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The Spatialization of Loss in the Theatre of Marguerite Duras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Mary Noonan
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Extract

Marguerite Duras developed a theatrical form that both staged a severing of the woman's body/ presence from discourse/subjectivity, and gave expression to the distressed source of the woman's voice beyond discourse. This form of theatre appeals to the spectator who is willing to become involved in its uncovering of possible meanings of female identity through a meticulously orchestrated, slow, rhythm-based and essentially uncomfortable sifting and dredging of the processes of memory and desire. In exploring this terrain, Duras went some way toward realizing Irigaray's feminist project of ‘playing with mimesis’, whereby the woman resubmits herself to ideas about her self that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, in order to uncover the place of her exploitation by discourse.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1998 , pp. 215 - 224
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1998

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References

Notes

1. Irigaray, Luce, ‘Pouvoir du discours, subordination du féminin’, in Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), p. 74.Google Scholar ‘To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself—inasmuch as she is on the side of the ‘perceptible’, of ‘matter’—to ‘ideas’, in particular to ideas about herself that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic, but so as to make ‘visible’, by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain invisible: the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means ‘to unveil’ the fact that if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply resorbed in this function. They also remain elsewhere.’ Translation by Catherine Porter with Burke, Carolyn, in The Irigaray Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 124.Google Scholar

2. Duras, Marguerite, India Song (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).Google Scholar Subsequent quotations from the French text will be from this edition, and page references will be given in the body of the essay.

3. Duras, Marguerite, L'Eden Cinéma (Paris: Mercure de France, 1977).Google Scholar

4. Duras, Marguerite, Agatha (Paris: Minuit, 1981).Google Scholar

5. Duras, Marguerite, Savannah Bay (Paris: Minuit, 1983).Google Scholar

6. Elin Diamond provides an illuminating discussion of the theatrical means Duras uses in India Song in order to ‘expose the coercive desire underlying both spectating and narrating’, in her essay ‘Refusing the Romanticism of Identity: Narrative Interventions in Churchill, Benmussa, Duras’, Theatre Journal 37, 1985, pp. 273–86.

7. Diamond, Elin, Unmaking Mimesis (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8. ‘The mother remains motionless in her chair, expressionless, as if turned to stone, distant, separate—as is the stage—from her own story.’ Translation by Bray, Barbara, Marguerite Duras: Four Plays (La Musica (La Musica Deuxième), Eden Cinema, Savannah Bay, India Song) (London: Oberon Books, 1992), p. 49.Google Scholar

9. ‘She was very young. Just out of high school. She used to swim a long way out. You never knew … You could never be quite sure that she would consent to go on living … let us see her again … hear her again … wait for her to agree to come back from the sea one more time.’ (My translation)

10. Duras, Marguerite and Porte, Michelle, Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras (Paris: Minuit, 1977), p. 94.Google Scholar In her essays and interviews, Duras frequently refers to her experience of the writing process as one of blindness and deafness, where the writer gives herself up to a state of wandering in an opaque zone, while remaining alert to the accidental sounds and images that manage to penetrate the opacity of her consciousness. See in particular Les Lieux, p. 101, and Duras, Marguerite and Gauthier, Xavière, Les Parleuses (Paris: Minuit, 1974), p. 16.Google Scholar She frequently draws parallels between the state of sexual passion or desire and the writing process–for Duras, both experiences involve an undermining of the ego.

11. Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in Sigmund Freud, The Complete Works, Volume XIV (London: Hogarth Press, 1978), pp. 243–58.Google Scholar

12. Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 179.Google Scholar

13. ‘The set should seem accidental—stolen from a ‘whole’ that is by its nature inaccessible.’ (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 139.)Google Scholar

14. ‘La plaine de Kam, dans le Haut-Cambodge, entre le Siam et la mer’, L'Eden Cinéma, p. 11. (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 49.)Google Scholar

15. ‘She waits motionless for the sound effects to emerge: the noises of night and the plain … children's cries, laughter, dogs barking, drums’, (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 53.)Google Scholar

16. ‘Behind the foreground area and separate from it is a large set designed to suggest a vast empty landscape. A pair of curtains—wood painted to represent red velvet—are parted to reveal a central vista … this central space is flanked by a pair of huge marble pillars … then by a lofty dark-green double door, flung open … through the opening lies … the sea … Thus the setting of Savannah Bay is separate from the representation of Savannah Bay—uninhabitable by the women who are its protagonists, apart.’ (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 98.)Google Scholar

17. Madeleine. The play will never be written. So might as well die. Young Woman. Or might as well live. Madeleine. Mm. I suppose so. Young Woman. So it's a play that has never been performed, never even written. Madeleine. NO. That play, never.' (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 115.)Google Scholar

18. L'Eden Cinéma, p. 30.

19. ‘as if it were being played elsewhere … ‘India Song’ again, slow, far away … ‘India Song comes back from far away’. (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 122, 124, 125.)Google Scholar

20. Agatha, ou les lectures illimitées, film directed by Marguerite Duras. Distribution: Des Femmes filment, 1981.

21. ‘Une lèpre, du cœur … Elle est à qui veut d'elle … Prostitution de Calcutta … Anne-Marie Stretter … est comme née de cette horreur … poreuse, dangereuse.’ India Song, pp. 34, 46, 148.

22. Irigaray, Luce, Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), p. 134.Google Scholar In this text Irigaray elaborates her ideas on what she terms ‘la mascarade de la féminité’ (p. 80): femininity as a mascarade or role imposed on women by male systems of representation.

23. Ibid., p. 29.

24. Ibid., pp. 28–29. ‘It is pointless, therefore, to trap women into giving a precise definition of what they want to say, to make them repeat (themselves) in order to make themselves clear: they are already somewhere other than in that discursive machinery where you would hope to catch them out. They have gone within themselves … which means, in the intimacy of that touch which is silent, multiple, diffuse. And if you ask insistently what they are thinking of, they can but reply that they are thinking of nothing. Of everything.’ (My translation)

25. Madeleine. The theatre's dark … You tell it the sea was blue. (Pause.) How hot it was. (Pause.) How white rock. Young Woman. How long the pain. (Pause.) How it changes. (Pause.) What it becomes. (Pause.) The second journey. (Pause.) The other shore. (Pause.) The second love.' (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 115.)Google Scholar

26. Madeleine. I can remember, but it's lost its shape, it's hidden. I can't remember what I remember when I remember her. But it's there … Strange … That kind of thing I am sure of … the dark. (Pause.) The rain. (Pause.) The cries., (Pause.) The colour of the sea … (Pause.) The sound of the voices. (Pause.) The silence between the voices.' (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 107, 114.)Google Scholar

27. ‘A love belonging to every moment. (Pause.) Without a past. (Pause.) Without a future. (Pause.) Changeless. (Pause.) A crime.’ (Bray, , Four Plays, p. 113.)Google Scholar

28. Duras, Marguerite, La Musica Deuxième (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 64.Google Scholar

29. Quoted in Papin, Liliane, L'Autre Scène: le théâtre de Marguerite Duras (Saratoga, California: Anma Libri, 1988), p. 28.Google Scholar

30. Ibid., p. 14.

31. Ibid., p. 106.

32. India Song, p. 57.

33. Irigaray, , Ce sexe, p. 111.Google Scholar ‘Outside this volume already circumscribed by meaning articulated in (the) discourse (of the father) there is nothing: awoman. Zone of silence.’ (My translation)

34. Ibid. ‘This voice which overflows the subject’.

35. Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine, La Jeune née (Paris: Union Générate d'Éditions, 1975), p. 172.Google Scholar ‘The song before the law.'

36. Kristeva, Julia, ‘La Maladie de la douleur’ in Soleil noir: Dépression et mélancolie (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), pp. 229–65Google Scholar (p. 251). (This work has been translated as Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, by Roudiez, Leon S. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)).Google Scholar

37. Ibid., p. 233.

38. Kristeva, Julia, ‘The Father, Love and Banishment’, in Desire in Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), pp. 148–58 (p. 157).Google Scholar

39. Ibid., p. 156.

40. Kristeva, Julia, ‘About Chinese Women’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Moi, Toril (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 139–59 (p. 150).Google Scholar

41. Soleil noir, p. 247: ‘unnameable’.

42. Irigaray, Luce, ‘Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère’, in Sexes et parentés (Paris: Minuit, 1987), pp. 21–33.Google Scholar

43. See ibid., p. 32. Translation by Macey, David in The Irigaray Reader, p. 44.Google Scholar

44. Duras, Marguerite, L'Amant (Paris: Minuit, 1984), pp. 34–35.Google Scholar