Space, Place, and Memory: The Holocaust Effect in Marguerite Duras’ La Douleur

Abstract

The vast pain of Marguerite Duras’ traumatic past occupies many of her texts. Meyer analyzes the Holocaust’s effect on Duras’ representation of space, place, and memory in La Douleur (1984) in dialogue with Les Cahiers de la Guerre (2006), her novel Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964) and Finkiel’s film (2017), The tension between trauma which erupts through her texts and memory narrated in often controlled ways seems inextricably linked to the earth (place and space). The mechanisms of trauma which erupts unconsciously through various voids in Duras and in her narrative differ from those of a more conscious manipulation of memory. This article interrogates how the contrast of closing the La Douleur with the expansive beach and endless horizon informs the cramped darkness of ditches, bodies, and domestic spaces which precede them. Is there control (or repression) operating here in an effort to contain trauma that functions differently in her fictive texts? How can the beaches of her fictional Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein along with Duras’ mother’s attempts to salvage the family property against the encroachment of the ocean which threatens the family’s livelihood, marking the mother’s madness in Un barrage contre le Pacifique (1950), help us to reconsider the ways Duras inscribes traumatic memory into her autobiographical texts?

Keywords:

• Duras
• La Douleur
• trauma
• beach
• sea
• memory

Notes

1 Emmanuel Finkiel, director, The War: A Memoir, Music Box Films, 2017.

2 Kristeva states of this passage: “La mort ravive l’amour mort” (244). This may be true, however, for the narrator, past passion has died. The distinctions between love and passion provide an interesting reading of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein.

3 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Johns Hopkins UP, 1996, p. 109.

4 Joyce Glasser,  “A Brave, but Flawed Adaptation of Marguerite Duras’ Powerful Memoir,” May 24, 2019, https://www.maturetimes.co.uk/joyce-glasser-reviews-memoir-of-war/. Accessed 17 June 2021.

5 See Marguerite Duras, “La Destruction la parole,” Cahiers du cinema, vol. 217, 1969, pp. 47–57, and Jacques Lacan, “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” Cahiers Renaud-Barrault, volume 52, (December 1965), pp. 7–15.

6 As Catherine Cusset states, Un barrage contre le Pacifique is “in a sense the matrix of her other books” (62).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

E. Nicole Meyer

E. Nicole Meyer, Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes académiques, is Professor of French and Women’s and Gender Studies at Augusta University. Her co-edited volumes include Rethinking the French Classroom: New Approaches to Teaching Contemporary French and Francophone Women (Routledge 2019) and Teaching Diversity and Inclusion: Examples from a French Classroom (Routledge, 2021). This essay comes from her current book project Fractured Families in Contemporary French and Francophone Women’s Autobiographies.