Fearful Fantasies
DAVIS, HOPE HALE
Fearful Fantasies Emily L. By Marguerite Duras Translated by Barbara Bray Pantheon. 112 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" In a 1967 Cahiers du...
...In the more than half century since she began writing, at age 18, she has produced fiction, plays and many film scripts, notably Hiroshima, Mon Amour...
...And that it's been like that for years...
...Except her talents are not so narrowly focused...
...One of the various Duras wish-fulfillment fantasies to be discerned here from earlier books, the longing for a slave-lover, has been revised appropriately by the aging author...
...Andrea describes their bleak alcoholic seclusion...
...In her thoughts "they're clearly murderers, but I recognize this fear, whereas I don't know anything about the one before.' The Koreans play no part in the story and are droppedlongbeforetheend...
...The Sea Wall, 1950, runs to 288 pages of conventional narration telling in full the family history that would be touched on in The Lover...
...What she likes are fragments, stage directions, as in her novel /film Destroy, She Said: "Dusk in the hotel...
...It is easy to see why...
...Like characters in other Duras novels, the two are on a terrace overlooking a scene described with a fine-penned precision that by itself creates emotion...
...During the '70s she and her faithful companion, a man called Yann Andrea, literally gave themselves up to drink...
...The young man was kept on for 10 years to look after a boat that seemingly was never used...
...Over and over inEmily L. we are told that The Captain is drinking a black Pilsen and his wife a double Bourbon—to Duras, apparently, unmistakably British tipples...
...The seventh day...
...the observers imagine this happened to the watched couple in Emily L. What attracts the narrator to the couple is the fact that they speak English...
...She nurses him through his slow recovery, with all its repellent physical symptoms, and finally breaks the news that she is leaving him for his best friend...
...Throughout her fiction the personalities, place names, scenes and events keep reappearing...
...Only as she made the film did the book come clear...
...In Indochina, whether or not Duras was actually seduced by a Chinese millionaire, and whether or not her brother was a murderer—as suggested in several novels, especially the first, Les Impudents—she grew up in a reckless, violent family...
...Before she had gone quite too far, though already unable to hold a pen, she dictated anovel that is bad in every possible way, Malady of Death, published in 1982...
...By imbecility Duras may have meant something closer to the state of an "idiot savant...
...Often the same crucial experiences are repeated, such as the loss of a baby girl at birth...
...Watching the English woman, the narrator observes that "she's appreciably older than he...
...She seems to have changed clothes very seldom, even at night, for fitful stupor was as close as she could come to sleep...
...The scenes of historical horror in that movie gave it worldwide acceptance, despite the masochistic selfdramatization that critics see as weakening the author's work...
...Naturally this is not as simple as it seems...
...And in the dark...
...Sometimes Duras points this out herself in a tone almost of bravado, other times she lets the reader wonder...
...As they sit drinking, their imagination is caught by another couple and they speculate about these strangers' lives...
...Duras describes her headaches and sleepless nights and desire for death while waiting for the possible return of her husband from his imprisonment as a Resistance leader...
...A long first section is offered as a newly discovered diary of an agonizing period in 1944...
...The second fear comes with the sudden appearance of 15 people "where there shouldn't be anybody at all...
...they exchange nothing but banalities.' But that's exactly the point...
...The father's opposition to the girl's love for the hired "captain" lasted unto death, but was incredibly tolerant...
...The fantasies of an obsessed and masterful writer can be hard to resist...
...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" In a 1967 Cahiers du Cinema interview, Marguerite Duras insists that she "can't read novels any more...
...If all that does not suffice to account for her fears, Duras has the horrors of actual delirium tremens to remember...
...But there is more to a Duras best seller than borrowed fantasies and nevernever-land plots, as there is always more to a dream than can ever be captured...
...The guesswork in Emily L. formsastory that gradually becomes more and more detailed, momentous and unlikely...
...In her Cahiers interview about Destroy, She Said, Duras confesses, "I have the feeling I wrote it in a state of imbecility...
...They are trapped in the tanker harbor by some problem with their boat, and the narrator soon imagines they are forced to wander the world...
...That memoir is one of a collection of autobiographical pieces published in France as La Douleur and in the United States as The War (1986...
...In Blue Eyes, Black Hair the character who obsesses both the male and female protagonists is a man from "the North," probably Vancouver...
...No one would have guessed from the early Duras novels that she would be known as a writer of brief, oblique stories, of which Emily L. is the latest...
...The novel may " really" be about writing...
...The foreword to the last memoir piece notes that the events described took place during the decade that she was a member of the Communist Party...
...Emily L., too, has beenabest seller in France...
...But she is distracted by the first of two moments of fright: "It's between two landings of the ferry, while the square is empty, that fear arrives...
...Her lover (a writer too) remarks that pride is involved...
...Yet a cliché used by Duras is veiled in such mystery, such delicate conjurations as perhaps to go unrecognized...
...Duras comes as close as anyone can to capturing a dream...
...She adds that luckily she unconsciously preservedher writing from theparty's "nauseating proximity...
...In The Ravishing of Lol Stein the men in Lol's life are named Michael Richardsonand John Bedford...
...This dialogue, recounted later by the woman as if addressing the man, shapes the tale...
...The couple's imagined story is romantic, of course, and makes no show of being plausible...
...WasDuras, who grew up in Indochina, simply giving visual form to some alarming memory of Asians...
...The man, who wears a yachting cap, becomes "The Captain...
...Isthisoneof her waysof achieving uncanny effects...
...A couple is spending the weekend at a quayside hotel opposite a tanker port with thecliffsof Le Havre in thedistance...
...Then, during World War II she joined the Resistance...
...She would start the day with red wine, try coffee, still more wine, until finally she could hold something down...
...And that he has caught up with her in her slowness, and won't outstrip it...
...Silence...
...About one long encounter in the film between two women she recalls: "Many people said to me, 'It's impossible...
...Her 1952 fantasy of endless quest aboard a boat, The Sailor from Gibraltar, is 300 pages long, and seems longer, a labor of love and ingenuous devotion to Hemingway...
...In a book called M.D...
...Is this meant to evoke the moment in Duras' 1984 erotic novel, The Lover, when the schoolgirl heroine arrives on the Saigon ferry and gets into the long black car of the Chinese stranger...
...Then there was nothing, and suddenly she took herself to the American Hospital in Paris for an excruciating cure, with Andrea holding her hand through the worst hours...
...The narrator calls her own early ambition "sheer idiocy...
...She agrees, but also "It's as if it protected you from some sort of fear...' This fear, running like a dark stream through all the novels, has legitimate sources...
...They all look alike, and the narrator (who may be the only one who sees them) decides they are Koreans...
...They compel and infuse...
...In "Monsieur X, Here Called Pierre Rabier," she recounts in terrifying detail the hazardous meetings with her Gestapo contact on the streets of occupied Paris...
...His nationality is almost inevitable, since Duras is an Anglophile...
...In the cryptic later novellas the characters—described by an admiring French critic quoted unadmiringly by John Simon as "figures of indifference and meaninglessness"— drift as in a dream from one story to another...
...He comes back, emaciated and hardly alive...
...Since her seaman husband cannot understand the poetry, his imagined reflections are remarkable in their sophistication: "Her innocence was such that she'd written the poems without realizing that their worth derived from their very obscurity...
...Banalities may also be the point in Emily L., with a plot as boldly lifted from the public domain of fiction as any of Iris Murdoch's...
...Because of the sentences...
...Wishes are fulfilled...
...She was a child who had to be protected against herself, against an obscurity so clear to her that she took it for her own nature.' Is Duras referring here to herself, to the "unremitting narcism" she has been accused of...
...The lovers, even after marriage, lived in the family's Isle of Wight boathouse...
...The bride in the boathouse has written poems, and without her willing it they are beginning to appear all over the world...
...When The Lover appeared in 1984, it was rated the most elegantly written of all her works...
...Before the watchers become preoccupied with the other pair, they are intent on their own parallel story (which she threatens to write) "of the affair we'd had together, the one that was still there and taking forever to die...
...In any case, her new novel, coming more than two decades after her assertions in that interview, is composed almost entirely of complete sentences, firm as the stark opening: "IT BEGAN WITH FEAR...
Vol. 72 • May 1989 • No. 9
