The scene is Calcutta, the French Embassy in the 1930s. A man and woman dance slowly to a blues piano tune. The Ganges murmurs nearby. The queer light of monsoon season falls on the oleanders in the ambassador’s garden, on his gilt and white colonial decor. From two women speaking offstage in hushed, halting tones, we learn that the dancing lovers are Anne-Marie Stretter, wife of the French Ambassador, and the Vice Consul of Lahore, who has left everything to be with her.
There is something very English Patient about this opening, promising romance in that familiar elegiac colonial strain. But read (or watch) on, and something odd happens. We never do hear directly from those dancing lovers, nor do we ever see—or learn the identity of—those two women, who are later joined by two unnamed men’s voices. There is an entire embassy party scene, filled with gossiping and arguing, in which not a word is ever uttered by the people onstage; all their chatter is overheard from offstage as the guests mill about in carefully choreographed sequences. The play, which tells the story of the last two days of Anne-Marie’s life, turns out to be as much about the relationships between the characters that we don’t see (the second female voice, for example, is in love with the first, and the first is in love with Anne-Marie) as the ones that we do.
This gap between the seen and the heard is the first conundrum of India Song, Marguerite Duras’ boundary-pushing work from 1973, which she wrote as a play, then revised for a radio-play performance and again for a film version. Duras, who died in 1996, directed the film herself; it was released in 1975 to widespread praise despite its avant-garde status. She is one of France’s most acclaimed women writers; in this country, she is best known through films: Hiroshima mon amour (1959) for which she wrote the screenplay, and The Lover, a 1992 film based on her partly autobiographical novel set in Indochina, where Duras was born, about an interracial romance between a young white girl and an older Chinese man.
On the occasion of the tenth anniversary of Duras’ death, University of Vermont guest artist Rachel Perlmeter has chosen to promote the lesser known India Song through a semester-long “project,” which she is curating. Students enrolled in the team-taught academic side of the project are learning about the work’s historical background from history professor Abigail McGowan, its socio-cultural implications from film studies professor Hilary Neroni, and its literary-theatrical dimensions from Perlmeter herself. The public, meanwhile, is invited to a free—and rare—screening of the film at Merrill’s Roxy Theater in Burlington on Monday November 6th at 7:00 p.m., and a performance of the play, directed by Perlmeter, on campus, December 1st, 2nd and 3rd at 7:30 p.m.
Duras was commissioned to write the play, but she clearly wanted to experiment with how it could be heard and seen, and it is these dimensions which fascinate Perlmeter. “It’s spellbinding. It’s almost like a radio play that’s layered on top of a dance. Sound is key,” she says, adding that the film’s soundtrack, “one of the more inventive and evocative soundtracks in film,” has taken on cult status. For the UVM performance, UVM music professor Patricia Julien is writing an original score, a literal “India Song.”
Perlmeter, who joined the UVM faculty with her husband just over a year ago, did her graduate work on movement and gestures in Russian theater, and won a Fulbright to direct plays in Moscow. Since she wrote about it for a graduate paper, India Song has been the challenge she has wanted to take on. “Some critics call it an impossible play; there’s a whole book about Duras called Impossible Performances. She was trying to annihilate theater.”
In this way, Duras’ work resonates with that of Samuel Beckett, who was also accused of writing theater that annihilated theater: an extreme example being Breath, his 35-second play consisting of a recorded breath playing as the lights come up and go down on a garbage-strewn stage.
But Duras was challenging more than just genre. French theorist Helene Cixous celebrated her work as the embodiment of what she called ecriture feminine — women’s writing, or feminine writing — in which linear, patriarchal modes of thought, time, and narrative are replaced by more fluid structures grounded in feminine experience and intuition. It turns out that the voices in India Song, for example, are remembering, not witnessing, the story of the lovers, which raises the question: how much time has passed between the events they are apparently watching, and their retelling of them? And how trustworthy are their versions, when each voice seems to remember, and misremember, differently?
If India Song is a love story, written in a format that questions the traditional idea of narrative itself, it is also a story about colonial destruction. Evidence of this “horror” erupts in oddly fragmentary ways throughout the play. The Vice Consul once fired on lepers in his garden in Lahore; a beggarwoman who has wandered to India all the way from Laos haunts the story’s periphery. Those gleams in the sky? The “burning-ghats” for eliminating the bodies of the poor who have starved to death. But then again, how reliable are these disembodied voices’ accounts of the horrors of colonialism? “Lepers burst like sacks of dust, you know,” one of the women tells the other in a voice that is “informative, calm, gentle.” Her companion asks if they feel suffering when they burst. “No. Not a thing,” she responds, then laughs.
Readers and audiences at the film and play will have to reconcile these unsettling dimensions for themselves, says Perlmeter. “Duras wanted to make the viewer decide what really happens, make them synthesize all these different versions.” But one thing is certain: the play will strike an eerie chord of recognition in all of us who are watching a war happening on screen, accompanied by conflicting voiceovers by news media and politicians.
As Perlmeter wrote in an email, “At this historical moment, when nation building and regime change are pivotal subjects, Duras’ reflections on the tension between foreign and local should resonate with anyone watching the continuing fallout of colonial projects around the world.”
Associate Editor Amy Lilly lives in Burlington.
