M.D./‘Y.A., homosexuel’: Literary Collaboration and the Sexual Cure

Abstract

Agonising in Vie mat. over how to account for the mysterious failure of Yeux bleus, Duras refused to identify the novel as anything other than ‘the book’, treating it with the same paranoid fear displayed by its male protagonist towards the female body, i.e. as a ‘hostile, wounding object, a weapon levelled against her’ (Yeux bleus, p. 90). She declared it to be simply false and weak prose, ‘an essay à la Barthes’. If homosexuality creates ‘a shadow on a word’, the text itself ‘lied’ in the space of a word (p. 89). However, Duras did relate the writing of Yeux bleus to her relationship at the time with Yann Andréa, stating as follows:

We [Duras and Andréa] scoffed at all the compromises, all the usual arrangements between people. We confronted the impossibility of this love, we did not retreat, we did not run away … we would laugh at it [this love], we couldn’t recognise it, and we lived it as it came, truly impossible, and without intervening, without doing anything to suffer less, without running away, without destroying it, without leaving. And that was not enough. (Vie mat., p. 91)¹

I rose—because He sank … My soul / grew straight … I lifted him

(E. Dickinson)