: Mechthild Cranston, ed.
: In Language and in Love Marguerite Duras: the Unspeakable
: Digitalia
: 9780916379971
: 1
: CHF 51.30
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: Kunst, Literatur
: English
: 174
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This collection of eight critical essays on the modern French novelist (selected from a session devoted to her at the 1991 MLA meeting) employs contemporary theory to examine“the unspeakable” in relation to postmodern (and classical) issues of desire and language: textuality, selfhood, femininity, psychoanalysis, madness, ontology, and mythology.
INTRODUCTION (p. 1)

Mechthild Cranston

Even before the appearance of L`Amant de la Chine du Nord on the Paris scene last summer (come to dislodge, even before its release, Jean-Jacques Annaud`s film version of Marguerite Duras` earlier L`Amant, Prix Goncourt 1984) and prior to the debates sparked by the new Lover in publications like Liberation, Le Monde, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Le Point (June 1991), more than two dozen scholars on this side of the Atlantic suggested to the Modern Language Association of America meeting in San Francisco a session on"Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable."

From among the many interesting articles received, eight were chosen to make up the present anthology, meant not to displace, but to com- plement Sanford Ames` 1988 collection, Remains to be Seen, the first volume of essays in English devoted to Marguerite Duras.

From the beginning, our title vacillated between the unspeakable and the unnamable, the word and the fiction, the person and the persona of Marguerite Duras. Opting, finally, for Marguerite Duras: The Unspeakable, we are, of course, aware of that title`s inherent ambiguity and contradiction, since the essays presented here do indeed speak—and at length—of Hiroshima mon amour, 1960, Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, 1964, Le Vice-consul, 1965, La Maladie de la mort, 1982, Emily L., 1987,

La Pluie d`ete, 1990, L`Amant and L`Amant de la Chine du Nord, raising, along the way, the larger issues of language and madness,"truth" and"translation," autobiography and fiction, restoration and deception, the historical fact and the private myth of"celle qui n`est pas nominee," the unnamed and perhaps unnamable child of L`Amant, the in-fans of the Durassian universe that turns on the Pacific and Hiroshima, on Auschwitz and Never(s).

"Books," John Knowles declared during a recent reading from his autobiography,"books come out of trees." For us, the listeners, Knowles` unfinished autobiography also came, of course, out of the mouth of the speaker. Against the biographical/biological testing ground of the authorial, the essays collected here seek the textual body, a visual plane which, probed deeply, may surrender a voice, if not yet a name.

Speaking of Balzac`s novels, Duras has said,"His books are indigestible. There`s no place for the reader," which, fortunately, does not keep her from adding, in the same interview,"Balzac was my earliest nourishment." Reflecting on the contemporary cinema, Duras commented,"II faut de 1`air. On ne re- spire plus dans les films [. . .] moi, j`ai ca." The"open" air, the breath for which she herself must now struggle, physically,10 is the in-spiration Duras offers her listener, the place she makes for the reader in the silences and empty spaces of her texts.

Into the blanks thus created, the contributors to this anthology—come from different national and critical backgrounds, and at various stages of their careers—have placed their divergent views and interpretations of the Durassian oeuvre.
TABLE OF CONTENTS8
INTRODUCTION10
I: DAME DURAS: BREAKING THROUGH THE TEXT21
II: ELLE EST UNE AUTRE: THE DUPLICITY OF SELF IN L'AMANT46
III: THE UNSPEAKABLE HEROINE OF EMILY L61
IV: LOSS, ABANDONMENT, AND LOVE: THE EGO IN EXILE75
V: BATTAMBANG: THE UNNAMABLE98
VI: DURAS' 'LAUGHING CURE' FOR LACAN'S HYSTERICAL LACK109
VII: MEMORY AS ONTOLOGICAL DISRUPTION: HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR AS A POSTMODERN WORK128
VIII: IMAGINATION INTO MYTH: LOVE (LANGUAGE) AS MADNESS IN PLATO AND DURAS148
SELECTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY159
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS167