Framing Duras

"Plus rien. Nulle part. Que la vérité de la vérité et le mensonge du mensonge." (Yann Andréa Steiner, 129)

Duras' narrators can openly declare that they are prone to invention or lying (cf. Armel 148ff); the visible narrative framework in which they exist is equally invented and untrustworthy. Duras forces her public to confront the existing (but artificial, theatrical) "barriers" that frame her narrations, before expounding upon the futility of any attempt to transcend this visible framework and to achieve communication. The autobiographical enterprise of her late career carries with it a barrier of incommunicability since the non-fictive identity is structured by means of the multiple (and often unreliable) framework of text and interview, film and theatrical performance.

Mise en abyme is but one form of metanarrative focus Duras uses to expose her narrative framework. Told in the conditionnel parfait, Le Camion begins with a metanarrative "it would have been a film, therefore it is a film." The "you" of L'Homme atlantique steps off-camera, even where, in the prose version of the film, there is no camera. As demonstrated with her "couloirs scéniques," Duras shows how a stage direction in a text draws attention to the textual form, its framework and its limitations.

She also alludes, through stage direction or camera angles, to extratextual performances of the text in a modified form: plots and scenes recur in any of the distinct or composite ("texte/théâtre/film") narrative forms Duras tends to "fusionner" (Armel, 117). Framing Duras © 1996 Eclectic Iconoclast In L'Amant de la Chine du Nord, metanarrative focus serves to compare the novel to previous Durassian fictions. Often referring to "the book(s)" or "the other book(s)," this extra- and intertextual mirroring of previous works exposes the unnamed Marguerite Duras. The new version of L'Amant is strictly third-person narrative; the "she" and "I" of L'Amant have been fused into "she," who speaks of "le premier livre," what was said elsewhere "Et encore elle le dit ici" (78-79).

The intertextual borrowing, or "self-plagiarism" to which she readily admits (e.g., in the "Apostrophes" interview and in L'Amant de la Chine du Nord), puts metanarrative focus on "this book" when it is compared to the extratextual works to which Duras refers, either through reference within the text (52, e.g.) or by listing, in footnotes, the titles of her earlier novels and films.

Écrire. Je ne peux pas. [...] Il faut le dire: on ne peut pas. Et on écrit. [...] Je ne peux rien dire. Je ne peux rien écrire. (Écrire 63-64, 86)

Mars à Montparnasse photo T. Spear

The rose petals decorating this page are from Marguerite Duras' funeral, fading souvenirs from a gravesite.

When Duras states in L'Amant that "L'histoire de ma vie n'existe pas" (14), she's lying, of course. Neither autobiography nor fiction, she tells multiple variations of her autofictive legend. Like the missing photograph of L'Amant, the autobiographical reality cannot be rendered into clear representation. Before Bernard Pivot, she wonders what this curious enterprise of writing (écriture) is and why one would attempt this impossible doubling of one's self through writing. "Il n'y a rien de plus mystérieux que ça," she wrote, "ce dédoublement de l'être humain dans l'écrit" (Outside 2 24). Writing is a "filter," she says, that modifies and transforms reality; it is not an autobiographical mirroring: "c'est une sorte de désincrustation de l'expérience et même de l'imaginaire" (M.D. à Montréal 58). "L'Amant n'est pas un récit autobiographique," she says in another interview, "c'est une traduction" (Le Monde 13 juin 1991). Mimicked and parodied by her large public, Duras creates a portrait of a woman characterized by excessive tears, alcohol, sorrow, and impossibly passionate love. Through frequent public appearances, her fiction is augmented by an autobiographical paratext which links the character portrait to that of herself: "Je vais de moi à moi. C'est ça le narcissisme" (Le Monde 13 juin 1991). By rendering visible the constricting structure of her films and texts, she reminds us of the limitations of fictional representation. Her readers become voyeurs gazing through the narrative framework of the Durassian legend. She, Duras, willingly exhibits her persona as the paid storyteller, the Pute de la côte normande.