"Metaphorically Seeing: The Place Names of Marguerite Duras" (Screen)

Metaphorically seeing: the placenames of Marguerite Duras

TIJANA MAMULA

Over the opening shot of Marguerite Duras’s India Song (1975), whichdepicts a sunset in a hazy and unplaceable landscape, we hear theacousmatic chant of a beggarwoman from Savannakhet (figure 1). At thesame time, an offscreen conversation between two women – guests atthe French Embassy ball that structures the film’s imaginary setting –informs us that the beggarwoman has been roaming the banks of theGanges for at least ten years. In Calcutta at the time of the story, shespeaks in Laotian and her few sentences – voice recordings of a Laotiangirl on French television – irrupt on the soundtrack in fragments, atirregular and seemingly arbitrary intervals. Overlapping the flow of herindecipherable speech, the two narrators provide some basic informationon the beggarwoman’s history, but most of all they inaugurate the film’scontinuous (and narratively superfluous) reiteration of the place namesassociated with her foreign origins: Savannakhet and Laos. Throughoutthe course of the film, this prioritization of the proper name of her nativehome comes to have a strange impact on the chant of the beggarwoman: inlight of its almost compulsive repetition, the Laotian words themselvesnot only appear (to the viewer) inextricably bound to the place from whichthey originate but become important for the beggarwoman, whose chantcomes to resemble an invocation, conjuring up the presence of that whichis no longer available to perception.

Later in the film, the death of the beggarwoman is described asoccurring in innocence of the knowledge ‘that the whole world is dead,that all the people of Calcutta are dead’,1 until a voice, in subtle correction,wonders ‘can she die?…What isn’t alive, doesn’t die.’2 The

1 Marguerite Duras, ‘J’ai toujoursdésespérément filmé…’, Cahiersdu cinéma, no. 426 (1989), p. 64.

2 Carlos Clarens, ‘India Song andMarguerite Duras: an interview byCarlos Clarens’, Sight and Sound,vol. 45, no. 1 (1975/76), p. 35.

36 Screen 53:1 Spring 2012© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved.doi:10.1093/screen/hjr058

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beggarwoman – at seventeen, the same age as Duras at the time of hermove from Vietnam to France – makes no concessions to Calcutta: she iselsewhere; mad, but free to inhabit the language she chooses. So if shedoes not know ‘that all the people of Calcutta are dead’, is this notprecisely because she designates that ‘ghost’ of Duras who never made itpast Calcutta, who stayed there, stuck in time and embedded in an Asianlanguage? Indeed, in all the film’s temporal ambiguity only the chant ofthe beggarwoman remains consistent. Emerging in detachment from bothpast and present, neither in the villa with us nor in Calcutta with thecharacters, her interruptions confirm the hypothesis that she is neitheralive then nor dead now. All that survives is a familiar–unfamiliarlanguage and a place name – here Savannakhet.The preponderance of place names in India Song – so clearly signalled

in the first synchretic juxtaposition of language and landscape and in thefilm’s very title –mirrors the equally obvious repetition, both in the film’sdialogue and in Duras’s oeuvre more generally, of common nouns,pronouns and adjectives whose indefiniteness lays them open to multipleimagings and spectatorial projections. The status of such words,particularly in disjunction with a visual track that seeks simultaneously toforce reference onto the verbal matter and to detract from it, not onlypoints to the absence of fixed or determined meaning in Duras’sidiosyncratically abstract vocabulary but marks – at least in the films – anattempt to substantiate the hollow core of this language with relevantperceptions and material presences. The significance of place names onthe one hand and nouns and adjectives on the other is not, however,univocal. Where the former stand to evoke times and locations in all theirirrecoverable specificity, the latter appear to struggle with the burden of areferential multiplicity that separates past from present. This problematicpoints both to the heart of Duras’s project in India Song – which is

Fig. 1. Over a fixed-frame shot of an

unplaceable landscape, we hear

the acousmatic chant of the

beggarwoman from Savannakhet.

Screenshot from the French DVD

releaseof India Song, Benoït Jacob

Vidéo (Paris, 2005).

37 Screen 53:1 Spring 2012 . Tijana Mamula . Metaphorically seeing



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precisely the reconjunction of past and present, here and elsewhere,through the metaphoric process enabled by the juxtaposition of image andsound – and to the linguistic displacement, or migration, which can beseen to prompt the development of such a project.

Perhaps the best known of Duras’s films, India Song belongs to a six-work series produced between 1964 and 1976. Set in and around Calcutta,and centred on a small group of recurring characters, the series includestwo other films, La Femme du Gange (1974) and Son nom de Venise dansCalcutta désert (1976), as well as three preceding novels: Le ravissementde Lol V. Stein (1964), Le Vice-Consul (1965) and L’amour (1971). In itsentirety, the series develops a multiperspectival and nonchronologicalreconstruction of a government ball, held at the French Embassy inCalcutta, and of the intertwined and melodramatic histories of four of itsEuropean attendees. Thus contextualized within an extended body ofwork that refracts Duras’s experience of the colonies through the memoryof a single day and night in Calcutta, the films of the India series alsocontribute to the director’s sustained exploration of the creativepossibilities of sound–image disjunction, and of the cinema’s potential forestablishing a signifying relation between otherwise irreconcilableelements. This exploration serves more, of course, than a single function:sound–image disjunction recurs throughout Duras’s films withunprecedented constancy and spans the whole of her fifteen-year forayinto the medium. Yet what stands out in the India series is her attempt touse this formal strategy to link the memory of the past and the perceptionof the present into – to borrow Julia Kristeva’s concept – a kind ofheterogeneous ‘unary sign’, and to effect a filmic integration of twoseparate symbolic registers. Thus India Song – which locates the Embassyball in a Parisian villa and edits its silent and enigmatic reenactments intoa sporadically synchronous disunity with the offscreen dialogue – appearsto rest on the desire not only to reconstruct memories of Indochina but tobring these into relation with the present perception of France, and to doso through the construction of a new bind between words and things,between language and the perceptions it serves to register and recall. Inshort, the use of sound–image disjunction as it appears in the India seriesindicates an attempt to create a single, semiotically substantiated realityout of a linguistically and geographically disjointed experience.3

Striving towards this difficult goal, Duras eschews the pitfalls oftranslation and focuses instead on the unification of word and imagethrough what might best be termed the filmic equivalent of a metaphoricalutterance or act – a unification rendered possible precisely by thedisjunction to which sound and image are subjected for the better part ofthe film’s duration. Contentious in theory, and only problematicallyeffective in practice, the filmic metaphor raises a number of pertinentquestions with regard to the complex interactions between sound andimage in the cinema, as well as the latter’s relationship to language assuch. The aim of this essay, therefore, is to elucidate Duras’s basic formalprocedure, especially as evidenced in India Song, and to consider its

3 The existing scholarship on Duras’suse of sound in India Song issubstantial. In addition to the workcited throughout this essay, see, inEnglish, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, ‘The disembodiedvoice (India Song)’, trans. KimberlySmith, Yale French Studies, no. 60,‘Cinema/Sound’(1980), pp. 241–68; Joan Copjec,‘India Song/Son nom de Venisedans Calcutta désert: thecompulsion to repeat’, October, no.17 (1981), pp. 37–52.




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broader implications for the relation between film form and the linguisticeffects of transnational displacement.

That the use of sound–image disjunction in the India series can be, anddeserves to be, read also in terms of Duras’s history of displacement isdetermined, in the first instance, by the director’s own statementsregarding the film’s identificatory intentions and the relevance oflanguage to her memories of the colonies. Secondly, and less incidentally,the foundational centrality of Calcutta positions the India series as a pointof conjunction between France and Indochina, further supporting theintuition that its attempt to bind the two locations in a metaphorical unity(however temporary and partial) must be understood in light of theseparation from the colonies to which so much of Duras’s writing andfilmmaking bears witness.More than any other of her cinematic works, with which they

nonetheless share an autobiographical impetus and an extremely specificstyle primarily defined by sound–image disjunction, the films of the Indiaseries constitute a return to Duras’s childhood and adolescence in theFrench colony of Indochina, which she left aged seventeen in 1932.Referring to India Song, Duras proclaims that all of the characters are infact her, and that she herself is ‘in the film. Because these are my ghosts,you see… I am filming myself… I think that in India Song theidentification is with me.’4 Though critics have rightly argued that the‘emblematic abstractness’5 of Duras’s images invites viewers ‘toparticipate actively in recreating her films by projecting their own mentalimages on to the screen’,6 it would seem that, prior to any otherspectatorial activity, we are being asked to identify with Duras’s ownmemories. The fact that two of the ‘ghosts’ to which she refers are centralfemale characters – one European (Anne-Marie Stretter) and the otherAsian (the beggarwoman from Savannakhet) – whose structuringspecularity rests on their shared experience of exile and their radicallyopposed, and linguistically incompatible, expressions of its discontents,further underlines the links between the film’s declared performativity andthe mnemic afterlife of its maker’s distant origins.Although the constancy of French in Duras’s life – the fact that the

mother tongue itself is lost in neither passive nor active contact – appearsat first glance to exempt her move from Indochina to France from theconsequences of language loss, this move nevertheless constitutes aradical displacement in which one reality, mediated by two languages, isreplaced by a different reality mediated not by an entirely new languagebut by just one of the previous two. The specificity of this shift, as well asthe evidence of its impact in Duras’s work, sheds light on the relationshipbetween migration, language and cinema from an instructively particularperspective.In a 1983 interview, Duras draws attention to her involvement with

Vietnam beyond the confines of colonial society, and explicitly declares

4 Clarens, ‘India Song andMarguerite Duras’, p. 34–35.

5 Madeleine Cottenet-Hage andRobert Kolker, ‘The cinema of Durasin search of an ideal image’, TheFrench Review, vol. 63, no. 1 (1989),p. 91.

6 Renate Günther, Marguerite Duras(Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 2002), p. 24.




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the importance of the Vietnamese language to her childhood andadolescence:

Really we were much more Vietnamese than French. …We spokeVietnamese like Vietnamese children… I myself passed the bac inVietnamese. …You’re in a certain milieu, in a given space, you areborn in the milieu, you speak the language – our first games wereVietnamese, played with Vietnamese children.7

Duras’s comments suggest that although Vietnamese may not havedominated all facets of her childhood, it nonetheless provided a symbolicregister in which a set of recurrent or unique events, often different tothose lived through French, were experienced and stored. Upon the moveto France, Vietnamese must therefore have undergone the standardvicissitudes of linguistic displacement, the loss of active contact with thewords themselves sweeping away the memory traces that – to use apsychoanalytic vocabulary – they otherwise cathect. Simultaneously,however, it is clear that the French language and the perceptions andmemories it served to register and recall would have suffered a differentsort of transformation. If – as theorists of aphasia and language loss fromSigmund Freud to Julia Kristeva have argued8 – the crux of a meaningfulsymbolic relation lies in the functional link between words and things(between language, perception and memory), then the psychic effects oflinguistic displacement may also follow upon the loss not of language butof the perceptual reality that this language originally mediates. In hermemoir on the subject, Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language, EvaHoffmann points to the inextricable links between symbol and referent –and the effects of the loss of either on the speaking being – in a way thatsheds valuable light on this:

The problem is that the signifier has been severed from the signified. …‘River’ in Polish was a vital sound, energized with the essence ofriverhood, of my rivers, of my being immersed in rivers. ‘River’ inEnglish is cold – a word without an aura. It has no accumulatedassociations for me, and it does not give off the radiating haze ofconnotation. It does not evoke.The process, alas, works in reverse as well. When I see a river now, it

is not shaped, assimilated by the word that accommodates it to thepsyche – a word that makes a body of water a river rather than anuncontained element. The river before me remains a thing, absolutelyother, absolutely unbending to the grasp of my mind. … This radicaldisjoining between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, drainingthe world not only of significance, but of its colours, striations,nuances – its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection.9

Although Hoffmann does not put it in these precise terms, we can gleanfrom her description the fact that the impoverishment of this ‘livingconnection’ between words and their ‘accumulated associations’ mayresult as much from the loss of perceptual reference as from the loss of

7 Marguerite Duras and MichellePorte, ‘The places of MargueriteDuras’, trans. Edith Cohen, Enclitic,vol. 7, no. 1 (1983), pp. 60–61.

8 Sigmund Freud, On Aphasia: aCritical Study, trans. Erwin Stengel(London: Imago, 1953); JuliaKristeva, Black Sun: Depressionand Melancholia, trans. LeonS. Roudiez (New York, NY:Columbia University Press, 1991).

9 Eva Hoffmann, Lost in Translation:Life in a New Language (London:Vintage, 1998), pp. 106–7.




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words themselves. The linguistic abstractness evidenced (andsimultaneously counteracted) in Duras’s India series reflects preciselysuch a loss of association, of reference. For what the move from Vietnamto France involves is in the first instance a displacement of referencewithin the context of a single language. In other words, one language,used previously to inhabit a particular reality, to cathect a specific series ofmemory traces, is not abandoned (as in Hoffmann’s case) but rathercontinues to be used in a radically different context. It is precisely for thisreason that the words central to Duras’s project are on the one hand thoseexclusively bound to specific referents – proper names, or place names –and on the other those applicable across a number of situations in differentperceptual contexts, such as commonly used adjectives or nouns. Bytaking as an example one of the latter, we can illustrate the precise natureof this aspect of linguistic displacement and begin to approach itsrelevance to the films of the India series.Of central importance not only to India Song but to Duras’s imaginary

more generally is, in fact, the river (registered both visually and aurally)and the French word that denotes it, fleuve. Starting from this word –whose key appearance in Hoffmann’s own volume, however coincidental,underlines the relevance of this problematic to the most frequentlyrecurring lexemes – we can formulate the following hypothesis. For thenative francophone living in Vietnam, the word fleuve will signify theconcept of a large body of water flowing from land to sea, but will also belinked to recollections (stored associations) of the thing thus denoted.These recollections, however, will be determined not simply by rivers thatthis person has seen, but by rivers that they have seen in the context ofusing (saying, hearing, thinking) the word fleuve as distinct from thewords rio, river or Fluß. While the mental representation might vary fromsituation to situation and will almost inevitably involve a condensation ofdifferent rivers, the memory traces recalled and cathected by the wordfleuve will nonetheless be derived from perceptual encounters withspecific rivers, or fleuves. At the end of a childhood spent in Vietnam,these will be rivers seen in Vietnam. Moving thereafter to France, andcontinuing to use the word fleuve, new perceptions, and therefore newmemory traces of other rivers, will be accumulated. After some time, theword fleuve will become more readily associated with the new memorytraces. Saying, hearing or thinking the word fleuvewill be likely to conjureup the traces of rivers other than those once known in Vietnam: the Seineor the Loire rather than the Mekong or the Saigon. We can see how thislogic would apply to most nouns, as well as to common adjectives (suchas ‘blue’, ‘humid’, ‘dark’, and so on), but we can also see how propernames would, to a great degree, be exempt from it. This explains, at leastin part, the prevalence of both in Duras’s obsessive vocabulary, whichthus recollects the specific, and now irrevocable, referents of place namesas well as returning the hypercathected nouns and adjectives to theperceptions they once registered.




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The contradictory forces of these two categories of words, as well as theindices of migration that they contain and enunciate, emerge mostexplicitly through the subtle, but continuous, juxtaposition of thebeggarwoman (who remains a purely auditory presence throughout) to thefilm’s female protagonist, Anne-Marie Stretter (played by DelphineSeyrig). This juxtaposition centres in particular on the women’sembodiment of specific linguistic attitudes (and their affective resonances)and on the nature of their deaths. Both women, of course, are displaced toCalcutta: the former from Venice (born ‘Anna Maria Guardi’, hence alsoSon nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert); the latter, as we know, fromSavannakhet. The beggarwoman’s age at the point of her displacement,seventeen, not only echoes Duras’s own history but also equals theamount of time that Anne-Marie Stretter is said to have spent in thecolonies. Rooted in this basic parallelism, the women’s widely divergentattitudes towards the fact of exile uncover the profound ambivalence of itsmnemic implications, and simultaneously illuminate the function of thewords and place names so central to the India series.

When Stretter dies, by suicide, we are told that she does so, unlike thebeggarwoman, ‘in full awareness of the horror’.10 Given the screen ofunambiguous melancholy that otherwise filters this character, as well asthe sense of external imposition that differentiates her plight from thebeggarwoman’s self-perpetuated wandering, this cryptic remark may bebest read in terms of Stretter’s sensitivity to – to quote Edward Saïd’swell-known phrase – ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human beingand a native place’.11 In other words, having abandoned everything thattied her to Venice, Stretter lives and dies in full awareness of how much(perceptual stability, symbolic grasp, linguistic plenitude) has beensacrificed to those seventeen years of accompanying her husband aroundthe colonies, from Savannakhet to Calcutta. Conscious and painfully self-aware, she must, then, embody the other side of linguistic displacement –the side where certain significant words (typically common adjectives andnouns such as bleu, nuit, jardin, ciel, and so on), burdened by the new andunrelated memory traces that they have grown to reference, come to berepeated obsessively in a desire (which does not attempt to disguise itself)to linguistically retrieve half a lifetime’s worth of excised memories. Thisaccounts for not only Stretter’s abstract, affectless speech but also thedefinition of her very body as both ‘bloodless’ and ‘riddled with holes’12 –a terminology whose relation to linguistic disturbance is made explicit in apassage from the India series’ inaugurating novel, Le ravissement de LolV. Stein. In what stands as a kind of condensed treatise on the nature oflanguage loss, Duras describes these ‘holes of flesh’ as nothing other thanwords, understood in their corporeal bind to sensory perception andmemory:

[Lol] believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remainssilent. It would have been an absence-word, whose centre would havebeen hollowed out into a hole, the kind of hole in which all other words

10 Marguerite Duras, India Song(Paris: Gallimard, 1973), p. 35 (mytranslation).

11 Edward Saïd, ‘Reflections on exile’,in Reflections on Exile and OtherEssays (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000), p. 173.

12 Marguerite Duras, ‘Notes on IndiaSong’, trans. Susan Suleiman,Camera Obscura, no. 6 (1980), p. 49.




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would have been buried. It would have been impossible to utter it, but itwould have been made to reverberate.…By its absence, this wordruins all the others… this hole of flesh. How were other words found?Hand-me-downs from…massacres, oh! you’ve no idea how manythere are, how many blood-stained failures are strewn along thehorizon, piled up there, and, among them, this word, which does notexist, is none the less there: it awaits you just around the corner oflanguage, it defies you… to make it arise from its kingdom, which ispierced on every side and through which flows the sea, the sand, theeternity of the ball in the cinema of Lol Stein.13

A brief scene shortly preceding the start of the reception provides a clearindication of the interaction between the two dimensions of (linguistic)displacement designated by the beggarwoman and Stretter, and highlightsthe function of place names in Duras’s audiovisual economy. The shot is anocturnal closeup of Delphine Seyrig’s resting torso, capturing her deepbreathing and the thin layer of sweat covering her naked skin (figure 2).Dark and languorous, suggestive of both an erotic and a maternaldimension, the shot conveys, above all, an impression of heat, theseasonless heat of Southeast Asia that Duras never tires of mentioning.14

Here, as elsewhere, the filmmaker seems intent on evoking all thecomponents of a particular memory – not only the sight but the sound,smell, taste and touch of a humid Vietnamese night. Yet this is achievednot through direct naming of the diverse components but through aparticular interaction between image and word. On the one hand, the bodyof Stretter – like an incarnation of the absent word, the hole of fleshdescribed in the quotation above – becomes a vehicle for the passage ofsensory traces associated with humid Vietnamese nights. Through this

Fig. 2. Over a closeup of Anne-

Marie Stretter’s resting figure, a

female Embassy guest lists the

woman’s moves ‘through the

capitals of Asia’. Screenshot from

the French DVD release of India

Song, Benoït Jacob Vidéo. (Paris,

2005)

13 Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing ofLol Stein, trans. Richard Seaver(New York, NY: Pantheon,1986), pp. 38–39 (my emphasis).

14 See also Elisabeth Lyon, ‘Thecinema of Lol V. Stein’, CameraObscura, no. 6 (1980), pp. 24–25.




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body flow not only ‘the sea, the sand, the eternity of the ball’, as LolV. Stein implicitly suggests, but also, as Duras’s commentary on the filmovertly states, the ‘song of Laos… the slow-moving fan, the sweat on hernaked body, the birds, the dogs’.15 On the other hand, the offscreendialogue presents a litany of place names, as a female guest at theEmbassy lists the Stretters’ moves through the Asian capitals: ‘We findher in Peking, and then in Mandalay. In Bangkok. We find her inBangkok, in Rangoon, in Sydney. We find her in Lahore. Seventeen years.We find her in Calcutta. Calcutta, she dies.’ Immediately evocative of thebeggarwoman’s constitutive bind to ‘Savannakhet’, this loopinginventory of Asian place names supplements the image of Seyrig’s bodyin prompting the scene’s impression of heat. In other words, this heat –evocative of many other aspects of the tropical night – characterizes, isassociated with and is evoked by the names of places such as Bangkok,Rangoon, Mandalay, and so on.

It is in this sense that the words obsessively repeated in the offscreendialogue of India Song fulfil the function of recalling, or attempting torecall, the sensory traces of Vietnam. However, these words only acquiretheir full significance when they are placed in relation to sounds andimages that not only adequately represent them but are also, significantly,derived from France. The key moments of India Song – those thatconstitute the crux of Duras’s project – are those in which the nouns,adjectives or place names continuously recurring throughout the filmactually coincide with what we are seeing and hearing. This, as we shallsee, is the metaphorical moment, the ‘happy coincidence of word andimage’ that, as Duras says, satisfies her ‘with evidence, with sensualpleasure’.16 In other words, the ‘happy coincidence’ of sound and imageemerges in the simultaneous evocation of Vietnam through the words andnames associated with it, and the suggestion of its perceptual realitythrough the audiovisual indices of France, in a way that does not annul theFrench landscape/soundscape but, on the contrary, valorizes it as such. Itis thus that the film unites Vietnam and France in a new, semioticallysubstantiated and symbolically meaningful reality. In short, if India Songfulfils its purpose – or its deepest desire – it does so in those momentswhen the reality of the two places is recondensed, through the conjunctionof audiovisual indices with voiceover speech, into a unary and meaningfulcinematic sign.

The film’s potential to effect a meaningful recondensation of twoirreconcilable localities is further related, as we have seen, to its Indiansetting. Apparently arbitrary, this setting raises the question of its ownsignificance in a work purportedly dealing with the ‘ghosts’ of Duras’spast in French Indochina (or the South Vietnamese cities of Gia Dinh,Vinh Long, Saigon and Sadec). In other words, the writer’s decision tolocate the series in an Indian city where she had only ever been once, andfor a single day, cannot be a matter of small importance; and it is difficultnot to perceive its centrality as at least partially related to the fact that

15 Duras, ‘Notes’, p. 47.

16 Duras, Green Eyes, p. 88.




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Duras’s journey of repatriation from Vietnam to France involved anunforeseen day-long stopover in Calcutta.17 Although her description ofthis stopover in L’Amant (1984) need not be read as strictly factual, themultiple resonances between the novelized recollection and the mise-en-scene of India Song (in which gardens, tennis courts and indices ofhumidity predominate) make the passage worth quoting:

One day I come, pass by. It’s the English quarter, the embassy gardens,the monsoon season, the tennis courts are deserted. Along the Gangesthe lepers laugh.

We’re stopping over in Calcutta. The boat broke down. We’re visitingthe town to pass the time. We leave the following evening.18

However fictionalized, L’Amant describes – with imagery analogous tomuch of India Song – the first day that Duras is no longer in Vietnam; aday that therefore stands as her final encounter with colonial Asia, whilstalready facing the French reality to come. Viewed from the perspective ofthe India series, this stopover – occurring as an unexpected interruption tothe departure, an experience both concentrated and unnaturally prolongedof the loss of the colonies – appears like a nucleus of memory resonantwith far more than the traces of the day itself. Thus the tennis courts, forexample, which recur throughout India Song – as wet and deserted as theabove passage suggests – were not exclusive to Calcutta but rather, asDuras explains, ‘everywhere we would go in the colony’.19 Far from beingarbitrary, the Calcutta setting thereby becomes not only a privileged sitefor the recollection of Vietnam but also, given its status as an interludebetween the two, a means of linking Vietnam to France. Like the remnantsof a traumatic encounter, the words and referents associated with Calcuttarecur across India Song and provide a way of binding the memories ofVietnam to the sights and sounds of France, both linguistically andcinematically.If Duras’s unlikely turn to cinema ultimately comes down to, in her own

words, ‘the longing to “paste written texts” on pictures’,20 then theimportance of the films’ locations – or the source of their images – cannotbe underestimated. Indeed, Duras herself accords an unequivocalsignificance to India Song’s shooting locations when she states that thespectator is ‘being invited to come to another place. And it’s not just theplace the narration tells about, it’s also the place where the narration ishappening.’21 The latter, of course, is always France. As the offscreendialogue recreates the French Embassy ball in Calcutta, the images ofIndia Song follow the silent interactions of a handful of actors in theabandoned and dilapidated Rothschild Palace in Paris’s Bois deBoulogne. To the uncertain spectator, the Palace appears at oncesuggestive of colonial India and strangely reminiscent of continentalEurope. Likewise the film’s ambient sounds – of dogs, rivers, theindistinct chatter of a society event – all putatively belonging to Calcutta,are also derived from France. There is even a certain exhilaration in

17 Marguerite Duras, ‘The tremulousman: conversation with Elia Kazan’,in Green Eyes, trans. Carol Barko(New York, NY: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1990),pp. 157–164.

18 Marguerite Duras, The Lover, trans.Barbara Bray (London: HarperPerennial, 2006), p. 93.

19 Michael Tarantino, ‘Review &interview: India Song’, Take One,vol. 5, no. 4 (1976), p. 43.

20 Duras, Green Eyes, p. 133.

21 Clarens, ‘India Song’, p. 35.




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Duras’s description of the search for the ‘right’ sounds, which took place‘everywhere’, from the street, to the park, to the ocean, to churches, barsand even lifts.22 The voice of the Laotian beggarwoman is itself neithermore nor less than a felicitous extract from a French televisionprogramme. The soundscape of India Song is replete with the auditorytraces of ‘everywhere’ in France, structured, like the images, to pass forthe perceptual reality of India (and, by association, of Indochina). Itself farfrom arbitrary, the Parisian setting standing in for Calcutta thereforeconstitutes an essential element in the film’s overarching project, whichreveals a desire to merge not ‘all spaces, all times, and therefore allmeanings’, in the transcendentalizing sense that has previously beensuggested,23 but rather to regain Vietnam, and to do so in France; in short,to perceive Vietnam in France, and thus to establish the missing relationbetween them.

A number of commentators on Duras’s cinema have noticed the sporadicmoments when the radical disjunction between word and image isovercome in favour of a ‘metaphorical’ relation. Renate Günther, forexample, argues that ‘the meanings that may emerge from the relationshipbetween voices and images are largely metaphorical and need to beinterpreted as such by the spectator’.24 Leslie Hill finds that ‘suchalternative images would constitute a further textual gloss on the narrative,which they would inevitably signify, by metaphor or metonymy’,25 whileDean McWilliams notes that ‘the visual and aural elements flow alongseparate but parallel courses, occasionally intersecting as a literalillustration or as a metaphorical equivalent’.26 But how, precisely, is this‘metaphor’ defined?

Without seeking to treat the notion of metaphor as it has been theorizedin relation to cinema – which would far exceed the scope of this essay – Ido want to note that it has most often been thought of primarily in terms ofthe image,27 often with considerable difficulty and the provocation ofmuch criticism.28 The presence of sound, on the other hand, and especiallyof disjunctive sound, presents the viewer with a copresence of dissimilarsthat seems almost naturally to evoke the metaphorical process, even inscholars generally averse to the notion of the latter’s existence in thecinema. In the words of Christian Metz, for example, the ‘pure metaphor’would occur ‘only with extra-diegetic images or sounds’.29 Nevertheless,a complication appears when we attempt to apply this logic to Duras’scinema. In one sense, which seems to be that most often invoked byGünther, it is precisely the radical disjunction between word and imagethat would provoke the spectator to engage in an interpretive act, bindingtwo disparate contexts into one mental representation, which would thusflow alongside the audiovisual disunity as its metaphorical elaboration.Though it is wise to distinguish further between simply seeing(‘projecting a mental image’) and what Paul Ricoeur defines as theproperly metaphorical action of ‘seeing as’,30 this is nonetheless a valid

22 La Couleur des Mots: Entretiensavec Dominique Noguez (JérômeBeaujour and Jean Mascolo,France, 1984).

23 Cottenet-Hage and Kolker, ‘Cinemaof Duras’, p. 94.

24 Günther, Duras, p. 25.25 Leslie Hill, Marguerite Duras:

Apocalyptic Desires (London:Routledge, 1993), p. 105.

26 Dean McWilliams, ‘Aesthetictripling: Marguerite Duras’s LeNavire “Night”’, Literature/FilmQuarterly, vol. 14, no. 1 (1988),p. 19.

27 Trevor Whittock, however, treatssound and image indiscriminatelyfrom this in his Metaphor and Film(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1990).

28 Famously, see Mitry’s critique ofthe application of metaphor to filmin his Esthétique et psychologie ducinéma, Volume II (Paris: EditionsUniversitaires, 1963), pp. 24–26,381–83, 446–48; Metz’scommentary on Mitry in ‘Currentproblems of film theory’, Screen,vol. 14, nos 1/2 (1973), pp. 70–78;Whittock’s critique of Metz inMetaphor and Film, and DudleyAndrew’s in Concepts in FilmTheory (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983), pp. 157–71. See alsoKaja Silverman, The Subject ofSemiotics (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1983), and LindaWilliams, ‘Hiroshima andMarienbad: metaphor andmetonymy’, Screen, vol. 17, no. 1(1976), pp. 34–59.

29 Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis andCinema: the Imaginary Signifier,trans. Celia Britton, AnnwylWilliams, Ben Brewster and AlfredGuzzetti (London:Macmillan, 1982),p. 197.

30 See Paul Ricoeur, The Rule ofMetaphor, trans. Robert Czernywith Kathleen McLaughlin andJohn Costello (London: Routledge,2003), pp. 245–54.




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observation which goes far towards accounting for the manner ofspectatorial engagement in the moments of disjunction. However, whatother critics have argued – in the vein of McWilliams’s observation above– is that metaphor occurs in those moments when word and imagecoincide.31 Yet this coincidence is not metaphorical in any commonlyaccepted definition but instead literal. Duras’s word and image coincide inthose (rare and surprising) moments when they are effectively enunciatingthe same thing: by accompanying a nocturnal landscape with the word‘night’, for instance, or actually showing an empty tennis court and a redbicycle as a narrator mentions these two objects on the soundtrack(figure 3). Insofar as word and image are otherwise disjunct, thesemoments strike us with some force and provide sense where it hadpreviously been negated. Overall, what India Song leads us to experienceis a kind of continuously frustrated attempt to create a correspondencebetween word and image, or a striving towards metaphor, which is onlyoccasionally fulfilled. And it is fulfilled not because our interpretive actshave been able to create an original sense out of the disjunctive material,but because the film itself brings us back to a condensation of word andimage, which then reverberates beyond the ephemeral moment of itsoccurrence.In what sense, then, is this action metaphorical? The effectuation of

metaphor is typically understood to depend on something like ‘theintroduction of a foreign term into the isotopy of the context’,32 or, inTrevor Whittock’s looser, cinematically approachable terms, ‘the mutualinfluence of disparate ideas or contexts upon one another’.33 Yet Duras’soperation appears to be the precise inverse of this: the ‘metaphorical’moment breaks the disparity; a familiar term is introduced into theradically defamiliarizing and unsignifying interaction between disparatecontexts. In other words, an anchor is thrown into the destruction of

Fig. 3. In a rare convergence of

word and image, a narrator

describes the scene: ‘The tennis

court, deserted. Anne-Marie

Stretter's red bicycle.’Screenshot

from the French DVD release of

India Song, Benoït Jacob Vidéo

(Paris, 2005).

31 See also Madeleine Borgomano,L’Écriture filmique de MargueriteDuras (Paris: Albatros,1985), pp. 119–22; JamesS.Williams, The Erotics of Passage:Pleasure, Politics and Form in theLater Work of Marguerite Duras(Liverpool: Liverpool UniversityPress, 1997), pp. 47–65.

32 Michel Le Guern, Sémantique de lamétaphore et de la métonymie(Paris: Larousse, 1973), p. 22; citedin Ricoeur, Rule of Metaphor,p. 217.

33 Whittock,Metaphor and Film, p. 27.




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meaning being carried out by the decondensation of word and thingthrough sound–image disjunction, so that the coincidence of sound andimage ‘in sudden, exceptional circumstances’ offers, as James S. Williamshas written, the ‘satisfaction of re-cognition’.34 Thus the film presentswhat Deleuze has, with perhaps just the right degree of non-specificity,termed a ‘new intertwining, a specific relinkage’.35 Nonetheless, anargument can be sustained that recognizes not only the tendentialmetaphoricity of Duras’s use of sound–image disjunction but also theunderlying metonymy that makes it possible.

On the most basic level, Duras’s sound–image disjunction literalizesthe presence, in the psyche, of words or names which no longer recall their‘proper’ images. Inversely, the images, always obtained from other places,do not find their correspondence in the attempted lexical retrieval. Thesemiotic void thus reflected can be usefully defined, appropriating Freud’sclinical category for broader use, as an instance of asymbolic aphasia.Coined by Freud, this term describes a break or disjunction betweenwords (understood as abstract phonetic signifiers) and the materialperceptions (which Freud calls ‘thing-presentations’) that relate them tothe subject’s unconscious and provide them with meaning. In a differentbut profoundly related context, Freud’s definition has been taken up byJulia Kristeva to affirm the crucial role of condensation in the formation ofthe sign (the perceptually heterogeneous word- plus thing-presentationthat Kristeva opposes to the Lacanian Signifier/signified): that is, in theestablishment of a meaningful relationship between symbolic structureand semiotic materiality.36 And it is precisely in Kristeva’s conception ofcondensation that we find an inherent link to metaphor:

What is it that ensures the existence of the sign, that is, of the relationthat is a condensation between sound image (on the side of wordpresentation) and visual image (on the side of thing presentation)?Condensation is indeed what we are dealing with. … The figure ofspeech known as metaphor merely actuates, within the synchronichandling of discourse, the process that, genetically and diachronically,makes up one signifying unit out of at least two (sound and sight)components.37

Retracing this process, Duras’s cinema commences from decondensation,from a disruption of the originary bind between word-presentation andthing-presentation that constitutes the sign, the basic unit of signification.This disruption, to summarize the argument elaborated above, derivesfrom the irrecoverable break separating the symbolic-semiotic (word-thing) bind constituted in Vietnam, through Vietnamese and French, fromthat reelaborated in France, through French alone. Thus the failure to unifythe voiceover narrative and the image-track appears like an entirelystraightforward transposition of the effects of asymbolic aphasia into thecinematic realm. In this sense, the film illustrates the permanence of thebreak between word and thing. Yet it also attempts a new condensation, arecondensation that brings Vietnam and France into a previously

34 Williams, The Erotics ofPassage, pp. 49–53.

35 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: the Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson andRobert Galeta (London: AthlonePress, 1989), p. 253.

36 Julia Kristeva, ‘Within themicrocosm of “the talking cure”’,trans. Thomas Gora and MargaretWeller, in Joseph H. Smith andWilliam Kerrigan (eds), InterpretingLacan (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1983), pp. 33–48.

37 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: anEssay on Abjection, trans. LeonS. Roudiez (New York, NY:Columbia University Press, 1982),p. 52.




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unthinkable relation. Following Kristeva, we can define thisrecondensation as a metaphor.Thus described, however, the metaphor appears to be born of a

metonymic contiguity. That is, at the basis of every condensation of word-and thing-presentation into the signifying unity of the sign lies thecontiguity in space and time of the two presentations, the event of theircontiguous presentation. To return to an earlier example, if the word fleuveand the mnemic traces pertaining to the sensory perception of a river canbe brought together into a sign that will thereafter meaningfully symbolizethe object for us, this is only possible insofar as we have heard that word inthe presence of, and in reference to, a river, or fleuve. Otherwise we wouldknow the thing by a different name, or by none at all. That metonymyprecedes metaphor, logically and chronologically, is of course widelyobserved, and Kristeva’s description of this precedence refers back to thestandard Lacanian position, according to which condensation has logicalpriority over displacement just as ‘the coordination of signifiers has to bepossible before transferences of the signified are able to take place’.38

In literary theory, writers such as Stephen Ullmann, Gérard Genette,Paul de Man and Umberto Eco have attempted to rethink the metaphoricalfigure in a way that would account for its inalienable dependence onmetonymy, or for ‘the role of metonymy in metaphor’.39 As JonathanCuller explains, this reevaluation of metaphor’s metonymic ground standslargely as a critique of the general tendency to maintain the primacy ofmetaphor by treating language ‘as a device for the expression of thoughts,perceptions, truths’,40 which would consequently situate the distinctionbetween metaphor and metonymy in the difference between ‘essential’and ‘contingent’ relations. In the psychoanalytic terms outlined above, themetaphorical relation might be defined as ‘essential’ insofar as it issituated as the basis of the very possibility of signification. The sign thatcondenses word- and thing-presentation is absolutely arbitrary, but if thiscondensation is at the root of our acceptance of language andsymbolization, it is also perceivable as essential. Simply put – and at therisk of sounding profoundly un-Lacanian – it is only after we know withcertainty that we have accepted the convention of language thanks to nomore than a specific mental operation, that we will deeply repudiate anysuch convention other than the one that came first and that has come toappear, in light of subsequent falsifications, as the one that is true.41

Returning to the cinema of Duras, what begins to appear essential is notonly the metaphor that begets signification but the contiguity that madethe metaphor possible in the first place. If it is true that only the wordfleuve can adequately symbolize a river, it is also true that the fleuve itselfis only that one, or those ones, whose presentation alongside the wordpermitted the sign’s originary condensation. Thus, not only does ‘a certaincontingency attach to the “essence” thereby revealed’,42 to cite Culler, butthe contingency or contiguity itself is revealed as an ‘essence’. Runningthe word-presentations of Vietnam alongside the indexically registeredFrench reality means also the reestablishment of a metonymical

38 Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire. LivreVIII. Le transfert, 1960–61, ed.Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Seuil,1991), p. 229; this translation inDylan Evans, An IntroductoryDictionary of LacanianPsychoanalysis (London: Routledge,1996), p. 114. A similar, and widelyinfluential, discussion of this pointin reference to cinema, is in Metz,The Imaginary Signifier, p. 200.

39 Gérard Genette, Figures III (Paris:Seuil, 1972), pp. 42–43. See alsoStephen Ullmann, Language andStyle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1964);Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading(New Haven, CT: Yale UniversityPress, 1979); Umberto Eco, The Roleof the Reader: Explorations in theSemiotics of Texts (Bloomington,IN: Indiana University Press, 1979).Albert Henry sustains the samethesis from a psycholinguisticperspective in Métonymie etMétaphore (Paris: Klincksieck,1971).

40 Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit ofSigns (London: Routledge, 1981),p. 224.

41 This point is also emphasized byErwin Stengel, the Englishtranslator of Freud’s On Aphasia, in‘On learning a new language’,International Journal ofPsychoanalysis, no. 20 (1939),p. 467.

42 Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, p. 221.




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relationship between them, a metonymical relationship that is thecondition for the metaphor to which it occasionally gives rise. The placenames of Vietnamwere heard inVietnam, they were presented in contiguitywith Vietnam. In transposing them onto a French landscape, andsoundscape, Duras recreates the (essential) contiguity that is the only onecapable of recondensing the sign. Thus the perceptual elements pertainingto both France and Vietnam, evoked through sounds, images and words,are brought into relation, or fused in a metaphorical utterance. Themetaphor, as an originary act of signification, creates a unity out of disparatecontexts: one language, emerging as a new symbolic–semiotic bind, wheretwo had previously existed in scission or irreconcilable conflict.

Once established, moreover, the specific recondensation does notremain in isolation but reverberates further, its metaphoric synchronyresulting, to adopt Noël Burch’s phrase, ‘in other interactions, this timebetween the images and the entire sound tissue of the film’.43 And yet thisis precisely where the metaphorical act splits off frommetonymy. Arguingagainst an intransigent reduction of metaphor to metonymy, Paul Ricoeurpoints out that insofar as metaphor ‘plays on comprehension in a syntheticand intuitive manner’, while metonymy ‘follows the order of things’ andproceeds analytically, ‘the imaginative equivalence instituted bymetaphor does more violence to the real than does metonymy’.44 Duras’sfilms, by allowing the contiguous recondensation to extend across bothfields of reference and to be manifested at the level of the work as a wholerather than that of a temporary semiotic equivalence, perform preciselysuch a violence to the real, an imaginative synthesis without whichVietnam and France would remain separate, albeit comparable.

For Kristeva, too, this aspect of the figure assumes a central importance,as she reiterates the merits of contemporary theories of metaphor(Ricoeur’s in particular) and their foregrounding of ‘the interference oftwo nonhierarchized semantic fields and two reference areas alsononhierarchized’.45 Thus Duras’s word–image disjunction, havingestablished a familiarizing, metaphorical recondensation, brings intorelation both of the contexts (the French place, the Vietnamese name)from which the latter has been pulled. This is enabled precisely by thenon-hierarchization of the two contexts, here understood in their doublefunction as semantic fields and reference areas: image/France on the onehand and word/Vietnam on the other, disparate but united in the search foran (unrealizable) totalizing signification. The metaphor becomes possibleonly from the moment that word and image are both radically disjunct andabsolutely equal, which simultaneously renders the cinema ‘truly audio-visual’, as Deleuze has noted,46 and reasserts the equality of word andthing in the constitution of the sign, and thus the Kristevan emphasis ofthe place of the semiotic within the symbolic.

Two questions inevitably raised by these observations concern the impactof the disjunction on the status of the image itself and, in relation to this,

43 This is in reference to Mizoguchi’sChikamatsu monogatari/TheCrucified Lovers (1954). Noël Burch,Theory of Film Practice, trans. HelenR. Lane (London: Secker andWarburg, 1973), p. 95.

44 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor,p. 237.

45 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans.Leon S. Roudiez (New York, NY:Columbia University Press, 1987),p. 273.

46 Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 243.




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the degree of success of the endeavour to establish a semiotically rooted,signifying relationship between two irreconcilable places through thefilmic registration of one and the verbal invocation of the other.The first problematic – the question of what happens to the image in the

moment that it is made to stand in opposition to the soundtrack – unearthsanother constitutive paradox at the centre of Duras’s project: namely, thewriter’s thorny turn to the very image-based medium she so often swore afundamental aversion to. In the first instance, this turn seems to be at leastpartly due to Duras’s lack of visual records of Vietnam (‘I haven’t got anyphotographs of Vinh Long, not one, of the garden, the river… not of thehouse’47), and to the aggravation of that lack during the Vietnam War. AsDuras’s writings and statements on this period emphasize, the final decadeof the war – which coincided with the making of the India series – wasmarked by an unprecedented intensification of media coverage thatentailed, for the director, the replacement of colonial memory with imagesof a distinctly altered, indeed ravished, reality. To quote the suggestivephrasing of the published script for India Song: ‘the chant of Savannakhetstops with the sounds of gunfire, as though the chant of Savannakhet,itself, had been fired upon’.48 In short, if we take Duras’s lament to EliaKazan regarding the ‘demolition’ of her birthplace – a fact, she says, that‘is always with [her]’49 – at face value, then it is not difficult to appreciatethe significance of the war (and its representation) as a sudden annihilationof both places and memory, and to grasp how it may have prompted theestablishment of a surrogate image of Vietnam that might still resemblethe country’s appearance in the years preceding 1932.However, it is precisely in subordinating the images of France to

disjunctive verbal suggestions meant to evoke Vietnam that India Songpoints to a problematization of the filmic image. In substituting France forVietnam in an attempt to make them coexist, Duras harnesses the image’sindexical force but puts it at the service of a vaguely recollected andverbally evoked elsewhere, thus subverting (or attempting to subvert) thevery referentiality of the cinema itself. Hence, for example, the strangeinsubstantiality of the actors, whose silence and studied languorimmediately suggest a denial of physicality and the evocation, through theghostlike figures that remain, of the vague traces of another time andplace. Already prominent in India Song, this erasure of referentialityapproaches its logical conclusion in Son nom de Venise dans Calcuttadésert: here Duras reutilizes the same soundtrack, but confines the actorsto two brief shots at the beginning and end of the film, and returns to theempty Rothschild Palace to film, as she says, ‘the swallowing up of bothplaces and people’.50 It thus becomes increasingly clear that the attempt totransform the images of the present into the memory of the past throughthe superimposition of a disjunctive soundtrack is paradoxical on morethan one count. For if the words seek to cancel out the specificity of theimages (a specificity which is nonetheless indispensable to the entireproject), the images themselves exert a referential force that annuls thesymbolic power of the words, and thus their ability to evoke the past.

47 Duras, The Lover, p. 100.

48 Duras, India Song, p. 28.

49 Duras, ‘The tremulous man, p. 157.

50 Marguerite Duras et al.,MargueriteDuras (Paris: Albatros, 1979), p. 94.




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Duras’s answer to the difficulty thus posed lies, first of all, in thegradual abandonment of the intense singularity of the human figure infavour of imagery that is less specific and therefore more open to thesuggestions of language: in her own phrase, an image passe-partout.Ultimately, however, she moves ever further from vision itself, composingher penultimate film (L’Homme atlantique [1981]) almost entirely ofblack leader, and eventually abandoning cinema altogether to returnexclusively to writing. In its gradual abdication of the image (and thus ofsound–image disjunction), Duras’s filmography suggests that theunwieldy referentiality of the photographic index is too intrusive to beswayed by the poetical appeals of her prose. The signifieds of Duras’sabstract writing seem better absorbed, in effect, by the brief flashes ofreference to which the image is reduced in L’Homme atlantique. Havingset out to destroy ‘the cinema’ with words, Duras demonstrates insteadthat the force of the referent remains ever subversive of signification; thatif language can succeed in taming photography it will do so, on thecontrary, by binding the image to the text, and the text to narrative. In thusprogressing, her cinema marks a clear disillusionment with its own abilityto bridge the linguistic gap between past and present through the use ofsound–image disjunction and the metaphorical acts it may be led toproduce. Until this happens, however, the India series provides adetermined attempt to achieve precisely this type of relinkage.

On the other hand, the limited success of Duras’s endeavours is bothinformed by and informs the effect of metaphor itself. For, as Ricoeurasserts, the metaphorical act and its reverberation across both referentialareas and semantic fields is always only a temporary state ‘in the processof being superseded’.51 Thus metaphor’s relation to love – which forKristeva, following Lacan,52 forms the crux of her theory of ‘the amatoryfigure of speech’53 – is reversed to reveal its equally inalienable bind tomelancholia. As Kristeva writes, ‘this involves the semanticemptiness that shatters each metaphor with enigmas and rests perhaps on afundamental narcissistic disappointment where meaning ascondensation… finds its origin’, while in terms of the figure itself only afine line separates metaphor from ellipsis, the ‘ultimate form ofcondensation on the brink of aphasia’.54 In a similar vein Duras herself hasreferred to India Song, only a few sentences after describing it as ‘thefailure of any attempt at reconstitution’, as an unresolved struggle betweendeath and love (melancholia and metaphor):

What can be said to be tragic is the place from which the story is told,that is, the co-presence of both the destruction of this story by death andforgetting and of this love. …As if the only memory of this story werethat love which continues to flow from a bloodless body riddled withholes. The ground of the story is this contradiction, this split. The filmicrealization of this story, the only one possible, consists in the ceaselessto-and-fro movement of our despair between this love and its body: inthe very blocking of any narration.55

51 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor,p. 354.

52 For Lacan, the signification of loveis metaphorical insofar as it isproduced by the substitution of thelover (the subject of lack) for thefunction of the loved object. SeeLacan, Séminaire VIII, p. 53.

53 Kristeva, Tales of Love, p. 91.

54 Ibid., pp. 332, 278.

55 Duras, ‘Notes’, p. 49 (my emphasis).




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Against ‘the failure of any attempt at reconstitution’, some meaning isnonetheless regained through a metaphorical recondensation of words andsensory traces whose place in the psyche, however, must continue to bemarked by a radical discontinuity. Thus the ambiguous result of Duras’sattempt to metaphorize returns the figure to its origins in the act ofcondensation, as an intermittent action against non-meaning or asymbolia,whilst simultaneously reasserting the centrality of the filmic medium in itsrealization. As the syntactical slippage of the last sentence indicates, it isnot only ‘this story’ – of the love (the metaphor) that continues to flowfrom a bloodless (melancholic, aphasic) body – that is the only onepossible, but the story’s only possible realization is a filmic one,inherently capable of disjoining the two contexts (word/thing, Vietnam/France) through the same motion, or mechanism, that brings themtogether.Finally, the transitoriness of the metaphorical act emerges from the

identificatory relationship that Duras sets up between herself and theaudience. In exploring the essential place of metaphor in love as well as inpsychoanalytic transference, Kristeva reflects that the speaking subject is‘not simply an inside facing the referential outside’ but also ‘in symboliccontact, that is to say in motion, in transference with another’. In such asituation, the subject ‘transposes the same process of identification, oftransference, to the units of language – the signs’. What takes place then isan intersubjective utterance act, in which the symbolic relation betweensubject and other allows for the metaphorical renewal of meaning, whichthus reveals itself to be a ‘provisional accident’ that at another juncturemight ‘appear absurd’.56 Although defining the artist–audiencerelationship as one of transferential love might amount to a rather grosstheoretical imposition, it seems to me that the imagined relationship Durasenters into with her viewers posits identification as well as demanding it.That is, insofar as Duras appears certain that we should and will identifywith her, she herself manifests an identification with the spectatorialposition, revealing the repetitious structure of her utterance acts –continuously returning to the same names and places, reelaborating theircondensations – as a constant search for the renewal of meaning in anintersubjective setting. Places are shown and names invoked always forDuras but through an other – an other who also sees and hears these forthe first time and provides faith in their condensation. Watching the film,we are hardly certain, after all, that the Rothschild Palace is not the FrenchEmbassy in Calcutta, that the company’s tennis courts are not the dampand withering relics of colonial opulence, that the hazy landscape of thefilm’s beginning does not reveal, in the lower corners of its indeterminablewilderness, a beggarwoman seated on the banks of the Ganges. Thusviewed, the metaphorical act emerges within a transferential identificationin which reference is swept up in sense, constituting a violence to the realthat allows for the meanings of words as well as the sensory tracestriggered by them to proliferate within ‘the infinity of the signifier’,57 or,better, of the cinematic sign.

56 Kristeva, Tales of Love, pp. 274,275, 276.

57 Ibid., p. 276.




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"Metaphorically Seeing: The Place Names of Marguerite Duras" (Screen)

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