39 Books: 1997

I found this ghastly 60-page Grove Press hardback edition in a second-hand bookshop, its large typeface and generous spacing very similar to Beckett's late works (Barbara Bray, Beckett's translator, also translated this). Such productions are rare now, and perhaps were when it was published in 1986. Fitzcarraldo's edition of Jon Fosse's A Shining and Carcanet's edition of Gabriel Josipovici's Everything Passes, both under 60 pages, are notable exceptions.

With such short works the reader is naturally suspicious, naturally perceiving a lack, as if the weight of pages and density of typeface promise a fulfilment these spare productions proleptically withdraw. It may then be appropriate that the story of The Malady of Death is that of a man, an unidentified 'you' addressed by the narration, seeking to end a lack by paying an unidentified woman (declared not to be a sex worker) to sleep in a bed in his presence.

You say you want to try, for several days perhaps.
Perhaps for several weeks.
Perhaps even for your whole life.
Try what? she asks.
Loving, you answer.

The narration proceeds from there, in a circle, around the bed. This is a cold echo of the Albertine Asleep passage in The Captive in which Marcel watches his mistress in bed and in that state realises the possibility of love as he no longer needed to live on the surface of himself. In Duras's novel, the woman says love for him is an impossibility. He asks why she accepted his deal. She says it's because she saw he was suffering from the malady of death. 

You ask: Why is the malady of death fatal? She answers: Because whoever has it doesn't know he's a carrier, of death. And also because he's likely to die without any life to die to, and without even knowing that's what he's doing.

I recognised that the inability to feel even the deprivation of life also follows another famous work, though it was only later through Maurice Blanchot's chapter on the novel in The Unavowable Community that I learned Duras had translated and staged the story, Henry James' The Beast in the Jungle. John Marcher tells May Bartram that the deepest thing within him was "the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible", which turns out to be standing over May's grave. The escape from the beast would have been to love her: "No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant."

We read these three stories, so very different from one another in form and style, in the same way, from afar. It would be straightforward to stand back further and write essays about sexual politics, of repression and otherness using these works as examples, and The Malady of Death in particular given its overt focus on sexuality, and yet in its anonymity, the univeralism of the address to 'you', each one of us is implicated, removed from passion, seeking what is outside of us in the work. As readers each one of us is the one "to whom nothing on earth was to have happened". We are all Marcherites now.