Marguerite Duras' earlier works fit readily into the genre of the traditional novel and, like many early works of fiction, are often autobiographical
in content. Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (l950), for example, tells the story of her difficult childhood in Indochina where she was raised by a widowed mother. However, with Moderato Cantabile (1958) her writing style changes markedly. The author associates this alteration in style with a crisis in her personal life whereby her writing becomes poetic and the narrative content increasingly abstruse. It is with the writer's experimentation in film during the sixties and seventies that a group of works, referred to in this paper as the "India Song" texts, appear. In this group of works, beginning with Le Ravissement de Loi V. Stein (1964), and ending with Aurélia Steiner, Aurélia Steiner, Aurélia Steiner (1979), the same story is told and retold, yet the form of the language, the narration, and the dominant mode of perception alters remarkably from text to text. These texts together are proposed, in this study, to form a unique self-portrait of the author.
The thesis is divided into two parts. In Part I, the transition in writing style is considered as a movement away from an autobiographical mode into a self-portraiture mode. A comparison is made between the characteristics of her writing style in the texts following Moderato Cantabile and the characteristics of the self-portrait as outlined by Michel Beaujour in Miroirs d'encre. To elucidate the situation of the Durassian heroine prior to the self-portrait revealed in the "India Song" texts, the myth of Narcissus and Echo is utilized. This use of myth provides a background Gestalt against which the patterns within the fiction begin to appear.
Part II is a textual analysis of the "India Song" self-portrait works which include Le Ravissement de Loi V. Stein, Le Vice-Consul, L'Amour, La Femme du Gange, India Song, and Aurelia Steiner, Aurelia Steiner, Aurélia Steiner. The ancient Summarian myth of female initiation, the myth of Inanna, when applied to these texts, discloses the transformation
in perspective underlying the arcane surface patterns in which the same "story" reappears from text to text. From a one-dimensional world dominated by the masculine "regard", the reader is pulled, via the auditory,
into a multidimensional kinaesthetic feminine world of the "lower" senses that is referred to in the analysis as "l'écoute". It is this perspective that the female writing voice of Aurelia Steiner, culmination of this unusual self-portrait, offers to the reader. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/25355 |
| Date | January 1985 |
| Creators | Brett, Susan Mae |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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