From the 1970s to the 1990s anyone who, like me, was interested in French women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework. I now realise that I was treating the text as an intellectual puzzle rather than as an expression of lived experience. Maybe that’s why it never occurred to me to try to read Duras for pleasure. Nevertheless, at the time, it felt impossible to be a feminist literary theorist without reading her, so I struggled on, making my way through the texts and watching the movies, without ever asking myself whether I actually liked her work.
But even in the heyday of French theory, her wartime novels were not part of the Duras canon. We didn’t discuss Les Impudents (1943) and La Vie tranquille (1944), which we thought of as hard to get hold of, even in French. Rumours circulated that Duras herself was preventing publishers from reprinting them. Given that Gallimard republished La Vie tranquille in 1972, and Les Impudents in 1992, this was clearly a myth. Yet I persisted for a long time in thinking of these books as somehow secret, potentially packed with suspect ideas. After all, Duras’s first publication had been L’Empire français, a 1940 propaganda booklet on the benefits of French imperialism, co-written with Philippe Roques, a colleague at the Ministry of the Colonies, where she had worked since earning her law degree in 1937. For a while she was seconded to write copy for an outfit called the Committee for Propaganda for the French Banana. In July 1942, she became the administrative secretary for the Book Organisation Committee, which allocated paper quotas to publishers. Run by the Vichy government, the committee was under the direct control of the German occupiers.
Duras’s shady political past fuelled my suspicion that the early novels must be full of embarrassing, even scandalous, material. But I still didn’t read them. Now I wonder why not. If I really thought shocking revelations were to be found in these novels, why didn’t I just get them out of the library? It was as if I preferred a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing.
I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the height of the vogue for ‘écriture féminine’ responded to something essential in her late life persona as the grande dame of French letters, namely her constant myth-making, her blending of truth and fiction. Although some of her novels look like autofiction, they aren’t concerned, as, for example, Knausgaard’s My Struggle is, with getting past the tired old moves of fiction-making literature to grasp reality. Nor do they, like Annie Ernaux’s novels, blend accurate historical and sociological analysis with searing descriptions of personal experience. In a novel such as L’Amant – The Lover – Duras’s struggle is quite the opposite, to mythologise herself, to turn herself into literature.
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