Structures of Power in Duras's "Un Barrage contre le Pacifique"

Abstract

It has often been said that the early novels of Marguerite Duras resemble the American novel of the same period, particularly the novels of Hemingway. Alfred Cismaru, for one, sees a combination of adventure, brutality, drunkenness, sexual aggressiveness hiding deep frustrations, and artificial gaiety that are reminiscent of Hemingway (18). Given the tremendous popularity of American writers in the 1940s and 50s it is not at all surprising that an unproven woman writer might adopt a safe voice as her own. How else, after all, is one to find a publisher? Certainly the Duras of the 1960s and beyond would not have found acceptance easily as an unknown. Nathalie Sarraute, even with a preface by Sartre (the obligatory masculine acknowledgement), had trouble finding a publisher for her excellent first novel, Portrait d'un inconnu; and when it was published, it was not particularly well received. It is no wonder then that in Un Barrage contre le Pacifique, Duras's third novel, we find the story of a young woman struggling with a voice that is not her own, a masculine voice that she has uncomfortably adopted, mirroring the author's own subservience to an alien voice. In fact, the novel studies a number of tools of subjugation, two of which, language and the gaze, will be the focus of this discussion.