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Introduction Revisioning Duras

James S. Williams

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

Marguerite Duras was the most widely read living French author during her lifetime, but also the object both of adulation and denigration in her own country. While she enjoyed the loyal and public ... More

Marguerite Duras was the most widely read living French author during her lifetime, but also the object both of adulation and denigration in her own country. While she enjoyed the loyal and public support of friends, critics, and exegetes from Michelle Porte to Alain Vircondelet, Duras was also criticised by many for her alleged self-absorption and overexposure. Her literary style has been widely ridiculed, if not dismissed, in France. This book examines the acute polarisation in attitudes towards Duras around three themes: film, sex, and race. It looks at some of her films, her film criticism, and her engagement with photography, as well as gender and sexuality, intersexual relations, and sexual practices in her ouvre. It also investigates questions of racial difference, immigration, and the representation of the native Other in Duras's work, with a special emphasis on female identity and desire.Less

Kitchen Talk: Marguerite Duras’s Experiments with Culinary Matter

Edwige Crucifix

in Gastro-modernism: Food, Literature, Culture

This chapter examines the connection between literary experimentation and feminine matter/material experiences through the treatment of food, cooking and gastronomy in two of Marguerite Duras’s early ... More

This chapter examines the connection between literary experimentation and feminine matter/material experiences through the treatment of food, cooking and gastronomy in two of Marguerite Duras’s early novels, Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953) and Moderato Cantabile (1958), in which the modernist author explores ways to dismantle traditional narratives and gender roles. In these novels, experimenting with food and gastronomy creates the possibility for a different literary discourse, a form of feminine kitchen talk, that materializes female experiences in the text. Echoing later autobiographical accounts, Duras’s experimentation with culinary matter is a central tenet of her depiction of the feminine in relation to the body and affect, but also of Duras’s own literary practice, a topic still surprisingly under-studied. Attending to the peculiar position of food in Duras’s oeuvre is an invitation to rethink not only the relationship between language and the real, but also between women and matter in modernism.Less

The Contexts of Marguerite Duras’s Homophobia

Michael Lucey

in Someone: The Pragmatics of Misfit Sexualities, from Colette to Hervé Guibert

This chapter proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her ... More

This chapter proposes a contextualization of Marguerite Duras's 1983 book, The Malady of Death, along with some of her other writings and statements from around that time. These writings register her long-term intimate relationship with a younger gay man whom she called Yann Andréa, and also record a good deal of violently homophobic discourse. The chapter proposes that there is something to be learned by taking the sexuality that Duras shared with Andréa to be a misfit one—one that can, to a degree, be recognized in practice, but that there is no easy way to represent or denote. Misfit sexualities exist mostly in context, in interaction; when represented or registered in writing, they often reside in the relations between texts and the interactive processes that produce them. To attempt to contextualize a work such as Malady of Death in this way involves attempting to reconstruct something of the social world (mainly a part of “literary” Paris from the 1950s through the 80s) in which the work intervened, and attempting to understand the particular cultural concepts for understanding the various ideologies and practices of sexuality it invoked, and in which it was implicated.Less

‘Like the French of France’: Immigration and Translation in the Later Novels of Marguerite Duras

Martin Crowley

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

As a writer, Marguerite Duras developed a reputation as a staunch advocate of the rights of immigrant communities and other groups facing oppression due to race. This is evident in her constant ... More

As a writer, Marguerite Duras developed a reputation as a staunch advocate of the rights of immigrant communities and other groups facing oppression due to race. This is evident in her constant alignments with racially marginalised groups, her denunciations of the Front National during the 1980s, and her vision of France as a country friendly to immigrants and immigration. This chapter examines the place of racial and linguistic identity in Duras's later novels. It first considers immigrant identity and textual solidarity with this identity before turning to the presence of a kind of linguistic pluralism in the texts, and then offers a close reading of the problematic of translation in the 1987 text Emily L..Less

Hijacking the Hunter: Duras's ‘La nuit du chasseur’

Catherine Rodgers

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

This chapter examines Marguerite Duras's 1980 article ‘La nuit du chasseur’, a somewhat eccentric but enlightening example of her film criticism in which she offers a critique of Charles Laughton's ... More

This chapter examines Marguerite Duras's 1980 article ‘La nuit du chasseur’, a somewhat eccentric but enlightening example of her film criticism in which she offers a critique of Charles Laughton's film The Night of the Hunter and commits a number of factual inaccuracies in the process. Moreover, Duras appears to be wholly unconcerned with the art of the film or its startling images, reminiscent of Molyan Mills's critique. Her analysis, saddled with factual mistakes, blind spots, and apparent disdain both for its biblical inspiration and its context, results in a singular falsification of The Night of the Hunter. Through her article, Duras effectively creates her own film out of Laughton's work.Less

Excitable Silence: the Violence of Non-violence in Nathalie Granger

Owen Heathcote

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

Actual violence has been linked to its representations via two forms. First is the violence of art itself, the ‘violence of beauty’. Second is the violence that appears to intensify due to its ... More

Actual violence has been linked to its representations via two forms. First is the violence of art itself, the ‘violence of beauty’. Second is the violence that appears to intensify due to its representations. These two forms of representational violence – the violence endemic to representation and the violence promoted by representation – present a challenge to traditional perceptions of art. The representation of violence has two principal aspects that are relevant to Marguerite Duras's film and book Nathalie Granger: the violence of children and the importance of representation itself to the way the violence is perceived and treated. This chapter explores the relations between children, violence, and representation in Nathalie Granger, focusing in particular on what it can teach us about violence and about dealing with violence.Less

Female Homoerotics and Lesbian Textuality in the Work of Marguerite Duras

Renate Günther

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a ... More

Love and desire are prominent themes in Marguerite Duras's work and have been interpreted by critics from a largely heterosexual perspective. Drawing on contemporary lesbian theory, however, a lesbian subtext underlies the overt heterosexuality in the texts. This subtext constantly features female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as L'amant, Moderato cantabile, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. While lesbian desire figures in some of these texts in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work generally seems to be more diffuse and fluid. This chapter examines the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras: Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. It considers the representations of love between women in these texts and the presence of certain textual patterns that reflect lesbian textuality in Duras.Less

Multidirectional Memory and the Universalization of the Holocaust

Michael Rothberg

in Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate

Marguerite Duras's “Les Deux Ghettos” employs an aesthetic of juxtaposition: taking the form of two interconnected interviews, it brings together memory of the Holocaust and recent developments in ... More

Marguerite Duras's “Les Deux Ghettos” employs an aesthetic of juxtaposition: taking the form of two interconnected interviews, it brings together memory of the Holocaust and recent developments in the ongoing struggle between France and the Algerian independence movement, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Duras's article approaches the massacre in roundabout fashion, through a historical analogy between Nazi policy and the context of Fifth Republic France. His article might be said to illustrate one of the central arguments of Jeffrey Alexander's chapter. Sometime around 1961, the Nazi genocide of European Jews went from being perceived as a terrible wartime atrocity with limited implications to being an event uniquely suited to illuminating historical evil wherever it cropped up. Thus, Alexander would most likely see in “Les Deux Ghettos” an exemplification of moral universality.Less

Erasing

Sarah Cooper

in Film and the Imagined Image

The focus of this chapter is on mental images that spectators are prompted to build and then to erase, either by conjuring a disappearance within them or by dismantling them fully as part of the ... More

The focus of this chapter is on mental images that spectators are prompted to build and then to erase, either by conjuring a disappearance within them or by dismantling them fully as part of the activity of imagining. This iconoclastic mental activity is the corollary of the onscreen relation to the image in the work of the two contrasting directors discussed in this final chapter. The reshaping of the previous chapter necessitated adding something to the onscreen image. The work of erasure explored in this current chapter involves both subtracting something from the mental image that has been formed on the basis of verbal instruction and destroying it in its entirety: the former process is one traced as a recurrent element of Guy Debord’s first film Howls for Sade (1952). The latter process is one traced through a series of late films by Marguerite Duras, from The Lorry (1977) and The Ship Night (1979) to two shorts, Negative Hands (1979) and Caesarea (1979). Negative Hands also prompts instances of what Elaine Scarry terms ‘re-picturing’, which involves the forming and re-forming of mental images even as this too, in Duras’s case, serves an ultimate process of annihilation.Less

An Art of Fugue? The Polyphonic Cinema of Marguerite Duras

Wendy Everett

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

This chapter explores how music is intimately related to the multilayered and self-referential cinema of Marguerite Duras by discussing her films vis-à-vis the concept of fugue, looks at ways in ... More

This chapter explores how music is intimately related to the multilayered and self-referential cinema of Marguerite Duras by discussing her films vis-à-vis the concept of fugue, looks at ways in which they relate to the wider modernist context, and offers a new perspective from which to view her ouvre. Duras's cinema can also be discussed in the context of musical simile; Alain Vircondelet, for example, compares her films' composition to that of a piece of music. Duras's love of music is not only reflected in the titles of her films and in the complex and repeated references to music that they contain, but also emerges in the fundamental role accorded to music within the soundtrack.Less

Durasie: Women, Natives, and Other

Marie-Paule Ha

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

Marguerite Duras's Asian novels are structured by a colonial narrative space, which has been the subject of numerous studies that probe Duras's relation to her native land and colonialism. This ... More

Marguerite Duras's Asian novels are structured by a colonial narrative space, which has been the subject of numerous studies that probe Duras's relation to her native land and colonialism. This chapter examines the colonial problematic in Duras's Asian ouvre by revisioning her women characters within the framework of colonial gender politics. It first looks at the roles of white women and their native counterparts as articulated in the colonial discourse of the Third Republic, and then analyses the extent to which Duras draws on colonial narrative stereotypes in her representation of both white and native women as two diametrically opposed groups. The chapter also discusses the narrative of ‘the white women's burden’ and ‘the myth of the destructive female’, along with the importance of colonial Indochina in Duras's work and life. It concludes by showing how the colonial gender politics that underlies Duras's portrayal of women in her Asian texts is itself disarticulated by the liminal positionality of some of her female protagonists.Less

Life and Death Upon the Page: Marguerite Duras and Roland Barthes

James Creech

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

In France, homosexuality has not received the credit it deserves as an important element in literature and its production. Marguerite Duras showcases in her work the homophobic potential that lies ... More

In France, homosexuality has not received the credit it deserves as an important element in literature and its production. Marguerite Duras showcases in her work the homophobic potential that lies within postmodern versions of French universalism. This chapter examines her attitudes towards Roland Barthes, a gay man. In his review of Edmund White's biography of Marcel Proust, Peter Ackroyd offers a classic example of critical legerdemain that is lethal for gay authors and which relates to the anti-homosexual tactics of Duras. Barthes never alluded to his sexuality, either personally or explicitly, in his published writings. Duras had a few things to say about différence and about Barthes. In La maladie de la mort, a narrator tells of an encounter between a homosexual man and a straight woman in the typical Durassian manner.Less

Imaginary White Female: Myth, Race, and Colour in Duras's L'amant de la Chine du Nord

Kate Ince

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

One of the texts widely held to make up the ‘corpus’ of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical writings is L'amant de la Chine du Nord, whose composition was bound up with Jean-Jacques Annaud's ... More

One of the texts widely held to make up the ‘corpus’ of Marguerite Duras's autobiographical writings is L'amant de la Chine du Nord, whose composition was bound up with Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of L'amant, another Duras autobiography, for the cinema. This chapter explores relationships between women, along with the representation of myth, race, and colour in L'amant de la Chine du Nord, and considers how colonialism and postcolonialism structure race relations, with a particular focus on ‘whiteness’. It also examines the relevance of Richard Dyer's writing on whiteness to Duras as well as the mythification of sexuality in L'amant de la Chine du Nord.Less

Screening the Vampire: Notes on India Song and the Photographic Images of La Mer Écrite

Gill Houghton

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

This chapter, which offers a reading of Marguerite Duras's film India Song and the book of photographs La mer écrite, views India Song as a film consumed by its own narcissism and doomed like the ... More

This chapter, which offers a reading of Marguerite Duras's film India Song and the book of photographs La mer écrite, views India Song as a film consumed by its own narcissism and doomed like the vampire, and considers its first frame as mist, from which the vampire emerges directly. The film also produces specific co-ordinates in space that become both subject and object within the image. Darkness, a connecting thread in Duras's films, enshrouds India Song and seems to create a space for death and desire. On the other hand, La mer écrite implies clues, fragments, and parts of events with no fixed linear time, and is characterised by a temporality and open space of looking in both image and text. The chapter highlights the relation between narcissism and vampirism in India Song.Less

Photography and Fetishism in L′amant

Alex Hughes

in Revisioning Duras: Film, Race, Sex

This chapter examines the roles of photography, photographic invention, and fetishism in Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel L'amant, which features a récit that derives its impetus from a ... More

This chapter examines the roles of photography, photographic invention, and fetishism in Marguerite Duras's autobiographical novel L'amant, which features a récit that derives its impetus from a verbalised, fantasised image, a ‘fantasme de photographie’. This phantasmatic, verbalised self-image conforms to the ‘fetish = pocket phallus’ paradigm mentioned by Christian Metz in his essay entitled ‘Photography and Fetish’. Viewed through Freudian psychoanalysis, the photo-images associated with the narrator's mother in L'amant seem to symbolise a (refused) maternal ‘castration’ or failed female phallicity. In other words, they can be interpreted as symbols for a maternal Lack that arises every time the mother suffers from (de)privation, whether of money, sanity, authority, or, most especially, jouissance.Less

Paper Witnesses: Documentary Memory after World War II

Alison James

in The Documentary Imagination in Twentieth-Century French Literature: Writing with Facts

This chapter traces the emergence of a literature of testimony in the years following World War II. However, this new tendency does not immediately reshape the literary field, which was dominated in ... More

This chapter traces the emergence of a literature of testimony in the years following World War II. However, this new tendency does not immediately reshape the literary field, which was dominated in the 1950s and 1960s by the (mostly) anti-documentary approach of the nouveau roman. Later, however, the document becomes central to explorations of the national past. In Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur (1985) and Patrick Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997/1999), the “found text” is a figure of the personal and cultural repressed, before becoming a site of simultaneous identification and separation. Written traces set in motion a quest for the past, while narrative reconstruction aims to restore immediacy to the personal archive (as in Duras’s war notebooks), or to point to intimate truths beyond the impersonality and violence of the bureaucratic record (as in the documents collected by Modiano). In the wake of these experiments and at the turn of the twenty-first century, French and Francophone works alike experiment with documentary or hybrid approaches to historical trauma—especially in cases where fictionalization is perceived to be ethically risky, such as the Rwandan genocide.Less

Introduction: The Sublime Freedom of the Ancients: Beauvoir, Cixous, and Duras on Gender, the Erotic, and Transcendence

Paul Allen Miller

in Diotima at the Barricades: French Feminists Read Plato

This chapter sketches a trajectory stretching from Simone de Beauvoir to Marguerite Duras, as mediated by Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. These texts stand as tokens for the intricate set of ... More

This chapter sketches a trajectory stretching from Simone de Beauvoir to Marguerite Duras, as mediated by Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. These texts stand as tokens for the intricate set of movements through which gender, philosophy, and the erotic have pursued their minutely choreographed dance from the dawn of the philosophical tradition to the deconstruction of Western metaphysics. This introduction, after an initial excursus that sketches the basic problematic, looks at: Simone de Beauvoir, for whom antiquity yields a moment of sublime transcendence analogous to the concepts of woman and liberté ; Hélène Cixous, who coined the term écriture féminine; and Marguerite Duras, whose novels and films elaborate a uniquely feminine style that looks forward to the textual practices of Cixous and Irigaray.Less

With This Break in History Stuck in One’s Throat: The Unavowable Community (1982–1983)

Christophe Bident

in Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

This chapter explores Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community. It unpacks that work’s accounts of his (political and philosophical) friendships with Georges Bataille and Marguerite Duras.

Dissemination

Adam Guy

in The nouveau roman and Writing in Britain After Modernism

This chapter surveys the early dissemination of the nouveau roman in Britain, beginning around 1957. First, the nouveau roman’s main British publisher, Calder & Boyars, is introduced, with ... More

This chapter surveys the early dissemination of the nouveau roman in Britain, beginning around 1957. First, the nouveau roman’s main British publisher, Calder & Boyars, is introduced, with consideration of that publisher’s broader activities and ideals; particular attention is paid to its transnational contexts. There is mention too of the nouveau roman’s other British publishers, including Faber and Jonathan Cape. Then the different publishing formats used by Calder & Boyars for the nouveau roman are discussed, with analysis of visual presentation. The chapter then turns to the ways in which Calder & Boyars mediated the nouveau roman in promotional copy and in the search for new audiences; reference here is made to modernism, Existentialism, the notion of the literary ‘classic’, detective fiction, pulp fiction, cinema, theatre, television, and radio. The chapter concludes with two case studies that typify the nouveau roman’s complex status for British readers, first looking at Samuel Beckett’s relation to the nouveau roman, and then narrating Calder & Boyars’s ‘French Week’, in which the publisher organized a British speaking tour for Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Nathalie Sarraute.Less