Intertextualities

Abstract

The author’s transpositions from novel to novel, and from novel to play to film, raise questions of intertextuality and inter-genres. Duras’ practice is not based on the principles of simultaneity, continuity and non-contradiction so fruitfully developed by Balzac in another period. Avoiding the construction of a (chrono) logical edifice rooted in an outdated conception of verisimilitude, when this writer reintroduces elements from one text to another, she alters them. Contradiction functions both as a deconsructive strategy and as one productive of a more contemporary truth. Otherwise stated, Duras reaffirms on the intertextual level what she expresses within each distinct text: that, rather than attempting mimesis of an (inaccessible) objective reality, her writing is concerned with fictions, with non-objective reality, with social conventions communicated and changeable through those fictions. Her texts do not claim to report occurrences fixed in some immutable, experiential past. They advance possible narratives of possible stories, and one must keep both variables in mind. Intertextually speaking, each work functions like a variant of a missing original. That the definitive version remains always already lacking constitutes the a priori of her textual productivity.

“Un coup de dès jamais n’abolira ...”

Mallarmé