Charm, narcissism, poisonous tongue... Enigmatic Duras

Yu Gengyun/Wen

Margaret Duras, an obscure writer? On this issue, she actually has a self-evaluation. "Obscurity can be divided into two types: one that can be overcome and does not affect reading, and the other that is the opposite. It is this obscure attribute that makes some books sell well and others unpopular." Apparently, Duras implied to us that she belonged to the former. However, her image is constantly being shaped, is it a popular writer, or a writer in serious literary circles who has been "overexposed" by the media? Duras's work spans a variety of artistic disciplines at the same time, but rejects various labels and genres. "She creates an increasingly aggressive, massive, seemingly imperceptible image of the author." Private Literary History: Interviews with Duras is an anthology of her print, radio, and television interviews from 1962 to 1991. In these floating dialogues, Duras is full of ambiguous and contradictory charm, that kind of passionate expansion, self-obsession and silent confession, which is more powerful than the work. In addition to self-criticism and portraiture, this book is a Duras's "private creation talk", which contains the core areas of literary theory, writing concepts, and film directing. More importantly, with a strong personal style, she combines the interviews she has written with the novels she has written and the films she has made. In this way, duras, which is sometimes contradictory and repetitive, is not essentially a broken Duras.

Love is the most important bridge point for her creation, and it is also the best way to understand her cross-border. Even, interview reporters can't help but put on a "erotic writer" hat (despite her strenuous opposition). It can be said that her works are the infinite possibilities nourished by love. "For love is the currency that circulates between all works, cultural, musical, painterly, novel, philosophical, everything. There is nothing more open than it, it is inexhaustible, endless mediocrity." With love, there is also the sex, violence and desire that are swirling in her work. "There is no distinction between sex and men. There is only one kind of sex, and all relationships are immersed in it. I see it as violence, seeking its own object of venting, as if nostalgic for a redistribution of violence that it itself is the initiator of. And it is desire that is looking for its object. Behind Duras's fascination with "Lover" is actually a kind of physical memory of Chinese men. "There is a Chinese tenderness in desire, mixed with violence; almost cruel." It even overwhelmed the strong racial atmosphere in the colonies and did not hesitate to make itself a "scandal".

Only words and memories are emerging, and the story is being told over and over again. "I think it's some words. Maybe. I saw them, lined them up, sentences followed, clinging to them, surrounded by them, growing on their own. These words remain the same and never lose their hand." It can become any length, stretching infinitely, without end. The Chinese man (whom Duras called Mr. Ruo) appeared in The Against the Pacific, The Lover, and later in The Lover of Northern China. Duras has been relying on words and words to recall the changes and growth of imaginary lovers, and even she has turned her back and distanced herself from his original image. This emphasis on words also extends to her concept of drama. "The play is not acted. Racine, can't act, can't act. It should be completely at the mercy of language. What else is there to play where the language goes? ”

This idea is accompanied by a kind of "fluid writing", which is Duras's self-confessed style. The issue of style, the writer himself is very important to define, otherwise, it is inevitable that the critics talk to themselves and wishful thinking. "Fluid writing is like this, without pointing, wandering through the crest of words, fleeting. It never interrupts reading, never crosses the line. No explanation is given, no explanation is given". "Lover" is a flow, not a narrative. She tried to come up with words, to "envelop" sentences, which were completely transient and could not be reconstructed. "When I write from my brother's evil deeds to the equatorial sky, from unfathomable ugliness to unfathomable blue sky, from instigating bad deeds to infinite formation", this is like a musical creation.

Duras in the interview presents an "interesting qualities"—a super high "critical and counter-critical skill.". In my opinion, her charismatic demeanor often emanates from the concise violence of words. She resents being categorized, hates being imitated, and has a physiologically reflexive weariness to critics' clichés. Especially on the subject of the "new novel", her reaction was decisive. "To write in the way of a new novel, I'm not at all interested. That's a wrong path for the new novel. At the end of the day, I think it's a prank. They say I invented a new novel, and that's the weird thing. "New novel, it has nothing to do with writing. It is a kind of intricacies of literati. ”

It's not hard to see why she's "not too cold" to Roland Barthes (a supporter of the new novel), and even bluntly says she is "the worst example." Bart, on the other hand, is a staunch supporter of the new novel. Of course, this is not the main reason, duras is actually disgusted with Bart's head. "That simplified way of thinking. It is impossible to explain everything in three or two words, and it is extremely harmful to the thinking of contemporary people." "Caused by simplification. He wrote little and was short. He doesn't have a long-form masterpiece." More importantly, he also had a lasting impact on the contemporary era, even hindering the thinking of writing. Duras seems to have some "poisonous tongue" bias and is extremely harsh. In fact, she treats theoretical texts as literary literature. Barthes's use of semiotics to achieve reductive interpretation is itself very different from the thinking of literary writing. Duras crosses the standard to evaluate, and it is inevitable that there is also a suspicion of "double standard".

It wasn't just Bart who lay the gun, she poured "cow dung" on Sartre. In the interview, Duras sneered at Sartre, and the aggressiveness seemed to have formed a great personal vendetta. She thinks Sartre didn't understand what writing was, "he didn't call it writing." In just six words, Duras wrote off the existentialist mentor Sartre. If we use the popular saying at the moment, one kind of person is really writing, and one kind of person is pretending to be writing - thinking that he is writing. Sartre was apparently classified as the latter by her. This is actually worth reflecting: what are so many writers doing? Most of them are just completing the writing event and realizing the action again and again.

Duras gave her reasoning: "He (Sartre) was always focused on the minutiae, on the things that weren't important. He never touched on real writing. Sartre, he was a Taoist. He always draws inspiration from society, from the environment in which he lives. There is a political and a literary environment. But I won't say: he's writing. I didn't even think about it that way." Although this analysis is not pleasant, some elements are also very objective. In my opinion, she points out the interesting qualities of Sartre's "literary peripheral man": a trivial man, unable to find the key points of literature itself, always circling around in the external environment. In other words, Duras resented Sartre's use of literature as a missionary tool in the sociological sense, as a vassal of politics and philosophy. For it is the greatest doubt to put non-literary thinking in literary form.

Interestingly, Duras's "anti-criticism" abilities are even more superior. You can think of it as an overly sensitive defense, perhaps a provocative attack on self-esteem, all in all wonderful. When orthodox critics almost stop talking about her books, I think her loss must be a little bit, yet she mocks critics for living in the age of the steam engine, the age of collective human melancholy. The writers who are sought after by critics just prove that they belong to an era that has passed. Whether duras is masturbating or not, his attitude of not caring about criticism is remarkable: "We must learn to look beyond criticism and live outside of this unnecessary supervision." Should only believe in yourself and write".

So, are there any people who are not afraid of Duras? There are also. She gave flowers to Brownshaw and Bataye. "I can say that Brownshaw is called writing, and Batayer is called writing." The reason is that Duras is conceptually fellow traveler with them, always emphasizing survivorship in writing. What is surviving writing? That is to be at ease, to regard writing as existence, and to regard life as work. It is the source of immanence. In this way, we can understand why Duras claimed in the interview that he had no "private life". Because, she gave up her life to her work, and writing replaced everything. You'll notice that Duras clearly meant that she was referring to "dependent writing"—writing as an external, secondary appendage. "For example, Solzhenitsyn's writing - it is all external. Writing is an inner burst, there is no object, there is no purpose except itself, and it is essentially useless. "All attachment to writing, no matter how clever it may be—even for a noble cause, for the defense of human rights."

Writing is not simply out of a certain feeling, but more importantly, "the immersive experience and play space needed to convey the feeling". In this way, Duras's experience of writing also directly guides us to read and understand the mental model of the work. This mode does not care about the events and characters themselves, it values the pervasiveness of sensory memory and spatial experience. In her work, you want to "be able to hear the sound of dancing, to see the garden, to hear the voice of the beggar, to hear the voice of the ambassador, to the cries of the vice-consul, and so on." Duras sees writing as a devotion, a displacement of the self toward the text, all just to perceive and reenact the world of life.

We found that when Duras talked about writing, she was always talking about lust, violence (wildness), and death. In her view, only these elements are homogeneous to writing. Even, they are the source. "It (violence) is a deadly expression of love. Men can only end in murder. Women, on the other hand, can only do one thing, which is to ask the other party to kill themselves." "There is no way out of love... It can only be resolved internally, by the parties. Solved in an infinite, passionate expression. I don't see any other ultimate expression besides death." Her view is Galmanian, and her writing treatment is completely governed by passion, either love or death. When desire subsides, it is on the verge of death, and when desire comes, it rarely leaves. "Books may still be able to wait, but desires can't work, passions can't." She has been discussing the dynamics of writing, why writing (teleology). "I think this activity (writing) really makes people think about death every day. Without this, writing is meaningless, and writing is about trying to die for writing. Without that, there is no need to write."

In the book, the women of Duras stand clearly, forcefully, and have an irrefutable momentum. When she "draws" women's literature out of the literature created by men, she shows a unique vision, although there are some separatist tendencies (resulting in a confrontation between the two attributes). "The literature created by men is the same. The only difference is women's literature. The men said the same thing. Whether it's government, the department, all you want, theoretical, authoritative, university - everywhere there are men following suit. They can't choose any other way. It's like a dyskinesis. They can no longer turn to the right, they cannot turn left, they can only follow in the footsteps of those who came before them. And we women, we're not on that road."

This evaluation actually expresses an essential difference, that is, the difference between words and words. Men's literature is full of discourse, which is the synthesis of speech running in mechanisms, grafted with power. Women's literature, on the other hand, is wild by nature, because it has no intention of rejecting the chaos and barbarism that excludes the intolerable power, thus maintaining its original appearance. Duras, however, also rejected feminist radicalism. In her opinion, drawing a line with men and blaming men is not only stupid, it is also pointless. As long as women stop imitating men, they will do what they are. Her private attitude towards men is "stay away from them and stop believing in them". She even made a rather provocative assertion, which was entirely intuitive—"I think wisdom is negative, and sensibility is negative... I think everything is going negative. I have no doubt about this, and this transformation is inevitable."

Duras's attitude toward men, however, is in fact ambiguous, in the presence of the object of desire. She once confessed that her face, which was obsessed with "yile", was prematurely destroyed by the years, on the one hand, because of the anxiety of writing, and on the other hand, because of the consumption of passion in men. "I've been controlled by a few men. I don't regret it. It was a rare experience that enriched, reflected on, and regrouped, as if I could immediately find the power I had been looking for. ”