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I recently became aware of Marguerite Duras’s writing. I’ll share some snipits here from her essay “writing” in a book by that same title translated by Mark Polizzotti.

“To be alone with the as yet unwritten book is still to be in the primal sleep of humanity. That’s it. It also means being alone with the writing that is still lying fallow. It means trying not to die. It means being alone in a shelter during the war. But without prayer, without God, with no thought whatsoever except the insane desire to exterminate the German Nation down to the last Nazi” (“Writing” 15).

“Deliverance comes when night begins to settle in. When work stops outside. What remains is the luxury we all share, the ability to write about it at night. We can write at any hour of the day. We are not sanctioned by orders, schedules, bosses, weapons, fines, insults, cops, bosses, and bosses. Nor by the brooding hens of tomorrow’s fascisms” (31).

“Crying has to happen, too.

Even if it’s useless to cry, I still think we have to cry. Because despair is tangible. It remains. The memory of despair remains. Sometimes it kills.

To write.

I can’t.

No one can.

We have to admit: we cannot.

And yet we write.

It’s the unknown one carries within oneself: writing is what is attained. It’s that or nothing.

One can speak of a writing sickness.

What I’m trying to say isn’t easy, but I believe we can find our way here, comrades of the world.

There is a madness of writing that is in oneself, an insanity of writing, but that alone doesn’t make one insane. On the contrary.

Writing is the unknown. Before writing one knows nothing of what one is about to write. And in total lucidity.

It’s the unknown in oneself, one’s head, one’s body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: an other person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger, and who sometimes, through his own actions, risks losing his life.

If one had any idea what one was going to write, before doing it, one would never write. It wouldn’t be worth it anymore.

Writing is trying to known beforehand what one would write if one wrote, which one never knows until afterward; that is the most dangerous question one could ever ask oneself. But it’s also the most widespread.

Writing comes like the wind. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself” (32-3).

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Tags: Marguerite Duras, Writing