For the latter recount events that occurred in the past, events they not only did not themselves witness, but the “original” narrative of which they have largely forgotten. Thus no direct visual representation is provided, either to the public or to the speakers. The en visaged tale is not enacted on the screen, which simply shows people dancing or lying down (India Song) or people walking (La Femme du Ganges). We “hear” them “see,” since we know they are looking only because they say so, and we know what they are “seeing”-the story-only because they tell it. In the films India Song and La Femme du Ganges, for example, speakers who never appear on screen narrate a mixture of the story and their personal reactions to it and to each other. Often the narrative structures play on several levels of visual absence.
Directed towards the invisible and the unknown, unstuck from concrete objectai representations, the gaze becomes a verbal instrument productive of open-ended imagination and textuality.
With Duras, this dislocation deemphasizes the visual in favor of the verbal. Fur ther, this has not been linked to a form of intertextuality that crosses from one genre to another, which might be called “inter-genre.” In her films, Duras disconnects the sound track from the screen images, which causes the viewer to reconsider a coincidence hitherto largely unquestioned. Although much critical com ment has been made about her cinematic innovations, on the one hand, and about vision as a theme in her books, on the other, critics have rarely situated seeing with regard to absence and to language in her work. Duras writes this absence with visual metaphors, but in ways that deconstruct the dominant, central izing primacy of seeing as documentation. Marguerite Duras M OST OF MARGUERITE DURAS’ WORK focuses on the ref erent’s essential absence. Cohen Le seul sujet du livre c’est l’écriture. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:įiction and the Photographic Image in Duras’ The Lover Susan D.
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