Narrar o (im)possível: a memória reconstruída em La Douleur, de Marguerite Duras

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the book La Douleur (1985), by Marguerite Duras (1914-1996), understanding her writing as a process of reconstructing war memories. In the book, published in 1985, but partially written 40 years earlier, Duras builds a narrative of the (im) possible, while waiting for her husband, Robert, imprisoned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, during World War II (1939-1945). Duras's writing calls into question the memory of peace, at the end of the war, this institutionalized memory in contrast to an unbearable pain, not only her own, but of many others, who were waiting for the prisoners to return. Considering that all memory is already a construction and that all testimony is also fiction, we seek to understand how Duras's text can contribute to a reconstruction of the memory of the war and the post-war period, from the testimony of her pain. To help us in the elaboration of this analysis, we worked with some theories, which are in line with our vision about concepts such as memory, narrative and testimony, of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, among others.