The conclusion of the book studies one final intervention in a fait divers that pushes the role of the writer in public debates to new limits. In the case of Luc Tangorre, Duras seems to defend the indefensible in the interest of following her own passion, performing a version of her persona out of sync with public opinion. I maintain that Marguerite Duras represents a case study for the growing relationship between the media and literature and argue for the importance of looking at literature as an enduring, meaningful part of a broader culture as it reflects upon and interacts with vital elements of the mass media. The content of contemporary literary works has come to reflect increasingly the popular media forms that promote it, inspire it, and interface with it.

The introduction considers Duras as an important literary persona in a critical period where rapidly changing media helped to enhance and alter the already elevated status of the French public intellectual. I argue that despite the apparent rise in media attention accorded the author after the publication of The Lover in 1984, Duras had in fact been extremely attentive to the media throughout her career. I outline how her oeuvre can be characterized as a porous interface between literature and mass media, reflecting the changing media landscape in the twentieth century. After an overview of the distinguishing characteristics and the cultural significance of the fait divers, I trace the rubric’s critical role as an inspiration in ninteenth- and twentieth-century French fiction. My interdisciplinary methodology allows us to see the compatibility between high literature and mass media and to imagine the future of serious thought in the public sphere.

Chapter 1 introduces Duras the journalist to English-speaking audiences less familiar with this important aspect of her work as a writer and public persona. I analyze a number of her journalistic writings, in particular, her chroniques judiciaires and rewritings of faits divers in the press in the 1950s and 60s. I examine the way that she engages in public conversations around popular representations of crimes in order to subvert them. Because she is not a trained journalist but a literary writer, she claims to have a deeper insight into crime, criminals, and the judicial process. The writer therefore attempts to correct what she considers erroneous reports already printed in the press – based not on systematic examination of evidence but on close readings of these reports and at times on her presence in the courtroom – with her own interpretations and representations of the crime. According to Duras, dismissing a rationalizing rubric improves the conditions for examining the crime’s specific circumstances and its implications for possibilities of transgression and social critique. This chapter reveals how a keen literary eye can help readers to decipher the news.

foucault I've been a little nervous about the idea of talking about Marguerite Duras since this morning. Whenever I've read her books or seen her films, they've always left — always leave — a very strong impression on me. However long it's been since I've read her, the presence of Marguerite Duras's work remains very intense — and yet, now that I come to talk about her I feel as if it's all gone. It's a kind of naked force that one just slides off, that slips through the fingers. The presence of this same shifting, slippery force, of this presence that at the same time runs away from you, is what keeps me from being able to talk about her, and no doubt also so attached to her.

cixous I felt much the same earlier on. I got out all of Marguerite Duras's texts that I've read several times and that I naively thought I knew so well. But one can't know Marguerite Duras; she won't be grasped [on ne peut pas la saisir]. I think that I know her, that I've read her, and then I realize that I've not “retained” anything. Perhaps that's what it is: there's a Duras effect, and this Duras effect is that something very powerful drains away.

It is probably true to say that most critics of Duras have interpreted the importance of love and desire in her work from a largely heterosexual perspective. A different reading of her texts, however, informed by contemporary lesbian theory, shows that the overtly heterosexual Durassian scenario is infused with an underlying lesbian subtext, creating a sense of sexual and textual ambivalence in a number of her key works. A constant feature of this subtext is the presence of female couples and the figure of the female double in texts such as Moderato cantabile, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange, L'amant and, more recently, L'amant de la Chine du Nord. Whereas in some of these texts lesbian desire figures in explicitly sexual terms, female homoeroticism in Duras's work as a whole appears to be more diffuse and fluid. For the purposes of this chapter, therefore, I will use the term ‘eroticism’, following Adrienne Rich's definition, as ‘a diffuse and omnipresent energy unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself ’. Similarly, Rich has challenged the narrow interpretation of lesbian desire as being confined to sexual activity between women. Instead, she understands lesbianism as a ‘primary intensity between and among women’. This broader definition is certainly appropriate to an analysis of Durassian representations of female same-sex relationships which question socially produced boundaries between friendship, love and desire. The aim of this chapter is to provide a detailed examination of the lesbian aspects of three texts by Duras, Détruire dit-elle, La femme du Gange and L'amant de la Chine du Nord. My reading focuses both on the representations of love between women in these texts and on the presence of certain textual patterns as indicative of lesbian textuality in Duras.

Recent work in lesbian theory points to the existence of two apparently distinct approaches to the question of lesbian textuality. The first, which presupposes fixed categories of sex and sexuality, is concerned mainly with a thematics of desire between female figures in literary texts.

Reviewing Edmund White's recent biography of Marcel Proust, Peter Ackroyd offers a text-book example of critical legerdemain that is lethal for gay writers. It will introduce us indirectly to the anti-homosexual tactics of Marguerite Duras:

Ackroyd's writing here is uncharacteristically murky, probably because the thinking behind it would not survive too much clarity of expression. If we dust it off and lift it up to the light, the core idea might look something like this: we readers can't tolerate too much insistence on Proust's gayness; it kills our interest in him. Edmund White ‘asserts’ Proust's gayness. Consequently, Proust doesn't ‘live upon the page’ of this biography.

It is not altogether clear why Ackroyd thinks any of this is true. One thing is clear, however: the extraneous business about ‘biographical art’ is like the squid's ink, as is the later suggestion that the word ‘gay’ is anachronistic when applied to Proust. These gambits function mainly to camouflage the egregious insinuation that a gay biographer who ‘asserts’ Proust's ‘gay life and consciousness’ has failed to ‘intuit the personal stirrings’ of his subject, and thus, has failed to make him live upon the page. It is the other way around, of course: Edmund White asserts Proust's gayness because he intuits his personal stirrings so keenly. Indeed, for some of us this is a big part of what makes Proust come alive in White's biography.

For practically the entirety of her career as a writer, Marguerite Duras displayed a determination to uphold the rights of immigrant communities and other groups facing oppression in racial terms. Examples of Duras's early journalism testify to a determination to focus attention on the problems faced by immigrant workers in Paris confronted by a racism that is both banal and institutional (see in particular ‘Les Fleurs de l'Algérien’, ‘Racisme à Paris’, and ‘Les deux ghettos’ in the collection Outside: Papiers d'un jour); one of the exhortations to be found in Duras's 1969 publicity text for her film Détruire dit-elle is that in favour of a general alignment with ‘the last coolie’; and Duras's alignments with racially marginalized groups are constant. In 1970, she took part in a protest against the death of five immigrant workers in a Foyer de solidarité franco-africaine in Aubervilliers, during which a group of 200–300 protesters seized the premises of the Conseil National du Patronat Français, and 116 (including Duras and Jean Genet) were arrested. Her denunciations of the Front National during the 1980s are frequent and vociferous; at this time, she also begins to insist polemically on a vision of France as exemplarily open to a welcome flux of immigration. In Duras's literary work of the 1980s and 1990s, the figure of the immigrant accordingly becomes an important one; this figure is accompanied by a generalized interest in questions of racial difference, insistent not least in her avowedly autobiographical revisitings of her adolescence in French Indochina, which inscribe Duras's authorial persona intimately within a complicated economy of identity and difference in terms not only of race, but also of gender and class. An emphasis on questions of racial identity is, moreover, also rehearsed formally by Duras at this time, as the texts in which these questions come to the fore (for example, L'amant, Emily L., and La pluie d’été) begin to include noticeable elements of languages other than French, while also engaging internally with the business of translation.