Sleeping Beauties: Discourse, Gender, Genre in the “Erotic” Texts

Abstract

While several of Duras’ texts contain sexual scenes, I separate La Maladie de la mort and L’Homme assis dans le couloir for purposes of discussion because they focus exclusively on sexual encounters and offer in distilled form images of erotico-pornographic relations as defined and experienced in patriarchal society. I conflate the terms or use them interchangeably because, conceptualized in the dominant symbolic order, the erotic and the pornographic are on a continuum in which the line between them tends to blur ethically and materially. Regardless of aesthetic distinctions, which rest on debatable grounds, the discursive system in question correlates sexuality with violence.¹ Duras’ work throws these processes into relief. In La Maladie de la mort and L’Homme assis dans le couloir, this is achieved through further exploration of narrative modalities that inscribe discursive and implicit narrative plurality, though less through referential absence than through a certain overabundance of presence in conjunction with a displaced, yet essential matrix of narrative “ignorance.”

Husserl-Kapit: “Your feminine characters are lucid; they are aware of everything. Your men are unaware of everything.” Duras: “No, they are unaware of women.”

“C’est à votre incompréhension que je m’addresse toujours.”

Marguerite Duras

“Let the priests tremble — we’re going to show them our sexts!”

Hélène Cixous

“Je connais, j’affirme, je veux la. différence de mon sexe. C’est différent que je t’apppelle, c’est différente que tu me cherches ... je n’aime que dans la perspective de la différence.”

Annie Leclerc