“HOW SOFTLY THE EVENING FALLS…” THE BEAST IN THE JUNGLE BY MARGUERITE DURAS
Christina Tudor-Sideri, 2025
This text accompanies Marguerite Duras’ La bête dans la jungle, a one-night-only theatrical reading of Duras’ 1962 stage adaptation of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” preceded by a screening of her 1979 film, Aurélia Steiner (Vancouver), at the Emily Harvey Foundation.
1903. The beginning of autumn. John Marcher and Catherine Bertram, suspended on the cusp of a fate unnamed, wander the corridors of regret and lost chances. In the echoing hallways of Weatherend castle, amidst ancestral portraits and the whispers of inherited silence, unfolds a tale of haunted interiority. Adapted from Henry James by Marguerite Duras and translated into English by Nicholas Byrne, The Beast in the Jungle asks: What if the catastrophe was not some thunderous tragedy, but the quiet passing of one’s life? A story of time, silence, and the slow corrosion of a soul haunted by its own illusions, the play lingers not in action but in atmosphere. Its rooms echo with voices never fully heard, its walls hide more than they reveal. At its center are two people locked in an exquisite, aching stillness.
John Marcher is a man convinced that he has been chosen for something rare and most terrible. Since youth, he has lived with the belief that a defining event lies in wait, structuring his life around this metaphysical deferral. His own beast in the jungle. It is this belief that keeps him apart from others. From Catherine Bertram, a woman who offers him the one true antidote to dread: companionship. Catherine, unlike John, is very much rooted in the present. In a Blanchotian sense, she is both the immanent witness of absence and the one who lives through the impossibility of experience. Her presence becomes a trace of life. She, herself, bears the trace of the Other; she bears the absence of life as life itself. Catherine lives alongside John in this suspended time, year after year, watching, listening, hoping—never demanding. She reminds him, “I have not forgotten anything that we have shared, anything that has existed between us.” She knows, long before he does, that the great event he fears has already arrived: their love, unspoken, unclaimed, now irrevocably slipping past.
The play unfolds like memory—elliptical, haunted by echoes, often indistinguishable from dream. The rooms of Weatherend Castle are as much metaphor as they are setting. The portrait of the Fourth Marquis, hidden and revealed again, becomes a silent witness to Marcher’s long descent into the abyss of his own prophecy. To this, too, Duras brings her signature spareness and poetic distance. Henry James writes from within the Victorian psyche; Marguerite Duras from the aftermath of the twentieth century. Post war. Post hope. His language is ornate. Her language is absence. With Duras, the ruins are not symbolic— rather, they are spatial, temporal. Empty chairs. Vast gardens. Somber rooms. The glint of love on an untouched face. More than an adaptation, what Duras offers is a haunting. In both works, the beast is not the question; we are not meant to know what it is, but how to endure what is not. The event of the non-event. The life not seized.
“Our story will never really exist,” Duras writes in Emily L. A recurring motif throughout her oeuvre. We encounter it in The Lover, The Malady of Death, Le Navire Night, Blue Eyes, Black Hair. “As long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn’t happened,” she writes in the latter. If one wonders why Duras chose to adapt Henry James, more so, why this novella in particular, herein lies the answer, in the infinity of absences that unravel across her body of work. A twin echo in The Malady of Death: “You have managed to live that love in the only way possible for you. Losing it before it happened.” Absence unto eternity. The Durasian path. Embedded deep within her work—the possibility never to be realized. The impossible possible. The possible impossible. A paradox. This: in not living, we have lived the greatest love of all.
But for Duras, love is not romantic. It is ruinous. Absence-made-flesh-made-absence. The slow unraveling of what will not be. She transforms the tragic irony of James’ novella into ritual. Absence into presence. Time unlived into eternal time. “John, the gaps that open between us, we’ve always crossed them…” The move is never a move forward, but a return. Again and again, Catherine and John walk through the gardens; again and again, they speak of the non-event. Again and again, the slow drift of time. “How softly the evening falls…” Again and again. Yet with Duras, time is not time as we commonly understand it. Time does not unfold—it recoils. The event becomes a persistent deferral; a condition of being for the characters.
“In the absence of its joys, love attempts to eternalize its sorrows,” writes Chateaubriand. In The Beast in the Jungle, the eternal is composed of moments that pass almost imperceptibly. The play hinges not on revelation or climax, but on slow dawning. Winter becomes summer, years become decades, and all the while, John Marcher waits. But the beast he imagines never arrives in the form he expects. In the final act, as Catherine falls ill, she names it for him. The terrible thing he feared, the thing that has claimed his life, was his inability to see love when it stood before him. And still, he asks: “But how, Catherine, how could something whose presence I never felt be what I was predestined to suffer?”
The stage directions capture the essence of this to perfection. “Time has passed but you cannot see it on their faces.” Repetition becomes a character—not as sameness, but as eternal return. In the topological time of Marguerite Duras, the past bleeds need. With this adaptation, she offers not simply a version of Henry James’ novella, but a portrayal of the structural condition it implies; a dirge for the might-have-been. Hers is an ontological intervention: void, interval, deferral. Catherine is more than a character; she holds—and is herself—a philosophical function, affirming the space of meaning that inhabits the very rupture at the heart of the story. She makes the audience ask not what happens, but how it does not happen.
To step into a play by Marguerite Duras is to surrender to a terrain where the everyday dissolves into the abstract, where language collapses on itself as often as it unveils meaning, where silence is its own character. As in many of her plays, here too, Duras distills human experience into elemental gestures, exposing the raw texture of being. Effortlessly, she gives us what so many have sought with their art—the primordial nature of the gesture unto becoming. We are drawn into a space where time feels adjourned, where the emotional weight of a glance, a silence, a pause, a turning away, is heavier than any plot turn. Duras summons her audience not to follow a story, but to sit with a sensation, to dwell within a rhythm: the slow, aching realization that life can slip away not through catastrophe, but through inertia. We are meant to listen—to the silences, the repetitions, the reverberations of lives shaped by fear. And, perhaps, in hearing them, to hear ourselves.
As the final silence settles, we are left with the echo of what might have been. With the epitome of absence: a life unlived. That is where Marguerite Duras leaves us. In the ache of what never was. And what always will be.
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Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer, translator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and critical theory. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue, and the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Her forthcoming monograph, Reliquary: On the Phenomenology of Kept Time, undertakes an investigation of temporality, archival desire, and the phenomenological status of preservation. Her translation work, aimed at recovering underrepresented literary voices, includes texts by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.
