We're back at Duras's flat again, taking up the story from 1960 onwards.
Our protagonists:
Marguerite Duras (1914-1995). She is now a well-known and greatly respected author; she will begin to make films, too, and contributed a script for Resnais’s extraordinary Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Dionys Mascolo (1916-1997). The former lover of Duras and the father of her son. He still shares the flat with her. Author of Le Communisme, published 1953. I get the impression that Mascolo is a tremendously active and passionate man, whose energies are devoted to social change. He works as a reader for Gallimard. Must get his book Autour d’un effort de mémoire, in which Mascolo remembers the community at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, published in the late 1980s.
Robert Antelme (1917-1990). The former husband of Duras and a close friend of Mascolo. Author of The Human Race, published in 1947 and republished, to great acclaim, in 1957. He works on the Gallimard Encyclopeadia and is married to Monique. Antelme commands enormous respect from everyone. People remember him as a kind of saint, a gentle man who seems to embody responsibility and justice.
Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003). Blanchot appears from time to time at 5 rue Saint-Benoît, and is a close ally of Duras, Mascolo and Antelme. He returns to Paris in the late 1950s, having spent several years alone in a village between Nice and Monte-Carlo on the South coast. He already enjoys an enormous reputation as a literary critic and a writer of novels and tales (récits). During the 1960s, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze will all indicate their indebtedness to him. In this period, his relationship with Denise Rollin is ongoing. They live apart. Blanchot, like Antelme, is remembered by those around him (in this case Rollin) as resembling Prince Myshkin.
Mascolo, cited in The Blanchot Reader:
In 1958 de Gaulle seized power. With Jean Shuster – from the Surrealist group – I founded an anti-Gaullist journal with the title le 14 Julliet. As soon as the first number appeared, Maurice Blanchot, who since the war had not said a word politically, sent me a letter which I found stunning: “I want you to know that I am in agreement with you. I refuse all the past and accept nothing of the present”.
Le 14 Julliet exhibits fidelity to the notion of revolution, ongoing resistance to the Gaullists, and a refusal of political power. 19 signatures in the first edition, including Antelme, Breton, Duras, des Forêts, Lefort, Morin, Nadeau, Bruce Parain, Vittorini. For the signatories, the Gaullist regime set up in 1958 was analogous to that set up by Petain under the Occupation in 1940. The state was no longer answerable to its people; it was undemocratic.
25 October 1958, Blanchot’s text ‘Refusal’ appears in the second edition of Le 14 Julliet. Here’s an excerpt:
At a certain moment, in the face of public events, we know that we must refuse. The refusal is absolute, categorical. It does not argue, nor does it voice its reasons. This is why it is silent and solitary, even when it asserts itself, as it must, in broad daylight. Men who refuse and who are tied by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. The time off joint affirmation is precisely that of which they have been deprived., What they are left with is the irreducible refusal, the friendship of this certain, unshakable, rigorous No that keeps them unified and bound by solidarity.
That’s the first paragraph. The essay itself, although is 4 paragraphs long, is immense. It is from a book that seems as vast as all the libraries in the world: Friendship.
Hill comments of 'Refusal':
Importantly [the title 'Refusal'] also mobilised, with undiminished virulence, but in the service of a different kind of political project, one of the few terms in Blanchot's political lexicon to have survived from his pre-war activist past. This shows how far Blanchot's return to political commitment, whatever some have charged, was not preimised on a cuplable repudiation of his pre-war involvements, which in any case remained largely unkown to the majority of his new political associates.
1960 ... Duras, in this period, is in love with Gérard Jarlot, a journalist and novelist. He is accepted by the Antelmes and des Forêts, but Duras knows him to be a liar. Adler: ‘Jarlot didn’t care about anything – not truth, not love, not death – he respected only womanizers and writers'. Duras writes two screenplays with him.
In the same year, Blanchot writes yet more brilliant essays for La Nouvelle Revue Française: "Héraclite," "Albert Camus," "Entretien sur un changement d'epoque," "Le détour vers la simplicité," "La marche de l'écrevisse," "Reprises," "Oublieuse mémoire," "La question la plus profonde" (I).
I make this list because the essays are so profound. Notice, too, the changes in style and register from essay to essay. And, one presumes, he’s also writing L’Attente, l’oubli (published in 1962). But Blanchot is busy with the events that surround the drafting (with Jean Shuster and Mascolo)the "Déclaration sur le droit à l'insoumission dans la guerre d'Algerie", the so-called ‘Manifesto of the 121’.
Adler:
Before the Manifesto was drawn up, Marguerite and Dionys had aided and abetted those fighting for the cause of Algerian independence. They both hid FLN funds up the chimney in rue Saint-Benoît, carried suitcase and lodged people wanted by the police. The pro-FLN activist Madelaine Lafue-Veron, at the time a barrister practicing in Paris, under surveillance and for a long time accused of undermining national security, remembers that whenever she had a ‘favour’ to ask of Marguerite, this was promptly carried out. Her apartment was a crossroads. ‘We had a lot of funds in the rue Saint-Benoît, which had to be delivered around Paris. I was a porter. I remember the terror of being followed and searched’, Margeuirte told Luce Perrot.
Blanchot recalls that Laurence, Bataille’s daughter, was arrested as a ‘bag carrier’. Bataille himself was too ill to sign the Manifesto.
The third issue of Le 14 Julliet published the results of a questionnaire devised by Schuster, Breton, Blanchot and Mascolo which was sent out to intellectuals. It was really from this that the Manifesto grew, according to Adler.
De Gaulle's militarism, his nationalism, his self-importance, his sense of authority, as well as those who accepted his ascendancy: this is what the writers linked to Le 14 Julliet vehemently refused. But as the campaign developed, it is a matter no merely of defending democracy and the constitution, but also of ending French colonialism in Algeria. This required resistance to the war the French Republic was prosecuting in Algeria, even as they denied there was such a war.
Hill commenting on the Manifesto:
In its opposition to the [Algerian] war, the Manifesto did not invoke a moral duty, based on a universalising code of laws, principles, values, and obligations. As Blanchot points out, it was this that distinguished it from an act of commitment in the Sartrian sense; indeed, it might be argued in this respect that the Manifesto was one of the first texts, in France, to contest and rethink the figure of the intellectual as universal conscience, as Foucault and others were to do increasingly after May 1968. Instead of appealing to morality, and thus necessarily to some institutionalised code that had disquieting similarities with the very authority of the state it sought to challenge, the Manifesto reaffirmed each signatory's inalienable right of refusal, a right that was absolute to the extent that it logically preceded any form whatsoever of recognition of the power of the state and any complicity in its decisions.
The Manifesto itself was circulated in France and then all over Europe, being passed from person to person. Those who signed it did so at considerable risk: these so-called ‘propagandists of desertion’ were banned from the RTF, the French broadcasting service, and deprived of state funding for films and artworks. The Manifesto was supposed to disrupt the trial of Francis Jealson, who had set up a clandestine network providing the FLN with accommodation and financial assistance. The military tribunal drew great crowds. Sartre, Claude Roy, Sarraute and others were character witnesses.
Blanchot on the Manifesto:
What happened then (and took months to achieve) belonged to everyone; it was like what Victor Hugo says of maternal instinct: ‘Each has in it his or her own share, and everyone has it all in its entirety’. The responsibility was common to us all, and even those who refused to sign did so for reasons of substance, which were carefully thought out, explained at length in correspondence. At times, matters became very fraught.
As soon as the Manifesto was published (but only in two magazines, Nadeau’s Lettres nouvelles and Sartre’s Temps modernes, which were immediately banned, censored, silenced – it would therefore be more accurate to say that the Manifesto was published, but failed to appear), and as no newspaper, including the most prestigious, reproduced even the smallest extract from it (the risk was too great), we were prosecuted, accused, and charged without anyone knowing why.
Autumn: Blanchot interviewed by Madeleine Chapsal, who finds him ‘the most gentle of men’. The interview, published in early 1961, makes the stakes of the Manifesto clear.
... the right to Insubordination. I say right and not duty, a term that some people, in all ill-considered way, wished the Declaration to use, no doubt because they believe that the formulation of a duty goes further than that of a right. But that is not the case: an obligation depends upon a prior morality, that vouches for it, guarantees it and justifies it; when there is duty, all you have to do is close your eyes and carry it out blindly. In that case, everything is simple. A right, on the contrary, depends only on tiself, on the exercise of the freedom of which it is the expression. Right is a free power for which each person, for his part and in relation to himself, is responsible, and which binds him completely and freely: nothing is stronger, nothing is more solemn. That is why one must say: the right to insubordination; it is a matter of each person's sovereign decision.
Le 14 Julliet led to the Manifesto of the 121; that, in turn would lead those who were associated with 5 rue Saint-Benoît to another venture. Perhaps this has something to do with an incident Blanchot recalls in 'For Friendship' (though Robbe-Grillet had already alluded to it). Writing of his clashes with the examining magistrate who had sought to prosecute him in the wake of the publication of the Manifesto, Blanchot recalls:
After I had finished giving my statement, the examining magistrate wanted to dictate it to the clerk of the court: ‘No, no’, I said, ‘you will not substitute your words for my own. I do not wish to question your good faith, but you have a manner of speaking that I cannot accept’. He insisted. ‘I will not sign’. – ‘We will do without your signature then, and the inquiry will resume in some other place’. Eventually he gave in and allowed me to restate the exact same words I had uttered earlier.
When Blanchot, the accused, speaks, what he says is different from what the examining magistrate would dictate to the clerk of the court not because of a difference in the content of what was said, but because of the place of each speaker within certain networks of power. We believe we are able to speak and to write, to listen and to read in our own name. And yet, as Blanchot shows, none of us can be said to possess language, making it do our bidding, allowing us to subordinate it as a vehicle for the transportation of meaning. We are each possessed by the field of forces and powers with which language is always associated. But we can also refuse to be so possessed. This refusal is linked to the practice of a fragmentary writing which, for Blanchot, was linked to a new form of collective writing, of writing in friendship.
Le 14 Julliet folded for lack of funding. But Blanchot, Mascolo and Vittorini had already begun to dream of a Revue Internationale, published in French, German and Italian editions. A list of some of the authors who agreed to participate:
Italy: Elio Vittorini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia;
Germany: Hans-Magnus Enzenberger, Martin Walser, Günter Grass and Ingeborg Bachmann;
France (in addition to our protagnosts): Louis René des Forêts, Maurice Nadeau, Roland Barthes, Michel Leiris.
Britain: Iris Murdoch was involved. Imagine!
Alas, the magazine appeared only once, in April 1964, as a supplement to the Italian review Il Menabò as a supplement. Blanchot's texts ‘The Name Berlin’ and ‘The Conquest of Space’, written in 1961, as well as 'Parole de fragment" and part of ‘La parole quotidienne’, appear in this supplement.
Here is what Blanchot remembers:
Who was the first to have the idea of an International Review? I think it was Vittori, the most enthusiastic and most experienced among us. But recently [Blanchot is writing in 1993) the periodical Lignes, thanks to Dionys Mascolo who had kept them, published some of the documents concerning this enterprise, which was not in vain even if it failed.
Blanchot remembers Roland Barthes took the failure of the journal very badly, and writes:
He would have liked to erect a monument and transform out disappointment into a work. If we refused, it was both in order to preserve the future and to avoid accusing some rather than others, thereby eluding the unhappy fate of groups that survive by the brilliance of their disputes.
Blanchot adds, in a footnote:
Responsibility lay with the building of the Berlin Wall, which was an event that affected us all, but overwhelmed our German friends. Enzenberger, who was closest to the project, and the most friendly, went to live in Norway; all went their separate ways. The review carried on, didn’t die, but solely faded away.
The Berlin Wall? Really? It took until 1965 for the dream of the Review to pass away entirely. But the Events of May 1968 were approaching ...
What of Duras in these years? She works alongside the others in 14 Julliet and the Manifesto. She is also writing a string of books, screenplays, plays for theatre and continuing her career as a journalist.
In 1960, along with Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute and Roy, Duras sits on the panel for the prix Médicis. She is instrumental in rewarding Monique Wittig (she died this year) for her first novel.
Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night, another Duras novel appears. The critics are accusing her of repeating herself. The Sea Wall and The Sailor from Gibraltar are reprinted in paperback, selling 60,000 copies.
Next, The Afternoon of Mr Andesmas – An/telme, des/Forêts, Mas/colo. Duras, perhaps, satirises those from who she formerly sought advice about her writing.
Duras reads all of Henry James before adapting The Aspern Papers with Antelme. She then helps James Lord adapt ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, which was performed in 1962.
Duras is now extremely fashionable. Beckett attends the first night of her play The Viaducts of Seine-et-Oise in 1963 – he is impressed; Duras wins an award.
In this period, she also writes a draft of what would become The Man Sitting in the Corridor, a violent, mysterious tale.
Duras awards the Médicis prize to Jarlot’s novel, written with her guidance. He, however, is tremendously jealous of her success.
Duras and Jarlot are drinking a lot. Jarlot is certainly not faithful....
In 1963, Duras writes The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein … what years!
We're up to the mid 60s. 5 rue Saint-Benoît III to follow.
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