MARGUERITE DURAS AND THE TESTIMONY OF THE IMPOSSIBLE IN HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

Abstract

A couple of lovers meet in Hiroshima in August 1957. He is Japanese. She, a French actress, is in town to shoot a film about peace. Lying in bed in a hotel, she tells everything she saw in Hiroshima, the museums, the images, the survivors, the tracks. To which he replies, emphatically: Tu n'as rien vu to Hiroshima. Thus, she starts Hiroshima Mon Amour, text by Marguerite Duras, written as a script for the homonymous film by Alain Resnais, in which she creates a dialogue between these two characters, marked in different ways by the horrors of war. Her writing reveals the impossibility of talking about catastrophes like the one in Hiroshima – and all one can do is talk about this impossibility. Duras highlights the unavoidable character of the tragedy while, throughout the narrative, her character tries to elaborate on her own war traumas, provoked by the interest of her Japanese lover. Our objective, therefore, is to analyze how Duras' text builds a testimony of the impossible, stretching the limits of literature, and cinema, beyond an attempt at representation. In order to do so, we dialogue with thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Márcio Seligmann-Silva, whose theories about testimony and literature, or even testimonial literature, help to deepen this reflection.