths of both murderer and victim, and links them in some kind of ritualistic or
sacrificial embrace, suggesting perhaps that the presence of the diabolical, even in
the form of sexual vampirism, is not restricted to the structure of the plot). More
important, however, is the point of view adopted by the text, which, after an
introductory section, stages the scene of the crime from the viewpoint of Anne
herself:
AnneDesbaresdesse renseigna.
-Quelqu'un qui a ete tue. Une femme.
Ellelaissasonenfantdevantle porchede MademoiselleGiraud,rejoignitle grosde la foule
devantle cafe,s'y faufilaet atteignitle dernierrangdes gensqui, le longdes vitresouvertes,
immobilisesparle spectacle,voyaient.(p. I4)
Intriguingly, the act of seeing, or looking ('voir'), takes on an absolute status, and
the word is used here as an intransitive verb. Seeing the crime, imagining, or
reimagining it on the basis of its aftermath, becomes, in its own right, a compelling,
even compulsive, act. The scene is described by Duras as a spectacle, as a spectacle,
moreover, which roots its spectators to the spot. This is important, for it puts Anne
in the position of someone viewing a fantasy or dream image of her own, or,
alternatively, in the position of someone looking on at an imaginary scene like that
performed on a cinema screen. (What makes being in the cinema most like
dreaming, it is sometimes said, is that everything except the screen is in darkness
and that it is impossible, or undesirable, for people to move.) To reinforce the
parallel, Duras incorporates within the fictional scene a press photographer, by the
light of whose flash-bulb Anne is able to distinguish the age of the murdered woman
as well as the blood disfiguring her mouth and that of her lover. The scene is framed
in a single ray of light (a 'lueur' (p. I5), like that of the setting sun), and begins to
stand out in the novel not only as a kind of screen image to be visualized by the
reader and the hero but also as a screen memory, which condenses into one vivid
scene, unlocated in both time and space, a whole complex of potential other
meanings and associations.
The position occupied by Anne is crucial. She is a witness at the scene of the crime
and thus involved as a spectator, but she is also kept at a distance as though she were
the viewer of a more private scene taking place on a different stage. As she looks on,
with the other bystanders, the things she sees are 'au fond du cafe, dans la penombre
de l'arriere-salle' (p. 14), as though they were at the back of a stage set. Her own
special implication in the vision before her is underlined, as she stands looking, by
her hearing the man repeat (as though it were a dream) her own earlier words to her
son, 'Mon amour. Mon amour' (p. I4), and there are a number of other common
elements detailed in the murder scene and in the seemingly unconnected music
lesson: these range from disgust (an anonymous bystander seeing the blood on the
murderer's mouth finds it all 'degouftant'(p. 15), as does Anne when describing her
son's obedient attitude to his teacher), to the theme of violent suffering and
martyrdom, evoked both in the murder and by Anne's remark (already prefiguring
her parting words to Chauvin) that her son causes her pain, that 'c'est deja fait, il me
devore' (p. 13). Etymologically, to be a martyr is to be, like Anne, a witness.
LESLIE HILL 607
Childbirth is another repetitive motif. Later, in talking with Chauvin, Anne
compares the woman's dying moan to the sounds Anne made during the birth of her
son. Earlier, too, as the sounds of the murder had begun to merge with the boy's
piano-playing, Anne had closed her eyes (and this privileging of inward seeing again
makes the point) to display 'le douloureux sourired'un enfantement sans fin' (p. 13)
(and just afterwards the murderer himself is photographed 'assis et souriant'
(p. I5)). A complex patchwork of verbal echoes is set up across the text, and the
result is not only to create suspense by the forging of oblique and enigmatic verbal
connexions but also to modify the status of the scene Anne witnesses by transferring
it from the outside world into a more hallucinatory inner one. At the same time, the
effect is also, arguably, to invite the reader to inquire into his or her own position as a
voyeur looking on at this scene of violent murder.
As a result, as Madeleine Borgomano suggests, the murder scene functions in the
novel rather like a primal scene (or Urszene)in the Freudian sense of the term
(pp. 113-39). These are vivid, hallucinatory scenes, based on real memory, but
substantially reinvented and overlaid with other meanings by the unconscious.
They work as densely-woven miniature scenarios dramatizing in fantasy form what,
according to Freud, can be interpreted as the viewer's or dreamer's first (traumatic
or dramatic) encounter with sexuality, and the moment of his or her initiation into
the secrets of sexual difference. As Borgomano argues, in Duras's novels the density
and energy of scenes like the murder in Moderato cantabile(and many other scenes of
this type could be cited here) derive from their capacity to condense into one
luminous scene or narrative tableau a complex but necessarily latent drama of
sexual insight and awareness.
In the Freudian context, such memories are usually thought of as childhood
memories, and it is worth stressing in this respect the role played at the scene by
Anne's child. Clearly, Anne's son is used in the first chapter in part as a realistic
device, to emphasize Anne's role as wife and mother (and there are few enough
major novels which explicitly deal with this dimension of parenthood). But there is a
furtherimportant aspect to the child's presence, for it is implied later that the child is
almost an imaginary creation of Anne's, and she declares to him, accordingly, that
'quelquefois je crois que je t'ai invente, que ce n'est pas vrai' (p. 25). The child
becomes almost an integral part of Anne herself, not just her child but a part of
herself, and thus, to some degree, herself as a child. But also, what the child
encapsulates for Anne is Anne herself as sexually differentiated,not only in the sense
that childbirth presumes a knowledge of the sexual difference between male and
female but also in the sense that she, a woman, has borne this male child.
This sexual knowledge, then, is what, from Anne's perspective, seems to be at
issue in this scene she has witnessed. The insight it gives is clearly visible, in so far as
the scene can (and perhaps can only) be viewed, but the scene also seems to speak
silently of the unseen. The child is instructed not to look ('ne regardepas', Anne says
to him, without elaborating (p. I5)), and the discussion is immediately covered up
by the question of the meaning of the words 'moderato cantabile'. Admittedly, this
serves to underline how the vision of the scene touches on a social and sexual taboo,
but it also achieves the second and equally important purpose of linking music with
the theme of sexuality. Music, as a structure of repetition and variation, and as a
process of (non-verbal) differentiation, becomes a means of dramatizing the very
instability of sexual difference, the separation but also the apparent fusing of
Duras
identities, the violence but also the erotic union displayed in the murder scene. It is
not coincidental in this respect that by the end of the first chapter the two major
enigmas posed by the text are the significance of the words 'moderato cantabile' and
the meaning of the murder incident.
Yet much of the ambivalence of the murder appears to derive from the mixture of
generic registers at work in the text and the expectations of reading which accom-
pany them. The scene Duras unfolds seems to hesitate between low crime and high
romance, between brutal realism and passionate melodrama, and, ultimately,
between sensationalism and seriousness. It is far from self-evident how readers are
to react to this spectacle of the crimepassionnel.The generic clues seem to be working
at cross-purposes, and readers are invited by the text to respond in a number of
possible ways: with disgust, shock, sympathy, annoyance, indifference, curiosity,
fascination, or even rapture, depending on which position in the text readers decide
to share.
One of the characteristic traits of the apocalyptic genre as such, Derrida argues, is
precisely this mixing of genres, the combining of the pious with the lurid, the
extravagant with the reverential. This can be pushed to such a degree that the notion
of a message to be revealed becomes gravely compromisedby the text's own inability
to exhaust the absolute, unspeakable, or infinite which is its object.8 The same
paradox seems to affect Duras's text. The more the murder scene takes on the
semblance of a scene of revelation or recognition, the more Anne Desbaresdes's
vision or insight recedes into enigma, and the more unclear it becomes what it is that
is being revealed. Indeed, the uncertainties readers may have about the generic
conventions the novel may be following (romance, crime fiction, 'women's' fiction,
psychological thriller, or high art?) reflect disturbances at work on the level of
gender as well as of genre. It is far from clear not only what Duras's novel actually
implies in terms, say, of its sexual politics, but also what the novel's own position (if
it has one) is towards the sexual violence it depicts. National tradition also plays a
part and it is no doubt the case that French readers are more attuned to the mythic
dimensions of the theme of the crimepassionnelthan English-speaking ones. The
connexion claimed between eroticism and violence has become, in France, a rather
dreary contemporary commonplace, one which, some readers might well argue,
Duras's own novel reveals in its apparent refusal to frame the murder in any other
way than as an act of violent and excessive desire.
What Duras does in Moderatocantabile,by way of answering her own question
about the meaning of the title, is to produce a set of contradictory frames of
reference, the effect of which is to challenge the existence of any unified interpre-
tation or intent behind the text. What happens instead is that readers are exposed,
uncomfortably, to the puzzles and enigmatic implications of sexual difference and
sexual relations in a way which bypasses convenient rationalizations. On one level,
Duras's text revamps in overtly melodramatic fashion a number of canonic and
mythical images on the subject of the interpenetrationof love and death. The notion
of orgasm as 'la petite mort' lies tremulously in wait in the margins of Duras's text for
any over-enthusiastic commentator. The scene rehearses, albeit in fantasy form, a
8 See
Jacques Derrida, Dun ton apocalyptique adoptenaguereen philosophie(Paris, I983), pp. 76-78. It
cannot be coincidental in this context that the story of Moderato
cantabileis spread out over seven days (the
book has been translated as SevenDaysandSevenNights),and that seven should be the apocalyptic number
par excellence.
LESLIE HILL 609
myth of romantic passion, set in a seaside town in modern France, and at the heart of
that myth is a theme of passion, of love and desire as a fusing of identity between
sexual partners. It is the same loss of difference, of the boundaries which exist
between individuals, between me and you, which is implied in the actions of the
murderer as he lies across his dead lover, mingling his blood with hers in a moment
of sadistic oral communion (and we must be wary here of assuming that Duras's
novel unproblematically endorses the myth of love as erotic fusion):
Dans la lueurdu magnesium,on put voirque la femmeetaitjeuneencoreet qu'ily avaitdu
sang qui coulaitde sa boucheen mincesfiletseparset qu'ily en avaitaussisurle visagede
l'hommequi1'avaitembrassee....
L'hommese recouchade nouveaule longdu corpsde sa femme,maisun tempstrescourt.
Puis,commesi celal'eutlasse,il se relevaencore....
Maisl'homme ne s'etaitrelevequepourmieuxs'allonger,de pluspres,le longdu corps.II
restala, dans une resolutionapparemmenttranquille,agrippede nouveaua ellede ses deux
bras,le visagecolleau sien,dansle sangde sa bouche.(p. 15)
While Duras evokes this theme of merging identities, she simultaneously
highlights the irreducible gap which is inherent in the relation between male and
female. For unmistakably (and the story of Anne and Chauvin perhaps stresses
this more than the opening murder scene) the murder is also an act of aggression
which has as its outcome the suppression of the difference existing between the
couple (which had made it possible for this 'relationship' to exist, however
furtively, between them). A fundamental question-mark is raised here as to the
nature of that relationship between the sexes. The novel itself provides no answer
to the question, because the novel itself is the dramatic enactment of that question,
its rehearsal and repetition, and, by refusing to answer, is proof of the fact that
there can be no universalizing answer to the question, only singularly different
ones, since sexual difference is precisely what ruins the claim to existence of
universal truths. There can be no single frame of reading which would resolve
these issues. What Duras's readers are given instead is the puzzling terms of a
scene of literature which has to be deciphered and read, not only by the book's
readers, male and female, but also by the novel's protagonists, Anne and Chauvin.
And this, as Marianne Hirsch suggests, is largely what happens in the remainder
of the novel ('Gender, Reading and Desire in Moderatocantabile',Twentieth-Century
Literature,28, no. i (Spring 1982), 69-85 (p. 78)).
Here, the murder scene comes to dominate Moderatocantabilein a second impor-
tant way. The incident reverberates throughout the novel as more than just a
powerful beginning. Though it occupies less than three pages in the first chapter, the
scene comes to programme, rather like some fascinating but impenetrable subtext,
almost all the subsequent actions of Anne, especially in her relationship with
Chauvin, as soon as she encounters him in the cafe at the beginning of Chapter 2.
The story of the murder provides them with their major topic of conversation, and
thus, in the theatrical sense of the term, with their text. As Anne is attracted to
Chauvin as a witness who might cast some light on the perplexities of the primal
scene, she begins to repeat the scene in her talks with him (and Chauvin's behaviour
suggests his willingness to repeat the scene, too). Numerous elements recur:the cafe
locale serves as a common theatre or stage for the murder and the meeting with
Chauvin, the colour symbolism of the wine Anne drinks (and does so to excess) in
the course of her flirtatious relations with the man echoes that of the blood in the
21
6Io SexualDifferencein Marguerite
Duras
earlier scene, while the timing of the meetings, at dusk, is the same, and allows the
glow of the sunset, like a theatrical spotlight, to pour in through the windows in the
same way as in the last paragraphs of the first chapter ('le mur du fond de la salle',
we read in the middle of the third chapter (p. 33), 's'illumina du soleil couchant. En
son milieu, le trou noir de leurs ombres conjuguees se dessina').
The compelling presence of the murder as an object of Anne's and Chauvin's
fascination and as an enigma they seek to resolve but end up repeating means that the
boundary between the central plot and the frame story of the murder is effectively
blurred, and it is no longer clear which of the two takes logical precedence over the
other. In Moderatocantabile,as elsewhere in Duras's novels, notably in Le Vice-consul,
meaning is organized by use of a rhetoric of contagion (in Le Vice-consul and India
Song this is thematized with the aid of the motif of leprosy or untouchability).
Rather than subordinating themes hierarchically, though, Duras's text sets up its
own logic of association, creating connexions by metonymic juxtaposition or
repetition. The relation between the murder and its re-enactment, for instance,
remains indeterminate. No chain of causality is established in the text and a circular
structure results, by which the murder is a preliminary section of a larger story,
which itself is a subsection of the story of the murder, itself the culmination of an
earlier story which is withheld from the reader and suspended in oblivion. The
inquiry into the crime becomes part of the crime just as much as the crime is itself
part of the inquiry, and it is no longer evident which story events are repeating or
rehearsing which, or which set of events is the metaphoric transposition or trans-
ference of which other. Narrative hierarchy is perturbed and it is no longer possible
to distinguish with confidence between what is literal and what is figurative, or what
terms are available to formulate the enigmas of love, desire, and sexual difference.
Typical of this process is the way the words exchanged by Anne and Chauvin take
on a slippery ambivalence. Few of Duras's pronouns (in this novel or in any other
texts) are made explicit, and it is at times questionable whom they refer to. On one
occasion, for example, the pair remain silent for some moments, and Anne asks:
-Je voudraisquevous me disiezmaintenantcommentils en sontarrivesa ne plusmemese
parler....
-Je ne saisrien.Peut-etreparde longssilencesquis'installaiententreeux,la nuit,un peu
n'importequandensuiteet qu'ilsetaientde moinsen moinscapablesde surmonterparrien,
rien. (p.40)
Unmistakably, the referents of the third-person 'ils' have changed. They are no
longer the earlier couple but Anne and Chauvin themselves, who have forfeitedtheir
own personal pronouns and become the participants in some romantic 'ceremonial'
(p. 38), a ritualistic sexual encounter which dissolves their sense of identity and, like
the sunset, turns them into silhouettes of themselves who remain who and what they
are, but also exist as the shadows and reflections of someone or something else.
As the novel proceeds, then, Anne and Chauvin become actors in a scenario
which, though it seems not to be of their making, they reinvent, repeat, re-enact, and
make their own. The dividing line between real and imaginary, between knowledge
and simulation, between self and other, is erased. The plot of Moderatocantabileas a
whole takes the form of a series of self-mirroringevents to which it is impossible to
assign an origin or a root cause. This style of reflexivity works counter to the idea of
the mirror as a controlling device (and continues to inform much of Duras's work,
notably the film of IndiaSong,in which almost all the interior shots, either totally or
LESLIE HILL
in part, are done through a mirror). Both the relation between Anne and Chauvin
and the murder earlier become versions, rehearsals,or repetitions of something else,
which is not named and is lost as an absent and forgotten memory. This most of all is
what lends Duras's novel its air of compelling mystery. None of the enigmas
announced in the first chapter (the reasons for the murder, or the significance of the
words 'moderato cantabile') is resolved; they are simply repeated and reworked,
rehearsed, and varied (like a musical excerpt) in a spiralling movement which takes
the reader forward, but also leads back in time towards an unlocated and effaced
memory to which access is denied.
Structured as a series of repetitive mirrors, what the novel does is to describe and
to put into crisis a whole array of frames, divisions, and borderlines,which no longer
serve to stabilize meaning but become blurred and uncertain. It is difficult, if not
impossible, to resolve the enigma of desire or sexual difference dramatized in the
murder scene by recourse to a readily-available frame of reference.On the contrary,
frames slip and slide, and borderlines become areas of confusion, not demarcation
zones affording clarity. This is the lesson behind the famous and no doubt
programmatic set-piece dinner scene (Chapter 7), where Anne faces the implica-
tions of her experiences on the borderline (between sea and shore, promiscuity and
maternity, seeing and not seeing). The dinner party is another inquiry into
borderlines and the turbulence they conceal, an exploration, for instance, of the gulf
now apparent between Anne and her social world, of the scandalous nature of her
relation to Chauvin, and of the limit between the inside and outside'ofthe house and
park, as well as that between the inside and outside of Anne's own body.
On this frontier, limits are paradoxically undone, and Anne is able to stage her
revolt against the masculine order of her social world, against the well-policed
divisions of a 'societe', as Duras puts it, 'fondee, dans ses assises, sur la certitude de
son droit' (p. 70). But while Anne does rebel against the profligacy and rituals
(indeed, the 'ceremonial' (p. 68) ) of the world of her husband and family, she does so
in the name of a different excess and a differentritual, and in response to a different
man, one who comes prowling, and invades the 'parc correctement clos' (p. 70) of
her matrimonial home, like the agent of some primeval sexual disturbance, reveal-
ing the deep complicity of desire now present between Anne and Chauvin. 'Un
homme rode, boulevard de la Mer', writes Duras. 'Une femme le sait' (p. 6 ).
It would seem that in the Bible, Derrida suggests, the idea of apocalyptic
disclosure has to do with the improper unveiling of sexuality, that of the father, for
example, within the family circle, with the public exposure of private parts (D'unton
apocalyptique, pp. 13-14). As in the Bible, so it is in Duras's novel, where, moreover,
the enactment of desire, the dramatization of the space between Anne and Chauvin
is performed by way of the motif of overpowering, sweet-smelling, cup-shaped
magnolia flowers. (Later, in IndiaSong,leprosy is described as having 'comme une
odeur de fleur' (p. I9).) 'Dehors, dans le parc', Moderatocantabilehas it, 'les
magnolias elaborent leur floraison funebre dans la nuit noire du printemps naissant'
(p. 67), and there follows a whole string of allusions to the magnolia blossom Anne
wears in her cleavage (marking her sexual identity) and finally crushes as the
culminating gesture of this love scene carried out at a distance.
Sexual desire, like the magnolias, overpowering, excessive, funereal, and deadly,
irrupts into Anne's domesticated world with catastrophic force. 'II lui faut fracasser
les arbres, foudroyer les murs', mutters Stein in Ditruire,dit-elle(p. 136), speaking of
6I2 Duras
SexualDifferencein Marguerite
the music of Bach as it floods in across the parkfrom the forest, and the effectof desire
in Duras's work is much the same, objecting turbulence, disorder, excess to the
carefully circumscribed borderlines of established society. Anne herself, responding
to the call of Chauvin (who, like her, throughout this chapter, pronounces a name,
which Duras leaves unspoken), vomits the sumptuous food at the dinner-table, thus
rejects her family, and forfeitsher child as a result. Her social identity is effaced, and
the structured lines of that life give way to a catastrophic blurring of borders. The
margins of her life, those areas where her sense of self had mysteriously been held in
abeyance (as she discovers by witnessing her own primal scene in the border-zoneof
the docks), move to the centre.
It is possible, as some critics have argued, that Anne achieves here some form of
self-emancipation (see David Coward, Duras: 'ModeratoCantabile'(London, 1981),
pp. 51-53). But that would imply a view of subjective freedom which the self-
mirroring circularities of Moderatocantabileseem not to accommodate. In the closing
scene, as it rehearses once again the frame story of the murder, it still remains
enigmatic between Anne and Chauvin whether their relationship has been merely a
game, or a faithful re-enactment of the past (but whose past?), or a real sexual
encounter, whether it culminates in freedom from a compulsive model or in the
ritualistic endorsement of a murderous confrontation, and what it is that distin-
guishes the ritual of their daily meetings from the rituals of middle-class domesticity.
Duras provides a dual, or even triple, story, a modern love-story, which tells a tale of
merged identities, but also of irreconcilable differences, indeed a story of the
enigmatic and unspeakable character of sexual desire. She manages to subscribe to
and to confront at one and the same time two of the major modern (fictional and
literary) myths of human sexual relations:the myth of sexuality as the fusing of selves,
and the myth of inescapable and remorseless difference, both TristanandIsoldeand
Sodome et Gomorrhe,while subjecting both to the catastrophicsense of their inadequacy
and fragility. In this regard it is unsurprising that the novel has an ending which is
both a completion of a ritualized enactment and its deliberate effacement, both a
repetition and a refusal to repeat:
AnneDesbaresdesse relevaet tentaencore,par-dessusla table,de se rapprocher de Chauvin.
-Peut-etre queje ne vais pasy arriver,murmura-t-elle.
Peut-etren'entendit-ilplus.Elleramenasa vestesurelle-meme,la ferma,l'etriquasurelle,
fut reprisedu memegemissementsauvage.
-C'est impossible,dit-elle.
Chauvinentendit.
-Une minute,dit-il,et nousy arriverons.
AnneDesbaresdesattenditcetteminute,puis elle essayade se releverde sa chaise.Elley
arriva,se releva.Chauvinregardaitailleurs.Leshommeseviterentencoredeporterleursyeux
surcettefemmeadultere.Ellefut levee.
-Je voudraisquevoussoyezmorte,dit Chauvin.
-C'est fait,dit AnneDesbaresdes.(pp.83-84)
As Anne gets up and, with the courtesy of a passing referenceto the Bible, emerges
once more into the apocalyptic sunset, the reader of these closing lines is put in the
position of not really being able to say what it is that he or she has witnessed, or what
has just been carried out: the final acting-out of an obsessive fantasy, a symbolic
enactment of death, murder, and ritualized desire, or the ironic relegation of that
fantasy to the past (with Anne offering a final gesture of mock compliance to
Chauvin). But, if that is true, the readeris treated no differentlyfromthe protagonists
LESLIE HILL 613
of the novel. In some ways the reader's only option seems to be to behave like Anne
and Chauvin, who, as I have said, become caught up in a scenario over which they
have no apparent control, but which dictates to them, as though from some
pre-established script, the enigmas of sexual difference as though these signified
revelation and as though that revelation itself were to imply, in fact, like some
blood-red visionary sunset, nothing less than the end of the world.
But what does the end of the world mean? The use of the formula 'c'est fait', with
its overtones of biblical martyrdom, is not isolated in Duras's writing. It occurs
notably in the first version of the story L'Hommeassis dansle couloir,which, on its
publication in 1980, was criticized by some readers as little short of pornographicin
its explicit coupling of sexual enjoyment and violence.9 (In it, for example, as an
aftermath to orgasm, during 'la lente remontee du desir' (p. 32), the woman asks the
man to strike her and to continue beating her to the point of insensibility.) Marcelle
Marini suggests that the text, together with La Maladie de la mort (and presumably,
too, the more recent Les Yeux bleus cheveuxnoirs), needs to be read as to some extent
detached from the rest of Duras's work, almost as its infernal doublet, though it is
she who points out that in the early version of L'Hommeassis dans le couloirpublished
in L'Arc, the woman character is named as Anne-Marie Stretter. Moreover, as
Madeleine Borgomano shows (pp. 172-73), various fragments from this version
survive in Le Vice-consul,where they are presented as a fantasy of Charles Rossett's
concerning Anne-Marie Stretter.
Given this close connexion between L'Homme assis dans le couloir and some of
Duras's major novels, it is difficult to see how the text can be relegated to some
purgatorial antechamber. For in each of the various texts concerned, the two
versions of L'Homme assis dans le couloiras well as Le Vice-consuland Moderatocantabile,
there seems clearly to exist an underlying but none the less recurrent scene, which
takes on different guises, but which insists on the coupling of erotic fusion with
beating, violence, death, even murder. That the scene also has its voyeuristic
component is made clear not only in Moderatocantabile and Le Ravissementde Lol V.
Stein but also by the changes made in the published version of L'Hommeassis dans le
couloir, which, Duras notes in Les Yeuxverts, hinged in part on the introduction of a
spectator, a voyeur, as witness to the actions of the couple, and on the realization
that 'cette vue etait, devait etre mentionnee, integree aux faits'.10 Why, in turn, this
voyeur should make her appearance in a text initially intended for the Cahiers du
cinema,is something which must be reserved for another occasion.
9 See Marcelle Marini, 'La Mort d'une rotique', CahiersRenaud-Barrault, io6 (September 1983), 37-57.
As Marini points out, there exist (at least) two published versions, in French, of L'Hommeassis dansle
couloir.The first, which appears to be fragmentary (and has suspension points in various places), but none
the less gives the woman's name as Anne-Marie Stretter, appeared in L'Arc,20 (October 1962), 70-76.
Totally rewritten, except for a few portions of the text, the story (initially intended for Duras's special
Cahiersducinemaissue) reappeared as a separate volume in i980, published by Editions de Minuit. This
later version differs considerably in detail, though much of the structure of the earlier version is retained.
Similar material is found also towards the end of Le Vice-consul (Paris, 1966), pp. 203-04.
10 Marguerite Duras, Les Yeuxverts,Special number of Les Cahiersducinima,312-13 (June 1980), 33. It
might be argued (this is to some degree the position put forward by Marcelle Marini) that, by coupling
sexuality with violence in this way, Duras is dramatizing sexual violence as an inherent component of
heterosexual relations. It is important to note, however, that the voyeur viewing, witnessing, and
inventing the scene (like Anne in Moderatocantabile)is not a male fetishist or pornographer, but Duras
herself, as she admits: 'J'ai trouve', she says, 'que les amants n'6taient pas isoles mais vus, sans doute par
moi' (LesYeuxverts,p. 33). The whole question of gendered looking and sexual knowledge is an important
and recurrenttheme in her work, particularly in her films, but limitations of space prevent me from going
into it here.
614 Duras
SexualDifferencein Marguerite
In the L'Arcversion of L'Hommeassisdansle couloir,the phrase 'c'est fait' marks the
conclusion of a scene which, unmistakably, is a transposed description of sexual
intercourse, executed by a phallic male hand labouring the lips, teeth, and mouth ofa
compliant Anne-Marie Stretter. The rhythm of his beating hand is clearly crucial,
since it recurs in both versions of L'Hommeassisdanslecouloiras well as in Le Vice-consul
(p. 203). 'La main bat', says each of these texts, and it is no surprise to realize the
importance given to hands and lips in the closing pages of Moderato cantabile,as Anne
and Chauvinjoin in some deathly sexual partnership (and on the last page ofthe novel
we read: 'La main de Chauvin battit l'air et retomba sur la table' (p. 84) ).
Though the level of explicitness is quite different, the distance is not vast between
Moderato cantabileand texts such as L'Hommeassisdansle couloir.In both there is within
sexual relations the same depersonalization, the same extremity of violence, of
participants being engulfed by an absence of memory, a primeval blankness, an
apocalyptic emptiness such that, as in the concluding words to the first version of
L'Hommeassis dansle couloir,'le non-sens s'installa'. In the later version, like the red
sunset that greets Anne Desbaresdes as she gets up to go, what happens is the colour
violet, as though to bear witness to some catastrophic, apocalyptic disclosure. The
colour violet, offering as its homophonic doublet the spectre of destruction, rapture,
and rape, is another reference, this time to the film India Song and the death of
Anne-Marie Stretter, to Venice, and the blinding white light which, in the film, floods
the screen as though to reveal the decaying mortality of white supremacy and the
political crises changing the landscape of colonialist Europe. The vision is that of a
world collapsing, it is the aftermathof a vision, the vision of an apocalyptic aftermath
which, as a man lies weeping across his lover's body, rehearsesyet again the murder
scene of Moderatocantabile.This is how the 1980 version of L'Hommeassisdansle couloir
ends:
Je vois que la couleurviolettearrive,qu'elleatteintl'embouchuredu fleuve,que le ciel s'est
couvert,qu'il est arretedans sa lente coursevers l'immensite.Je vois que d'autresgens
regardent,d'autresfemmes,qued'autresfemmesmaintenantmortesontregardede memese
faireet se defaireles moussonsd'etedevantdes fleuvesbordesde rizieressombres,facea des
embouchuresvasteset profondes.Jevois quede la couleurviolettearriveun oraged'ete.
Je vois que 1'hommepleure couche sur la femme.Je ne vois rien d'elle que l'immobilite.Je
l'ignore, je ne sais rien,je ne sais pas si elle dort. (pp. 35-36)
Irredeemably, then, this scene of apocalypse stands at the various turnings of
Duras's text or texts: as a figureof disaster and violence, separatenessand flow, origin
and finality, insight and puzzlement. It signals the coupling of male and female in
death and melancholy; it traces, too, the unbridgeabledifferencebetween female and
male against the background of the summer monsoon. Its contours remain blurred,
filling the frame of reading but refusing to settle as a simple object of voyeuristic
inquiry. What it does, in tune with the whole of Duras's cinema and much of her
fiction, is to raise the very question of the frame through which Duras's readers, as
sexed bodies, gaze on, with fascination, at the mysterious spectacle of these bodies,
one male, one female. Apocalypse as revelation gives way to apocalypse as violent
conundrum. Love as transcendance becomes love as abolition and the only meaning
of sexual differencethat of an obsessive but none the less empty and inhospitable space
of division.
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK LESLIE HILL

Marguerite Duras: Sexual Difference and Tales of Apocalypse

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A number of Duras's books are written indifferently as plays, film-scripts, or novels.

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