On a Passage from Marguerite Duras’s The Lover
Marguerite Duras — The Lover p.10–11
I get off the bus. I go over to the rails. I look at the river. My mother sometimes tells me that never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as beautiful and big and wild as these, the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of ocean. In the surrounding flatness stretching as far as the eye can see, the rivers flow as fast as if the earth sloped downwards.
Duras. I’d read The Lover as a loosey-goosey twenty-eight year-old while living in my college town as a fickle and unbesmirched post-graduate. It had featherweight impact, though if someone asked I would have called it “good” and “worth it.” And then I came back to its din in a much different light of time, twenty years on. Duras’s films had wedged themselves into my consciousness — so many slow-moving, glassine, unobtrusive, and casting a pall, holding that characteristic and uncharacteristic color of 1970s Eastman color motion-picture film — Deleuze called her filmic essences:
…a liquid quality which increasingly marks the visual image…it is tropical Indian humidity which rises from the river, but which spreads out on the beach and in the sea as well; it is the dampness of Normandy which already drew Le camion from the Beauce to the sea; and the disused room in Agatha is not so much a house as a slow phantom ship moving on to the beach, while the speech-act unfolds…Duras creates seascapes…not only because she is related to what is most important in the French school, daylight grey, the specific movement of the light, the alternation of solar and lunar light, the sun setting in water, liquid perception.
The films are an extension of the books and a recalibration of many of them — they sing in a kind of reverse-action of the written word, since she is mainly interested in the disjunction between the sound-image and the speech act, as many of her films including the whole of India Song, Le Navire Night, and Agatha et les lectures illimitées contain no synched speech though characters walk about. Deleuze’s “liquid perception” dominates, even in that dark blue vegetative landscape of the truck driving in Le camion, which alternates with her and Gerard Depardieu reading a text at her house, the background being white drapery and jaundiced lamps. The slow transitions between dark blue and lamplight create a portable Cezanne in the afterimage of all those movements — his mountain now being the lorry and the two readers inscribing themselves into avant-garde counterpoint: it’s not what you think will happen, it’s the process to a different understanding. The “story” is in the words (a story about a female hitchhiker and communist truck driver who picks her up), but the images tell of that indelible afterimage of truck, lamplight, Duras, Depardieu, and their voices waxing and waning. As Merleau-Ponty avers, my Durasian experience of this film and many others is “My gaze wanders in it as in the halos of Being. It is more accurate to say that I see according to it, or with it, than I see it.”
The Lover was written after the bounty of films came out — she writes in Practicalities that “the process of writing it was so smooth it reminded you of the way you speak when you’re drunk, when what you say always seems so simple and clear.” The book travels forward and backward in time, like her films, but this is literature — the word is holy — the sentence isn’t the image or the voiceover (voix-off) or that disjunction, it is older and ancient…Biblical.
On the seventh page of the book, a seemingly mundane paragraph starts, where she (the character, Duras) is on a ferry crossing over the Mekong river with her mother. I can’t say whether the translator Barbara Bray is right or wrong, but she was an accomplished translator (last sentence of the passage: “Dans la platitude à perte de vue, ces fleuves, ils vont vite, ils versent comme si la terre penchait.”) and to cast these sentences in simple formulations seems the best choice as they retain an odd lyricism. The adjectives (whole, big, beautiful, wild, great, fast) are large and in charge of an almost standard motion build-up of landscape and character, though in Duras-like cinematography stretching a shot for many minutes (think of her wandering camera, especially in Aurelia Steiner — Melbourne, which actually takes place on a Seine riverboat, viewing the quays and bridges). The majestic fourth sentence sets up the climatic fifth, with the “sometimes” an odd but true tweak on the character of the mother that so much hampers and enlivens the young girl. In Practicalities, she writes: “…the mother represents madness. Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.” “Never in my whole life shall I ever again see rivers as beautiful and big and wild as these,” the mother tells the daughter — well, what can one, a child no less, answer to that? “You never know, mama,” but the watery sentence oxidizes (Wallace Stevens: “watery words awash”) and closes with “the Mekong and its tributaries going down to the sea, the great regions of water soon to disappear into the caves of ocean.” A great “cinematic” line adding more depth to my imagination than any Hollywood special effect, save 2001’s uncanniness. “[I]nto the caves of ocean” — ah, those more than gigantic ocean caves that we can only imagine hold all this onrushing riverwater slowly turning saltish. But Duras amplifies this in the next sentence with an even greater special effect — in the “surrounding flatness” “the rivers flow as a fast as if the earth sloped downward.” The rhythmic flow of those last eleven words…: “flew as fast as if” — what an interchange of f’s and a’s! With the “sloped” catching at the ending as if a Niagara Falls is alive where the earth ends and so much water falls.
The wonder of this paragraph is the viewpoint of a child and the old-woman narrator at the same time, and are even contained within the other, though it is more that the child is the mother of the woman — one believes the earth sloped downward in childhood only to reach a point in old age where one can again think anything, to dream in possibilities. I think this is why the paragraph stuns me so — it seems so simple but it is the product of years and years on earth and a hard gradient of attentiveness…and magic. Would she have been able to write this if she didn’t make all those films of “liquid perception”? That would belie the statement that it just came out of her so smoothly. Duras is with her mother in this moment of the novel, but the character of Duras is also with herself there on the ferry, saying, Look how far we have come, it’s beautiful. This moment on the ferry happens across time — the writer (and the reader) re-experience it and get reinvigorated every time it is felt, thought, or read.
