Magazine: College Literature, February, 1994

          WRITING POWER IN DURAS' L'AMANT DE LA CHINE DU NORD.
          ----------------------------------------------------

Ramsay is author of Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality, and
Subversion (Florida 1992) and many articles on contemporary French
literature. She is associate professor of French at Simmons College.

It has been a matter of theoretical concern that "difference" or the
"feminine," like the principle of "carnival" or of the disorderly woman,
might remain a simple reversal of values, reversal that ultimately
serves to reinforce the power structures in place. The transgression of
the law--or of narrative--might simply confirm the power of the law or
of the language that it transgresses.

The question of whether writing has the power to enter and recover a
"wild country" of "difference" (another kind of power) through reversals
or transgressions of traditional frames of reference is necessarily at
the heart of any critical reading of the "new autobiographies" (L'Amant,
Emily L.) of Marguerite Duras (see Ramsay). Nathalie Sarraute's "new
autobiographies," too (Enfance, Tune t'aimes pas), seek to move toward
the unknown (the unsayable) in the self through the prodding, the
squeezing inside and the exposing of the meanings of conventional
expressions. These works remain self-consciously aware of the
compromised nature of the language that serves as their instrument of
investigation. Duras attempts to recover the power of the "wild country"
through a "chaotic" text that models regression to the brutality of
primitive states, a text marked by the cry, gesture, silence, and
obsessive repetition of founding scenes of desire. Sarraute is embroiled
in a struggle between a unified, polished, surface order of language as
it fixes and limits sensations and self and the swarming undersides of
these structures, the multiple selves that can be forced for a moment
into view in a war of the words. Both writers have undertaken this
"impossible" movement between feeling and saying through the medium of a
literary excavation without much certainty of success and with a
paradoxical sense of powerlessness/new power.

The "new" power sought in the "new" autobiographies[1] resides in just
this apparent contradiction, the impossible movement, both in and yet
somehow reaching beyond the postmodern bind in which self, desires,
sensations, fantasies are a construction by language, discursive
formations, always already there. As they transform traditional
autobiography, science, and gender, the new autobiographies rewrite the
apparently dialectical oppositions (the logic of contradictions) lurking
in the very designation of the reversals they effect: feminine for
masculine, or powerlessness for power. They write a new "chaotic"
character into the circulation between power and resistance to power.

For Michel Foucault, power and knowledge are situated within a social
dynamics of control characterized by a movement from subversion to
containment. Such a movement is essentially a self-canceling equilibrium
process: subversion remains within power (see Power/Knowledge). In
Duras' work, however, power/language/knowledge are abused and used to
forge connections with what is not (in) power. This is, as Duras
expresses it in Emily L., the unsayable or unreadable "minimal
difference, where the meanings are" sensed in the unmaking and remaking
of knowledge. In Sarraute, the unsayable is identified with the tiny,
affective, tropistic "differences" underlying and deferred in speech yet
detectable through the speaking voice. Although they participate in the
circulation of power/resistance to power that constructs both the
individual and the truth, a circulation that is, for Foucault, at once
an effect of power and its mode of domination, the "differences" in the
new autobiographies also introduce something new (local, approaching
agency). These local, unpredictable, mobile truths move the ordered
Foucault system in equilibrium through minute but recursive changes
toward the fluctuating non-equilibrium states and the bifurcation points
of random change that may create event or new knowledge. The forms of
the new autobiographies are close to the models of a new science (chaos
theory, Ilya Prigogine's "dissipative systems," catastrophe theory) that
contests reductive determinism. They move beyond the Foucault model to
the extent that the circulation Foucault envisages leaves no place for
change or agency.[2]

It has become a commonplace that pre-oedipal identification is the most
obvious route to significations unassimilable to the Patriarchal Law in
place. The originality of L'Amant de la Chine du nord, I argue, is that
as it experiments with the forms through which the capture of the
unconscious or the prelinguistic might indeed be possible (the
psychoanalytic domain), it experitaneously struggles with the question
of whether the unconscious is indeed structured like a language, as
Jacques Lacan claims (the domain of the semiotic). The character of the
"beyond" (beyond the prison-house of language or ready-made Law, beyond
dialectic, beyond deterministic closed systems, beyond conventional
notions of power as juridical sovereignty, social contract, or right)
that the new texts model is not simply a regression to the pre-oedipal.
The "minimal difference" of which Duras speaks must participate in the
sphere of language as much as in the pre-linguistic. Its nature--that of
the body made word is contradictory.

Nor does the pre-oedipal or the "minimal difference" simply recover a
traditional essence. In her study of Italian feminism, Teresa de
Lauretis argues that a certain form of essentialism, based on the
individual contexts and experiences of women, is not incompatible with
constructionism (woman as readymade ideological or linguistic product),
despite the mutual exclusion of essentialism and constructionism in
current theory. Change, agency, the touching of a beyond might derive,
her thesis suggests, from the very specificity and uniqueness of female
contexts and experiences and within local inter- and intra-personal
hierarchies, differences, and relations of force as much as from global
equal rights. Agency might manifest itself in choice and individual
style.

For Foucault too, the local and the singular have particular
significance: "Power is constructed and functions on the basis of
particular powers, myriad issues, myriad effects of power"
(Power/Knowledge 188). The traditional relation between the global (as
cause and dominance) and the local (as effect and submission/reaction)
undergoes a radical change. As in the principle of "sensitive dependence
on initial conditions" in chaos theory (a principle that emerged from
the study of non-mechanical, non-traditional dynamical physical systems),
small local dislocations or effects of power, magnified through the
system, can initiate major change in global relations. In the Lorenzian
hypothesis of "the butterfly effect" in weather systems, for example,
the movement of a butterfly's wings in Peking, repeated through the
system, might produce a storm in Florida. In the new autobiographies, as
in postmodernism and feminism, the dissolution of "Man" and the
subsequent lack of any absolute principle or paternal legitimation to
give meaning to the self and to the world constitute the starting points
for the exploration of the chaotic and generative impulses and the
complex, sado-masochistic relations of power concealed within this
"void." These relations do not exist in perfect equilibrium or symmetry
and are far from predictable--not unlike those of most complex living
systems.

Foucault chooses, much as the new autobiographers do, to investigate the
network of relations from the bottom, or at the lowest level. But
arguing that power is always already there, that one is always inside
power, the philosopher limits his enterprise of knowledge to an
intellectual modeling of the ways in which the mechanisms and effects of
power have been able to operate. The new autobiographers are writing
from within similar power relations and discourses but they do not seek
to elaborate a distancing archaeology of knowledge or a history of
sexuality as Foucault does. Rather, at the limits of their own intimate
affective experience, they seek to sound the unsaid or unsayable, the
more mobile "chaotic" laws of intimate power, sexuality, and knowledge.
Resistance, for Robbe-Grillet, cannot be simply a question of opposition
to the Law, of cutting off the King's head, or indeed of casting bright
light on his own fantasies of the beautiful captive. In Robbe-Grillet's
work, Boris, the regicide, is also the King; as his old head rolls, the
"hydra-monster" of theory simply sprouts new heads, Stalin replaces the
Czar, and the marine monster who both devours little girls and flees the
devouring sea/mother (mer/mere) makes confession of his fantasies--but
in a self-conscious linguistic pirouette. In the new interchangeable non-
dialectical figures that they create and in the movement that breaks
down the limits between inside and outside, language and life, sadism
and masochism, there is, however, a recoding of the relations of power
that may alter them.

The limitation of Foucault's poststructuralist formulation of the
question of the relation to power (even in resistance, one is inside
power) is highlighted by a number of new forms emerging into the general
cultural climate. These appear in art, in the work of Magritte
(paintings of landscapes/landscapes painted that are simultaneously
inside and outside the room in The Human Condition or The Beautiful
Captive) for example. They are present also in the scientific discourses
that Foucault himself sees as dominant in contemporary society, in the
reversibility of the new topological figures of the Moebius strip or
Klein worms where inside and outside are indistinguishable, in
Heisenberg's "complementary relations" (matter as both particle and wave)
, and in the unpredictability and pattern in the dynamical systems of
chaos theory. De Lauretis, too, formulates the hope that struggle
against repressive or disciplinary power might take place not in the
name of juridical sovereignty or right--that is, of the other face of
global power--but rather in the search for a new kind of right.

Foucault claims, however, that the play of power and resistance that
generates itself at each moment, at specific points, and in every
relation (between male and female, adult and child, etc.) allowing the
emergence of "subjugated knowledges," including those of the body,
nonetheless remains within power. According to the Foucault model, then,
Duras' resistance would necessarily function within a sexuality
constructed by a productive power exercised in both the repression and
the stimulation (by advertising, pornography, etc.) of bodies and
desires and in the production of effects at the level of desire and
knowledge. Duras' work, however, is an attempt to dramatize such
internalized oppressions and to go beyond the effects of the matrix of
received sex/text. Her text seeks stubbornly, persistently, passionately,
outside the mainstream tradition of rationality, to write her desire in
spite of its mixed nature and the problematic gap between text and life.
Foucault, who, as Jana Sawicki argues, sees the body as the target and
the vehicle of modern disciplinary practices, calls for a displacement
in relation to the sexual centering of the problem of power, and argues
against the thesis of repression.[3]

In Duras' work, too, of course, the Law may be constitutive of desire.
"Difference" is perceptible only through the rhythms, semiotic flow, and
breaks of the texts that obscure it. It is the lost, pre-verbal,
desiring other side of the repressive and formative social structures in
place. But sign-posted in linguistic, thematic, and structural
inversions, and in the writer's metatextual observations and the
fracturing effect of metalepsis (illicit slippage between levels of the
text, between fiction and metacommentary), desire in Duras is a complex,
non-linear, non-dialectical product of a pleasure-inducing network of
power relations and conflicts and not simply an opposite reaction to
repression or disciplinary normalization of the body. It maintains
tensions and interactions at all levels of functioning of the text
between the pre-oedipal or pre-linguistic (maternal fusion, oceanic
beatitude, emotion) and the oedipal (the separation, identification with
the father's authority [the Phallus], loss, individuation, and
rationality of the symbolic or linguistic).

One new autobiography (also a novel and a film scenario), Duras' 1991
L'Amant de la Chine du nord, illustrates precisely the existence of a
power of writing in Duras that cannot be wholly contained as in the
Foucault model. In this rewriting of a first autobiographical fiction--a
local re-writing of the story of the lover (brother, mother) already
present in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (Gallimard, 1950) and L'Amant
(Minuit, 1984)--Duras seeks once again, stubbornly, passionately, to
write intense and buried desire from her own hysterical body at once
given voice by, and filtered through, a text that seeks new forms of
community and economies of power and pleasure. The fictional truth that
Duras attempts to produce, as writing gives form to her life and her
life takes on the form of art, goes beyond the role that Foucault
assigns truth, that of reflecting and sustaining social systems. In this
respect, it may engender something new, not embedded in the circulation
of power relations in place. Duras has presented L'Amant de la Chine du
nord as the most truthful of her autobiographies (see Garis). At first
sight, an aging writer appears to be at pains to retell the stories of
institutional colonial power and of the play of power within familial
and sexual relations that have already appeared in her earlier texts in
order to set the record still straighter.[4]

Rather than simply demonstrating improved recall of real events or
greater sincerity, however, the re-writing of L'Amant "without
literariness" introduces a number of small and only apparently
inconsequential local changes in the stories recounted in the earlier
works. These differences magnify through the intertextual "system" of
Duras' work, introducing uncertainty and disorder--not unlike the
principle of sensitive dependency on initial conditions that creates the
butterfly effect in chaos theory. The modification of details and the
addition of a number of new scenes also alter previous relations of
power within familial relations and between the former and the present
works.

One such "new" and very cinematographic or visual scene is situated in
early childhood at Vinhlong, one evening after house-washing when the
younger brother Paulo has been chased away by Pierre. The mother is
braiding the child's hair for the night under the mosquito net in the
bed they share to prevent the young girl from sneaking into Paulo's bed.
The daughter initiates a dialogue with the mother, accusing her of blind
preference for the bullying older brother and neglect of the dominated
and slightly retarded younger son. Despite the new diegetic frame, this
is, once again, the primal Durassian scene of the family romance, the
triangulation or circulation of desire through the mother's unjustified
and passionate preference for the violent profligate brother, the
daughter's desire to be loved by the mother (and brother) and protective,
possessive love for the "little" brother. However, although the scene is
still colored by the young girl's accusing and demanding cries of pain,
it is marked by an attempt on the part of the (adult?) narrator to speak
also from the mother's position. She recalls the mother's protest that
she loves all her children, and her admission of the danger posed by
Pierre. In this context, Pierre takes on the form of the negative
archaic father of the Oedipus myth, a powerful and tyrannical Laios who
would kill any son who threatened to replace him.

The daughter's rage at the mother's preference for the older brother is
permeated in this scene by a new understanding, an apparent intimacy and
an empathetic affective power moving within the mother-daughter
relationship. Such minor changes in the writer's still complex and
contradictory re-membering and re-writing of youthful desire, out of the
devastation of age, evoke a more intense identificatory relation with
the mother than the scenes of Un Barrage contre le Pacifique or L'Amant.
The fluctuations between the child's individuation and separation from
the mother and her need for recognition of and by the mother that marked
the account of the mother-daughter relation in L'Amant are resolved in
this work on the side of a movement toward mutual recognition and a kind
of interchangeability. Translating this within a psychoanalytic frame,
in L'Amant de la Chine du nord there seems to be an attempt to resolve
the conflict between a pre-oedipal stage of unity with the mother and a
situation of oedipal conflict in which identification with the mother
(as inside, lack of desire, lack of agency and of power) requires
renunciation of outside "phallic" desire, excitement, power. Duras is
seeking a border territory, margins in which it is possible to
renegotiate the apparent opposites of a pre-oedipal, "feminine" space of
freedom from linguistic and patriarchal constraints in "maternal waters"
(similar to the space outside language posited by object-relations
models of analysis) and an oedipal, ready-made, "masculine" language.

Toward the end of the novel, the ambiguities already present in the
earlier portraits of the mother in L'Amant as punitive and yet, at some
level, complicitous with her young daughter's transgressions of the law
(her conversation with the Director of the Pensionnat Lyautey in which
she explains her daughter's need to come and go as she pleases) are also
given a new focus by the addition to the story of a meeting between
lover and mother. The lover comes to the mother's house as envoy for his
wealthy father who has been solicited by the older brother for
compensation for his sister's "dishonor." He is initially
indistinguishable from the Chinese creditors waiting for payment of
Pierre's opium debts and perhaps represents a similar dishonor, a client
come to pay for the daughter's favors.

The new dialogue between the mother and the Chinese man could be
described as "scattershot," a term that Tom Bishop uses to talk about
his own disconnected exchanges with Duras, punctuated by silence or
repetition, and unconcerned with making clear immediate sense.[5] It
succeeds in establishing intimacy between the mother and the lover
indirectly, using rhythm, break and repetition, through the shared
interest in the young Marguerite and the mother's empathetic
understanding of the lover's suffering. The subsequent new scene between
mother and daughter also turns around the daughter's emotional
involvement with the Chinese man and her probable future abandonment in
favor of a traditional Chinese bride. The mother appears to have an
intuitive understanding not only of the desire and empowerment inherent
in the daughter's transgressions, freedom, and socially marginal status,
but also of the daughter's fierce desire for the power (the money) to
compensate her mother as defrauded and powerless woman. In this scene,
then, it is together that the mother and the daughter ("Elles") took
("ont pris") the money that the too wealthy Chinese father had to offer
in an act that reversed self-abasement to make it self-empowerment:
"Avec la more elles ont fait ca: elles ont pris: l'argent" (173) [They
did it: she and the mother: they took: the money].[6]

Although Duras' own obsessive relationship with money is indeed "common
knowledge," money/power is not modelled here as simply serving the
economic circulation of commodities or as something one acquires or
possesses. A metatextual or omniscient commentary claims that the North
Chinese lover, too, had understood intuitively the true and double
nature of the desire elicited by the diamond in the pivotal scene of
seduction on the ferry crossing the Mekong: "Le Chinois avait su qu'elle
avait voulu la bague pour la donner a la mere autant qu'elle avait voulu
sa main sur son corps" (141) [The Chinese man had known that she had
wanted the ring to give it to her mother as much as she had wanted his
hands on her body].

It would not have been possible for the daughter/narrator to have been
present at a meeting between the lover and the mother. This could only
have been imagined or, at best, recounted second-hand. It seems
improbable that these additions to the novel of childhood in Duras'
mature years have their origin in any single scene lived more than fifty
years earlier. They are in apparent contradiction with certain other
earlier fictional portraits of the mother's law-enforcing codes and
attitudes--scenes, for example, in which the child, suspected of sexual
precociousness, is stripped, humiliated, and beaten by a suspicious,
desperate mother egged on voyeuristically by the brutal older brother in
order to "correct" ("dresser") her daughter's sexual promiscuity and
save her social reputation. By emphasizing the complicity between mother
and lover in the first dialogue, or mother and daughter in the second,
Duras may be rewriting one more time, and with a more positive
resolution, the complex scars left by this other recursive scene of the
mother's anger and despair, the daughter's physical humiliation, and the
brother's sexual voyeurism.

The truth of the scenes of the mother's direct complicity in the
daughter's affair and "prostitution" added in L'Amant de la Chine du
nord, and the knowledge that these scenes invoke, derive less from a
recovery of a factual past event than from its invention, in the present,
where the body is, in a movement between past desire re-membered in the
present and desire created through the act of writing. Duras has said
explicitly in a number of interviews that the mother could not have been
told of, and could not have accepted, an affair between her adolescent
daughter (fifteen and a half in L'Amant, fourteen in L'Amant de la Chine
du nord) and a twenty-seven year old Chinese man. In the final lines of
the interview with Bernard Pivot for the Apostrophes program televised
after the appearance of L'Amant, Duras reiterates this claim that
neither her mother nor her brother ever knew of the lover's existence:

   Bernard Pivot: "Est-ce qu'elle, elle avait honte de votre liaison
   avec le Chinois?" Marguerite Duras: "Elle ne la connaissait pas...
   Ca aurait ete pire encore si elle avait appris que sa lille
   couchait avec un Chinois, pire que le barrage . . . Elle ne l'a
   jamais su."

   [Bernard Pivot: "Was she ashamed of your affair with the Chinese
   man?" Marguerite Duras: "She didn't know about it. That would have
   been even worse if she had learned that her daughter was sleeping
   with a Chinese, worse than the sea-wall... She never knew."]

There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of this assertion, but it is
contradicted in L'Amant de la Chine du nord. The truths of Duras'
relationships always turn out to be more local, relational, multiple,
contradictory, and shifting than any single or global statement can
suggest. Perhaps this is because Duras' text has no power to say
anything not known directly and locally, that is, through the body in
the dialogic act of writing.

The scenes of reconciliation between mother, daughter, and lover do not
eliminate the daughter's rage against the injustice of the mother's
exclusive love for a "criminal" son. However, the fiction of a
complicity on the part of the mother with a lover himself now identified
more strongly with the maternally beloved "little" brother also changes
the relations of power that existed in previous texts. In L'Amant, at
the dinner he offers the young girl's family in an expensive restaurant,
the rich Chinese lover is ignored, exploited, and humiliated. He is
presented as weak and ineffectual before the older brother in this scene
where the young Marguerite joins cruel ranks with her poor, but
scornfully racist white family. The adolescent participates in the
mother's fascination with the toughness of her farming brothers and the
brute strength of the older brother against the weakness of the lover,
although she does resist the brother's absolute tyranny. Annaud makes
this ugly scene a central one in his film, pushing the family's vulgar
disdain and the young girl's provocative bravado to burlesque lengths
and inventing a subsequent scene of sexual violation in which the lover
takes revenge for his public humiliation. In the version of the dinner
and its nightclub sequel in L'Amant de la Chine du nord, on the contrary,
the lover is tacitly accepted by the mother and the little brother.
Pretending to be adept in Kung-Fu, he stands up to and defeats the
bullying older brother. Indeed, a taller, more confident, less weak and
fearful lover is prescribed by Duras to play the lead part of "her"
film.

Although all the elements of potential abuse of power are put
provocatively into play in this text in characteristic Durassian
reversals--the nymphet, the older man, a diamond, inequality of power--
the lover himself in L'Amant de la Chine du nord moves between positions
of power and of weakness that are linked not only to virility or
impotence, or to wealth and social situation, but also, and especially,
to states of desire. The lover from North China is in the power of his
father's law, in the power of the fear of death, and in the final
instance, as much in the desperate power of money ("un desespere de
l'argent") as is Duras' mother, otherwise burdened with her son's
gambling and opium debts, and her family's material survival. The lover
is also, and most particularly, in the power of his exclusive, excessive
passion for the under-age white girl.

Voluntarist attitudes in the De Beauvoir style, claims Marcelle Marini,
are explicitly refused by Duras ("Je [ne] veux pas etre declarative" [I
don't want to make statements]) (Duras and Gauthier 184) or undermined
by other involuntary movements of the body. Truth and power for women,
according to Duras, derive from desire: "On n'ecrit pas au meme endroit
que les hommes. Et quand les femmes n'ecrivent pas dans le lieu du desir,
elles n'ecrivent pas, elles sont dans le plagiat" (Porte, qtd. in Marini,
Territoire 35) [We don't write from the same place as men. And when
women don't write from the place of their desire, they do not write,
they plagiarize]. Duras, says Marini, takes the figures that De
Beauvoir's analysis lays bare--the man who exults in feeling sexually
powerful and the woman who is affectively dependent and dispossessed-and
explores their underside, their indecency. Her writing removes the taboo
on the aggressive violence within us and permits investigation of
dereliction, the horror of loss, suicidal crisis, desire to massacre
those one loves, or to destroy the sex desired in the body of the other
("L'autre corps" 36). These undersides reveal unexpected new relations
of gender, close to an entre-deux or to what Julia Kristeva in Powers of
Horror has called "abjection": an entre-deux that the lover comes to
embody and that once again incorporates new relations of power/lack of
power.

Madeleine Borgomano's readings of the novels of Duras could be extended
to the autofictional stories of the power/powerlessness of the mother
and of the power/lack of power of money to see the latter as also
deriving from a passionate story of the painful and regressive desire
for a male body that has disappeared ("le signifiant absent du corps
masculin participe de ce vide central du texte durassien" [the absent
signifier of the masculine body is part of this central void in the
Durassian text]). In this reading, the fables of the loss of Duras' own
child-lover-little brother would appear to be a traditional Freudian or
Lacanian story of loss (of the Phallus).

But, in L'Amant de la Chine du nord, the little brother's desired body,
like the lover's, is feminized and sexualized. Paulo is also a (post-
Renaissance) Christ-like figure, described as a martyr dying of despair
and pain. The passionate, protective and possessive maternal love for
Paulo ("C'est comme mon fiance, Paulo, mon enfant, c'est le plus grand
tresor pour moi" [29; He's like my fiance, Paulo, my child, he's my
greatest treasure]) is paralleled by a fierce rejection of the kind of
cruel and tyrannical paternal power exerted by the older brother Pierre.


In Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, a single brother who exerts a strong
fascination on the young gift concentrated aspects of the two brothers.
It seems clear that Duras' rage against and refusal of the fascination
of the older brother's power was less intense or less conscious at the
time of the writing of Un Barrage than it had become almost forty years
later. In L'Amant de la Chine du nord on the other hand, the daughter's
fierce love for her victimized brother, first clearly evoked in L'Amant,
has been pushed to its extreme limits and become explicitly incestuous.

What was telescoped into a single character in the fictional Un Barrage
is polarized in the autobiographical L'Amant and its sequel, suggesting
that the turbulent extreme states of love and hate, of rage and tears,
may be "complementary." The poles of pain and pleasure, sadism and
masochism, power and lack of power, love and hate are contradictory but
not mutually exclusive and as troubling in the circulation of their
distinctive features as the meaning of the accompanying tears that link
the lover "taking" the little white girl and those of the little brother
"taken" by the sister.

The verb "to take" is used to express the reciprocity of love in the
incestuous relation with the younger brother: "C'avait ete la qu'ils
s'etaient pris pour la seule fois de leur vie" (200) [It was there that
they took each other the only time in their life] and the triangulation
of passion in the desire to give Helene to the lover; "Je voudrais
beaucoup ca, que tu la prennes comme si je te la donnais" (183) [I would
like that a lot, for you to take her as if I were giving her to you].
The potential self-discovery in self-dispossession is implied in the
scandalous being "taken" in the ditches along the roadways, or being
"taken for another" by men who do not love her like the schoolgirl
"prostitute," Alice. Duras exploits the contexts in which the verb to
take ("prendre") recurs to create a network of significations that
undermine the traditional semantic distinctive features (+ active +
virile) of its active form ("to take") as well as its conventional
binary relationship (active/passive) with the passive "taken." In the
repetitions of the verb "to take," desire is made to circulate between
the passivity and the sexual violence, the voyeurism and the
exhibitionism, the control and the renunciation of control that lie at
the paradoxical heart of the work of Duras. Again, conventional binary
opposition is rewritten.

Similarly, the repetition of the verb "to look" is used to effect shifts
between seeing and being seen, between being the subject or the object
of the gaze. The two are telescoped into a non-contradictory interactive
process in which relations of domination have been reconfigured but have
not disappeared. On the ferry: "II la regarde. Ils se regardent . . .
Elle le regarde fort" (36) [He looks at her. They look at each other...
She looks hard at him]. In the Morris Leon Bollee, driving towards
Saigon: "Lui, il regarde alors les signes de misere" (40) [He looks at
the signs of poverty, then]. Later, "Il la regarde tres fort" (43) [He
looks very hard at her]. "Le Chinois la regarde: Tu pleures" (49) [The
Chinese man looks at her: You're crying].

The "child" accepts being the object of the gaze and the object of a
seduction, but her own looking is also determinedly active. In the
bedroom in Cholen, "Elle le regarde. Ce n'est pas lui qui la regarde.
C'est elle qui le fait. Elle voit qu'il a peur" (69) [She looks at him.
It is not he who looks at her. She looks. She sees that he is afraid].
"C'est elle qui veut savoir..." (70) [It is she who wants to know...].
The verbal repetitions may correspond to directions for the camera but
these movements of oscillation and reversal are something more.
Significantly, the Chinese fiancee who does not yet have the right to
look at the lover plays no active part in the story. What does not
permit circulation of power and powerlessness, taking and being taken,
looking and being looked at, what is passive only, is rejected. In a
footnote that describes the requirements for casting the protagonist of
the film, beauty is excluded because: "La beaute ne fait rien. Elle ne
regarde pas. Elle est regardee" (70) [Beauty does nothing. It does not
look. It is looked at]. At the end of the book in a similar and now
characteristic conflating of opposites, of strength and weakness, the
lover "avait pleure. Tres fort. Du plus fort de ses forces" (232) [had
cried. Very hard. With all his strength]. The breaking down of the
conventional opposition between the intimate and the public, the
movement that characterized L'Amant, is also continued here in the
repetition of the "openness" of the room, the "exposure" of the lovers
"... dans ce passage du dehors dans la chambre" (78) [... in the passage
from the outside into the bedroom].

It can be argued that the relative positions of the writer and the young
girl she once was are involved similarly in a circulation of opposing
elements. Duras' relation with her character/adolescent self is
sometimes that of a fascinated or admiring mother gazing at "la petite"
[the little one], sometimes that of empathetic regression to the child's
state "je" [I]. The text moves between a polyphony of first persons,
"Je" [I] the writer and "Je" [I] the child, and third persons, "elle"
[she], "la petite" [the little one], "la petite blanche" [the little
white girl], "la jeune fille" [the young girl], and "elle" [she], the
writer. Other subject designations operate a circulation between
characters and between narrator and character. The words used to
designate Paulo by the sister, the mother, and the narrator, "le petit
frere" [the little brother] or "l'enfant" [the child], are used to refer
to the protagonist/child that the narrator once was, also described as
"la petite" [the little one] or "l'enfant" [the child]. The fluidity of
these movements breaks down the boundaries of a clear and distinctive,
single, powerful self. Past unconscious desire or what Duras has called
the "ombre interne" [inner shadow] surfaces in the poetic devices of the
rhythmic, repetitive writing. At the same time, there is a narrative
stance of present and artful (conscious) control over complex textual
relations and intertextual reference.

The extreme masochistic thematics so troublingly present in Duras'
earlier works recur in this re-writing of power. The fascination exerted
by the crime passionnel, the fantasy of self-loss or dissolution of the
self in the other and the text's own uncertainties and self-cancelings
are all reinforced by the use of diminutives with shifting reference. In
the drama of the opening of the body to the other/the outside in the
scene of the "little one's" deflowering, the "taking," the "bleeding,"
and the "mind-numbing pain" are presented as a kind of ecstasy.
Suffering transforms to pleasure and vice-versa in this place where one
is lost ("naufrage" [79]) and thought is defeated ("terrassee" [77]),
where the ecstasy of the flesh is also longing and despair ("ce
desespoir du bonheur de la chair" [79]) perhaps because, to echo Duras,
no love can take the place of Love. The words that weave the thread of a
masochistic mysticism in this scene ("prendre," "naufrage," "terrassee")
are repeated at other moments of L'Amant de la Chine du nord and in
other Durassian texts.

The child is "emportee par le chauffeur a son amant. Livree a lui" (95)
[carried off by the driver to her lover. Delivered over to him]. "Elle
devient objet a lui, a lui seul, secretement prostituee... Livree comme
chose, chose par lui seul, volee. Par lui seul prise, utilisee,
penetree" (96) [She becomes his object, his, his alone, secretly
prostituted... Delivered like a thing, his thing alone, robbed. Taken by
him alone, used, penetrated]. Her identity becomes "celle de lui
appartenir a lui, d'etre a lui seul son bien, sans mot pour nommer ca,
fondue & lui, dilute dans une generalite... celle depuis le commencement
des temps nommee a tort par un autre mot, celui d'indignite" (96) [that
of belonging to him, of being his thing only, with no word to name this,
merged with him, diluted in a generality... that named erroneously from
the beginning of time by another word, indignity]. He "lovingly" insults
her: "--Une petite Blanche de quatre sous trouvee dans la rue" (133) [--
A poor little White girl picked up in the street].

In this more recent text, however, there are small changes in the re-
writing of the passionate relation with the lover and of the gender
associations of the pairs of strength and weakness, outside and inside,
domination and humiliation that go further than L'Amant in the
modification of the traditional "feminine" connotations of weakness,
inside, and humiliation.

She, in her turn, insults and degrades him in erotic play as an "espece
de petit Chinois de rien du tout, de petit criminel" (134) [worthless
little Chinese, little criminal]. Earlier, she had called him "un voyou"
(85) [a wastrel], the word that designated the older brother. The text
comments on the inversions it employs: "C'est la, c'avait ete la, apres
ce fou rire-la, que s'etait inversee l'histoire" (41) [It's there, it
was there, after that uncontrollable laughter, that the story had
reversed]. She had taken the hand of the Chinese man, weak, unresisting,
and naked, and looked at it before putting it aside: "... ca s'inflechit
vers les ongles, un peu comme si c'etait casse, atteint d'adorable
infirmite ca a la grace de l'aile d'un oiseau mort... Elle la regarde.
Regarde la main nue... La main, docile, laisse faire" (42) [It curves in
towards the nails, a little as if it were broken, affected by an
adorable infirmity, it has the grace of the wing of a dead bird... She
looks at it. Looks at the naked hand... The hand is docile, does not
resist]. In the bedroom, initially, the lover seems to control the
scenario "avec une sorte de crainte comme si elle etait fragile, et
aussi avec une brutalite contenue" (75) [with a kind of fear as if she
were fragile and also with restrained brutality] but he is awed,
overwhelmed by his "violation" and, as in L'Amant, the child also
dominates the lover's abandoned, weak, and unresisting body: "Et c'est
alors qu'elle le fait, elle. Les yeux fermes, elle le deshabille" (75)
[And it is then that she does it. With her eyes closed, she undresses
him]. When the lover returns from the visit to the mother at Sadec,
"Elle le savonne. Elle le douche. II se laisse faire. Les roles se sont
inverses" (133) [She soaps him down. She showers him. He does not
resist. The roles are reversed]. She protects him, maternally. He is her
impotent "child .... without strength" who "fait ce qu'elle veut" (133)
[does what she wants], much as she has been "sa soeur de sang. Son
enfant. Son amour" (81) [his blood sister. His child. His beloved]. He
is killed by her, martyred: "Mort du desir d'une enfant. Martyre" (61)
[Dead from desire for a child. A martyr] as she, too, becomes fascinated
by the fear of martyrdom, "D'etre tuee par cet inconnu du voyage a Long-
Hai" (134) [of being killed by this stranger of the Long-Hai journey].
As her departure and his marriage approach, his despair and erotic
impulse towards death increase: "--il dit: Desespere, fou, a se tuer"
(212) [--he says: Despairing, mad, to the point of suicide]. On the boat,
the young girl closes her eyes to rediscover the smell of the silk suit,
the skin, his captive look: "L'idee de l'odeur. Celle de la chambre.
Celle de ses yeux captifs qui battaient sous ses baisers d'elle,
l'enfant" (217) [The idea of his smell. The smell of his bedroom. The
idea of his captive eyes fluttering beneath her kisses, she, the child].
Her body is a center of power.

The thin child, almost without breasts, is "cruel" (149). But, so, too,
in this oscillating movement that is not an equilibrium, is the North
Chinese lover. Unable to keep the child through fear of his father and
weakness before the force of Chinese family law that would have him
marry the sixteen-year-old Chinese girl betrothed to him in childhood to
unite the family fortunes, he fantasizes the murder of the little white
girl at Long-Hai, a place of primitive impulse and madness and of her
cruel sacrifice in jealous love. In spite of her fear, the young girl
shares, but asymmetrically, the fascination of this fantasmatical beach-
site of loss of power, where the mad beggar-women and the dispossessed
laugh at the same time as they cry.

In earlier work, I interpreted the recurring thematic of "feminine" self-
loss and "masculine" violence and domination (ravishing) as the textual
imaging of a sado-masochistic (master-slave) structure of the psyche
that Jessica Benjamin, for example, sees as characterizing
quintessentially the "bonds of love" (see also Gear and Hill). The re-
membering of the incestuous nature of the fierce love for the little
brother that was not present in L'Amant might be emblematic of a
struggle within the psyche against the superego and its burying
("enfouissement") of powerful impulses. While there is no substantive
evidence of the real existence of a Chinese lover or of an incestuous
relation with one brother, autofiction seeks the recovery of such
desires from repression or from the kind of projection that seems to be
at work, for example, in Agatha in the invention of the meeting between
a brother and a sister and their indirect evocation of an earlier
incestuous love. Lacan has claimed that Duras' poetic discourses
unconsciously repeat his own psychoanalytic constructs ("Elle s'avere
savoir sans moi ce que j'enseigne" [It turns out that she knows, without
me, what I teach; qtd. in Marini 32]). Yet Duras' re-writing of the non-
dialectical, asymmetric, unpredictable structures of an intra- and inter-
psychic sado-masochistic desire is surprisingly conscious. It seems to
go beyond the fetish of the lost Phallus or, indeed, beyond even the
primal Lacanian "mirror" stage or scene in which the jouissance of (self)
recognition through the other is also (self)loss as anguished captive of
the dislocated image of the other(self), loss accompanied by aggressive
tension toward the other(self). And whereas Lacan takes for granted the
primacy of the theoretical discourse, in Duras' text the conscious
character of the structuring of the "I" as a fiction, the systematic
breakdown and proliferation of traditional meaning, the silences and
gaps that demonstrate loudly that conscious language is holed or flawed
("lacunaire") and allows the activity of the imagination to penetrate
only in a veiled and incomprehensible form, infinitely repeated, alter
traditional power relations between writing from the body and theory.
These different kinds of discourse become "complementary" and similarly
narcissistic. The logic of the unconscious, which, for Freud, ignores
the dialectic of alternatives much as dream brings together opposites
(the hunter is also the hunted) influences this Barthesian "mixing" of
every language.

Duras' explicit, repetitive intratextual paradigms of sexual violence
and masochism are troubling. But the conflating or telescoping of
opposites to show their connections in a chaotic and dynamic non-
dialectical structure changes conventional relations. Such a structure
makes new sense out of the scenes of excess and contradiction that
recall Lol who "devait delicieusement ressentir l'eviction souhaitee de
sa personne" (Le Ravissement 124) [who must have experienced the desired
eviction of her person with delight]. At the same time, the small
changes in the gendering of the dominator and the dominated in the
shifting relations of power between the little white girl and her
Chinese lover have moved in the direction of an increased association of
the "feminine" with active and enjoyed power.

My staging of the sado-masochistic thematics that mark the new
autobiographies and, indeed, characterize postmodern texts in general
suggests the lines of intersection of what Foucault sees as the two
dominant views of the domain of sex: at once the place where the
"ineluctability of the master" is established and the source of the most
radical of all subversions. Power and resistance to power converge at
this intersection. Foucault argues that the figure is dialectical,
reducing power to a negative law of prohibition that is homogeneous at
every level (the family and the state). It enables power never to be
considered in other than negative terms, and the fundamental operation
of power to be thought of erroneously as a speech act (enunciation of
law, discourse of prohibition), while its origin is subjectivized and
located in the sovereign (140).

The relations of domination, like resistance, in the new
autobiographical texts, however, are multiform and largely
interchangeable. The writer becomes the child and the child the writer
in a telescoping of present and past, history and story, ignorance and
rhetorical mastery as Duras claims to have rediscovered and relived the
formative age of her own crossing of the Mekong River during the year
she re-wrote this new autobiography. The portrait of the film's heroine
is evidently a function of the writer's present images of herself and
her "others" as well as a product of her previous works and of her
personal past. The images of early childhood with the mother in Vinhlong
give way to the crossing of the Mekong in which the child is both the
heroine of the fictional autobiography L'Amant and aspects of the self-
portrait that Duras chooses to elaborate in 1991.[7]

But writing, as for Peter Morgan in Le Vice-Consul, is also an act of
desire and an act of knowledge whose vehicle is empathy with pain and
non-knowledge. "Peter Morgan est un jeune homme qui desire prendre la
douleur de Calcutta, que ce soit fait, et que son ignorance cesse avec
la douleur prise" (9) [Peter Morgan is a young man who desires to take
on the pain of Calcutta, who wants this to be done, and his ignorance to
cease with the pain assumed]. The verb "prendre" here takes on the
meanings of "apprendre," but taking and being taken, knowing and non-
knowing, like power and powerlessness, are, once again, telescoped.

Such a concern with the nature of verisimilitude and truth as ready-made,
originating in common knowledge and in texts (that is, as effect of
power and mode of domination in Foucault's model or as entry into the
Symbolic in Lacanian terms), has characterized both nouveau roman and
new autobiography from their poststructuralist beginnings. The writer
remembers her childhood: "Elle se souvient... Elle entend encore le
bruit de la mer dans la chambre" (78) [She remembers... She can still
hear the sound of the sea in the bedroom]. Sensation, as in Sarraute or
Robbe-Grillet, seems to provide some guarantee of truth. But the memory
of the sound of the sea recalls, indistinguishably, her past writing of
her childhood: "D'avoir ecrit ca, elle se souvient aussi, comme le bruit
de la rue chinoise. Elle se souvient meme d'avoir ecrit que la mer etait
presente ce jour-Ar dans la chambre des amants" (78) [Writing that, she
remembers too, something like the sound of the Chinese street. She even
remembers having written that the sea was present that day in the
lovers' bedroom].

There is an author(ity) controlling and commenting metatextually on
these slippages. The writer calls attention in footnotes to the
intertextual origins of a number of scenes, for example, the "ghostly
ball" ("bal exsangue") on the deck of the liner that had "already"
appeared in Emily L., now watched by the Chinese lover and the little
white girl. She corrects the details of scenes from earlier texts--the
rattle-trap family car, the B12, from Un Barrage contre le Pacifique was
not in such bad condition, after all. Referring to herself in the third
person,[8] Duras, narrator, also plays critic for her reader, analyzing,
for example, the nature of the dialogues while again pointing to their
unnatural, factitious, but artful character that paradoxically re-
creates naturalness: "L'auteur tient beaucoup a ces conversations
'chaotiques' mais d'un naturel retrouve. On peut parler ici de couches
de conversations juxtaposees" (203) [The author attaches great
importance to these "chaotic" conversations with their constructed
naturalness. You could say that they are layers of juxtaposed
conversations].

Memory, like writing, is the recapture of a past (body/text) but
triggered by a present body and entrusted to a present text that frames
and transforms it. Here again, the relations of power put into play in
Duras' latest work in the movement between feeling and saying, life and
text, go beyond any simple resistance to traditional narrative. There is
at once a contesting and reversal of narrative conventions (mimesis is
not life) and an affirmation of the writer's power for change (writing
brings life to mind/text and alters it).

The relations of power that the thematics and the forms of Duras' text
trace are analogous to "complementary relations" in particle physics
(association of opposites, matter as both particle and wave) or certain
models of the new sciences of complex systems mentioned at the beginning
of this essay that incorporate a plurality of simultaneous, self-
ordering physical processes. Equilibrium, predictability, and symmetry,
like classical determinism, give way in these complex physical systems
in far from equilibrium states to probabilistic processes, recursive and
self-similar asymmetry, spontaneous local activity, disordered order,
and, more generally, to new "complementary" orders within disorder and
randomness. Within science, such new models represent change in
traditional binarism and determinism. In writing, too, they suggest new
kinds of sovereignty.

The fluctuating, local movements toward identification with the mother
as intuitive and non-phallic and the imagining of the mother's
empathetic, self-giving understanding of the power of her daughter's
transgressive desires effect changes in intimate relations of familial
and sexual power. So, too, does the writing off, or writing out, of the
self-assertive power and attraction of the older brother, the settling
of accounts with brutal physical power in favor of the interaction with
a feminized, beloved little brother identified increasingly with the
lover. These shifts in the relations with the mother, brother(s), and
lover, and with the child she once was, do suggest local and specific
agency (the writer seeking present resolution of her own past [selves],
the mind evoking the senses of the body's responses, in the present, to
these fictional memories"). I have argued that the to-and-fro movements
and the gendering of relations of domination and submission both stage
and begin to subvert relations of power. Like the "complementary" and
"chaotic" forms that carry them, these changes are not always already
there. Perhaps we are not always within power as Foucault would have it.
What is filtered through the gaps in the text does take Duras further,
beyond her ready-made "self." The forms of these modifications may
indeed go beyond the already said to represent not only a staging of
previously existing power (and gender) relations but also a rewriting of
the conventions of traditional autobiography, science, and gender that
is both the power of this writing and a re-writing of power.

                                 NOTES

1 In the work of Robbe-Grillet, difference, or power "outside power," is
a residue--what remains when language is flattened to reveal its
ideological basis, when textual play attacks narrative and conventions
of genre and deconstructs mythologies and fantasies. This residue of
desire has the power to transform the ironic, knowing writer- detective
into the unknowing, anguished criminal in the prison cell, powerless
victim of the beautiful captive, that is, of his own sado-erotic
desires. The unsayable, in Robbe-Grillet, is identified with the choice
and pursuit of the sado-erotic fantasies by which the writer is pursued.
See Ramsay.

2 My reflection on chaos theory and literature is indebted to Katherine
Hayles' work (in particular to Chaos Bound). A paper read by Barbara
Riebling was a catalyst for my thoughts on the difference between the
Foucault model of power and the more unstable and dynamic models chaos
theory proposes.

3 Foucault does note the power of fiction to go beyond what is in place:
"It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in
truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for
bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or 'manufactures'
something that does not as yet exist, that is, 'fictions' it"
(Power/Knowledge 193).

4 This novel and film scenario is, as an interview published in The New
York Times Magazine makes evident, itself a product of a struggle for
power over the "truth" of L'Amant. Jacques Annaud's erotic cinematic
production of the very successful Prix Goncourt novel was originally to
have followed a screenplay written by Duras. Duras fell out with Annaud
who, she claims, told a story that she did not recognize. She published
her own novel-film scenario version in 1991, L'Amant de la Chine du nord,
thereby preempting Annaud's cinematic version, released in 1992.

5 Interviewed by Leslie Garis for an article on L'Amant de la Chine du
nord, Tom Bishop concludes, "Like her talk, her work doesn't make a lot
of sense," but it does "something else .... It allows me to have an
insight into the human psyche that I have found unique. I have learned
things about humanity through her that others don't teach me" (60).

6 All translations from French are my own.

7 "Elle, elle est restee celle du livre inconsolable du pays natal et
d'enfance, crachant la viande rouge des steaks occidentaux, amoureuse
des hommes faibles, sexuelle comme pas rencontre encore. Folle de lire,
de voir, insolente, libre" (L'Amant de la Chine du nord 36) [She, she
has remained the same young girl as in the book . . . inconsolable for
the land of her birth and childhood, spitting out the red meat of
Western steaks, loving weak men, unbelievably sexual. Mad about reading,
about seeing, insolent, free].

8 These movements between pronouns can also be seen as uncertainty about
any single identity and knowledge that is not an effect of power or
existing text. The objective, omniscient author observing the young
woman whom the sister had seen earlier crying on the boat deck ("elle
est vers Paulo" [she is over by Paulo]) slips to take up a position
marked by an ambiguous possessive adjective "my" that might refer either
to the child or to Duras herself, as narrator or as writer: "Libre mon
petit frere adore, mon tresor" (216) [Free my adored little brother, my
treasure]. Reference in such examples is often uncertain, overlapping,
or multiple. "Elle s'est endormie, on dirait. Elle, elle sait que non,
elle croit ca, que non. On ne salt pas" (43) [She has fallen asleep, you
would say. She knows that it is not so, she believes that, that it is
not so. We don't know]. Even the first person "It" the child, telling
the mother's story("ma mere, la mere" (98), "elle" [my mother, the
mother, she]) to the North Chinese lover is sometimes indistinguishable
from the writer, Duras: "Je ne peux pas encore m'habituer a cette vie de
ma mere. Je ne pourrai jamais" (99) [I still cannot come to terms with
this life of my mother. I'll never be able to].

                              WORKS CITED

Bajomee, Danielle, and Ralph Heyndels, eds. Ecrire dit-elle: lmaginaires
de Marguerite Duras. Bruxelles: Editions de I'Universite de Bruxelles,
1988.

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Borgomano, Madeleine. "Le Corps et le texte." Bajomee and Heyndels 49-
62.

De Lauretis, Teresa. "The Essence of the Triangle or, Taking the Risk of
Essentialism Seriously: Feminist Theory in Italy, the U.S. and Britain."
Differences I (Summer 1989): 3-35.

Duras, Marguerite. L'Amant. Paris: Editions de minuit, 1984.

(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar). L'Amant de la Chine
du nord. Paris: Gallimard, 1991.

(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar). Moderato Cantabile.
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(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar). Le Ravissement de
Lol V. Stein. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar). Le Vice-Consul.
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(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar), and Xaviere
Gauthier. Les Parleuses. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979. Foucault,
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(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar). L'Histoire de la
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(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar). Power/Knowledge:
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Garis, Leslie. "The Life and Loves of Marguerite Duras." The New York
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Gear, Marie, and Melvyn Hill. Working through Narcissism: Treating its
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Hayles, Katherine. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary
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Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon
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Porte, Michelle. Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras. Paris: Editions de
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Marini, Marcelle. "L'autre corps." Bajomee and Heyndels 21-48.

(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar)(underbar). Territoires du
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Ramsay, Raylene. Robbe-Grillet and Modernity: Science, Sexuality and
Subversion. U of Florida P, 1992.

Riebling, Barbara. "Remodeling Truth, Power, and Society: Implications
of Chaos Theory., Nonequilibrium Dynamics and Systems Science for the
Study of Politics and Literature." Conference of the Society for
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Sawicki, Jana. "Foucault and Feminism." Disciplining Foucault: Feminism,
Power, and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.

~~~~~~~~
By RAYLENE RAMSAY
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