Fictionalising Trauma: The Aesthetics of Marguerite Duras’s India Cycle

Description

With Marguerite Duras being the most disputed French artist after World War II, symbolising trauma represents the most problematic crux of contemporary trauma research. This book brings together these troublesome issues by way of integrating Duras’s aesthetics and the challenge of working through major historical trauma. Starting from the concept of an embodied mind as developed in current social neuroscience, the study illuminates the stylistic devices of the famous India Cycle that arose from Duras’s relentless struggle with the trauma of French colonialism. It reveals how converting trauma into fiction can become a powerful emotional strategy for surviving traumatic events, which may provoke necessary changes in our cultural memory through collective sharing. Table of Contents Preface 7 Acknowledgements 9 Abbreviations 13 Introduction 15 Articulating the India Cycle through Trauma 17 Reading Colonial Trauma: A Cognitive Approach 22 On Duras’s Cyclic Aesthetics 30 Narrativising Trauma: The Dual Nature of Traumatic Memory 37 The Outline of the Study 43 I. Memory, Discourse, Fiction: The Birth of the Absent Story 47 On Duras’s Critical Working-Through 51 Between Melancholy and Mourning: L’affection intentionnelle 58 Dismantling Literality 64 II. The Aesthetic Strategies of the India Cycle 69 Repetition: Paralleling Analogical Structures 74 Doublings, Homologies, Reversals 79 Romantic Formula: Contamination and Multiplication 83 Metafiction and Testimony: Possible Worlds 86 Breaking Frames, Creating Fictional Worlds 90 Accessing Trauma through Narrative Holes 96 The Traumatic Index 99 Literality and Affectivity as Powers of Change 104 III. Witnessing Trauma: Writing the Novel – Writing the Self 113 Jacques Hold and Western Subjectivity: Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein 117 Re-enacting Suffocated Love 124 Peter Morgan and the Ethnic Other: Le Vice-consul 132 Interconnected by Differences: ‘Morgan’ 135 Between Mimicry and Mirroring: the Double Beggar 144 IV. Modifications of the Madwoman Trope 153 Obsession in the Provincial Prison: Lol V. Stein 157 Rebuilding the Triangle, Renouncing Progress 162 Sorrow in Exile: The Cambodian Beggar 169 Bodily Suffering as a Mode of Resistance 174 Towards Forgetting and Freedom 179 In the Madwoman’s Land: L’amour 184 Towards an Allegorical Interpretation 188 A Universe of Despair: The Perpetrator’s Return 191 Refiguring Lost Emotions: Love as Care 195 V. Crime in the Salon: The French in British India 203 Calcutta: Exclusive Spaces 206 Isolating the Criminal 215 Intrigues of the White Hermit 217 The Rite of Purification 222 Emotional Illiteracy and Stigmatisation 227 Between Passion and Destruction: A Male Cry 234 Recognition and Reversal 236 VI. Icons of Mourning: India Song 243 Towards Cinematic Metastructures 246 The Power of Voice: Entangled Worlds 249 Prologue 251 The Ball 254 Epilogue 255 Chiasms of Life and Death: Key Images 256 Conclusion 265 Bibliography 273 Index 295