Staging Writing or the Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras

Liliane Papin

Modern Drama, Volume 34, Number 1, Spring 1991, pp. 128-137 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mdr.1991.0018

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/499295/summary

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 Staging Writing
or the Ceremony of Text
in Marguerite Duras
LILIANE PAPIN

Marguerite Duras's plays have been produced all over the world. She has
herself directed many of them and has never ceased writing for the theater.
Among the numerous other directors of her theater work. one finds the names
of Peter Brook, lean-Louis Barrault and Claude Regy . Her fascination with
the theater and the quality of her work are unquestionable . Yet, in her critical
essays or in comments to journalists, Duras has often belittled her own stage
productions and theater in general. In reference to India Song, which she
originally wrote as a stage project for Peter Brook but which she then decided
instead to produce as a film, she justified her choice by stating that "film is
more flexible (malleable) and less burdened by the weight of the actor.'" For
anyone interested in the relationship between performance and text. however,
this very ambivalence is well worth studying and can be most enlightening.
It offers a rare opportunity to observe first-hand an unfolding process through
which Duras endeavors to resolve a dilemma which is at the core of
contemporary reflection on the nature of "representation. Duras' s constant
to

movement from one form to another, her shifting back and forth between
fiction, theater, film , radio and television, illuminates the direction and
evolution of a writer who, beyond the confines of "genre," has played with
the given limits of each form and pushed those limits to their extremes. In
this respect, she is probably one of the most representative authors of our
time, an age characterized by the blurring of clear boundaries among genres.
In the case of theater, which is the focus of the present essay, the
relationship between text and performance has undoubtedly undergone drastic
alterations . Together with the growing importance and prestige of the director,
the concept of "adaptation" has emerged. Partly due to the influence of film,
which has further widened the concept by borrowing material from various
literary sources, the notion of theatrical "text" has also changed. The
playwright used to write for the stage and followed certain "rules" (e.g.,
 Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras 12 9

dialogue, division into acts and scenes, etc.). In the past, the director and
writer were one. If one goes back to classical tradition, a play was often
wrinen with a specific company in mind, and the writing of the text was
adapted to specific circumstances of production. The text was not seen as a
separate entity; the issue of textual' ' fidelity ," the questioning of the meaning
of "interpretation," had not yet arisen. For Duras, however, although she is
herself both writer and director, the two functions were initially quite separate
and often perceived as antagonistic. The concept of text is for her veiled in
a certain aura of sacredness, a "pure product" that is necessarily submitted
to a distortion, through the process of performance, whether in film or
theater. Duras finds adaptation for the stage, however, more cumbersome and
more distorting than adaptation for film; in her own words, stage "writing"
is less "pure" than film writing. But both film and stage productions are
always considered in reference to a matrix which is the "text," the "pure"
point of reference.
Why , then , has Duras even bothered to continue producing both plays and
films? The paradoxical answer is that the attraction resides in the very process
of this distortion and the struggle it entails. In theater, she works against the
constraints of a given tradition and against the nature of theatrical representa-
tion , pushing them to their limits while knowing she cannot totally overcome
them . In the parameters of that tension and impossibility lies the source of
both her interest in and impatience with the theater. The direction of her work
on stage throughout the years can best be summarized as a constant striving
to recapture the lost "textual purity." In this respect, Duras's work seems
diametrically opposed to the direction opened up by Artaud , whose goal was
to widen the gap between text and performance, to rediscover the "purity"
of theatricality, and whose ultimate ideal was the creation ofa theater without
text, a theater of "signs." (His search was, likewise, an impossible quest
bound to fail to some extent.) Duras, on the contrary, strives to give total
predominance to the text . to eradicate the "noise" of theater ("noise" is to
be taken here in its meaning of "interference" in communication theory)
which obscures the text.
Duras is not the only one to choose such an option. This contradiction so
underlines modem stage productions that Patrice Pavis coined the two terms
"aura] theater" (" theatre d' ecoute' ') and' 'visual theater" (" thetltre visuel' ')
to define it.' One could further argue that this apparent antagonism is not
even in itself anything new - especially when it comes to French theater.
grounded as it is both in the classical tradition of the Italian Commedia
dell'arte (and its influence on Moliere) on the one hand and in Racine on the
other hand. Isn't Racine a proponent of pure narration and pure "text" ? One
could successfully argue that Duras and Racine have, indeed, much in
common. For both, "action" is relegated offstage and is merely the support
or pretext for the discourse unfolding onstage. Duras actually resurrects a
130 LILIANE PAPIN

modem version of the art of recitative. All her stage directions stress that the
actors involved in the staging of her work should refrain from any " natural "
interpretation and should use, as much as possible, a "neutral " tone ("as if
reading," "mechanically"), a subdued form of declamation. It is not
uncommon to hear spectators complain, after watching one of her films or
plays, that the actors don't act "natural," that they simply "recite" their
lines (a complaint one often hears also with Bresson's films). When she chose
Delphine Seyrig for India Song, the quality of the actress's voice, its sing-
songy peculiarity, was the determining factor. Her interest in theater stems
from her interest in a recitation of the text more than in a portrayal of
characters or in visual dramatic effects.
Duras was not immediately drawn to the theater. Others, however, quickly
became aware of the dramatic potentiality of her writing . Directors who have
staged her work often mention that the underlying rhythm of her writing, its
repetitive musicality that made one want to read out loud, is what attracted
their attention . She granted authorizations for stage adaptations and decided
to go to rehearsals , "curious to see what the results would be."J Her curiosity
was to bear consequences which she could not foresee at the time: she was
suddenly confronted with the projection of her own voice and its transform-
ation through the channeling of the actor. " As long as you haven' t heard your
own text, you cannot really know it," 4 she commented after a rehearsal. She
became aware of the underlying ' 'voice" of writing, but a voice whose origin
is uncertain and unanchored, constantly changing and changeable. While she
could "know" her own voice better, she could neither recognize nor own it
anymore. As a somewhat paradoxical result, Duras , who has always struggled
with the confinement of representation and performance and has often rejected
it, feeling the need to come back to a " pure" text after a play or a film , is
possibly the writer whose style and approach to writing have been most
influenced by the discovery of performance. The experience became
integrated , as it were , in the very fabric of her texts.
After her first experience with rehearsals, Duras started writing and
publishing " plays" in the traditional sense of the term , that is to say texts
divided into acts and featuring dialogue and stage directions. She quickly felt
imprisoned , however, by the constraints and rigidity of such a structure. A
comparison between her early and later plays (and her subsequent produc-
tions) is particularly revealing of her own evolution . In many of her first
plays, one finds stage directions of a traditional and' 'psychological" nature,
such as ., hypocritical" or "flirtatious," which call for an interpretation from
the actor. In later plays , such indications have totally disappeared . Some of
her early plays like The Square are actually already devoid of such indica-
tions, which shows that her later style was only an actualization , an
affirmation, of an underlying current. As time goes on , her stage directions
are reduced merely to very precise indications of the pauses and silences
 Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras 131

which punctuate the text. Such is, for instance, the only difference between
the "novel" version of The Square and its publication as a play. She herself
described her experimentation with The Square on stage as the realization of
the " respiration, " the "breathing" of a text. ' Silences and pauses are the
structure of its flow. Adapting a text for the stage, then, meant turning the
"script" into a musical score. And this is indeed where the stage provides a
unique quality. Silences become tangible once projected into time and space;
on the page, they remain static. For Duras, the theater is a place for the
" happening" of poetry and for its actualization.
Seen in this light, it is no wonder that theater was always to be somewhat
of a paradox for Duras. She was not attracted so much by the possibility of
lTansposing what is said as by the possibility of making palpable what is
hidden and unsaid . The texts by other writers she chose to adapt for the stage
all shared this same "silent" quality. Of Miracle en Alabama, for example,
Duras's adaptation of William Gibson's The Miracle Worker, she noted:
"Certain moments of silence - the silent struggle between the young woman
and her pupil - that is what atlTacted me to [the play]. ,,6 Silence on stage can
be the means of transmitting the "subconscious" of the text, a dimension in
which a whole drama is enacted without ever being directly expressed,
without the support of any representation. For Duras the magic of writing, the
particular relationship it establishes with the reader, lies in its absence of
constraints, in its absolute silence. A text is by nature plural. Whether the
writer intends it or not , readers always create their own version. their own
reading and, therefore, in the end, their own writing. "Writing and reading
are exactly the same. Now, we all know it ," she has commented.' The text
becomes a sediment deposited in other memories where it will play and create
itself, in a constant process of lTansformation and becoming.
The presence of the actor confirmed for Duras what she had always
intuitively known and felt: that her text did not belong to her, that it escaped
her as soon as it was written. Didn't she describe the function of the writer
as that of an "echo chamber"? The theatrical projection only magnified the
phenomenon. But instead of trying to recenter her writing, to focus it, she
chose on the conlTary to emphasize the loss of origin. Loss and separation are
a constant and a cenlTaI theme of her texts. In India Song the beggar woman
has forgotten her past, has lost her memory and her own individuality:
madness is the form that marks the exlTeme point of loss of the self. Both the
vice-consul and Anne-Marie Stretter are also losing themselves; Duras
describes the heroine's path in India Song as " paraIIel and similar" to that
of the beggar woman. Anne-Marie Stretter's maiden name was "Guardi ," the
only remaining trace of which is the faded inscription on the tomb . The
heroine of L 'Amante anglaise is similarly a lost soul. She has kiIIed her
cousin. but cannot explain her crime, cannot talk about an act which has
already sunk into an obscure past and which cannot be exhumed without
132 LILIANE PAPIN

being distorted. She is forever wandering in the grey zone of her own mind,
astray in the story of her own life. And in L 'Eden Cinema, the voices of the
children bring to life for the moment of the performance the image of their
mother. But the Mother is not really a character in this play, only the ghost
of one, listening to what her children have to say about her after her death.
L'Eden Cinema is Duras's stage adaptation of one of her first novels, The
Sea Wall (Un barrage conlre Ie Pacifique). The comparison between her own
adaptation, seventeen years later, and an adaptation written by Genevieve
Serreau shortly after the novel 's publication, is particularly enlightening .
Serreau opted for a more Brechtian and political interpretation than Duras.
The novel, more or less autobiographical, features three main characters: the
Mother, her son Joseph,. and her daughter Suzanne. Suzanne is really the
narrator: we know and see only what she can know and see. The mother, who
carne to Indochina as a school teacher, decides to leave her job and, with
money painstakingly saved, buys land in a desperate attempt to remedy the
starvation of the peasants and children of India. The land she purchases,
however, has been sold to her by corrupt realtors and has no value. Every
year at monsoon season, the crops are inundated by the tides of the Pacific
Ocean. The mother becomes obsessed with the idea of building dams to stop
the flooding , but she has no technological knowledge and her futile attempts
fail year after year. Surrounded by corruption in a world she does not
understand, she slowly sinks into madness.
The novel is chronological and traditional in its narrative. Serreau
summarizes her stage adaptation:

I was led to an epic construction which had the advantage of preserving in another
fonn the density of narrative time: J took the mother while still young. the day after
the destruction of the dams which she tries to oppose to the tides of the Pacific Ocean.
I made her grow older and wither, faced with the unrelenting wave of injustice, slowly
overcome, vanqui shed by age, dispossessed by the unruly vitality of Joseph and
Suzanne. s

Although Serreau later decided to condense the events, this description shows
how her approach tended to respect the chronological development of time.
By contrast Duras, in her own theatrical version, decided to abandon
chronology totally. The only time sustaining the text is the time of stage
presentation itself. Characters become the ghosts of their own past. The
Mother is beyond any possible degradation: she does not feel pain, anger or
sorrow. We are the listeners to a story being told, a legend; the fictitious time
has been erased, replaced by the time of fiction unfolding itself. Because of
her decision to respect narrative time. Serreau also had to make a choice as
to which of the novel's many events she would keep and "represent," in
order not to dilute the text too much or make it too long. Duras, on the other
 Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras I33

hand, dramatized only two scenes, the essence of the trianguhir relationship
among the three main characters; all other events were simply narrated ,
Serreau was further interested in the historical context of colonialism and
exploitation underlying the novel:

I did not want anybody to be misled: the text was not about eternal injustice , but
about specific events that were still close to us (this was 1959 and we were in the
midst of the Algerian war).

I added a brief prologue which clearly illustrated this particular situation, by means
of a parallel of simple irony: on stage, in front of the Mother's bungalow , two
Vietnamese peasants, reduced to total deprivation, congratulate themselves for not
dying like so many of their countrymen during the construction of the road for the
Whites. Meanwhile, offstage, a child' s voice is heard, innocently memorizing his
geography Jesson on "French Indochina. " This text came directly out of a geography
manual I had borrowed without so much as changing a comma.9

In L 'Eden Cinema , Duras chose instead to emphasize the " fundamental

injustice that prevails among the poor, " which is precisely the " eternal
injustice" Serreau was trying to avoid, For Duras, the story of the Mother is
only one story among thousands, She is overwhelmed by events which she
doesn't comprehend, caught in a stream of historical circumstances which
hoth define and obliterate the contours of her life, This is dramatized in the
play by the fact that the children have become the narrators of a story from
which she is estranged, a puppet coming to life through narration, a ghost
sustained by the flow of narrative, The play is not a political comment about
injustice; it is about the mystery of a human being whose life is shaped by
surrounding injustice, the mystery of a unique and banal story, Similarly, in
Yes , peut-etre, although the play came out of a particular historical event (it
was written during the Vietnam war), Duras asked that it be adapted to the
particular circumstances of any country where it would be performed, Yes,
peut·€tre expresses the essence of war, just as L 'Eden Cinema expresses the
essence of injustice. Duras goes beyond particular circumstances or events to
achieve the universality of myth. Her direction is constant movement toward
an ever greater degree of abstraction, awai from illustration and representa-
tion.
The theme of separation is crucial to Duras's writing; one cannot
understand her approach to theater without understanding this fundamental
process at work, Discovering the "third character" or narrator which appears
in all her work, starting with the novels The Ravishing of Lol v, Stein and
Destroy, She Said in the 1960s, was for her a natural extension of this
separation, This narrator - also embodied in the " interrogator" who asks
Claire Lannes questions about the murder in L'Amante anglaise; in the
134 LILIANE PAPIN

children who narrate the life of the mother in L'Eden Cinema; and in the
narrative voices of India Song - is at a crossroad between the character, the
writer and the audience. At all levels it establishes a "distanciation." a
"place of writing" which avoids the pitfalls of direct representation.
Characters become actors in a drama that encompasses them but which they
don't control. For Duras as a writer, this "third character" embodies the
process of writing itself, the activation of the "echo chamber" which she
inhabits as a recipient rather than as an active "director. " In the space left
open by the third character, the audience is invited to create its own story . to
fill in the blanks with its own imagination. This is the sense in which Duras
felt that performance was "impure," in that it interferes with the freedom of
imagination left to the reader of a book. In her written texts, Duras never
describes the physical appearance of her characters ; there are only glimpses,
elements of an outline. But for the spectator of India Song , it is practically
impossible to then read the screenplay without visualizing Anne-Marie Stretter
as Delphine Seyrig. The distancing allowed by the narrative voices, however,
re-establishes a space of mystery in the process of reading. In film , Duras has
frequently experimented with pure narration. A second film version of India
Song explores empty spaces while disembodied voices unfold a tale. Other
films such as L'homme atlantique or Agatha are also devoid of any human
presence.IO This is a distancing which the theatre does not normally allow.
Duras's desire to create a process of "distanciation," her recommendation
to actors to avoid interpretation, inevitably calls to mind Brecht, who had
similar preoccupations. Brecht wished to break with the Aristotelian tradition
and the process of identification. Duras's goal, however, is different. Whereas
Brecht wanted an estrangement that would enable the spectator to keep a clear
mind and integrate the performance in a process of political awareness, Duras
refrains from political "messages" or lessons. She strives to avoid judgment
on her own characters and to approach them from a distance that entails the
mystery of life, identity and destiny. An interesting parallel can also be drawn
with Artaud; the means are totally different but the goal is in some ways
similar. Like Artaud, Duras wants to break away from the realistic tradition
and the "psychologizing" of characters. She refrains from explaining and
simplifying them, removing them from familiar surroundings and choosing
abstract settings. But whereas Artaud dreamt of pure theatricality, Duras relies
on the ceremony of text to create that abstraction.
The "third character," the story-teller, opens up a "blank" in the fabric
of Duras's narration, a blank which is the integration and embodiment of the
process of writing. Who precisely is telling the story? Of course , the writer
is behind the scene, but what exactly is the relationship between the writer
and the text? The mystery of this relationship and the fascination it held for
Duras can best be illustrated by the numerous' 'reworkings" of her different
texts. From her early novel The Sea Wall, for instance, emerged not only the
 Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras 135

play L'Eden Cinema, written seventeen years later, but also Whole Days in
the Trees (story, play and film), the film Agatha, and finally The Lover,
written as an "autobiography" thirty years later. That last text constantly
shifts back and forth between "I" and "she." Even in a text that presents
itself as autobiographical the question of the "origin" of writing is not clear.
The blanks remain in the truncated memories and indecisions of a writer who
says that "maybe" this is what happened, who switches between subject
(narrator) and object ("She," "the little girl") of her own narration. Who is
she telling the story to? The interrogator of L 'amante anglaise is perhaps the
best illustration of how the "third character" also draws the audience into the
performance. Who is the spectator, or even the reader of the book? Who is
reading, watching, listening? What do they want to know? What do they
remember, what do they retain from what they hear and see? What story are
they making up?
In her "recit" Le Navire Night (which she later turned into a screenplay),
Duras took as her point of departure a "true" story which she had heard. A
man had had for years a "telephone relationship" with a woman he had never
seen or met. The woman had several times arranged meetings to which she
never carne. One day she stopped calling. She had told the man she was very
sick and very close to death but he did not know if that was true. She had
constantly contradicted herself and he could no longer discern truth from lies.
When Duras finished the manuscript, she decided to give it to the main
protagonist to read. Having read it, his comment was that " everytrung was
true but d)at he could not recognize anything":

After reading this development of his own story - written by somebody else - JM
was silent for a while . ... I think he must have discovered that different accounts of
his experience would have been just as possible - that he had not told them because
he did not know that they were all possible as they are possible of any narrative. 1I

As a reader, he was dispossessed of his own narration, irremediably separated

from it. Writing mUltiplies the possibilities, de-centers the subject, and is
itself a process of loss in a play of mirrors which erases the clear and illusory
boundaries of identity.
In a similar fashion, Duras explored the mystery of Claire Lannes, the
silent murderess who never said a word to explain her acts. That silence again
is what fascinated Duras. She wrote three different texts about the same story,
each one from a different perspective. The one that she kept and finally put
on stage was L'Amante angiaise, with the appearance of a third character, the
interrogator. Michael Lonsdale, who played the part of the interrogator in a
stage production directed by Claude Regy, was attracted by a part which
represented a challenge for him since the interrogator was a character
"without any reference, any psychology." Relating his experience in an
 LILIANE PAPIN

interview, Lonsdale described how the spectators projected upon the

character, who was seated in the audience at the beginning of the play, what
they wished to see. Some thought he was a psychiatrist, others ajudge, others
a policeman. For Lonsdale, however, that voice was also Duras, the questions
she would have liked to ask." For the director Regy, the play was a
revelation:

Since then, a lot of similar experiments have been made ... taking texts that were not
specifically written for the stage ... but at the time it was a new e~periment. We
thought a lot about the production and came to the conclusion that any idea of
representation was to be abolished: ... total immobility, no setting, no movement. It
was an attempt to trust the text completely as pure dramatic material .... I)

Regy later directed L'Eden Cinema, and has often, since then, applied the
principles discovered in the staging of those two plays to productions of other
contemporary writers such as Sarraute, Peter Handke or Pinter. He has
integrated those principles in his teaching of drama and trains students to
resist their desire to interpret, to "represent," a teaching which runs opposite
to the traditional Stanislavski "method" still taught in most theater depart-
ments and drama schools.
In her struggle against the representational nature of dramatic conventions,
Marguerite Duras has opened up new dimensions in the possibilities offered
by theater. Obviously Duras fully belongs to her century; her preoccupation
with the nature of representation lies at the heart of every modern search in
the performing arts. She found in her own way, as an extension of her own
writing, an abstract, non-representational style of theater which recuperates
the primary ingredient which had been lost during years of realistic tradition:
poetry and its dimension of myth and legend. In spite of her impatience with
the shortcomings of theater (or maybe because of it), she has successfully
metamorphosed the ceremony of text into a theatrical event.

NOTES

1 Colette Godard, "Marguerite Duras tourne India Song," Le Monde, 28-29

July 1974, p. 15. My translation. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from
the French cited in subsequent footnotes are my OWO.
2 Patrice Pavis , umguages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre
(New York, 1982), pp. 181-91. It should be stressed, however, that this
distinction is far from clear-cut and does not by any means delineate distinct
and contradictory categories. Pavis, in this essay, stresses the common points
more than the differences.
3 Marguerite Duras, cited in "Un barrage contre Ie Pacifique," Courrier drama-
rique de I' Ouest, 93 (May 197 I), 2.
 Ceremony of Text in Marguerite Duras 137

4 Ibid., p. 7·
5 Jdem.
6 Ibid., p. 6.
7 Cited by Claude R~gy, in Liliane Papin, L'aUlre scene: Ie theatre de Mar-
querite Duras (Stanford, 1988), p. 146.
8 Genevieve Serreau, cited in "Un barrage contre Ie Pacifique." p. 3.
9 Idem.
10 In L'homme atlantique, Duras did away with images altogether. The screen
remains black during most of the film. A few sparse images appear: the beach,
the sea, a man watching the sea.
II Marguerite Duras, preface to Le Navire Night (Paris, 1979), pp. 8-9.
12 "Interview with Michael Lonsdale," in Papin, pp. 126--27.
13 "Interview with Claude Regy ," in Papin, pp. 139-40.