But How, How to Occupy Life?

Marguerite Duras in 1960. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Marguerite Duras’s Le navire Night (The ship named Night) is both a film and a would-be film, or rather a documentary of a film that the writer decided never to finish. Duras abandoned her initial project after several days of shooting, deciding instead to record the “disaster” it became. What results is an eighty-nine-minute composition of slow, panning shots and zoom-outs on the actors that would have starred (Dominique Sanda, Bulle Ogier, and Mathieu Carrière), the makeup and wardrobe they would have worn, and the Parisian backdrops and candlelit rooms in which they would have played their roles, overlaid by the voices of Duras and her friend the film director Benoît Jacquot reading directly from the text she had planned for the actors to use as their script. The original text, written in 1978, describes the paranoia and passion of an erotic affair conducted entirely over the telephone by a young man and woman, insomniacs both, the man working a night shift and the woman dying of leukemia, as they pleasure themselves to each other’s voices and make ill-fated plans to meet in person. Below, translated into English for the first time by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan, is Duras’s account of the making and unmaking of Le navire Night, a film which she would elsewhere call “beautiful and vain.”

—Owen Park, editorial assistant

 

 

The story in Le navire Night was told to me in December ’77 by the person who had lived it, J.M., the young man of Les Gobelins. I knew J.M. and I knew the story. There were about ten of us who knew of its existence. But we had never spoken about it together, J.M. and I. It was after three years passed that one day—I had spoken about it with a friend of J.M., who said she had already forgotten certain details—I was afraid that the story would be lost. I asked J.M. to record it on tape. He agreed.

Apart from certain dates and the knot of names in Père Lachaise that he had never managed to disentangle, he remembered. Everything was still there. It was three years after the end of the story, F.’s wedding.

Hearing him tell it, I understood that J.M. had no doubt always hoped to bring this story face to face with a listener, but that he had always feared—when the moment came—that people wouldn’t believe him “if he said everything.”

And that rather than being troubled by it, he was happy to speak about it.

It was based on that tape recording that I wrote Le navire Night—twice over, with six months in between. The first version of the text is from February ’78, it appeared in Minuit journal. The second version of the text is what is published here, it is the final text from the film shoot, July ’78. I gave the first version of the text to J.M. He read it. He said that “everything was true but that he recognized nothing.” I asked him if I could publish it and then perhaps, later on, turn it into a film. He told me that he hoped I would. That day we stopped talking about the story. T o tell the truth, never again. After having read what his own experience became—in the words of another—J.M. remained silent but as if he were always on the verge of speaking. I think he must have realized that other versions of his story were possible—that he had silenced them because he didn’t know that they were possible just as they were possible for any story. I think too that his own version had carried him so far that he had forgotten its sprawl, its banality.

A few days after he read the text, J.M. called me, he told me that he had been consumed again by a desire for F. that was so strong—after reading the written story—that he wanted to know whether she was still alive and he asked me to use her full name, rather than her initials, in Minuit. So that F. would understand that he was calling out to her. I said that the initials seemed sufficient to me given that F. knew her own name. He agreed.

Later, during the week that followed the film’s release, I called J.M. He told me that he had received phone calls with no one at the other end of the line except for that presence, breathing, undeniable, which he knew was hers. Because that was already her behavior as their story was unfolding, to make sure he knew that she loved him still and so intensely that she might die from it.

The dying F. was still alive at the beginning of 1979. I haven’t seen J.M. again since then.

I didn’t distribute the text of Le navire Night among those who spoke it in the film. There were only dashes before the sentences to indicate that the speaker should change at this or that moment of the narrative. Similarly, I didn’t specify the order of the shots or describe their content.

These precautions, I think I took them to try and erase the traces of the film in order to keep the reader from using it instead of their own interpretation.

I believe now—surely I have always believed it, but how, how to occupy life?—that it was perhaps not worth the effort to make the film. I believe the film was no doubt surplus, too much, thus unnecessary, useless. That it was in sum the marriage of desire on the very premises of the night but of the night chased away, replaced by the day. The light in the bedroom of the lovers, I think it shouldn’t have been done. After the writing of the text, everything came too late, everything, because the event had already taken place, in fact, in the writing. Because writing, whether it be written or read, it’s the same thing in this case, it’s also the sharing of the general story. This story, which belongs to everyone, I had the right to have my part of it because that’s how I share it with others, by writing. But perhaps I didn’t have the right here—here, I think of evil, of the devil, of morality—once the writing was over, once that universal night of the abyss was penetrated and closed back up again, to act as if it were possible to go back there to look a second time. To pass through the abyss, that first age of men, of beasts, of fools, of the mud, through the specter of the light, even if it was through an identity that was uncontrollable, even accidental.

It was unavoidable to write Night—we know this—yes, it was beyond control. But it was avoidable to film it—that we also know—and I won’t get away with it: it was avoidable to make a film with that darkness. But how to occupy the time?

The person who is revealed in the abyss claims no identity. They claim only that, to be the same. The same as the person who answered them. As everyone. It’s a fabulous clearing-out that begins as soon as we dare to speak, rather as soon as we arrive there. Because as soon as we call we become, we are already the same. As who? As what? As what we know nothing about. And it’s by becoming the same person that we leave the desert, society. To write is to be no one. “Dead,” said Thomas Mann. When we write, when we call, already we are the same. Try. Try while you’re alone in your bedroom, free, with no outside control, to call or to answer beyond the abyss. To fuse with the vertigo, the immense flood of calls. This first word, this first shout, we don’t know how to shout it. May as well call God. It’s impossible. And it happens.

My good fortune is that I escaped from the first edit that I made. I wrote for the press, when the film was released, the story of that failure. I include it here for the sake of memory and also because I see it there already, albeit masked, the ban that I establish for myself, the film:

I began filming Le navire Night on Monday, July 31, 1978. I had planned out the images. On the following Monday and Tuesday, through August 1, I filmed the shots planned for the edit. Tuesday night, I saw Monday’s rushes. In my journal that day, I wrote: film ruined.

For one evening and one night, I abandoned the film, Night. I stood outside of it, far, as separate from it as if it had never even existed. This had never happened to me before: to no longer see anything, no longer glimpse the slightest possibility of a film, of a single film frame. I had been completely wrong. The edit was false. More than that: I had been a stranger to the film: the edit didn’t exist.

I said to my friends: ‘That’s it, it happened to me.’ My friends told me that it was normal, that given what I was trying to do in cinema, they had expected it. We spoke very little. They had seen the rushes too and we were all in agreement. We spoke of what had to be done, notifying the production, the team, the actors, that everything would stop.

Benoît Jacquot told me to wait for the next morning to make a definitive decision about stopping the film. To sleep on it. I agreed.

I don’t think I hoped for anything from that coming night, from sleep. It would have troubled me to keep hoping. I was happy, suddenly plunged into a boundless sterility, akind of expanse without any accident, no suffering, nor desire. Finally present to myself in this assessment of an avowed failure, with no recourse. It was clear. It was finished.

Cinema, finished. I would start writing books again, I would return to my native land, to that terrifying labor that I had abandoned ten years prior. Meanwhile, I felt good. Happy. I had won that failure, I had won. The happiness must have stemmed from there, from having won. I leaned on that victory, that of having finally reached the impossibility of filming. I had never been so sure of a success as I was of that failure, that night.

I’ll add that the financial aspect wasn’t important to me. I gave myself permission to ruin a film, it didn’t matter to me.

I slept. And then, as usual, I had that insomnia—a symptom of depression, they say—that comes before dawn. And during that insomnia I saw the disaster of the film. I saw the film.

In the morning, we met up again and I told my friends that we were going to abandon the edit and shoot the disaster of the film. During the day, we would film the set and the actors’ makeup. We did it. Little by little, the film came back from the dead. I did it. I saw, each day a little more, that it was possible. I found the material to cover the screen while the sound, the story, elapsed. I realized that it was possible to attain a film derived from Night, which would testify to the story all the more (but to an incalculable degree) than the supposed film of Night that I had attempted for months never could have. We turned the camera around and we filmed what was going on inside, the night, the air, the projectors, some roads, some faces too.

The deferred narratives of Le navire Night about Greece are from episodes of the friendship that links us, Benoit Jacquot and me. It’s true, I went to the Parthenon and to the Athens City Museum in that way. And it’s also true that afterwards I recounted it to him alone. And also that then he went there strictly in the same way. It’s our way of finding each other through time.

 

This text is adapted from Six Films, which will be published in September by Inpatient Press. The book collects Duras’s writings on Le navire Night and five of her other works as a director, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan.

Marguerite Duras was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Her breakthrough international success came with The Lover, a semi-autobiographical novel that won the Prix Goncourt. She made significant contributions to cinema, writing the acclaimed screenplay for Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Olivia Baes is a multidisciplinary artist. Her translations include The Easy Life and Me & Other Writing by Marguerite Duras, cotranslated with Emma Ramadan.

Emma Ramadan is a literary translator from the French. Her translations include Sphinx, Not One Day, and In Concrete by Anne Garréta and A Country for Dying by Abdellah Taïa.