Marguerite Duras, a novelist who blurred the lines between her life and her work

Stéphane Bern 2:58 p.m., December 30, 2021

"The story of my life does not exist ..." Here is what Marguerite Duras wrote at the start of her book

, which, after its publication and obtaining the Goncourt Prize in 1984, made her a true star of the edition.

In an interview, she explains her thoughts: "the novel of my life, yes, not the story".

There is therefore a difference between lived history and written history.

And it is precisely this distinction that Marguerite Duras blurs and blurs, fueling questions about the realities and fantasies of the story of her own existence.

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"I have nothing to say about myself," she assured.

Yet it is his story and his memories that we find throughout all his work that it therefore seems impossible to dissociate from his life.

A life begins in 1914 in French Indochina.

Marguerite spent a childhood and youth as a European, yet very close to those who were then called "the natives", following a family wandering between towns and rice fields, mired in complex, if not poisonous relationships, which would be the breeding ground for its literature. 

From colonialism to anti-colonialism, from collaboration to the Resistance

"The mother", as she often designates in her writings, both valiant and cowardly, and whose adventurous side Marguerite does not hesitate to embellish, takes up all the space and completely erases the figure of the father who died too soon. His childhood seems made of trauma and misery, nevertheless mixed with a great freedom in the discovery. Arriving in Paris at the age of 18, it is in France that Marguerite makes her life. But she drags there the ghosts of these banks of the Mekong bathed in light, torpor and smells that she will never cease to summon to write a past that pursues her.

Her first book (published by Gallimard in 1940 under her real name of Marguerite Donnadieu while she was working at the Ministry of the Colonies) has nothing of the literary production which will then be hers.

If Asia is present there, it is to praise the merits of French Indochina using colonialist arguments imbued with the prejudices of its time.

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This work,

, she will deny it, to the point of having it erased from her bibliography. This does not prevent her from taking advantage of it when she seeks to have her first novel published. It was not until the Algerian war and the construction of another political conscience that Marguerite became a fierce anti-colonialist. This is in the image of his person, full of ambiguities, truths which follow one another, and sometimes even contradict each other.

Ambiguous as is its role during the Occupation, ranging from a passive compromise to the Resistance.

If it is not abnormal that a young girl of her time procrastinates before engaging clandestinely against the German enemy, thereafter, Marguerite Duras will always minimize her role within a book commission under German surveillance. , responsible for distributing the paper to publishers.

Little secretary, according to her, it seems that she assumed real responsibilities in this body, at least until the end of 1942.

Hybridization between life and fiction

It was the following year that she joined the Resistance and published her first novel,

, under the pseudonym Marguerite Duras, named after the village of the paternal family. From then on, she never stops writing. In 1950, Duras came close to the Prix Goncourt with his novel

 which tells of a youth in Indochina, the struggles of a mother against colonial authority and the ocean which invades her plantations.

There is also the character of "the lover", the rich man who marks for the young girl the discovery of love, sensuality, abandonment too.

This figure of the lover, we then find it again, 34 years later, in the eponymous novel, then in its rewrite,

.

This cycle, if we can call it that, participates a lot in the debates on the part of reality and fiction in a clearly autobiographical work.

The same memories are written differently in the three works and leave all the time for specialists to point out the dissimilarities.

Where is the line between true and false?

Does it only have one meaning?

Because Marguerite Duras always plays on permeability as she plays on hybridization in certain works.

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In particular in her other creations, she who also assembles plays or makes films.

Such India

in 1975, in which we get lost between literature, theater and cinema.

Everything is muddled.

Duras presents paradoxically static characters, speaking like books while their lips do not move.

The dialogues are interior, decorrelated from the image, and are juxtaposed with an almost hypnotic melodic refrain.

Director, writer, Marguerite Duras is also a subjective witness of her time, carried by many fights which make her a figure of committed intellectual.

Before the disease and its demise in 1996, it had become a living myth, as much mocked as it was glorified.

She did not hesitate to have an opinion on everything and to lose her interlocutors in sentences sometimes caricaturedly esoteric.

Writing, an "elucidation" of oneself

However, Duras the woman of letters has developed a personal, inimitable style: unstructured sentences, sometimes lapidary, abrupt dialogues, elliptical descriptions, accumulation of words punctuated by abundant punctuation. A writing sometimes close to orality. And when she speaks precisely, which she does a lot on radio and television, there is this unique way of expressing herself, punctuated by eloquent silences. As a way of being often sententious, irrevocable.

The expressions "always", "never", "in any case", "deeply", "definitely" keep coming back.

Everything seems categorical, almost immutable ... Ironic for the one who, little stingy in interventions, sometimes manages to contradict herself.

Everything is valid the moment the thing is said, but only the written word makes the truth exist.

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In her novels or stories, more than a voluntary interference with her life, there is in fact a porosity, a confusion between the real and what she says about it. Writing is, to use the words of her biographer written by Laure Adler, a kind of "elucidation" of oneself, which explains why Marguerite Duras has returned, on several occasions and with different words, to the same images and memories. , supporting the doubt as to their reality. The only truth is that of the written word. "Nothing is true in reality, nothing", she assures.

In the end, can we decide between what is real and what is imaginary in Duras's work?

Biographers took care of it, with great acuity.

Biographies that Marguerite Duras refused during her lifetime, reserving to herself the faculty to write her life necessarily.