Marguerite Duras(1914 — 1996)
Marguerite Duras
France
7 min read
French writer, playwright, screenwriter, and filmmaker (1914–1996), Marguerite Duras is a major figure in contemporary literature. Author of The Lover, she revolutionized the novel form by exploring psychological introspection and the formal ruptures of the Nouveau Roman.
Frequently asked questions
Famous Quotes
« I believe that always, or almost always, in all childhoods and in all the lives that follow them, the mother represents madness. »
« Writing is forgetting. »
« You must never explain anything, never. »
« We know nothing about anyone. »
Key Facts
- 1943: Publication of her first novel Les Impudents (The Insolent Ones)
- 1960: Screenplay for the film Hiroshima mon amour directed by Alain Resnais
- 1984: Publication of The Lover, an autobiographical narrative that won the Prix Goncourt
- 1985: Direction of the film The Lover as a filmmaker
- 1996: Death in Paris, leaving behind a body of work considered fundamental to the Nouveau Roman
Works & Achievements
Duras's first major autobiographical novel, it recounts a poor childhood in Indochina and her mother's struggle against the colonial administration. A finalist for the Prix Goncourt, it revealed her talent to the general public.
A novel associated with the Nouveau Roman, it depicts a bourgeois woman fascinated by a crime of passion. Through its ellipses and pared-down language, it marks a major stylistic turning point in Duras's work.
The screenplay for Alain Resnais's film, exploring memory, forgetting, and love between a French woman and a Japanese man in Hiroshima. A founding work of the French New Wave, it received a special Palme d'Or at Cannes.
A novel set in colonial India, it portrays madness, marginality, and existential pain. Considered one of her most ambitious and complex texts.
A film directed by Duras, adapted from her own stage play. An experimental work dissociating voices from images, it is now considered a masterpiece of auteur cinema.
An autobiographical novel recounting her teenage affair with a Chinese man in Indochina. Awarded the Prix Goncourt and translated into forty languages, it remains her most widely read and best-known work in the world.
A collection of autobiographical texts about waiting for the return of deported Robert Antelme, rediscovered in forgotten notebooks. A shattering document on the war, the Resistance, and the pain of love.
Anecdotes
Marguerite Duras was born in French Indochina (present-day Vietnam) in 1914, under the name Marguerite Donnadieu. It was in this tropical country, marked by her family's poverty and by her encounter with a wealthy Chinese man when she was fifteen, that she would draw the material for her most celebrated novel, The Lover, published seventy years later.
In 1984, her novel The Lover won the Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize. Duras was 70 at the time: a belated but resounding consecration for an already recognized author, and the book became a worldwide bestseller translated into forty languages, with several million copies sold.
During the Second World War, Marguerite Duras joined the French Resistance. Her husband, Robert Antelme, was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Dachau concentration camp. Duras, devastated, waited months before finding him alive, emaciated to the extreme. This traumatic experience left a profound mark on her entire body of work.
Duras was a fixture of the Café de Flore and the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood in Paris, where she rubbed shoulders with Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the great intellectuals of the post-war era. Her apartment on the Rue Saint-Benoît was a meeting place for writers, filmmakers, and philosophers for several decades.
Toward the end of her life, Marguerite Duras maintained a singular relationship with Yann Andréa, a young man thirty-eight years her junior who had written her admiring letters. He became her companion, her secretary, and her witness until her death in 1996, inspiring several of her late works including Yann Andréa Steiner.
Primary Sources
I am fifteen and a half. It is the crossing of a ferry on the Mekong. The image lasts throughout the entire crossing of the river.
I found this diary in two notebooks in the blue wardrobes at Neauphle-le-Château. I have no memory of having written it.
You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. — I saw everything. Everything.
— Do you want to read? asked the lady. — No, said the child. The lady was not surprised by this refusal.
Writing is also not speaking. It is keeping silent. It is screaming without making a sound.
Key Places
Marguerite Duras's birthplace in 1914, this city near Saigon and the Mekong landscapes nourished her entire literary imagination, particularly in The Lover and The Sea Wall.
Duras's Parisian apartment where she lived for decades and received the French intelligentsia. This location at the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés was the center of her intellectual and social life.
Duras's country house where she liked to retreat to write. It was there that she rediscovered the notebooks that became The War: A Memoir, and where several film shoots took place.
A city symbolic of the worldwide trauma of the atomic bomb, made famous in Duras's work through the screenplay of Hiroshima mon amour, a meditation on memory and forgetting.
Nazi concentration camp where Robert Antelme, Duras's husband, was deported. His miraculous but physically devastated return inspired the autobiographical work The War: A Memoir.
Liens externes & ressources
Références
Œuvres
Un barrage contre le Pacifique
1950
Moderato Cantabile
1958
Le Vice-consul
1966
