Wartime Writings, or the Imaginary Lover of Marguerite Duras

The publication in 2006 of Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre, ‘Wartime Writings,’ written between 1943 and 1949, made accessible to the reader the first known versions of the family drama that was to become the material of much of her fiction. As this work now takes its place as chronologically first in the intertext of Duras’s autofictional writings, it sheds considerable light on our understanding of the transformations in these texts that occurred over her lifetime. Whereas L’Amant had been presented and accepted as the disclosure of a real occurrence and the origin of the other works, it presents several significant aspects of Duras’s life at the time, as well as the lover himself, in a way that is not verifiably real. The “Cahiers” help establish the difference between the verifiably real and that which seems most true about herself to the author in later life when she fictionalizes her own coming of age. The first “Cahier” holds the key to understanding the exigencies that led to the invention of the character of the Chinese lover, as it reminds us that there is no moment before legend and story-telling, and that individual memory is always constructed imaginatively. This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss1/7 Wartime Writings, or the Imaginary Lover of Marguerite Duras Bethany Ladimer Middlebury College The publication by the IMEC1 in 2006 of Marguerite Duras’s Cahiers de la guerre ‘Wartime Writings’ written between 1943 and 1949 made accessible to the reader the first known versions of the family drama that was to become the material of much of her fiction. As this work now takes its place as chronologically first in the intertext of Duras’s autofictional writings, it sheds considerable light on our understanding of the transformations in these texts that occurred over her lifetime. Duras is of course known for her rejection of any ordinary definition of autobiography as distinct from fiction. In this first piece of confessional writing we see not only all the elements of the many subsequent reworkings of her autofiction,2 but also some fairly clear statements of what it meant to her in 1943, when she had been in France for thirteen years, to begin the lifetime labor of retrieving her own past. I want to focus here on the first volume in particular (the “Cahier rose marbre” ‘Pink Marbled Notebook’), which is composed of a lengthy, uninterrupted confession of sixty-six pages in which Duras yields to “an instinct to unearth” (32) her memories of childhood in Vietnam. She goes on to say that these memories are essential to the construction, understanding, and affirmation of self, for herself in 1943: “Si je ne suis pas fidele a moi-meme, a qui le serai-je?” (73) ‘It’s very simple. If I do not write (my memories) down, I will gradually forget them. ... If I am not faithful to myself, to whom will I be?’ (32). This material should nevertheless not be considered solely as a personal diary, because the young Duras defends it from questioning by an imaginary reader or a Lacanian “other.” In speaking of the 1 Ladimer: Wartime Writings, or the Imaginary Lover of Marguerite Duras Published by New Prairie Press