Repetition: The Art Of Duras’ Fiction From Four Texts

As a literary preposition, “Fiction and Repetition” is being paid increasing attention nowadays. Repetition is also a remarkable characteristic in the texts of French writer Marguerite Duras’ fictions. In her early works, the repetition art is mainly reflected in some images, details and events repeatedly appearing in the same text or different texts, on behalf of L’aprè-midi de Monsieur Andesmas. L’aprè-midi de Monsieur Andesmas, published in the same year as L’attente L’oubli by Maurice Blanchot, whose philosophical concepts mutually echoed, expounded the waiting movement, the relationship among waiting, lust and death. After this, Duras created a series of experimental fictions, in which great changes have taken place in the language style, and a large number of statement repetition is one of them. Abahn Sabana David, nearly 30 thousand words in number, only consists of 400 different words, where the expression form of statement repetion and key words repetition all have the unique Duras features. Duras wrote L’Homme Assis dans le Couloir when she returned back to fiction again after ten years of film and drama creation. The complex alternating repeition images in this novel direct its theme to extreme love and lust between men and women. With this fiction as the boundary, the works of Duras concerned with love and lust could be divided into two classes before and after, and sharp contrasts are fomed in all kinds of repeatedly appearing events and spaces. From the angle of the repetition art, this novel proves to be a turning point of Duras’ fiction system. In Duras’ later life, she wrote L’amant de la Chine du Nord, in which she restated the “love events” in the earlier years’ ficitons L’amant and Un barrage contre le Pacifique, and meanwhile she reproduced the details of other works through collage and annotation of intertextuality. These three texts manifest both strong intertextuality and obvious differences, as a result of the conversion of the writer’s different writing motives and the use of the means of deconstruction.The representative fiction texts mentioned above revealed the all-sideness and complexity of the repetition art in Duras’ fictions. As a whole, we can conclude two main points from repetition art. First of all, different marks constantly repeat and then continually disrupt in the text. Second, as a female writer, Duras has constructed her text source with Duras’ intertextuality and “pure memory”. And these two points are closely connected to the fictional authority of Duras text construction.