INTRODUCTION: EXCEPTIONAL, UNREADABLE, OR UNNARRATABLE MINDS?

Ten years ago, when I was first immersed in Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle, an ensemble of three novels and three films, I became anxiously haunted by its mysterious characters: the abandoned somnambulist Lol V. Stein, the decadent femme fatale of colonial Calcutta Anne-Marie Stretter, and the awkward vice consul Jean-Marc de H., a persona non grata suspended for an irrational shooting incident. Within the same texts there were other minds attempting to get hold of these oddities but ending up with a collec-tion of uncertain fragments, rumours, or mere fabricacollec-tions. Literary or cin-ematic, these narrativizing minds still did not seem able to get access to the whole story or to reveal the genuine essence of their targets, the Durassian unreadable and unnarratable minds. In his article on “unreadable minds,”

H. Porter Abbott (2008, 448) encourages us to embrace “that peculiar com-bination of anxiety and wonder” that gains its full strength when we accept the unreadability of certain literary minds. Indeed, part of the fascination of fiction—and art in general—may be its ability to exceed our grasp.

Although Duras touches upon heavy issues such as desire, death, mad-ness, and trauma (both personal and transhistorical), the setting or events of her works are not necessarily so extreme. As readers or spectators, we do not face the unearthly ineffability caused by incredible monsters or halluci-nations (see contributions by Brümmer and Kakko in this volume). Rather, not only anxiety but also excitement is aroused by both the unnarratabil-ity of Durassian minds and the impossible spatio-temporal storyworlds that, from one work to another, toy with the tension between writing and film, concrete and abstract. The vast quantity of the scholarship on Duras approaches this tension—both thematic and formalist—from a perspec-tive of trauma theory, gender studies, or post-colonial studies. All of these approaches are relevant points of view. I am also keen to examine the rela-tionship between Duras’s poetics and political activism. However, I suggest that we should not hasten to remove all the strangeness, but instead enter

the Durassian void and treat the private unnarratable area sketched in her works not as a crossword puzzle to be stubbornly solved but as a sanctuary from stuffy assumptions and flimsy mind reading.

In this chapter, I concentrate on two novels from the India Cycle, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964, The Ravishing of Lol Stein 1966) and Le Vice-consul (1966, The Vice-Consul 1968). In Le ravissement de Lol V.

Stein (from now on, Lol V. Stein, and RLVS/RLS in citations), the character- narrator Jacques Hold delves into reconstructing the initial rejection trauma of Lol V. Stein. Lol’s fiancé has left her for another woman during a ball night.

Ten years after Lol starts stalking her old friend Tatiana Karl and Tatiana’s lover, Jacques Hold. In Le Vice-consul (LVC/TVC in citations), there is no such central narrating consciousness as in Lol V. Stein. It is mostly the collec-tive “on,” the white society of the colonized Calcutta, who gossips about the French Vice-Consul at Lahore, Jean-Marc de H., and the French ambassa-dress, Anne-Marie Stretter. Meanwhile, Peter Morgan is working through his white man’s burden by writing a novel about an anonymous mad Cambodian beggar woman. Later on, in the novel L’amour (1971) and in the three films of the cycle (La femme du Gange 1973, India Song 1974, and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desert 1976), Duras first stretched literary narration to the utmost and then detached sound from image, all the while working on the elements of the same eerie storyworlds. Toward the end of this chapter, I will examine briefly how the dynamics of unnarratability are elaborated in Duras’s cinematographical experiments. There are also other levels of com-plex narrative spatiality in the India Cycle, especially in the films, that operate simultaneously—but separately—on multiple diegetic levels. Most often the works are experiments with various kinds of “impossible” or “abstract” spaces.

Duras was not the only author associated with the loose label of nou-veau roman to test the limits of mental representations. In her essay “De Dostoïevski à Kafka,” Nathalie Sarraute describes the need for deciphering the deepest secrets of other fictive minds that gnaws away at the souls of Dostoyevsky’s characters:

It is this continual, almost maniacal need for contact […] that attracts all these characters like dizziness and incites them on all occasions to try, by any means whatsoever, to clear a path to the “other,” to penetrate him as deeply as possible and make him lose his disturbing, unbearable opaqueness; in their turn, it impels them to confide in him and show him their own innermost recesses.

(Sarraute 1990, 33) This tendency to speculate on other minds is obviously deeply rooted in reading and interpreting fiction, both at the level of the actual reader and that of a character inside the diegesis. It has also been—and still is—the very central topic of current narratological discussion. A variety of cogni-tive and metacognicogni-tive speculations can be found from realist to the most

experimental narratives, but one cannot take for granted that this urge would gain any consummation. In many cases, the metacognitive efforts for mind-construction rather seem to underline the impotence and clumsi-ness behind human communication or to accentuate the uncanny effects of which fiction is capable.

David Herman posits himself and the contributors to his anthology The Emergence of Mind (2011, 8–9, see also Andersson in this volume) in oppo-sition to what he calls the “Exceptionality Thesis,” i.e., the premise that readers experience fictional minds on a different basis than those in the real world, for it is only in fiction where we possibly could have access to another mind. This ethos can be traced back to Dorrit Cohn’s classical study Transparent Minds (1978), and, according to Herman, further applications are localizable in the research of “unnatural narratologists.”¹ He argues that fictional narratives do not afford any clear-cut view of others’ minds and therefore the everyday cognitive and folk psychological processes of meaning-making and mind-reading become applicable to reading fiction as well. I wholly agree with Herman’s reservations regarding the transparency of fictive minds. Our paths differ at the point where in my view it seems a more fruitful and interesting solution to abandon folk psychology and pro-ceed bravely beyond the “Exceptionality Thesis” (or “separatist approach,”

as Andersson calls it), to examine how fiction, slick in its swerves, may turn down even the most artful efforts to penetrate other minds.

It seems that the recent emphasis on mind in post-classical narratol-ogy sometimes too eagerly embraces the idea of constructing, reading, and interpreting other (fictive) minds as a proof for the overall benevolence of

“natural” human interaction. If we are to follow Herman’s ethos (which Stefan Iversen calls the “Similarity Thesis” 2013, 99) and lump fictive minds together with actual minds, or a more general tendency of cognitive nar-ratology to renaturalize impossible narrative elements, we risk taming the

“affective power” or missing the “essential dynamics” between a work of verbal art and real-life experientiality, to which “separatists” such as Iversen (ibid., 96) and Maria Mäkelä (2013, 130) alert us. Taken to its extreme, this mind-reading may lead to flagrant overinterpretations and narrative exploitation. If we ceaselessly aim at verbalizing each other’s hidden inner worlds, what kind of space is left for the individual freedom of not being

“connected” every time everywhere?

In this chapter, I aim to demonstrate how Duras’s works abandon the belief that constructing other minds is always an authentic and decent form of human interaction—at least in narrative fiction.² I will also discuss briefly how Duras elaborated this rejection of coherent communication in her India Cycle films by separating sound from image. The more frantic the efforts for mind constructing, the more ambivalent the result (if there even is a result).

By highlighting this impossibility, these novels introduce a space for read-ings that lean more on the “negative way” of knowing than on clear-cut cognitive reasoning.

José García Ángel Landa (2011, 437) argues that narrative may provoke even claustrophobic feelings in a mind longing for the openness of unplotted reality, free from any “manipulative and vicious” narrative pattern. Thus, the resistance to narration is a battle for space and certain limits for privacy.

Moreover, in the introduction to their anthology Beyond Narrative Coher-ence (2010, 7), Matti Hyvärinen, Lars-Christer Hydén, Marja Saarenheimo, and Maria Tamboukou pose the question of whether narrative coherence might even be a harmful phenomenon, as it intertwines with the problemat-ics of power, idealization, and marginalization. The mistrust of narrative structures as a tool for parsing experience and social environments is not a new phenomenon. This concern has its echo in an overall post-war tendency to regard Western metaphysics and reason as dubious.³ As Sirkka Knuuttila (2011, 155) points out, Duras’s work can be positioned in the continuum of the antipsychiatry movement of the 1960s and the 1970s, as the author revises the age-old imagery of madwomen, letting them “flee from all con-trol of reason” in a way that appears to be a “strong emancipatory vehicle.”

Facing or trying to surmount one’s narrative inadequacy is one of the central features of the India Cycle. Peter Morgan wants to “take the misery of Calcutta” and tries to process the exotic, horrifying “unheimlich,” the poverty and the leprosy, by writing. For him it seems to be a therapeutic act.

Jacques Hold also gets truly obsessed with reconstructing Lol’s mind and eventually turns this absent-minded woman into a projection of his own (auto)erotic fantasies. We do not get “authentic” access to Lol’s conscious-ness; in the novel, there are sequences that are narrated in free indirect dis-course by a third-person narrator, but in the middle of the novel, it turns out that Jacques Hold is actually both the third and the first-person narrators.

Thus, we can hear Lol’s own voice only in the direct discourse, in the dia-logue. Otherwise Lol stays in her private unnarratable area. I see this kind of narrative tension as a struggle for space: the narrator, Jacques Hold, is trying to penetrate into this space, and Lol tries to defend it.

THE URGE FOR AND THE FAILURE OF READING—AND