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Lefebvrian 'Moments' in Marguerite Duras's Cahiers de la
   guerre

   Jennifer Willging

   French Forum, Volume 43, Number 3, 2018, pp. 423-437 (Article)

   Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
   DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.2018.0033

       For additional information about this article
       https://muse.jhu.edu/article/722367

[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]

Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite
   Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre
   jennifer willging

Marguerite Duras’s posthumously published Cahiers de la guerre (2006), a
transcription of four notebooks in which the author wrote between 1943
and 1949 (a period contemporaneous with her membership in the Com-
munist Party), contain hand-written drafts of several texts with which Dur-
as’s readers are familiar. They also hold many fragments of stories and
reflections that Duras herself never published. I will analyze here a small
set of these fragments, which appear to have been written in spring 1947
and served for Duras as the origin of the short story “Madame Dodin,”
published in the 1954 collection of short texts titled Des Journées entières
dans les arbres. I have written elsewhere about “Madame Dodin,” the story
of a crafty and cranky concierge at number 5, rue Sainte-Eulalie, a thinly
veiled number 5, rue Saint-Benoı̂t, where Duras lived from 1940 until her
death in 1996.1 Whereas there I examine the revisions Duras made to cer-
tain passages in the Cahiers for publication in “Madame Dodin,” here I
will focus on the fragments of the draft that never made their way into the
published version. These particular passages recount in the first person, in
a diary-like fashion, not memories of the author’s childhood or the war
but a series of rather banal, everyday moments she was experiencing at the
time of the writing. These moments occur very early in the morning when
she is awakened by various sounds emanating from the rue Saint-Benoı̂t
beneath her bedroom window. This sequence of passages in the Cahiers
opens in the following way:

   Lorsque je me suis réveillée, je n’ai pas immédiatement regardé le
   réveil. Je n’ai pas ouvert les yeux. Mais ma fenêtre était ouverte et
   j’ai entendu que quelqu’un longeait la rue, quelqu’un qui marchait
   d’un pas rapide, régulier. Puis, tandis que ce quelqu’un était arrivé

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424   french forum winter 2018 vol. 43, no. 3

   au bout de la rue, quelqu’un d’autre pénétra de nouveau dans la rue.
   Tandis que le pas du premier s’effaçait, le pas du second s’amplifiait
   jusqu’au moment où il est passé devant ma fenêtre et où, dans la rue
   vide, car à ce moment-là, l’autre avait quitté la rue et il était seul, il
   se détacha avec une intense sonorité.

   J’ai compris alors que le matin était arrivé et que déjà, des gens par-
   taient pour leur travail.
       Saint-Germain-des-Prés a sonné six coups. (301)

    This reference to the Saint-Germain-des-Prés abbey and later ones to
other neighborhood landmarks, such as the Ecole de Médecine being built
at the time on the rue des Saints-Pères (301), make it clear that the “je” in
these passages is meant to refer to the author herself rather than to a fic-
tional character. Along with footsteps and the chiming of church bells, the
various sounds she hears distinctly on this and other mornings include
rain falling (302), water splashing from a gutter (302), two lovers singing
together (315), neighbors or passers-by talking (316 et al), and finally, the
sound that is the real seed for the story that would become “Madame
Dodin,” the metallic scraping of her building’s garbage can being dragged
out to the street by her concierge, Mme Fossé (302 et al). All of these
sounds trigger in the sleepy young communist and writer certain reflec-
tions about her fellow beings. By being awakened over a number of morn-
ings by these sounds, in particular the lonely footsteps of a stranger whom
she supposes, because of the early hour, is a member of the proletariat
(“déjà, des gens partaient pour leur travail”), “j’ai appris,” she writes:

   à regarder, écouter les choses et à ne m’accorder dans l’affaire que
   l’importance de ‘l’autre.’ Cet homme qui marche seul, d’un pas
   rapide, qui habite la rue plus complètement et plus suggestivement,
   d’une présence plus réelle et plus impressionnante que celle d’un
   héros de tragédie sur une scène de théâtre, je l’écoute en lieu et place
   d’une collectivité, je suis à l’écoute, à moi seule, [de] toute une ville
   éveillée et troublée, car cet homme ne me concerne pas en tant qu’in-
   dividu particulier ayant une expérience et une sensibilité particuliè-
   res, mais en tant que membre de cette collectivité dont nous sommes
   tous deux, au même titre. Ce qu’il y a d’extraordinaire, c’est que cet
   homme qui marche est n’importe qui, je suis n’importe qui qui
   écoute marcher, et cet anonymat existe avec une très grande force et
   m’emplit de joie – d’amour – d’espoir. (305)

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Willging: Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre 425

   That being awakened before dawn by sounds from the street below
should fill the author with “joy, love, and hope” cannot help but strike the
reader as curious. She doesn’t know who the man is, and he doesn’t know
that the echo of his footsteps is being not just heard but listened to by a
stranger, “[une] autre,” waking from her sleep on the third floor of build-
ing number 5. She is the lone member of the audience (in the strict sense
of the word since she cannot see him) of the “tragédie”–that is, presum-
ably, the daily life of the working class–he is acting out on his “scène,” the
city street. His footsteps, she writes, “me passent sur le corps et s’incrus-
tent, et emplissent de leur sonorité cette conque que je suis” (306). Her
aural attentiveness and the openness of her body to receiving the sounds
he is generating lend meaning and import, she suggests, to an act–an
ouvrier going to work in the early morning–not normally considered to
have much of either. Since both she and the man are “n’importe qui” and
members of a collectivity “au même titre,” the relationship of validation
appears to be egalitarian, as well as reciprocal; the man walks beneath her
window as if in order for her to hear his footsteps and to sense a joyful
connection, however fleeting, with him.
   Six pages into these musings, the writer pauses a moment to make a
meta-commentary, the first of several direct references to the writing of
the text she is beginning to fashion out of her morning reflections:
   Il faudrait pouvoir décrire cela, un homme qui marche seul dans une
   rue vide, au petit matin, alors que vous venez de vous réveiller, que
   le jour filtre à peine à travers une bâtisse de ciment armé [l’Ecole
   de Médecine under construction], et au même moment une vieille
   concierge traı̂ne, de sa cour à la rue, une poubelle pleine d’ordures
   puantes, et vous entendez le bruit de la poubelle et les pas de
   l’homme, alors que vous êtes dans votre lit, dans la chaleur, le repos,
   l’abandon. (306)
   Although she is describing one particular moment here, and the foot-
steps belong to a particular man, and the concierge who is dragging the
poubelle is a particular woman she can name, Mme Fossé, this incident,
she notes, is “habituel” (306):
   Lorsque je l’entends je le ressens comme essentiellement quotidien.
   C’est chaque matin qu’il a lieu, chaque matin de chaque jour, de
   chaque jour de l’année, moi je ne l’entends que rarement et lorsque
   cela arrive, je ressens que je ne l’entends pas chaque jour mais que
   chaque jour il a lieu, je l’entends comme tel, quotidien. (322)

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426   french forum winter 2018 vol. 43, no. 3

    She reminds herself that although she does not always hear the ritual of
the poubelle, presumably because she often sleeps through it, it is part of a
reality that exists independently of herself and her perception. The fact that
she knows Mme Fossé personally, she goes on to say, needs to be set aside
rather than emphasized in her text: “bien que je connaisse Mme Fossé, je
la retrouve alors, abstraite des relations particulières que nous pouvons
avoir, elle est n’importe quelle vieille femme qui traı̂ne une poubelle à six
heures du matin, maudissante, aigrie, terrible” (306). She is suggesting that
Mme Fossé has less significance as Mme Fossé per se, concierge of number
5, rue Saint-Benoı̂t, than as an abstract symbol, that, say, of the servitude
of the working classes. In parallel, Mme Fossé’s poubelle, filled as it and as
others like it are with the fish bones, potato skins, and empty tin cans of
her contemporaries, comes to symbolize, better than the most celebrated
cathedrals, she claims in all earnestness, the dogged “volonté de durer des
hommes” (323).
    So, it is everyday life—la vie quotidienne—in the abstract, the seemingly
timeless daily life not just of common but of anonymous people, rather
than a series of particular incidents happening to particular individuals,
that the writer wants to capture and theorize in the text she is creating. She
is striving to turn the highly personal, diary-like narrative of these early
morning experiences into an exposition of more general truths, perhaps
two in particular: first, the universal injustice to which working men and
women are subjected, and second, the inner revolt they manage neverthe-
less to retain while under its yoke (for Mme Dodin remains habitually
“maudissante, aigrie, terrible”). In these reflections Duras hints, then, at
what Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre (who after the war mixed in the
same intellectual circles as Dionys Mascolo, Duras’s then-lover and long-
time friend) would call for in his Critique de la vie quotidienne, the first
volume of which was published the same year Duras was writing these
lines (1947).2 What Lefebvre was calling for was the recovery and theoriza-
tion, the perception and analysis, of the average man or woman’s everyday
experience, which had always been eschewed by historians, novelists, and
playwrights in favor of the exceptional exploits of “great” individuals,
whether real or fictional. Lefebvre wanted to make la vie quotidienne of
everyday people an object of study in order to understand the extents to
which their presumably “personal” choices, actions, and thoughts are sub-
ject to–and the extent to which they might escape from–the social, politi-
cal, and economic forces that surround them. Lefebvre loosely defined
everyday life as “ce qui reste quand on a extrait du vécu toutes les activités

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Willging: Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre 427

spécialisées,” such as work, school, or religious practice (quoted in Debord
21). Everyday life, he wrote, “[c]’est la nourriture, le vêtement, l’ameuble-
ment, la maison, le logement, le voisinage, l’environnement,” and, we
might add in the context of this analysis, sleep, a paradigmatically quotid-
ian activity (Lefebvre, La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne 46, quoted
in Elden 111). For Lefebvre, daily life is at one and the same time a place of
alienation–a place in which we believe we are less restricted and controlled
than in our work lives but in which, in modern technocratic society, “colo-
nized” as it has become by capitalism and consumerism, we are increas-
ingly not; and a place in which, if only momentarily, alienation could be
put on pause and the human being could catch a glimpse of how life might
be led differently and more freely (Critique II 16–17).3 In his autobiographi-
cal La somme et le reste (1958) and in the second volume of Critique de la
vie quotidienne (1961), Lefebvre in fact lays out a theory of such glimpses,
which he called “moments.” In his afterword to Lefebvre’s The Production
of Space (1991), David Harvey describes Lefebvre’s “moments” as
   fleeting but decisive sensations (of delight, surrender, disgust, sur-
   prise, horror, or outrage) which were somehow revelatory of the
   totality of possibilities contained in daily existence. Such movements
   were ephemeral and would pass instantaneously into oblivion, but
   during their passage all manner of possibilities—often decisive and
   sometimes revolutionary—stood to be both uncovered and achieved.
   “Moments” were conceived of as points of rupture, of radical recog-
   nition of possibilities and intense euphoria. (429)
    In what follows, I want to suggest that the “joie, amour, espoir” (305)
Duras lyrically describes in one of the longer passages reproduced above
and with which the banal act of listening to a workman’s footsteps on an
empty street curiously fill her become more comprehensible if understood
in light of Lefebvre’s theory of the “moment.” A number of other passages
in these Cahiers fragments further demonstrate the multiple ways in which
the experiences Duras describes appear to conform to Lefebvre’s descrip-
tions of “moments.”
    A key characteristic of Lefebvre’s moments is that they occur in every-
day life but somehow stand out from ordinary experience: “Tout le
contenu des moments vient de la vie quotidienne et cependant chaque
moment émerge de la vie quotidienne dans laquelle il prend les matériaux
ou le matériel dont il a besoin” (Critique II 346). As noted, waking from
sleep is of course a quintessentially quotidian occurrence. When describing

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428   french forum winter 2018 vol. 43, no. 3

the kind of morning she does in the Cahiers, however, Duras uses a super-
lative to underscore its extraordinary nature: “Je ne pouvais pas me rend-
ormir. J’étais éveillée plus qu’à n’importe quel autre moment de la journée”
(302 my emphasis). This kind of awakening, she goes on, “se coule, clair,
et on pense et on ressent, on écoute et on voit en soi et au-dehors comme
à travers une vitre” (302). As in a Lefebvrian moment, here thoughts, emo-
tions, and perceptions are exceptionally lucid and give access to a sharper
and more profound understanding of both the self and the world. The
borders of the body are figured here as a “vitre,” so although they still
exist, they become temporarily transparent, allowing greater communica-
tion between inside and outside, the self and the world.4
     A second characteristic of Lefebvre’s moments is that, while they are
extraordinary and stand out from the everyday, they are also recurring,
like certain dreams; they constitute, Lefebvre writes, “une forme supérieure
de la répétition, de la reprise et de la réapparition” (Critique II 344), that
is, a higher form of repetition than that of our normal everyday activities,
such as bathing, shopping, or reading a newspaper. An individual can
experience multiple moments (some of them repetitions of previous
moments, others new), and together these moments form what Lefebvre
calls a “constellation,” which dips below the horizon during her normal
everyday life but which emerges from that horizon each time a moment
occurs, making her aware, reminding her, of past moments (347). While
Duras begins the fragments in the Cahiers by describing, in the passé com-
posé, a singular moment—“Lorsque je me suis réveillée, je n’ai pas immédi-
atement regardé le réveil” (Cahiers 301)—she soon reveals that she has
experienced this kind of awakening, however exceptional it may feel,
before: “Je me rappelais avoir été réveillée de la sorte, au petit matin, et
c’était toujours un éveil à part” (302). This kind of apparent contradiction,
between singularity and recurrence, is common in Lefebvre’s dialectical
thinking. The moment is a part of everyday life yet constitutes a radical
break from it; it arises from the banal but is itself extraordinary; it is
strange yet familiar, like Freud’s unheimlich (which, while unsettling, ulti-
mately gives he who experiences it a fleeting sense of wholeness via a
glimpse into his own, normally hidden unconscious). The recurring nature
of the moment only makes its extraordinariness more salient and leads to
the hope that it can be relived.
     As should be clear by now, Lefebvre’s moments are always revelatory or
epiphanic in nature: during the moment, “[l]a lumière fausse qui éclaire
[la quotidienneté] se dissipe et laisse place à la vraie clarté de la critique”

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Willging: Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre 429

(Critique II 357). That is, during a moment, the normally invisible alien-
ation from both ourselves and others in which we live in modern society
becomes, though fleetingly and partially, apparent. In his writings Lefebvre
always emphasized that the human being is alienated, separated, not just
from the fruits of his labor and therefore just in the economic sphere, he
is also alienated from his own humanity (because in a capitalist system he
is a means of production and not an end in himself and thus a thing),
from other human beings, who, like him, have become things devoid of
humanity. He therefore experiences a sense of fragmentation and separa-
tion not only at work but in his leisure time as well, and everywhere in
between (precisely, in his “daily life”).5 Lefebvre’s moments, however, offer
glimpses of wholeness: “Désaliénant par rapport à la trivialité de la vie
quotidienne–dans le sein de laquelle il se forme, mais dont il émerge–et
par rapport aux activités parcellaires qu’il surmonte, le moment devient
aliénation” (Critique II 347). That is, though only to be had in everyday
life, the moment stands apart from the everyday and alienates the individ-
ual who experiences it from her own everyday alienation and fragmenta-
tion; the moment, then, is a temporary and redemptive alienation (release)
from chronic and crushing alienation.
    If the moment allows an individual to experience a feeling of totality or
wholeness, Lefebvre’s assertion that the moment is “la reconnaissance por-
tant sur certains rapports déterminables avec l’autre (ou l’autrui) et avec
soi” (344) might on the surface appear somewhat contradictory, as other-
ness of course implies division and difference. In Lefebvre’s dialectical
thinking, however, “recognizing” otherness implies accepting and embrac-
ing it rather than seeing it as a threat to the self and therefore wishing to
keep it at bay or to destroy it. When the individual is open to otherness,
to co-existing peacefully with it, he breaks out of his alienation from it. In
such an open state of mind, which moments can temporarily provide,
“autrui” is “ce qui est assez proche de nous pour que nous puissions entrer
avec lui en connivence. L’autrui c’est l’amical (possiblement) et l’accessible;
l’autrui s’offre à nous, jusqu’à un certain point. Sous son regard, nous ne
souffrons pas d’un malaise, sinon momentané et bientôt surmonté. C’est
le prochain” (Critique II 217). The other and the self both still exist but are
joined by their common humanity.
    In the Cahiers fragments we have already seen, Duras very clearly
expresses a heightened awareness of the otherness, that is, the independent
existence, of the man whose footsteps to which she listens. This is why she
insists, in one of the longer passages reproduced above, on attributing to

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430   french forum winter 2018 vol. 43, no. 3

herself in these early-morning scenes only the status of “the other” (“à ne
m’accorder dans l’affaire que l’importance de ‘l’autre’ ”), that is, an anony-
mous and non-threatening human being who accepts the humanity in oth-
ers. Given the “joie” these moments produce in her, it is also clear that she
relishes these moments of escape from atomic Cartesian subjectivity and
egocentrism and experiences–not in spite of this sense of otherness but
precisely because of it, as in a Lefebvrian moment—a unity with her sur-
roundings. Listening to the sounds of dawn, “je me sentais,” she writes,
“au cœur d’une réalité vivante qui s’emparait de toutes choses, et de mon
corps, et de mes pensées, qui étaient claires et nettes comme les choses”
(Cahiers 316–17 my emphasis). The reality to which these footsteps give her
access contains “toutes choses,” everything, including her body and her
thoughts, which are thus equal to all else, neither distinct from nor supe-
rior to what her senses perceive and her mind contemplates. Her use of
the word “chose” is not intended to dehumanize what is human but rather
to put every “thing” (every element of reality) on a level playing field and
to eliminate hierarchy. She is no different from the objects and individuals
around her, just as common and anonymous as they, and she derives from
this sensation of sameness, of radical in-difference, not a feeling of loss but
rather of unity. “Un pas relayait l’autre, dans la rue,” she notes of the
footsteps, “[c]es pas martelaient le silence, ils l’occupaient intégralement,
ils occupaient intégralement l’espace sonore qui va du boulevard Saint-
Germain jusqu’à la rue Jacob” (302 my emphasis). The footsteps provoke
in her a moment in which fragmentation, difference, and discord disappear
in an enveloping and reassuring integration or oneness not only of time
but of space as well.
    A final but key commonality between Lefebvre’s moments and Duras’s
early-morning awakenings is that, in spite of their shared ephemerality,
they both give birth to a profound feeling of hope. While the moment
“veut durer,” Lefebvre writes, “[i]l ne peut pas durer (pas longtemps)” in
our modern state of chronic alienation. Yet “[c]ette contradiction interne
lui confère son intensité, poussée jusqu’au paroxysme lorsque dans la pléni-
tude se présente l’inéluctabilité de la fin” (Critique II 345). Fragile and tran-
sitory, moments are not disalienation and fulfillment, but they do offer us
a brush with these states and thus generate the hope that they can one day
be attained. Andy Merrifield underscores the hope that Lefebvre’s
moments engender by figuring them as “inconspicuous cracks, holes in the
net, little shafts of light, and pockets of air in the system of control of
capitalism.” They are signs that

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Willging: Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre 431

   [c]ommodification and domination hadn’t overwhelmed everything,
   not quite. There is always leakiness to culture and society, unforeseen
   circumstances buried within the everyday, immanent “moments” of
   prospective subversion. Moment became his key revolutionary
   motif, signifying that all was not lost. (Merrifield 26)

    It must be emphasized that, in spite of his assertion that alienation had
seeped into nearly every crevice of everyday life, Lefebvre’s vision of the
human condition in modern society is still a cautiously optimistic one.
His entire oeuvre, after all, is devoted not just to exposing the increasing
colonization of everyday life but to insisting that, if everyday life could
change for the worse, as he argued it had over the postwar period, it was
therefore not immutable and could also change for the better (Critique I
243).
    For Duras, the hope the special awakenings she describes inspire in her
is inextricably linked to the moment of the day when they take place—
dawn—making that link a metonymic as well as a metaphoric one. Dawn,
she writes:

   [c’est] une heure qui a de la force, parce que vierge, naissante, l’heure
   où le soleil n’est pas encore levé mais où il va se lever, où cet
   immense événement [le jour] s’annonce. Voilà où est la force de
   l’heure : c’est qu’elle [est] celle de l’espoir et qu’elle en a tous les
   caractères, car elle contient plus de promesses que n’en tiendra le
   jour qui naı̂t, car à mesure qu’il s’écoulera, cet espoir s’ensablera de
   nouveau dans la nuit qui suivra ce jour, mais du moment qu’il n’est
   pas né, cet espoir est intact et plein de l’inconnu du jour qui vient,
   et qui maintient dans l’homme le feu brûlant de la vie. (Cahiers
   304–05)

   Duras’s “moment” is prompted by a natural cycle within everyday life
(the earth’s rotation), which for Lefebvre stood at the antipode of the
relentless repetitions engendered by modern capitalism (like the repetition
of the assembly line or of commuting to work) (Critique II 52–54). Dawn
contains “more promises” than day because it is day not yet realized, day
before the train-train begins, before it disappoints. In his own celestial
metaphor, to which I alluded earlier, Lefebvre too warns against the “faux
soleils” of the day: “Le jour de la quotidienneté, ce clair-obscur, occulte la
constellation des moments. . . . Ce sont de faux soleils qui éclairent aujour-
d’hui la vie quotidienne: la morale, l’Etat, l’idéologie. Ils font pire que

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432   french forum winter 2018 vol. 43, no. 3

l’éclairer faussement: ils la maintiennent et la retiennent loin au-dessous
des possibilitiés” (347–48). “Qu’un trouble obscurcisse le quotidien,” how-
ever, something as banal, say, as the steps of a lone man on a street, “et la
constellation monte à l’horizon,” that is, one can experience a moment
during which others moments one has lived in the past become together
accessible to consciousness (347). Moments, occurring in the heart of the
normally deceptive light of the everyday, can reveal these “possibilities” of
which Lefebvre speaks, these “promesses” in Duras’s terms, and supply
the fuel that keeps the desire for life–a life of wholeness, freedom, and
creativity–burning.
     At one point in these Cahiers fragments, Duras’s attention shifts, excep-
tionally, from current perceptions to recent memories.
   Il n’y a pas si longtemps j’ai pris le métro à six heures du matin, tout
   le monde lit L’Humanité dans le métro. Il y a là une coı̈ncidence
   entre le sort de l’ouvrier et son appartenance au PC [Parti Commu-
   niste] qui, s’ils en prenaient conscience comme d’un fait, aussi réel
   et indiscutable qu’un fait purement matériel (aussi matériel que la
   constatation des grandes lois sociales qui règnent dans notre société)
   qui, s’ils l’observaient, ferait réfléchir et découragerait beaucoup de
   gens, juste assez pour les fatiguer d’imaginer le réel au lieu de le voir,
   et de créer en eux une disposition à recevoir ce réel, naturellement
   et sans préjugés. (316)
    It is worth noting that when Duras joined the French Communist Party
in 1944, she took on the job of distributing copies of L’Humanité, its daily
mouthpiece (Adler 234). It is possible that it was for this reason that this
young bourgeois writer with a law degree found herself on the metro at six
o’clock in the morning one day. The ambiguous “ils” in the second sen-
tence of this somewhat confusing, unpolished passage refers to the equally
ambiguous phrase, “beaucoup de gens,” that appears only later in the sen-
tence. In this evocation of the metro, classic symbol of everyday life (métro,
boulot, dodo), the “gens” Duras references do not appear to be members
of one particular social class. The passage suggests rather that what they
have in common is a certain false consciousness, for the “s’ils en prenaient
conscience” implies that they currently lack awareness of the coincidence
between Party membership, or at least sympathy for the Party, and socio-
economic class. There are members of the working classes themselves who
suffer from this mauvaise foi—those who have not yet become members
of the Party, like Gaston the street sweeper, whose early morning conversa-

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Willging: Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre 433

tions with Mme Fossé the author also frequently hears from her bedroom
window.6 And there are of course members of the bourgeoisie among these
“gens,” those who are blissfully unaware of—or who choose to ignore—the
struggles of the working class. Were these latter to get up early for a change
and, like the author, behold such a mass of people reading L’Humanité on
the metro (“s’ils l’observaient . . . “), they might realize, or be frightened
into realizing, that their own comfort, ease, and security, like the author’s
in the warm bed in which she normally finds herself at this hour, is not
shared by the majority of their fellow men. More importantly, they might
realize that this majority is becoming, thanks in part to its morning read-
ing, more and more aware of this disparity. These bourgeois would then
grow weary (“fatigu[és]”), the author believes, of straining to maintain
their illusion that all is well in the world, and they would become receptive
to seeing and understanding the reality of social injustice and class conflict.
Suddenly, however, all of these lofty reflections about social relations
under modern capitalism are interrupted, not by another sound this time,
but by a sensation. It emanates from within the author’s own body (as
private a space as can be found) rather than being provoked by anything
happening on the street (public space par excellence): “Et alors l’enfant
que j’ai dans le ventre a bougé. Il a bougé pendant que passaient ces
ouvriers, dans la réalité précise de la rue” (316–17) (Duras was pregnant
with her son Jean Mascolo in spring 1947). She turns onto her back and,
over the next page and a half of text, describes trying to feel the contours
of the baby’s body moving inside her. The depth at which he seems to be
enveloped within her makes it hard for her to believe that in three months’
time, “il creusera, enfoncera mon utérus, jusqu’au moment où il sera assez
large pour y passer tout entier” (317–18). She then begins to think about
childbirth in somewhat more prosaic terms: “Je sais, car j’ai déjà eu un
enfant, que c’est une souffrance terrible” (318). Her own immanent and
likely excruciating pain seems to distract her momentarily from the work-
ing man’s plight.
Then, it is as if the personal nature of such thoughts suddenly strikes
her as indulgent. While childbirth, she says, “est une chose extraordinaire,”
she quickly adds that, “Bien sûr, elle a été vécue et dite et décrite” (318). She
realizes that pregnancy and childbirth have been borne silently by nameless
women for millennia, and also that those women privileged enough to
have written about the experience have probably already said all there is to
say. While still insisting that “[cette chose] reste extraordinaire” (318), she
nevertheless hastens in the following passage to reduce to it its proper

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434   french forum winter 2018 vol. 43, no. 3

dimensions, that is, to see it as an everyday occurrence, a shared and com-
mon part of the human (or at least female) condition that she is in no way
exceptional for having experienced. “Si extraordinaire que [cette chose]
m’ait paru,” she now writes, changing the verb from the definitive “être”
to the subjective “paraı̂tre” and from the indicative to the subjunctive
mood, and thus recognizing that her feeling of uniqueness is an illusion:
   elle prenait place dans cette totalité du petit jour, et non moins
   extraordinaire était d’entendre les pas des premiers ouvriers sur le
   trottoir, le bruit de la poubelle sans écho, l’écoulement lent et régu-
   lier de la pluie, de savoir que le jour allait insensiblement monter, et
   enfouir tout cela dans sa diversité et dans la multiplicité de ses
   aspects. (318 my emphasis)
     She emphasizes once again here her sense that she is witnessing a “total-
ity” but also insists upon the diversity and multiplicity of that totality, a
totality that includes and welcomes, once again, the other. Her pregnancy,
however extraordinary and significant it may be to her, is no more extraor-
dinary or significant to the human race as a whole than are these other,
seemingly banal events of daily life she has been aurally witnessing from
her bed. Despite their disparateness, together the rain falling, the workers’
footsteps, the scraping of the “poubelle du prolétarait opprimé” (319), and
the movement of the baby inside her give her “ce que Paulhan appelle
‘l’illusion de la totalité du monde’ ” (318).7 This is an illusion she neverthe-
less feels she can almost touch it is so palpable, and that perhaps is, in the
end, unlike her feeling of uniqueness, no illusion at all, but rather a Lefeb-
vrian moment of disalienation. Though comfortably nestled in her bed
(the injustice of her position relative to those on the street is not lost on
her), she feels as one with the workers out in the early morning rain and
experiences joy, not for the way things are, but rather for the way they will
be, she confidently asserts, in a not-so-distant future: “Pendant que des
enfants se font, que grandit l’horreur du prolétariat opprimé, des hommes
vont travailler à l’usine et”–nourished by their daily dose of L’Humanité
—“préparer la libération” (319). The use of the indefinite article here (“des
enfants,” “des hommes”), like the “n’importe qui” in earlier passages,
underscores once more the ideology being expressed, which is that of the
primacy of the anonymous collectivity over the particular individual. It is
not, she insists, because she is a Communist that she has interpreted this
symphony of matinal sounds in this way—“Du moins, je ne le crois pas,”
she then cautiously adds. It seems to her that anyone should be able to

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Willging: Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre 435

perceive the totality of human life that these diverse sounds seem to
announce in concert. But then again, “Comment le savoir?” (319). Perhaps
she understands these things in such a way, she appears to begin to suspect,
because of the ideological filter (Communist doctrine) through which she
is perceiving them, one which, at least in its orthodox form, we know she
would shed in short order.
    As noted at the beginning of this article, none of the references to these
early morning awakenings, and very few to the various sounds the author
hears from her bedroom window, remain in the final version of “Madame
Dodin” published in 1954, four years after Duras’s break with the Commu-
nist Party. The one sound that is retained is the scraping of the poubelle,
and in the end, the published story revolves around (and indeed is titled
after) not an anonymous Concierge, one who represents all working-class
oppression, but one particular concierge, Mme Dodin of number 5, rue
Sainte-Eulalie. The story recounts in great and colorful detail, in fact, Mme
Dodin’s individual mannerisms, speech patterns, and opinions, as well as
a number of her often comical and sometimes shady exploits, such as steal-
ing the packages of butter a tenant has country relatives send to her and
finessing free meals from the manageress of the boarding-house across the
street (“Madame Dodin” 179, 164). The few fragments of text I have cited
above that do make their way into “Madame Dodin” in a revised form,
such as the rhapsodizing about the symbolism of the poubelle, are, I have
argued elsewhere, ironic rather than ingenuously sincere, as they clearly
are in the Cahiers draft (Willging, “Toeing” 470). So over the several years
that passed between the writing of the draft and the publication of
“Madame Dodin,” the story appears to have evolved from a “tragédie”
(Cahiers 305) into a comedy (indeed, it is among the most comic texts
Duras ever wrote). Mme Dodin loses none of her dignity for the transfor-
mation, however, and the story is still most definitely a critique of the
condition of the working classes. Yet the critique is produced through the
telling of a detailed, autobiographical, idiosyncratic story about specific
characters rather than through an abstract theoretical homage to “n’im-
porte qui,” to a universalist idea of Man.
    I contend that, in the end, Duras excluded the particular fragments
describing her early morning musings from her later published work not
because they were too personal (we know she never shied from often dis-
comfiting personal revelation) but because, in a sense, they were not per-
sonal enough; that is, in them she tries too hard to justify the attention she
pays to personal sensations and impressions by attempting to universalize

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436 french forum winter 2018 vol. 43, no. 3

them (“Il me semble que n’importe qui d’autre, ce matin, aurait vu la
pluie, entendu les pas,” etc.) (319). The later, post-PCF Duras wanted to
let the personal speak more freely, less loftily, and not in the name of
supposed universalism, as in the Cahiers fragments. She no longer felt she
had to justify writing about the personal and the particular, because she
knew instinctively better than most that the personal is the political. For
in the modern age, as Lefebvre announced in 1947, the matrices of power
and control once primarily contained within the workplace, the church,
the school, the political party–have seeped into everyday “private” life, in
which we had formerly felt ourselves free. While in the Cahiers Mme Fossé
becomes a member of the PCF upon her tenant’s (the author’s) insistence,
in the 1954 version, Mme Dodin refuses to join (“Les communistes, c’est
du pareil au même que les curés. . . . Ils répètent la meme chose, qu’il faut
être patients, alors, il y a pas moyen de leur parler” (“Madame Dodin”
130)), or indeed to submit to any other authority (including, given her
theft of her tenant’s butter, the law). Yet while the author of “Madame
Dodin” and later texts was no longer a card-carrying communist who
scorned, or at least tried to scorn, the indulgence of the personal and the
lyrical (as appears to do the author of the Cahiers fragments), in her writ-
ing Duras continued relentlessly to expose and fight against the pervasive
alienation, so clearly suffered by characters like Anne Desbaredes, Lol V.
Stein, and Anne-Marie Stretter, for example, that Lefebvre describes in his
Critique and in which he felt the “moment” could pierce a tiny hole.8 More
optimistic (and perhaps more naı̈ve) than much of Duras’s later writing,
the abandoned Cahiers passages analyzed here give us, at the very least, a
glimpse into another’s glimpse of liberation from that alienation.

The Ohio State University

Notes
1. See Willging, “Narrative Urge, Narrative Anxiety.”
2. Mascolo and Lefebvre both contributed, for example, to the existential Marxist
journal Arguments (1956–62), of which Lefebvre was one of the directors (Poster 211–12).
3. In using the term “colonized” to describe modern everyday life, Lefebvre is quot-
ing Guy Debord, founder of the avant-garde Marxist organization the Situationist Inter-
national and one-time ally of Lefebvre in his project to expose and overcome the
alienation of everyday life (Debord 70).
4. The extreme, disalienated lucidity and sense of unity with the world this awaken-
ing provides stand in marked contrast to the confusion, disorientation, and bourgeois

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Willging: Lefebvrian ‘Moments’ in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre 437

solipsism associated with the awakenings Proust describes in the opening pages of A la
Recherche du temps perdu, of which Duras may nevertheless have been thinking when
writing these scenes.
    5. See Lefebvre’s discussion of alienation in Critique de la vie quotidienne II 208–18.
    6. Gaston will become a major character in “Madame Dodin.”
    7. French writer Jean Paulhan titled the first part of his Entretien sur des faits divers
(1930, 1945) “L’illusion de totalité ou les paradoxes de l’esprit.” In it he decries the
human tendency to make assumptions about all items in a category based on an
encounter with one example of it; that is, to practice an inductive type of reasoning that
leads to a misguided sense of mastery: “[N]otre esprit est si curieusement bâti que le
fragment d’expérience qu’il recueille ne lui apparaı̂t jamais pour commencer comme un
fragment, mais bien comme un tout” (25).
    8. These are characters in (among other works) Duras’s Moderato cantabile (1958),
Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), and Le Vice-consul (1965).

Works Cited
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Duras, Marguerite. Cahiers de la guerre et autres textes. Edited by Sophie Bogaert and
   Olivier Corpet, P.O.L./Imec, 2006.
———. “Madame Dodin.” Des Journées entières dans les arbres. Gallimard, 1954,
   pp. 119–84.
———. Moderato cantabile. Minuit, 1958.
———. Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein. Gallimard, 1964.
———. Le Vice-consul. Gallimard, 1965.
Elden, Stuart. Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. Continuum, 2004.
Harvey, David. “Afterword.” The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre. Translated by
   Donald Nicholson-Smith, Blackwell, 1991, pp. 425–34.
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique de la vie quotidienne. Fondements d’une sociologie de la quoti-
   dienneté. Vol. 2, L’Arche, 1961.
———. Critique de la vie quotidienne. Introduction. Vol. 1, L’Arche, 1947.
———. La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne. Gallimard, 1968.
———. La Somme et le reste. Nef de Paris, 1959. 2 vols.
Merrifield, Andy. Henri Lefebvre: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2006.
Paulhan, Jean. Entretien sur des faits divers. Gallimard, 1945.
Poster, Mark. Existential Marxism in Postwar France. Princeton UP, 1975.
Proust, Marcel. A la recherche du temps perdu. Gallimard, 1913–27.
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   guerite Duras’s ‘Madame Dodin’.” French Review, vol. 73, no. 4, 2000, pp. 699–709.
———. “Toeing the Party Line in Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre.” Modern
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