Carol Hofmann - Forgetting and Marguerite Duras

Copyright 1991 by the University Press of Colorado
P.O. Box 849
Niwot, Colorado 80544

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, University of Southern Colorado, and Western State College.

Hofmann, Carol, 1946
Forgetting and Marguerite Duras / Carol Hofmann.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87081-225-4
1. Duras, Marguerite Criticism and interpretation. 2. Memory in literature.
I. Title.
PQ2607.U8245Z74 1991
843'.912 dc20

91-9951

CIP

I am grateful for the help, collaboration, and support of colleagues, family, and friends. I wish to thank in particular Robert Frysinger, Nancy Hathaway, Al Hutter, George Guffey, Patrick Melly, Albert Sonnenfeld and Rjean Lemay. Thank you also to Alain Gauthier and Jean-Franois Chassy of Editions Spirale in Montreal for the photograph of Marguerite Duras and to Editions Gallimard and Les Editions de Minuit for the rights to reproduce Duras's texts.

Forgetting is a thematic constant in the novels and films of Marguerite Duras. Forgetting also describes the relationship of the reader to her texts. Michel Foucault commented that despite the intense and lasting impression left by a Duras text, "au moment d'en parler, j'ai l'impression que tout m'chappe."1Michle Montreley described reading Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein with "On lit, on lit sans arrter mais au fur et mesure on oublie profondment."2

Through the use of slow, repetitive, almost incantatory narrative, a narrative that constantly asserts its own fragility and invention, Duras communicates the incommunicable. She triggers what seem to be undefinable memories in the reader through her characters and their stories, both of which "remember" pasts in which memories dissolve, fragment, and empty themselves of meaning. Hlne Cixous called Duras's narrative "l'art de la pauvret" or "le rien qui est tout."3 Michel Foucault called it "la mmoire sans souvenir."4 This notion of "memory without memories'' well describes Durasian forgetting - a forgetting closely linked to memory, love, and desire as well as to repetition and obsession. Obsession, in its turn, is tied to the search for the unknowable, "l'impossible."

There are two distinct kinds of forgetting in Marguerite Duras's texts. One is forgetting-as-repression. In this state, as defined by Freud, forgetting seemingly takes place in one's conscious waking life.

A memory trace, however, lingers in the unconscious. Being refused admission to consciousness, it maintains itself indefinitely in an unchanged state.5 In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud wrote, "It is a prominent feature of unconscious processes that they are indestructible."6Asserting that it is the task of psychotherapy "to make it possible for the unconscious processes to be dealt with finally and forgotten,"7Freud maintained that it is only those memories that can emerge from the unconscious that can be forgotten. This brings us to the second sort of forgetting found in Duras's texts, forgetting-through-remembering, a forgetting made possible through the remembering of an event that had been repressed because of its traumatic or painful nature.

Marcel Proust, in A la Recherche du temps perdu, described "oubli" as "un si puissant instrument d'adaptation la ralit parce qu'il dtruit peu peu en nous le pass survivant qui est en constante contradiction avec elle."8 It is the notion of forgetting as an instrument of adaptation, of change, and possibly of mastery as well as an indication of the resolution of mourning that I will explore in Marguerite Duras's texts through models proposed by both Freud (repetition-compulsion/mastery) and Melanie Klein (mourning). These models will serve as points of reference, helping to define a Durasian forgetting, which, although sharing many similarities with these models, differs dramatically from them in its tenacious refusal to be an instrument of adaptation. The forgetting-as-repression examined in this first chapter will also serve as a counterpoint to the uniquely Durasian forgetting-through-remembering, which is the focus of this work and a mainstay of her characters and texts.

Freud speculated that one represses or forgets memories, images, dreams, and obligations in order to avoid what he called "unpleasure." This unpleasure (which in the context of Duras's work I will call pain) would come either from consciously acknowledging the repressed sexual or libidinal motivation for a behavior or interest or from consciously remembering a traumatic incident. In