Escrever a dor: Marguerite Duras e a escrita literária de si / Writing the Pain: Marguerite Duras and the Literary Self-Writing

Resumo: A escritora Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) publicou, em 1985, A dor, livro que reúne uma série de textos elaborados a partir de anotações em cadernos e diários, incluindo texto homônimo ao livro. Nessa narrativa em específico, é possível reconhecer uma forte carga autobiográfica no relato da espera pelo marido feito prisioneiro durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. Tal acontecimento acometeu justamente a escritora na década de 1940, quando seu marido naquela época, Robert Antelme, fora levado pelas forças alemãs a campos de trabalho forçado e de extermínio. Posteriormente, os textos originais, isto é, os próprios cadernos de Duras, foram organizados e publicados em novo livro, intitulado Cadernos de guerra e outros textos, algo que possibilitou uma nova abordagem à sua leitura. Sendo assim, e tendo em vista essa última publicação em que constam os diários da escritora – algo que nos permite comparar um texto a partir de suportes distintos –, a intenção desse artigo é explorar os caminhos percorridos por Duras entre a versão registrada em seus diários e a versão publicada em livro. O objetivo principal é investigar como a ideia de escrita de si passa a ganhar ressignificações quando confrontada com um novo processo de ficcionalização e publicação da escrita autobiográfica, o qual chamaremos, enfim, de escrita literária de si. Para tanto, utilizaremos os estudos de Michel Foucault e Jacques Derrida para um embasamento teórico mais aprofundado sobre as noções que regem tal processo de escrita (e reescrita) de uma experiência pessoal.Palavras-chave: Marguerite Duras; escrita de si; literatura de testemunho; diários.Abstract: In 1985, the writer Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) published the book The pain, which gathers many texts based on notes from several notebooks and diaries including a homonymous story. In this specific narrative, it is possible to recognize a great number of autobiographical elements from the writer’s life while she tells the pain of waiting for a husband captured during the second world war. The same event happened to the writer during the 1940’s, when her husband at the time, Robert Antelme, was taken by the German army to fields of forced work and extermination. Lately, the original texts, that is, Duras’ notebooks themselves, were organized and published in a new book, something that changed the way we used to read the narrative “The pain”. Therefore, and considering the later publication of the text exactly as it was written in the writer’s diary, the intention of this article is to confront the original text and the final book version of it. The main purpose is to investigate how the idea of self-writing gains different meanings when it faces a new process of fictionalization and publicization of the autobiographical writing, named in this case as a literary self-writing. Studies from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are going to be used as theoretical background on notions that guide the process of writing (and rewriting) a personal experience.Keywords: Marguerite Duras; Self-writing; Witness Literature; Diaries.

Features and significance of narration in the witness literature

Witness literature is an important and significant factor in the historical memory formation. Third-person witness narratives are well-known, and 1-person fictional descriptions are equally well-known. However, first-person factual narrative evidence is of particular interest. They represent the initial reflection narratives of personal experience. In addition, this reflexive narration contains the meaningful being picture dynamics, including changes in the content of this picture. The article contains the results of a value-normative analysis of little-known sources of witness literature, which presents the experience of the repressive practices in the USSR in 1920 1980. Generalization of the analysis results allows us to speak about two cycles of radical performance of the semantic picture of the world. In turn, each such cycle includes two phases. The first phase is associated with strangeness of familiar experience and the liminality of new experience. The second phase expresses the subsequent reaggregation of a new understanding of social life. These dynamics are very close to the dynamics of the conceptual narration of war experiences. The main differences are related to the greater emphasis on victimization, different attitudes towards actors and the reasons for victimization. Over the years, witness literature has become an important material for the socio-cultural engineering of building ideas about the sad events of the past – their oblivion (as meaningful unoblivion) in order to prevent their repetition in the present and in the future. A simple hush-up of such circumstances forms the enduring trauma of public consciousness, its «neuroticism», the inability to distance oneself from the past, to live confidently on, causing obsessive associations, or even repetitions, it becomes a source of internal and external conflicts. Constructive oblivion provides not suppression and deletion, but a systematic comprehension of historical experience.

Vidnesbyrdlitteraturens stille stemmer

The Silent Voices of Witness Literature. Refugee Crisis in Danish Children’s Literature since 2015 In 2015, Europe experienced the most massive refugee crisis since World War II. This crisis has been reflected in different kinds of art from poetry to picturebooks. In Denmark as well as in other countries, a number of children’s books has been published about the war in Syria and Syrian and other war refugees. These books have a common ground in sharing knowledge about violence, escape and death. Although fleeing is a known topic and the death of a child character is not an unusual event in children’s books (Clement and Jamali), it may be difficult or even controversial to address traumatizing war experiences and death in works for relatively young readers. Very few refugee children are able to tell their stories themselves since they are eithertoo small, displaced in language, traumatized or even dead (Nel). These children’s stories tend to be represented by others (authors and illustrators) who strive to imagine and bear witness to their situation in an artificial language. In this article, three Danish children’s books by widely acknowledged authors and illustrators are chosen as examples of fictional interpretations of refugee children’s experiences. The texts are diverse in genres and target groups and the stories are told with different levels of realism and fantasy, but they are allconnected to the same theme and context. What and how do these contemporary authors and illustrators tell us about refugees and their experiences, and how are they able to represent or bear witness to the experiences of the child victims who are silenced? The theoretical background of this study is Giorgio Agamben’s theory about witness literature and lacunas in language (Agamben; Engdahl ”Philomelas tunge”).

Child Witness Expressions of Certainty are Informative

Children are frequently witnesses of crime. In the witness literature and legal systems, children are often deemed to have unreliable memories. Yet, in the basic developmental literature, young children can monitor their memory. To address these contradictory conclusions, we reanalysed the confidence-accuracy relationship in basic and applied research. Confidence provided considerable information about memory accuracy, from at least age 8, but possibly younger. We also conducted an experiment where children in young- (4–6 years), middle- (7–9 years), and late- (10–17 years) childhood (N=2,205) watched a person in a video, and then identified that person from a police lineup. Children provided a confidence rating (an explicit judgement), and used an interactive lineup—in which the lineup faces can be rotated—and we analyzed children’s viewing behavior (an implicit measure of metacognition). A strong confidence-accuracy relationship was observed from age 10, and an emerging relationship from age 7. A constant likelihood ratio signal-detection model can be used to understand these findings. Moreover, in all ages, interactive viewing behavior differed in children who made correct versus incorrect suspect identifications. Our research reconciles the apparent divide between applied and basic research findings and suggests that the fundamental architecture of metacognition that has previously been evidenced in basic list-learning paradigms also underlies performance on complex applied tasks. Contrary to what is believed by legal practitioners, but similar to what has been found in the basic literature, identifications made by children can be reliable when appropriate metacognitive measures are used to estimate accuracy.

Lessing’s Witness Literature

This chapter takes as its starting point World War One, its traumatic effect on Lessing’s parents, and the ongoing effect of their traumas on Lessing herself; and goes on to explore how these issues are channeled into literary form in The Wind Blows Away our Words (1987), Mara and Dann (1999), The Story of General Dann and Mara’s Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2005) and Alfred and Emily (2008). In exploring the effects of trauma on survivors and their children, it refers to the theories of a psychologist specialising in war trauma, Robert Jay Lifton; to Holocaust scholars such as Michael Levine; and to the philosopher Susan Brison. The chapter demonstrates how Lessing’s early experiences influenced her contribution to what is termed ‘witness literature’, developing techniques in her work that encourage readers to engage with the most challenging issues of her time, and to expose the ways in which language can be manipulated. Lessing’s thinking is contextualised with reference to other writers such as Herta Müller, Nadine Gordimer, Storm Jameson, Attia Hosein and Kamala Markhandaya, whose work is haunted by the effects of war and violence, and who all insist that personal experience cannot be divorced from the Zeitgeist.