Exploring
Literature
Robert Gibbons
Loving
Duras
What
then would it mean to say, "I love Duras."? To love flesh
& text as one. Writing that comes from the body. A woman's body.
Her choric voice. In Kristeva's sense of the word, chora as pulse,
inner vibration, which when listened to intently can charge forth
as moan, roar, or silence. It comes from the Greek for enclosed space,
or womb.
A
great teacher of writing, of Woman. What it is to be Woman. Aren't
we all sick of men pointing everything out, needing to make a point,
to be right, a gender that insists, argues, intimidates, specifies,
rationalizes, beats the dead horse of its own sex? An inevitable language,
not eroticized.
Listen
to Duras. To the sound of the choric utterance. One of the best examples
of this difference between women & men writers is the aura surrounding
one of her most fascinating characters, whom she brings into the world
this way: "Then one day this infirm body stirs in the womb of
God." Lol V. Stein comes into the world, or back into the world.
But
when she comes into the world, it is full of holes. Wounded. Duras
sees the wound as a place where, "the greatest joy & the
greatest pain are so commingled as to be indefinable, a single entity
but unnamable for lack of a word." (The Ravishing of Lol Stein,
Grove, 1966, p.38)
I
like to believe - since I love her - that if Lol is silent in her
daily life it is because, for a split second, she believed that
this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It
would have been an absence-word, a hole-word, whose center would
have been hollowed out into a hole, a kind of hole in which all
others would have been buried. (38)
Throughout
this exquisite tracking of female language, the body speaks its own
undecoded communiqués through such expressions as a "vague,
emotion-filled wail;" crying; "screaming all sorts of things
that made perfect sense;" a wife who, "never offered a word
of complaint."
Lol
carries the symptoms of the sound of her sex. The beautiful reverberations
of her sex. She is symbolic of a feminine language it would serve
men well to listen to. The labial plosive, the sibilants of the vagina-dentata
hiss & silence, the orgasmic oracular of that same sacred vessel.
Freud wondered what women want. The same as men, Identity, defined
on their own terms, in their own language, & one, of course, linked
to desire & pleasure.
Barely
subaltern to both sex & death: desire & suffering. Duras felt
that only the female perspective of sex & desire is interesting
anymore, the male's driven to repetition & predictability. Only
the great territories (terror stories) of woman are left to be explored
(to be told). Sunrise is a birth, my wife says, an evagination.
Listening
at the chora, which Duras compared to a gong, (the sound of a slit-drum?)
is her secret, & it can't be done without suffering. Duras, the
writer. Duras teaching writing. She's tough. I always loved her image
of wrestling "The Black Block," in her book of essays. (Practicalities,
translated by Barbara Bray, Grove, 1990.)
When
you're writing a kind of instinct comes into play. What you're going
to write is already there in the darkness. The image of a black
block in the middle of the world isn't far out. You have in front
of you a mass suspended between life and death and entirely dependent
upon you. I seize the mass that's already there, move it about,
smash it up - it's almost a question of muscles, of physical dexterity.
(25-26)
In
another little book, originally from Gallimard in 1993, & translated
by Mark Polizzotti for Lumen editions in Cambridge, MA, titled, Writing,
Duras shares more secrets. For her, two essential elements in writing
are solitude & doubt. She also warns against what she finds in
others' books as "clean," but which, "derive from a
classicism that takes no chances. Inevitable would probably
be the word." (19)
She
continues, "Writing comes like the wind. It's naked, it's made
of ink, it's the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes
in life, nothing more, except life itself." (33) That intimation
of death is echoed in a quote from a diary in one of two new biographies,
this one from The University of Chicago by Laure Adler,
I'm
sitting at my table, searching for a sentence, yes, a little drunk,
I'm searching for a sentence that won't come. Yesterday the sentence
was spiraling fragmented inside me. Today it won't recreate itself.
It was long, quickened by the pitch of a song, a refrain; it was
like a lament, regular, intoned. Words I remember were caught up
in it: slime, death, fan, frightened birds, thief, I'm searching
for the sentence. It is such exquisite pain not to find it tonight.
It will return tomorrow like a bitch to her master after the shame
of the night hunt. (261)
In
her latter years Duras waxed oracular presaging the AIDS tragedy in
The Malady of Death, &, again, Adler in Marguerite Duras:
A Life, quotes her as saying in 1990, "We in Europe eat sick,
disabled, decalcified animals, walking mush with no muscle that stumble
with each step." (373) Her last book, a deathbed vigil kept for
over a year, & transcribed by Yann Andrea, is appropriately titled,
No More. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998.) Haunting, courageous:
"I feel crushed by existence. It makes me want to write."
(52)
-previously
published in Niederngasse
Copyright © 2001 Robert
Gibbons
All Rights Reserved