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Les barrages de la mère dans la plaine, c'était le grand malheur et la grande rigolade à la fois, ça dépendait des jours. C'était terrible et c'était marrant. Ça dépendait de quel côté on se plaçait, du côté de la mer qui les avait fichus en l'air, ces barrages, d'un seul coup d'un seul, du côté des crabes qui en avaient fait des passoires, ou au contraire, du côté de ceux qui avaient mis six mois à les construire dans l'oubli total des méfaits pourtant certains de la mer et des crabes. (53) |  |
Like this wall which cannot hold back the Pacific, Duras' land of inventive fantasy is washed away by the sea of reality, not destroyed by it but rather encompassed by the larger totality. Her fictive narrations, however solid or ravishing, are mere constructions of human dreams which melt into nothingness, elusively holding back the painful reality of human existence.
From Atlantic crossings to the bac crossing the
Mékong, from the Normandy coast of her later years to the
infamously impossible barrage contre le Pacifique, the
peripheries of Duras' life are defined but by the
sea and its boundless horizons. Breaking through narrational walls or at least
rendering them visible, Duras speaks from without as within her texts
with a fluid openness
unwilling to be diked into a fixed identity. The point of view, of you, cher
spectateur, helps determine what one "sees." Duras' mediated voice may be
disembodied in film or radio, it nonetheless permeates her written
narrations with a rythmic regularity.
Duras loves confronting her audience with structural walls. As in Suzanne's film, she frequently makes the framework of her narrative world visible through mises en abyme before breaking through the limiting boundaries of the artistic medium itself. The narration of Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs is accompanied by a secondary text containing stage directions for the principal story. This is an example of Duras' "couloirs scéniques," the "longs passages détachés du texte par une légère mise en retrait, mais intégrés pourtant à la compréhension de l'ensemble" (Armel 117). Using such typographical distinctions, Duras makes the narrative framework visible. In Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, she creates actors in this subtext who tell (in the conditional mode) how the principal text would be staged, a mise en abyme of the central plot through a theatrical reading of the characters' roles. The actors of this secondary text go to the edge of their textual possibility, approaching the point at which they would burst through the narrative walls of their respective characters. Like the place of her own narrative and autobiographical persona, the space for Duras' protagonists is specifically defined but constrictive; they want to enter into another realm, to jump through their narrative frame (cf. Willis 139). In the passage cited at right, the characters' story is performed on a stage: the male actor is deeply concentrated on himself as well as on his public, but the space of his communication can be "betrayed" through a revelation of its framework, its very walls of fictitiousness. Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs is complicated by multiple layers of acting and reality; an odor, for example, rises up in the subtextual theatre and becomes "celle qui est écrite ici" (21), carrying its presence into the principal story. At the end of the story the external frame of the subtextual reading, previously described simply as a room of a theatre, becomes that of a theatre built with its backstage wall against the sea. The symbolic wall "betraying" the separation between fiction and reality is revealed, making the space of fiction real. The proposed theatrical reading places the actors against the background sea like the characters of the principal story. By staging the text in the subtext, its own reality is subsumed by its "realistic" theatrical re-presentation. |
Si elle parlait, dit l'acteur, elle dirait : Si notre histoire se jouait au théâtre, un acteur irait au bord de la scène, au bord de la rivière de lumière, très près de vous et de moi, il serait habillé de blanc, il serait dans une concentration très grande de son attention, intéressé par lui-même au plus haut degré, tendu vers la salle comme vers lui-même. Il se présenterait comme l'homme de l'histoire, l'homme, dirait-on, dans son absence centrale, son irréversible extériorité. Il regarderait, comme vous avez tendance à le faire, vers l'extérieur des murs, comme si c'était possible, dans la direction de la trahison. (116-117) |
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© 1996-97 Thomas C. Spear All Rights Reserved. |
