Learn to Read, She Said

Albert des Capitales is an account of a torture session. It is one of the narratives in Marguerite Duras's La douleur.' I was not inclined, initially, to pay much attention to it. I was put off by various things, among them this: that Duras should not have hesitated to provide an account of torture with tone. That she should place one impersonal, expressionless phrase after the other like dull blows dealt in deliberate successionand thus, with these resoundingly impassive, dramatically colorless utterances, enthrall. first blow falls. It resounds strangely. The second. This is serious, it's true; a man is being tortured. The flat, laconically declarative style that refuses torture a single spectacular or even extraordinary feature and denies it the status of the utterly foreign and unthinkable very effectively surrounds it with an aura of spellbinding fatality. Or so it seemed to me. Now it's inevitable, pronounces Thfrese, the interrogator. You have to be somewhere, doing something. I happen to be here, in this dark room, closed in. . . . People think these are extraordinary things. They're like anything else. Like anything else, they happen to you. Then, they've happened. They could happen to anyone. It is true that before I even read Albert des Capitales I'd already gotten my back up to some extent because of Duras's observation, in L'amant2 (which was published the same year as La douleur) that between the writers and intellectuals she knew before the war who became collaborators, and herself, who joined the Resistance and later the Communist Party, there was after all no appreciable difference. Albert des Capitales seemed a sensational corroboration of that to-my-mind rather melodramatic remark. For the story describes French leftists at the end of the war torturing a Frenchman who had served the Gestapo. People who risked everything, it informs us in its hauntingly toneless tone people who themselves endured torture rather than acquiesce in Nazi brutality were nev

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