An Interview with Marguerite Duras

Abstract

Marguerite Duras, the distinguished French novelist, dramatist, and filmmaker, is loosely grouped with the writers of the New Novel. Linked by their revolt against the traditional novel, writers such as Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon have each found their own style and vision. Marguerite Duras, who has written sixteen novels, thirteen plays, and six film scripts over the past thirty years, is a strong case in point. In recent years, most notably since the student and worker rebellion of 1968, which crystallized French unrest and mobilized the discontented, Duras's work has taken on a new political tenor. The title of her 1969 novel is significant in this regard: Detruire: Dit-elle [Destroy, She Said]. And destruction of the old order is what Duras intends to accomplish in her literature as well as in her politics. The impact of the women's movement has led her to broaden her conception of the oppressor, to confront issues that she had formerly been able to transcend or ignore. The powers to be overthrown now include male supremacy, as pernicious in its domination of thinking, feeling, judging, and creating as in its economic and political suppression of women. It is the destruction of the male ethic that Duras attempts in her literature. No longer proud of critics' early claims that she wrote like a man, she now sees this as a trait to be purged. Indeed, she makes a conscious effort in her writing to rid herself of everything learned from men -rules, theories, techniques-to create an art which invalidates traditional logic and confounds systematic political and philosophical thinking. Since Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953), she has rejected the descriptive, analytic, and linear qualities of her early style in favor of one that is suggestive, poetic, and disdainful of chronology (e.g., as in Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein [The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein]. The well-