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Memory, Fiction and History Jeanine Pansier Plottel —Why doesn’t La Douleur have a table of contents? —What’s so surprising about that, you may reply. Marguerite Duras’s novels don’t usually have a table of contents. That didn’t disturb you when you read L'Amante anglaise, or Le Vice-Consul. And the table of contents of some of her books, La Vie tranquille, for example, simply lists Part I, Part II, Part III. —But La Douleur isn’t a novel. It is a collection of short stories, short fictions, that is, and I should like to see all the titles set forth on a page, either at the end or at the beginning. —How can you call La Douleur a collection of short stories or short fictions? The lead piece, the one that gives this book its name is hardly fictional. Marguerite Duras herselftells us that it isa lost journal she had put away in a blue armoire in her country house at Neauphle-le-Château —yes, the very same town where the Ayatollah Khomeini spent his French years in exile—a house that was flooded almost every winter. Her preface states very clearly that the word écrit itself is inappropriate. According to the author the manuscript is made up of pages completely filled up with a very small, even, and untroubled handwriting. You can hardly call a short story a diary she characterizes as a “phenomenal chaos of thinking and feeling that [she] dared not touch and in com­ parison with which literature filled [her] with shame.” 1 The second piece, “Monsieur X, dit ici Pierre Rabier” is also true to the last detail. —I grant you that “Albert des Capitales” and “Ter le milicien” are indeed short stories. Following Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Duras clearly states: “Thérèse c’est moi.” She is the one who tortures the informer and the one who feels like making love with the “milicien” (La Douleur, p. 134). —Well, they do have the markers of fiction, but in fact it seems to me that they may be a closer approximation of the truth (I take the word in an analytical sense rather than in a philosophical sense), than pages that claim to bejournals or diaries. I will grant you that we should believe the author when she writes about “L’Ortie brisée” (The Broken Nettle): “C’est inventé. C’est de la littérature” (La Douleur, p. 184). The same goes for “Aurélia Paris.” But I wonder whether we are being lured by Vol.XXX, No. 1 47 L ’E sprit C réateur the bait of the Duras magic. What I mean is that each of these pieces is prefaced by a short paragraph framing for readers what they are about to read. This is hardly original: forewords, preambles and prologues have operated this way for many centuries. The intention may be vindicating the author for writing in a given way (Moliére’s preface to Tartuffe), or guiding readers in order to enhance appreciation for the work at hand (Honoré de Balzac’s “Preface” to his Comédie Humaine). But in the case that concerns us here, the referent of the metatext is the relation between each text, that is, between I. “La Douleur” and II. “Monsieur X, dit ici Pierre Rabier,” “Albert des Capitales,” “Ter le Milicien,” “L’Ortie brisée,” “Aurélia Paris,” and a historical event, the end of World War II in France. —You mean that Marguerite Duras has probably read Philippe Lejeune’s Le Pacte autobiographique. The play is between the two classes of work, fictional and autobiographical. Are you thinking of the following passage for example: It isn’t a matter of knowing which of the two, autobiography or fiction, is more truth­ ful. Neither one is; autobiography will always be deficient in complexity and ambiguity, fic­ tion in accuracy; truthfulness would therefore be one added to the other. Rather, one associated with the other. What is uncovered is the space in which both categories of texts are inscribed, but which neither one embraces completely. The three dimensional effect obtained by this process results in creating...

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