Abstract
Les Papiers d’Aspern (1961) is Marguerite Duras’s untranslated play based on Henry James’s 1888 novella The Aspern Papers. French scholars generally have viewed this play as a direct translation of an earlier English-language adaptation by Michael Redgrave, but the differences between the two versions are substantive. Quite differently than Redgrave, Duras interprets James’s novella as an account of gendered racialization and linguistic difference that resonates with the emergence of French and Francophone postcolonial writing in Paris during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Her reading of James presents a systematic, period-specific analysis that should be considered within the larger histories of both feminist scholarly interpretations and French readings of his work. Additionally, in its analysis of Italy and the Italian language, this under-read play merits attention in discussions of Duras’s ambivalent portrayals of colonialism and ethnic gendering.
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Notes
- 1.
Most biographers of both Duras and Antelme—best known for his Resistance work and his published account of his wartime internment at Dachau , 1947’s L’Espèce Humain (The Human Race)—present their working relationship as jointly supportive. Colin Davis, however, uses textual evidence to argue that she was the dominant partner in their working relationship (see Duperray xl; Adler Chapters 6–9; Vallier, C’était II, Chapters 2–5).
- 2.
The authors find no feminist possibilities in either Duras’s play or James’s original; for them, Duras sees James as a stylistic precursor to the French nouveau roman. According to this analysis, her readings are in keeping with Maurice Blanchot’s (particularly in 1959’s Le livre à venir) as well as Nathalie Sarraute’s (in the 1956 essay “Ce que voient les oiseaux”), in which Sarraute compares James’s relationship to narration to Proust’s (22, 29–30).
- 3.
Duras, Lamy, and Roy 37; Chalonge 185–188; Adler 13. Although Duras would not have seen it this way, this is akin to the “queer nostalgia” that Probyn discusses—a creative, resistant, empowered relationship to one’s own origins. However, numerous scholars have accused her of simply lying, and indeed her “real” history is difficult to pin down. See Vallier (C’était I, Chs. 1–7) for a critical analysis of Duras’s childhood and its role in her later storytelling.
- 4.
See Vallier (C’était I, Ch. 1); Vircondelet Chs. 1–2; Adler Chs. 1–3. Gabrielle H. Cody is one of several interviewers who states that Duras spoke fluent Vietnamese (4; see also Leslie Garis); Julia Waters remarks upon Duras’s repeated assertions in interviews that she understood her “non-French origins” to be essential to her work as well as her personal identity (Duras and Indochina vi). Adler, among others, mentions her skill at cooking Vietnamese food (228). As Duras often serves as the sole source in these accounts, we should treat them with some skepticism.
- 5.
Unpublishable in French newspapers due to concerns about government reprisals, the document was circulated as an open secret. As Macey indicates, its existence was made fully public in Le Monde’s September 4, 1960 edition, via a strategically-headlined story: “121 Writers and Artists Sign a Declaration on the Right to insoumission (conscientious objection to military service) in the War in Algeria.” “The names of the signatories and the nature of the text were soon widely known” (445).
- 6.
See, for example, “Murderous Humanitarianism,” Samuel Beckett’s translation of a 1932 statement by the Surrealist Group of France, signed by eleven Surrealist artists (including André Breton, René Crevel, and Paul Éluard). The Surrealists argue that colonialism destroys indigenous cultures and creates a bourgeois (native) elite marked by a “counterfeit liberalism” that simply copies European society (67). Beckett’s translation was first published in Negro Anthology, a 1934 collection edited by Nancy Cunard that included work by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. These fusions were obvious and necessary to Duras and her contemporaries.
- 7.
In the late 1980s, Duras recorded with her old friend and fellow Resistance fighter a series of conversations published in 2009 as Entretiens inédits de Marguerite Duras et François Mitterand, which includes a four-minute discussion titled Le fondements du racisme. Duras’s continued Communism , even after she’d left the French Communist party, is well-documented (see Adler 175–184; Garis).
- 8.
“les Algériens ont raison de s’attaquer politiquement d’abord à ce système économique, social et politique et pourquoi leur libération et celle de la France ne peut sortir que de l’éclatement de la colonization” (The Algerians are right to attack politically first of all this economic, social and political system, because their liberation and that of France depend on the shattering of colonialism) (Sartre, “Le colonialisme” 1372). Fanon is quoted in Macey (343).
- 9.
Waters argues that the fact that the lovers of the young Frenchwoman in L’Amant and L’Amant de la chine de nord are Chinese rather than Vietnamese complicates readings of these novels as engaging in an essentialized “Orientalism ” of all Asian peoples. At the same time, in her view Duras’s work does little to challenge the system of colonialism. “China’s status as an imperial power in its own right establishes the lover’s credentials as a worthy match and adversary for the young white girl of French origins.” At the conclusion of L’Amant de la chine de nord, “the departure of the French does not signal the return of Indochina to the indigenous population but, rather, its inevitable and unspoken handing back to its former colonizers” (“‘Cholen’” 188). See also Lucy Stone McNeese, and the essays contained in the collection Orient(s) de Marguerite Duras, edited by Florence de Chalonge et al.—of particular interest are those by Elena Ciocoiu, Osama Hayashi, and Yann Mével, which present thoughtful readings of Duras’s exoticization of “the Orient.”
- 10.
In an interesting twist, Chamika Kalupahana suggests that The Europeans (see Chap. 3) stages anxieties about whiteness, through racially ambiguous descriptions of Felix’s sister Eugenia . It seems unlikely Duras would have read this novel, but perhaps Kalupahana provides further fodder for Duras’s argument, and vice versa, about James.
- 11.
Blair 3, 19–20, 172. Buonomo , Immigration 177–179; Backward 92–99. See Salter and Maine for readings of the representation of Italy in this novella or in James’s writing more generally. See Zorzi for James’s possible motives for placing The Aspern Papers in Venice . James devotes nearly a quarter of Italian Hours, his 1909 collection of travel essays dating from 1872 onwards, to his reflections on Venice. See also Warren.
- 12.
One key difference between the 1888 and 1909 editions is that “Tita” will be renamed “Tina .” In 1888’s Chapter IV James refers to Juliana Bordereau’s “reckless passion” (New Directions 44); by 1909, this has become “impenitent passion.” Redgrave uses “Tita,” but otherwise seems to be using the 1909 edition (see “impenitent” below as one example). Duras could have had access to two separate French translations of James, but it’s not clear which one she used (Bessière and Symington 16–17).
- 13.
See Buonomo (Backward 11–24) for an introduction to period-specific fantasies of Italy. James’s Italian was passable but not fluent. As Robert Gale, an early reader, states “James dots both his letters and his notebooks with ecco’s, basta’s, pazienza’s, speriamo’s and the like; but when he is seriously questioning a literary problem in the privacy of his notebook he uses, if not English, only French” (166 n.41). In Italian Hours James recounts attending in April 1873 “a comedy…in Venetian dialect,” which he could “but half follow” (189). The quote both disparages the Italian spoken in Venice and suggests he had comprehension problems when faced with regional variants.
- 14.
According to Geoffrey Dowding, an historian of printing, the italic type was invented in 1500 and modeled on Italian handwriting conventions. In the sixteenth century, it was a typeset for popular texts, rather than the formal Roman-type block letters used for more serious subjects (Dowding 43–58; see also Updike 125–132). In 1733’s “On Poetry: A Rhapsody,” Jonathan Swift writes: “To statesmen would you give a wipe, / You print it in Italic type. / When letters are in vulgar shapes, / ’Tis ten to one the wit escapes” (Swift 537, ll. 95–98). My thanks to Frank T. Boyle, years ago, for this context.
- 15.
Another suggestive example, in the final chapter, occurs when the narrator asks his Venetian servant, Pasquale , about Juliana , only to learn that she is dead. “‘When was the funeral?’” the narrator inquires, and Pasquale replies in a mix of awkward English, italicized but untranslated Italian phrases, and unitalicized single Italian words: “‘The other yesterday. But a funeral you could scarcely call it, signore: roba da niente—un piccolo passeggio brutto of two gondolas. Poveretta!’” (italics original, 81).
- 16.
Rowe suggests that the narrator of The Aspern Papers is “one in a long list of male characters in James’s fiction who express in one way or another their desires” for other men. Elsewhere, he will term the American critic’s “passion” for Jeffrey Aspern as an example of the “disguised male-male (sexual) relations” described in James’s work during this period (Other 27, 207 n.27). See also Savoy and Robert L. Caserio.
- 17.
See Introduction, note 5, above.
- 18.
Although Redgrave then immediately clarifies “I do not intend him, of course, as a portrait of his great progenitor” (viii), it is hard to read H.J. as anything but.
- 19.
James makes it possible to read his narrator as a delusional fanatic, obsessed with researching a mediocre and largely-forgotten poet. At the inception of the story, in describing his many co-authored publications about Aspern, he states “some people now consider I believe that we have overdone them” (5). The structure of the phrase is open-ended: “some people now consider” and “I believe” both modify “we have overdone them.” As the second modifying phrase is unmarked by commas, the narrator’s insistence on obtaining the material for yet another publication about Aspern may in fact be a defense against a realization that this work is of little real interest or importance.
- 20.
Bessière and Symington 17–19.
- 21.
For a representative example of the French play’s reinstitution of important dialogue from James’s text, compare Duras 78–79 to James 1–3 and Redgrave 14.
- 22.
For example, see the series of questions that comprise Jarvis’s dialogue with Pasquale , Duras 105–106, as compared to the same section in Redgrave (40–41).
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Wichelns, K. (2018). Gender, Colonialism, and Italian Difference: Duras and The Aspern Papers . In: Henry James's Feminist Afterlives. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71800-2_5
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