[From my 2023 notebook entries attempting to compare what it is that Duras and Ernaux do differently.]
Marguerite Duras and Annie Ernaux both control the narratives carefully by narrowing staging and circumscribing the temporality of the event. Each book has a distinct, particular time signature… Other books return to the same scene or event but alter the stage and time signature.
Absence of a controlled focus, the ripped-from-the-mind feel of the narration, the recursion and repetition make beginning and ending less central to the shape of the novel. This is different from realism, where the beginning and ending are part of the arc, and a way in which success is referenced.
Suspense is built in the voice’s relation to self through others. Voice – or the sound of their own — is central to style for both writers.
The interlocutor is rarely described at the outset, or, if they are, the shift occurs inside the You with transitional movements from interior world to exterior.
Techniques used by both include: rhythm, tempo, use of silence and pauses in a way that resembles music theory, recursive repetition, modulation, use of refrain rather than flashback, ongoing rupture, continuous interruption, contrapuntal alterations between descriptions or inventories and dialogue or address, recurrence, leitmotif, disclosure without psychologizing, and the centrality of human relationships as a site in which meaning is created.
Things overheard become part of the speaker's life – the porous self, the unfinished, is often portrayed through non sequiturs and open ended statements or thoughts. The ellipsis, the open dash, the unfinished quotation…
Both Annie Ernaux and Marguerite Duras write love as a compulsive and destructive power which involves a loss of self; this loss is gendered by the margins, and the presence of motherhood and children. Both write parenting as an emotional and physical commitment carried primarily by the mother's body and mind.* So: motherhood and romantic love threaten the solitary self that both writers embody. There are no happy or well functioning couples. Therapy doesn't fix or prevent foolishness; therapy doesn't resolve harm. Boundaries are trespassed, selves are modified without being redeemed or improved. Shame persists, in time, in tone, in the grief over utopia, and the refusal of linear time (which is also therapeutic time) or progress.
From the individual memory privileged in Proustian literature, Ernaux attempts a horizontal move into cultural memory, the base of modernity's Memory Studies. This is her structural shift (Duras focuses on landscapes and cinematography instead). I keep trying to find a way to write this without feeling as if I have abandoned my protagonist.
* (Part of me wonders if I could appreciate Ernaux or Duras in the same way without this awareness of how much the cost of mothering is factored into their words. That is the shadow looming behind their stoic silences. The unmentionable, unsexy part. So many of us are bludgeoned by it. How funny that it is gauche to say so. I laugh and look back at the knife or pen in my hand.)