Public Exhibition

In her late years, Marguerite Duras became a fictional persona, a questionably autobiographical character placed on public exhibition. The author's personal creation and principal obsession was Marguerite Duras. With an ever-increasing stream of autobiographical writing and through numerous interviews, Duras' fictional focus made a shift to herself in the late 1970s.

As Aliette Armel writes, in the 1977 film, Le Camion, Duras, "la Dame au camion," first discovered "la liberté de la parole autobiographique et médiatique" (89) by acting the principal role created for herself. Especially in film -- even when the public's attention is drawn to silence or nothingness -- Duras develops an art of framing. Using Gérard Genette's narrational terminology, we can say that in the Durassian epitext (*), the author (and often her interviewers) suggests autobiographical links never made within the texts themselves. By the 1980s, Duras' creative attention becomes openly self-centered and the author stepped into the narrative terrain established in the context of her fictional world, becoming and surpassing a composite of her women protagonists. Her established fiction-writing talents are thus summoned to the task of fabricating her own persona.

Through various forms of prose narrative, theatre, and film, Duras develops a portrait of her life and career as a politically engaged writer and filmmaker. In the process, the identity of the fictional Duras becomes entangled with her public persona. Her alcohol abuse, for example, can become a joke (Les Parleuses 218) or a serious problem (La Vie matérielle 20-25), part of her fictional and real worlds. In self-parody, Duras dresses her real-life character in a "look Duras" (La Vie matérielle 75). Her mediated interviews encourage a continuity with that established in a narrative framework; Duras wills her public to accept this composite life story, a fait divers of rape and incest, alcohol and passion. She tells Bernard Pivot, "vous avez beau fouiller, j'ai vraiment vécu comme tout le monde." Nonetheless, she invites her reader, spectator, and listener to pry into the details of her life, to delve with her into the narrative of her childhood, and to believe in her fiction.

The Durassian identity is forced upon her readers, as a stage character who might reveal to her audience that she is not an actress but a woman who is speaking of her own life. Duras' commercial success was such that, for example, on the eve of the release of L'Amant de la Chine du Nord on June 14, 1991, there were double-page promotional interviews in both French dailies, Le Monde and Libération, and, a week later, she appeared on the nationally-broadcast "Caractères" television program hosted by Bernard Rapp. Naming off most every item of the text as true -- including herself: "Moi, c'est vrai" -- she told the journalist from Libération that she had returned to the land of the novel because it is "libre, désintéressé." The novel form does indeed free her from an audience's expectation to tell the truth, but her novels are not "disinterested." They are carefully constructed to coincide with her extratextual maneuvering of her readers' response. By securing her texts' presence in the media, she locks this paratextual interpretation into the reading of the works themselves.

Duras makes use of public communication channels to affect interpretation, creating combinations of fictive and autobiographical forms. In her first novels, the author's identity is never directly linked with her protagonists; in the last works, an unnamed "she" is extratextually identified as Duras herself. She not only shifts her identity into that of a fictive character but becomes this character in interviews. In C'est tout, for example, she would stage herself in dialogue with Yann Andréa, as "M.D." and "Y.A." The multiple re-writing of the Durassian persona continually changes from novel, to interview, and back into "fiction."

Her life story has become theatre. In an ironic, metanarrative commentary, she told her interviewer from Le Nouvel Observateur "On joue mes interviews maintenant" (14-20 novembre 1986). The "Marguerite Duras" identity is established in her fictions as well as in public appearances; life and text play with and against one another; Duras breaks out of a purely textual mold and becomes the "Duras" persona.
Various presentations of "Dame Duras" will demonstrate how the author invents her textual persona from fact and imagination.
"Le Look Duras"

Mo' Duras © 1996
Eclectic Iconoclast

* Note: The paratext is that which accompanies the principal text (title pages, book covers, interviews, etc.). The epitext is the portion of the paratext completely separate from the printed text itself, such as interviews and magazine articles. See Genette. (Return to text)