Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what remains? In his monthly series Should I re-read…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. Today, the one who was called Marguerite Donnadieu has drawn a part of her inspiration from her stormy life, her pen name becoming synonymous with a literary style often imitated, never equalled: Marguerite Duras (1914–1996).
Among the finalists for the 1984 Goncourt prize, a certain Bernard-Henri Lévy had slipped in with his novel The devil in mind, at Grasset. Whoever will later become BHL is still unaware of it, but his chances of winning are nil. Because far ahead of all the others, and as a revenge on a distant past, Marguerite Duras, 70, is the favorite with the loverEditions de Minuit.
Revenge because in 1950, the one who was at the dawn of a trajectory as singular as it was exceptional could have won with A dam against the Pacific, a powerful novel about his family tragedies in the time of Indochina, a moving story about the forces of nature, but also those of French colonialism. Receive it 34 years later for the loverand while Duras reconnects with the same landscapes, and the same youth deprived of a father who died too soon, there was still something incongruous.
For once, France grabbed one of its novels, the novelist, but also playwright (La Musica second, Savannah Bay), scriptwriter (Hiroshima my loveby Alain Resnais), and filmmaker (India Song, The man Atlantic) being unaccustomed to commercial success. Sales were so impressive for this book praised by the influential animator Bernard Pivot (Apostrophes) that some considered the Goncourt superfluous. This is what made the president of the jury, Hervé Bazin, say that Duras “was closer to the Nobel than to the Goncourt”, while one of the members, Robert Sabatier, said: “We gave Duras to the Goncourt! Others feared that she would refuse top honors out of a spirit of revenge.
Two and a half million copies sold later, the lover transformed Marguerite Duras into a media writer, even if she never departed from her literary principles: to disturb, to deconstruct, to detonate… Which she quickly followed up with a book like Pain (1985) does not surprise Vincent Grégoire, from Berry College, in Georgia, in the United States. Once again, she draws on her own story – the disappearance and return of her husband, Robert Antelme, against the backdrop of World War II – to better distort it. According to the French teacher, “there is no guilt in Duras, and one does not die of love in his work”. This is also evident in Pain“because she is impatiently awaiting the arrival of her husband while planning a divorce, and when they meet again after he has survived the concentration camps, it is to leave each other”.
For Julien Lefort-Favreau, professor in the Department of French Studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Pain is one of the last major texts by Duras, “because from the 1980s, she published a large number of them, but not all of them were completed”. He is all the same ready to defend tooth and nail the one who, since his first novels in the 1940s (The impudent, The quiet life), “has created a work that cannot be reduced to its tics, namely the prophetic statements, the repetitions, the sentences beginning with “I”, etc. “. “This is what bewitches many people, and irritates others, continues the essayist (The luxury of independence. Reflection on the middle of the book). Like all successful authors, it can be tempting to repeat certain formulas. But those of Duras, which others call her failings, she has the merit of having invented them. »
moderato cantabile (1958) was for Julien Lefort-Favreau and Vincent Grégoire their gateway to the world of Marguerite Duras. “I was 14, and it fell out of my hands,” recalls the first. “I read it with pleasure, without however hanging on, and I quickly lost sight of it”, concedes the second. In their lives as readers, and even more so as teachers, the loverfor one, and Hiroshima my lovefor the other, will be the works that will transform their gaze on the one who wrote Destroy, she said (1969).
Others adhered more quickly, and with more enthusiasm, to the books of a woman whose existence was sometimes as surprising, as tumultuous as her novels, between alcohol problems and coma, voluntary loneliness and particular liaisons, including the one with Yann Andréa at the end of his life, a homosexual 30 years his junior. Among them, the actress and director Martine Beaulne, who is still surprised to have mounted The sickness of death at the Prospero Theater in February 2020 starring Sylvie Drapeau and Paul Savoie, less than a month before the global COVID-19 pandemic…
“It was both prophetic and strange”, recalls the one who is as interested in Greek tragedy as in Japanese theater (including that of Yukio Mishima) or commedia dell’arte. Upset after readingthe lover and the viewing ofHiroshima my loveshe has never stopped dating the one who distinguishes herself “by this absolute search for love”.
At Duras, Martine Beaulne adheres as much “in substance as in form, to this writing describing the impulses of the soul in short words, and an emotional and sensitive musical score”. Seduced by this “psychic refrain”, she is also seduced by the novelist’s ability “to show what is hidden behind the words, to study the crack, as she puts it so well in The suspended passion “.
Lasts today
More than 20 years after her death, does Marguerite Duras still fascinate so much? Hard-core “Durasians” can draw from this abundant corpus, but is it attractive to new generations of readers?
Vincent Grégoire notes that in the United States, the Duras fashion among academics is over. For this Frenchman established there for 35 years, “in the 1990s and 2000s, one could not attend a conference without there being two or three panels on Duras”. Saturation has been reached, its monopoly disappeared, “and I believe that Annie Ernaux will soon take its place”, underlines this graduate of Rutgers University who notes the less and less attractiveness of American students for the language and French culture.
So, what books to put in their hands so that they get in touch with Duras? Julien Lefort-Favreau has more than once proposed The Rapture of Lol V. Stein (1964). “In Toronto, my students liked it…to my surprise! It can also be presented as an investigation or as a romance novel. Duras demonstrates that at a certain point, we are foreign to our desires, and that they are beyond us. »
While his classes are full of “students thirsty for questions about gender identity,” they can, he says, find answers in Duras’s books. Martine Beaulne shares this conviction, and strongly invites them to dive into a perfect universe “to shake good consciences and current ready-to-think”. “The unique way in which this woman spoke of sexual desire and love can only help them to shake up taboos, according to the director. Death is also very present in his work: as we age, as a reader, it touches us more and more. »