Reframing the Void: The Cinematographic Aesthetic of Marguerite Duras's Autobiographical Novels

Both a filmmaker and writer, Marguerite Duras imbues her literary works with a notably cinematographic aesthetic. L'Amant, the second and most celebrated of Duras's trio of autobiographical novels about her childhood in French colonial Indochina, is a vividly visual text in its voyeurism, its examination of the colonial gaze, and its presentation of the autobiographical subject through a series of photographs, several of which are "real" and one non-existent. Duras's use of ekphrastic photographs and cinematic scenes serves to decenter, mask, and absent the autobiographical subject insofar as she makes a clean break between image and referent in both cases. Thus, when Jean-Jacques Annaud attempted to suture this break in his film version of L'Amant (1991), he compelled Duras to articulate her aesthetic in even stronger visual terms by rewriting L'Amant yet again in the form of her final novel, L'Amant de la Chine du Nord. This novel proclaims itself "un livre... un film," and remarks on the ways in which the characters are presented as "plus 'pour le cinema' que [ceux] du livre [L'Amant]." The essay examines the relationship between Duras's last two autobiographical novels and Annaud's film to reveal the ways in which Duras textualizes photographic and cinematographic images not as a means of fixing an image, but as a means of casting it into the interpretive interregnum of visual and written textuality. In trying to present a singular visual image of Duras's self-portrait in his film, Annaud sparked a battle between his biographical vision and the author's autobiographical vision, as well as Duras's need to splinter the film's images by writing her own cinematographic account of L'Amant. In her final novel, then, Duras hones her visual aesthetic and displaces the autobiographical referent in her use of multiple, unfixed, and even inaccessible sites of subjectivity.