Silence and revelation in Marguerite Duras’ writing

Abstract

Her childhood lived in French Indochina is a recurring theme in Marguerite Duras’ work (even in books whose theme, apparently, did not address this subject). The aim of this article is to show that the story about the writer’s family was always present in her work from the beginning of her career to the end. Duras reformulated her family story several times, making the reader believe that the writer was telling another story. However, in fact, she has never ceased to tell the same story, but in a different way. For a long time, the writer kept in secret facts later released in the 1984 publication of L’Amant. Duras explains that this information would have been extremely embarrassing to her family if they had been revealed while they were alive. Therefore, an interesting feature in Marguerite Duras’ literary creation is the various layers of her writing. By hiding certain facts of her childhood, the writer created artifices as a way of not exposing her family; that made her stories have several versions which hide a story of incestuous love.