Twenty years after her death, Marguerite Duras is still intensely up to date. The proof: the adaptation of La Douleur, by Emmanuel Finkiel is to be discovered in theaters since the beginning of this year 2018.
Two Marguerite have particularly marked the literary world in the twentieth century: Marguerite Yourcenar, by becoming the first woman elected member of the Académie française in 1980, and Marguerite Duras, by the diversity and modernity of her work.
It is the latter that we will present to you.
Personal life
Marguerite Donnadieu, her real name, was born on April 4, 1914 in Gia Dinh, a town in the northern suburbs of Saigon in French Indochina, to parents who volunteered to work in the colony of Cochinchina. His father, Henri Donnadieu, was a school principal in Saigon, and his mother, Marie Donnadieu-Legrand, was a teacher. At the age of 5, the young Marguerite was still living in Saigon when her father died. Two years later, in 1923, his mother moved with her three children to Vinh Long, a city in the Mekong Delta.Marguerite Donnadieu spent her childhood in Viet-Nam. In 1932, when she had just obtained her baccalaureate, she left Saigon and moved to France to continue her studies.
The beginnings
In 1936, she obtained a law degree and met a certain Robert Antelme whom she married in 1939. From this union was born in 1942 a first child unfortunately stillborn. Marguerite never really recovered from this disappearance, and began to write. Under the pseudonym of Marguerite Duras (the name of the village where the paternal house is located) then comes out his first novel: Les Impudents published by Plon. The following year she published her second book, La vie tranquille, at Gallimard. These two novels will unfortunately not make her known to the general public, but anyway in France, the hour is serious. In 1944, while the country was occupied, her husband Robert was arrested and deported to Dachau. Marguerite then joined the PCF, the French Communist Party, and led a long-term fight to save it. At the liberation, Robert Antelme returns in a critical condition, he joins his wife in his Parisian home. Just two years after the end of the war, Marguerite Duras divorced and remarried Dionys Mascolo, with whom she and Robert had entered the resistance. They will both soon have a child named Jean.
Early writings
It is therefore between the education of Jean, her young son, and her new love story that she writes this fresco inspired by the situation she experienced when she was young. In 1950, after leaving the PCF, Marguerite Duras published Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, a major work begun three years earlier.The action is set in French Indochina and sets up a mother and her two children, Joseph and Suzanne, living on an unprofitable plantation and trying to survive on various trafficking. This novel was adapted into a film in 2008 by Rithy Panh.
Trailer A Dam Against the Pacific
Then in 1952, still with Gallimard, she published Le Marin de Gibraltar which features a man who, to change his life, enlists on a boat. On this boat, there is a woman who travels the world in search of the sailor from Gibraltar whom she loved and who has disappeared. As often in Duras' novels, the human relationship is central and allows to channel emotions.
Le Square appeared in 1955, it is a story that is at once short, strong and tender. It traces the dialogue between two characters who did not know each other before the beginning of the book: a solitary commercial traveler, who does not project himself into the future and aspires to rest, and a young girl who works as a handyman, who hopes for a better future. It is really only a dialogue: Marguerite Duras removes any narration from her story. At that time, she began to collaborate with Gérard Jarlot (around 1957) for numerous theatrical and film adaptations.
"People can't stand happiness. They want it, of course, but as soon as they have it, they gnaw at it dreaming of something else. »
The Square, 1955
Success and recognition
At the same time, her personal life was disrupted by two major events: she separated from her second husband and her mother died.
Despite everything, Marguerite Duras published Moderato Cantabile with Éditions de Minuit in 1958.This novel, with its melodious title, reveals the power of suggestion specific to Duras' writing. It will be adapted for the screen two years later by Peter Brook with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
His copyright began to bring him a certain ease, which allowed him to move into a detached house in Neauphle-le-Château. Launched into the cinema, she signs the dialogues of Hiroshima mon amour, by Alain Resnais, which tells the love story that will live a young French woman, actress, and a Japanese, architect, who meet for the needs of the shooting of a film on Hiroshima and the damage caused by the explosions of the nuclear bomb. In the course of their relationship, the book derives from the Japanese evocation of this damage to the ordeal that the woman experienced during the liberation, while she was living a loving relationship with a German soldier. Shorn, rejected, she will have to flee her family and her city to anchor herself in the anonymity of Paris. This is where the committed artist comes into play.
"I'm meeting you. I remember you. This city was made the size of love. You were made to the size of my very body. Who are you? You're killing me. I was hungry. Hunger for infidelities, adultery, lies and dying. Always. I suspected that one day you would fall on me. I was waiting for you in boundless, calm impatience. Devour me. Distort me in your image so that no one after you will understand at all the reason for so much desire. We will be left alone, my love. The night is not going to end. The day will not dawn on anyone. Never. Never again. Finally. You're killing me. You make me feel good. »
Hiroshima mon amour, 1960
Trailer Hiroshima mon amour
Marguerite Duras
This multiplication of activities made Marguerite Duras recognized at the national level. From 1960 to 1967 she was a member of the Medici jury. Politically marked on the left despite the abandonment of her PCF membership card, she actively campaigned against the Algerian war, of which the signing of the Manifesto of the 121, a petition on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war, was the most striking fact. Among his 47 books, L 'Amant, published by Éditions de Minuit in 1984 and winner the same year of the prestigious Prix Goncourt, translated in more than 35 countries and sold more than 2 million copies; or The Pain, which was mentioned earlier, intimate notebooks found in the 80s where the author had noted her reactions during the war, the resistance, and the attempt to free Robert Antelme. Her last book dates from 1993, an essay entitled Writing in which she confronts her worst difficulties in writing, and three years later, she died at the age of 82. In 2011, it entered the Pléiade.
"Pain is one of the most important things in my life. The word "written" would not be appropriate. I found myself in front of pages regularly full of extraordinarily regular and calm little writing. I found myself in front of a phenomenal disorder of thought and feeling that I did not dare to touch and in view of which literature made me ashamed. »
La Douleur, 1985
The Durassian style
First of all, it should be noted that Marguerite Duras is looking for writing. Writing is for her a way to fight against forgetting. His themes are very modern and at the same time, very common to so-called "classical" writings since it concerns the family and the couple.She started with the novel, then she worked as a playwright and filmmaker; Not to mention journalism and essays. There is still a coherence in his writings. When she returns to the novel after cinema, her style is enriched by practices or a mode of writing that keeps the memory of cinema. A style that, moreover, is totally indefinable. Whether by its ability to destructure the sentence, its very dry, raw dialogues, by a very cumulative sentence, or very crumbled, poorly structured sentences of which L'Amant gives an illustration.
"The story of my life does not exist. There is no such thing. There is never a centre. No path, no line. There are vast places where people are made to believe that there was someone, it is not true, there was no one. »
L'Amant, 1984
Many women authors have marked the century, but Marguerite Duras, as controversial as she is, will remain in the collective memory by her commitment and the diversity of her works. His work is also a very human testimony to the history of his time, and his pen, very singular, offers writing a certain modern orality. The various chapters of her life, from writer to filmmaker, have evolved her style, especially in the dialogues, which allow the reader to really take part in the story. Which Duras will you be heading towards for your next reading?
Sources:
- https://www.marguerite-duras.com/Biographie.php
- https://www.marguerite-duras.com
