In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Marguerite Duras, I. Les Récits des differences sexuelles
  • Kate Ince
Marguerite Duras, I. Les Récits des differences sexuelles. Textes réunis et présentés par Bernard Alazet et Mireille Calle-Gruber. (Revue des lettres modernes). Paris, Minard, 2005. 276 pp. Pb €25.00.

Bernard Alazet and Mireille Calle-Gruber are familiar names in the field of Duras criticism, and it is therefore no surprise to find them co-editing this composite volume of pieces on her work. Only the first eight of the essays relate to the title of the volume: they are followed by a further set of six études on aspects of Duras's writings not connected to sexual difference(s), and by a short carnet critique of reviews of recent books on Duras in French. Since three of the études compare works by Duras with texts by other authors (Le Square with Nathalie Sarraute's Pour un oui ou pour un non, La Maladie de la mort with Louis-René des Forêts's Le Bavard, and L'Amant with Jean Genet's Journal du voleur), the focus on Duras gets somewhat lost during the second part of the book, causing one to reflect that this could have been prevented by tighter editing. The quality of the études is also very mixed, Sélila Mejri's stimulating discussion of how epic and dramatic elements combine in Savannah Bay coming after Najet Limam-Tnani's comparison of L'Amant with Genet's Journal du voleur in which she pursues the utterly unconvincing argument that both authors' autobiographies are written as part of a search for a stable identity that will lay to rest their past phantoms. Out of the three études that examine questions of dialogue, voice(s) and polyphony, Mejri's on the epic and the dramatic is easily the best argued and most effective. Going back to the first part, essays that definitely merit reading are Calle-Gruber's discussion of nudity and/as apocalyptic revelation in Agatha and Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, and Christiane Blot-Labarrère's focus on the eponymous chief character of Le Vice-Consul. Sylvie Loignon's 'La Retombée des mots', in which she draws to good effect on Blanchot, Barthes and Derrida, is also highly competent, but the same can unfortunately not be said of Johan Faerber's essay on L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. Given that the first eight essays are published together because they were all presented at a day conference organized by Alazet and Calle-Gruber at Paris VIII in April 2004, and the justification for including the fourth, fifth and sixth étude is their inclusion in a colloquium held in Tunis in February of the same year, but that it is not made clear why the other three études have been collected in the same volume, the editorial strategy Alazet and Calle-Gruber are pursuing in their Série Marguerite Duras (of which this is the first volume) remains opaque. The book contains work worth consulting, but the complete absence of anglophone Duras criticism from it certainly scuppers Alazet's declared intent to provide 'un état des lieux de la critique durassienne' (p. i).

Kate Ince
University of Birmingham
...

pdf

Share