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Kriisiytynyt kertomus poliittisena tilana: Marguerite Durasin Détruire, dit-elle ja Monique Wittigin Les guérillères

• Tytti Rantanen Tampereen yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74922

Abstract

From May Towards the Zero Point. The Crisis of Narrative as a Political Space: Marguerite Duras’s Destroy, She Said and Monique Wittig’s Les guérillères

The May 1968 student revolts in Paris distinctively mobilized intellectuals and artists like writers and filmmakers. The article examines the connection between the radicalization of the narrative form and political activism. Both Marguerite Duras and Monique Wittig took part in the riots and extended the politics into their own writing – not only as a subject matter, but as a profound questioning of narrative as a form of communication and expression. Duras’s Destroy, she said (Détruire, dit-elle, 1969) is a plain story about two men and two women and their symbiotic communion in an isolated sanatorium. The crisis of narrative escalates in the laconic, minimalist form which marks an overture to a series of her even more apocalyptic and stripped-down writings. Wittig’s collage-like Les guérillères (1969) abandons conventional narrative order and invites the reader to participate in its collective celebration of women’s triumph over patriarchal discourse. These texts can be read as forms of the ”communism of writing”, as formulated by Maurice Blanchot during the riots. Their movement towards fragmentarity, anonymity, collectivity and disclosure is aiming beyond institutionalized culture.