Autofiction

Serge Doubrovsky's term "autofiction" serves to describe Duras' dubiously autobiographical, self-conscious terrain. Aliette Armel has studied the development of the autobiographical revelations in Duras, this writer who is directly involved in an autofictional act, "abolissant la distance que la littérature établit entre la vie et l'oeuvre " (109). According to Armel, Duras writes from the position of "absence," an absence or distancing from one's self in order to

Ultimately giving priority to the text rather than to the life represented, Duras writes autofiction, having "confié le langage d'une aventure à l'aventure du langage" (Doubrovsky 69). The autobiographical identity is defined and of course fictionalized in the language of the text. Duras' life has become the primary sustenance to her fiction, especially in her late works that Armel calls the "Yann Andréa cycle" and that I prefer to call her "autofictions."

In an autofiction such as those of Doubrovsky, multiple games are played on the names of the author/narrator. Duras prefers to leave her autofictional protagonists unnamed, in a rather "nouveau roman" characterization. In works prior to the 1980s, Duras transformed her life into fictive narrative (and/or film and theatre) where the protagonists often had names other than the simple "she" or "I" the author uses and identifies with herself in several of her late texts. The autobiographical identity is never specifically made in her texts with the name "Marguerite Duras." Rare occurrences of the initials "M.D."or the name "Duras" appear, but more frequently in texts that can be called interviews (such as La Vie matérielle and Les Parleuses) than in her novels. In L'Amant, Duras uses both first- and third-person pronouns for the narrated past and the narrating present of her narrator/character. In L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, her pivot of autobiographical identity is the third-person pronoun "elle," maintained throughout the narration to describe both "the child" of the story and "elle" who remembers the past of this child:

Duras' visible efforts to avoid naming her "fictional" character could prevent the inclusion of works such as L'Amant as autobiography in which, as Philippe Lejeune defines it, the author identifies him- or herself within the work as the narrator/character, a link made to the name and identity of the author on the book's cover (26). In L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, Duras in essence makes this link of identity within the text yet without using her proper name. The textual "she" of this novel is nameless: "Elle, c'est celle qui n'a de nom dans le premier livre ni dans celui qui l'avait précédé ni dans celui-ci" (13). The third-person "she" nonetheless incarnates the identity which mirrors back to the author. Previous works by Duras are precisely named in footnotes, and Duras explicitly identifies with this narrative persona in frequent and unambiguous extratextual declarations. As paratext (especially in television and press interviews), these declarations become an implicit part of the reading (of the textual reality). Since, however, these interviews reveal the storyteller's love to enchant listeners with embellished modifications, we can see how they contribute to the autofictive creation of the Marguerite Duras character.

As Armel argues, Duras' writing turns toward the autobiographical around 1980. An analysis of the Marguerite Duras character as presented in the press shows that the author also sympathizes with previous protagonists such as Lol V. Stein, Anne-Marie Stretter, and Suzanne of Barrage contre le Pacifique, as well as with the post-1980 "I" and/or "she"of L'Amant, Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs, Emily L. and L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Duras identifies with her women with a tarnished reputation: a white-trash whore, the Other woman, the voyeuse. She has made it impossible to distinguish life from text in her recent, most candidly autobiographical works that Armel justifiably finds to be a "fusion totale entre le texte et l'existence de celui qui écrit" (159). A portrait of Duras based on interviews compares reasonably well with that of her fictional characters, which complicates a reader's efforts to distinguish biographical detail from invention.

Pivot médiatiseur © 1996 Eclectic Iconoclast

For Bernard Pivot, when he interviewed Duras in 1984, there is never a doubt that the "I" and "she" of L'Amant is the author. Her answers, televised to so many thousands of real and potential readers, encourage the autobiographical link. Also moving beyond what is found in the text, Jean-Jacques Annaud makes this autobiographical link visually in his film adaptation of The Lover by showing "Duras'" hand writing her story in the very first scene. Nonetheless, one must make a distinction between a textual "I" and/or "she" and the author's identity, especially when this link of identity is made paratextually and not in the texts themselves.

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Speaking of Savannah Bay in an interview with Michelle Porte, Duras defines, in essence, her theatrical autofiction. She insists that, leaving the performance, "vous ne saurez pas si c'est une légende ou si c'est une histoire véritable, vraie. . . . Ça n'a aucune espèce d'importance qu'elle soit vraie ou non." As she reminds us, "there are novels truer than life."

"Duras: La Pute de la côte normande" © 1996-97 Thomas C. Spear All Rights Reserved.