Dans le miroir des mots: identité féminine et relations familiales dans l’œuvre romanesque de Marguerite Duras (review)

The theme of the family and female identity is a familiar one in Duras studies, but this examination of ten novels, from La Vie tranquille to L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, aims to be systematic and comprehensive. Each of the roles played by the female characters both within the family structure (daughter, sister, mother, wife) and outside it (the lover) is analysed separately, while the characters that play these roles are examined in chronological order. The fifth main chapter explores the identity of women in relation to themselves, from the young girl to the ideal woman. The book’s particular structure makes for some interesting and potentially fascinating connections and comparisons across the corpus, allowing us, for example, to see the fatally seductive figure of Anne-Marie Stretter in Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein as a clear prototype for Alissa in Détruire dit-elle. What this underlines is Duras’s thematic consistency, notably regarding the search for an absolute beyond the self, even as she entered new experimental territory. The general conclusions drawn — that identity is elusive in Duras and that the failure of the various family relationships to fulfil the female characters’ basic needs leads to a crippling narcissism — are uncontroversial, if overly negative. Yet the immediate virtues of this book — its descriptive detail, focus, and accessibility — also work against it. It is not just that Haskett’s reading of narcissism as dangerous and pathological is oversimplistic and ultimately collapses all female types in Duras into a negative maternal image. By shunning any theory other than standard clinical and psychological accounts of narcissism and madness (by Pierre Dessuant, Elsa Ronningstam, and Roland Jaccard, among others), Haskett fails to engage with the most influential study of depression in Duras, Julia Kristeva’s Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie published in 1987 (part of which, ironically, is cited uncritically on p. 463). Divorced from a historical or political context and lacking any consideration of style and form, Haskett’s study is further marred by the misguided intention — first expressed in a short and, for a work of nearly five hundred pages, woefully slight Introduction — to relate the key personality types in Duras’s work to the author’s own life. Odd, teasing references are made out of context to biographical events, in an overdetermined modelling of the work on the life that reduces the former to a set of symptoms — the so-called ‘essential’ of Duras’s life (p. 5). Lost in the process is any convincing grasp of the sheer force of Duras’s artistic projections and her extraordinary self-mythmaking. In a protracted study where genuine insights by other Duras scholars are deferentially referenced in the footnotes and where each chapter is drawn out with an unnecessarily long concluding section, the absence of a more subtle and bold critical approach becomes glaring. Yet, though limited and problematic, the volume will no doubt prove useful to students seeking initial background material on the stated themes.