The Crimes of Marguerite Duras: Literature and the Media in Twentieth-Century France by Anne Brancky

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Crimes of Marguerite Duras: Literature and the Media in Twentieth-Century France by Anne Brancky Adrienne Angelo Brancky, Anne. The Crimes of Marguerite Duras: Literature and the Media in Twentieth-Century France. Cambridge UP, 2020. Pp. 221. ISBN 978-1-108-49038-2. $99.99 (paper). $80 (eBook). Given the amount of scholarship dedicated to Marguerite Duras's prolific oeuvre comprising novels, plays, essays, and films, as well as her career as a journalist, it is clear that Duras continues to fascinate as she remains one of the most visible if not controversial women writers of the twentieth century whose literary legacy resounds in the works of a number of contemporary women writers to this day. Anne Brancky's intriguing monograph, The Crimes of Marguerite Duras: Literature and the Media in Twentieth-Century France, provides refreshing critical insight into Duras's life and work as Brancky investigates Duras's "crimes," both as a writer and as a media figure. In her introduction, Brancky establishes the reciprocal and inseparable connections between Duras and the media. Not only, for example, did Duras seize on her literary renown to promote her work on televised interviews and in the press, but popular culture itself, and in particular crime stories and the fait divers, inspired her writings. By examining the coexisting tensions between "the lauded high literary and the belittled, feminized mass culture" (5) in relation to Duras's work, Brancky convincingly unpacks Duras's project as one rife with overlapping disturbances between the real and the fictional, the subjective and the objective, and thus as one which holds the potential for reworking crime narratives and criminal figures to political and aesthetic ends. In these introductory comments, Brancky explains the three "crimes" that structure her study: Duras's literary appropriation of the fait divers as source material, Duras's journalistic rewriting of the fait divers, and the controversy that Duras courted in her media appearances which created a fait divers-like and sensationalized public persona of Duras herself. The first chapter focuses on Duras's journalistic career which began in the late 1950s and, in particular, on Duras's rewriting of faits divers in the press. Brancky explains how Duras's subjective journalistic writing about crime marks a key period for the author, one which will shape the themes, writing style, and even ethics of Duras's later literary texts. Duras's engagement with real-life faits divers and her literary approach to reporting and commenting on them in the press lead to some uncomfortable positionings for readers who are faced with what one may call Duras's counternarratives or her own literary-inflected rewritings which challenge, and thus ask readers to question, the more widely accepted truths about specific crime cases and their legal proceedings. In this way, Duras gives voice to criminals—those on the fringes of society—and speaks on their behalf as she sheds a humanizing light on their experience. As such, Brancky argues, Duras implicitly critiques the social structures that fail them and against which they act (through crime). Yet, as Brancky points out, one cannot ignore the ambiguous [End Page 172] ethical and political dimensions of Duras's journalistic rewritings of the faits divers in which the author's empathy lies with criminals rather than victims. Exploring how Duras's readership of these crime stories is mirrored in the literature she writes, the second chapter considers Moderato cantabile (1958) and Dix heures et demie du soir en été (1960). Here Brancky examines how Duras's own avid consumption of real-life stories of crimes of passion are projected onto the female protagonists of each novel; as fascinated readers of such stories, they can be read as fictional surrogates of Duras herself. Brancky demonstrates how these novels reveal the ways in which Duras's protagonists (and by extension, readers) process these disturbing events on identificatory, affective, and cathartic levels. Through Brancky's analysis, we see how Duras "explores an existential function in the identification with victims" (65). The third chapter probes Duras's multi-layered adaptations of a real-life crime which Duras rewrites and restages in Les viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise (1960), L'amante...