Marguerite Duras: Agatha (1981)

Marguerite Duras was encouraged to write her ‘incest book’ Agatha after partly reading Robert Musil’s L’Homme sans qualités, in which the incestuous love between Ulrich and Agathe takes place: it brought back a flood of memories about her brother Paulo Donnadieu, with whom she had had an incestuous relationship. In Alexandra Saemmer’s Duras et Musil : drôle de couple ? drôle d’inceste ? (2001), the author points out that in the French translation of the Austrian work, the author concentrates on the chapters ‘Souffles d’un jour d’été’, evoked on page 64 of Agatha. Duras had, as she notes in Le Monde extérieur, Outside 2 (1993), found Musil’s work ‘eminently obscure, unreadable, irresistable’.

Duras’s film Agatha et les lectures illimitées (also 1981) – which was filmed in Trouville, contains almost identical dialogue to the book, and is with virtually motionless images – is played by Yann Andréa and Bulle Ogier, with the voices of Andréa and Duras herself.

The book is a conversation, with many silences, between brother and sister, both aged thirty, Lui and Elle (or Agatha), and takes place in and around ‘La Villa d’Agatha’. They have spent their youth there and speak of many different activities (including, very coyly, their secret incestuous love) in the house at different ages. Only now, they create a distance between themselves, calling each other 'vous'. Agatha is seeing her brother for the final time because early in the morning she will get up to take a plane. They are obviously still in love, and although the man begs her to stay a little longer, even says he’ll kill himself, the woman is irrevocably determined to leave.

For Duras, incestuous love is never-ending, has no resolution, is unworkable, is cursed, and is pure.

My Marguerite Duras posts:
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Marguerite Duras: La Pute de la côte normande
Marguerite Duras: L'Homme assis dans le couloir
Marguerite Duras: Agatha
Marguerite Duras: Emily L.
Marguerite Duras: Les Yeux bleus cheveux noirs
Marguerite Duras: L'Amant | The Lover
Marguerite Duras: Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein
Marguerite Duras: L'Amante anglaise
Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras: Cimetière du Montparnasse
Marguerite Duras: Un barrage contre le Pacifique
Marguerite Duras: L'Après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas
Marguerite Duras: Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia
Marguerite Duras: Le Marin de Gibraltar | The Sailor from Gibraltar
Marguerite Duras: La Douleur | The War: A Memoir
Yann Andréa: Cet amour-là
Marguerite Duras and Xavière Gauthier: Les Parleuses
Marguerite Duras: Savannah Bay
Marguerite Duras: Détruire, dit-elle | Destroy, She Said
Marguerite Duras: L'Amour
Marguerite Duras: Dix heures et demie du soir en été
Marguerite Duras: Le Square | The Square
Marguerite Duras: Les Impudents
Marguerite Duras: Le Shaga
Marguerite Duras: Oui, peut-être
Marguerite Duras: Des journées entières dans les arbres
Marguerite Duras: Suzanna Andler
Marguerite Duras: Le Vice-Consul | The Vice Consul
Marguerite Duras: Moderato cantabile
Marguerite Duras: La Vie matérielle
Marguerite Duras: La Vie tranquille
Marguerite Duras: La Pluie d'été