True stories: Locating realism in the autobiographical intertextuality of Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux (France)

This study reveals and examines a new form of autobiographical realism in the work of Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux. I argue that Duras and Ernaux have constructed through the span of their careers a web of interconnected texts reverberating with and anchored to an autobiographical “real.” Within the corpus of each writer, these texts reference one another implicitly and explicitly, creating by their very proliferation a climate of familiarity which helps to create a closed system of verisimilitude that functions according to, and can be read as, an intertextual realist guarantee. Although realism fell out of favor with critics and writers in the 20th century, I show that to pit realism against experimentalism is to create a false generic opposition, since Duras and Ernaux have created realism out of radically new forms of textuality. Because they weave together textual strands emanating from autobiography, fiction, historically-based journals, and, in the case of Ernaux, autoethnography, a subtler, more flexible understanding of genre is required.; In Chapter One I explore the codes of realism and autobiography, teasing out the differences between the work of Duras and Ernaux and more traditional writing. Chapter Two examines Duras's thickly layered intertextual network and its interactions with the real, demonstrating that textuality always dominates and ultimately replaces the real in its role as referent. Ernaux's insistence on linking her writing to the real is investigated in Chapter Three. Through the practice of autoethnographic analysis, Ernaux redeems her working class background, not unproblematically recuperating it by means of the very kinds of language that set it apart to begin with. The final chapter juxtaposes the ways in which both authors take intertextuality to unprecedented levels, through convoluted interconnections—and even confusion—between texts and real people. Duras and Ernaux each got involved romantically with fans of their work, and these lovers became themselves the sites of productive liminalities in their texts. I conclude by arguing that the strength and originality of their writing comes in large measure from the very permeability of its textual and generic boundaries.