Born in 1914 in Saigon and died at the dawn of the 21st century, in 1996, in Paris, after having lived since 1942 on rue Saint-Benoît, Marguerite Duras crossed the century, its ups and downs and its errors, observing the banal, dissecting the feeling of love and the borders of madness, confronting colonial memory or the memory of the Second World War, and, above all, making reality out of fiction and fiction into its reality…
A profoundly contemporary work through its ability to move from one media to another: theater, literature, cinema, journalistic chronicles, there are few narrative arts that she will not have experimented with, writing since then, and in places that will take on a absolute importance in his work: of the Indochina of his childhood, told in The Dam against the Pacific or The Loverat his house in Neauphle-le-Château, a setting for his films Nathalie Granger or The truckand again in Trouville, place of writing of Lol V. Stein’s delight…
How did the places that Marguerite Duras inhabited, or fantasized about, become the breeding ground for her inspiration and her writing? How did the landscapes that she looked at and transposed into her stories become metaphors? Can we make a Durassian biography through the places of her life? Some questions that will guide our conversation with:
Anne Cousseauprofessor of letters and Cultural Studies at the University of Nancy, who brought together and presented the studies Landscapes in the series “Marguerite Duras” published by the Review of Modern Letters and who participated in the Pléiade Duras editions.
Sylvie LignonHDR lecturer in French literature in Caen and notably member of the editorial board of the Cahiers Marguerite Duras.
Bruno Nuyttendirector of photography for several films by Marguerite Duras, includingIndia Song a you Truck.
The landscape as horizon: childhood
As for many creators, childhood takes on a singular importance for Marguerite Duras, who was still Marguerite Donnadieu; her childhood took place around Saigon, then French Indochina, a French colony, and which today is Vietnam…
“To make “India Song” eShe had no intention of returning to Indochina (…) so from that moment on, we were necessarily talking about the imaginary and not at all about reality. (…) She told her intimate landscape through images that were completely foreign to her original landscape. ” Bruno Nuytten
“Can we trust Duras’ texts? There are obviously elements that are right and true in what she mentioned (…) at the same time Duras’s desire was never to write her life, in “The Lover”, she says it: “the story of my life does not exist” and it is precisely from this way in which she will transform reality with memory, the imagination, that she will make something of it that escapes the truth and that is interesting.” Anne Cousseau
From the forest to the house: a story of madness and dangers?
Marguerite Donnadieu became Marguerite Duras, the forest became a place of all dangers, but another fundamental place in her work is the house…
“The house belongs to the woman, the woman is a proletariat, well, as you know, millennial. The house belongs to her in the same way as the instruments of work belong to the proletariat.” Marguerite Duras’s archive
The sea, a place of eroticism and death?
After Indochina, after Neauphle, arrives the Roches Noires apartment in Trouville… An apartment which is located, by accident of life, next to the one occupied by Marcel Proust with his grandmother… Facing the sea, she will perhaps write one of his most beautiful novels, The Rapture of Lol V Stein. Duras said that the sea was the closest thing to her writing… She wrote little, spoke little theoretically about her writing, but was it ultimately a way of describing her own style?
“Several characters are assimilated by name to place, I think of Hiroshima my love, at the end, it’s the woman who says “Hiroshima, that’s your name” and the Japanese responds “Nevers, it’s your name.” For Duras, places are vectors of memory and as a result, they condense and crystallize history (…) the characters are assigned to a place and from a place a whole imagination and a story.” Sylvie Loignon
A lifetime Listen later
Lecture listen 59 min
Archive references
- Extract The Lady of Yvelines, afterword of Truck, In Marguerite Duras, cinematographic workscritical video edition, Multimedia Editions Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1984
- Archive “Marguerite Duras and the house”, extract from the documentary Marguerite as she isdirected and written by Dominique Auvray, France, 2002
- Final music: The rumba of the islandsJeanne Moreau, Marguerite Duras
Bibliography
- The Impudent, Marguerite Duras, Plon, 1943
- A Barrage against the PacificMarguerite Duras, Gallimard, 1950
- LoveMarguerite Duras, Gallimard, 1972
- The places of DurasMichelle Porte, Midnight editions, 1977
- The Disease of DeathMidnight editions, 1982
- The LoverMarguerite Duras, editions of Minuit, 1984
- The Color of Words, interviews by Marguerite Duras with Dominique Noguez around
of eight filmsBenoît Jacob, Paris, 2001 (reissue of the book published in
the critical edition of the films in 1984) - Marguerite Duras, Landscapes, The Revue of Modern Letters, Classics Garnier, 2017
Filmography
- Nathalie Granger, Marguerite Duras, 1972
- The Woman of the Ganges, Marguerite Duras, 1974
- India SongMarguerite Duras, 1975
- The truckMarguerite Duras, 1977
- The Atlantic ManMarguerite Duras, 1981
- The Lady of Yvelines, afterword of the Truck, In Marguerite Duras, cinematographic workscritical video edition, Multimedia Editions Office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1984.
The five video afterwords of the films of Marguerite Duras (Nathalie Granger, India Song, His name is Venice, The truckas well as four short films) have been the subject of a new digitization by the Bibliothèque nationale de France and will be published on the Gallica digital library during the year 2024
A program directed by Anne-Lise Assada, produced by Sophie-Catherine Gallet, with the collaboration of Marie Dalquie.
