The Daisy Chain

Abstract

Nothing could be tougher than Duras. Dur dur! That is the implication of Danielle Bajomée’s 1989 study, Duras ou la douleur,¹ and it underlies most of the major criticism on Duras’s work, from Maurice Blanchot and ‘the solitude of an authentic dialogue’² to Jacques Lacan and ‘the silent nuptials of empty life with the indescribable object’;³ from Carol Murphy and absence and forgetting as alienation and disjunction,⁴ to Julia Kristeva and the melancholia of non-catharsis.⁵ It has even been proposed that La douleur (1985) represents the fundamental truth of a corpus of aporia and aphasia that had lain dormant since the publication of Duras’s first novel, Les impudents (1943), written in Paris during the dark days of the Occupation.⁶ Each of the above critics defines pain differently, of course, yet the question must be asked: how could a corpus of such sustained energy and consistently diverse range—over ninety books, plays and films between 1940 and 1995⁷—have generated this almost uniform response? Moreover, how could such an ominous sounding thematics account for the current, unprecedented popularity of Duras, once a ‘difficult’ writer for a chosen few but now one of France’s most widely translated authors, in danger even of not being taken seriously enough? Not only has she been comprehensively pastiched by (among others) Patrick Rambaud,⁸ but in 1992 a journalist sought to expose what he considered her over-inflated worth by sending a sample of the 1962 novel, L’après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas, to her main publishers, Editions de Minuit, Gallimard and POL (it was unanimously rejected as ‘not of the highest literary quality’⁹).

J’étais déjà dans le cinéma, j’étais dans un film … j’étais quelque part ailleurs en étant là. C’était déjà transporté quelque part ailleurs voyez. On dit sublimé, je crois, les autres.

(M. Duras)