Silence as literary device in Marguerite Duras’s novels

https://doi.org/10.20339/PhS.2-19.062

Shulyatyeva Dina V.,

Сandidate of Philology, Teacher of the School of Cultural Studies

National Research University “Higher School of Economics”

e-mail: dshulyatyeva@hse.ru   

This article examines silence as literary device, putting it in a intermedi-al context. In Marguerite Duras’s novels silence is represented as device, inter-acting with dialogue and producing an effect of “speech rupture”. Silence is ex-amined from different points of view: as lack of speech (silence replaces speech), as lack of sound (producing void of sound and, as a result, contrasting with noise of the city) and, according to reader-response criticism, as a “gap”, in a plot of the story or in a speech of characters, which must be filled up by reader. In Marguerite Duras’s films, essentially linked to her novels according to her own ideas, silence is literalized, first of all, and then is used in a meta-phorical form of “black shots”, disrupting visual events. Persistent use of this device arranges a space of uncommunicativeness, full of interrupted communi-cation in novels.

Keywords: silence, literary device, communication, intermediality, Marguerite Duras.

References

1. Epshtein M.N. Slovo i molchanie. Moscow, 2006.

2. Stevens B.E. Silence in Catullus. University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.

3. Olsson U. Silence and subject in modern literature: spoken violence. Springer, 2013.

4. Iser W. Der Akt des Lesens – Theorie aesthetischer Wirkung. Muenchen, 1976.

5. Maier-Katkin B. Silence and acts of memory: a postwar discourse on literature, history, Anna Seghers, and women in the Third Reich. Bucknell University Press, 2007.

6. Barton B. Visual devices in contemporary prose fiction: gaps, gestures, images. Springer, 2016.

7. Duras M. Entretien avec Jean Schuster // L’Archibras. 1967. No. 2.

8. Duras M. Le Camion, suivi d’entretiens avec Michelle Porte. Les Éditions de Minuit, 1977.

9. Diuras M. Liubovnik. Letnii vecher polovina odinnadtsatogo. Moderato kantabile: per. s fr. N. Khotinskoi, O. Zakharovoi. Moscow: Fliuid, 2007.

10. Duras M. Le Square. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1983.