Digression Nº 1; l'Amour impossible

In the stark, seaside room, the violently harsh light shines upon the naked woman under the young man's gaze. But for some slow, hypnotic music, this scene recalls the close-up of Anne-Marie Stretter's sweating breast in the filmed version of India Song. The sea provides the background sound in Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, beating against the rocks behind which, in the invisible distance, lurks the Other (man) who is an object of both of the protagonists' empty passion and subject of their discussion. Like the sea, he casts his presence into the house around which he prowls. As in Emily L., where both man and woman equally desire the departed "Other," the homosexual man and heterosexual woman are drawn together by their mutual attraction to a third party. As Hewitt shows, Duras frequently introduces "a third term in the love rapport" to thus define "the self through the other's desire" (119). For the characters of the novels, this "third term" is a dark, blue-eyed man.

In much of her fiction, characters appear who exist "outside" the lives of principal protagonists, voyeurs who look in on the central protagonists, often through a window. Thus, in Le Vice-Consul or its filmed version as India Song, just as we observe Anne-Marie Stretter in her Calcutta interior, so is she observed by the wandering crazy woman (upon whose outside world Anne-Marie Stretter can look, as well). Like the "you" of L'Homme atlantique (the man [Andréa] who moves on and off camera), principal characters step in and out of scenes they view through the windows that pierce the walls. Lol V. Stein looks in through a hotel room window that provides her with a partially obscured view of her old friend Tatiana Karl (fornicating with the novel's narrator). In Emily L. and Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, observers wander up to a hotel and lose their stance of objectivity when their lives become affected in reaction to what they see. Characters take on this role of witnesses, "la fameuse troisième personne" (M.D. à Montréa l37) as will readers, becoming voyeurs peeking into the narrative framework.

When the man is not out chasing sex on the beach, the two characters of Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs meet together to act out their inexplicable performance under the bare light bulb: it is a time for lies, tears, a certain jouissance, and uncomfortable tension. Together in the house, they each dream of this Other, the stranger with blue eyes and dark hair, the man they had seen as described in the first scene of the novel. By choosing two protagonists both of whose gaze falls upon the same man, Duras has chosen a couple whose shared passion for an absent man creates between them an impossible love, beyond physicality, an ephemeral and yet permanent feeling that passes through them like the waves of the sea heard outside their room. Duras transgresses barriers of gender and age to create this passion between an older, heterosexual woman (herself) and a younger, homosexual man (Yann Andréa). Andréa is Duras' late life Other, although, as she writes in La Pute de la côte normande, their love is formed with a built-in barrier:

Since Duras' love relationships are often a figuration of "l'amour impossible," the existing barriers make the passion that transcends them all the more powerful. Duras breaks down sociologically erected "walls" when her protagonists transgress not only conventional barriers of sexuality but the ultimate separation of one human from another. She favors relationships defined by real or figurative walls, or barriers. A love defined as powerless and impotent produces a certain fruition nonetheless. The ultimate barrier (or wall) is that of the Other: the impossibility of transcending one's self even when there are no socially constructed boundaries. As Andréa writes to Duras, "Entre vous et moi, la séparation définitive: je vous aime" (121).

Digression Nº 2, Homosexuality

She not only has depicted the abusive objectivisation of women by men (e.g., L'Homme assis) but she also reverses the macho male gaze upon women. In Le Marin de Gibraltar, for example, the narrator finds himself objectified by the woman's gaze: "je n'étais plus du tout gêné d'être regardé comme l'une d'entre les nécessités de l'existence d'une femme" (275).

An evaluation of Duras' views of homosexual men, however -- a major focus in both her life and her art, especially since meeting her last companion, Yann Andréa -- demonstrates how twisted her views of male (homo)sexuality can be. In her discussion with Xavière Gauthier in May 1973, Duras advanced the following:

Such ludicrous notions of sexual pathology (that she never repudiates) could be attributed to the fact that Duras associates her own feelings as a woman with those of homosexual men (in her rejection of heterosexual men): women, she feels, are in solidarity with homosexual men as persons who live "sur un fond de désespoir et de peur qui les ouvre" (152). As the section of La Vie matérielle entitled "Les hommes" shows, Duras maintains not only odd notions of homosexuality (cf. p. 46), but a very problematic vision of the heterosexual couple. Speaking of "la splendeur de l'hétérosexualité", she wrote: "Pour moi le désir ne peut avoir lieu qu'entre le masculin et le féminin, entre des sexes différents.
L'autre désir, c'est un auto-desir, c'est pour moi comme le prolongement de la pratique masturbatoire de l'homme ou de la femme" (Ouside 2 13).