'The Malady of Death explores a relationship as irreconcilable, as about the gap between men and women that is not romantically resolved, but inexplicably opened. “You realize it’s here, in her, that the malady of death is fomenting, that it’s this shape stretched out before you that decrees the malady of death.” This short, hypothetical book about two people meeting up for sex has the narrator saying early on, “You may have paid her. May have said: I want you to come every night for a few days. She’d have given you a long look and said in that case it’d be expensive. And then she says: What is it you want?”
'Here, the woman is presented in the third person as she; the male character in the second as you. “You say you want to try, try it, try to know, to get used to that body, those breasts, that scent. To beauty, to the risk of having children implicit in that body.” Julia Kristeva in Black Sun has astutely referred to Duras’s “aesthetics of awkwardness”, the way Duras will create a truncated syntax to achieve a certain sense of fragmented melancholy. “Duras’s work does not analyze itself by seeking its sources in the music that lies under the words nor in the defeat of the narrative’s logic. If there be a formal search, it is subordinate to confrontation with the silence of horror in oneself and in the world.” Kristeva adds, “such a confrontation leads to an aesthetics of awkwardness on the one hand, to a noncathartic literature on the other.” In an interview, ‘Black Sun: Melancholia and Creation’, Kristeva mentions students saying to her of Duras’s work, “We cannot read Duras because it is so close to us that it plunges us back into the sickness.” Kristeva later adds, “catharsis supposes that we leave depression, while I have a sense that these books plunge us into depression and do not give us a way to get out of it.”
'In The Malady of Death, the literary style seems to force upon us an inevitability that cannot be reversed; for these are characters caught in a metaphysical battle of sexual wills that goes far beyond their individual characteristics. This isn’t quite the same thing as saying they are archetypes; more that given the condition of a certain type of man, and a certain type of woman, the result is inevitable. The man wants to “try loving”, but he is also paying her, and the more intimacy he requires, the more money she will charge. When he says he wants to sleep “with your sex at rest, somewhere unknown,” and that he wants “to weep there, in that particular place”, “she says in that case it’ll be even more expensive. She tells you how much.” Is this why the malady of death takes over; because he is in love with a woman that he cannot possess except on economic terms? Duras’s genius is for balancing the singular and the general – the inexplicability between the sexes, but also the specific problem given the relationship she is looking at. Here is a man it would seem given to control, and perhaps he believes by paying for the woman he will retain that power; that he can go to the very deepest part of himself emotionally whilst holding on to his full identity.
'Yet perhaps this identity is shattered before the encounter and can never recover from it, and Duras opens the book implying this: “You wouldn’t have known her, you’d have seen her everywhere at once, in a hotel, in a street, in a train, in a bar, in a book, in a film, in yourself, your inmost self, when your sex grew erect in the night, seeking somewhere to put itself, somewhere to shed its load of tears.” The man may be paying for the pleasure, but the woman is denying him some notion of the essence he wishes to understand. “She’d always be ready, willing or no. That’s just what you’ll never know. She’s more mysterious than any other external thing you’ve ever known.”
'What Duras’s book captures is the further reaches of that unknowability, a grandeur of the inexplicable, we might call it, the inevitable gap between the sexes that will occasionally reveal the abyss. One reason why Kristeva feels such trepidation in the face of Duras’s work is that it traps the reader in a state of inevitable melancholy. In the interview, she sees Duras’s work as perhaps personal, but that touches upon “something general that joins a universal symptom of our generation, I think. That is why her books speak to so many people.” Kristeva reckons, though, that the work’s danger lies in that “it is not cathartic but, let’s say, an echo, a connivance with depression.” This connivance meets the gap between the sexes, and Duras talks interestingly of the idea that men in heterosexual relationships are biding their time. “The number of men in heterosexual couples (or in drawing rooms or on beaches or in the streets) who are just waiting,” she says in the essay ‘Men’, “all alone, with no language in common between them and their partners, and don’t know it.” Here we have the flipside of The Malady of Death and yet not at all contrary to this work. If we have the man searching out the unknown other in the novella, we also have in ‘Men’ man falling not into the abyss but into boredom. Is this partly where Duras’s non-cathartic melancholy lies, from the male perspective, and in turn perhaps for the woman also? If the woman is finally no more nor less than an obsessive revelation of nothingness, or someone with whom time stands too still, what hope is there for the couple?
'This is not the place to address alternatives, for that would be to defy the point Kristeva sees in Duras’s work: that in the hopelessness resides the noncathartic. Now before meeting the woman in The Malady of Death, the man seems never to have loved. “Haven’t you ever loved a woman? You say no, never. She asks: Haven’t you ever desired a woman? No, never.” Yet near the end of the book the narrator says “even so you managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.” What does the narrator mean by this? Perhaps a sidelong glance at that great male writer of love, Cesare Pavese, can help us here, and some comments he makes in his diaries This Business of Living. When Pavese says in an entry on October 13th, 1938 “it is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her,” Duras might say that though one may never have met the person doesn’t mean you can do without her. This is surely what Duras means when saying the man lost her before it happened. It is a crack awaiting an opening, a space that the woman creates that reveals the nothingness within him. The final entry in Pavese’s diaries, before he killed himself partly over a failed love affair, opens with “the thing most feared in secret always happens”. Has the man in The Malady of Death met the thing most feared – not so much the woman of his dreams as the one who can open up the nightmare of non-being? In one moment near the end of the book “the tears wake her. She looks at you. She looks at the room. And again at you. She strokes your hand. Asks: Why are you crying? You say it’s for her to say, she’s the one who ought to know.” Is it because, she says, he has never loved, never known the wish to “keep him for yourself, yourself alone, to take him, steal him in defiance of every law, every moral authority – you don’t know what that is, you’ve never experienced it?” The man replies “never”, and the woman says “a dead man’s a strange thing”.
'Has the man always been like Pavese when he says in the diary entry on 30th September, “the best defence against a love affair is to tell yourself over and over again till you are dizzy: ‘this passion is simply stupid; the game is not worth the candle’”? Would Duras reply that the man isn’t avoiding love but confronting his own basic absence of feeling? When the woman says love takes place “perhaps through a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe”, “never through an act of will”, can a man quite countenance this acceptance? In another essay in Practicalities, ‘The Man Who Was a Lie’, Duras says of a man she knew, “he thought men and women were as fundamentally different in their flesh, their desire and their shape as if they belonged to two different orders of creation.”
'Yet again we have Duras talking of the grandeur of inexplicability, and of course there is nothing more grandiose about the inexplicability of The Malady of Death than the premise upon which it is based: the man hires the woman to stay with him for a couple of weeks hoping that by the end of this relationship he will be able to experience love with a woman. It is a premise containing its own inevitable failure: as we’ve noted the woman saying, love is not an act of will, nor an act of purchase.'-- Tony McKibbin
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Further
'In Love with Duras'
Marguerite Duras Website
Marguerite Duras @ IMDb
MD @ goodreads
'The Life and Loves of Marguerite Duras'
'Marguerite Duras at 100'
'The Muse of Trouville'
'The obsessions of Marguerite Duras'
'Notes Toward a New Language: Holes: On Marguerite Duras'
'On a Pedestal'
'The Stolen Pigeons', by Marguerite Duras
'The Bible', by Marguerite Duras
'Intense Vocalization: Marguerite Duras', by David Ehrenstein
'Truth and Memory in Two Works by Marguerite Duras'
'The Contexts of Marguerite Duras's Homophobia'
Tour: 'IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF MARGUERITE DURAS'
'Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure'
'The TLS Blog: The art of Marguerite Duras'
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Film Adaptation
'Director Asa Mader's La Maladie de la Mort, based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, and starring Anna Mouglalis, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2003. The film has subsequently played in festivals worldwide. La Maladie de la Mort examines the process of a man in his attempt to love. He finds a woman: in a hotel, in a street, in a bar, in a train. She would come. Perhaps for several days, perhaps for several weeks. She would be young, beautiful. She could be any woman. And it is her who will discover he is taken by an incurable illness, the malady of death.'-- collaged
Trailer
Watch the entire film
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Extras
Marguerite Duras - Worn Out With Desire To Write (1985)
Marguerite Duras - "Écrire" (ARTE)
Marguerite Duras MARGUERITE TELLE QU'EN ELLE-MÊME
Jean Luc Godard - Marguerite Duras
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Interview
from Book Rags
What does it mean to you to write at the end of the twentieth century?
Marguerite Duras: Writing … I've never asked myself to be aware of what time period I was living in. I have asked myself this question in relation to my child and his future activities, or in wondering what would become of the working class—you see, in relation to political considerations or issues. But not as concerns writing. I believe writing is beyond all … contingency.
Is it valid/of value to write as a woman, and is it part of your writing today?
I have several opinions about that, several things to say. Perhaps I should give a personal example. I don't have any major problems anymore in terms of the reception of my books, but the way men in society respond to me hasn't changed.
That hasn't changed at all?
No, each time I see critics who are … Misogyny is still at the forefront.
Only in France or …
I haven't read the foreign papers. The Lover, you know, has been translated in twenty-nine countries. There have been thousands and millions of copies sold. I don't think that in America there's been as much [misogyny] … because a lot of women write articles [on my work]. I don't think there's been any misogyny, strictly speaking, aimed at me in America.
I have the same impression.
No, actually, there is someone at the New York Times who doesn't like me at all, because I was once rather nasty to him. It was after a showing of India Song. The auditorium was full, I remember that, and at the end the students were really pleased and gave me a big ovation. The audience was asked to speak; I was there to answer. So this guy got up, you know, from the Times, very classic, old. He began, "Madame Duras, I really got bored with your …"
He said that?! in public?
Yes, it was a public thing. So I said: "Listen, I'm really sorry, but it's hardly my fault. There must be something wrong with you." He just looked at me. (Usually this works well.) "Please excuse me, but I can't do anything for you." It was really terrible. Since then, people tell me, "I can't invite you anymore because he'll never forgive you." It doesn't matter to me. I'm very happy.
I have the impression that misogyny, in the most classic sense of the term, exists in France much more than in the United States. Even if it's on the tip of American men's tongues or the tip of their pens, they stop themselves now because there's been so much … They swallow their words because they know what will happen afterward if they don't; whereas here in France, it seems to me that they get away with it. No one says anything. And that's why, for me, to write as a woman in France begins to have a very different meaning….
But I have safety valves. That is, from time to time, I write articles about critical theory, and that scares the critics.
I can imagine.
But … it scares women too. It has to do with écritureféminine. There are a lot of women who align themselves with men. Recently, a guy did a whole page in a journal about me to say that I don't exist, that I'm … I don't remember what. So in that instance, I said that he was the victim of great pain at the thought of my existence. And I can't do anything about that.
It's not worth the energy.
No. It's not a question of energy. It's just that in France, if you don't pay attention, you can get eaten up.
As a woman or as a writer generally?
As a woman writer. There are two potential attacks: those from homosexuals and those from heteros.
And they're different?
At first, no; but in the end they each think that they do such different things, although it's not true at all. They do the same things. It's about jealousy, envy … a desire to supplant women. It's a strange phenomenon. I write quite a lot about homosexuality … because I live with a man who's homosexual … as everyone knows … but I write outside all polemic. You see, Blue Eyes, Black Hair is outside any polemic. Homosexuals are often not interested in their experiences, they think they've said everything there is to say. That's a limitation. They're not interested in knowing what a woman can get from that experience. What interests them is knowing what people think about homosexuality, whether you're for or against it, that's all.
You have been describing men's reactions to your work as a woman writer. I too have been intrigued by the question of how men respond to woman and women. My latest book, Men in Feminism, coedited with Paul Smith, is a collection of articles addressing the complicated relationship men have to feminism, and women have to feminist men. My book Gynesis intervenes in this debate by examining how the metaphor of woman operates in several key French texts by men from the last twenty-odd years, for example, those by Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan.
You know, even before those writers, there was Beauvoir. She didn't change women's way of thinking. Nor did Sartre, for that matter. He didn't change anything at all. Is Gynesis coming out in France?
Yes. One of the interesting problems that has come up with my translator is how to find an expression for the term "man writer." In the United States, you see, we're trying to deuniversalize: we say woman writer. We try to give terms genders. But in French, it doesn't work at all. If my translator uses "man writer," everyone will say it's horrible.
It's too late.
Yes, it's too late. But I can't just put the gender of the writer in the footnotes either. When I say "writer," I mean "man writer" because that's how the universal returns.
Because "writer" historically means male, is that it?
Yes, the universal.
But even when they were making distinctions between men and women writers twenty-five years ago, in newspaper headlines, there were no women writers or men writers. There were "novels by women,""novels by men," and books by women or books by men. But that was always a minor distinction, always in a footnote.
It's odd, in French you can get woman out of the universal, but not man (you can say woman writer [femme écrivain] but not man writer [homme écrivain]).
Many women writing today find themselves, for the first time in history, at the center of such institutions as the university or psychoanalysis. In your opinion, will this new placement of women help them to enter the twentieth-century canon, and if so will they be at the heart of this corpus or (still) in the footnotes?
I think that the women who can get beyond the feeling of having to correct history will save a lot of time.
Please explain.
I think that the women who are correcting history, who are trying to correct the injustice of which they're victims, of which they always were and still are victims—because nothing's changed, we have to really get that: in men's heads everything's still the same….
You really think so?
I'm sure, yes. The women who are trying to correct man's nature, or what has become his nature—call it whatever you want—they're wasting their time.
What you're saying is really depressing.
I think that if a woman is free, alone, she will go ahead that way, without barriers; that is how I think she'll create fruitful work.
All alone?
Yes. I don't care about men. I've given up on them, personally. It's not a question of age, it's a question of intellectuality, if you like, of one's mental attitude. I've given up on trying to … to put them on a logical track. Completely given up.
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Book
Grove Press
A man hires a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence, "the malady of death.""The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning." - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential." - Translation Review.
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Excerpt
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p.s. Hey. So, I'm back. I was in London and Kent. I didn't say so before because Zac and I were going over there to surprise Kiddiepunk for his birthday. While there, I fucked up my back, or, rather, my back fucked me up, so I'm in pain and on pain killers. And Paris is boiling hot. In other words, this p.s. is going to suck to one degree and/or another. Apologies. ** Tuesday ** David Ehrenstein, I thought that bulge might cause a mention. ** David S. Estornell, Hi, David. Hooray for the post. Thank you. ** Bill, I thought so too. Cool. 'Young Adam', yeah, great. How did you decide to pick up it? I believe Mr. W arrives here in a week, yippee. ** Thomas Moronic, Gorgeous riposte poems, even through a filter pain plus meds. God can only imagine how they will land when I'm clear as bell again, and I will find out. Thank you, T. ** Kier, Hi, Kierster. Shit, did you get sick or better? Better? I'm a mess too, so I send you a weak, trembly high-five from the ugh place. Cool, awesome! About the Zac/me project thing. We will be in touch at some point since the thing gets firmer. Thank you!!!!!!!! My week was fun even if it has ended with me lying on my back on the floor grr-ing. I think I'd better preserve my strength and brain cells, so I'll skip the details for today, but it was very cool. How are you feeling now, and what are you doing? ** Bernard Welt, Hi, B! My fingers are crossed that said rumor is based. And I'm so happy, as you can imagine, that you're working on your work! I expect a full report or private reading or something once you're here. I'll be here when you move in. I just found out this very morning that one of the main performers in our piece had a heart attack, and the premiere has been cancelled. He's fine and seemingly can do future gigs, but not next week. So, I'll be here. And with any luck, the hellish heatwave that Paris is being murdered by at the moment will be over by the 8th. Buzz me when you're here or almost here. Excited to see you, very natch! Yeah, I'm keeping up on the US stuff. Here in France it's just strikes and strikes and disrupted travel of every kind at the moment. ** Cal Graves, Thanks. Variety of reactions is the spice of life, says my sedated, pain-distorted brain. I've been good apart from back problems and the heat from hell skies hovering over Paris. Wow, that's serious flooding. I'll trade you your drowning people for our growing pile elderly heat-stroke victims. Job! Mall! What's the job? Agonizingly-ly, Dennis. ** Steevee, Hi. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Ooh, letter press. So cool. I have a little letter press fetish. Did you SPUD guys make stuff with it? ** Adrienne White, Hi. Oh, shit, hold on, let me see if I can it again easily. No, I can't, and my brain/back are uncooperative. Memory says it's a German band. A punk band, I think. On actual X-rays. Of the band members, I think. I promise that I'll look for it again when I get a pain break. Love, me. ** Wednesday ** James, Hi. No, it was a mysterious but now clarified (see: above) trip for fun. We surprised Kiddiepunk for his birthday, made a trip to Diggerland in Kent, saw art, walked around, hurt my back. Wow, glad C_C's photo was such a hit with you. You're no weirder than me, but that probably means you're weird since I'm pretty sure I am too big time. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. What a true and depressing Babits quote. Good old Eve. I should do an EB post. Thank for the Times link. I'll read it when my brain is functioning sufficiently again. ** Bill, Hi. Oh, cool. His novel 'Lord of Barnyard' is pretty great. I miss Bo. I hope some press reprints 'The Dream Life' sometime. Such a seriously neglected and amazing novel. ** Thomas Moronic, Hi, T. Bo was great, both writer-wise and as person. He was one of my closest friends. He's really due for a rediscovery. ** Steevee, Hi. Oh, what do I know, you know? Everyone, Steevee has written about the new Amy Winehouse documentary, and you can fully access it, as you should, right here. ** Thursday ** David Ehrenstein, I watched some of those yesterday. Jesus. ** H, Hi! Oh, everyone calls me a cult writer, so I guess I talk about that when people ask me about it. They ask me a lot, so I don't know which interview that was. I'm used to it. Nothing I can do about it. Shrug. I'm preparing to get back to work on my text novel, yeah. I'm more interested in making gif fiction right now, but I think I'm ready to go back to all-language again to see what's what, and the novel's maybe half-done, so I should finish it. The reruns were because I was in the UK for 2 1/2 days. Hope you're weller than me! ** Etc etc etc, Hi, Casey. The upcoming gif/lit book is finished. It's just waiting for Kiddiepunk to organize and design it pre- its August release date. I feel like the gif is a natural for narrative experiments, but I don't know if anybody else who writes fiction or poetry primarily will find that possibility fruitful too. I hope so. I would so love to see what happens when other writers with different styles and interests give it a go. What Danielewski is doing is inherently and conceptually interesting. I've never been all that high on his actual prose itself. His organizing and moving around is really good, but the prose itself doesn't have a lot of dimension to me. The storms are impressive, but the sentences, phrases, etc. always seems like the same twigs landing in different, sometimes interesting spots. I don't know. But of course I like that he's pushing fiction so much. Best to you, buddy! ** Thomas Moronic, Thanks, man! ** Bernard Welt, Safe trip out of NYC today, pal! ** Steevee, Very glad to hear that about your eyes' improvement. Well, you can refill your prescription if necessary, can't you? ** Okay, I need to go lie and down and moan now. I hope you enjoy this post which spotlights my personal favorite Duras novel. See you guys tomorrow, hopefully in better shape on my end.