The Person who Tortures is Me: Violence and the Sacred in the Works of Margurite Duras

Abstract

The Person Who Tortures Is Me: Violence and the Sacred in the Work of Margurite Duras Sylvere Lotringer Columbia. is Professor of French at the University of By the time Marguerite Duras died in Paris in 1996 at age 82, she was what the French call a sacred monster, a literary- monument unto herself with some forty-odd novels, fifteen films and as many plays to her credit. Although she had first been known in the late 60s both in France and in America as a practitioner o f the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) together with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, she didn't exactly belong there, or anywhere for that matter. Her novels were far more atmospheric and romantic than experimental. Some people in France went as far as denying that she was a writer, outraged by what they considered her cheap lyricism, self-indulgence and unabashed narcissism. Others loved her precisely for that. A l l her life, Marguerite Duras was a controversial figure, eliciting strong reactions o f adulation and exasperation in her audience. She especially enraged French literati after one o f her later novels, probably the most mannered, The Lover, published in 1984, became an international bestseller and earned her the prestigious Prix Goncourt. For Duras, it was sweet revenge thirty-five years after she had been turned down by the Goncourt for her first masterpiece, Sea Wall (Barrage contre le Pacifique), actually a much better novel and truer to the saga o f her prewar adolescence among poor Indochinese peasants. That same year, in 1950, she was excluded from the French Communist Party, which she had joined early on during the German occupation, when being a communist in France still meant something. She became militantly anti-Stalinist after that, but still passionately believed in a communism o f the mind, like her boyfriend, Dionys Mascolo, and her husband, Robert Antelme. During the war years the three o f them, Marguerite, Dionys, and Robert, got involved in a resistance group created by Francois Mitterand in 1943. Arrested by the Gestapo and sent