By Jess Goldschmidt

In every aspect of her life, Duras embodied a trés
Français extremity—an obsession with eroticism, death,
liquor, and life. She claimed a powerful sexual connection to her younger
brother, Paulo. She left home at 17 to attend the Sorbonne. She worked alongside François Mitterand in the French Resistance, loathed Charles de Gaulle, had a child out of wedlock with her
husband’s best friend, and
made her living as a journalist for the leftist Observateur until she
quit to write novels full time.
Despite the fact that her body of work includes countless plays,
essays, and films, Duras is best known as a novelist. Her work was
stylistically innovative and definitively minimalist—a fact that led her
to be claimed by France’s nouveau roman movement, a
wave of novelistic innovation championed and theorized by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Yet Duras defied classification. Her more than 50 novels at times feel like
plays or poems: minimal character description and maximal dialogue, much of it
written flat across the page, without attribution or punctuation. And most of
her works center on female characters, probing their inner lives, loves,
madnesses, and—almost especially—fears. “Only the stupid are
not afraid,” she once proclaimed.
Duras’ gift for dialogue led her to
experiment with theater and film scripts—the latter most
notably in her collaboration with Alain Resnais, the classic Hiroshima mon
Amour (1958). Yet unsatisfied with her role as a screenwriter, in the 1970s
Duras turned her attention almost exclusively to film, working as a director on
her own projects. Elusive and often alienating, her film work experimented
heavily with image and sound, eschewing all constraints of narrative; she once
said her goal as a filmmaker was to “murder the writer.”
She drank her way through liters
of wine for every few pages of text composed until she entered recovery in 1982, and triumphantly escaped a five-month coma in 1988. She disappeared for years into a relationship
with her muse, companion, savior, and sometime-servant Yann
Andréa (a gay man 38 years her junior), then reemerged at the age
of 70 with her most successful novel, The Lover, which sold a million
copies and was translated into 43 languages. Living on the razor's edge,
Marguerite Duras survived—and thrived—against
all odds.
Duras' play, Savannah Bay, comes to the BAM Fisher November 11—14. Standby seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis the day of the show.
Jess Goldschmidt is an artist living in Brooklyn.
Jess Goldschmidt is an artist living in Brooklyn.
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