One of the few texts that the French writer Marguerite Duras set in her childhood home of Indochina, The Sea Wall was also her first publication to gain both critical and popular notoriety and success. The novel incorporates themes of motherhood, desire, and colonialism with a coming-of-age narrative told in the third person from the point of view of Suzanne. Though the content is predominantly fictitious, in many ways this landmark work serves as a springboard for Duras’s later telling and retelling of her girlhood in Indochina in works such as The Lover (L’Amant, 1984) and The North China Lover (L’Amant de la Chine du nord, 1991).
The Sea Wall tells the story of an unnamed widow who supports her children, Joseph and Suzanne, by playing piano for silent films at the local Eden Cinema. Like Duras’s own mother, The Sea Wall’s mother purchases a property she intends to cultivate as farmland. The Pacific Ocean, however, encroaches on the land yearly, and the mother plots to build a sea wall against the tides, with little long-term success. The wall is a tangible form of resistance, which proves to be futile; such resistance is also futile when applied to the family’s struggles to overcome their own marginalized position in the social hierarchy of the East. Escapism and imagination offer the only consolation to their plight.
The cinema is a powerful emblem of fantasy and avoidance, where the children in particular can indulge their desires in a safe, dark interior space. The lure of the cinema is as romantic and exotic as the lure of propaganda aimed at the early colonists, of whom the novel’s mother numbers. Here, idealized notions of dreams achieved are mere illusions, much like the flickering, temporal salve of the silver screen. Ironically, while Joseph and Suzanne are basically raised in the cinema and lose themselves time and time again in the movies, the mother is denied this pleasure, as when she is on duty and at the piano, she cannot see the screen.
Much like the salvation of the cinema, the children in the novel use lovers and storytelling as modes of escape and for the expression of physical and emotional desire. In the dire poverty of their youth they both imagine wealthy lovers who will rescue them. Soon Suzanne attracts a real-life admirer, Monsieur Jo, the son of a well-to-do planter, whom her brother finds intolerable. Joseph’s own imaginings ring true when a rich woman named Lina takes him with her to the city and provides him with the opportunity to flee from both his mother and her failing land. When Joseph relays the tale of his eight-day adventure with Lina, Suzanne becomes endowed with the notion that she too can live like her brother, and that, in fact, she possesses the same traits that she admires in him. Having spurned Monsieur Jo, Suzanne is able to conduct an affair with Jean Agnosti. Suzanne allows him to be the first man with whom she makes love, and they, too, spend eight days together. This affair allows for Suzanne to escape her long-suffering mother, but only for so long; Suzanne must return to her to watch her die.
Escape, sexuality, and relationships, however, offer painfully disparate gender constructs, as Suzanne discovers when she attempts to create a life for herself like her brother’s, or, more specifically, her brother’s storytelling. While Joseph can wander freely about the city and happily embarks on a love affair with Lina—the fulfillment of his fantasies—Suzanne is limited without the companionship of a man, and gets only Agnosti, whom she ultimately rejects. Suzanne’s story is unresolved at the end of the novel, deliberately so, as Duras was firm on the issue of The Sea Wall’s lack of closure.
Contrary to her vehement wishes, the 1957 film version of the novel bears a substituted ending, to which Duras objected. Furthermore, the novel narrowly missed winning the coveted Prix Goncourt; Duras attributed this to her involvement in the Communist Party. Regardless, The Sea Wall helped establish Marguerite Duras as an author, and the themes, landscapes, characters, and motifs of this novel serve in retrospect as the seeds she would sow to immense fruition in many of her later works.
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 and New York: Peter Lang, 2000.
Crowley, Martin. Duras: Writing and the Ethical. Oxford and New York: Claredon, 2000.
Gunther, Renate. Marguerite Duras. Manchester and 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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