Duras, Marguerite: General Commentary

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MARGUERITE DURAS: GENERAL COMMENTARY

TRISTA SELOUS (ESSAY DATE 1988)

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

LISA F. SIGNORI (ESSAY DATE 2001)

SOURCE: Signori, Lisa F. Introduction to The Feminization of Surrealism: The Road to Surreal Silence in Selected Works of Marguerite Duras, pp. 1-24. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.

In the following essay, Signori explores Duras's transformation of surrealist poetics into a feminist literary practice.

Mais comment réunir le tout d'un écrivain?: livres, articles de revues, commentaires, critiques, interviews, interventions de toutes sortes dans les journaux ou ailleurs … bref, tout ce qui, de près ou de loin, fait texte—prétexte à ma propre recherche. A tout cela, à tous ces écrits, majeurs ou mineurs selon le cas, mais tous aussi signifiants quels qu'ils soient, il s'agit de donner cohérence et forme, unité et sens ultime, tâche impossible, en réalité (car comment réunifier le sujet d'une écriture?).
—Gabrielle Frémont¹

In the above comments, Gabrielle Frémont astutely summarizes my own struggle as I face the task of trying to come to terms with the essence of the enigmatic work of Marguerite Duras. Her corpus is extraordinarily complex, not to mention varied, and large in scope, but I take comfort in the knowledge that I am obviously not alone in my dilemma, for, as Aliette Armel implies in her article "J'ai vécu le réel comme un mythe," "malgré l'ampleur de son retentissement et la variété des domaines que Duras englobe: roman, théâtre, cinéma et même journalisme—elle a suscité un certain nombre de thèses mais pas encore de véritable synthèse." In fact, the difficulty created by the task to appraise her corpus seems insurmountable, although numerous attempts by various critics have been made. As Bertrand Poirot-Delpech writes in an article appearing in Le Monde on March 5, 1996, two days after Duras's death, "pourquoi la mort, qui n'apprend rien permettraitelle tout à coup de classer un artiste, d'augmenter la postérité? Marguerite Duras s'est tue, voilà la seule certitude, énorme." What Duras leaves behind after her death, then, is a vast corpus that spans more than five decades and crosses the boundaries of genre classification. Her writings eliminate all genre distinctions, for her novels become film scenarios, her cinema is played out on stage, and all becomes poetry. The poetic quality in Duras's work is evident given the intuitive, emotional intensity her work evokes in the reader. As Christiane Makward states, "there is a strangeness, an otherness to Duras's style which … may function more attractively for readers of experimental texts who are not desperately clinging to a respectable but unrealistic need to make perfect sense of every message, i.e., to readers of contemporary poetry." So how is it possible to take into account the richness and complexity of the literary universe (sixty-three fictional works, twenty films, and approximately twenty-five plays and theatrical adaptations according to Robert Harvey and Hélène Volat)—and let us not forget the countless interviews and journalistic pieces written for various newspapers and journals as well—that this enigmatic writer has been creating since she began publishing in 1943, and whose final work, La Mer écrite, was published 12 days after her death in her Rue Saint-Benoît apartment in Paris on March 3^rd, 1996? To the present moment, critics have used many different approaches in an attempt to analyse Duras's literary universe: feminism, autobiography, the theme of silence or destruction, alienation or absence, the body, love and desire, as well as the "legacy of mourning" to name a few.² Yet Duras's work eludes categorization, which reinforced her own disdain for the practice of literary criticism. Her abhorrence of the "isms" that dominate the literary world was evident when she expressed the desire in Le Camion "que tous les 'isms' aillent à leur perte." Thus when reading and discussing Duras, the reader must above all heed Alain Vircondelet's suggestion to "se laisser porter par ces mots, ces phrases, au coeur desquelles l'on devrait se loger, ne pas tenter de s'en éloigner sous peine de ne plus comprendre, ou de revenir à une banalité vulgaire et dérisoire" (Pour Duras 11).

I take heed of Vircondelet's comments, but think it is nonetheless important to situate Marguerite Duras's place in literary history. Amid much controversy, Marguerite Duras earned a place among France's most noteworthy female writers of the 20^th century. She has come to share the limelight with Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, and Marguerite Yourcenar. Yet Duras believed her writing was different from that of these other female writers, an opinion she expressed in an interview with Alice Jardine in Shifting Scenes. Duras explained to Jardine that her works had been singled out by French critics, but not in order to give them favorable reviews. "They never attacked Simone de Beauvoir. They never attacked Sarraute," she said, "But in my case, I've been involved in men's things. First, I was involved in the Communist Party. I did things that are considered in bad taste for women."³ This study focuses precisely on Duras's involvement in "men's things." In fact, her involvement in "men's things," in particular, her relationship to the male dominated literary domain of Surrealism, greatly influenced her fiction. Moreover, this approach will ultimately allow a greater understanding of her work, and broaden the realm of surrealist aesthetics as well.

As Jane Winston suggests, Duras's earliest French critics knew a great deal about her personal life and political persuasions, and this in turn led to their less than favorable comments on her life and works.⁴ Marilyn Schuster points out, moreover, that there is an abundance of material available on Duras's life; yet it is difficult to know her as a woman, for no two biographies are the same. Marguerite Duras, née Donnadieu, was born April 4^th, 1914 to Emile and Marie Donnadieu in Gia Dinh, Cochinchina, then French Indochina and now part of Vietnam. Her parents were both teachers; her father taught mathematics until an illness forced him to return to France where he died in 1918. Sometime after her father's death, Marie Donnadieu took her family back to the father's house in southwestern France for two years to settle his estate before returning to Cambodia in 1920. Duras chose her pseudonym after the name of the town where her father died, Duras in the Lot-et-Garonne region of France. As a widow, her mother continued to teach in Indochina, first appointed to Phnom Penh, then Vinh-long, and finally to Sadec. Marguerite spent her childhood and adolescence in a milieu of poverty, colonial exploitation, and social injustice. She had two older brothers, Paul and Pierre (Marguerite spent much time with the younger brother, nicknamed Paulo), as well as two step brothers from her father's previous marriage to Alice Rivière who had died in Hanoi 20 years earlier. The family was more closely tied to the local population than to the other French colonists, and spoke Vietnamese fluently. As a result, Duras chose to write her baccalauréat examination in Vietnamese. In 1930 she enrolled in high school in Saigon, where she met the Chinaman who was to become her lover when she was not yet 16 years old.

In 1932, Duras left for France to finish her studies. She moved to Paris where she studied mathematics, law, and political science. In 1935 she was employed by the Ministère des Colonies in Paris in the Service intercolonial de l'information et de la documentation. Duras wrote (still as Marguerite Donnadieu), along with Philippe Roques, one of her friends from the Ecole coloniale,L'Empire français. In this text, which was published in 1940, she and Roques attempt to justify French colonialism and all that the French thought to bring to the indigènes: equal opportunity for education, scholarships and travel, and improved health care are a few examples that she and Roques give in this apology of imperialism. In the troubled period in France before the second World War, Duras and Roques wrote propaganda to spread the message of the grandeur and strength of France. Now, from our twenty-first century perspective, it is hard to understand why Duras collaborated in the writing of such a work that suppressed her own life experience of colonialism. According to Frédérique Lebelley, Duras, in this work, "a tout occulté: images, souvenirs, sentiments. Elle les a livrés à ce texte imbécile, momifiés. Elle voulait enterrer ce passé tyrannique de peur qu'il ne l'empêche d'exister. Elle l'a neutralisé" (113). Nonetheless, this work represented the first opportunity for Marguerite to come into contact with "la chose écrite, le premier pas vers le livre" (Lebelley 108).⁵

In 1930, Marguerite married Robert Antelme, a left-wing writer under whose influence she began to write. During the Occupation, Duras worked for the Cercle de la librairie at L'Edition française as secretary for the Commission du contrôle du papier. In this role, she took writer's requests for paper and determined whether or not their manuscripts were worthy of the paper to be printed on. Thus, she was continuously surrounded by writers and their ideas. Duras, too, finally discovered her literary calling in her desire to discover herself and her place in France amidst the turmoil of the second World War. Lebelley thinks that Duras's new found compulsion to write came from her desire to "s'enraciner dans le sol de France" (118). So, she began to write in her newly adopted country. Her first manuscript, La Famille Taneran, originally entitled Les Complices, was refused by Gallimard in 1942.⁶ During the same year, her younger brother died suddenly, a loss which greatly affected her, especially since it followed the death of her first child at birth. At this time, she also met Dionys Mascolo who was working as a reader for Gallimard.⁷ They would eventually have a son together in 1947.

In 1943, Duras became a member of the Mouvement national des prisonniers de guerre along with Robert Antelme and Dionys Mascolo. All three then participated in the Resistance movement during the German Occupation. In the midst of her political involvements, Duras did not give up writing. She diligently reworked her first novel, La Famille Taneran, into Les Impudents, which was published by Plon with the encouragement of Raymond Queneau, who saw in her the promise of a great writer. The following year, Robert Antelme was arrested and deported to Dachau, while her second novel, La Vie tranquille, was accepted by Gallimard. During this time, Duras, motivated by her own personal interest in trying to get information on her husband, created a research service that published the journal Libres. This journal listed information about those emprisoned and deported by the Germans. Apparently, this experience, and her experience of waiting for the return of her husband, led to the writing of a collection of texts entitled La Douleur. The first text in the collection, also entitled La Douleur, recounts Duras's anxious vigil awaiting the return of her husband from a German concentration camp. Interestingly enough, Duras suppressed the publication of this text, and proclaimed to have forgotten all about it until she came across the manuscript many years later. Though the writings date from the second World War, the collection was not published until 1985. Several of the other texts in the work describe Duras's involvement with a resistance group led by former President Mitterand under the name of François Morland. These writings, however, are far from being a coherent text with a structured plot and chronology. Instead, all the anxieties and suppressed emotions Duras felt during the absence of her husband surface in La Douleur. As Leslie Hill puts it, this work, which begins as a diary, "is less a series of events than stages in the experience of fear, grief, and loss" ("Marguerite Duras and the Limits of Fiction" 7).

Duras was a member of the French Communist Party from 1944 until 1950, at which time she was forced to leave the party due to ideological differences. According to Jane Winston, Duras also had earned a reputation for "amorous meanderings" by the late 1940's. Winston argues that many people were upset about the unusual trio she formed with her husband Robert Antelme (until their divorce in 1946) and her lover (from 1942) Dionys Mascolo and the sociosexual norms that they together transgressed (469). Thus, the early critical reception of her work was clearly influenced by her controversial personal life and political dealings. Duras herself believed that she was not awarded the 1950 Prix Goncourt for Un Barrage contre le Pacifique because "she was a woman and a dissident communist to boot, and that the Academy's ubiquitous sexism had penalized her for both of those transgressions."⁸ Duras spent the next two decades writing at a furious pace. By the end of the 1960's, when the events of May 1968 broke out, she had published 19 works of various genres—novels, plays and film scenarios. Primed by her earlier political involvements, Duras's militant spirit was revived during the student revolution in 1968 when she joined the students in their défilés and protests, appeared alongside them on the barricades, signed their petitions, and was even arrested. She adopted their motto as her own: "brûler le passé pour tout recommencer" (Lebelley 223). As a member of the Comité des intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre d'Algérie, she had already spoken out virulently against De Gaulle; and, as a founding member of the Comité d'action étudiants-écrivains, she wrote a manifesto for the committee that was rejected. During these turbulent times, Duras demonstrated a sense of political engagement and a desire to transgress the status quo, for, as Winston indicates, she sheltered such student leaders as Henri Weber and Daniel Bensaïd in her Saint-German-des-Près apartment.⁹

After 1950, Duras's style changed and her texts became more minimalist. When asked by Xavière Gauthier in Les Parleuses why her style had changed, Duras explained that it was due to an extremely traumatic, even violent love affair. Though Duras does not name the other party, Françoise Lebelley thinks that Duras was referring to her tragic love affair with Gérard Jarlot. In Les Parleuses, Duras suggests that Moderato cantabile is based upon a comparable destructive affair, and that this "expérience érotique, très, très, très violente" also led to a "crise suicidaire qu'elle raconte dans Moderato cantabile. " Duras said that "cette femme qui veut être tuée, je l'ai vécu … et à partir de là les livres ont changé" (59). The self-avowed influence that this love affair had on Duras's life and writing is a living example of surrealist André Breton's belief in the power of love to transform an individual.

Several critics, noting the change in her writing style, chose to classify Duras with the writers grouped together as the school of the Nouveau Roman, although Duras denied adherence to any movement or group whatsoever. As Duras herself stated in an interview with Thérèse de Saint-Phalle, she rebelled against any and all labels: "Le Nouveau Roman est perclus de consignes, alors que la seule consigne d'un écrivain serait de n'en avoir aucune. Aucune autre que la sienne" ("Le Monde" 20 janvier 1962). In 1963 she added that "je ne crois pas à ce mouvement littéraire qui est un rewrite plus ou moins adroit de la littérature américano-surréaliste" ("Paris-Théâtre" n. 198 s.d.1963), an interesting comment in light of the topic of this study. Regardless of her involvement, Duras had always scorned being involved with any movement, literary or otherwise. But given that various critics choose to include her in the New Novel, it is necessary to examine her "noninvolvement." According to one critic, Mireille Calle-Gruber, the Nouveau Roman only existed from 1971-1974, which is not the accepted idea about the existence of the Nouveau Roman. For Calle-Gruber, the group officially began in 1971 when Jean Ricardeau and Françoise Van Rossum-Guyon organized a colloquium at Cerisy to "institutionalize" the movement. Duras was invited to the meeting, but chose not to attend. Her refusal indicates an unwillingness to be associated with the "group." In 1974, the colloquium that served to mark the demise of the group dealt with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and also took place at Cerisy (Calle-Gruber 14). Although Duras was not included on Ricardou's definitive honorary list of nouveaux romanciers in his 1973 work entitled Le Nouveau Roman, Robbe-Grillet nonetheless insisted on including her in the Nouveau Roman. Robbe-Grillet stated that her refusal not to attend the colloquium was not pertinent since "elle ne supporte pas d'être mélangée à quoi que ce soit. Mais il n'en reste pas moins que c'est du Nouveau Roman. Au sens large.…" (Calle-Gruber 13). In 1971, Duras again emphatically denied any and all involvement with the Nouveau Roman when she said "Non. Je ne fais pas partie de ce groupe" ("The French" Review n. 4 mars 1971). In a 1990 interview with Alain Veinstein for France Culture, Duras once more refused her inclusion: "Je n'en fais pas partie.… C'est Robbe-Grillet qui m'a fait croire ça un jour. J'ai rigolé."

It is revealing that even in light of her refusal to be associated with the Nouveau roman, many critics have included her. For example, Raylene L. Ramsay's article links Duras and Robbe-Grillet together in a discussion "The Power of the Erotic and the Eroticization of Power in the works of Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet." According to Calle-Gruber, what she does share with the new novelists is the refusal of "quelque chose à dire préexistant à l'écriture" (15). Like the nouveaux romanciers, Duras did not sit down to write with the artifice of subject or plot in mind to dictate the text. But unlike the members of the New Novel, her works are emotionally charged examples of surrealist écriture automatique. Duras herself insisted that "ce qui vous arrive dessus, dans l'écrit, c'est sans doute tout simplement la masse du vécu" (Les Parleuses 99), and because "on est hanté par son vécu, il faut le laisser faire."¹⁰ Her emphasis, then, on the "lived" experience replete with its emotional overflow as the building block of the text differentiates her from most of the nouveaux romancers.

Duras's critics eventually acknowledged the intertwining of Duras's life and writing. However, it was not until after 1984, with the publication of L'Amant and its reception of the Prix Goncourt, that critics finally heeded Duras's cry, "je suis le livre." With this autobiographical work, critics had begun to introduce Duras's biography into the interpretation of her works. As Jane Winston observes from a feminist viewpoint, a contextual reading of Duras's life could offer further insight into the origins of Duras's writing and would "anchor her writings in the concrete and provide a means for moving beyond conservative images of a patriarchally feminine Marguerite Duras."¹¹ From the standpoint of autobiography, Christiane Blot-Labarrère believes that Duras's "oeuvre et vie sont les deux visages d'une unique aventure" (7). With Surrealism in mind, such a statement inevitably recalls Breton's cry that one should "vivre la poésie." For Breton, existence and poetry were one and the same, and when Duras wrote that "l'argument de mon livre, c'est l'écriture. L'écriture c'est moi. Donc, je suis le livre," she echoes Breton's belief in the continuity between existence and the search for revelation through writing. Often Duras wrote about the act of writing, but she claimed to have lived the process as well, so much so, in fact, that each work she wrote drained a bit of life out of her. "Je vois le livre," said Duras, "comme une soustraction du corps, comme un dépeuplement du corps." The completion of each work was generally followed by illness and even coma. For example, after the completion of her 1987 work, Emily L., Duras fell into a coma that lasted several months. Duras's companion, Yann, writes about her coma and recovery in his 1983 work entitled M.D. In Cet Amour-là, Yann's 1999 love-letter written more than three years after her death, he writes to Duras that each work "chaque fois il vous laisse comme morte, anéantie, et votre main et votre esprit" (195). The act of writing for Duras is necessarily physical and painful: "Ce qui est douloureux, la douleur—le danger—c'est la mise en oeuvre, la mise en page, de cette douleur, c'est crever cette ombre noire afin qu'elle se répande sur le blanc du papier, mettre dehors ce qui est de nature intérieure" ("Entretien avec Michelle Porte" 83-136 in Duras Le Camion ). In brief, Duras's life and work are, admittedly, inexorably intertwined, and this connection allows the argument that Duras heeded Breton's cry that one should "live poetry." In fact, Duras created a new literary realm that extends beyond poetry, one that is in line with Breton's surrealist aesthetic, "porté par le soufflé poétique et l'envol de l'imaginaire, où l'écriture et la vie sont intimement liées.…" (Armel "Le Jeu autobiographique" 31).

In accordance with Duras's involvement with men's things, Jane Winston astutely points out, along with Alain Vircondelet, that the origin of Duras's writing lies in her involvement with men, and, specifically, that her inspiration came from her ex-husband Robert Antelme. Antelme chronicled his experience in concentration camps during World War II (478) in L'Espèce humaine. In his 1991 Duras biographie, Alain Vircondelet claims that Antelme ultimately gives birth to Duras's writing, and that her characteristic silences, holes, and repetitions stem from his influence. If we accept Vircondelet's explanation, then we might say that the blanks and silences in Duras's work represent her fear, grief, and anguish at her husband's sufferings. It seems that her husband internalized her silences as his own, for, as Frédérique Lebelley states, upon completion of L'Espèce humaine, Antelme "choisit de se taire. Il ne reparle plus. On ne l'entendra plus jamais prononcer ces mots. Jamais plus. Pas même le titre de son livre" (146). According to Vircondelet's analysis, Maurice Blanchot had a hand in forming Duras's literary style as well. He believes that Blanchot intuitively showed Duras the path to follow in her writing and that her work was "nourished" in his own Espace littéraire (Duras biographie).

To the two "male" influences briefly alluded to here, I am going to add the literary practice of Surrealism. When Vircondelet comments that "plus Duras avança dans l'oeuvre, plus elle accorda d'importance aux accrocs du langage, au surgissement des images, à l'inattendu, à ce qui vient, brut et barbare" (Pour Duras 83), his references to the sudden appearance of images, and of the unexpected, confirm my belief that, in order to understand fully Marguerite Duras, we must look for the parallels to surrealist aesthetics. I agree with Vircondelet when he says he is not surprised that "le surréalisme fut une de ses influences avouées" (Pour Duras 83). In spite of her rejection of what she labeled as the américano-surréaliste literature of the New Novel, on at least two occasions, as Christiane Blot-Labarrère points out, Duras herself acknowledged direct surrealist influence on her work. In an interview with Pierre Hahn, published in Paris-Théâtre Duras said: "j'ai vécu dans le bain existential. J'ai respiré l'air de cette philosophie.… Et il en va de même pour le surréalisme." Then, in a 1967 piece that appeared in Le Monde, Duras affirmed to Jacqueline Piatier, in reference to her writing syle that: "le surréalisme, je ne suis pas allée à lui, mais maintenant il vient à moi et j'en suis très heureuse" (29 mars 1967). In this interview, Duras explained that she did not strive to master a certain, preconceived and desired form of writing, but that the creative impulse for her is more like an outpouring of emotion during the moment of writing. Her outpouring of emotion is, as I shall demonstrate, her own form of écriture automatique.

It is not surprising, then, that in a number of articles and footnotes, other scholars have noted Duras's affiliation with Surrealism. In the most hyperbolic claim, Jean Decottignies traces "tout un champ de la littérature contemporaine" back to the tenets of Surrealism, including "entre autres, l'oeuvre entière de Marguerite Duras" (95). Madeleine Cottenet-Hage finds other indirect signs of kinship between Surrealism and Duras, and among these, Duras's book-length interview with Xavière Gauthier in Les Parleuses. In 1972, Gauthier wrote an important work entitled Surréalisme et surréalité, a stringent critique of Surrealism that nonetheless links her to the surrealist movement. And her interest in Duras would suggest that Gauthier, too, according to Cottenet-Hage, found Duras to be a kindred surreal spirit. Another critic, Susan Rubin Suleiman, uncovers surrealist ties in Duras's work in an article entitled "Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein: Women, Madness and Narrative." Suleiman thus makes the connection between André Breton's Nadja (1928) and Duras's Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) through the mediation of madness. Of even more importance is Duras's interview entitled "le surréalisme en octobre 1967" with Jean Schuster (a critic for the surrealist review, L'Archibras). In this interview, Duras's notion of ombre interne appeared for the first time. According to Aliette Armel in her article "La Force magique de l'ombre interne," Duras was implicitly referring to the surrealists when she remarked as early as 1966 that "la nature même de l'ombre interne … est donnée commune, qu'elle dépasse très largement l'histoire individuelle, tout en conservant le pouvoir de porter l'homme hors de soi" (12).

In the realm of Duras's biography, more links to Surrealism appear. Jacques Lacan, who proclaimed himself one of Duras's greatest admirers in his article entitled "Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras," was at one time closely linked to the surrealist group (Cottenet-Hage 541). Duras's involvement with Dionys Mascolo led her to direct contact with André Breton and other surrealists. In an interview with Aliette Armel, Mascolo explained that in 1955 le groupe de la rue Saint-Benoît founded le Comité des Intellectuels contre la poursuite de la guerre en Algérie, and, as Mascolo suggested, the political ideals they shared permitted "un rapprochement entre notre groupe et le groupe surréaliste" ("Un Itinéraire politique" 39). According to Mascolo, "Breton s'est déclaré immédiatement d'accord. Il a même déclaré … que ce comité a permis aux surréalistes de sortir de l'isolement politique où ils étaient confinés depuis la Libération" (39-40). Then, when de Gaulle came into power in 1958, Mascolo founded an anti-gaulliste review entitled Le 14 juillet with surrealist Jean Schuster. The third volume of the journal, appearing in April of 1959, contained a questionnaire written by Maurice Blanchot and André Breton which was "un appel à la résistance contre le nouveau régime de la part des intellectuels" ("Un Itinéraire politique" 40). Another link to Surrealism is Duras's acquaintance with Michel Leiris, who in the 1960's, was a frequent visitor to the rue Saint-Benoît apartment. Duras, Mascolo, and Antelme's involvement in May 1968 events, whose "surrealist inspiration was attested to by graffiti, mottoes, posters" (Cottenet-Hage 540), also allows a connection to Surrealism.

It may seem somewhat contradictory to draw close parallels between Duras, a woman writer, and Surrealism, given Surrealism's blatant and desired occultation of women as objects. The surrealist's conception of women as objects seems to contrast with Duras's concern in her works with women as subjectivities, and the conditions and oppressive attitudes and conventions under which they live. Rudolf E. Kuenzli emphasizes that surrealist works are addressed to men; in their function as erotic object or muse, women serve only as a means of inspiration for surrealist art and poetry (18). Many contemporary feminists criticize the emphasis that the male surrealists place on imagery of the female body. And, in a more damning critique, critic Gwen Raabert suggests that the marginal roles that women held in society were reproduced in the male surrealists' works. In her opinion, these works represent a "male subject seeking transformation through a female representational object" (8). The images of the female body offered a path to the desired realm of surreality. Duras also denounced Surrealism's position toward women in the following statement. "Whatever form this veneration of women takes," Duras said, "… be it religious or surrealist … it is still racism." This comment leads me to ponder her seemingly contradictory affinity for Surrealism.¹² How is it possible to link her work with a literary movement that virtually excluded women?

To begin to answer this question, it is first necessary to examine, in greater detail, Surrealism. The surrealist movement was officially founded in 1924 with the publication of André Breton's Manifeste du surréalisme. The first issue of the official review of the movement, "La Révolution surréaliste," also appeared that year and continued through 1929. In 1930, due to the polemic surrounding the surrealists's relationship to Communism, a new journal "Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution" replaced "La Révolution surréaliste." This new journal was published through 1933 when it folded and the movement was left without an official review. Meanwhile, the movement endured numerous defections and exclusions at the same time it constantly acquired new members. For example, Louis Aragon, one of the founding members and most visible participants, left the group in 1932. As a genuine avant-garde movement, Surrealism died around 1935 (though Breton did not share this opinion). According to Maurice Nadeau, one historian of the movement, Surrealism continued to maintain itself as a movement and organize collective exhibits in the late 1930's and throughout the war, when many of its members were in New York. Even today, as certain critics believe, Surrealism has become an integral part of our consciousness. For example, as Alain Virmaux points out, "il en reste trace jusque dans le bagage linguistique moyen de l'homme aujourd'hui" (9), since, as he says, Surrealism now refers to anything that qualifies as bizarre, unexpected or upsetting. The movement was officially dispersed in 1969, three years after Breton's death, but, as Susan Suleiman notes, "for a long time by then, it had been no more than a surviving remnant" (168).

Historically, between 1924 and 1933, during the most dynamic period of Surrealism, it is revealing that no women were listed as official members of the movement and that their signatures were absent from the manifestoes. But that does not mean that there were no women present behind the scenes, or in the margins, so to speak. Though women were not active participants in Surrealism, they were obviously important as muse in their roles as wives and lovers to the male surrealists. For example, the artist Leonora Carrington was the partner of Max Ernst. Like Leonora Carrington, these women were, at the same time, artists and writers in their own right, though this was not "officially" recognized by the early surrealist movement. In "A Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-garde in France," Susan Suleiman examines the difficulties one encounters when one examines Surrealism as a "men's club" with regard to women. She refers to Xavière Gauthier's 1971 pioneering work Surréalisme et sexualité, in which Gauthier examines surrealist poetry and painting to illustrate and explain, in psychoanalytical terms, the misogynous nature of many of the male surrealists. Though the male surrealists were somewhat supportive of several women writers and artists (Breton's promotion of Joyce Mansour, for example), they generally failed to acknowledge their female counterparts. The roles they had assigned to women in surrealist poetics, those of muse and object of desire, blocked the surrealist's ability to see women as "independent, active subjects" (Raabert 2). The "women behind the scenes" of Surrealism were, as Raaberg states, on average younger than the male surrealists, and thus they "often produced their most mature work after their relationships with the male Surrealists and the movement had ended" (2). As Raaberg also acknowledges, the women associated with the movement belong more properly to a "second generation of surrealists" (2).

One might argue that the Surrealism of the works of these women was finally officially recognized in the 1977 review Obliques. This surrealist journal was devoted to La Femme surréaliste. This issue of Obliques represented the first catalog of "surrealist women" in alphabetical order, complete with photographs and bibliographies. However, J. H. Matthews did include Joyce Mansour in his 1969 collection of surrealist poets entitled Surrealist Poetry in France. Suleiman also mentions Lea Vergine's 1980 work L'Autre moitié de l'avant-garde, which "sought to document the lives and work of women artists associated with all the major European avant-garde movements between 1910 and 1940, and which included eighteen women under the heading Surréalisme" (Suleiman 157). More recent efforts include Surrealism and Women, edited by Mary Anne Caws et al. (MIT Press, 1991), Whitney Chadwick's Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985), and Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron's Le Surréalisme et le roman (Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1983). There was a "hidden" association of women artists and writers behind the surrealist movement, and one can understand that Marguerite Duras, too, fell under Surrealism's spell, and that, as a result, she might, in her own writing, expand our conception of this male movement to include the feminine viewpoint. Duras thus renders the movement feminine, in what I will call her feminization of Surrealism.

Both André Breton, our representative surrealist, and Marguerite Duras seem to have had similar agendas in mind in many respects: both sought the subversion of existing order and the freeing of individual desire (Cottenet-Hage 541). As Cottenet-Hage points out, love is the seminal, if not the unique, theme of Duras's work. When asked to describe her writing, she labels herself "un écrivain du désir." Breton, too, believed in the power of erotic desire to transform one's life by projecting one into the realm of the marvelous. For Duras, writing necessarily has a sexual role, since, as she said in La Vie matérielle, writers are "des objects sexuels par excellence" (77). In Surrealism, too, writing, sexuality and desire are all interrelated. For the surrealists, poetry and love "represent the overthrow of restraint, and the affirmation of total liberty" (Matthews Surrealist Poetry 8). Thus, the surrealists, believing in the revolutionary and transformational powers of erotic desire wanted to use poetry as the locus where they could give free reign to desire. In their quest for an absolute and unique love, they placed woman at the center of their activities. As Whitney Chadwick notes, "no artistic movement since Romanticism has elevated the image of woman to as significant a role in the creative life of man as Surrealism did; no group or movement has ever defined such a revolutionary role for her" (7). Chadwick is essentially interpreting what Breton said in his Manifestes. In a note in his 1929 Manifeste du surréalisme, Breton writes that "le problème de la femme est, au monde, tout ce qu'il y a de merveilleux et de trouble" (129). Breton and the surrealists believed in the power of erotic desire in their attempt to flee the temporal and spatial limits of society as they knew it. Woman opened the pathway to a new conception of the world.

With the projection of love and desire in surrealist poetry, the surrealists wanted to create the conditions necessary for an epiphany of new forms of meaning. For the surrealists, love has the power to reveal a side of the real which had been previously hidden by conventions of habit (Matthews Surrealist Poetry 112). As Susan Suleiman suggests:

There has existed since Surrealism a strong and almost continuous current in French literary and artistic practice and thought, based on the double exigency to "be absolutely modern" and to change, if not the world, at least—as a first step—the way we think about the world. This recurrent tendency has expressed itself with remarkable consistency, privileging certain concepts (heterogeneity, play, marginality, transgression, the unconscious, eroticism, excess), and mounting heavy attacks on others (representation, the unitary subject, unitary meaning, linear narrative, the realist novel, paternal authority).¹³

Both writers in question indeed privilege the concepts of marginality, transgression, and eroticism. They try to liberate the imaginary through an exploration of the unconscious. To this end, Duras and Breton each seek to destroy linear narrative, unitary meaning, representation, and the realist novel in the process. But in Surrealism, the language of love is a male language, its object woman. The surrealists define her image in terms of male desires (Chadwick 103). We have seen that there are female artists associated with the surrealist movement, yet:

a woman surrealist cannot simply assume a subject position and take over a stock of images elaborated by the male imagery; in order to innovate, she has to invent her own position as subject and elaborate her own set of images—different from, yet as empowering as the image of the exposed female body, with its endless potential for manipulation, disarticulation and rearticulation, fantasizing and projection, is for her male colleagues.
("A Double Margin" 164)

The male surrealists chose to forget that "not all spectators of art are heterosexual males," so if "women are to be part of an avant-garde movement, they will do well to found it themselves" (Suleiman 158). And this is what Duras does: I want to argue that Duras, in her feminization of Surrealism, creates her own feminine realm of the marvelous.

As I have already suggested, for Breton, the novel and poetry as genres, are diametrically opposed. Actually, in opposition to Breton, Duras wrote novels, and only progressively did they become poetic in nature. In Duras's most recent, and final, work, C'est tout, she seems to blend the two genres together, and in doing so, frees literature from strict genre constraints. Duras seems to illustrate, as the title of Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron's article suggests, this critic's comment that there are many "versants et versions du surréalisme français,"¹⁴ for Duras's feminization of Surrealism culminates in C'est tout.

When C'est tout was published in 1995, many critics, as David Coward states, dismissed it as a "tasteless exercise in deathbed exploitation" ("Light from a Dying Star" TLS May 21 1999). I, however, find that this work serves as a point of departure that calls for a reexamination of Duras's corpus. C'est tout consists of a series of writings from November 20th, 1994 to August 1st, 1995, and reads much like a journal intime in which Duras expresses her fears of imminent death, and comments on the process of her writing. In this text, she also demonstrates her love and desire for Yann Andréa, a young homosexual man with whom she lived from 1980 until her death in 1996. But more importantly, this work is poetic in nature, and the words are arranged on the pages like lines of poetry. Much in the way Breton and the surrealists combine and manipulate words in novel ways in their poetry in an attempt to liberate the marvelous occasionally resulting from the interaction of contradictory meanings, "the elliptic fragments of Duras's discourse produce poetic écarts."¹⁵ When asked about the poetic nature of her work in the phone interview with Susan Detlefsen, Duras quipped: "S'il y a un élément poétique dans mon oeuvre, j'en suis tout à fait inconsciente. D'ailleurs, les questions de style ne m'ont jamais beaucoup intéressé" (61). Duras elsewhere refers to the poetic quality of her own work, in a blatant contradiction that is common to Duras, when she calls her work, Moderato cantabile, a poem as opposed to a novel in an interview with Bettina L. Knapp. Duras describes the written word as "un poème par le mot. Le mot jouant tous les rôles.…Lemot étant jeté" (Vircondelet Marguerite Duras ou le temps de détruire 162). Duras's conception of the written word again links her to the surrealists who privilege poetry over all other forms of writing.

Thus Duras's later writing increasingly fuses prose with poetry. For example, the short diary C'est tout is reminiscent of the surrealist poetry of Paul Eluard, for whom the love of and desire for a woman is the source of all inspiration and revelation. Yet, Duras reverses the surrealist role of women, when, often, the female becomes the desiring subject, and the male becomes the object of desire. This is the springboard by which Duras transforms and feminizes the literary practice of Surrealism. In a reversal of surrealist poetics, Duras indicates that "sans homme il n'y aura plus rien" (36), and she dedicates C'est tout to Yann: "Pour Yann mon amant de la nuit. Signé Marguerite, l'amante de cet amant adoré, le 20 novembre 1994, Paris, rue Saint-Benoît" (7).

In the surreal and poetic tradition of the troubadours, Yann, as her muse, served as the inspiration for her writings: "Tu es l'auteur de tout" (41) she says, and "Tout a été écrit par toi, par ce corps que tu as" (42). In fact, Yann is the anonymous hero to whom Duras dedicated the series of works I refer to as the "Yann cycle:" Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, Emily L., L'Homme atlantique, Yann Andrea Steiner, L'Eté 80, La Maladie de la mort, as well as La Pute de la côte Normande, L'Homme assis dans le couloir, and C'est tout. In C'est tout, the "entry-poem" of July 24th in particular reads as a surrealist ode to man, which emphasizes Duras's feminization of Surrealism.

Venez m'aimer.
Venez.
Viens dans ce papier blanc.
Avec moi.

Je te donne ma peau.
Viens.
Vite.

Dis-moi au revoir.
C'est tout.
Je ne sais plus rien de toi.

Je m'en vais avec les algues.
Viens avec moi.
(53)

Here, the reader can envision Duras lying on a bed made up of white sheets ("Viens dans ce papier blanc"), as she calls to her companion to join her in her longing for a surreal fusion with his being ("Je te donne ma peau"). This entry poem recalls, to press my analogy, the opening lines of Breton's "Sur la route de San Romano," in which "La poésie se fait dans un lit comme l'amour / Ses draps défaits sont l'aurore des choses" (Signe ascendant. Gallimard, Poésie. 1968. 122). For Duras, as for the surrealists, all boundary limitations between the real and the unreal are blurred, as the above example illustrates. Duras renders these surreal images feminine when she becomes the desiring subject. Her skin envelops Yann as he becomes one with her in the bed made up of white sheets. The white sheets also suggest a sheet of white paper as it, too, envelops and covers that which is underneath. Duras says of her writing: "que du moment que ce n'est pas, toutes choses confondues … écrire ce n'est rien. Que du moment que ce n'est pas, chaque fois, toutes choses confondues en une seule par essence inqualifiable, écrire ce n'est rient que publicité" (Amant 14-15), which I translate to mean that for Duras, the act of writing is not a worthwhile endeavor unless it surpasses all boundary limitations.

Duras's conception of the act of writing itself is analogous to the surrealist practice of écriture automatique. The goal of Surrealism is to liberate the unconscious freed from all control of reason. In 1924, André Breton defined Surrealism as the "automatisme psychique pur par lequel on ne propose d'exprimer, soit verbalement, soit par écrit, soit de toute autre manière, le fonctionnement réel de la pensée. Dictée de la pensée, en l'absence de tout contrôle exercé par la raison" (Manifestes du surréalisme 36). The narrator of Duras's Emily L. gives an analogous definition of écriture automatique in the following passage: "il fallait écrire sans correction, pas forcément vite, à tout allure, non, mais selon soi et selon le moment qu'on traverse, soi, à ce moment-là … ne rien élever de sa masse inutile, rien, la laisser entière avec le reste, ne rien assagir, ni vitesse ni lenteur, laisser tout dans l'état de l'apparition" (153-154). Duras said herself that to write is to "laisser le mot venir quand il vient, l'attraper comme il vient, à sa place de départ, ou ailleurs, quand il passe. Et vite, vite écrire" (qtd. in Armel "J'ai vécu le mythe" 20). And Duras often seems to practice automatic writing, for, as she explains, "le livre s'inventait, se faisait à son insu: Tout se fait sans contrôle, dans un ordre qui échappe à soi et même au monde … Il s'agit d'attraper vite les mots qui s'échappent de la tête (cette passoire), et de les inscrire sur le papier." And for Duras, the creative process is necessarily the fruit of chance when she states: "C'est ainsi que tout se fait; étrange histoire de la création … issue du hasard." Breton and the surrealists heeded the impulse of chance when they, too, committed their automatic, spontaneous thoughts to paper.

The surrealists label these spontaneous thoughts le hasard objectif, which, according to Michel Carrouges, "serait l'ensemble des prémonitions, des rencontres insolites et des coïncidences stupéfiantes, qui se manifestent de temps à autre dans la vie humaine."¹⁶ In her writing, Duras mentioned two such coincidences which she recounted to Michelle Porte in Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras. When asked about the place name S. Thala that she used in her work Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Duras acknowledged that "c'est très tard que je me suis aperçue que ce n'était pas S. Thala, mais Thalassa" (85). Michelle Porte asked Duras if she intended to write Thalassa in her work, to which Duras replied "no." For the surrealists, this is a revelatory coincidence [.…] In the same interview Duras referred to a second incidence of discovery that was not consciously controlled nor intended when she made the film Hiroshima mon amour : "j'ai fait Hiroshima, il y a seize ans maintenant et je me suis aperçue il y a deux ans peut-être que Nevers c'était never (jamais) en anglais. Je me jouie des tours comme ça, souvent, c'est bizarre" (85). Duras went on to say that: "ça me fait plaisir quand je découvre ça, les choses que je n'ai pas voulues, ces accidents, si vous voulez" (85). For Breton, the coincidences that arrive from moments of chance are revelatory, and he delights in their lack of intentionality. Such moments are revelatory because they link together two similar, yet separate events that occurred at different times. The first event, already forgotten, is thus mysteriously called back to the present. For example, in L'Amour fou, Breton recounted one day that in 1934, he bought a spoon with a little shoe (slipper) worked into the handle while walking in a flea market with Alberto Giacometti. After his purchase, he recalled that a few months earlier he had tried to convince Giacometti to make an ash tray that Breton called a cendrier Cendrillon, whose inspiration stems from a phrase Breton had imagined when he was not yet fully awake (Chénieux-Gendron 114). Thus, this incident of coincidence was revelatory for Breton since the spoon recalled to him his earlier idea for a Cinderella slipper ash tray. In this case, chance, knocking on his unconscious, somehow urged Breton to purchase the spoon. After his purchase, he then was able to link the two episodes together.

In his Premier manifeste du surréalisme Breton lists several "secrets de l'art magique surréaliste," and among these is the recommendation to "écrire vite sans sujet préconçu" (41). Duras's conception of writing fiction is analogous of Breton's imperative to "capter la coulée d'un autre sens" (Picon 23) by using the technique of écriture courante which is analogous to écriture automatique. Like the flow of running water, Duras, too, would begin the writing process without regard for a preestablished or mapped out story line. She told Michelle Porte that: "Je me méfie, d'une histoire faite, toute faite, voyez, déjà avant d'écrire, avec un commencement, un milieu, une fin, des péripéties,… Jene comprends pas comment on peut écrire une histoire déjà explorée, inventoriée, recensée" (Les Lieux de Marguerite Duras 37). For Duras, the term écriture courante replaces the surrealist écriture automatique, and implies a transformation of this concept. Duras coined the expression écriture courante in her novel L'Amant in the passage where she explains that she can write about her mother now that she no longer remembers the color of her eyes or the perfume she wore. "C'est fini," Duras says, "je ne me souviens plus. C'est pourquoi j'en écris si facile d'elle maintenant, si long, si étiré, elle est devenue écriture courante" (38). In French, the adjectif courant means, among other things, "quotidian" or "common;" and the emphasis on "daily" parallels the way the surrealists attempted to capture sparks of the marvelous in everyday occurrences.

Duras used what she called écriture courante for the first time in Eté 80, which is a collection of essays dealing with daily events first published in La Libération. Aliette Armel describes this work by saying that it is "la première mise en oeuvre de ce que Duras appelle l'écriture courante, où les événements de Gdansk en Pologne se mêlent au récit très intime de ses rêves de vacances et de l'arrivée d'un homme dans sa vie" ("Le Jeu autobiographique" 31). In 1987, in La Vie matérielle, Duras referred to her writing as "l'écriture flottante" (9). And as many critics have pointed out, courant in French also refers to the movement of water—i.e. running water—and this image is appropriate because, in the Durassian universe, bodies of water abound in images of the mer, delta, and fleuves. Water serves as the foreground to much of Duras's work, which leaves the reader with the impression that there is no stable ground on which the discourse is fixed, there is only the fluid passage of water "in which scenarios, situations, persons are never arrested, jelled, but emigrate and fuse with each other."¹⁷ In Marie-Paule Ha's analysis, Duras's writing thus became a kind of mer-écriture where "the movement of writing itself which like the lines traced by the Pacific tides, erases itself no sooner has it been formed. Constantly on the move, the Durassian text is never fixed" (318).

In addition to the practice of writing, Duras shared the surrealist goal to reject the fixity of language in their search for the transformation of consciousness. With explicably political designs in Les Parleuses, Duras allowed Xavière Gauthier to call her works revolutionary: "je crois que ce sont des livres entièrement révolutionnaires, entièrement d'avant-garde, et d'un point de vue habituel révolutionnaire et d'un point de vue de femme …" (61). Surrealist works in general are also considered revolutionary because they looked to previously unexplored realms to find an absolute. Dreams, madness, and the unconscious were their realms, and they purposefully played with language in hopes of producing the spark that would open for them the domain of an absolute reality. In this sense, they heeded Baudelaire's revolutionary cry: "Au fond de l'inconnu pour trouver du nouveau." As a feminist revolutionary, Duras, too, delves into her feminine unconscious, as she takes Surrealism's rejection of the fixity of "normal" language one step farther by totally rejecting, in dadaistic fashion, language. For her, meaningful communication will take place outside the realm of language, and is a revolutionary act. As Roland Barthes suggests, "déplacer la parole, c'est faire une revolution."¹⁸ And though Duras does not consciously seek to follow Breton's imperative, she seemingly adopts the culminating cry of the Premier manifeste du surréalisme that "l'existence est ailleurs" (60) when she displaces the writing in her works into silence. In line with surrealist goals, Duras, too, is in search of a new form of writing, one that, according to Noëlle Carruggi, "laisse transparaître toute la dimension de l'impalpable, de l'insaisissable ou de l'irréprésentable" (Marguerite Duras 3). Carruggi astutely observes that ignorance is "la seule vraie connaissance" (3) in the Durassian universe, which ultimately leads Duras down the road to silence. As Verena Andermatt Conley suggests, Duras writes of "meaning that is about to merge but also to disappear."¹⁹

For Duras, emptiness and silence become the basis for a feminine aesthetic that equals the surrealist ideal of the marvelous that is revealed in "the repeated transformation of the individual subject through the fusion with others" (Hirsch 84). Marianne Hirsch explains that Duras's feminine aesthetic "lies in the affirmation of death and destruction, not as an end of life, but as a means to other lives which emerge after silence and emptiness have been reached, which emerge through emptiness and silence, through fiction and beyond it."²⁰ Duras believes that women have, "in response to centuries of silence and oppression imposed on them, turned in on themselves and become attuned to silence" (Murphy Alienation and Absence 26). But whereas Murphy claims that it is the emergence from silence that Duras aims to portray in her works (as manifested in the female protagonists in her texts when they break out of their mold of lethargy and inaction), I would say that the emergence from silence is only implied and hoped for at the end of her literary career. Duras's last work, C'est tout, a post-scriptum if you will, ends in silence, for by then Duras has exhausted all possibility of expression, written or spoken. As Alain Vircondelet suggests, "chacun des texts de sa bibliographie est une trace de plus dans la comprehension générale de Marguerite Duras, dont on ne saura l'ampleur et l'importance qu'après sa mort, quand elle aura cessé d'écrire" (Pour Duras 75). If we heed Vircondelet's suggestion, Duras's final work is revealing and serves as a starting point from which to evaluate her entire corpus.

For Duras, the end was always a beginning, and the ultimate silence at which her work aimed was hinted at from the beginning. With her final text (C'est tout ) in mind, I suggest a re-evaluation of the Durassian corpus based on a comparison of the ultimate silence of her texts to the surrealist ideal of the marvelous. For Duras, silence is the only solution possible to "l'immense tristesse du monde" that she talks about in her first published novel (Les Impudents 233). This idea, as Carol Murphy puts it, "lays the thematic and stylistic groundwork for future texts" (Alienation and Absence 27). Like the surrealists, Duras, too, was looking for a solution to a world gone bad. It is through writing that Duras transforms "le monde pourri en lendemain nouveau" (Vircondelet Marguerite Duras 1972 8). But, as Duras herself suggests, the reader must interpret the silences, for these gaps leave space for sentences to come: "Parfois c'est la place d'une phrase à venir qui se propose. Parfois rien, à peine une place, une forme, ouverte, à prendre. Mais tout doit être lu, la place vide aussi" (Les Yeux verts 49). Thus for Duras, the feminine locus for a surreal revelation is the space language leaves behind when it disappears into the whiteness of the page.

Due to Duras's emphasis on the void, on silence, her fiction has been labeled, on the one hand, experimental and, on the other hand, interpreted as representative of feminist writing. Hélène Cixous gives praise to Marguerite Duras, whose writing, she believes, is the best representation of écriture feminine. Hélène Cixous believes that the act of women writing is necessarily revolutionary, which goes hand in hand with the surrealist concept that writing represents the very possibility of change. Cixous's concept of écriture feminine closely resembles the surrealist practice of écriture automatique, for it is a type of writing that emanates from the body, and allows the unconscious to speak. This type of spontaneous writing challenges normal "male" language because it "disrupts the text down to the level of sentences and word usage. In so doing language is being decentered and liberated."²¹ But Duras liberates language more than the surrealists with her use of breaks and blanks in her writing; she does more than decenter it; she displaces language into silence, and in doing so, she adds a feminine dimension to surrealist aesthetics.

In Les Parleuses, Xavière Gauthier questioned Duras about "feminine writing," about the blanks and holes specifically in L'Amour, and suggested that only a woman could write such a work. Duras in turn replied "qui sait," but then went on to explain that the appearance of such blanks is not due to a conscious effort on her part: "C'est des blancs, si vous voulez, qui s'imposent. Ça se passé comme ça: je vous dis comment ça se passé, c'est des blancs qui apparaissent, peut-être sous le coup d'un rejet violent de la syntaxe …" (12). The incorporation of silences in her works challenges phallocentric discourse and linear narrative. But more importantly, "the silences of course, demonstrate the failure of language to accommodate female experience" (Wiedermann 106). Bernard Alazet, in his discussion of Le Navire night, evokes the image of the white page, referring to the text as a "territoire aveuglé de lumière qu'est la page blanche" (38). The white page could also refer to the empty page, in that the writing on the page is obliterated by the intense light until nothing remains. If one accepts the traditional view that light is typically associated with the masculine—in Greek mythology Helios is a sun god—and dark with that which is feminine, then one could say the feminine is being oppressed, subverted by the masculine. The introduction of silences (blanks) represents the leitmotiv durassien, that of "l'impossibilité de dire, le dire et ne pas dire, le dire indicible."²² The Durassian paradox is that as a writer, Duras nonetheless uses language, in writing, to express that which cannot be expressed: "ces pages vides à force d'être pleines, illisibles à force d'être écrites, d'être pleines d'écritures."

To conclude this introduction, Duras's writing is analogous to the surrealist endeavor in the areas of convergence mentioned above. Yet, up to the present time, no in-depth study exists that explores Duras's affiliation with Surrealism. Several brief but significant articles, footnotes, and references to Surrealism in her works have set the groundwork for such a study. I have already referred to Cottenet-Hage's groundbreaking article "Magnetic Fields II," and mentioned Jean Decottignie's suggestive footnote in the "Le Poète et la stature," as well as relevant remarks made by Duras herself and those of her critics such as Alain Vircondelet and Christiane Blot-Labarrère. Susan Rubin Suleiman explores similarities between Duras and Surrealism in "Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein," and Micheline Tison-Braun compares Breton and Duras's concept of fidelity in her 1985 work entitled Marguerite Duras. More recently, in her 1998 biography, Marguerite Duras, Laure Adler expresses the opinion that Duras's writing is "profondément influencée par le surréalisme" (440) in the sense that Duras is interested in all that which lies outside the limits of "un réel qu'elle trouve bien pauvre et trop plat" (440). Building on these articles and books, I propose here a more detailed analysis of the relation between Surrealism and Duras's work. There are many areas of convergence to explore, as Madeleine Cottenet-Hage would put it. Duras and the surrealists share a similar quest for the universal or absolute. In each case, the desired effect of writing evokes a strong emotional reaction (whether positive or negative) on the part of the reader. They both appeal to the depths of the unconscious, and they equally privilege the significance of l'attente for love. And of course, la folie is prevalent in the Durassian universe and in surrealist aesthetics as well. Madness ultimately leads us to the surrealist concept of l'amour fou, a type of love that expresses desires that defy the control of social norms or reason. In her literary universe, Marguerite Duras expands the surrealist notion of amour fou by replacing the male language used to express feminine sexuality. She celebrates the feminine. To study this, it is necessary to examine the degree to which, in selected works, Duras expands or transforms surrealist principles and creates a new realm that translates the female experience. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage states that if "Surrealism can be credited with having facilitated the shameless expression of Man's erotic impulses, Duras can be credited with having endowed woman's eroticism with a direct language" (546). Though, as this study will show, the "direct language" ultimately becomes the non-language of silence. Duras's work shows that it is possible for women to find meaning within the masculine literary practice of Surrealism by breaking down the barrier to what is traditionally considered a male domain. In my opinion, a surrealist sensuality infuses the Durassian corpus from beginning to end and serves as a "conceptual thread" that allows the reader a fresh approach in understanding, evaluating, and appreciating Durasie.²³

Notes

Gabrielle Frémont, "Madeleine Gagnon: Du politique à l'intime," Voix et Images 8.1 (1982): 23.
I quote part of the title of Michelle Beauclair's innovative work entitled Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras and the Legacy of Mourning (New York: Peter Lang, 1998).
Alice J. Jardine and Anne M. Menke, Shifting Scenes: Interviews on Women, Writings, and Politics in Post-68 France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991): 77.
See Jane Winston, "Forever Feminine: Marguerite Duras and Her French Critics," New Literary History 24.2 (1993).
Interestingly enough, Marguerite Duras brought a suit against Frédérique Lebelley for her work Duras ou le poids d'une plume, referred to here as a "biographie romancée," according to her son Jean Mascolo in an interview with Danielle Laurin for Courrier International 364 (23-29 octobre 1997) 22.
Germaine Brée refers to this novel as La Famille Thanakya, and states that it was rejected in 1941 by Gallimard ("A Singular Adventure: The Writings of Marguerite Duras." L'Esprit créateur 30.1 (1990): 8-14.).
Dionys Mascolo, father of Jean Mascolo, died August 20, 1997.
Winston quotes Alain Vircondelet, Duras: biographie (Paris: François Bourin, 1991) 469.
See Alain Vircondelet, Duras: biographie (Paris: François Bourin, 1991) 304-305.
Alain Vircondelet, Pour Duras (Mesnil-sur-l'Estrée: Editions Calmann-Lévy, 1995) 85.
Winston 480.
From an interview in La Création étoufée, Horay, 1973, quoted in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., New French Feminisms (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980): 112.
Susan Suleiman, "A Double Margin: Reflections on Women Writers and the Avant-garde in France," Yale French Studies 75 (1988): 149.
Jacqueline Chénieux-Gendron, "Versants et versions du surréalisme français," Revue des Sciences Humaines 56.184 (1981): 11-31.
Susan Detlefsen, "A Rethinking of Genre and Gender Through a Reading of Yes peut-être," Journal of Durassian Studies 1 (1989): 66.
Michel Carrouges, "Le hasard objectif," Entretiens sur le surréalisme, Ed. Ferdinand Alquié (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1968): 271.
Germaine Brée, "A Singular Adventure: The Writing of Marguerite Duras," L'Esprit Créateur 3.1 (1990): 10.
Quoted in Bénédicte Mauguière, "Critique littéraire féministe et écriture des femmes au Québec (1970-80)," The French Review 63.4 (1990): 632.
Verena Andermatt Conley, "Signs of Love: Duras's Minimal Ways," L'Esprit Créateur 29.3 (1989): 107.
Mariane Hirsch, "Gender, Reading, and Desire in Moderato Cantabile," Twentieth Century Literature 28.1 (1982): 84.
Barbara Wiedeman, "The Search for an Authentic Voice: Hélène Cixous and Marguerite Duras," Journal of Durassian Studies 1 (1980): 103.
Mareille Calle-Gruber, "L'Amour fou, femme fatale: Marguerite Duras," Le Nouveau Roman en Questions, Ed. Robert-Michel Allemand (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1992): 19.
The term is coined by Claude Roy in "Duras tout entière à la langue attachée" in Le Nouvel Observateur 31 août 1984.