Original scientific paper
Love in the Shadow of Melancholy: Desire, passion, and pain in the poeticism of Marguerite Duras
Ingrid Šafranek
orcid.org/0000-0002-0416-5473
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The central themes of desire and erotic passion are here merged with the secondary and contrary motifs of melancholy and deprivation. This dichotomy is present on all levels of writing and poeticism of Marguerite Duras – from the topics to her narration, rhetoric, and style, as well as her multi-layered metaphors. The starting point of her artistic, “feminine” poetic writing (écriture) is a different, reciprocal relationship between the body (senses, emotions) and language, imaginary and symbolical, image and word, the literal meaning and the figurative one – in the text. All this is manifested in her lyrical, avantgarde opus, modern and anti-modern at the same time, at the intersection of prose and poetry, as well as in her experimental, newwave cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. At the core of her “poeticism of desire” there is a dichotomy of opposition, as well as exchange between sensuousness and knowledge, love and pain. The key of that poeticism is the fusion and interaction of antinomies, which nevertheless persist as differences (male-female, East-West, passion and melancholy, “life” and “art). “Feminine” desire is transformed into a gesture of inner exile and the subject’s subversion of historical determinism, the authoritarianism of social power and ratio. The motifs of erotic passion and love are combined with the pain of forgetting and the pain of remembering. Her writing is a semioticized interpretation of experience, a relationship between the unconscious and language. Desire and passion as the most powerful élan vital are antipodes to depression and the feeling of contingency. Desire and anxiety are the two extremes of this liminal, paradoxical writing of “female difference” (border writing). In between corporality and semiotics, personal and gender history – love and writing, ethic and philosophy, poeticism and language function as mutual metaphors.
Keywords
desire; passion; melancholy; “feminine writing”; poeticism of transition
Hrčak ID:
194671
URI
Publication date:
1.7.2017.
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