“The story of my life doesn't exist. Does not exist. There's never any center to it. No path, no line. There are great spaces where you pretend there used to be someone, but it's not true, there was no one.”
– Marguerite Duras, The Lover
“It is true that romance approaches the extremes of feeling and desire by way of a discourse of love: but love can be thought of as a way of managing the sheer ambiguity of romantic language and expectation.”
— Lauren Berlant
1. “SOLD”
Please don't speak another truth out loud / Whatever else you do /
I only want you keep me lost in your cloud / I'll do the same for you
(Joe Henry, “Sold”)
Describing her life as “completely screwed up” and therefore “fertile, abundant ground to write on,” Marguerite Duras named the personal terrain and then qualified it with the following statement: “When I say suffering, here, I mean the ambiguous ground of happiness.” For Duras, intelligence, consciousness, and thinking drive the hunger to write. The desire emerges from a commitment to interiority, but publication is its necessary condition. “Without the prostitution of publication, without the public act, there’s no writing.” The humiliation of publication is propounded by the labor of being one’s own pimp under late capitalism.
For Duras, “the hell of a unique love story” is more compelling than the surrendering to the fear of writing it. Or finding oneself written by it. The Lover moves through her texts, appending the first to the last, for it the first love that gets carried into other stories. The first love is the template, the singular term of comparison: its subjects the lover are irrevocably marked by its languages, places, and topos. But the violence of writing, of attempting to give form to the things that deform us, supersedes the violence of love.
Comparing writing to the birth of a child, Duras couldn’t "discern a difference between the two”; "writing is wholly equivalent to life,” a form of experience, a book is a time one lives through as a relationship. Describing her experience of being as “a writer” rather than “someone who lives," Duras blurs the distance between imagining and acting. Life is the thing which occurs on the page rather than in the room which the page creates, remembers, or dismembers.
"That people kill themselves because of my books won’t stop me from writing," Duras announced. "Catholic guilt” does not apply. She would continue writing if her books took lives, but not if her books created "reactionaries, political assholes."
“A metaphor is a species of symbol,” said Anne Carson, “So it’s a lover.”
The lover is the thing one buries in a book.
The book is a tomb for a time-space that reckons with its own limitations.
The culture industry prefers to keep the dead out of sight, out of mind; the capacity to perform this erasure is taken to signify psychological competence, and to indicate “good mental health”. Not mentioning the dead, not airing their names like dirty laundry, forgetting them: all these expressions evoke an obsession with social hygiene that renders respect for the dead as a sign of a twisted psychic attachment, a mental deformation of a relationship whose only significance exists in the churn of presence across a daily life.
There is a passage Hélène Cixous’ Steps Up the Ladder of Writing that refuses to oblige this injunction to render the dead unmentionable:
Writing or saying the truth is equivalent to death, since we cannot tell the truth. It is in every way forbidden because it hurts everyone. We never say the truth, we must lie, mostly as a result of two needs: our need for love and cowardice. The cowardice of love but also love's courage. Cowardice and courage are so close that they are often exchanged. Cowardice is probably the strange, tortuous path of courage.
Love is tortuous. So it is only at the very last page of a book that we perhaps get a chance to say what we have never said, write what we have never written all our lives, i.e., the most precarious, the best, in other words, the worst. I have respect and admiration for those writers who, in their lifetime, have approached that point where cowardice and courage are so close to each other they might fly into the flames if they were to say one word more. This is what Tsvetaeva describes, the point that I call the truth and which she calls the magical words in writing.
"Christianity's condemnation of degradation has also been responsible for the attitude that the whole of eroticism is something evil,” wrote Georges Bataille in Erotism.
2. “LOVECRIMES”
You write me love letters with your father's pen
If he knew the freaky, freaky things that you write with it
(The Afghan Whigs, “Lovecrimes”)
“Why does death come to mind when thinking of love?” wondered Michel Leiris, before pinning the blame on his parents’ passion of opera. The childhood association between love and death was nourished by the aria, and the cadence that bound pleasure to loss. Decades later, "those childish regrets in the theater" still made him "want to weep." But Leiris' anticipatory weeping is by nature confined to childhood recollections and involuntary memories. His texts rarely grant contemporary events such power over his emotional states.
“What is forbidden is unfortunately the best and that is joy,” Hélène Cixous wrote. “That is the definition of truth, see, right, it is the thing you must not say.”. And it recognizes us in a line, a scene, a light, a landscape. We encounter it with alarm, with horror, for the world cannot go back to its former self. Not unless we agree to lie, trivialize, to dissimulate – to collaborate in the reburial of truth— discursive collaborations which Cixous refuses.
Instead, the writer leverages language to depict “the scene of the crime,” or the space in which the criminal heart of humans is not hidden. “We must keep our crime in order to keep our crimes safe to avoid the terrible fate of being forgiven,” claims Cixous. There is no safety in lifting the pen.
The “lovecrimes” of writing are constituted by the expectations inherent to narrativity. No single narrative could satisfy the truth conditions of a relationship as defined within language, circumscribed by what is said and communicated between two parties who believe in an “us” they invented.
As for socialization, or social scripts, the princess needs the monster in order to have an excuse to marry the man. But she also needs the monstrous as an imaginary that turns the man she married into an erotic possibility.
“Now you know,” my Bunicu said, “that nothing is like your Disneyworld television. The princess is just an ornament until the demon or the monster arrives. The monster is that terrible unknown beast that threatens us, and the threat is what makes the princess precious.”
The story anticipates the monster's presence: the character is shaped by waiting to meet the thing she imagines. This is why desire is monstrous.
When Bunicu said that "the monster, the threat, is what makes the princess precious," did he mean precious or valuable? For the little girl, the semantic difference is slight. For the adult, the difference is a market.
POSTSCRIPT
Robert Fludd’s Utriusque Cosmi (1617) includes an image of nonexistence. The black square is intended to represent the void or nothingness prior to the universe’s coming into being. Each of the four sides of the square includes the words, “Et sic in infinitum…” (And so on to infinity…”). And yet, this inscription—- perhaps more than the box, itself—- feels like a boundary, or a way of forcing us to reckon with observation’s inherent boundedness.
*
Hélène Cixous, Sarah Cornell, and Susan Sellers, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (Columbia University Press, 1993)
Marguerite Duras, Me & Other Writing, trans. Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan (Dorothy Project, 2019)