“Everything was written when I was writing in the house. The writing was everywhere.” All immersed in writing without ever leaving it, such should be the desire of the writer in the sense that Marguerite Duras would understand it.
Reading Writing by Duras (1914-1996), we understand why she states in Bernard Pivot that “Sartre never wrote”. This statement is decisive, even categorical, and it changes our conception of writing.
Indeed, such remarks against Sartre are neither the words of a writer nor those of a provocateur. Proof of this is that Duras devoted a book to writing in order to explain it.
And this ties in with what Céline said when asked about Giono, that “it’s insignificant, he insinuates,” before adding that each generation knows only one writer, two, three at most.
Although it’s difficult to write about writing, it would have to be said that Duras rose to the challenge. Just how difficult is it to write about writing?
As is the case with a true painter, not being able to talk about his painting, it is the same with the writer who feels in a state of inertia as soon as it comes to talking about writing.
Hence the fact that, listening to the writer taking writing seriously, we are struck to notice that he has difficulty talking about HER, his own Muse, WRITING. Thus, SHE forbids him from speaking about HER, with the result that he finds no other way out than to speak around and in a roundabout way, taking advantage of the characters and the story among other things.
But what is writing?
A matter of solitude, first of all. Because there is a “solitude of writing”, this is intimately linked to the act of writing.
“There always needs to be separation from other people around the person who writes the books. It’s lonely.”
Solitude is created by the writer himself; he made it for him, him for HER.
“We don’t find solitude, we make it. Solitude happens alone. I made it.”
Not only. Because the writing remains no less wild!
“It makes writing wild. We return to a savagery from before life.”
Irony demands!
The writer feels wild, and that’s right! After all, it’s the best way to be ironic all the way. Irony, as we know, is what remains for the writer when everything has been taken from him.
Anselm Kiefer tells us: “Artists always think that there is the possibility of creating a new world”, this world “before life”.
But we only have to listen to Duras when he expresses himself wisely: “Let us break everything and start again”. Categorical! they replied, as always!
Total disappointment of the writer, hence his solitude, which he makes for himself, which he is obliged to create for himself. He is forced to be alone until there is no one left to talk to.
No hope for him, and he knows it. It’s the cursed one, forever!
Its place is in writing, that is to say, in solitude. However, this solitude is free and it has no limit. It is the place of the unlimited, writing. She embodies the spirit of the child who believes that everything is possible.
But the meaning of writing does not stop there for Duras:
“Writing goes a long way…Until you put an end to it…”
And it’s not just men who write, flies too!
“Around us, everything is written, that’s what we have to be able to perceive, everything written, the fly, she writes, on the walls, she has written a lot in the light of the large room, refracted by the ‘pond. It could fit on a whole page, the writing of the fly. Then it would be writing. From the moment it could be, it is already a writing. One day, perhaps, in the centuries to come, this writing would be read, it too would be deciphered, and translated. And the immensity of an illegible poem would unfold in the sky.
And that, to be perceived, there is a need for madness, accompanied by solitude, because “loneliness is always accompanied by madness”.
Finally comes the deliverance that the night offers the writer, and this is only possible through writing. It makes you free to write. Better: writing is a matter of lucidity, a lucidity finding its starting point in irony.
“Deliverance is when night begins to set in. When work stops outside. There remains the luxury we have of being able to write about it at night. We can write at any time. We are not punished by orders, schedules, bosses, weapons, fines, insults, cops, bosses and bosses. And brooding hens of tomorrow’s fascisms.”
By Najib Allioui
