Marguerite Duras, 81, Author Who Explored Love and Sex
By ALAN RIDING
Published: March 4, 1996
PARIS, March 3—
Marguerite Duras, author of the best-selling novel
"The Lover" and one of the most widely read French writers of the
postwar era, died today at her home in Paris. She was 81.
Miss Duras, who was also a prolific playwright, film
maker and screenwriter, was best known for the way she used her early
life in French Indochina as the inspiration for many of her works,
including "The Lover," the story of her clandestine teen-age romance
with a wealthy young Chinese man. Yet perhaps what most characterized
her 53-year literary career was her simple, terse writing style, as if
language itself were merely a vehicle for conveying passion and desire,
pain and despair. The mysteries of love and sex consumed her, but she
had no room for sentimentality in her works, or indeed, in her life.
I write about love, yes, but not about tenderness,"
she said in a 1990 interview. "I don't like tender people. I myself am
very harsh. When I love someone, I desire them. But tenderness supposes
the exclusion of desire." Ever provocative in her use of language, she
always bowed to the supremacy of words. "Acting doesn't bring anything
to a text," Miss Duras wrote of her work for cinema and theater. "On the
contrary, it detracts from it -- lessens its immediacy and depth,
weakens its muscles and dilutes its blood."
In the theater, this seemed to matter little, and
her plays continue to be performed regularly in France. However, despite
the enormous success of her screenplay for Alain Resnais's 1960
classic, "Hiroshima, Mon Amour," few of the 19 movies she wrote and
directed herself did well, not least because words often entirely
replaced action. Until her 70th birthday, her novels had a loyal albeit
small readership. With the publication of "The Lover" in 1984, however,
Miss Duras reached a mass audience in France and abroad. The book sold
more than two million copies and was made into a well-received film in
1992 by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
Because she considered her words to be sacrosanct,
she often had stormy dealings with movie directors who adapted her
novels, among them Peter Brook, Tony Richardson and Jules Dassin. And
when Mr. Annaud altered her screenplay for "The Lover," Miss Duras broke
with him and turned her text into yet another semi-autobiographical
novel, "The Lover From Northern China." She described that book,
published in 1991, as a "reappropriation" of "The Lover," yet once again
she seemed to be reinventing her life to a point where it became
impossible to know whether her original novel, Mr. Annaud's film or her
second version of the story was the closest to reality. To Miss Duras,
of course, this did not matter.
She was born on April 4, 1914, in Gia Dinh, near
Saigon. Her parents, Henri and Marie Donnadieu (she changed her name to
Duras in the 1930's), were teachers in France's colonial service. She
was only a child when her father died, and her first memories were of
economic hardship, above all after her mother invested the family's
savings in a disastrous rice-farming venture.
After attending school in Saigon, Miss Duras moved
to France at the age of 18 to study law and political science. After
graduation, she worked as a secretary in the French Ministry of the
Colonies until 1941, but by then Nazi Germany had occupied France. In
1943, she joined the Resistance in a small group that included Francois
Mitterrand, who remained a friend until his recent death.
In 1939, Miss Duras married the writer Robert
Antelme, who was arrested and deported to Germany during the war. By the
time he returned from Dachau concentration camp in 1945 (he was the
subject of her 1985 book "La Douleur," later published in the United
States as "The War"), she was already involved with Dionys Mascolo, who
was to become her second husband and with whom she had a son, Jean.
In the late 1940's, Miss Duras joined the French
Communist Party, and though she later resigned, she always described
herself a Marxist. Yet perhaps her strongest political stance was her
contempt for Gen. Charles de Gaulle. "He never pronounced the word Jew
after the war," she said in the 1990 interview. "Many people think I am
Jewish, and that always pleases me."
Her first book, "Les Impudents," was published in
1943, and from that time, she lived off her writing, gradually building a
body of work that included more than 70 novels, plays, screenplays and
adaptations. She eventually acquired a country home in Normandy, but her
book-lined Left Bank apartment on the Rue St.-Benoit remained her Paris
home from 1942 until her death.
For many years, she struggled with alcoholism -- a
subject she frequently addressed in her writings -- and her health was
further shattered by emphysema. But in the 1980's, long separated from
Mr. Mascolo, she also found love again in an unusual relationship with a
young homosexual writer, Yann Andrea Steiner, with whom she shared her
final years.
Late last year, struggling again with illness, Miss
Duras published "That's All," a tiny 54-page book that seemed intended
to be her literary adieu to her readers, to Mr. Steiner and to herself.
Written between November 1994 and last August, with each occasional
entry carrying a date, it consisted of poetic bursts of love, fear and
despair, as if all too aware that her death was near.
The very last entry, on the afternoon of Aug. 1, 1995, read:
"I think it is all over. That my life is finished.
"I am no longer anything.
"I have become an appalling sight.
"I am falling apart.
"Come quickly.
"I no longer have a mouth, no longer a face."
She is survived by her son and Mr. Steiner.
Photo: Marguerite Duras. (Alan Riding/The New York Times)
2013.10.17 晚聽譯者 介紹Marguerite Duras (M.D.)的一生和本書背景. 很精彩.謝謝繆女士.......
La Passion
suspendue
懸而未決的激情：莒哈絲論莒哈絲
La Passion suspendue
- 作者：瑪格麗特．莒哈絲
- 原文作者：Marguerite Duras
- 譯者：繆詠華
- 出版社：麥田
- 出版日期：2013/
目錄
推薦序 胡晴舫
楔子
法文版譯序
懸而未決的激情
童年
巴黎歲月
寫作歷程
文本分析
文學
評論
人物群像
電影
劇本
激情
女人
地方
註釋
人名對照表
楔子
法文版譯序
懸而未決的激情
童年
巴黎歲月
寫作歷程
文本分析
文學
評論
人物群像
電影
劇本
激情
女人
地方
註釋
人名對照表
內容連載
頁數 1/3
論激情
（體例：【】內文字是採訪者樂奧伯狄娜的提問，後面接著莒哈絲的回答。）
【您所有的書，不管以哪種方式寫成，都是愛情故事。求助於激情作為極致和必須的解決手段，以超越癱瘓了您筆下人物的無能為力和墨守成規。激情相當於整個莒哈絲世界的主軸。】
愛是唯一真正具有重要性的東西。想將愛侷限成為一個男人和一個女人之間的故事，這麼做很愚蠢。
【愛這個主題統御著法國文學，法國文學為其著魔，尤瑟納對這點頗不以為然。】
我不同意。即使愛是所有藝術的主題，但從來沒有任何東西像激情一樣如此難以敘述，難以描繪。愛，是最平庸的東西，然而同時卻又最曖昧不明。
【《廣島之戀》裡面有一個句子，或許可以概括您認為所有愛的本質都既深刻又矛盾：「你殺我，我覺得好舒服。」】
在我又窮又怪的時候，我遇見了中國情人，我這才發現任何激情中都有著矛盾情緒在孳生。愛，渴望擁有另外一個人，渴望到想將其吞噬。
【提到《情人》，您說過跟那名有錢的中國男子所發生的事，是您這一生中最重要的經歷之一。】
這 段經歷將其他所有人的、所有告白過的、系統化的愛拋諸腦後，不予理會。透過將愛那初始且神聖的幽冥晦暗加以抽絲剝繭，試著說出個所以然，語言殺死了全部激 情，限制它，減弱它。不過愛只要沒被說出來，它就具備肉體的力量，具備快感那盲目又完整的力量：停留在情人們有光環加持的神奇狀態。我在《情人》裡面，透 過提到那座中國城、那些河流、那種天空，提到在那邊生活的白人的不幸，我能夠遠遠地講述這個故事。至於愛，我則不發一語。
【完全的愛，令 人又受到蠱惑又懼怕，會灼傷人。《廣場》中，那個少女說：「就是有像這樣的東西，大家都躲不了，沒人能躲得了」，那位先生回道：「生命中沒有任何東西像它 一樣如此令人受苦，又如此讓人嚮往。」某種類似超現實主義者的瘋狂所愛，激情，帶領情人超越日常生活的單調乏味。對追求絕對來說，唯有愛，才能與死亡抗 衡，才能對付惡，才能抵擋生命中的厭煩。「世界上沒有任何一種愛可以取代愛情的愛，這是沒有辦法的事」，《塔吉尼亞的小馬》裡面的女主角莎拉如此說道。
而 且，猶有甚者，愛，唯有在缺席或死亡中才得以解決。「我希望妳死。」在《如歌的中板》裡面，修凡對安妮‧德巴赫斯德這麼說。就本體論觀點看來，愛正是因為 不可能所以才完整。在您的短文《坐在走廊裡的男人》（L’Homme assis dans le couloir）、《大西洋男人》、《諾曼第海邊的妓女》（La Pute de la côte normande）還有《藍眼睛黑頭髮》裡面，您將不可能的愛加以擴充，乃至於變成了激情的一種隱喻。】
愛只會存在片刻，隨後便會四散紛飛；消散於實際上不可能改變生命進程的不可能性中。
【愛的主題反映出另一個主題，那就是兩性間難以溝通。您筆下的人物總是彼此相愛和掙扎，最後以失敗告終。】
這些人處於肉慾退化狀態。我感興趣的不是性，我感興趣的是處於情色源頭的那樣東西——慾望。這是一樣我們不能、或許也不該因為性就得到滿足的東西。慾望是一種潛伏活動，就這點來說，慾望跟書寫類似：我們寫出我們所欲想的，總是如此。
此外，就我正準備要寫的那個當下，我覺得自己滿腦子都是書寫，比我實際上真正在寫的時候還要嚴重。就跟在書寫的初始渾沌和訴諸白紙黑字上的最後結果之間的差異一樣，慾望和快感之間的差異也會自行減少、會變得清楚。
混沌就在慾望裡面。快感只是我們所能達到的東西裡面微不足道的一小部分。其餘部分，我們欲想之物的好大一部分，都停在那邊，永遠的佚失了。
（體例：【】內文字是採訪者樂奧伯狄娜的提問，後面接著莒哈絲的回答。）
【您所有的書，不管以哪種方式寫成，都是愛情故事。求助於激情作為極致和必須的解決手段，以超越癱瘓了您筆下人物的無能為力和墨守成規。激情相當於整個莒哈絲世界的主軸。】
愛是唯一真正具有重要性的東西。想將愛侷限成為一個男人和一個女人之間的故事，這麼做很愚蠢。
【愛這個主題統御著法國文學，法國文學為其著魔，尤瑟納對這點頗不以為然。】
我不同意。即使愛是所有藝術的主題，但從來沒有任何東西像激情一樣如此難以敘述，難以描繪。愛，是最平庸的東西，然而同時卻又最曖昧不明。
【《廣島之戀》裡面有一個句子，或許可以概括您認為所有愛的本質都既深刻又矛盾：「你殺我，我覺得好舒服。」】
在我又窮又怪的時候，我遇見了中國情人，我這才發現任何激情中都有著矛盾情緒在孳生。愛，渴望擁有另外一個人，渴望到想將其吞噬。
【提到《情人》，您說過跟那名有錢的中國男子所發生的事，是您這一生中最重要的經歷之一。】
這 段經歷將其他所有人的、所有告白過的、系統化的愛拋諸腦後，不予理會。透過將愛那初始且神聖的幽冥晦暗加以抽絲剝繭，試著說出個所以然，語言殺死了全部激 情，限制它，減弱它。不過愛只要沒被說出來，它就具備肉體的力量，具備快感那盲目又完整的力量：停留在情人們有光環加持的神奇狀態。我在《情人》裡面，透 過提到那座中國城、那些河流、那種天空，提到在那邊生活的白人的不幸，我能夠遠遠地講述這個故事。至於愛，我則不發一語。
【完全的愛，令 人又受到蠱惑又懼怕，會灼傷人。《廣場》中，那個少女說：「就是有像這樣的東西，大家都躲不了，沒人能躲得了」，那位先生回道：「生命中沒有任何東西像它 一樣如此令人受苦，又如此讓人嚮往。」某種類似超現實主義者的瘋狂所愛，激情，帶領情人超越日常生活的單調乏味。對追求絕對來說，唯有愛，才能與死亡抗 衡，才能對付惡，才能抵擋生命中的厭煩。「世界上沒有任何一種愛可以取代愛情的愛，這是沒有辦法的事」，《塔吉尼亞的小馬》裡面的女主角莎拉如此說道。
而 且，猶有甚者，愛，唯有在缺席或死亡中才得以解決。「我希望妳死。」在《如歌的中板》裡面，修凡對安妮‧德巴赫斯德這麼說。就本體論觀點看來，愛正是因為 不可能所以才完整。在您的短文《坐在走廊裡的男人》（L’Homme assis dans le couloir）、《大西洋男人》、《諾曼第海邊的妓女》（La Pute de la côte normande）還有《藍眼睛黑頭髮》裡面，您將不可能的愛加以擴充，乃至於變成了激情的一種隱喻。】
愛只會存在片刻，隨後便會四散紛飛；消散於實際上不可能改變生命進程的不可能性中。
【愛的主題反映出另一個主題，那就是兩性間難以溝通。您筆下的人物總是彼此相愛和掙扎，最後以失敗告終。】
這些人處於肉慾退化狀態。我感興趣的不是性，我感興趣的是處於情色源頭的那樣東西——慾望。這是一樣我們不能、或許也不該因為性就得到滿足的東西。慾望是一種潛伏活動，就這點來說，慾望跟書寫類似：我們寫出我們所欲想的，總是如此。
此外，就我正準備要寫的那個當下，我覺得自己滿腦子都是書寫，比我實際上真正在寫的時候還要嚴重。就跟在書寫的初始渾沌和訴諸白紙黑字上的最後結果之間的差異一樣，慾望和快感之間的差異也會自行減少、會變得清楚。
混沌就在慾望裡面。快感只是我們所能達到的東西裡面微不足道的一小部分。其餘部分，我們欲想之物的好大一部分，都停在那邊，永遠的佚失了。
【您不認為慾望的這種形象屬於典型的女性世界嗎？】
或許吧。男性的性慾圍繞著相當確切的行為模式打轉：興奮、性高潮。隨後又再度開始。沒有任何東西是懸而未決、沒說出口的。當然，由於老祖宗傳下來的守貞規矩，所有女性都很克制，沒辦法完全依照自己的慾望過活而不會有罪惡感。
【您經常堅稱您才十五歲的時候，慾望便已在您臉上留下痕跡。】
我還好小，打從我最初的性冒險，跟陌生人，在海灘的更衣室還有火車上，我就知道慾望意味著甚麼。跟中國情人在一起的時候，我體驗到慾望的力量無遠弗屆，從那時起，我的性經驗總是十分豐富多彩，甚至粗暴。
【您如何成功地將您不計其數的愛好跟所謂的對書寫工作的真正癡迷結合在一起？】
我這一生中，只要我不再跟男人一起生活，我就會重新找回自己。那些最美的書，是我獨自一個人寫的，或是跟情人過客一起寫的。孤獨的書，我會這麼稱呼它們。
【您對男人有何看法？】
男人活在不透明的生命裡，乃至於沒察覺到周遭大部分的事物。他們只注意自己，只注意自己的所作所為，乃至於有時候永遠也不會知道在女人的腦子裡，無聲無息地，產生了甚麼念頭。我認為，自以為了不起的陽具級別依然存在......
【您會怎麼形容您跟男人在一起的生活？】
旅 行的時候，我老是跟著他們，走到哪跟到哪。分享幸福，對他們強加於我、我卻很受不了的消遣做出讓步。否則他們就會氣死。跟我在一起過的男人都很難忍受我老 評論個不休，很難忍受我遭他人抨擊時所發的牢騷。他們希望我打理好家務、管好廚房，還有，要是我真的非寫不可，那麼就玩票式地寫寫，好像從事見不得人的勾 當似的。
搞到最後，我一直都待在別的地方：作家永遠都不會在別人希望他待的地方。
我交往過所有類型的男人。每一個都自然而然地要我寫出一本大賣的暢銷書。不過，不到二ＯＯＯ年就甭想。
【您會責怪男人哪些地方？】
男人喜歡對周遭所發生的事物進行干預、高談闊論、加以詮釋，得非常愛他們，才受得了他們這種需要。
【您常宣稱「男人全都是同性戀」。】
無能，沒辦法活出激情威力的極限，我會補充這點。男人只準備好去瞭解一些像他們的東西。男人一生真正的伴侶——真正的知己——只可能是另一個男人。在雄性世界裡，女人在他方，在男人偶爾會選擇去跟她會合的世界裡。
【您怎麼看待同性戀者？】
同 性戀者缺乏這種僅屬於異性戀者的神話和普世尺度：同性戀者愛同性戀更甚於愛他的情人。所以文學——光想想普魯斯特就夠了——才不得不把同性激情轉換成異性 激情。說得更明白些，把阿爾弗萊德（譯註：莒哈絲指的是普魯斯特的同性情人阿爾弗萊德‧阿哥斯特奈里。）換成阿爾貝婷。
我已經說過，這就是我無法將羅蘭‧巴特視為是一位偉大作家的理由，因為某樣東西老限制著他，似乎是因為他錯過了生命中最古老的經驗：跟女人發生性關係。
【您有過女同性戀情嗎？】
當然有。另一個女人所帶來的歡愉是一樣非常親密深刻的東西，然而，這樣東西本身卻總是帶著不會引人頭暈目眩的標誌。因為，跟男人在一起，才是真正能讓女人屈服的轟雷掣電。
或許吧。男性的性慾圍繞著相當確切的行為模式打轉：興奮、性高潮。隨後又再度開始。沒有任何東西是懸而未決、沒說出口的。當然，由於老祖宗傳下來的守貞規矩，所有女性都很克制，沒辦法完全依照自己的慾望過活而不會有罪惡感。
【您經常堅稱您才十五歲的時候，慾望便已在您臉上留下痕跡。】
我還好小，打從我最初的性冒險，跟陌生人，在海灘的更衣室還有火車上，我就知道慾望意味著甚麼。跟中國情人在一起的時候，我體驗到慾望的力量無遠弗屆，從那時起，我的性經驗總是十分豐富多彩，甚至粗暴。
【您如何成功地將您不計其數的愛好跟所謂的對書寫工作的真正癡迷結合在一起？】
我這一生中，只要我不再跟男人一起生活，我就會重新找回自己。那些最美的書，是我獨自一個人寫的，或是跟情人過客一起寫的。孤獨的書，我會這麼稱呼它們。
【您對男人有何看法？】
男人活在不透明的生命裡，乃至於沒察覺到周遭大部分的事物。他們只注意自己，只注意自己的所作所為，乃至於有時候永遠也不會知道在女人的腦子裡，無聲無息地，產生了甚麼念頭。我認為，自以為了不起的陽具級別依然存在......
【您會怎麼形容您跟男人在一起的生活？】
旅 行的時候，我老是跟著他們，走到哪跟到哪。分享幸福，對他們強加於我、我卻很受不了的消遣做出讓步。否則他們就會氣死。跟我在一起過的男人都很難忍受我老 評論個不休，很難忍受我遭他人抨擊時所發的牢騷。他們希望我打理好家務、管好廚房，還有，要是我真的非寫不可，那麼就玩票式地寫寫，好像從事見不得人的勾 當似的。
搞到最後，我一直都待在別的地方：作家永遠都不會在別人希望他待的地方。
我交往過所有類型的男人。每一個都自然而然地要我寫出一本大賣的暢銷書。不過，不到二ＯＯＯ年就甭想。
【您會責怪男人哪些地方？】
男人喜歡對周遭所發生的事物進行干預、高談闊論、加以詮釋，得非常愛他們，才受得了他們這種需要。
【您常宣稱「男人全都是同性戀」。】
無能，沒辦法活出激情威力的極限，我會補充這點。男人只準備好去瞭解一些像他們的東西。男人一生真正的伴侶——真正的知己——只可能是另一個男人。在雄性世界裡，女人在他方，在男人偶爾會選擇去跟她會合的世界裡。
【您怎麼看待同性戀者？】
同 性戀者缺乏這種僅屬於異性戀者的神話和普世尺度：同性戀者愛同性戀更甚於愛他的情人。所以文學——光想想普魯斯特就夠了——才不得不把同性激情轉換成異性 激情。說得更明白些，把阿爾弗萊德（譯註：莒哈絲指的是普魯斯特的同性情人阿爾弗萊德‧阿哥斯特奈里。）換成阿爾貝婷。
我已經說過，這就是我無法將羅蘭‧巴特視為是一位偉大作家的理由，因為某樣東西老限制著他，似乎是因為他錯過了生命中最古老的經驗：跟女人發生性關係。
【您有過女同性戀情嗎？】
當然有。另一個女人所帶來的歡愉是一樣非常親密深刻的東西，然而，這樣東西本身卻總是帶著不會引人頭暈目眩的標誌。因為，跟男人在一起，才是真正能讓女人屈服的轟雷掣電。
【在諸如《死亡的病症》等文本中，尤其是《藍眼睛黑頭髮》，您戲劇化地，同時也很明確地涉及男同性戀的主題。這兩本書敘述不可能享有肉體快感的一男一女之間，永遠也不可能發生的愛的故事。】
這是一個我相當瞭解的問題。同性戀，就跟死亡一樣，是唯一專屬於上帝的領域，這個領域，男人不能、心理分析家不能、理性也不能介入。此外，不可能生育這點，大大拉近了同性戀與死亡的距離。
【您甚至宣稱，您曾經愛過並且跟許多同性戀者交往過。】
我 還沒跟他們交往之前，以為他們和大家一樣。其實並不是。同性戀者很孤單，不啻為被判了刑，被判無法與跟自己一樣的人在一起，要不就是只能斷斷續續。生活在 他身邊的女性成為唯一會待在他左右的人。然而，正因如此，看似不可能的這點，正因為基本上和生理上的不可能，愛才能存活。這就是發生在我和同性戀者身上的 情形。
【您和洋‧安德烈亞已經生活了九年。】
是他來找我的。他寫了好多很美的信給我，寫了兩年。不過，寫信給我這件事，我並不訝異，因為看過我的書以後，很多人都會寫信給我。
有一天我狀況不好，誰知道我怎麼了，我決定回信給他。然後他就打電話給我，我從沒看過這個來自卡昂的學生，我卻叫他過來。我們很快便喝將開來，就是因為這樣，我們兩人間的瘋狂於焉展開。跟洋在一起，我再度發現：一個人一生中所能發生的最糟糕的事，就是無法去愛。
我受不了他在我眼前出現。他朋友指責他跟一個比他大那麼多的女人在一起，可是洋不予理會。
至今我依然還在思索這怎麼可能。我和他之間的激情是悲劇性的，誠如所有激情。我們不合適，我們的慾望不切實際，激情卻於焉而生。
【洋‧安德烈亞是一本名為《M. D.》的書的作者——這本書切分音式的書寫讓人聯想起您近來的文學創作——他在這本書中，提到您戒酒，還有您在幾年前決定戰勝酒癮而住院的可怕情形。】
我從這本書的許多地方都看出有我的影子。市面上出版了許多有關我的電影或者我的書的文集，可是從來都沒有關於我本人的，真正的我。
【您尤其從書中的甚麼地方找到了您自己？】
從這份衰竭感、不滿足感、這份空裡。這種自我毀滅，不喝就活不下去，一想到沒得喝了就自我毀滅。
【您第一次戒酒是甚麼時候？】
當 時我對待酒精就像對待一個真正的人一樣。在政治聚會或是晚宴裡面，我就是這麼開始喝的。然後，四十歲的時候，我真正陷了下去。我第一次戒酒是在一九六四 年，然後，戒了十年後，我又喝了。我又開始酗酒，然後又戒了三次，直到目前為止。直到我進了訥伊的美國醫院，歷經三週的幻覺、譫妄、嚎叫之後，院方終於把 我從深淵中拉了出來。
從那時起，七年過去了，可是我知道我隨時都會再犯，明天就可以。
【您認為自己為甚麼會酗酒呢？】
酒精讓孤獨的幽靈變形，酒精取代了不在這兒的「他者」，總有一天，酒精會填補長久以來我們身上所被挖出的空洞。
這是一個我相當瞭解的問題。同性戀，就跟死亡一樣，是唯一專屬於上帝的領域，這個領域，男人不能、心理分析家不能、理性也不能介入。此外，不可能生育這點，大大拉近了同性戀與死亡的距離。
【您甚至宣稱，您曾經愛過並且跟許多同性戀者交往過。】
我 還沒跟他們交往之前，以為他們和大家一樣。其實並不是。同性戀者很孤單，不啻為被判了刑，被判無法與跟自己一樣的人在一起，要不就是只能斷斷續續。生活在 他身邊的女性成為唯一會待在他左右的人。然而，正因如此，看似不可能的這點，正因為基本上和生理上的不可能，愛才能存活。這就是發生在我和同性戀者身上的 情形。
【您和洋‧安德烈亞已經生活了九年。】
是他來找我的。他寫了好多很美的信給我，寫了兩年。不過，寫信給我這件事，我並不訝異，因為看過我的書以後，很多人都會寫信給我。
有一天我狀況不好，誰知道我怎麼了，我決定回信給他。然後他就打電話給我，我從沒看過這個來自卡昂的學生，我卻叫他過來。我們很快便喝將開來，就是因為這樣，我們兩人間的瘋狂於焉展開。跟洋在一起，我再度發現：一個人一生中所能發生的最糟糕的事，就是無法去愛。
我受不了他在我眼前出現。他朋友指責他跟一個比他大那麼多的女人在一起，可是洋不予理會。
至今我依然還在思索這怎麼可能。我和他之間的激情是悲劇性的，誠如所有激情。我們不合適，我們的慾望不切實際，激情卻於焉而生。
【洋‧安德烈亞是一本名為《M. D.》的書的作者——這本書切分音式的書寫讓人聯想起您近來的文學創作——他在這本書中，提到您戒酒，還有您在幾年前決定戰勝酒癮而住院的可怕情形。】
我從這本書的許多地方都看出有我的影子。市面上出版了許多有關我的電影或者我的書的文集，可是從來都沒有關於我本人的，真正的我。
【您尤其從書中的甚麼地方找到了您自己？】
從這份衰竭感、不滿足感、這份空裡。這種自我毀滅，不喝就活不下去，一想到沒得喝了就自我毀滅。
【您第一次戒酒是甚麼時候？】
當 時我對待酒精就像對待一個真正的人一樣。在政治聚會或是晚宴裡面，我就是這麼開始喝的。然後，四十歲的時候，我真正陷了下去。我第一次戒酒是在一九六四 年，然後，戒了十年後，我又喝了。我又開始酗酒，然後又戒了三次，直到目前為止。直到我進了訥伊的美國醫院，歷經三週的幻覺、譫妄、嚎叫之後，院方終於把 我從深淵中拉了出來。
從那時起，七年過去了，可是我知道我隨時都會再犯，明天就可以。
【您認為自己為甚麼會酗酒呢？】
酒精讓孤獨的幽靈變形，酒精取代了不在這兒的「他者」，總有一天，酒精會填補長久以來我們身上所被挖出的空洞。
------
hc
（2005/10/25）：「這篇
the Guardian 的Helena Frith Powell's top 10 sexy French books
，主要是給進入睡鄉的瑞麟兄（rl
）…….」
rl ：「不知道Helena如何定義 sexy？不過暫時不會對這些書有興趣。兩個翻譯版本的包法利，再加上兩本不同出版商出版的法文包法利，買回至今， 還不曾好好讀過。…… .」 這篇的前言，竟然（大意）是「英法戰爭 —女性篇」：什麼法國女性之魅力，古來有之 ……現在還可以說，法國女人除了時尚之領先，對於文學，更不遑多讓 …..凡我英國女性，其勉之，所以列出頂尖的十本供我Briti sh Subjects 效法之…… 」 雖然 hc平生以「不懂法文為大憾事」，不過他乃好事之徒，做點「外行的情報販子」，供大家茶餘飯後思念一下。 其實，這種情色文學，日本人也頗有研究。譬如說，我們常提的松岡先生就介紹過： Pierre Klossowsk （ピエール・クロソウスキー） : Robrte ce soir 1953 『ロベルトは今夜』遠藤周作・若林真訳，河出書房新社，1962
-----
這十本，我選一本來談，即杜拉斯
Marguerite Duras 的
Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,
（Gallimard, 1964.）
Duras英文本，順理翻成. The Ravishing of Lol Stein ， 因為ravish 一字，就從古法文來 （[Middle English ravisshen, from Old French ravir, raviss-, from Vulgar Latin *rap īre, from Latin rapere, to seize.] ）一般辭典說「v. tr. - 使陶醉, 使銷魂, 使狂喜 , 強奪, 搶走, 強姦 」。
日文本有兩回，都用同一書名：『ロル・Ｖ・シュタインの歓喜』
（白井浩司訳、白水社、1967
／平岡篤頼訳、河出書房新社、1997
）。在網頁中，也有採取『ロル・V
・シュタインの喪心,
』的。
我問：不知大陸翻譯成什麼？
原來是『勞兒之劫』王東亮譯，上海譯文，
2005。小說兩篇翻譯者所寫的附文，引作者決定「將錯就錯」，
這本書，譯者王東亮教授有三種譯法。在
Coquet著『話語符號學』（
La Semiotique du discours）中，他翻譯成『勞兒之陶醉』。然後：
「
…….本書五年前曾以《勞兒的劫持》之名由春風文藝出版社出版，
他選「劫」，因為它又有佛教「（萬、永）劫」的意思（
以上，只是翻譯者修正的三分之一。
蔡淑玲（淡江大學法文系系主任】
以《情人》
莒哈絲一九一四年四月十四日生於越南，四歲父親去世，
詩的價值：一個心中永遠存在的、荒蕪卻可以永恆探索的地點。
莒哈絲這句話在一本中譯的傳記上讀到，立刻佔據我的思緒，
為什麼讀莒哈絲？
因為她把我心底的荒蕪翻譯出來了吧？
荒蕪———在美好的布爾喬亞物質生活、道德與秩序底層；
「荒蕪」，因為沒有文字語言可以清楚界定。
荒蕪，是勞兒般的女人、對自己的愛情漠然無知、
莒哈絲的廢墟美學由如魔如謎的女子帶開，往往歷經突來的災難、
蕪即是愛；瘋魔，即是愛；貧困與豐饒共同的孩子。荒蕪之處，
然而，莒哈絲無意把荒蕪提升到形而上的境界，
2.
是什麼樣的道德呢？ 讓一個作家以轉譯瘋魔、廢墟、荒蕪為職志？
身在洞裡，在洞底，處於幾乎絕對的孤獨中而發現只有寫作能救你。
就像藉著寫作通靈。也為不公不義。 莒哈絲自己說：「文本中的文本是舊約。」
而宗教，「我指的是一種比人更強大的、無法理解的、
一隻下午三點二十一分在白牆上死亡的蒼蠅、
寫作之不可抗力，是一種災難。相對於這樣的作家，
我也許找到了自己的讀法？面對一個挑戰你所有讀法的作家。
The Life and Loves of Marguerite Duras
NOVELIST,
PLAYWRIGHT, FILM MAKER, COMMUNIST, outrageous social commentator,
Marguerite Duras has awed and maddened the French public for more than
40 years. Considering her impoverished childhood in Vietnam, her
participation in the French Resistance, her Communism and ultimate
disaffection with the Party, her two marriages and many liaisons, the
near-fatal cure she underwent for alcoholism in 1982, and, especially,
her miraculous recovery from a five-month coma induced by complications
from emphysema in 1988, it is reasonable to suggest that Marguerite
Duras is a force of nature.
Her 48th work, "The Lover," published in 1984 when she was 70, was a best seller not only in France and throughout Europe, but in the United States as well. According to the French publisher Jerome Lindon, whose Les Editions de Minuit brought out "The Lover," it is one of the few contemporary French books to have an international impact. He knows of at least 29 foreign editions, including 3 in separate Chinese dialects. It won France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt.
Her 48th work, "The Lover," published in 1984 when she was 70, was a best seller not only in France and throughout Europe, but in the United States as well. According to the French publisher Jerome Lindon, whose Les Editions de Minuit brought out "The Lover," it is one of the few contemporary French books to have an international impact. He knows of at least 29 foreign editions, including 3 in separate Chinese dialects. It won France's most prestigious literary award, the Prix Goncourt.
Set
in prewar Indochina, where Duras spent her childhood, "The Lover" is a
despairing, sensuous novel about an affair between a 15-year-old French
girl and a 27-year-old Chinese man. The consuming infatuation and brutal
shifts of power between the lovers echo many issues of modern
colonialism. Although Duras's work is avidly followed by a coterie of
intellectuals, and her 1960 film script of Alain Resnais's "Hiroshima
Mon Amour" has become a cult classic, it wasn't until "The Lover" that
she reached a mass audience. Duras stated publicly that it was
completely autobiographical -- an assertion that made her a media star.
Now, at 77, she has again captured center stage by publishing "L'Amant de la Chine du Nord" ("The North Chinese Lover"), a book the newspaper Le Point calls "stunning and diabolical." With the audacity for which she is famous, this book is an end run around the film director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who has shot his version of "The Lover," scheduled for European release in January. Until she and Annaud argued, Duras was the screenwriter; eventually Gerard Brach, whose credits include the screenplays for "The Name of the Rose" and "The Bear," adapted the novel with Annaud. (Annaud will not speak to the press about the film.) Meanwhile, Duras recast her best seller into a new version, which is a fuller telling of the original, including many new shocking details, and -- always mischievous -- camera angles and directions for the soundtrack. Duras says her new book is more true than "The Lover."
Truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity. After "The Lover," Duras said, in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the story of her life did not exist. Only the novel of a life was real, not historical facts. "It's in the imaginative memory of time that it is rendered into life."
Between "The Lover" and "The North Chinese Lover," Duras has written and directed her 18th film and published a collection of essays, three novels and "The War," a vivid account of waiting for her husband, Robert Antelme, to return from Dachau during the Liberation, then nursing him back to health from near starvation.
Keeping in mind her special relationship to truth, I visited her in her apartment in Paris to talk about her work and her long life. At that time she had almost completed "The North Chinese Lover." Monique Gonthier, a bilingual French journalist, accompanied me for linguistic emergencies.
IN THE DARK, CRAMPED HALLWAY OF THEIR apartment stand a tiny woman bent with age and a handsome, middle-aged man -- Marguerite Duras and her companion of 11 years, Yann Andrea. She wears a plaid skirt and green stockings, he wears leather pants and has a mustache; together they evince images of whimsy, intellect and danger.
We walk into a small, dusty room filled with strange objects: a broken candleholder that is a model of the Eiffel Tower, a box of old postcards, little tins of tea next to a piece of curled red ribbon. There are piles and piles of paperback books and a round table in the middle of the room where Duras seats herself in front of some blank pages and three pens.
Her head is so large that her cheeks spread out toward her narrow shoulders. She must be less than five feet tall. She wears many rings and bracelets.
"Let me tell you something," she says. Her voice is gruff, energetic and frank. "I am finishing a book. I am going to pick up the story of 'The Lover' without any literature in it. The fault I have found with 'The Lover' was its literariness, which comes very easily to me because it's my style. But you won't understand that."
"Even I am struggling to understand," says Yann, smiling. "Another version of 'The Lover' without the style of 'The Lover'? It's the same story."
"Not exactly. Another novel. It is between the little girl and the Chinese."
"Why go over the material again?" I ask.
"Because there is a film maker who is one of the greatest in the world, whose name is Jean-Jacques Annaud, who took on 'The Lover.' He told a story that I didn't recognize, so I said: 'Now you're going home, it's finished. I don't want to work with you anymore.' I was a little nasty."
The film is being made in English with two unknowns playing the leads: an English girl and a man from Hong Kong. Duras waves her hand in dismissal when I ask her if she will watch the shooting. "It doesn't interest me," she says. But, of course, she has her new book, which more or less throws down the gauntlet to Annaud.
As Yann plays with a piece of ribbon like the one on the table, twisting it through his fingers, she looks at me expectantly, and I begin by asking about early literary influences. She denies having any. "My mother was a farmer," she says bluntly. "She had no idea what literature was all about."
"Did you know you were a writer when you were young?"
"I never doubted. I wrote when I was 10. Very bad poems. Many children start out writing like that, with the most difficult form."
The form of a typical Duras novel is minimal, with no character description, and much dialogue, often unattributed and without quotation marks. The novel is not driven by narrative, but by a detached psychological probing, which, with its complexity and contradictory emotions, has its own urgency.
I ask her why she has said in interviews she feels suffocated by the classical novel, especially Balzac.
"Balzac describes everything, everything. It's exhaustive. It's an inventory. His books are indigestible. There's no place for the reader."
Yann says gently: "There is pleasure too, in reading Balzac. You're very reassured."
"If you read it at 14," Duras barks back. "Balzac was my earliest nourishment. But I am a part of my own time, you have to be a part of your own time. One can no longer write as Balzac does. And Balzac could never have written 'Lol Stein.' "
"THE RAVISHING OF LOL STEIN" (1964) IS ONE OF DURAS'S seminal works. Nineteen-year-old Lol Stein is engaged to Michael Richardson. They go to a ball in S. Tahla, an imagined town on the north French coast, similar to Trouville, where Duras owns a house. Anne-Marie Stretter, a glamorous older woman, arrives and steals away Michael Richardson. Lol Stein goes mad. Ten years later she is back in S. Tahla as a married woman. She walks incessantly, seldom talking. One day she follows a man who has a clandestine meeting with a woman from Lol Stein's youth. Later, the three of them meet socially, and eventually Lol Stein lies in a field outside a hotel in which the man and woman are making love. She occasionally sees her woman friend, naked, cross in front of the window, oblivious of being watched. The man, however, knows, which heightens Lol Stein's pleasure. An odd, obsessive longing she had felt to follow Michael Richardson and Anne-Marie Stretter when they left the dance is now fulfilled by this act of voyeurism.
I ask her what sort of state she was in when she wrote "Lol Stein," and she tells me a curious story.
"With 'Lol Stein,' I screamed. I was by the sea, in a house in Trouville. I was in the living room, and at a little distance was my lover. I heard a cry. I leaped up. I went to see the young man. I said, 'What's the matter?' He said: 'What are you talking about? I'm the one who should ask why you screamed.' I'd cried out, without even . . . it's funny."
"Have you ever known someone like Lol Stein?"
She picks up the papers before her, stands them upright and taps the edges to align them. She is so small that her face disappears behind the pages. I hear a deep sigh.
"One day I took care of a madwoman. I went to a psychiatric hospital and asked for a young woman who had attracted me. She was very beautiful, very elegant. I took her out in the car. She didn't say anything. We simply went to a cafe. She ate and ate and ate -- like a clochard , crudely, with her hands. At her core she was very sick. I wanted to see it physically. I saw it in her. The gaze. That's Lol Stein.
"I've been thinking about this character for 10 years. I have an image. Not another book. Maybe a film. She is on the beach at Trouville. She is in a rickshaw. There's no roof, she's exposed. She is very made up, like a whore. She's wearing dirty dresses, and it's as if she grew old in an asylum. And you know where she's going? She's going to the dance."
"Terrific!" says Yann. "You have to do it! Write it!" She turns to him with a distant look in her eyes and a faint smile. Silence prevails.
MARGUERITE DURAS WAS born in Giadinh, near Saigon, in 1914. Her father, Henri Donnadieu, was a professor of mathematics at a school in what was then French Indochina. He died in 1918, leaving Marguerite, two brothers and her mother practically destitute.
Until she went to the Sorbonne in France in 1932, Duras lived like an Asian child and spoke fluent Vietnamese.
In 1924 her family moved to Sadec, then to Vinhlong, villages on the Mekong River. In Vinhlong a new French governor arrived from Laos with his wife, a pale beauty named Elizabeth Striedter. It was rumored that the wife had a young lover in Laos who killed himself when she went away. The news of this suicide had a searing effect on the imagination of Duras, for whom the woman came to represent a dark, mythic feminine power. She was the model for Anne-Marie Stretter (who reappears in "The North Chinese Lover"). "Many times I have said to myself," Duras told the critic Michelle Porte, "that I am a writer because of her."
There was another event in Vinhlong that changed Duras forever. Her mother, the daughter of poor French farmers, had saved for 20 years to buy arable land in Indochina. At last she purchased a farm from the French colonial government, not realizing that without a bribe she would be cheated. With the help of her children, she built a bungalow and planted rice. But as soon as the rainy season started, the sea rose to the house, flooding the fields, ruining the crops. Every penny of her savings was lost. She fought against the sea for years, building dikes that washed away, until finally her health was broken. Marguerite, herself, at age 12, had an emotional crisis serious enough to be called madness. After that, for the rest of her life, she was preoccupied by insanity and convinced that the world was fundamentally unjust.
Her childhood was also full of a wild freedom. With no supervision she played in the rain forest and hunted for birds and small game that, in her extreme poverty, she brought home to eat.
IN A 1974 booklength interview with Xaviere Gauthier, Duras said: "I have a bedazzled memory . . . of the night in the forest when we'd walk barefoot, barefoot while everywhere it was teeming with snakes! . . . I wasn't afraid at 12, and then, as an adult, I've said to myself, 'But how did we get out alive?' We would go to see the monkeys, and there were black panthers too. I saw a black panther fly by a hundred meters away. Nothing in the world is more ferocious than that."
Thinking about that panther, I ask her: "There seems to be a chronic underlying panic in your books. Did that come from your childhood?"
"Who can say? It's true that it exists. Endemic, as they say."
During another long silence I gaze at a strange tableau on a table. A mirror with dried flowers drooping from the top is propped against the wall. In its reflection is a poster of "Destroy She Said," her first independent movie. Leaning against the mirror is another, smaller mirror.
"There was a sexual fear, fear of men, because I didn't have a father. I wasn't raped, but I sensed rape, like all little girls. And then afterwards I had a Chinese lover. That was love."
Yann serves us grenadine. I remember French friends telling me, with eyebrows raised, that between them is un vrai amour , even though he is a homosexual.
"Do you think most people live with continual fear?"
"Only the stupid are not afraid."
FEAR, DESPAIR, alienation are themes that seized her in her childhood; later Duras became fascinated with crimes of passion. In the 1958 novel "Moderato Cantabile" -- Duras's first major success -- a crime is committed: lying on the woman he has just killed, a man sobs: "Darling. My darling." Two witnesses, a man and a woman, later drink together and reconstruct in repetitious and incantatory dialogue a passion so intense that its climax was murder. This mix of eroticism and death runs through her work like a river that feeds everything it passes. Certainly one of its sources was the French governor's wife, but an even stronger one was a savage conflict within her family circle.
Duras passionately loved Paulo, the younger of her two older brothers (both of whom are now dead). Paulo was slightly retarded and was deathly afraid of Pierre, the older brother, who tormented and physically battered Paulo. One of the most jarring revelations in "The North Chinese Lover" is that Duras had sex with Paulo. In the book he begins to crawl into her bed when they were both very young, precipitating terrifying rages from Pierre. That intimacy eventually leads to consummation, just before the family leaves Vietnam. This new slant on her childhood might explain why she hated Pierre so much that she wanted to kill him.
"I should have," she cries today. "There was only one solution. That was murder. And one didn't adopt that solution. And it went on throughout my whole childhood. Hate grows. It's like a fire that doesn't go out. When he was 17 and I was 13, during a nap one day I got a knife to kill him."
"Why?"
"For everything, for the sake of killing him. So he wouldn't beat the little one anymore. I can't talk about the little one because I'm going to cry."
"Why didn't you kill the older one?"
"He woke up. He laughed." She imitates horrible laughter. It's a bizarre moment."He got hold of the knife. He flung it away. I picked it up. He called my mother. He told her. They laughed uproariously. And I cried, I cried."
"What did your mother do?"
"She was very hard on me. She didn't love us, the little one and me. I've never seen anything like it in my life, my mother's preference for my older brother. She was proud of me because I did well in school. My little brother wasn't altogether normal, and that's why my older brother persecuted him. And as for me, I was going mad with pain because above all I loved my little brother. I wanted to kill myself when he died."
Self-destruction for love is a particularly Durasian obsession. "You destroy me. You're so good for me," repeats the woman in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" to her lover. I ask her today why sex and death are always entwined for her.
"It's difficult to articulate. It's erotic." She takes a deep breath. "I had a lover with whom I drank a lot of alcohol." She pauses, staring straight at me. Her face is expressionless, her dark eyes are absolutely still. "I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists."
In "Practicalities," a 1987 book of essays, Duras writes about a violent affair. "We took a room by the river. We made love again. We couldn't speak to one another any more. We drank. He struck me . . . in cold blood. We couldn't be near one another now without fear and trembling. . . . We were both faced with the same strange desire." It was after that experience that she wrote "Moderato Cantabile."
Is Duras's attitude toward eroticism an anomaly, or is it particularly French? Jennifer Wicke, an associate professor of comparative literature at New York University, told me that while the English may write about a languid conversation in front of a fire, the French are entirely different.
"Duras's writing is always at an extremity, and that is quite French," she said. "I see her as carrying on the tradition of l'amour fou, the crazed love. It's a bleak world view, the opposite of a lyrical text. It proposes a tragic end, because desire can't be sustained. It will either turn into obsession and, thus, ultimately destroy its object, or it will see itself be deflated by the very cruel contingencies of history, or death."
Duras is associated with the Nouveau Roman (literally "new novel"), a movement born in the 50's, whose members include Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. The Nouveau Roman rejects the classical novel as an inappropriate medium to express the chaotic, morally ambiguous postwar world. Although Duras shares many of the movement's stylistic hallmarks -- the free flow of time and the use of silence -- she is the least obsessed with literary principles, and the most inspired by her own inimitable sensibility.
Peter Brooks, the Tripp Professor of Humanities at Yale University, commented to me that the other Nouveau Roman writers got more attention than Duras when the movement began because there was "something more technicolor about their technique. Their theorizing and their break with the traditional novel were overt and total. But Duras is the one from that whole generation who really is going to last."
DURAS LOOKS AT YANN, and he takes her hand. During our conversation he has been shuffling around, walking in and out of the room, one hand on his hip, flipping his hair back with a toss of his head -- a movement that must be, in other circumstances, flirtatious. I ask how they like to spend their time.
"The thing we like most in life is to be in a car together," she says, "to go in bistros, cafes, and make stories from what we see."
"Do you ask a lot of questions?"
"All the time. People talk to us. I go out every day in the car." Then she adds: "I had chronic bronchitis. You can hear my voice very well, even so. I still have vocal cords. I was in a coma for five months."
In October 1988, Duras fell into a coma from which she miraculously awoke intact. She now has a tracheostomy and wears a necklace of wire with a silver button in the middle. At times she adjusts it, which seems to alter the force of her voice.
The most difficult storm Duras weathered was her cure from alcohol in 1982. Yann wrote a harrowing account, which has not yet been translated into English, called simply "M.D." She tells me Yann's book is "magnificent."
"I drank because I was an alcoholic. I was a real one -- like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write."
Her small, bejeweled hands lie on the table before her, one resting on the blank paper.
THE NEXT DAY, WE talk about criminals. Duras has never shunned conflict -- as a Resistance fighter, as a Communist or as a woman who speaks out in defense of murderers if she imagines the killer is an anti-establishment figure.
"I became great friends with Georges Figon," she tells me. "He had stolen diamonds and he had killed people. And afterwards he had kidnapped people, with ransom. He was a dear friend. I got him a television interview. He was amazingly intelligent. I even went away for the weekend with him."
"A romantic weekend?" Monique immediately asks.
"No. We never slept with each other. Never. And he never tried to sleep with me."
What is the allure of a criminal for her?
"It exerts a fascination for me -- all the people who abandon the golden rule of good conduct. Criminals are heroes for me."
In 1985 Duras wrote an article about Christine Villemin, who was accused of murdering her child. Although conceding Villemin's guilt under the law, she justified the murder as a natural result of social injustice. The article caused a furor.
Duras's pronouncements in the press have given her a notorious reputation. In 1988 she was interviewed on television for some four hours. Duras alternately spoke and stared speechlessly into the camera. Very little of it was comprehensible to the general public. It was just before her coma.
During my interview I was disconcerted by her habit of jumping disconnectedly from subject to subject, and it wasn't until I was back in America and spent many weeks studying the transcript of the interview (which Nancy K. Kline, of Barnard College, translated for this article) that I gradually understood the connections she was making. In New York I spoke to Tom Bishop, chairman of the French department at New York University, a Beckett scholar and a friend of Duras's for 25 years. It had occurred to me that she had sustained brain damage in the coma.
"She was always like this," he declared. "I don't think she was ever any different. I would doubt that it's the coma." He described the scattershot exchanges of ordinary friendship, which often went something like this:
Bishop: "Let's have lunch."
Duras: "I never have lunch."
Bishop: "O.K."
Long pause.
Duras: "Where would you want to have lunch if we had lunch?"
Bishop: "I was thinking of the Rue de Dragon."
Duras: "Well, O.K., fine, let's do that."
"I think she's a fabulous writer who should just write and not talk about what she's thinking," Bishop said. Like her talk, her work doesn't make "a lot of sense," but it does "something else. It allows me to have an insight into the human psyche that I have found unique. I have learned things about humanity through her that others don't teach me."
A good example of meaning in ambiguity is Duras's work in the cinema, where she is almost as important to 20th-century experimental film as she is to literature. Annette Michelson, a professor of cinema studies at New York University, told me that one of Duras's most important contributions is her realization that "the cinema is made of relations." "And when you change the relations between sound and image," she says, "you have something new."
In "India Song" (1975), the actress Delphine Seyrig and various men walk through a room furnished only with a grand piano. They dance, lie down, sleep, weep, while off-screen voices comment on the unbearable heat, a man shrieks and sobs, a woman chants in Cambodian and jazz melodies pulse. Sounds never emanate from the actors. And yet the audience feels despair, longing, sensuality, the presence of death, colonialism, the impossibility of human communication -- a welter of specific impulses that elude verbal definition.
Of course, a writer who concerns herself with disjunction and alienation is difficult to pin down in conversation. She used to say that as a film maker she wanted to "murder the writer," and recently she said she wants to "kill the image." I wonder how it is possible to make a film without image.
She answers: "With words. To kill the writer that I was."
All right. Suddenly she picks up the pen that has been in front of her for two days and begins to write on the paper. "I'm thinking of something." She looks up. "Sensitivity depends on intelligence. It's completely connected. There's an innocence also. Luckily." She puts down the pen. I record it as it happened. I do not fully understand.
To ground us a little, I introduce the subject of politics. Her hatred of de Gaulle springs to the surface.
"When de Gaulle arrived in France, I became an anti-Gaullist instantly. I saw through his power game. I saw he was an arriviste, with a special gift for language. And at just that moment they opened the camps, and my husband had been deported. I never got over it, the Jews, Auschwitz. When I die, I'll think about that, and about who's forgotten it."
"De Gaulle never said a word on the Jews and the camps," Yann adds quietly. "If de Gaulle had not been as big as he was," Duras says angrily, "no one would have noticed him. Because he was taller than everyone, he was boss. But why this arrogance? As far as I'm concerned, he's a deserter. He's horrible, horrible."
In "The War," Duras describes her days in the Resistance, working with Francois Mitterrand, keeping records of deportees, trying to coax information from Germans stationed in Paris. It was Mitterrand who went to Germany with Dionys Mascolo, the man who would be her second husband and the father of her son, Jean. They rescued Antelme from Dachau in the first days after the German surrender. Antelme, nearly unconscious, was consigned to a quarantined section for hopeless cases. Mitterrand and Mascolo smuggled him out.
"MITTERRAND IS wonderful. I worked with him in the Resistance. I protected him in the street. We never met in a house or a cafe. We liked each other so much we could certainly have slept with each other, but it was impossible. You can't do that on bicycles!" She laughs.
"Are you still a Communist?"
"I'm a Communist. There's something in me that's incurable."
"But you left the Party."
"The Party is not Communism." Her mouth hardens into a straight line across her wide face.
"Has there been any true Communist government over the years?"
"Not one. There was one Communist year: 1917."
"Do you hope to see that sort of Communism return to the world?"
"I don't know. I don't want to know. I am a Communist within myself. I no longer have hope in the world."
Yann begins to laugh. "And the other?" he asks. "Do you have hope for the next world?"
She is not amused by his question. "Zero. Zero." A DURAS SAMPLER
She says, I'd rather you didn't love me. But if you do, I'd like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, Is that what you want? She says it is. He's started to suffer here in this room, for the first time, he's no longer lying about it. He says he knows already she'll never love him. She lets him say it. At first she says she doesn't know. Then she lets him say it.
He says he's lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she's lonely too. She doesn't say why. He says, You've come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone. She says she can't say, so far she's never gone into a bedroom with anyone. She tells him she doesn't want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does with the women he brings to his flat. She begs him to do that. -- The Lover (1984)
The sound of the violin ceases. We stop talking. It starts in again.
"The light went on in your room, and I saw Tatiana walk in front of the light. She was naked beneath her black hair."
She does not move, her eyes staring out into the garden, waiting. She has just said that Tatiana is naked beneath her dark hair. That sentence is the last to have been uttered. I hear: "naked beneath her dark hair, naked, naked, dark hair." The last two words especially strike with a strange and equal intensity. . . . The intensity of the sentence suddenly increases, the air around it has been rent, the sentence explodes, it blows the meaning apart. I hear it with a deafening roar, and I fail to understand it, I no longer even understand that it means nothing. -- The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964)
Now, at 77, she has again captured center stage by publishing "L'Amant de la Chine du Nord" ("The North Chinese Lover"), a book the newspaper Le Point calls "stunning and diabolical." With the audacity for which she is famous, this book is an end run around the film director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who has shot his version of "The Lover," scheduled for European release in January. Until she and Annaud argued, Duras was the screenwriter; eventually Gerard Brach, whose credits include the screenplays for "The Name of the Rose" and "The Bear," adapted the novel with Annaud. (Annaud will not speak to the press about the film.) Meanwhile, Duras recast her best seller into a new version, which is a fuller telling of the original, including many new shocking details, and -- always mischievous -- camera angles and directions for the soundtrack. Duras says her new book is more true than "The Lover."
Truth, in the Durasian universe, is a slippery entity. After "The Lover," Duras said, in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the story of her life did not exist. Only the novel of a life was real, not historical facts. "It's in the imaginative memory of time that it is rendered into life."
Between "The Lover" and "The North Chinese Lover," Duras has written and directed her 18th film and published a collection of essays, three novels and "The War," a vivid account of waiting for her husband, Robert Antelme, to return from Dachau during the Liberation, then nursing him back to health from near starvation.
Keeping in mind her special relationship to truth, I visited her in her apartment in Paris to talk about her work and her long life. At that time she had almost completed "The North Chinese Lover." Monique Gonthier, a bilingual French journalist, accompanied me for linguistic emergencies.
IN THE DARK, CRAMPED HALLWAY OF THEIR apartment stand a tiny woman bent with age and a handsome, middle-aged man -- Marguerite Duras and her companion of 11 years, Yann Andrea. She wears a plaid skirt and green stockings, he wears leather pants and has a mustache; together they evince images of whimsy, intellect and danger.
We walk into a small, dusty room filled with strange objects: a broken candleholder that is a model of the Eiffel Tower, a box of old postcards, little tins of tea next to a piece of curled red ribbon. There are piles and piles of paperback books and a round table in the middle of the room where Duras seats herself in front of some blank pages and three pens.
Her head is so large that her cheeks spread out toward her narrow shoulders. She must be less than five feet tall. She wears many rings and bracelets.
"Let me tell you something," she says. Her voice is gruff, energetic and frank. "I am finishing a book. I am going to pick up the story of 'The Lover' without any literature in it. The fault I have found with 'The Lover' was its literariness, which comes very easily to me because it's my style. But you won't understand that."
"Even I am struggling to understand," says Yann, smiling. "Another version of 'The Lover' without the style of 'The Lover'? It's the same story."
"Not exactly. Another novel. It is between the little girl and the Chinese."
"Why go over the material again?" I ask.
"Because there is a film maker who is one of the greatest in the world, whose name is Jean-Jacques Annaud, who took on 'The Lover.' He told a story that I didn't recognize, so I said: 'Now you're going home, it's finished. I don't want to work with you anymore.' I was a little nasty."
The film is being made in English with two unknowns playing the leads: an English girl and a man from Hong Kong. Duras waves her hand in dismissal when I ask her if she will watch the shooting. "It doesn't interest me," she says. But, of course, she has her new book, which more or less throws down the gauntlet to Annaud.
As Yann plays with a piece of ribbon like the one on the table, twisting it through his fingers, she looks at me expectantly, and I begin by asking about early literary influences. She denies having any. "My mother was a farmer," she says bluntly. "She had no idea what literature was all about."
"Did you know you were a writer when you were young?"
"I never doubted. I wrote when I was 10. Very bad poems. Many children start out writing like that, with the most difficult form."
The form of a typical Duras novel is minimal, with no character description, and much dialogue, often unattributed and without quotation marks. The novel is not driven by narrative, but by a detached psychological probing, which, with its complexity and contradictory emotions, has its own urgency.
I ask her why she has said in interviews she feels suffocated by the classical novel, especially Balzac.
"Balzac describes everything, everything. It's exhaustive. It's an inventory. His books are indigestible. There's no place for the reader."
Yann says gently: "There is pleasure too, in reading Balzac. You're very reassured."
"If you read it at 14," Duras barks back. "Balzac was my earliest nourishment. But I am a part of my own time, you have to be a part of your own time. One can no longer write as Balzac does. And Balzac could never have written 'Lol Stein.' "
"THE RAVISHING OF LOL STEIN" (1964) IS ONE OF DURAS'S seminal works. Nineteen-year-old Lol Stein is engaged to Michael Richardson. They go to a ball in S. Tahla, an imagined town on the north French coast, similar to Trouville, where Duras owns a house. Anne-Marie Stretter, a glamorous older woman, arrives and steals away Michael Richardson. Lol Stein goes mad. Ten years later she is back in S. Tahla as a married woman. She walks incessantly, seldom talking. One day she follows a man who has a clandestine meeting with a woman from Lol Stein's youth. Later, the three of them meet socially, and eventually Lol Stein lies in a field outside a hotel in which the man and woman are making love. She occasionally sees her woman friend, naked, cross in front of the window, oblivious of being watched. The man, however, knows, which heightens Lol Stein's pleasure. An odd, obsessive longing she had felt to follow Michael Richardson and Anne-Marie Stretter when they left the dance is now fulfilled by this act of voyeurism.
I ask her what sort of state she was in when she wrote "Lol Stein," and she tells me a curious story.
"With 'Lol Stein,' I screamed. I was by the sea, in a house in Trouville. I was in the living room, and at a little distance was my lover. I heard a cry. I leaped up. I went to see the young man. I said, 'What's the matter?' He said: 'What are you talking about? I'm the one who should ask why you screamed.' I'd cried out, without even . . . it's funny."
"Have you ever known someone like Lol Stein?"
She picks up the papers before her, stands them upright and taps the edges to align them. She is so small that her face disappears behind the pages. I hear a deep sigh.
"One day I took care of a madwoman. I went to a psychiatric hospital and asked for a young woman who had attracted me. She was very beautiful, very elegant. I took her out in the car. She didn't say anything. We simply went to a cafe. She ate and ate and ate -- like a clochard , crudely, with her hands. At her core she was very sick. I wanted to see it physically. I saw it in her. The gaze. That's Lol Stein.
"I've been thinking about this character for 10 years. I have an image. Not another book. Maybe a film. She is on the beach at Trouville. She is in a rickshaw. There's no roof, she's exposed. She is very made up, like a whore. She's wearing dirty dresses, and it's as if she grew old in an asylum. And you know where she's going? She's going to the dance."
"Terrific!" says Yann. "You have to do it! Write it!" She turns to him with a distant look in her eyes and a faint smile. Silence prevails.
MARGUERITE DURAS WAS born in Giadinh, near Saigon, in 1914. Her father, Henri Donnadieu, was a professor of mathematics at a school in what was then French Indochina. He died in 1918, leaving Marguerite, two brothers and her mother practically destitute.
Until she went to the Sorbonne in France in 1932, Duras lived like an Asian child and spoke fluent Vietnamese.
In 1924 her family moved to Sadec, then to Vinhlong, villages on the Mekong River. In Vinhlong a new French governor arrived from Laos with his wife, a pale beauty named Elizabeth Striedter. It was rumored that the wife had a young lover in Laos who killed himself when she went away. The news of this suicide had a searing effect on the imagination of Duras, for whom the woman came to represent a dark, mythic feminine power. She was the model for Anne-Marie Stretter (who reappears in "The North Chinese Lover"). "Many times I have said to myself," Duras told the critic Michelle Porte, "that I am a writer because of her."
There was another event in Vinhlong that changed Duras forever. Her mother, the daughter of poor French farmers, had saved for 20 years to buy arable land in Indochina. At last she purchased a farm from the French colonial government, not realizing that without a bribe she would be cheated. With the help of her children, she built a bungalow and planted rice. But as soon as the rainy season started, the sea rose to the house, flooding the fields, ruining the crops. Every penny of her savings was lost. She fought against the sea for years, building dikes that washed away, until finally her health was broken. Marguerite, herself, at age 12, had an emotional crisis serious enough to be called madness. After that, for the rest of her life, she was preoccupied by insanity and convinced that the world was fundamentally unjust.
Her childhood was also full of a wild freedom. With no supervision she played in the rain forest and hunted for birds and small game that, in her extreme poverty, she brought home to eat.
IN A 1974 booklength interview with Xaviere Gauthier, Duras said: "I have a bedazzled memory . . . of the night in the forest when we'd walk barefoot, barefoot while everywhere it was teeming with snakes! . . . I wasn't afraid at 12, and then, as an adult, I've said to myself, 'But how did we get out alive?' We would go to see the monkeys, and there were black panthers too. I saw a black panther fly by a hundred meters away. Nothing in the world is more ferocious than that."
Thinking about that panther, I ask her: "There seems to be a chronic underlying panic in your books. Did that come from your childhood?"
"Who can say? It's true that it exists. Endemic, as they say."
During another long silence I gaze at a strange tableau on a table. A mirror with dried flowers drooping from the top is propped against the wall. In its reflection is a poster of "Destroy She Said," her first independent movie. Leaning against the mirror is another, smaller mirror.
"There was a sexual fear, fear of men, because I didn't have a father. I wasn't raped, but I sensed rape, like all little girls. And then afterwards I had a Chinese lover. That was love."
Yann serves us grenadine. I remember French friends telling me, with eyebrows raised, that between them is un vrai amour , even though he is a homosexual.
"Do you think most people live with continual fear?"
"Only the stupid are not afraid."
FEAR, DESPAIR, alienation are themes that seized her in her childhood; later Duras became fascinated with crimes of passion. In the 1958 novel "Moderato Cantabile" -- Duras's first major success -- a crime is committed: lying on the woman he has just killed, a man sobs: "Darling. My darling." Two witnesses, a man and a woman, later drink together and reconstruct in repetitious and incantatory dialogue a passion so intense that its climax was murder. This mix of eroticism and death runs through her work like a river that feeds everything it passes. Certainly one of its sources was the French governor's wife, but an even stronger one was a savage conflict within her family circle.
Duras passionately loved Paulo, the younger of her two older brothers (both of whom are now dead). Paulo was slightly retarded and was deathly afraid of Pierre, the older brother, who tormented and physically battered Paulo. One of the most jarring revelations in "The North Chinese Lover" is that Duras had sex with Paulo. In the book he begins to crawl into her bed when they were both very young, precipitating terrifying rages from Pierre. That intimacy eventually leads to consummation, just before the family leaves Vietnam. This new slant on her childhood might explain why she hated Pierre so much that she wanted to kill him.
"I should have," she cries today. "There was only one solution. That was murder. And one didn't adopt that solution. And it went on throughout my whole childhood. Hate grows. It's like a fire that doesn't go out. When he was 17 and I was 13, during a nap one day I got a knife to kill him."
"Why?"
"For everything, for the sake of killing him. So he wouldn't beat the little one anymore. I can't talk about the little one because I'm going to cry."
"Why didn't you kill the older one?"
"He woke up. He laughed." She imitates horrible laughter. It's a bizarre moment."He got hold of the knife. He flung it away. I picked it up. He called my mother. He told her. They laughed uproariously. And I cried, I cried."
"What did your mother do?"
"She was very hard on me. She didn't love us, the little one and me. I've never seen anything like it in my life, my mother's preference for my older brother. She was proud of me because I did well in school. My little brother wasn't altogether normal, and that's why my older brother persecuted him. And as for me, I was going mad with pain because above all I loved my little brother. I wanted to kill myself when he died."
Self-destruction for love is a particularly Durasian obsession. "You destroy me. You're so good for me," repeats the woman in "Hiroshima Mon Amour" to her lover. I ask her today why sex and death are always entwined for her.
"It's difficult to articulate. It's erotic." She takes a deep breath. "I had a lover with whom I drank a lot of alcohol." She pauses, staring straight at me. Her face is expressionless, her dark eyes are absolutely still. "I'm acquainted with it, the desire to be killed. I know it exists."
In "Practicalities," a 1987 book of essays, Duras writes about a violent affair. "We took a room by the river. We made love again. We couldn't speak to one another any more. We drank. He struck me . . . in cold blood. We couldn't be near one another now without fear and trembling. . . . We were both faced with the same strange desire." It was after that experience that she wrote "Moderato Cantabile."
Is Duras's attitude toward eroticism an anomaly, or is it particularly French? Jennifer Wicke, an associate professor of comparative literature at New York University, told me that while the English may write about a languid conversation in front of a fire, the French are entirely different.
"Duras's writing is always at an extremity, and that is quite French," she said. "I see her as carrying on the tradition of l'amour fou, the crazed love. It's a bleak world view, the opposite of a lyrical text. It proposes a tragic end, because desire can't be sustained. It will either turn into obsession and, thus, ultimately destroy its object, or it will see itself be deflated by the very cruel contingencies of history, or death."
Duras is associated with the Nouveau Roman (literally "new novel"), a movement born in the 50's, whose members include Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. The Nouveau Roman rejects the classical novel as an inappropriate medium to express the chaotic, morally ambiguous postwar world. Although Duras shares many of the movement's stylistic hallmarks -- the free flow of time and the use of silence -- she is the least obsessed with literary principles, and the most inspired by her own inimitable sensibility.
Peter Brooks, the Tripp Professor of Humanities at Yale University, commented to me that the other Nouveau Roman writers got more attention than Duras when the movement began because there was "something more technicolor about their technique. Their theorizing and their break with the traditional novel were overt and total. But Duras is the one from that whole generation who really is going to last."
DURAS LOOKS AT YANN, and he takes her hand. During our conversation he has been shuffling around, walking in and out of the room, one hand on his hip, flipping his hair back with a toss of his head -- a movement that must be, in other circumstances, flirtatious. I ask how they like to spend their time.
"The thing we like most in life is to be in a car together," she says, "to go in bistros, cafes, and make stories from what we see."
"Do you ask a lot of questions?"
"All the time. People talk to us. I go out every day in the car." Then she adds: "I had chronic bronchitis. You can hear my voice very well, even so. I still have vocal cords. I was in a coma for five months."
In October 1988, Duras fell into a coma from which she miraculously awoke intact. She now has a tracheostomy and wears a necklace of wire with a silver button in the middle. At times she adjusts it, which seems to alter the force of her voice.
The most difficult storm Duras weathered was her cure from alcohol in 1982. Yann wrote a harrowing account, which has not yet been translated into English, called simply "M.D." She tells me Yann's book is "magnificent."
"I drank because I was an alcoholic. I was a real one -- like a writer. I'm a real writer, I was a real alcoholic. I drank red wine to fall asleep. Afterwards, Cognac in the night. Every hour a glass of wine and in the morning Cognac after coffee, and afterwards I wrote. What is astonishing when I look back is how I managed to write."
Her small, bejeweled hands lie on the table before her, one resting on the blank paper.
THE NEXT DAY, WE talk about criminals. Duras has never shunned conflict -- as a Resistance fighter, as a Communist or as a woman who speaks out in defense of murderers if she imagines the killer is an anti-establishment figure.
"I became great friends with Georges Figon," she tells me. "He had stolen diamonds and he had killed people. And afterwards he had kidnapped people, with ransom. He was a dear friend. I got him a television interview. He was amazingly intelligent. I even went away for the weekend with him."
"A romantic weekend?" Monique immediately asks.
"No. We never slept with each other. Never. And he never tried to sleep with me."
What is the allure of a criminal for her?
"It exerts a fascination for me -- all the people who abandon the golden rule of good conduct. Criminals are heroes for me."
In 1985 Duras wrote an article about Christine Villemin, who was accused of murdering her child. Although conceding Villemin's guilt under the law, she justified the murder as a natural result of social injustice. The article caused a furor.
Duras's pronouncements in the press have given her a notorious reputation. In 1988 she was interviewed on television for some four hours. Duras alternately spoke and stared speechlessly into the camera. Very little of it was comprehensible to the general public. It was just before her coma.
During my interview I was disconcerted by her habit of jumping disconnectedly from subject to subject, and it wasn't until I was back in America and spent many weeks studying the transcript of the interview (which Nancy K. Kline, of Barnard College, translated for this article) that I gradually understood the connections she was making. In New York I spoke to Tom Bishop, chairman of the French department at New York University, a Beckett scholar and a friend of Duras's for 25 years. It had occurred to me that she had sustained brain damage in the coma.
"She was always like this," he declared. "I don't think she was ever any different. I would doubt that it's the coma." He described the scattershot exchanges of ordinary friendship, which often went something like this:
Bishop: "Let's have lunch."
Duras: "I never have lunch."
Bishop: "O.K."
Long pause.
Duras: "Where would you want to have lunch if we had lunch?"
Bishop: "I was thinking of the Rue de Dragon."
Duras: "Well, O.K., fine, let's do that."
"I think she's a fabulous writer who should just write and not talk about what she's thinking," Bishop said. Like her talk, her work doesn't make "a lot of sense," but it does "something else. It allows me to have an insight into the human psyche that I have found unique. I have learned things about humanity through her that others don't teach me."
A good example of meaning in ambiguity is Duras's work in the cinema, where she is almost as important to 20th-century experimental film as she is to literature. Annette Michelson, a professor of cinema studies at New York University, told me that one of Duras's most important contributions is her realization that "the cinema is made of relations." "And when you change the relations between sound and image," she says, "you have something new."
In "India Song" (1975), the actress Delphine Seyrig and various men walk through a room furnished only with a grand piano. They dance, lie down, sleep, weep, while off-screen voices comment on the unbearable heat, a man shrieks and sobs, a woman chants in Cambodian and jazz melodies pulse. Sounds never emanate from the actors. And yet the audience feels despair, longing, sensuality, the presence of death, colonialism, the impossibility of human communication -- a welter of specific impulses that elude verbal definition.
Of course, a writer who concerns herself with disjunction and alienation is difficult to pin down in conversation. She used to say that as a film maker she wanted to "murder the writer," and recently she said she wants to "kill the image." I wonder how it is possible to make a film without image.
She answers: "With words. To kill the writer that I was."
All right. Suddenly she picks up the pen that has been in front of her for two days and begins to write on the paper. "I'm thinking of something." She looks up. "Sensitivity depends on intelligence. It's completely connected. There's an innocence also. Luckily." She puts down the pen. I record it as it happened. I do not fully understand.
To ground us a little, I introduce the subject of politics. Her hatred of de Gaulle springs to the surface.
"When de Gaulle arrived in France, I became an anti-Gaullist instantly. I saw through his power game. I saw he was an arriviste, with a special gift for language. And at just that moment they opened the camps, and my husband had been deported. I never got over it, the Jews, Auschwitz. When I die, I'll think about that, and about who's forgotten it."
"De Gaulle never said a word on the Jews and the camps," Yann adds quietly. "If de Gaulle had not been as big as he was," Duras says angrily, "no one would have noticed him. Because he was taller than everyone, he was boss. But why this arrogance? As far as I'm concerned, he's a deserter. He's horrible, horrible."
In "The War," Duras describes her days in the Resistance, working with Francois Mitterrand, keeping records of deportees, trying to coax information from Germans stationed in Paris. It was Mitterrand who went to Germany with Dionys Mascolo, the man who would be her second husband and the father of her son, Jean. They rescued Antelme from Dachau in the first days after the German surrender. Antelme, nearly unconscious, was consigned to a quarantined section for hopeless cases. Mitterrand and Mascolo smuggled him out.
"MITTERRAND IS wonderful. I worked with him in the Resistance. I protected him in the street. We never met in a house or a cafe. We liked each other so much we could certainly have slept with each other, but it was impossible. You can't do that on bicycles!" She laughs.
"Are you still a Communist?"
"I'm a Communist. There's something in me that's incurable."
"But you left the Party."
"The Party is not Communism." Her mouth hardens into a straight line across her wide face.
"Has there been any true Communist government over the years?"
"Not one. There was one Communist year: 1917."
"Do you hope to see that sort of Communism return to the world?"
"I don't know. I don't want to know. I am a Communist within myself. I no longer have hope in the world."
Yann begins to laugh. "And the other?" he asks. "Do you have hope for the next world?"
She is not amused by his question. "Zero. Zero." A DURAS SAMPLER
She says, I'd rather you didn't love me. But if you do, I'd like you to do as you usually do with women. He looks at her in horror, asks, Is that what you want? She says it is. He's started to suffer here in this room, for the first time, he's no longer lying about it. He says he knows already she'll never love him. She lets him say it. At first she says she doesn't know. Then she lets him say it.
He says he's lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she's lonely too. She doesn't say why. He says, You've come here with me as you might have gone anywhere with anyone. She says she can't say, so far she's never gone into a bedroom with anyone. She tells him she doesn't want him to talk, what she wants is for him to do as he usually does with the women he brings to his flat. She begs him to do that. -- The Lover (1984)
The sound of the violin ceases. We stop talking. It starts in again.
"The light went on in your room, and I saw Tatiana walk in front of the light. She was naked beneath her black hair."
She does not move, her eyes staring out into the garden, waiting. She has just said that Tatiana is naked beneath her dark hair. That sentence is the last to have been uttered. I hear: "naked beneath her dark hair, naked, naked, dark hair." The last two words especially strike with a strange and equal intensity. . . . The intensity of the sentence suddenly increases, the air around it has been rent, the sentence explodes, it blows the meaning apart. I hear it with a deafening roar, and I fail to understand it, I no longer even understand that it means nothing. -- The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964)
Leslie Garis writes frequently about the arts.
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