Lovers like to feel themselves similar to one another, to have shared parallel histories, to have led lives which let their encounter become fateful. But in the end, what do they share? Perhaps only the strangeness of love itself: it is as though love has no content, or if its content were solely the affirmation of love as love, in its surprise, its novelty.
Is love an egoïsme à deux? There is a kind of lover’s narcissism: love traps one with the other, nothing matters except the beloved. Is there a relationship which does not draw the lovers together but turns each apart from the other? This is also what love is: the chance of an encounter that does not enclose each lover in his or her love or enclose the other, the beloved, as the one who is known and who is understood.
Is this what it would mean to claim that love is also a relation to the outside? Perhaps. But this is a precarious relationship. It disappears; it is lost in the onrush of that living through of that affirmation that love is: telling one’s friends of new love, introducing one’s beloved to others, all the while being surprised at love’s bounty, at the depth of the gift that loving is.
But something disappears. This is because the gift of loving, love’s giving, usurps another kind of gift. When Duras will allow love to come close to hatred, when love for her comes close to a madness which turns each of us from the world. Somewhat foolishly, I will link one experience of love (love’s plenitude) to a D.H. Lawrentian vitalism: the living universe, everything alive, everything there in the presence of the beloved. Certainty. Nothing from the depth of passion can be wrong, all that.
And the other experience (love's nudity)? Not plenitude but horror. The tearing apart of the world. Not a possible love, not the opening of a world, but impossibility. The impossibility of loving. The impossibility of a world, of a world’s coherency. That is Duras, and all of Duras, from beginning to end.
Even the late books, which I like to imagine are not so highly regarded because the idea of protecting books – of books which need protection – is close to me. Build an ark, put the books in, carry them about as you would your own heart… These late texts are important for the nudity of the story they contain.
I want to write with the word nudeness – yes the nudeness of those stories which bear so nakedly on the impossibility of loving. The story of her brother in The Lover from North China, the one whom young Duras (is it her?) and the servant Thanh (he did not appear in the early versions of the same story, including The Lover) wanted to preserve as a kind of miracle.
And what of Hélène Lagonelle (a fellow pupil of the young narrator with whom she has an affair)? There is the objection (I’ve never heard it, but I want to imagine it in order to draw these books closer) that Duras becomes la Duras, a brand, a style, a way of writing akin to a way of dressing (and remember that la Duras also named a way of dressing).
The Lover from North China, Yann Andrèa Steiner (have I put the accent in the right place?): these books, written close to her death (like the other naked book, Writing) come close not to the Duras whose wrinkled face looks out of us from the backs of her books and from books of photographs, but from the other Duras, Duras’s other: the companion whom, ‘in’ her, stepped forward to encounter the one she was able to love.
She loved Yann Andrea , a young man, a homosexual (read The Slut of the Normandy Coast, read L’Ête 80) the relationship with whom, perhaps, allowed her to write The Malady of Death (others claim that is a rewrite of The Man Who Sat Down in the Corridor). She loved him from the other who loved inside her, her companion. The one whom she could draw upon to write, with whom she wrote. The other who wrote with her, inside her, and across her.
Write so as though to have no face. Is there a way of loving, too, which would allow your face to be torn from itself?
