Faits divers, forcément

She gave supplements to the "Duras story" every time she granted interviews to newspaper, magazine, and television journalists. Her easy access to a huge public enabled her to interweave the incidents of her documented public life into an intricate fabric of fiction. This life is a fait divers in performance, starring Marguerite Duras in the leading role, as in Le Camion or on television. She knew how to manipulate her public's reception of her character. Like the voyeur in the love triangle so often represented in her fiction, the public became her intermediary needed to communicate with her portrait. Mirroring and unmasking acts include their opposites: her identity is colored by her own distorting interventions as well as by the interviewer's leading questions, as seen in Les Parleuses. The mystification which results continues to generate a reading of Duras' fiction as reality, and her reality as fiction. The self-portrait she recreates in every text and modifies in every interview consistently encourages her readers not to do otherwise but to merge the various forms of the Duras character into one identity.

Duras, the black garbagewoman "Quinze personnalités en quête de mobilisation" (In Libération, le 21 juin 1993) Duras, with others, responded to the xenophobic turn the reform of the "code da la nationalité" seemed to be bringing with the following comments: Marguerite Duras, écrivain; je n'ai pas changé d'avis depuis 1987. Il faut absolument faire un appel général. C'est la chose la plus grave qui puisse arriver à la France. Depuis la guerre de 1940, tout ce qui a trait au code de la nationalité est fasciste. Avec ces mesures, on salit l'image de la France. J'ai écrit une lettre aux éboueurs de Paris -- que je n'ai jamais envoyée -- leur disant de ne pas avoir peur. Il faut empêcher ça. Il faut répondre par une salissure différente, inonder les murs de slogans, écrire partout en grosses lettres :

Duras and "l'Affaire Villemin" In an article published in the July 17, 1985 issue of Libération -- an article the editor of the newspaper, Serge July, presented as "scandalous" -- Duras publicly supported Christine Villemin, a woman accused of having killed her child, Gregory, several months earlier. Duras' text generated much indignation in the press, as though for once she had gone too far. Beyond the much-discussed interest Duras showed for this particular fait divers, it is interesting in the context of Duras' autofiction to read July's justification for publishing the text: not from a journalist, he wrote, but from a writer "fantasmant la réalité en quête d'une vérité qui n'est sans doute pas la vérité, mais une vérité quand même, à savoir celle du texte écrit." "Tapie, forcément" -- accompanied by a photo of Duras -- was how Le Nouvel Observateur titled their short article (5-11 mars 1992) giving Duras' support of Bernard Tapie just before regional elections in which he was a candidate. Duras often supported figures such as Christine Villemin, François Mitterrand, garbagemen, or Bernard Tapie -- the rich and popular French businessman who continues to have serious difficulties with French justice -- to the point at which her intermittant presence in the French press made her a virtual fait divers herself.