The intimate and the secret in the writing of Marguerite Duras

A writer of passion and death, Duras can also be described as a writer of the intimate. As shown in the stories of the sixties, Moderato Cantabile, Ten and a half hours of the evening in summer, Hiroshima my love and The Ravishment of Lol V. Stein, the silence around which the texts are built, the mystery that surrounds the female characters and their feelings, are the sign of an "intimate" experience kept secret, internalized, never quite expressed. In these works, Duras tirelessly tries to penetrate the intimacy of the heroines by seeking to uncover and understand their experiences, this painful and personal history that remains buried. Duras will thus only write and rewrite the traumatic event lived by her heroines. The lack and the absence, omnipresent motives also associated with the female characters, turn out to echo an impossible mourning. While this process of rewriting is indicative of a quest for a solution, Duras seems far from having resolved the heroines' immemorial past, since absence, love and death are directly or indirectly linked to childhood, to the mother and to the death of the younger brother.