The continuing story of rue Saint-Benoît …
By the mid-60s, Duras has become famous. Her books sell tens of thousands of copies. She tours the country, giving talks to schoolchildren. She tells them about Henri Michaux, who was, apparently, a friend of hers back in the days after the war. She takes a holiday with the Vittorinis in Italy – but Elio will die in 1966, as will her lover Jarlot, who was only 43. Adler quotes Jarlot:
With madness we destroy time, in other words we kill death. The same can be said of poetry, love if need be, alcohol and drugs … with all of those things we kill death.
She herself wrote:
He was a wonderful man, in every sense of the word accomplished, evhsuated from always dying without it killing him, demanding as much from death as from passion.
Duras has been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver. She tries to give up drinking.
Meanwhile, Duras is making films. Her son loves cinema. Jean Mascolo also assists Duras in making films. He will move out of Rue Saint Benoit in 1967, to move in with his wife Solange Leprince who will edit Duras’s film India Song. They have a daughter, Virginie.
I’ve never seen any of Duras’s films. I’ve read the scripts of some of them, and seen excerpts … what a shame. I’ve never seen many of Bergman’s films, either, which I know from scripts … The Passion of Anna, Shame, The Touch (a great script) …
Duras works on the radio, too. She is the envoy of RTL to the Canne Film festival in 1967 … in short, she is famous.
Adler notes that, throughout this period, Duras, Mascolo and Antelme meet often.
Blanchot, in this period, continues to publish great essay after essay. His work has become more avowedly political and ethical – that is, the political and ethical stakes of his discussions of the work of art came to the fore. He had already linked himself to some of the views expressed in the journal Arguments in an uncollected essay from 1959.
The publication of Levinas’s Totality and Infinity was a great moment for Blanchot (some of these texts are quoted in Godard’s film Forever Mozart in 1996). In 1963, he begins to correspond with Jacques Derrida, then in his early thirties, author of a dazzling sequence of essays. Derrida himself will note, in Resistances, the changes in Blanchot’s work in this period – it seems he foregrounded the word writing, and placed inverted commas around the word presence. This indicated the influence of Derrida – but then Derrida’s work is itself unthinkable without Blanchot.
On many occasions, as I understand it, from the ‘Beaufret affair’ onwards (1968), when the French Heideggerian Jean Beaufret, who was about to publish a text by Blanchot, revealed himself to be a Holocaust denier, Blanchot will visit Derrida in his office in the rue d’Ulm; they will often meet with Levinas, too. Alas now Derrida is dead, we will hear nothing more about such meetings!
Is Stein, in Duras’s Destroy, She Said, modelled on Blanchot? He is imposing and mysterious – haunted by the end of history, ill, insomniac …
See this post for an account of what the May 1968 Events meant to our protagonists.
May 1968 was where it was all leading, I suppose, for Rue Saint-Benoît. After the Events? Mascolo has remarried, Blanchot becomes ill, Duras becomes very famous. Mitterand becomes President; now, Rue Saint-Benoît will become the subject of reminiscences and biographies. People like me spend Saturday night writing about it (why?)
Lars Iyer's Blog 