Duras, Marguerite

views updated Jun 11 2018

Marguerite Duras

BORN: 1914, Saigon, French Indochina

DIED: 1996, Paris, France

NATIONALITY: French

GENRE: Fiction, drama

MAJOR WORKS:
The Sea Wall (1950)
The Sailor from Gibraltar (1952)
The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964)
The Lover (1984)
The North China Lover (1991)

Overview

One of the most important literary figures in France, Marguerite Duras won international acclaim after she was awarded the 1984 Prix Goncourt for her autobiographical novel The Lover. Although Duras had been writing fiction and directing films for over forty years,

she was always considered a rather inaccessible author by the general public. The publication of The Lover sparked interest in all her work, which was quickly republished to meet the overwhelming demand. Featured in numerous interviews on television and in popular magazines in France, Duras became something of a national literary phenomenon.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Childhood in Indochina Duras was born Marguerite Donnadieu on April 4, 1914, near Saigon (present-day Ho Chi Minh City), Vietnam, then known as French Indochina, where her parents had moved to teach school. Following the death of her father when Duras was four years old, her mother spent the family's savings on a rice plantation, hoping the venture would prove viable enough to support her and her three young children. Unfortunately, the colonial officials who sold her the plantation were dishonest, the land was virtually worthless because of recurring flooding from the sea, and Duras's mother found herself broke and trying to raise her family far from home. The family's troubles in Indochina form the backdrop for many of Duras's novels. In particular, her most famous novel, The Lover, is based heavily on her own experiences as a young woman coming of age in French Indochina.

A French Resistor Despite the family's poverty, Duras was able to study Vietnamese and French in the prestigious Lycée de Saigon. At the age of seventeen, Duras left for France and eventually earned a licence in law and political science at the University of Paris, Sorbonne. She worked as a secretary for the Ministry of Colonial Affairs until 1941, when World War II arrived at France's borders. At that time, France was invaded by German forces, resulting in the German occupation of much of France, with the rest of the country remaining “free” under a provisional government approved by the Germans and based in the city of Vichy. Duras became a member of the French Resistance who opposed the German occupation, working with François Mitterrand. She became a member of the French Communist Party, one of the main supporters of the French Resistance. In 1946 she divorced her first husband, Robert Antelme, whom she had married in 1939. She later married Dionys Mascolo, with whom she had a son, Jean. She published her first novel, Les Impudents, in 1943 and went on to publish more than seventy novels, plays, screenplays, and adaptations in her lifetime.

She was later dismissed from the French Communist Party in 1950 along with a number of other French intellectuals for ideological differences. Many who joined the party during World War II did so to show their opposition to Nazi Germany as well as their support of workers' rights. However, after World War II, communism became closely

associated with Joseph Stalin's dictatorial rule of the Soviet Union; Stalin's regime was notable less for the ruler's establishment of workers' rights than for his frequent use of imprisonment and murder against those who disagreed with his policies. This stigmatization of communism, especially in the United States, led to trouble between Duras and American officials over a travel visa in 1969. Duras, wishing to attend a New York Film Festival showing of her Detruire, dit-elle, had to prove to officials her adherence to anticommunist principles. Duras was also an apologist for the student uprisings in Paris in 1968 and a supporter of French president François Mitterrand during the 1980s.

In her later life, she lived with a young homosexual writer, Yann Andrea Steiner. In 1984, while recovering from alcoholism in a treatment center, Duras wrote The Lover, for which she won the Prix Goncourt in 1984. In poor health as a result of her lifelong alcoholism, she died on March 3, 1996, in Paris.

Works in Literary Context

Duras's work has spanned many genres and styles, but the emotional intensity and themes of love, solitude, desire, and despair remain constant throughout. Commentators on Duras's work often divide her literary career into four periods. The novels from her first period have been described as her most realistic and conventional. Her most significant novel from this period, The Sea Wall (1950), is set in Indochina and reflects the author's interest in both East Asian culture and issues of social injustice and oppression. Like many of her acclaimed novels, the book is loosely based on an incident that occurred in Duras's childhood.

Focus on the Individual The works from Duras's second period are marked by a shift from linear plots and abrupt, obscure dialogue to a more personal and ironic idiom. The primary works from this period—The Sailor from Gibraltar (1952) and The Little Horses of Tarquinia (1953)—are considered more concentrated than Duras's previous novels because they focus on fewer characters, events, and relationships. The Sailor from Gibraltar concerns a woman who travels on her yacht throughout the Mediterranean in search of her former lover. Duras suggests that the protagonist's persistence gives meaning to her otherwise empty life. The Little Horses of Tarquinia similarly reflects Duras's increasing interest in individual characters and their varying moods and emotions.

The Antinovel Duras's third literary cycle includes works often described as antinovels, in which she employs minimalist techniques to accent particular experiences or emotions. The Ravishing of Lol Stein (1964), for instance, describes a woman's descent into madness after being rejected by her fiancé. Considered an antinovel because of its stark narrative, unreliable narrator, and fragmentary contrast and insights, The Ravishing of Lol Stein has also been described as an investigation into human consciousness. The Vice-Consul, considered the last of Duras's antinovels, simultaneously focuses on a young Asian girl who is abandoned by her mother after becoming pregnant and a government official who becomes involved in the glamorous diplomatic life of Calcutta, India.

Inability to Love Duras's fourth and most eclectic literary period is evidenced in such novels as The Malady of Death (1982), The Lover, and The North China Lover. The Malady of Death is a minimalist account of an asexual man who pays a prostitute to live with him for a week and addresses his overwhelming sense of isolation and inability to love. Emily L. (1987), another novel from this period, also addresses how one's inability to love can lead to self-destruction.

LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES

Duras's famous contemporaries include:

Samuel Beckett (1906–1989): English dramatist and poet, Beckett's work straddles the line between modernist and postmodernist. His minimalist plays formed the keystone of what came to be called the “Theater of the Absurd.”

Robert Musil (1880–1942): Austrian author of the same generation as Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka, Musil never received the same recognition as his peers despite being greatly admired by them. His unfinished masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities, would be recognized after his death as one of the most important modernist novels.

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964): Major figure in the Indian independence movement, close associate of Mohandas Gandhi, Nehru was named the first prime minister of India after the country won its independence in 1947.

Hélène Cixous (1937–): French feminist writer, poet, critic, and philosopher, Cixous also wrote extensively on the relationship between sexuality and language, most famously in her 1975 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.”

Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970): French general, leader of the Free French during World War II, and founder of the French Fifth Republic in 1958, for which he served as its first president until 1969.

Autobiography Often considered a revised version of The Sea Wall, The Lover explores more completely Duras's childhood experiences in French Indochina and her debilitating relationships with her overbearing mother and indolent brothers. While The Lover is recognizably autobiographical, Duras focuses on the recollection of events and their emotional significance rather than on the events themselves, thus creating a complex

structure that conveys the illusion of simplicity. In 1985, Duras published The War: A Memoir (1985), a collection of six narratives believed to have been written during World War II and forgotten for forty years. In the title story, Duras recounts her experiences with the French Liberation Movement during the war. She also describes the mental agony she endured while waiting for her husband, Robert Antelme, to return from a German concentration camp. The North China Lover, which began as a screenplay for Jean-Jacques Annaud's adaptation of her novel The Lover, tells the same story as the novel but in a very different style and tone. In addition, Duras provides cinematic directions—how a scene could be shot, what kind of actress should play a role—creating a work that is part novel, part screenplay. The publication of The North China Lover is in large part due to the disagreements between Duras and Annaud over the script for The Lover.

Regarding the relationship between her fiction and her life, Duras is quoted by writer Alan Riding as explaining: “Even when my books are completely invented, even when I think they have come from elsewhere, they are always personal.” Speaking of how a writer should approach his work, Duras states: “You shouldn't have a subject. You have to go into the forest; you shouldn't be afraid, and it comes, all alone; stories of love, of foolishness, they come on their own, as if you were walking like a blind man before they arrived.”

Works in Critical Context

Critical commentary on Duras's work has focused on several major themes. These include the relationship between love and self-destruction, the metaphysics of boredom and inactivity, and the pain of solitude and despair. As Germaine Brée has observed: “The very title of [The Sea Wall] suggests a dogged, unequal battle against a superhuman force. This was to remain one of Duras's basic themes: barrage against the immense solitude of human beings, barrage against the pain of all involvements, barrage against despair.”

The North China Lover Scholars have also noted Duras's movement away from the realism of her early novels to the minimalist techniques and focus on emotional experience of her later works. Considered one of her most abstract and impressionistic works, The Vice-Consul, notes Alfred Cismaru, contains “standard [anti-novel] devices: unfinished sentences, subconversations, hidden allusions… [and] mysterious and unexplained situations.” At the time of its publication, many critics argued that The Lover was Duras's most effective synthesis of her themes and minimalist style. With the publication of The North China Lover, however, many critics argued that the latter was the better of the two closely related novels. In The North China Lover, Duras writes in the third person, a technique she uses to distance her characters from the reader, instead of switching between first and third person as she did in The Lover. While the second novel is more explicit and shocking, critics believe it is more humane, lyrical, and compelling.

Responses to Literature

  1. Duras was one of several French feminist playwrights active during the latter part of the twentieth century. Research another of these writers (Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, or Nathalie Sarraute) and analyze their style in comparison to Duras. What qualities make them feminist writers? How did their feminist views differ from each other?
  2. In addition to her plays, Duras worked in cinema as both a screenwriter and director. Watch one of the films she worked on (Hiroshima, Mon Amour or India Song) and compare it to its literary source. How did Duras adapt the film? What changes did she make to the material? Do you feel the essential story remained the same?
  3. What role does Duras's experience in the French colonies play in her writing? How does she represent colonial subjects in works such as India Song and The Lover?
  4. One of Duras's recurring themes is the body. How does she portray the body in her writing? Is it a positive or negative object? What larger themes does the body represent?

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Duras's life as well as her fiction have been marked by the author's alcoholism. The following works also deal with alcoholism:

John Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs (1913), a novel by Jack London. This novel is widely recognized as being the first intelligent literary treatise on alcohol in American literature.

The Lost Weekend (1944), a novel by Charles Jackson. In this novel, the author tackles the demons and obsessions that challenge the alcoholic.

Days of Wine and Roses (1962), a film by Blake Edwards. This story of an alcoholic man who draws his wife into his hard-drinking lifestyle received five Academy Award nominations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books

Ames, Sanford S., ed. Remains to Be Seen: Essays on Marguerite Duras. New York: Peter Lang, 1988.

Beauclair, Michelle. In Death's Wake: Mourning in the Works of Albert Camus and Marguerite Duras. New York: P. Lang, 1996.

Blot-Labarrere, Christiane. Marguerite Duras. Paris: Seuil, 1994.

Cohen, Susan D. Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras: Love, Legends, Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.

Cranston, Mechthild, ed. In Language and in Love, Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable: Essays for Marguerite Duras. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1992.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 83: French Novelists Since 1960. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, edited by Catharine Savage Brosman, Tulane University. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale Research, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 321: Twentieth-Century French Dramatists. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, edited by Mary Anne O'Neil, Whitman College. Farminington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2006.

Hacht, Anne Marie, ed. “India Song.” In Drama for Students., Vol. 21. Detroit: Gale, 2005.

Harvey, Robert, and Helene Volat. Marguerite Duras: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Murphy, Carol J. Alienation and Absence in the Novels of Marguerite Duras. Lexington, Ky.: French Forum Monographs, 1982.

Selous, Trista. The Other Woman: Feminism and Femininity in the Work of Marguerite Duras. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.

Duras, Marguerite

views updated Jun 27 2018

DURAS, Marguerite



Nationality: French. Born: Marguerite Donnadieu in Giadinh, French Indo-China, 1914. Education: Educated in mathematics, law and political science at the Sorbonne, Paris. Career: Published first novel, Les Impudents, 1943; subsequently novelist, journalist and playwright; directed first film, La Musica, 1966. Awards: Prix Goncourt for novel L'Amant, 1984, Ritz Paris Hemingway, Paris, 1986. Died: 3 March 1996, in Paris, France.


Films as Director:

1966

La Musica (co-d, sc)

1969

Détruire, dit-elle (Destroy She Said) (+ sc)

1971

Jaune le soleil (+ pr, co-ed, sc, from her novel Abahn, Sabana, David)

1972

Nathalie Granger (+ sc, music)

1974

La Femme du Ganges (+ sc)

1975

India Song (+ sc, voice)

1976

Des journées entières dans les arbres (Days in the Trees) (+ sc); Son Nom de Venises dans Calcutta desert (+ sc)

1977

Baxter, Vera Baxter (+ sc); Le Camion (+ sc, role)

1978

Le Navire Night (+ sc)

1978/79

Aurelia Steiner (4-film series): Cesarée (1978) (+ sc); Les Mains négatives (1978) (+ sc); Aurelia Steiner—Melbourne (1979) (+ sc); Aurelia Steiner—Vancouver (1979) (+ sc)

1981

Agatha et les lectures illimitées (Agatha) (+ sc)

1985

Les Enfants (The Children)



Other Films:

1959

Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais) (sc)

1960

Moderato Cantabile (Brook) (sc, co-adapt from her novel)

1961

Une Aussi longue absence (The Long Absence) (Colpi) (co-sc from her novel)

1964

Nuit noire, Calcutta (Karmitz) (short) (sc)

1965

"Les rideaux blancs" (Franju) episode of Der Augenblick des Friedens (Un Instant de la paix) (for W.German TV) (sc)

1966

10:30 P.M. Summer (Dassin) (co-sc uncredited, from her novel) (Dix heures et demie du soir en été); La Voleuse (Chapot) (sc, dialogue)

1991

L'Amant (The Lover) (co-sc)



Publications


By DURAS: screenplays—

Hiroshima mon amour, Paris, 1959.

Moderato Cantabile, with Gérard Jarlot and Peter Brook, 1960.

Une Aussi longue absence, with Gérard Jarlot, Paris, 1961.

10:30 P.M. Summer, with Jules Dassin, Paris, 1966.

La Musica, Paris, 1966.

Detruire, dit-elle, Paris, 1969; as Destroy, She Said, New York, 1970.

Les rideaux blancs, Paris, 1966.

Jaune le soleil, Paris, 1971

Nathalie Granger, suivi de La Femme du Gange, Paris, 1973.

India Song—texte—theatre—film, Paris, 1975; as India Song, New York, 1976.

Des journées entières dans les arbres, Paris, 1976.

Son Nom de Venises dans Calcutta desert, Paris, 1976.

Le Camion, Paris, 1977.

Le Navire Night, Césarée, Les Mains négatives, Aurelia Steiner, Paris, 1979.

Vera Baxter; ou, Les Plages de l'Atlantique, Paris, 1980.

Agatha, Paris, 1981.

Les Enfants, Paris, 1985.


By DURAS: fiction—

Les Impudents, Paris, 1943.

La Vie tranquille, Paris, 1944.

Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Paris, 1950; as The Sea Wall, New York, 1952; as A Sea of Troubles, London, 1953.

Le Marin de Gibraltar, Paris, 1952; as The Sailor from Gibraltar, London and New York, 1966.

Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia, Paris, 1953; as The Little Horses ofTarquinia, London, 1960.

Des journées entières dans les arbres, Paris, 1954; as Whole Days inthe Trees, New York, 1981.

Le Square, Paris, 1955.

Moderato Cantabile, Paris, 1958, and New York, 1987.

Dix heures et demi du soir en été, Paris, 1960; as Ten-Thirty ona Summer Night, London, 1962.

L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas, Paris, 1962; as The Afternoonof Monsieur Andesmas, London, 1964.

Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Paris, 1964; as The Ravishing of LolV. Stein, New York, 1967; as The Rapture of Lol V. Stein, London, 1967.

Le Vice-consul, Paris, 1966; as The Vice-Consul, London, 1968, New York, 1987.

L'Amante anglaise, Paris, 1967, New York, 1968.

Abahn, Sabana, David, Paris, 1970.

L'Amour, Paris, 1971.

Ah! Ernesto, with Bernard Bonhomme, Paris, 1971.

La Maladie de la mort, Paris, 1983; as The Malady of Death, New York, 1986.

L'Amant, Paris, 1984; as The Lover, New York, 1985; translated b1y Barbara Bray, New York, 1998.

Hiroshima Mon Amor, translated by Richard Seaver, New York, 1987.

Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, Paris, 1987; as Blue Eyes, Black Hair, London and New York, 1988.

Emily L., Paris, 1987, New York, 1989.


By DURAS: plays—

Théâtre 1 (includes Les Eaux et forets, Le Square, La Musica), Paris, 1965.

Théâtre 2 (includes Susanna Andler; Yes, peut-étre; Le Shaga; Desjournées entières dans les arbres; Un Homme est venu me voir), Paris, 1968.

L'Homme assis dans le couloir, Paris, 1980.

L'Homme Atlantique, Paris, 1982.

Savannah Bay, Paris, 1982.

The Square, Edinburgh, 1986.

Yes, peut-etre, Edinburgh, 1986.


By DURAS: other books—

Les Parleuses, with Xaviere Gauthier, Paris, 1974.

Étude sur l'oeuvre littéraire, théâtrale, et cinématographique, with Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, Paris, 1976.

Territoires du féminin, with Marcelle Marini, Paris, 1977.

Les Lieux de Duras, with Michelle Porte, Paris, 1978.

L'Été 80, Paris, 1980.

Outside: Papiers d'un jour, Paris, 1981, Boston 1986.

The War: A Memoir, New York, 1986.

The Physical Side, London, 1990.


By DURAS: articles—

"Conversation with Marguerite Duras," with Richard Roud, in Sightand Sound (London), Winter 1959/60.

"Marguerite Duras en toute liberté," interview with F. Dufour, in Cinéma (Paris), April 1972.

"Du livre au film," in Image et Son (Paris), April 1974.

"India Song, a Chant of Love and Death," interview with F. Dawson, in Film Comment (New York), November/December 1975.

"India Song and Marguerite Duras," interview with Carlos Clarens, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1975/76.

Interview with J.-C. Bonnet and J. Fieschi, in Cinématographe (Paris), November 1977.

"Les Yeux verts," special issue written and edited by Duras, of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1980.

Interview with D. Fasoli, in Filmcritica (Florence), June 1981.

Interview with A. Grunert, in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), February-March 1982.

"The Places of Marguerite Duras," an interview with M. Porte, in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Spring 1983.

Interview with P. Bonitzer, C. Tesson, and Serge Toubiana, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1985.

Interview with Jean-Luc Godard, in Cinéma (Paris), 30 December 1987.

Interview with Colette Mazabrard, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1989.

"Jacquot filme Duras," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1993.


On DURAS: books—

Bernheim, N.-L., Marguerite Duras tourne un film, Paris, 1976.

Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, La Texte divisé, Paris, 1981.

Trastulli, Daniela, Dalla parola all imagine: Viaggio nel cinema diMarguerite Duras, Geneva, 1982.

Borgomano, Madeleine, L'Ecriture filmique de Marguerite Duras, Paris, 1985.

Brossard, Jean-Pierre, editor, Marguerite Duras: Cinéaste, écrivain, La Chaux-de-Fonde, 1985.

Guers-Villate, Yvonne, Continuité/discontinuité de l'oeuvreDurassienne, Brussels, 1985.

Fernandes, Marie-Pierre, Travailler avec Duras: La musica deuxième, Paris, 1986.

Selous, Trista, The Other Woman: Feminism and Femininity in theWork of Marguerite Duras, New Haven, Connecticut, 1988.


On DURAS: articles—

Gollub, Judith, "French Writers Turned Film Makers," in FilmHeritage (New York), Winter 1968/69.

"Reflections in a Broken Glass," in Film Comment (New York), November/December 1975.

Lakeland, M.J., "Marguerite Duras in 1977," in Camera Obscura (Berkeley), Fall 1977.

Van Wert, W.F., "The Cinema of Marguerite Duras: Sound and Voice in a Closed Room," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1979.

Seni, N., "Wahrnehungsformen von Zeit und Raum am Beispiel der Filme von Marguerite Duras und Chantal Akerman," in Frauenund Film (Berlin), September 1979.

"Marguerite Duras à l'action," in Positif (Paris), July/August 1980.

Andermatt, V., "Big Mach (on the Truck)," in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Spring 1980.

Lyon, E., "Marguerite Duras: Bibliography/Filmography," in Camera Obscura (Berkeley), Fall 1980.

Murphy, C.J., "The Role of Desire in the Films of Marguerite Duras," in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (New York), Winter 1982.

Fedwik, P., "Marguerite Duras: Feminine Field of Nostalgia," in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Fall 1982.

Sarrut, B., "Marguerite Duras: Barrages against the Pacific," in OnFilm (Los Angeles), Summer 1983.

Murphy, C.J., "New Narrative Regions: The Role of Desire in the Films and Novels of Marguerite Duras," in Literature/FilmQuarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1984.

Le Masson, H., "La voix tatouee," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1985.

McWilliams, D., "Aesthetic Tripling: Marguerite Duras's Le navireNight," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), January 1986.

Cottent-Hage, M., "Le camion de Marguerite Duras, ou comment assurer la libre circulation," in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 7, no. 1, Fall 1987.

Williams, Bruce, "Splintered Perspectives: Counterpoint and Subjectivity in the Modernist Film Narrative," in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 15, no. 2, Winter 1991.

Grange, M.F., "Corps filmique entre lisible et visible chez Marguerite Duras," in Cinémas (Montreal), vol. 3, no. 1, Autumn 1992.

Vajdovich, G., "Antiregény és anitfilm," in Filmkultura (Budapest), April 1995.

Johnston, Trevor, "French Lessons," in Time Out (London), 18 October 1995.

DuPont, J., "The Enduring Duras," in Village Voice (New York), 9 April 1996.

Obituary, in EPD Film (Frankfurt), April 1996.

Obituary, in Kino (Sofia), no. 2, 1996.

Obituary, in Classic Images (Muscatine), May 1996.

Obituary, in Skrien (Amsterdam), June-July 1996.

Roy, André, "Marguerite Duras, moderne," in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 82, Summer 1996.

Everett, Wendy, "Director as Composer: Marguerite Duras and the Musical Analogy," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), April 1998.


* * *

As a writer, Marguerite Duras's work is identified, along with that of such authors as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Cayrol, with the tradition of the New Novel. Duras began working in film as a screenwriter, with an original script for Alain Resnais's first feature, Hiroshima mon amour. She subsequently wrote a number of film adaptations from her novels. She directed her first film, La Musica, in 1966. If Hiroshima mon amour remains her best-known work in cinema, her later films have won widespread praise for the profound challenge they offer to conventional dramatic narrative.

The nature of narrative and the potential contained in a single text are major concerns of Duras's films. Many of her works have appeared in several forms, as novels, plays, and films. This not only involves adaptations of a particular work, but also extends to cross-referential networks that run through her texts. The film Woman of the Ganges combines elements from three novels—The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, The Vice-Consul, and L'Amour. India Song was initially written as a play, taking characters from The Vice-Consul and elaborating on the structure of external voices developed in Woman of the Ganges. India Song was made as a film in 1975, and its verbal track was used to generate a second film, Son Nom de Venises dans Calcutta desert. This process of transformation suggests that all works are "in progress," inherently subject to being reconstructed. This is partly because Duras's works are more concerned with the quality or intensity of experience than with events per se. The films present narrative rather than a linear, unambiguous sequence of events. In Le Camion, two characters, played by Gerard Depardieu and Duras, sit in a room as the woman describes a movie about a woman who hitches a ride with a truck driver and talks with him for an hour and twenty minutes. This conversation is intercut with scenes of a truck driving around Paris, and stopping for a female hitchhiker (with Depardieu as the driver, and Duras as the hitchhiker). Thus, the verbal description of a potential film is juxtaposed by images of what that film might be.

An emphasis on the soundtrack is also a crucial aspect of Duras's films; her verbal texts are lyrical and are as important as the images. In India Song, sound and image function contrapuntally, and the audience must actively assess the relation between them, reading across the body of the film, noting continuities and disjunctions. The verbal text often refers in past tense to events and characters on screen, as the viewer is challenged to figure out the chronology of events described and depicted—which name on the soundtrack corresponds to which actor, whether the voices belong to on- or off-screen characters, and so forth. In this way the audience participates in the search for a story, constructing possible narratives.

As minimal as they are, Duras's narratives are partially derived from melodrama, focusing on relations between men and women, the nature or structure of desire, and colonialism and imperialism in both literal and metaphoric terms. In pursuing these issues through nonconventional narrative forms, and shifting the burden of discovering meaning to the audience, Duras's films provide an alternative to conventional ways of watching movies. Her work is seen as exemplifying a feminine writing practice that challenges the patriarchal domination of classical narrative cinema. In an interview, Duras said, "I think the future belongs to women. Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on to the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body." It is this new rhetoric, a new way of communicating, that Duras strives for in her films.

—M.B. White

Duras, Marguerite

views updated May 08 2018

DURAS, Marguerite


Writer. Nationality: French. Born: Marguerite Donnadieu in Giadinh, French Indo-China, 1914. Education: Educated in mathematics, law and political science at the Sorbonne, Paris. Career: Published first novel, Les Impudents, 1943; subsequently novelist, journalist and playwright; directed first film, La Musica, 1966. Awards: Prix Goncourt for novel L'Amant, 1984; CICAE Award, CIDALC Award, and Silver Berlin Bear Honorable Mention, Berlin International Film Festival, all for Les Enfants, 1985; Died: 3 March 1996, in Paris, France.


Films as Writer:

1959

Hiroshima mon amour (Resnais)

1960

Moderato Cantabile (Brook) (co-adapt from her novel)

1961

Une Aussi longue absence (The Long Absence) (Colpi) (co-sc from her novel)

1964

Nuit noire, Calcutta (Karmitz) (short)

1965

"Les rideaux blancs" (Franju) episode of Der Augenblick des Friedens (Un Instant de la paix) (for W. German TV)

1966

10:30 P.M. Summer (Dassin) (co-sc uncredited, from her novel) (Dix heures et demie du soir en été); La Voleuse (Chapot) (+ dialogue); La Musica (+ co-d)

1969

Détruire, dit-elle (Destroy She Said) (+ d)

1971

Jaune le soleil (+ d, pr, co-ed, from her novel Abahn, Sabana, David)

1972

Nathalie Granger (+ d, music)

1974

La Femme du Ganges (+ d)

1975

India Song (+ d, voice)

1976

Des journées entières dans les arbres (Days in the Trees) (+ d); Son Nom de Venises dans Calcutta desert (+ d)

1977

Baxter, Vera Baxter (+ d); Le Camion (+ d, role)

1978

Le Navire Night (+ d)

1978/79

Aurelia Steiner (4-film series): Cesarée (1978) (+ d); Les Mains négatives (1978) (+ d); Aurelia Steiner—Melbourne (1979) (+ d); Aurelia Steiner—Vancouver (1979) (+ d)

1981

Agatha et les lectures illimitées (Agatha) (+ d)

1991

L'Amant (The Lover) (co-sc)



Other Films:

1985

Les Enfants (The Children) (d)



Publications


By DURAS: screenplays—

Hiroshima mon amour, Paris, 1959.

Moderato Cantabile, with Gérard Jarlot and Peter Brook, 1960.

Une Aussi longue absence, with Gérard Jarlot, Paris, 1961.

10:30 P.M. Summer, with Jules Dassin, Paris, 1966.

La Musica, Paris, 1966.

Detruire, dit-elle, Paris, 1969; as Destroy, She Said, New York, 1970.

Les rideaux blancs, Paris, 1966.

Jaune le soleil, Paris, 1971

Nathalie Granger, suivi de La Femme du Gange, Paris, 1973.

India Song—texte—theatre—film, Paris, 1975; as India Song, New York, 1976.

Des journées entières dans les arbres, Paris, 1976.

Son Nom de Venises dans Calcutta desert, Paris, 1976.

Le Camion, Paris, 1977.

Le Navire Night, Césarée, Les Mains négatives, Aurelia Steiner, Paris, 1979.

Vera Baxter; ou, Les Plages de l'Atlantique, Paris, 1980.

Agatha, Paris, 1981.

Les Enfants, Paris, 1985.


By DURAS: fiction—

Les Impudents, Paris, 1943.

La Vie tranquille, Paris, 1944.

Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Paris, 1950; as The Sea Wall, New York, 1952; as A Sea of Troubles, London, 1953.

Le Marin de Gibraltar, Paris, 1952; as The Sailor From Gibraltar, London and New York, 1966.

Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia, Paris, 1953; as The Little Horses of Tarquinia, London, 1960.

Des journées entières dans les arbres, Paris, 1954; as Whole Days in the Trees, New York, 1981.

Le Square, Paris, 1955.

Moderato Cantabile, Paris, 1958, and New York, 1987.

Dix heures et demi du soir en été, Paris, 1960; as Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night, London, 1962.

L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas, Paris, 1962; as The Afternoon of Monsieur Andesmas, London, 1964.

Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Paris, 1964; as The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein, New York, 1967; as The Rapture of Lol V. Stein, London, 1967.

Le Vice-consul, Paris, 1966; as The Vice-Consul, London, 1968, New York, 1987.

L'Amante anglaise, Paris, 1967, New York, 1968.

Abahn, Sabana, David, Paris, 1970.

L'Amour, Paris, 1971.

Ah! Ernesto, with Bernard Bonhomme, Paris, 1971.

La Maladie de la mort, Paris, 1983; as The Malady of Death, New York, 1986.

L'Amant, Paris, 1984; as The Lover, New York, 1985.

Hiroshima mon amour, translated by Richard Seaver, New York, 1987.

Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, Paris, 1987; as Blue Eyes, Black Hair, London and New York, 1988.

Emily L., Paris, 1987, New York, 1989.

The Lover, introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston, translated by Barbara Bray, New York, 1998.


By DURAS: plays—

Théâtre 1 (includes Les Eaux et forets, Le Square, La Musica), Paris, 1965.

Théâtre 2 (includes Susanna Andler; Yes, peut-étre; Le Shaga; Des journées entières dans les arbres; Un Homme est venu me voir), Paris, 1968.

L'Homme assis dans le couloir, Paris, 1980.

L'Homme Atlantique, Paris, 1982.

Savannah Bay, Paris, 1982.

The Square, Edinburgh, 1986.

Yes, peut-etre, Edinburgh, 1986.


By DURAS: other books—

Les Parleuses, with Xaviere Gauthier, Paris, 1974.

Étude sur l'oeuvre littéraire, théâtrale, et cinématographique, with Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, Paris, 1976.

Territoires du féminin, with Marcelle Marini, Paris, 1977.

Les Lieux de Duras, with Michelle Porte, Paris, 1978.

L'Été 80, Paris, 1980.

Outside: Papiers d'un jour, Paris, 1981, Boston 1986.

The War: A Memoir, New York, 1986.

The Physical Side, London, 1990.

By DURAS: articles—

"Conversation with Marguerite Duras," with Richard Roud, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1959/60.

"Marguerite Duras en toute liberté," interview with F. Dufour, in Cinéma (Paris), April 1972.

"Du livre au film," in Image et Son (Paris), April 1974.

"India Song, a Chant of Love and Death," interview with F. Dawson, in Film Comment (New York), November/December 1975.

"India Song and Marguerite Duras," interview with Carlos Clarens, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1975/76.

Interview with J.-C. Bonnet and J. Fieschi, in Cinématographe (Paris), November 1977.

"Les Yeux verts," special issue written and edited by Duras, of Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), June 1980.

Interview with D. Fasoli, in Filmcritica (Florence), June 1981.

Interview with A. Grunert, in Filmfaust (Frankfurt), February-March 1982.

"The places of Marguerite Duras," an interview with M. Porte, in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Spring 1983.

Interview with P. Bonitzer, C. Tesson, and Serge Toubiana, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), July-August 1985.

Interview with Jean-Luc Godard, in Cinéma (Paris), 30 December 1987.

Interview with Colette Mazabrard, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1989.

"Jacquot filme Duras," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1993.


On DURAS: books—

Bernheim, N.-L., Marguerite Duras tourne un film, Paris, 1976.

Ropars-Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire, La Texte divisé, Paris, 1981.

Trastulli, Daniela, Dalla parola all imagine: Viaggio nel cinema di Marguerite Duras, Geneva, 1982.

Borgomano, Madeleine, L'Ecriture filmique de Marguerite Duras, Paris, 1985.

Brossard, Jean-Pierre, editor, Marguerite Duras: Cinéaste, écrivain, La Chaux-de-Fonde, 1985.

Guers-Villate, Yvonne, Continuité/discontinuité de l'oeuvre Durassienne, Brussels, 1985.

Fernandes, Marie-Pierre, Travailler avec Duras: La musica deuxième, Paris, 1986.

Selous, Trista, The Other Woman: Feminism and Femininity in the Work of Marguerite Duras, New Haven, Connecticut, 1988.

Vircondelet, Alain, Duras: A Biography, translated by Thomas Buckley, Normal, Illinois, 1994.

Adler, Laure, Marguerite Duras: A Life, translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, Chicago, 2000.


On DURAS: articles—

Gollub, Judith, "French Writers Turned Film Makers," in Film Heritage (New York), Winter 1968/69.

"Reflections in a Broken Glass," in Film Comment (New York), November/December 1975.

Lakeland, M.J., "Marguerite Duras in 1977," in Camera Obscura (Berkeley), Fall 1977.

Van Wert, W.F., "The Cinema of Marguerite Duras: Sound and Voice in a Closed Room," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1979.

Seni, N., "Wahrnehungsformen von Zeit und Raum am Beispiel der Filme von Marguerite Duras und Chantal Akerman," in Frauen und Film (Berlin), September 1979.

"Marguerite Duras à l'action," in Positif (Paris), July/August 1980.

Andermatt, V., "Big mach (on the truck)," in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Spring 1980.

Lyon, E., "Marguerite Duras: Bibliography/Filmography," in Camera Obscura (Berkeley), Fall 1980.

Murphy, C.J., "The role of desire in the films of Marguerite Duras," in Quarterly Review of Film Studies (New York), Winter 1982.

Fedwik, P., "Marguerite Duras: Feminine Field of Nostalgia," in Enclitic (Minneapolis), Fall 1982.

Sarrut, B., "Marguerite Duras: Barrages against the Pacific," in On Film (Los Angeles), Summer 1983.

Murphy, C.J., "New narrative regions: The role of desire in the films and novels of Marguerite Duras," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), April 1984.

Le Masson, H., "La voix tatouee," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), January 1985.

McWilliams, D., "Aesthetic tripling: Marguerite Duras's Le navire Night," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), January 1986.

Cottent-Hage, M., "Le camion de Marguerite Duras, ou comment assurer la libre circulation," in Post Script (Commerce), vol. 7, no. 1, Fall 1987.

Williams, Bruce, "Splintered Perspectives: Counterpoint and Subjectivity in the Modernist Film Narrative," in Film Criticism (Meadville), vol. 15, no. 2, Winter 1991.

Grange, M.F., "Corps filmique entre lisible et visible chez Marguerite Duras," in Cinémas (Montreal), vol. 3, no. 1, Autumn 1992.

Vajdovich, G., "Antiregény és anitfilm," in Filmkultura (Budapest), April 1995.

Johnston, Trevor, "French Lessons," in Time Out (London), 18 October 1995.

DuPont, J., "The Enduring Duras," in Village Voice (New York), 9 April 1996.

Obituary, in EPD Film (Frankfurt), April 1996.

Obituary, in Kino (Sofia), no. 2, 1996.

Obituary, in Classic Images (Muscatine), May 1996.

Obituary, in Skrien (Amsterdam), June-July 1996.

Roy, André, "Marguerite Duras, moderne," in 24 Images (Montreal), no. 82, Summer 1996.

Everett, Wendy, "Director as Composer: Marguerite Duras and the Musical Analogy," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury), April 1998.


* * *

Marguerite Duras brought the same qualities that made her a lyrical yet powerful novelist and playwright to her screenplays. Duras' work, originally influenced by such American writers as Hemingway and Steinbeck, drew on her unique life which began in what was then Indochina and is now Vietnam. She left Asia in the early 1930s for Paris and began publishing novels that were celebrated for their untraditional narrative structure. For Duras, certainty and a linear plot gave way to work that explored, instead, ambiguity and silences. She was, she said, exploring the "interplay of love and destruction."

She turned to screenwriting in 1959 when French director Alain Resnais asked her to write the screenplay for his film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which closely resembled the novel, Moderato Cantiblis (1958), that established her literary reputation. The film explores the brief extra-marital relationship between a French woman (played by Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (played by Eiji Okada.) The film won critical acclaim (the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Critics Best Foreign Language Film Award) in part for the innovative use of flashbacks to the war when the woman was involved with a German soldier. The haunting story, which was able to juxtapose such seemingly disparate themes as Hiroshima and love, reflected Duras' preoccupation with desire, death, love and memory. Although Duras was nominated for an Academy Award for her work as a screenwriter, she was unhappy enough with the result that she claimed she would never again let anyone else direct her words on the screen.

Duras continued to write for the screen and began to direct as well. In 1975 her screenplay for India Song demonstrated Duras' continuing connection to the Asia of her youth, a place that is, for her, emblematic of an unattainable desire and unknowable longing which, sought through memory, can only, finally, be resolved in death. The 1977 adaptation of her novel, Le Camion, which she directed, features a scene in which Duras herself reads star Gerard Depardieu the scenario of the film, which focuses on a truck driver and a mysterious woman hitch-hiker. Duras directed in order to be able to "preserve textual obscurity."

Her 1985 novel, L'aimant (The Lover), perhaps her finest work, returned to the Indochina of her youth. The New York Times Book Review praised it for the same qualities that infused the film (released in 1991): its "masterly balance between formalism and powerful emotional effect." Duras was uniquely capable of creating what has been called cinematic prose, or "literary films." Her innovative work as a screenwriter and director paved the way for such minimalist women filmmakers as Chantal Ackerman who followed in the wake of Duras' artistic legacy.

—Nina Bjornsson

Duras, Marguerite

views updated Jun 27 2018

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras (1914–1996) was one of France's most famous writers of the twentieth century. Her talents ranged across fiction, film, playwriting, and journalism, and all through her long career, just the mention of her name could be counted on to start a spirited discussion in a Parisian café or in an American or English college literature or women's studies department. A compulsive worker, Duras wrote 34 novels and a wide variety of shorter works, returning to writing even after a stroke robbed her of the use of her dominant hand.

Duras revealed her own tumultuous experiences in many of her writings, but she used fiction to disguise, dig into the underlying motivations behind, or elaborate upon actual events. She wove the clues of her own life into her writings, but her public utterances contradicted one another and tied biographers in knots. Key episodes in her early life are subjects of dispute, and Duras' own outspokenness and intensity made it hard to know when to take her statements at face value. Yet the dance of veils choreographed by Duras' fiction and public image was all part of her appeal. Duras was a daring innovator, using fiction to view the events of her life through a constantly changing set of lenses.

Spoke Fluent Vietnamese

Duras retold the events of her early life over and over again in her books. She was born Marguerite Donnadieu on April 4, 1914, in Gia Dinh, near Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) in the French colony of Indochina, now the country of Vietnam. As a young woman she learned to speak Vietnamese fluently, and, except for two years she spent at a family home near the town of Duras in southwestern France, she grew up in southeast Asia. Her father, a math teacher, died when she was four.

After Henri Donnadieu's death, Duras' mother Marie tried to put the family on a solid financial footing by buying a rice plantation on the coastline of what is now Cambodia. She was swindled, however, by corrupt officials in the French colonial government, and she found that the land she had acquired was so often swamped by seawater that it was unsuitable for farming. Repeated unsuccessful attempts to build a seawall further drained the family's savings. Duras attended high school in Saigon, but finances had declined to a point where she found herself poorer than many of her Asian classmates.

Encouraged by her mother, Duras embarked on a romantic and sexual liaison with a wealthy Asian man. One of Duras' many biographers, Laure Adler, working from an unpublished Duras diary, has asserted that Duras was essentially sold into prostitution by her mother in order to finance the drug habit of her brother Pierre, but this characterization of events has been strongly disputed by her son, Jean Mascolo. Both the affair and the family battle with the encroaching ocean would recur as motifs in Duras' writing.

That writing career would take more than a decade to get underway. Duras moved alone to France in 1932 and was admitted to the Sorbonne, a prestigious university in Paris. She studied law, political science, and mathematics there, and after she received her degree in 1935 she took a job with the Ministry of Colonies, working for the same bureaucracy that had cheated her mother out of the family inheritance. As with so many other aspects of her life, controversy has attended Duras' work during this period; using the name Marie Donnadieu, she penned a propaganda volume that laid out justifications for France's colonial adventures in Asia. It may be, however, that she was acting as a ghostwriter for a higher official. In 1939 Duras married a writer, Robert Antelme. The couple's first child was stillborn in 1942.

Became Involved with French Resistance

Duras' actions during World War II are likewise uncertain. Adler's biography claims that she worked for the Nazi puppet government in Vichy, France as a de facto censor, controlling the distribution of paper in occupied France. This claim, too, has been disputed by Mascolo. It is clear, however, that World War II turned Duras' life upside down, causing her to reevaluate her earlier life and present situation. She struck out in new directions both politically and artistically. By 1943, Duras was working for the French anti-Nazi resistance, and her first novel, Les impudents (The Impudent Ones) was published that year.

The head of her resistance cell was a man she knew as Morland who later became better known as François Mitterand, president of France for 14 years beginning in 1981. Duras herself narrowly escaped arrest by the Nazis, but her husband and sister-in-law were seized and sent to concentration camps. She claimed to have once saved Mitterand's life, and German rule fell apart toward the war's end with the advance of American troops, Mitterand returned the favor, finding Antelme near death in the Dachau camp and rescuing him.

Meanwhile, Duras' literary career had begun to rise from the ashes of war. Les impudents dealt with a fictionalized version of her family's part-time hometown of Duras, and she soon adopted the town's name as her own. Her second novel, La vie tranquille (The Tranquil Life, 1944), was also set in Duras, and the two novels both featured a negative mother figure whom Duras would revisit in various ways in many later writings. La vie tranquille attracted the attention of writer Raymond Queneau, who shepherded the book toward publication at the prestigious Gallimard house in Paris.

After the war, Duras joined the Communist party but resigned her membership in 1950 upon finding Communist doctrine too restrictive. She helped nurse Antelme back to health but also began an affair with writer Dionys Mascolo. For a time the three lived as a ménage à trois, and Mascolo became the father of Duras' only son, Jean Mascolo. Duras scored a critical breakthrough in 1950 with the publication of her novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique (translated as The Sea Wall), which was drawn on her family's experiences in Indochina.

Wrote Prescient Essay

Duras wrote voluminously in the 1950s, venturing into journalism as well as fiction. As her reputation grew, she became one of France's most familiar public intellectuals, quick with a sharp opinion even if she might sometimes contradict herself. "I think the future belongs to women," Duras said in an interview quoted in Women Filmmakers and Their Films. "Men have been completely dethroned. Their rhetoric is stale, used up. We must move on to the rhetoric of women, one that is anchored in the organism, in the body." Yet she also once said, according to the Scotsman, that "I am in favor of total submission to men. This is how I've got everything I wanted."

Some of Duras' early novels were sprawling, detailed narratives influenced in part by the expansive style of American writer Ernest Hemingway, but gradually she came under the influence of modernist trends. She won praise for the 1955 novel Le square and for 1958's Moderato cantabile, both composed nearly entirely of dialogue that seems to circulate around the edges of unspoken events. In 1959, leading French film director Alain Resnais asked Duras to write a screenplay for him. Although Duras had done little dramatic writing, Hiroshima, mon amour became one of the most celebrated films of all time. The story of a love affair between a French actress and a Japanese architect in Tokyo during World War II, the film juxtaposed a world of private feelings with the overwhelming tragedy of war.

Duras went on to make numerous short films of her own in the 1960s and 1970s, often working on a shoestring budget and using her own Paris apartment as a set. Although she was less well known as a director than other prominent French experimentalists of the day, her work attracted the attention of young film industry figures such as actor Gérard Depardieu, who played a truck driver in the film Le camion (The Truck). The film consisted of a single one-hour-and-twenty-minute conversation between a truck driver and a female hitchhiker, played by Duras herself. Her 1975 film India Song was a more elaborate production that won the grand prize of France's Cinema Academy.

The author of a number of plays between 1960 and the late 1980s, Duras continued to write novels at a steady pace. Many of them dealt with themes of love and passion. Her greatest success came at age 70 with L'amant (The Lover, 1984), which won France's top literary honor, the Goncourt Prize. In 1992 the novel was filmed by director Jean-Jacques Annaud; the film, at first condemned but later embraced by Duras, became internationally successful.

Returned to Scenes from Youth

L'amant succeeded in tying together many of the themes and techniques Duras had explored over her long career. Minimalistically told like many of her later novels, the novel took Duras' youthful affair with her Asian lover for its subject matter. Viewed in one way, it was part of an effort at self-revelation that Duras made as she looked back on her life; biographies of Duras had begun to appear, and she revealed more and more of her secrets to literary scholars. Sometimes, however, her revelations created more mysteries than they clarified. Another autobiographical work, La douleur (1985, translated as The War: A Memoir), traced Duras' experiences during World War II. Literary scholars have debated the levels of truth versus fiction in both books.

A heavy consumer of alcohol for much of her life, Duras suffered from health problems in the 1980s and 1990s. She underwent a detox program in 1982 that only worsened her health. In 1988 she fell into a coma for five months and was not expected to live. But she recovered and resumed writing, putting her own experiences, now those associated with impending death, front and center as before. Her novel La pluie d'été was published in 1990, and in 1992, partly as a reaction against what she saw as errors on Annaud's film of L'amant, she wrote a new version of the tale, L'amant de la chine du nord (The Lover from Northern China). Her last book, published in English as No More, was a series of diary entries tersely chronicling her physical decay. She continued to write until shortly before her death on March 3, 1996, in Paris.

That event did not dent Duras' popularity as a writer; it was once estimated that more undergraduate theses in American colleges and universities had been written about Duras than about any other figure, and new studies of her work continued to appear at a rapid pace. Even the twilight of her life held fascinating for the public; the 2003 film Cet amour-là dealt with her affair with the young philosophy student and obsessive fan, Yann Lemmée (renamed Yann Andrea by Duras), which began in 1980 and lasted until Duras' death. "I did not deprive my heart of anything," she wrote in a fable that was read (according to the Guardian) at her funeral. "But the sun rises, and sets, and goes back to the place where it is to rise again. I have understood that all is vanity and vanity for vanity's sake. It is food to the wind."

Books

Adler, Laure, Marguerite Duras: A Life, translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen, University of Chicago, 2000.

Ricouart, Janine, editor, Marguerite Duras Lives On, University Press of America, 1998.

Women Filmmakers & Their Films, St. James, 1998.

Periodicals

Capital Times (Madison, WI), March 8, 1996.

Financial Times, March 9, 1996.

Guardian (London, England), March 4, 1996; March 8, 1996; July 28, 1998; October 17, 1998.

Independent (London, England), March 4, 1996.

New York Observer, April 14, 2003.

New York Times, March 4, 1996.

Scotsman (Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K.), March 9, 1996.

Times (London, England), March 4, 1996.

Washington Post, March 4, 1996.

Online

"Marguerite Duras," Books and Writers, http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/duras.htm. (November 10, 2005).

"Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable, She Said …," The Written Word, http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/label_france/ENGLISH/LETTRES/DURAS/duras.html (November 10, 2005).

Duras, Marguerite

views updated May 29 2018

Duras, Marguérite

views updated May 11 2018

Duras, Marguérite (1914–96) French novelist and playwright, b. Indochina. Novels include The Sea Wall (1950), The Sailor from Gibraltar (1952), Destroy, She Said (1969), The Lover (1984) and Summer Rain (1990). Her best-known screenplay is Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959).

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