Existing in the Present: Marguerite Duras’ Practicalities

Practicalities (London: Flamingo, 1990; first published in French as La Vie Matérielle, 1987) Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras (whose 1984 novel L’Amant (The Lover) won the Prix Goncourt) haunts herself in Practicalities. She is both inside and outside the book – existing at the edges, as though between life and death. She doesn’t write: she speaks. She speaks as though from an afterlife. She speaks without thinking – the most pure, fluent speech imaginable. She speaks freely of what it is to be. To be a woman. To be an alcoholic. To be a writer. A mother. A figure existing in a particular set of circumstances at a particular time.

Experience is all we have, she seems to say. And yet at the edges of that statement there is so much else which can’t be accounted for. The lives and experiences of others. Their internal worlds: their desires, their frustrations, their angst, their dreams. All of these parallel existences brimming over with unspeakable content. Take, for example:

If you’re a man your favourite company – that of your heart, your flesh and your sex – is the company of men. And it’s in this context that you approach women. […] But the chief man inside you, man number one, has real relationships with men, his brothers. You listen to your wives’ restful conversations as a whole, not in detail, as if they were just old refrains. (p. 39)

The sense of proximity we experience to her subjects – together with the detachment of both Duras’ gaze and voice – communicates the very real concentration she must have given to her experiences. Testament to her courage as a writer is the cold, dispassionate eye she casts over every aspect of her life, including her own alcoholism. Thus she is capable of such statements as:

When a woman drinks it’s as if an animal were drinking, or a child. Alcoholism is scandalous in a woman, and a female alcoholic is rare, a serious matter. It’s a slur on the divine in our nature. (p. 17)

Her frankness and insight are shocking – so coolly does she present the facts as she experiences them. Like Virginia Woolf’s essays in memory, Moments of Being, the essays in Practicalities let loose without nostalgia or sentimentality. – How to speak the way we speak to ourselves? Duras seems to ask. – How to speak the way we speak in our bodies?

Both Woolf and Duras explore the way experience happens on the ‘inside’, – and both are obsessed with how that ‘inside’ can be brought to light and made external, made communicable. One of the ways in which they achieve this is by investing the so-called ‘domestic’ world with wider cultural and political meaning. This is realised, in part, through close descriptions of the depth and richness of a woman’s bodily experience.

At the centre of Practicalities there is a house which is also a body. In the middle of this house is another body: that of the mother. A place of insideness and interiorness, and a place without borders. Duras writes:

Motherhood means that a woman gives her body over to her child, her children; they’re on her as they might be on a hill, in a garden; they devour her, hit her, sleep on her; and she lets herself be devoured. (pp. 53-54)

The offspring – like little vampires – seem appalling, as does the implied masochism of the mother. The children are both “on her” and in her, as “in a garden”. Nowhere is the mother safe: she can be accessed every which way.

While the archetype of the mother as passive martyr seems both controversial and conservative, Duras explores her experience without self-censorship. At times, her meaning is shocking; but the poetry of her language is so pleasurable that the reader is willing to accept what she has to say. Perhaps this is due, in part, to the conversational tone of the book. Indeed, the book comes directly from spoken texts which were recorded, transcribed, then appraised and edited by Duras. As a result, Duras says the book “represents what I think sometimes, some days, about some things.” (p. 1)

This fluidity is the real beauty of Practicalities: reading it is like overhearing a conversation in the next room. The book is like a glass to the wall, and Duras lets her material flow without preciousness or self-censorship. In doing so, she achieves a kind of freedom. She simply speaks. As if speaking from the other side of life. She admits the relevant, the irrelevant, and everything in between. At times, this rawness makes for banality – the plain, horrible-featured banality of everyday life – but there is a place for this ugliness. Talking, after all, is an ugly, liquid medium. Writing, she suggests, should be more like speech: fluid, wandering, imperfect.