More Candles for Marguerite Duras

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of French writer-director Marguerite Duras.

Duras was born in French Indochina, near Saigon, in 1914, and spent virtually all of her adult life in France, where she died in 1996. Her complete works will span roughly 4000 pages in four volumes of the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

Until the publication of L'amant (The Lover) in 1984 - Duras' first bestseller and winner of the Prix Goncourt - she had for four decades almost the status of an underground writer. When I began reading her in the 1970s, only two of her books were available as rack-sized paperbacks in France: the novel Moderato cantabile (1958) and the screenplay for Hiroshima mon amour (published in 1960). Today she has acquired the status of a 'classic' (today's birthday feels to me like one of those watershed French events, like the funeral of Sartre). Duras is perhaps the most modern of classics, if either of those words is still meaningful - and some younger readers now approach her with an element of trepidation. (In interviews, Duras seemed to feel that 'the young' would ultimately understand her best, and I think they will, if they will only read her.)

Although I never met Duras, I 'followed' her (see my explanation of this use of the word 'follow', and an earlier discussion of Duras, here ) for the last 20 years of her life. She remains in some ways the most immediate of the authors I refer to collectively as 'the 26' - so that it's especially difficult for me to write about her without writing about myself. But I've resolved to let this be her day - and the best way I know to do that is to point to a few of her books as possible means of access to the rest.

Let's repeat three titles I've already mentioned - Moderato cantabile, Hiroshima mon amour, L'amant - and add a few more: Le ravissement de Lol. V. Stein, Le Vice-Consul, India Song, L'amante anglaise, L'été 80, La douleur (War) and Ecrire. But you can start, or restart, almost anywhere...

More to come.

'Hiroshima mon amour' (1959)

For several months now I've wanted to say something here about the 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour (directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Marguerite Duras). And that mirrors, to some extent, a problem faced by the creators of the film: the desire to speak about something that cannot be addressed directly.

Coming on the heels of her novel Moderato Cantabile (1958), Hiroshima mon amour again revealed Duras to be a powerfully innovative writer with more surprises up her sleeve than her earliest work had suggested. It was Resnais's first full-length film, and--together with Truffaut's 400 Blows (which, like Hiroshima, was first seen at Cannes in 1959) and Resnais's next film, Last Year at Marienbad--is associated with the emergence of the New Wave of French cinema.

But talking about how Hiroshima mon amour is or isn't a New Wave film, feels as wrong as comparable discussions of whether Moderato Cantabile is or isn't an example of le Nouveau roman. And the same thing could be said about efforts to situate Hiroshima in the respective careers of Resnais and Duras.

It's a film that both have spoken of as being born out of an inability to bring the usual tools of understanding, language and art to bear on the violent disruptions of the Second World War. Instead of making a documentary (or near-documentary) on the bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945 and its aftermath, they decided to film a love story set in the Hiroshima of 1957.

A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) is finishing work on a 'film about peace' in Hiroshima. The day before she is to return to France, she meets and becomes involved with a Japanese architect (Okada Eiji). When she tells him of everything she's seen in Hiroshima (museum, hospital, people...), he insists: 'You have seen nothing in Hiroshima--nothing.' The problem isn't the difference of nationalities: it's the enormity, the utter incomprehensibility of Hiroshima--and perhaps of war itself--as a phenomenon. The viewer sees, among other things, approximately what the French actress has seen: the Hiroshima of documentaries and tourism. But these images will be joined by others as the film continues....

Although they're both married, the architect asks the actress to stay on with him in Hiroshima. She softens her eventual refusal by telling him her own story of loss in wartime France, a story not even her husband knows. More terrible even than her girlhood loss and subsequent humiliation, however, is her acquired knowledge that the loss of love is not fatal: that we live on and in time forget. This does not mean that we forget the intolerable as a first step to building a new life: the erosion of memory is rather an extension of the ravages of war.

For me, it was time to see the film again, and to return to Duras's published screenplay. Perhaps you'll join me.

The Followed

Today's post has one and only one purpose: to introduce a concept. And a (blog) label. A concept and a label that didn't exist an hour ago.

Here's how it all began to take form. My intention, formed while sipping the first latte of the day, was to blog today about Marguerite Duras in general and (her screenplay for) Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour in particular. Duras, as regular readers of this blog may remember, is one of the writers I refer to collectively as 'the 26': a list of favorite writers that came together for me one day--in one moment, in fact--in 2009.

The 26 are for me an idiosyncratic mini-canon of authors for whom I have enormous esteem. I also have surprisingly clear and relatively unvarying feelings about who 'belongs' and who doesn't. There might be clerical (and other) errors, and changes that come with new experiences (I simply forgot to include Faulkner in the list, and in early 2009 I hadn't read Jo Nesbø yet) but there was at least no indecisiveness on my part: Balzac, a definite yes; Flaubert, no.

I'm very aware, however, that most of the 26 are what we used to call 'dead white European males'. (The only exceptions are Jane Austen, Duras, Thich Nhat Hanh and Ruth Rendell.) DWEMs tend to be included 'automatically' when we start formulating canons, and then the newly-formulated or -recognized canon (at least for some of us) brings up the whole DWEM issue in turn. Today I want to stress the 'D' term: 'dead'. Only two of the original 26 are alive: Thich Nhat Hanh (born 1926) and Ruth Rendell (born 1930). I'm very conscious of a sense that we have a different relationship to writers who are in some broad sense our contemporaries. And what has brought this home to me is not some sense of remoteness from authors of earlier eras but rather a sense that I needed to disclose or explain something about my closeness to Duras.

Marguerite Duras, who was born in 1914, died in 1996. For the last 20 years or so of her life, I followed her.

If I explain what I mean by that, it sounds like a watered-down paraphrase: 'I eagerly awaited each new publication, bought it at the earliest opportunity and read it immediately.' In reality, there was more passion in it. Note that I felt that the fact that I followed her was something that I had to disclose....

I had started reading Duras at some point in the early 1970s, reading with enthusiasm and admiration, reading books from her backlist--the Hiroshima screenplay, Moderato Cantabile, Lol. V Stein, L'amante anglaise--and towards the end of that time, something clicked for me and I had to read... well, of course, everything of hers I'd missed, but, even more passionately, every new volume as it appeared, starting, as I remember, with the screenplay Le camion.

I'm sure it had something to do with the fact that Duras in the 1970s was still perceived as at least marginally avant-garde. The great popular success of The Lover (1984) was still to come; there were even in France virtually no rack-sized paperback editions of her work. She wasn't a classic then.

And the fact that I followed her then, and for so many years thereafter, sets her apart from most of the rest of the 26. Let's risk overstating the obvious: for almost 20 years I 'went where she went'; I never lost sight of her. I didn't literally stalk her; we never met; indeed, I probably continue to have far less interest in the details of her private life (which have filled many books, both her own and others') than do the majority of her readers.

Still, when I came up with 'the Followed' as a term to designate collectively the writers whom I have read or still read in this way, I heard in that term a hint of Vince Kincaid's following of his ex-wife Miranda (in yesterday's excerpt from A Kiss Before You Leave Me) more clearly than the sense in which we speak of followers on Twitter. I want to underscore in 'the Followed' an association with the love you never quite outgrow, and such a love totally out of the context of regularization by corporations (e.g., Twitter) or groups (e.g., the totality of the 'fanbase' of a particular writer).

What writers have you 'followed' in this sense? How did it turn out?

Five Faces of Emma (Flaubert, Anyone? - Part 2)

Today I’ll sketch out as many examples as possible of the bovarysme I mentioned in my last blog post. As I suggested there, this bovarysme involves reading or interpretation that may endanger or seduce the reader who identifies with the characters in a text, for example.

When in the Inferno (links here) Dante encounters Francesca da Rimini and her brother-in-law Paolo Malatesta, she tells the poet how she and Paolo were drawn together, reading from a book recounting the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere. Paolo and Francesca quickly emulated the legendary lovers, and Francesca’s husband, Paolo’s brother, murdered them. Francesca blames the book alone—calling it a ‘Galehault’ (the name of the character in Arthurian legend who persuades Lancelot to declare his love to Guinevere).

The character we know as ‘Don Quixote’ is driven mad by his addictive reading of books of chivalry. He imagines both that the fictive world of chivalric romance is real and that he himself is a knight in it.

Catherine Morland, the young heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, is such an enthusiast of Gothic fiction (and especially Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho) that she comes to believe that the very Austen-like world in which she dwells, conceals a dark Radcliffean underside, rife with treachery, perhaps even murder.

Emma Bovary, first as a schoolgirl and then as a young wife, reads romantic fiction—‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘high’ and ‘low’—voraciously, and sees in it a sort of road map for life, a promise of what she can expect. She’s disappointed, and puzzled, by a marriage devoid of romance: ‘Emma wondered what people meant, exactly, in real life, by words like happiness, passion and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.’  She seeks love and happiness in vain, both in her marriage and outside it; her readerly tastes turn libertine, and she moves into successively more destructive relationships.

Finally, in Marguerite Duras’s 1958 novel Moderato Cantabile (which one contemporary reviewer described as ‘Madame Bovary rewritten by Béla Bartók’), Anne Desbaresdes, another woman bored with her middle-class marriage, strikes up a potentially dangerous acquaintance with a man in a café with whom she embroiders a speculative narrative about another man and another woman, killer and victim respectively in a crime passionnel that has just taken place in the café. As day follows day and one glass of wine follows another and another, Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin weigh evidence they don’t really have, weaving hypotheses of how the other pair came together (as strangers drinking in a café?) and what may have driven the man to kill the woman. Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin are drawn together by the murder, but it is not simply as bystanders: they seem to be talking not only about the other couple but also about themselves at the same time. The novel remains mysterious—there are no easy answers. Its version of interpretation is as ambiguous as anything in Faulkner (in this context, it has always reminded me of the long interpretive dialogue between the roommates in Absalom, Absalom!)—but one thing is clear: on some register their dialogue threatens to destroy Anne Desbaresdes’s world.

Still to come: a sixth face of Emma (Miranda Kincaid, naturally), and where we fit in.

Flaubert, Anyone?

My first thought today was to blog collectively about several 'classics' that come under the rubric 'in Miranda's books': books that were reference points not only for me as the author of A Kiss Before You Leave Me but also for its characters, especially Miranda Kincaid, several of whose favorite books and authors from her college days are listed in chapter six. These are books and authors that Vince, then her boyfriend and now her ex-husband, might be said to have read over Miranda's shoulder, figuratively speaking, as part of an attempt to understand and share (some would say control) all of her passions.

What a number of those 'classics' (Don Quixote, Madame Bovary and Marguerite Duras' unspecified but very much intended novel Moderato Cantabile) share is a concern with what the French call bovarysme... meaning in this context the very familiar literary motif of (excessive or dangerous) identification with what we read (or interpret): the book as seducer, familiar in European literature at least since the 'Paolo and Francesca' passage in canto five of Dante's Inferno. It's a huge topic in general, and multifaceted even just within A Kiss Before You Leave Me--a topic to which I promise to return, soon, soon.

Today, I wish only to recognize the author of Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, as a surprising ghost who--in little ways--haunts me as the author of A Kiss Before You Leave Me. 'Surprising' because of all the names to be found on the spines of 'Miranda's books', Flaubert's is the one (I would have said) farthest from my heart: true, he's an absolutely inevitable point of reference for 'all of us' (at least if 'we' are Eurocentric male writers who grew up with a certain literary canon in place), someone I've read, studied, even taught, throughout my life... but little more than that. Anyone who's come to Kiss after reading both Flaubert and his predecessor Honoré de Balzac (author, among many other works, of A Woman of Thirty, the novel most often mentioned as the inspiration for Madame Bovary) can well imagine that I'm far more impassioned by the unruly, often melodramatic (not to say megalomanic) Balzac than by Flaubert, master of the mot juste and (in Sentimental Education) of the timetable. ('Balzac or Flaubert?' is the 'lady or the tiger?', the 'boxers or briefs?' question for those of us who are still stuck in the French 19th century.) When I do manage to think lovingly of Flaubert, it's usually because I've managed to turn him into something like a Balzac character lurking beneath Flaubert's professional surface; in other words, I've endowed him, rightly or wrongly, with a passionate, messy vulnerability which he would not have appreciated.

How, though, does his ghost haunt me? I think it would be trivial to summarize the plots of Bovary and Kiss in such a way as to highlight their parallels ('a discontented middle-class housewife takes lovers' etc.). But Madame Bovary is famous for three things, even in the minds of people who remember little else about it: an obscenity trial (1857) that put it on the map as similar trials were to do for Ulysses, Howl and Lady Chatterley's Lover in the 20th century; the concept of bovarysme, however understood; and Flaubert's much-quoted statement that 'Madame Bovary, c'est moi.' Obscenity feels like a severely dated issue in present-day Western democracies, but the issue survives, in a muted way, in the 'pages' of A Kiss Before You Leave Me and in the responses of a few readers. Bovarysme I've promised to go into another day. But I became aware very early in the writing of A Kiss Before You Leave Me that I was all of its characters--partially, imperfectly... but, to me, unmistakably, and perhaps to an extent that is possible or likely only in the case of a first novel. That last point is tricky, but while twice may be pure coincidence (Madame Bovary was Flaubert's first published novel, Kiss is mine), a third reference may sway you: Goethe's first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther--not named among Miranda's books, and yet, and yet....

'Time Value' versus 'Tristram Shandy'

Most of the time the Jascha who writes Jascha Writes is content to remind you less of his alter ego, the more tightly wound (or tightly winding) James Hulbert who wrote A Kiss Before You Leave Me, than of Tristram Shandy, who in Laurence Sterne's masterpiece (1759ff.) sets out to tell the story of his life, gets caught up in anticipation of his own conception and (for hundreds of pages) may or may not get around to being born: the character as (pure) narrator, almost, and surely the poster child for dilatory discourse. Sound familiar? If you started delaying your next coffee break when I promised you a friend's recipe for skinny cappuccino last month, you're well and truly weaned now; and if you started wondering a couple of days later why I cited Marguerite Duras' North China Lover rather than her earlier (and far better-known) book The Lover, well, you're still wondering. But that's all right. All in good time. Most of the time. But if I don't post something today about Nick Spalding's Life… With No Breaks, you risk missing out on big savings on it at Amazon.com, where it usually costs $2.99 but until the end of October is reduced to 89 cents, which is a steal even for a Kindle book. Nick Spalding is a high-profile UK indie humor author and blogger; Life… With No Breaks is currently the number 4 humor bestseller on the Amazon.co.uk Kindle list and deserves more readers internationally. (It even contains a glossary of UK-specific vocabulary. Readers in the UK, by the way, can get a deal, too: for a few more days, Life… is just 69p at Amazon.co.uk.) Now, is it an accident that I'm talking about Sterne and Spalding practically in the same breath? Not necessarily.

26

Last year I caught the '25 things about me' bug on Facebook, and one of my 25 was an attempt to list my 25 favorite authors. I managed to come up with a list of 26, none of whom I could bring myself to cut. The list still looks pretty good to me today: Austen, Balzac, Büchner, John Dickson Carr, Chekhov, Conrad, Dickens, Diderot, Dostoevsky, Dumas, Marguerite Duras, Euripides, Freud, Henry James, Kafka, Kleist, Marx, Thich Nhat Hanh, Nietzsche, Plato, Ruth Rendell, Sade, Schiller, Shakespeare, Simenon, Wodehouse. I propose in future posts, from time to time, to blog about the 26, one by one, and to recommend examples of their work. (Hence the link to Duras' North China Lover in the column to the right.)