From “Chinese bound feet” to “Chinese lover(s)” – excerpts from Marguerite Duras: La chambre noire de l’écriture

Abstract

Abstract This paper draws on a translated and adapted excerpt from the author’s book, Marguerite Duras: La chambre noire de l’écriture (2021) (original title: 玛格丽特·杜拉斯:写作的暗房). Starting with Marguerite Duras’s unpublished essay, “Les petits pieds de la Chine,” written around 1950, this paper aims to reveal how childhood memories are generated and transformed into Duras’s typical mode of writing about the self over time, which holds good for understanding and analyzing the five versions of lover(s) that Duras created from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The theme and destination of Duras’s creation is not so much love as writing, which never stops generating “another possibility of returning to the original book.”