Duras: La Pute de la Côte normande, Yann

Yann

"Toi non plus tu ne dois plus savoir ce que tu fais ici, chez cette femme âgée déjà, folle d'écrire." (Yann Andréa Steiner, 76)

[Digression Nº 2, Homosexuality]

Duras' insistent focus on the couple formed by a heterosexual woman and a homosexual man in her late fiction (Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, Emily L.) -- often with a missing male to make a triangle -- differs from her preoccupation with the heterosexual couple in her earlier fiction in which we find such ultimately banal representations of jealousy and adultery as shown in Dix heures et demie du soir en été, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and Hiroshima mon amour. In the newer duo that predominates, Duras not only maintains but reinforces the barriers of communication she has always described as existing between humans, particularly when one of them is a man. Renaud Camus, reading La Maladie de la mort, shows how Duras can attribute "sickness" to a male protagonist -- whom Camus correctly reads, in this case, as homosexual -- not simply because he does not love, but because he does not love women (72).

Duras dates her first (written) acquaintance with Yann Andréa to January 1980 (La Vie matérielle 142). First published in Libération and later in a collected volume, L'Eté 80 traces the early development of the Duras/Andréa relationship by means of a progressively visible "vous" addressee and through the description of an 18-year old summer camp monitor (a young woman) and a very quiet, grey-eyed six-year old boy, named David. Duras compares this textual relationship to that of herself and Andréa, the implied addressee of this text dedicated to him: "Comme eux nous sommes séparés" (93).

Angelitos © 1996
Eclectic Iconoclast

In L'Eté 80, the barrier is simply that of age; the proposed reunion, in twelve years, would leave an entirely different set of circumstances for a 30-year old woman and an 18-year old man. The masochistic love represented in many of Duras' texts, like that of the suffering Chinese lover, is present "entre elle et lui"; between a woman and a child. As with Duras' homosexual companion, this impossible relationship is "désespérée": "cette douleur-là [...] le tourment invivable de ce désir-là" (85).

Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs is also dedicated to Andréa. It was released at about the same time as La Pute de la côte normande. In this latter, shorter piece, Duras speaks of her relationship with Andréa in that summer of 1986 when she was (coincidentally) writing a stage scenario of La Maladie de la mort at her home in Neauphle-le-Château. Andréa would type under Duras' dictation, scream at her or at the world, and go out carousing:

Il allait dans tous les sens, dans tous ces hôtels, pour chercher au-delà des hommes beaux, des barmen, des grands barmen natifs de la terre étrangère, celle d'Argentine ou de Cuba. Il allait dans tous les sens. Yann. (19)

He would return home to Marguerite and scream some more. Duras uses similar scenes of confrontation in her novels to expose the "walls" of separation between major characters. Duras doesn't understand Andréa's anger. He would say to her, for example:

Qu'est-ce que vous foutez à écrire tout le temps, toute la journée? Vous êtes abandonnée par tous. Vous êtes folle, vous êtes la pute de la côte normande, une connarde, vous embarrassez.
(La Pute de la côte normande, 16-17)

Qu'est-ce que vous croyez faire? Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire ça? Etre à écrire tout le temps toute la journáe? Vous serez abandonnée par tous, parce que vous êtes folle, intenable à vivre. Une connarde. . .
(Yann Andra Steiner, 73)

This is, of course, Duras speaking, attributing these epithets upon herself, whether or not she is truly citing Andréa. She had become this "pute" by becoming a writer and, in this case, by marketing a short piece -- which, like L'Eté 80, originally appeared in Libération -- in order to milk her enormous public for her share of the 20-franc list price. "Sans la prostitution de la publication," she wrote in 1982, "sans l'acte public, il n'y a pas d'écrit" (Outside 2, 22). Many of Duras' characters are labelled whores: the young French girl in Indochina (L'Amant 73), Anna of Le Marin de Gibraltar (209, 316), the woman of La Maladie de la mort (7), etc. As Hewitt writes, Duras "flirts" in L'Amant not only with "the scandalous assumption of feminine desire and passion in a culturally and racially proscribed relationship" but also "with the idea of willful prostitution" (115). In La Pute de la côte normande, Duras prostitutes the Duras/Andréa relationship by her very naming of Andréa, something not done in more "fictionalized" versions such as Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs or Emily L. By publishing and embellishing details from her private life in her novels, Duras also whorishly "flirts" with the autofictive creation of her legend.

"Le Survivant" is how Libération titles their article on Duras' compagnon -- he prefers the term "assistant," we're told -- shortly after her death in March 1996. In Yann Andréa Steiner, the narrator is identified as the author, without using her real name, through frequent mention of previous texts written. In this variation of Eté 80, she directly addresses Yann Andréa and clearly makes autobiographical links between the text and their lives. As with her rewrite of L'Amant (L'Amant de la Chine du nord), Duras gets racier in her sequel to Eté 80: the camp monitor lies naked with the boy (96) and proposes to make love to him in ten years, when he will be sixteen (87). (Curiously, the boy was six in "l'été 1980": Duras' fictive lovemaking was scheduled for the year of her death.) In Yann Andréa Steiner, Duras and Andréa make love (30), consummating the relationship and transgressing another supposed barrier to their passion. By its very title, Yann Andréa Steiner exemplifies the naming games of autofiction, giving to Andréa the preferred Jewish surname (Stein/Steiner) of her fictions while also using Andréa's real name in the text (9), mixing fact and fantasy.

The Duras/Andréa relationship is certainly as mutually beneficial as it is destructive: "vivre comme ils vivent, mieux vaut mourir" (Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs 194-95). Their books are a positive and productive element of their relationship: "ce que nous préférons, c'est écrire des livres l'un sur l'autre" (Emily L. 61). The intrinsic sexual barrier between them gives the relationship its strength. The barrier of age and sexual orientation is so conspicuous that it becomes part of each opposing side, an essential element of the inter-human communication. Duras's preferred relationships are as impossible as they are real: an "amour qui a tout pris et qui est impossible" (Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs 134).