The Impersonal in A Dam Against the Pacific by Marguerite Duras: Semiotic Analysis of the Literary Discourse
A dam against the Pacific is one of Marguerite Duras’s novels and is based on the author’s life. The story told traces the succinct panorama of Indochina in the 1940s. The novel is about a time when thousands of French families were leaving for Indochina for a better life. One of these families is the Duras family. This article is based on a semiotic analysis of an excerpt from the novel (Duras, 1950, p. 115-119) which is a description of the plain where the protagonists and the natives live. The long description of the Kam Plain, which is our corpus of analysis, draws not only a precise topographical space, but also the living space of the natives. Our analysis focuses on the recurring elements of the narrator’s discourse to reveal the semantic organization proposed by the general universe of the narrative. Our approach is that of semiotic analysis of literary discourse as it is elaborated and practiced in the work of A. J. Greimas, D. Bertrand and J. Fontanille, but also by linguists and narratologists J.-M. Adam and J.-P. Goldenstein. The analysis takes into account two aspects of the text: the statement and the enunciation. The discursive units frequently used in this description draw the isotopies of the corpus. The figurative and thematic elements allow us to address the profound organization of the meaning of the text.
La valeur de l’ “impersonnel” dans Un barrage contre le Pacifique de Marguerite Duras: Analyse sémiotique du discours littéraire
Un barrage contre le Pacifique est l’un des romans de Marguerite Duras qui puise sa source dans la vie de l’auteure. L’histoire racontée trace le panorama succinct de l’Indochine des années 1940. Le roman traite d’une époque où des milliers de familles françaises sont parties pour l’Indochine pour une meilleure vie. L’une de ces familles est celle des Duras. Cet article vise une analyse sémiotique d’un extrait du roman (Duras, 1950, p. 115-119) qui est une description de la plaine où vivent les protagonistes et les indigènes. La longue description de la plaine de Kam qui est notre corpus d’analyse dessine non seulement un espace topographique précis, mais aussi l’espace de vie des indigènes. Notre analyse s’attarde sur les éléments récurrents du discours du narrateur pour dévoiler l’organisation sémantique proposé par l’univers général du récit. Notre approche est celle de l’analyse sémiotique du discours littéraire telle qu’elle est élaborée et pratiquée dans les travaux d’A. J. Greimas, de D. Bertrand de J. Fontanille, mais aussi par les linguistes et narratologues J.-M. Adam et J.-P. Goldenstein. L’analyse prend en considération les deux aspects du texte : l’énoncé et l’énonciation. Les unités discursives fréquemment employés dans cette description dessinent les isotopies du corpus. Les éléments figuratifs et thématiques permettent d’aborder l’organisation profonde de la signification du texte.
Duras’s novel, with its richness and depth, lends itself to a plurality of readings. The novelistic discourse takes its strength by the evocation of the misery of the country, the mother’s effort to survive with her uncultivable plantation, the injustices of the colonial system, and by her intimate and distant writing that describes eminently fate and the misery of the natives and the «little whites» of the country.
In the first part of the novel, we will dwell on a fragment of the novel (Duras, 1950, p. 115-119) where the narrative focuses the Kam plain through a detailed description whose imaged style effectively shows the miserable conditions which the natives are subjected to. The extract highlights a poor landscape of Indochinese flora populated by children who are in a way the linchpin of the description. Around them are described the parents of these children and finally another group that surrounds them, namely the stray dogs of the plain.
This way of presenting collective actors (in three interrelational circles) not only shows the unfavourable aspect of this space, but it also shows in the menus the shortage, hunger, and contagious diseases that reign in the country. The long description draws a topographical space, which at the same time appears as a thymic space since it is linked to the harsh ordeal of the Mother culminating in the failure from which she will never recover. Thus, the mother’s effort to cultivate rice on this uncultivable land (which gives the title to the novel, since it builds a dam against the Pacific) appears as the culmination of the thematic network of the novel. Just as nothing can be said against the indomitable tides of the ocean, here any survival effort is also doomed to failure.
This analysis is essentially based on the semiotic approach to literary discourse, which relies on narrative processes as a constituent element of the narrative. It should be remembered that the literary text consists of two levels, one of which concerns the semantics of the content and the other, the manifestation of meaning. According to this approach, the literary text organizes the messages in an interrelation way to give rise to the discourse. It is therefore necessary to take into account the units of the discursive manifestation (lexemes) and the componential units of meaning associated with it.
The corpus of our analysis illustrates the thematic and figurative axes of the novel and appears as a significant example of the novelistic discourse that emphasizes the anonymous characters of the story told, namely the natives. Concerning the observer point of view, the children appear as an anonymous and collective figure whose tragic fate is combined with that of the small settlers of the country.
In the text, children are compared to animals and plants that grow in the plain naturally. Their lives and survival, like death, are an ordinary fact, so much so that their birth and death are invariably subject to the indifference of their families. Comparative processes, the use of verbs and adjectives illustrate the point of view chosen in the narrative to describe the shabby conditions of the plain as a space of the lives of the natives.
The discourse of stylistic processes bringing «children» and «dogs» together in cataclysm, life and death in indifference is conveyed in a particular way by a network of anaphoras used mainly for «children». Analysis of the frequency of «indefinites» and their semi-Semitic content showed the approximation or even erasure of the semantic categories «/animal/human,» «living/dead,» «sense/insignificance» in the thematic configuration defining «children.»
Thus, the large number of indefinite pronouns with an indefinite value affects the thematic isotopy «inanity» defined as «character of what is empty, without real content, which has no interest to the heart or the mind» to describe the being of children of the plain. The entire anaphoric system of the corpus emphasizes the non-meaning nature of children by reducing them in the discourse to the «inanimate» state.
As a result, the semantic line between «animated/inanimate,» between «human/ animal» and «sensible/insignificant» fades into the text. We can thus consider the game of inversion and/or approximation of the semantic values of the figures as «children, dogs, life, death, scourge» as a fact of style by playing on the referential ambiguity of these figures in relation to their figurative and thematic content.
As in this analyzed excerpt, Duras’s novel is in itself a denunciation of the unworthy conditions inflicted not only on the French expatriates in the colonies, but also on the peoples of these countries. The new life that the Mother wanted to build here has become a perfect example of failure (debt, poverty, boredom, distress, despair). But as the description of life on the plain, in these confines, shows us, there is no effective way to reorganize a prosperous life. The excerpt shows, through the strong images, the vain determination of the Mother to build the dams against the Pacific.
