Al limite. L'infanzia, la follia, l'amore in Marguerite Duras

TO THE LIMIT INFANCY, MADNESS AND LOVE IN MARGUERITE DURAS Marguerite Duras’ writing often concerns what we can call experiences of limits. Not only the characters of Marguerite Duras’ works express this experience of limits, but also writing itself becomes an experience of limits. In my study I’ve tried to read Marguerite Duras' production in connection with this notion of experience of limits. I've considered it under three principal acceptations: psychoanalytic, narratological and philosophical. In psychoanalytic terms we can say, as Madeleine Borgomano wrote, that Marguerite Duras’ writing is based on an experience of limits that separates the conscious from the unconscious . In Marguerite Duras’ works the unconscious seems to irrupt through the language and to rouse its rational coherence. This irruption has evident effects on writing itself and on the structure of Marguerite Duras' works. The basic elements of the narrative form are called into question: Who is writing? Which relationship is there between the narrative voice and the writer? What can or can't we say with the language? These questions, on which narratology insists, have an immediate philosophical resonance. Subjectivity, language, social and political separation and limitation are considered. In general we can say that being at the limit of something means being at the threshold which separates something from something else, that we often cannot define, and, at the same time, it means considering this same separation. Whatever we are at the limit of, whatever is the process that has brought to the limit, on that limit rises an interrogation about the sense. This general and, at the same time, precise interrogation is effective and put us on hold between sense and non sense. The discourse can’t be descriptive any more, but assumes a problematic feature which, just because it puts into question the sense of the discourse, puts into question also the form of the discourse. In this sense Marguerite Duras’ writing is an experience of limits. From whatever perspective we read her works, they will always let an interrogation like this rise. This interrogation does not belong exclusively to philosophy but it involves it somehow, just because philosophy is a thinking about limits. This study is divided in three parts. Every one of them is dedicated to a different experience of limits. The first part concerns infancy, the second madness and the third love. These three experience of limits, so important in Duras’ production, put under discussion different limits that build the human world. Infancy is a region of human experience in which nature and culture are not so clearly separated. Furthermore infancy has a relationship with the language that is not submitted to the logic of the signified but that is strictly connected with the singular emotional experience. Madness is an experience of limits that separates what we call reason and unreason. To follow the behaviour of the characters who cross these limits, as Duras’ writing does, means to question this separation itself, that has social, political and subjective origin and effects. Madness makes appear forces and dynamics of desire which are not submitted to the rational logic of the sense but which move unconsciously human behavior. What can we say about this unconscious forces? How can we write about what escapes the rules of the language and the reason? Love and desire are themes that go right through the whole of Duras’ production. They are experiences of limits: the limits that separate the one from the other, the subject of desire from the object of desire. Love and desire create a movement from the self to the other which takes into account their separation. How can we write about love if it tends to a unity in which subjectivities disappear? Can love really realize this unity? If not, what’s love, what can we write about it? As we can see, all these experiences of limits involve writing, which is, in the end, the very experience of limits for Marguerite Duras. The need to write has a biographical origin in the infancy of Marguerite Duras, probably connected, as we can notice in the earliest works, with a desire of personal, social and “spiritual” emancipation which makes the act of writing an experience of limits related to the present condition and an opening to an absolute horizon. Soon this absolute horizon appears unattainable and writing becomes an endless proliferation of language around this fundamental lack. Desire has no other object but the desire itself. Writing has no other object but writing itself. The lack at the heart of the desire, of the subject and of the language has been well pointed out by Jacques Lacan and by some contemporary philosophers and critics, like, for example, Maurice Blanchot. This last one, who Duras knew very well, theorized the proliferation of the language around an unattainable absolute or an unattainable immediacy as the essential movement of the literary writing. In this way writing is not submitted to the writer's subjective and rational intentions any more, but becomes an impersonal writing at the third person. On one hand Duras’ works let us see that she shared this kind of reflections, on the other hand we must underline some signifying differences. Carefully reading her works we can find another experience of the language that is not oriented by a lack, but that is linked to the presence and to the singular experience. This singular experience is not the subjective experience, about which we can compose some narratives, especially autobiographical narratives, but it must be considered as an event in which we have been involved. Duras’ writing pays attention to the absolutely singular dimension of the event, as to something that happens in a precise moment and in a precise place in a certain way. Even if we cannot build any narratives about this event, because it eludes the subjective control, it happens and it involves us in our singular condition, which is not impersonal. This means to emphasize the element of the presence and not only the element of the absence. Duras seems to look for and tries to let emerge the need of a “true word” strictly connected with the singular experience. This need and this word can’t be anything else but singular.