Notes to Chapter 1 Pp
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Notes to Chapter 1 pp. 1-24 1 Danielle Bajomee, Duras ou Ia dou/eur, Paris, Editions Universitaires, 1989. 2 'La douleur du dialogue', in Maurice Blanchot, Le livre a venir [1959], Paris, Gallimard, 'Folio', 1986, pp. 207-18. 3 Jacques Lacan, 'Hommage fait a Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de Lol V. Stein', Marguerite Duras [1975], ed. Fran<;ois Barat and Joel Farges, Paris, Albatros, 1979, pp. 131-37. 4 Carol]. Murphy, Alienation and Absence in the Novels of Marguerite Duras, Lexington, KY, French Forum, 1982. 5 'La maladie de Ia douleur', in Julia Kristeva, Solei/ Noir. Depression et melanco/ie, Paris, Gallimard, 1987, pp. 227-65. 6 Bernard Alazet, 'L'embrasement, les cendres', Revue des sciences humaines, Vol. 73, No. 204 (October-December 1986), pp. 147-60; p. 152. 7 The present study takes L'Empire frant;ais. Avec trois cartes, written in collaboration with Philippe Roques and published by Gallimard in 1940 under Duras's maiden name of Donnadieu, as Duras's first book. 8 Patrick Rambaud, Virginie Q. de Marguerite Durai//e, Paris, Balland, 1988. See also Dominique Noguez's skit, 'Aurelia Steiner (Trouville) de Marguerite Duras', in Semio/ogie du parapluie et autres textes, Paris, Difference, 1990, pp. 114-20. 9 Guillaume Jacquet of the magazine Reaction retitled an extract from Andesmas as 'Margot et ['important' and dedicated it to Marguerite 'qui ne sait pas'. Duras did not take legal action. Le Figaro published a letter on 22 September 1992 written jointly by Antoine Gallimard, Jerome Lindon, and Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, in which they defend their 'rigorous' standards of professionalism. 10 In Duras. Biographie, Paris, Fran<;ois Bourin, 1991, for example, Alain Vircondelet uses Duras's work as a source of biographical information in order to prove that she is both a lay mystic in the tradition of Pascal and a champion of the 'exploited'. Uncritical as it is, and while no doubt a personal reaction to his earlier impressionistic study, Marguerite Duras ou /e temps de detruire, Paris, Seghers, 1972, Duras: Biographie is still not as crude as Frederique Lebelley's undiscriminating hatchet-job, Duras ou /e poids d'une plume, Paris, Grasset, 1994, or even his own, more recent hagiography, Pour Duras, Paris, Calmann-Levy, 1995. 11 Michel de Certeau, 'Marguerite Duras: On dit', Ecrire, dit-elle. Imaginaires de M. Duras, ed. Danielle Bajomee and Ralph Heyndels, Brussels, Universite de Bruxelles, 1985, pp. 257-65. 12 See, for example, Christiane Blot-Labarrere's Marguerite Duras, Paris, Seuil, 'Les Contemporains' 14, 1992, which uses an astonishing volume of citation to argue that Duras's work offers a liberatory aesthetics of the possible. 13 'Le silence, c'est les femmes. Done, Ia litterature c'est les femmes' (Vie mat., p. 104) ('Silence is the domain of women. Thus, literature is the domain of women'). 14 According to Duras, only women can 'operate the big, organic, political 161 162 The Erotics of Passage transgressions'. See 'Marguerite Duras' (an interview), Suzanne Horer and Jeanne Socquet, La creation etouf(ee, Paris, Pierre Horay, 1973, pp. 172-87; p. 177. 15 According to Duras, Vice-consul is 'submerged' in madness. See Germaine Bree, 'An interview with Marguerite Duras', Contemporary Literature, Vol. 13, No.4 (1972), pp. 401-22. 16 Duras speaks in Yeux of '!'indifference', or 'the new grace of a world without God' (p. 40). 17 Duras stated that she spent two months writing Maladie in order to reduce it to its thinness, to 'what it was no longer possible to efface'. See Didier Eribon, 'Marguerite Duras: "C'est fou c'que j'peux t'aimer" ' (interview with Marguerite Duras and Yann Andrea), Liberation, 4 January 1983, pp. 22-23; p. 22. 18 For Duras in 1971, a progressive loss of identity was 'the most enviable experience one could know'. See Bettina L. Knapp, 'Interviews with Marguerite Duras and Gabriel Cousin', The French Review, Vol. 44, No.4 (1971), pp. 653-64; p. 656. 19 '[L]e cinema que je fais, je le fais au meme endroit que mes livres. C'est ce que j'appelle l'endroit de Ia passion. L1 ou on est sourd et aveugle. Enfin, j'essaie d'etre Ia le plus qu'il est possible.' 20 'Ces livres sont douloureux a ecrire, a lire ... cette douleur devrait nous mener vers ... un champ d'experimentation ... C'est douloureux, parce que c'est un travail qui porte sur une region non encore creusee peut-etre.' 21 According to Duras, a double 'murder' of the author is committed during the production of a book: the first during the actual process of writing by the author him/ herself, the second at the moment of the book's publication. See Eribon, ' "C'est fou c'que j'peux t'aimer" ', p. 22. 22 See Jean Narboni and Jacques Rivette, 'La destruction, Ia parole' (interview with Marguerite Duras), Cahiers du Cinema, No. 217 (November 1969), pp. 45-57. 23 See Pamela Tytell, 'lacan, freud et duras', Magazine litteraire, no. 158 (March 1980), pp. 14-15. 24 Leslie Hill has given perhaps the most interesting reading of 'Hommage', revealing that Lacan, while he abuses literature in order to make it conform to his own 'pre-emptive fable of sublimation', is also paying homage to another Marguerite, a would-be novelist, Marguerite Anzieu, whom he analysed (and renamed) in his 1932 doctoral dissertation on paranoid psychosis, and whose maternal grandmother was called Marguerite Donnadieu (coincidentally Duras's original surname). See 'Lacan with Duras', Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, Vol. 1 (1992), pp. 405-24. For a more formalist reading of 'Hommage', see John O'Brien, 'Metaphor between Lacan and Duras: Narrative Knots and the Plot of Seeing', Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 27, No.3 (1993), pp. 232-45. 25 See Jean-Louis Sous, 'Marguerite Duras ou le ravissement du reel', Littoral, No. 14 (1984), pp. 59-70. 26 See 'Sur Le Ravissement de La/ V. Stein' in Michele Montrelay, L'Ombre et le Nom: sur Ia feminite, Paris, Minuit, 1977, pp. 9-23. 27 See Patricia Fedkiw, 'Marguerite Duras: Feminine field of hysteria', Enclitic, Vol. 6, No.2 (1982), pp. 76-86. 28 See Mary Lydon, 'Translating Duras: The seated man in the passage', Contemporary Literature, Vol. 24, No.2 (1983), pp. 259-75, and 'The forgetfulness Notes to Chapter 1 163 of memory: Jacques Lacan, Marguerite Duras, and the Text', Contemporary Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3 (1988), pp. 351-68. 29 See the special issue of Didascalies (Cahiers occasionnels de !'Ensemble Theatral Mobile, Bruxelles), No.3 ('Aurelia Steiner') (April 1982), pp. 3-31. 30 See Michele Druon, 'Mise en scene et catharsis de !'amour dans Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, de Marguerite Duras', The French Review, Vol. 58, No.3 (February 1985), pp. 382-90, where Druon emphasises Lot's ability to perceive the 'theatrica lity' of love. 31 See Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of woman and modernity, Ithaca, London, Cornell University Press, 1985, in particular Chapter 8, 'Towards the Hysterical Body: Jacques Lacan and his Others'. 32 See Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, 'The Disembodied Voice: India Song', Yale French Studies, No. 60 (1980), pp. 241-68. 33 See Sharon Willis, Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1987. 34 See Marcelle Marini, Territoires du (eminin. Avec Marguerite Duras, Paris, Minuit, 1975. 35 See Susan D. Cohen, Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras, Oxford, Macmillan, 1993. 3 6See Trista Selous, The Other Woman. Feminism and Femininity in the work of Marguerite Duras, New Haven, London, Yale University Press, 1988, in particular, Chapter 4, 'The Blanks'. 37 In 'Marguerite and the Mountain', Contemporary French Fiction by Women, ed. Phil Powrie and Margaret Atack, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990, Selous reveals how feminists have appropriated Duras even though her work does not lend itself to a feminist reading. 38 See Susan Rubin Suleiman, 'Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein: women, madness and narrative', Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Shlomith Rimmon Kenan, London, Methuen, 1987, pp. 124-51; p. 146. 39 In her interview with Michel Foucault, 'A propos de Marguerite Duras', Les Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, No. 89 (October 1975), pp. 8-22, Cixous argued that one cannot talk of despair in Duras since there is no possibility of, or even wish for, the act of mourning (p. 14). Cixous also uses Kristeva's metaphor of the black sun to describe the engulfing effect of Anne-Marie Stretter's fascination on her male courtiers. 40 This situation is not helped by the fact that Kristeva is sometimes inaccurate in her use of primary sources. She claims, for example, that the arrival of Anne-Marie Stretter early in Ravissement is that of Lot's mother, and the article's epigraph, extracted from Duras's brief introduction to the title-text of Douleur, misreads Duras's opinion of 'La douleur' as a general statement on pain. 41 See Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot. Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1989, pp. 146-54, in particu lar the chapter, 'Waiting outside the Closed Door: Duras's The Lover'. 42 See Kathleen Hulley, 'Contaminated Narratives: The Politics of Form and Subjectivity in Marguerite Duras's The Lover', Discourse, Vol. 15, No.2 (Winter 1992-93), pp. 30-50; p. 33, where Hulley employs Elizabeth Ernath's notion of the 'posthistorical subject'. 164 The Erotics of Passage 43 Daniel Sibony, 'Repenser Ia deprime', Magazine litteraire, No. 244 ('Littera ture et Melancolie') (July-August 1987), pp. 54-56. 44 '[T]outes les femmes de mes livres, que! que soit leur age, decoulent de Lol V.