Relieving pain in Marguerite Duras’s ‘La douleur’ and ‘Albert des Capitales’

Abstract

This study will focus on how psychic pain is externalized in two short texts from Marguerite Duras’s La douleur. I will first argue that the collection’s opening work, “La douleur,” may be viewed as a trauma testimony, as a sub-genre of autobiography. Duras the narrator shows us how her psychic pain generates physiological symptoms. In the course of the narrative, we come to understand that her symptoms are the same as the ones she images her husband, Robert L., suffering from in Dachau. Duras also projects her pain onto her surroundings, transforming the Paris of her mind’s eye into the bleak landscape where she believes her husband has perished. In “Albert des Capitales,” we find what amounts to an externalization of psychological suffering through behavior as the protagonist, Thérèse, transforms herself from victim to victimizer during the interrogation of a “donneur,” a suspected collaborator. Her ordering the torture of the donneur is the result of the psychic pain caused by the uncertainty of her husband’s fate. “La douleur” and “Albert des Capitales,” I will argue, are two sides of the same coin, two different women—both Duras’s avatars—who find themselves in equally stressful circumstances but who unconsciously process their stress in divergent ways.