By Andrew Millar
“What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”[i]
– Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
“Nowadays it often seems writing is nothing at all.”[ii]
– Marguerite Duras, L’Amant
Marguerite Duras’s novel L’Amant, first published in France in 1984, is a densely elliptical text that adroitly navigates the tenuous textual boundaries of fiction, auto-fiction, memoir, and philosophy. Apropos of its refusal to be easily categorised within the formal boundaries of a definite textual identity, the novel too calls into question the very instability of language in its capability to express the inexpressibility of desire; to signify the unspoken.[iii] In this essay I argue that Duras’s novel does not posit a relation between desire and writing so much as it collapses one within the other; L’Amant acts as a nexus for desire, writing, and the body whereby all of these entities are continually imbricated and the divisions between them destroyed within Duras’s apocalyptic textual framework. Furthermore, I argue in favour of Andrew Slade’s assertion that Duras constructs a feminine sublime (sublime féminin) in L’Amant that works to exhume corporeality from the Kantian sublime, subtending all différends and all desire, whereby “all things [are] confounded into one.”[iv] In doing so, Duras works chiastically; L’Amant writes desire, and desire writes L’Amant. The Durassian Sublime finds a way to write and re-write being that is inextricable from its own materiality and the corporeality of the text.[v]
When considering Hélène Cixous’s famous injunction that opens “The Laugh of the Medusa” – “Woman must put herself into the text”[vi] – few writers correspond to this sentiment better than Duras. Her novel L’Amant is a complex navigation of embodied writing and autobiography whereby her own experiences of sexual desire are reconfigured through the textual medium. To put oneself into a text as such does not merely denote autobiography, but a practice of writing that privileges the text as an extension of the body itself. Michelle Boulous Walker likens Duras’s writing to a “sexual performance that eludes description,” but importantly one that does not directly inscribe the “space of desire” opened by her writing. Instead, her writing privileges the spaces and silences that come with writing desire.[vii] The narrator of L’Amant herself identifies desire with space, an emptiness that is not directly spoken: “Just as the space existed in me for desire.”[viii] Linked to this “space” is Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the différend, which pertains to a “suffering in language”; a suffering that is directly linked to the failure of language to capture certain things, certain feelings, which thereby creates a ‘space’ or gap in language.[ix] Boulous Walker emphasises the relationship of feeling to the emergence of a différend, whereby emotion becomes the agent of disclosure to make one aware of language’s limitations; in such situations, where theory and philosophy may mark the presence of différends, perhaps it is the role of art to signify that which remains unsignified/able. This would mean that an artistic mode of writing ‘outside’ of the master discourse of philosophy is not beholden to a rational relationship between sign/signifier, such that feelings, or the rhythms of the body, takes precedence and act as emotional agents of disclosure within the text for that which cannot be directly represented. This is arguably the textual strategy that Duras employs in her artistic-philosophical exploration of desire in L’Amant.[x]
From this literary-philosophical standpoint in L’Amant, Leslie Hill’s analysis of apocalypse and writing in relation to Duras posits a relation between the disaster of apocalypse and destruction with desire, where literature is the space on which this disaster/desire dynamic is enacted and performed.[xi] Writing “reveals by destroying, and destroys by revealing,”[xii] and in turn enacts a chiasmus that James Williams identifies as characteristic to Duras’s work.[xiii] This process of specular inversion, whereby writing both destroys and reveals in a reciprocal relationship, ultimately tests the limits of a masculine language and representational logic in its own ability to signify.[xiv] Boulous Walker situates Duras’s writing at the limits of language and of signification, always threatening to exceed it: “Desire, here, is the limit of language.”[xv] If Duras’s language pushes towards its own limits at the borders of desire, then she in a sense writes against a Wittgensteinian notion that “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”[xvi] and instead works to divest language of its own limits in asserting that “…writing is nothing at all. Sometimes I realize that if writing isn’t … all contraries confounded … it’s nothing. That if it’s not, each time, all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence, then writing is nothing but advertisement.”[xvii] The narrator here sets up a dialectical tension between writing as nothing, and writing as subsequently everything, “all things confounded into one.” This “inexpressible essence” seems to be the very différend that accompanies the difficulty of speaking and writing desire, a différend that L’Amant wrestles back and forth with throughout. The very next section of the novel is also where Duras’s narrator mentions the “space for desire” within herself. Desire, in writing, becomes a space of “inexpressible essence,” with space here denoting both a place and a gap; a surface of inscription and a gulf between desire and its expressibility. And yet, in and between this space, desire beckons forth continually in the narrator’s repetitious encounters with the lover in the novel. As she observes, “You didn’t have to attract desire … Either it was there at first glance or else it had never been.”[xviii] This either/or dichotomy of desire is continually reinforced and challenged in her sexual encounters with the lover, where “from the first moment she knows more or less”[xix] of the desire that exists between them, and yet in the next scene “she doesn’t feel anything in particular … so probably it’s already desire.”[xx] This continual hesitation between the unknown and the certain is reflective at a linguistic and textual level of the difficulties in expressing desire; L’Amant enacts this very struggle in its prosaic passages of continual encounter, brushing up against this desire, but always obliquely.
Continuous with the novel’s preoccupation in situating desire and writing within each other, L’Amant also engages with the embodiment of desire. Dani Cavallaro, in examining the relationship between writing and the body, draws on Julia Kristeva’s ideas around the culturally-inscribed body. The unstable nature of language and its failure to maintain coherent meanings results in slippages of that which language cannot express, which is “experienced as the body,” and therefore the body “is an excess which signs cannot capture.”[xxi] This idea is productive in extending Duras’s literary project of desire into the realm of the corporeal and the material. If the traditional tenets of écriture feminine emphasise writing the body, where the body does not necessarily always correspond to a biological body but the text as body,[xxii] then L’Amant is both body and text in its continual slippages in language to encompass an embodied desire, as that which “signs cannot capture.” And, as argued previously, it writes desire without speaking it directly.[xxiii]
In considering the practice of writing and art more generally, Cavallaro looks again to Kristeva:
In creating artworks … we are productive but we simultaneously deplete ourselves, drain our bodies and minds of vital energies … we remain in possession of an inalienable right to resort to art and writing as ways of metaphorically reliving … lost plenitude through signs. [They] will inevitably lack the actual body’s sensuous immediacy but … will at least enable us to relate to it via a symbolic substitute.[xxiv]
This link to the embodiment inherent to the act of writing finds an analogous sentiment conveyed succinctly by the narrator in L’Amant: “I am worn out with desire.”[xxv] If we accept that Duras works to make desire and writing inseparable; if we accept that the body is both corporeal and textual in L’Amant, then desire is writing, is art, is creation, is text, is body. Duras makes every attempt to recover that “lost plenitude” of the body in the symbolic structure of her novel, such that she/the narrator becomes continually “worn out with desire.” The process of enacting desire in writing becomes both depletive and restorative, destructive and regenerative, and the unbroken chain of signification, as Boulous Walker notes, “does not attempt to sum up desire”[xxvi]; rather, desire, like writing, is always performed,[xxvii] which only becomes clearer in looking to a crucial passage involving the narrator’s lover and her friend, Hélène Lagonelle.
In leading up to this scene of imagined desire and encounter, the narrator describes Hélène’s body in an extensive, languid series of erotic observations, far more detailed than any we are provided of the lover, before she eventually says:
I am worn out with desire for Hélène Lagonelle. I am worn out with desire. I want to take Hélène Lagonelle with me to where every evening, my eyes shut, I have imparted to me the pleasure that makes you cry out. I’d like to give Hélène Lagonelle to the man who does that to me, so he may do it in turn to her. I want it to happen in my presence, I want her to do it as I wish, I want her to give herself where I give myself. It’s via Hélène Lagonelle’s body, through it, that the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me. A pleasure unto death.[xxviii]
In many ways, this erotic scene of eruptive jouissance is the culmination of the unstable, apocalyptic mode of writing desire in L’Amant. For some critics, it is evident of a dissolution of sexual roles so that the narrator may occupy all positions simultaneously within desire; participant and observer; man and woman; sadist and masochist.[xxix] For others, it is a deliberate indeterminacy between a fusion of subjectivities and bodies, and their fragmented dispersion, where “male and female are no longer discrete positions,[xxx] but become joined in a round of desire in which neither the subject nor the object of desire can reliably be placed.”[xxxi] The narrator’s desire to be present and to observe Hélène’s possession of her lover, and his possession of her, enacts desire itself in that through the body of another, “the ultimate pleasure would pass from him to me.” However, it is still unclear, especially given the eroticisation of Hélène, whether the narrator delegates her desire to the body of Hélène such that she may experience her lover more wholly, or whether deferring desire to her lover in this dynamic allows her to experience true desire for Hélène. The “object of desire” in this sense cannot be placed. This ambiguity of positionality is where the limits of desire brush up against the limits of language and meaning, and, as Hill is apt to note, desire functions as a “sublime and transgressive force” that annihilates singular interpretation.[xxxii]
The notion of the sublime is frequently raised in Duras criticism, particularly as it relates to desire and language. For Hill, desire itself is conflated with the sublime, as that which cannot be quantified or understood through rational, linguistic means.[xxxiii] Boulous Walker concurs with Hill’s notion and specifically notes that this configuration of desire as sublime troubles all attempts at stable meaning or identity.[xxxiv] Cavallaro, in discussing the écriture feminine of Luce Irigaray and Cixous, likens the unbounded, free-flowing energy of this writing to a Kantian sublime; that which gestures towards an undefinable, un-representable quality that eludes rational characterisation. Indeed, of the traditional aesthetic notion of the sublime Immanuel Kant notes that it is “formless” and to denote the sublime, “we soon perceive that for this it is not permissible to seek an appropriate standard outside itself … It is a greatness comparable to itself alone.”[xxxv] The sublime as an aesthetic category is intrinsically related to an experience of magnitude that abjures understanding or comprehension, and yet it also denotes a shared understanding of its own sublimity. Duras, although rather obliquely, links the sublime nature of desire with the vast sublimity of water, oceans, rivers, and the sea. In doing so, she attempts to reconcile in metaphor a conception of the sublime that she summarises aptly as “The sea, formless, simply beyond compare.”[xxxvi]
This formless sea is of the very “formless” nature that Kant claims is inherent to the sublime, where the greatness of it is “comparable to itself alone.” Duras in her novel takes this problem of magnitude even further, and construes the sublime, desire, as “beyond compare,” even to itself. This “formless sea” only appears in the novel for the first time after the narrator and her lover have sex, and the imagery continues some time later when she “tell[s] him of this desire … when you let the body alone, to seek and find and take what it likes, and then everything is right, and nothing’s wasted, the waste’s covered over and all is swept away in the torrent, in the force of desire.”[xxxvii] Desire is a “torrent”; it is raging, destructive, incomprehensible and sweeps away all within its path; it is “beyond compare”; it is “formless.”
Philosopher Elizabeth Grosz emphasises the historical associations between women’s bodies and desire with flows, formlessness, and liquidity.[xxxviii] This formlessness and liquidity is often constructed as an ontological negative (a lack) and as a metaphor for uncontrollability and irrationality, however Grosz argues that these qualities can be re-thought as a complication and challenge to a rigid, Cartesian metaphysics of body that binarises at every opportunity.[xxxix] Duras, I believe, takes up this refashioning of a “formless” desire, where desire and the sublime are embodied, where desire is written into being as a sublime entity of physical reality, an entity that wholly rejects an anti-corporeal conception of the sublime such as Kant’s, who observes that “the sublime is not to be looked for in the things of nature, but only in our own ideas.”[xl] Duras returns the sublime to the realm of the corporeal, the material, to desire, and as such actively works to implicate desire both in the act of writing and in the embodiment of the sublime. The destructive formlessness of desire in this sense works again in the apocalyptic mode, where subject/object divisions are inherently troubled and ambiguous, which only comes about “when you let the body alone.”[xli] This foregrounding of a corporeal sublime is what Slade argues is evident of Duras’s construction of a feminine sublime (sublime féminin) through language and her literary works, in that it repudiates the sublime as a purely abstract, aesthetic category.
Slade marks an important distinction in the history of aesthetic thought, one that of course predates Kant but was actively reinforced in his work, which is the association of men with the sublime, and women with the beautiful.[xlii] The sublime is linked to a deeper, more cosmic and universal understanding, where the beautiful is worldly and immanent, although Kant struggles to provide concrete differences in what constitutes a sublime understanding compared to a beautiful understanding between men and women.[xliii] To put it directly, then, “The feminist sublime is a revolution within language which undoes the signification of language within language,”[xliv] one that attempts to write against an anti-corporeal and rigid sublime that deals only in the abstract realm of ideas and contemplation. This is the literary project Duras embarks on; to write desire, to desire to write, and in turn find a path which links this sublime to the materiality of existence, one that marks sexual difference but, in true Duras fashion, does not easily avail itself to a clear position.[xlv]
In returning to Cixous and her call for women to write the body, to inscribe themselves into the text, Slade asserts that Duras’s writing is an enactment of a sublime féminin through a practice of écriture féminine.[xlvi] L’Amant, in acting out this feminist sublime, collapses together writing with desire, the sublime with the material, the body with the text, and extravagantly indulges in its own ambiguity and silences; it celebrates the suffering of the différend. The celebratory suffering of pleasure is even hinted at throughout the novel in the repetition of its mantra: “A pleasure unto death.”[xlvii] This compounding of “desires, differences, and différends” is what Slade terms “the sublime affect” of Duras’s writing; as that which produces its mesmerising, vertiginous qualities.[xlviii] Returning to a previous passage from the novel, the narrator herself wryly outlines a manifesto of sorts for writing, “if writing isn’t, all things, all contraries confounded … it’s nothing.”[xlix] L’Amant’s sublime affect, one that permeates and simmers under the surface of the novel throughout, is of course, as the narrator observes “all things confounded into one through some inexpressible essence.”[l] In confounding and compounding the contraries of desire, her writing works at the very limits of signification.
As both Slade and Boulous Walker highlight, there is first and foremost always a feeling disclosed, a feeling which engenders the différend, a feeling of the sublime, and the work of Duras’s writing is in essence to give space to the silence—to that very inexpressibility—and to mark the space that silence occupies. If Hill compares desire in Duras to a “sublime and transgressive force,” then this sublime is “the ecstatic experience at the margin of words and speech.”[li] And thus, though theory and philosophy are productive in extending the philosophical qualities of L’Amant, Duras’s ultimate position is at the “margin of words and speech,” where the limits and borders of language are continually tested and made contiguous with desire itself.
In her fiction, then, Marguerite Duras takes the radical step of not merely signifying desire, and instead enacting it in the very process of writing itself. In this essay I have argued that in L’Amant, the relationship between writing and desire is such that the two are inextricable from the other; to write is to desire, and to desire is to write. Importantly, desire is by its very nature made unspeakable, and as such her writing thrives in the spaces and silences revealed by this différend. Continuous with this complex chiasmus, I argue that Duras writes the body as text, creating a novel that is at all times “all contraries confounded … all things confounded into one.”[lii] From this complex space, I argue in agreement with many critics that Duras constructs a sublime féminin in her practice of an écriture féminine whereby the Kantian sublime is refashioned, critiqued, and redeployed into a feminist space that exhumes the corporeality of the sublime from an anti-material realm. In doing so, the Durassian sublime posits desire as a sublime force, one which is only evoked in aiming towards its very unspeakability in writing, a writing that begets a sublime affect through the various ways in which it compounds desire and différends to claw at the very margins of language and signification.
Andrew Millar is a recent graduate of a Bachelor of Arts in literature and philosophy. He plans to undertake an Honours year in postmodern literature, and is particularly interested in the intersections of phenomenology, feminist philosophy, and literature.
ENDNOTES
[i] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears & B.F. McGuinness(Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1974), 74.
[ii] Marguerite Duras, L’Amant, trans. Barbara Bray(London: Flamingo, 1986), 12.
[iii] Michelle Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” in Performing Sexualities (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1994), 11.
[iv] Duras, L’Amant, 12.
[v] Andrew Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” in Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime (New York: Peter Land, 2007), 94.
[vi] Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John McGowan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Jeffrey J. Williams (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018), 1869.
[vii] Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 11.
[viii] Duras, L’Amant, 12.
[ix] Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 11.
[x] Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 11.
[xi] Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires (London: Routledge, 1993), 36.
[xii] Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, 36.
[xiii] James S. Williams, The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), 22.
[xiv] This notion of apocalypse is more akin to the destructive (and constructive) possibilities of an ‘apocalyptic’ mode of writing, rather than a literal apocalypse. This can be thought of as a transgression of sorts that Hill clarifies: “[Writing]’s role is to challenge and subvert the status quo, to undermine all established discourses and ideologies” 36.
[xv] Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 17.
[xvi] Wittgenstein, Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus, 56. Wittgenstein’s aphorism here gestures at a world wholly structured and delimited at the borders of language; Duras clearly gestures beyond such borders in her exploration of desire that seems to exceed language itself.
[xvii] Duras, L’Amant, 12.
[xviii] Duras, L’Amant, 23.
[xix] Duras, L’Amant, 39.
[xx] Duras, L’Amant, 40.
[xxi] Dani Cavallaro, “Writing and the Body,” in French Feminist Theory: An Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 126.
[xxii] Cavallaro, “Writing and the Body,” 115.
[xxiii] Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 19.
[xxiv] Cavallaro, “Writing and the Body,” 134.
[xxv] Duras, L’Amant, 79.
[xxvi] Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 19.
[xxvii] Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 19.
[xxviii] Duras, L’Amant, 79.
[xxix] James S. Williams, The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras, 72.
[xxx] It should be noted that there is a wealth of post-colonial criticism on Duras’s handling of the race of the lover in L’Amant, who is Chinese. Much of this centers around the feminisation of othered racial bodies, and whether Duras is employing an Orientalist approach to critique these distinctions, or if she in fact is reinforcing stereotypes of racial otherness. While this is beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth making note of that theorising on writing and desire could be productively intersected in future writing with how race functions as an intermediary between that relationship in the novel.
[xxxi] Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, 79.
[xxxii] Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, 54.
[xxxiii] Hill, Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, 54.
[xxxiv] Michelle Boulous Walker, “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence,” 19.
[xxxv] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 80.
[xxxvi] Duras, L’Amant, 42.
[xxxvii] Duras, L’Amant, 46-47.
[xxxviii] Elizabeth Grosz, “Sexed Bodies,” in Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 203.
[xxxix] Grosz, “Sexed Bodies,” 204.
[xl] Kant, Critique of Judgement, 80.
[xli] Duras, L’Amant, 46.
[xlii] Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” 92.
[xliii] Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” 92.
[xliv] Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” 92.
[xlv] Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” 92.
[xlvi] Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” 94.
[xlvii] Duras, L’Amant, 79.
[xlviii] Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” 95.
[xlix] Duras, L’Amant, 42.
[l] Duras, L’Amant, 42.
[li] Slade, “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime,” 95.
[lii] Duras, L’Amant, 12.
WORKS CITED
Boulous Walker, Michelle. “Performing Desire: Duras in Silence.” In Performing Sexualities, 11-23. Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 1994.
Cavallaro, Dani. “Writing and the Body.” In French Feminist Theory: An Introduction, 114-134. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004.
Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, John McGowan, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Jeffrey J. Williams, 1869-1886. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2018.
Duras, Marguerite. L’Amant. Translated by Barbara Bray. London: Flamingo, 1986.
Grosz, Elizabeth. “Sexed Bodies.” In Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, 187-211. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994.
Hill, Leslie. Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. London: Routledge, 1993.
Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Translated by James Creed Meredith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Slade, Andrew. “Marguerite Duras, Terror, and the Sublime.” In Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, and the Postmodern Sublime, 85-103. New York: Peter Land, 2007.
Williams, James S. The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1974.
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