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Ecriture courante: Theme and image in Marguerite Duras
Abstract
Marguerite Duras describes her writing as ecriture courante, an ideal writing in which passive, receptive states allow the unconscious to surface and solicit the imagination. Although Duras's writing style has been amply analyzed, the specific connection between water imagery and ecriture courante has not yet been explored. In fact, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the repetition of water vocabulary (especially oceans, waves, tides, and rivers) in both Duras's fictional oeuvre and in personal interviews. Duras has consistently used water metaphors throughout her writing career to evoke images, states of mind, and writing itself. This study traces Duras's preferred images in an effort to determine what gives profound unity to her work. My analysis incorporates several theoretical approaches, including Gaston Bachelard's material imagination, surrealism, and Ecriture feminine. In Part One the relationship between ecriture courante and water imagery is examined as a totality linked to themes of fear, intelligence, secrecy, madness, and femininity. The reversed world associated with oceanic depths constitutes a threshold which must be passed in order to achieve greater awareness of Self and Other. The maternal and feminine myths find their metaphor in le reve berce linked to sea voyages, car rides, and promenades. Writing is a therapy, a way of healing fear, pain, and loss. In Part Two the gaze is examined as a supplement to water imagery which invites mobility, doubling, and narcissism. Photographs, windows, and mirrors create the distance which enables the Self to objectify itself in order to create and recreate identity. Self-dispossession via the female body becomes a way of bridging internal schism and alienation between Self and Other. The mise-en-scene of desire creates a parallel world in which the unconscious projects and orders. This study notes the interrelationship between fact and fiction, including Duras's personal comments with regard to her own life as writer and individual. The female heroine is doubled by the female writer who leaves the private, passive enclosure of silence to become an active agent of transgression through creative endeavor.
Subject Area
Literature|Romance literature
Recommended Citation
Lauer-Cheenne, Julia Ann, "Ecriture courante: Theme and image in Marguerite Duras" (1991). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9211475.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9211475