Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras

"Total destruction will come first through Alissa," Stein says. "Don't you agree?"

"Yes. And do you agree she isn't altogether safe?"

"Yes," Stein says. "Alissa isn't altogether safe."

A man, whose name we will learn is Max Thor, spends all his time at a luxurious resort staring at a woman, whose name we will learn is Elisabeth Alione. Another man, Stein, makes Thor's acquaintance. When Thor's much younger wife, Alissa, arrives, the three of them--Thor, Stein, and Alissa--begin to attach themselves to Elisabeth. What do they want with her? Is it sexual? Stein becomes obsessed, in turn, with Alissa, and is frequently found fondling her, while Thor happily looks on. The three of them try to beckon Alione into the mysterious forest at the edge of the resort, of which she is quite afraid. Do they mean to rape her there? Or is the forest only meaningful for its symbolism, its wildness, and the way it sits on the other side of civilization's clear boundary? When Alissa says, simply, "Destroy," we know she means Elisabeth. But whether she means this quite literally, or, perhaps, whether she means she is out to destroy Elisabeth's petit bourgeois sense of herself, is not quite clear.

Destroy, She Said is a very cryptic book. It was too cryptic for me. It's hard to believe that this is the same writer who could produce such a funny, satirical novel as The Sea Wall, which must have represented a much different early career path. Destroy, She Said also seems less like a novel and more like a treatment for the film version that Duras herself directed; appended to the novel is a long interview with French director Jacques Rivette about both novel and film. Perhaps in the film, the crypticness of it works alongside a more cinematic kind of mood; where the sound of the unseen tennis balls caroming off of the courts works more effectively than the peripatetic attentions of the main characters upon the tennis players. 

So, I don't know about this one. With that said, you often here--and I have often said--that writers today are too monopolized by film, and that much of what is dead in modern prose comes from writers trying to write "scenes" of film upon the page. What Duras, who was also a very acclaimed filmmaker, does here, and perhaps elsewhere in her body of work, is to provide a model for a synthesis between film and literature that is much more successful. Perhaps--I'm spitballing here, not having seen the movie--the surface qualities of a film make it rather suited to evoking the mysteriousness of other people and their intentions; the novel certainly seems to put up a kind of image or scene as a barrier to prevent real psychological investigation.

We never really know what it is that the trio are up to with Elisabeth, but what comes through quite clearly is their strangeness, their unspoken abandonment of bourgeois morals. There's a really interesting scene where Elisabeth's husband shows up and meets them, and only halfway through the meal stops and realizes he's the only one eating. The rest are alien, as if in no need of nourishment, and we see that their attempts to sway Elisabeth to their side, whatever that might mean, have been successful. What also comes through clearly is the sense of some kind of revolution or violation; Alissa especially picks and borrows from revolutionary language. Does destruction promise release and renewal? Or is it only destruction?