If I type a few lines from Duras' L'Homme assis dans le couloir, as I have done below, do
I risk raising the prurient eyes of Canadian Internet censors, even when Duras' text is
but a fantasy in the future conditional tense? As the New York Times article indicates,
Duras dérange, even in the 1990s.
| Subjects that the Occident loves to censor -- such as violent and/or passionate sex, alcoholism, and incest -- are frequently and audaciously displayed in Duras' works. The woman's body in La Maladie de la mort that beckons to be strangled and raped (21) exemplifies how Duras solicits passionate reactions to her stories of lovemaking. Many of her women lovers carry with them an aura of prostitution that she will also attribute to herself. This alone is not particularly eyebrow-rousing, so Duras finds several other titillatingly techniques to modify her portrait. Near the end of L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, Duras hints that the young girl was regularly raped: "ce viol chaque nuit du corps maigre" (212). Up to this point, however, the "child" was more than a willing participant to the lovemaking (according to Duras, "si la femme jouit, il n'y a plus de viol" [Les Parleuses 44]). Through numerous sensationalist variations, Duras invites a re-evaluation of her own character and/or persona. | La main descend, frappe sur les seins, le corps. Elle dit que oui, que c'est ça, oui. Ses yeux pleurent. La main bat, frappe, chaque fois plus sûre elle est en train d'atteindre une vitesse machinale. (34)
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Duras makes public autobiographical revelations in the discussion of her alcoholism. Duras and Yann Andréa have both published books that tell of the period of Duras' detoxification at the American Hospital in Neuilly (home to such other, drawn-out, and painful internments as that of Simone de Beauvoir's mother in Une Mort très douce). In M.D. -- which happens to be the American abbreviation for medical doctors -- Andréa gives his account of Duras' period of alcohol "rehabilitation." In La Vie matérielle, she tells her version of her bouts with alcohol and her withdrawal hallucinations.
The reader of Duras can draw parallels with some of her "fictional" characters. In Peter Brook's interpretation of Moderato Cantabile (a film Duras hates), Jeanne Moreau beautifully renders the alcoholic impulses of Duras' Anne Desbaresdes. One would have to search much further than Hemingway to find any work of fiction where the characters drink as heavily as those in Duras' Le Marin de Gibraltar. Within the novel, as a mise en abyme, there is an "American" novel ("A cause des whiskys. Le whisky est un alcool américain" [204]) that the male narrator would write about Anna, "l'ivrognissime des mers du Sud" (376) who roams the world on her yacht. This marathon drinking adventure, supplemented with other prominent episodes of booze-guzzling in Duras' writing (such as that of Maria of Dix heures et demie du soir en été who drinks her manzanillas in a very Hemingway-American style), adds up to more than a simple characterizing device.
| The temptation to draw a connection
between Duras' fictional world and the author's own alcoholism is great.
If we are to believe what she writes in the section entitled
"L'alcool" of La Vie matérielle, Duras began drinking
seriously when she was forty-one. Through modifications of her
self-characterization, however, she prevents any single interpretation of
her fiction based on biographical association. In L'Amant de la Chine du Nord,
"she" began drinking (alcoholic choum with her Chinese lover) at
age fifteen. . . .
Such efforts to compare the author's life with her fiction lead to biographical criticism worthy of a Sainte-Beuve: everything against which artists have long fought. An author's life is distinct from the created work. Yet, as Genette has shown, a text is always "accompanied" by its paratext. Duras makes masterful use of her wide access to the media to firmly and willfully establish a paratextual identity that exposes the autobiographical elements of her fictions. |
 L'Inspecteur P. © 1996 Eclectic Iconoclast "Même pas un baba au rhum" lui dit-elle. |
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© 1996-97 Thomas C. Spear All Rights Reserved. |
