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. 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. Run by the Vichy government, the committee was under the direct control of the German occupiers.ĭuras’s shady political past fuelled my suspicion that the early novels must be full of embarrassing, even scandalous, material. In July 1942, she became the administrative secretary for the Book Organisation Committee, which allocated paper quotas to publishers. For a while she was seconded to write copy for an outfit called the Committee for Propaganda for the French Banana. 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. Yet I persisted for a long time in thinking of these books as somehow secret, potentially packed with suspect ideas. Given that Gallimard republished La Vie tranquille in 1972, and Les Impudents in 1992, this was clearly a myth. Rumours circulated that Duras herself was preventing publishers from reprinting them.

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. 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.īut even in the heyday of French theory, her wartime novels were not part of the Duras canon. Maybe that’s why it never occurred to me to try to read Duras for pleasure.

I now realise that I was treating the text as an intellectual puzzle rather than as an expression of lived experience.

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. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. F rom 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.

The lover duras novel