Told from a first-person point of view, The Sailor from Gibraltar is a story by the acclaimed French author Marguerite Duras (1914–96). The novel tells of a dissatisfied man in his thirties who is in the midst of a hapless Italian vacation with a woman he comes to realize he does not love. The unnamed narrator decides during an extended period of hot temperatures and malaise in Florence that he will tell his fiancée, Jacqueline, that not only is he ending his relationship with her, but he does not plan to return to his post in the Colonial Ministry, where the pair work. Part of the impetus for this dramatic break comes from the manic and fantastical dream visions in which he indulges. These visions allow him to free himself symbolically through the meditative and birthlike act of swimming along the river Magra, and via a powerful associative connection with a painting of an angel.

The narrator finds a greater muse in an enigmatic American woman, Anna, whose impressive yacht, Gibraltar, has docked at the seaside town where he is staying. Moved by her beauty and her air of mystery, the narrator devises a plan to bring himself aboard her boat to fill the post of brass polisher. He does not need to take such employment, however, as the two meet at a local dance and spend that entire night engaged in intense conversation. Anna reveals that her purpose in life is to sail about the world in search of a man with whom she once had a significant love affair. Little is known about the mysterious lover, save that he is a sailor who hails from Gibraltar, and that he entered Anna’s life when he came on board her boat after murdering an American ball-bearings tycoon with the moniker Nelson Nelson. The drifter soon abandoned both ship and Anna, so now his scorned lover devotes her life to finding him, responding to urgent messages from around the world with word of a potential sighting.

The narrator’s curiously detached obsession with Anna and, in turn, Anna’s obsession with finding the sailor from Gibraltar fuel the bulk of the novel. Anna’s encounters with the sailor and the many men she has taken aboard ship become parables. The tentative new couple dine out regularly, and Duras subtly erodes the conventions of gender in narrative as her male narrator passionately seeks the woman’s stories, and coaxes them out of her, thereby enabling her to confront her own anxieties. These stories, and the quest adventure that the two have embarked upon, inspire the narrator to say in jest that he aims to write a great American novel about Anna. Duras uses this trope to subvert the construction of the typical American novel, predominantly the work of Ernest Hemingway, who is referenced in the text.

As the yacht heads toward Africa and the shipmates plan a romanticized hunting excursion, the novel both parallels and deconstructs the plot and meaning of Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Storytelling and the reception of narrative are engendered in reverse for Duras, as in her tale the woman’s story is central and reliant upon the participation and collusion of a male audience and supporters. Anna’s story of the sailor from Gibraltar, however, grows into a patchwork of legend and fantasy, and is repeated with no conclusion, which the author seizes as the pattern and function of desire in life.

The Sailor from Gibraltar ends as inconclusively as Anna’s romantic tales when the two return from their African adventure only to find the yacht destroyed by fire. The ship, much like its human cargo, seems to have been unable to withstand the pressure of exaggerated narratives and the hunger of unfulfilled desires. The sense of dissatisfaction and incompleteness was deliberate on the part of Duras, who resented the film adaptation of her novel chiefl y because the director invented an ending. Duras believed that love is by definition inconclusive, and she wanted her novel to function in the same manner. Many devotees of Duras’s work take exception to The Sailor from Gibraltar, as its style and tone are distinctly different from her most celebrated work. Regardless, The Sailor from Gibraltar is invaluable as a text that tackles the form and style of the American novel, as well as for exploring the inherent tension of a female subject’s expression through a male voice, and a move toward a narrative of silence and the power of what is left unsaid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Translated by AnneMarie Glasheen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Best, Victoria. Critical Subjectivities. Identity and Narrative in the Work of Colette and Marguerite Duras. Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Crowley, Martin. Duras: Writing and the Ethical. Oxford and New York: Claredon, 2000.
Gunther, Renate. Marguerite Duras. Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Knapp, Bettina L., ed. Critical Essays on Marguerite Duras. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998.
Ramsay, Raylene L. The French Autobiographies: Sarraute, Duras, Robbe-Grillet. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
Schuster, Marilyn R. Marguerite Duras Revisited. Boston: Twayne, 1993.
Winston, Jane Bradley. Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

Categories: French Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

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