Throughout the film, Duras’s voice is heard reading at a slow, monotonous pace what is not yet – but will later become – a literary work in itself. Several disparate images of the ocean shore and of Duras’s last partner, the French future writer Yann Andréa, alternate with a black screen that is on display for most of this 45-minute-long, almost imageless cinematic experience. As a film, TAM is a different kind of experiment than its textual counterpart, defying fundamental conventions of its own medium.
Rather inconsistent with the French editorial labels that classify it as a novel ( roman) or a short story ( nouvelle), the text lacks not only the standard length, but also epic strength and complexity to be referred to by either name.īefore being branded as a novel and published by Les Éditions de Minuit 2, the text was the soundtrack transcript of an eponymous movie ( L’Homme Atlantique 3, 1981) created by Marguerite Duras from cuts left aside in her previous film ( Agatha et les lectures illimitées, 1981). The graphic arrangement of this experimental work situates it on the border between prose poetry and self-centered narrative, written for its most part in the second person. Its 30 pages accommodate no more than 2 400 words, together with the many interludes of silence that separate them in the form of typographic blanks. Marguerite Duras’s 1982 The Atlantic Man 1 (hereafter, TAM) is a hybrid textual structure that stands at the border of several literary genres and inhabits – if not inaugurates – the overlapping territory of two media: literature and cinema. The article concludes with a comparison of these two critical approaches to The Atlantic Man which, as a hybrid creation, was born as a symbolic “work of mourning” of a lost love whose absent presence can only indirectly alluded to.
Using deleuzian terminology, the article will then explain how Duras’s ostentatious literary and cinematic use of difference and repetition transgresses medium-specific norms. Duras’s deliberate transition from literature to cinema lends itself to an intermedial comparison that echoes Lessing’s Laocoön. A year later, Duras transforms the film into an eponymous novel. This experiment pushes cinematic limits so far that it ceases to be ‘visual’. More than a story of a lost love, the film explores this very failure: The Atlantic Man is a film almost entirely without of images. In the 1980s, in an act not dissimilar to that of Dibutade’s, Marguerite Duras makes a film out of the failure of language to come to terms with a beloved’s absence. L’étude se conclut par une comparaison de ces deux traitements critiques de L’Homme atlantique comme création hybride née d’un « travail de deuil » symbolique après la perte d’un amour dont l’absence peut être seulement vaguement montrée.
Ensuite, elle entame, en déployant une terminologie deleuzienne, une discussion sur l’usage littéraire et filmique de la répétition et de la différence en tant que transgression des normes médiatiques. L’auteure de l’article compare les références permanentes d’un médium à l’autre qui hantent les deux ouvrages avec une mise-au-jour des théories énoncées par Lessing dans Laocoön.
Un an plus tard, Duras publie le texte du film sous forme d’un roman éponyme. Ce qu’elle montre, au-delà de l’histoire d’un amour perdu, c’est plutôt cette impuissance même : L’Homme atlantique est un film qui manque presque complètement ses images. Dans les années 1980, d’un geste qui rappelle celui de Dibutade, Marguerite Duras fait un film sur l’impuissance du langage de rendre compréhensible, sans reste, l’absence d’un aimé.