Orchestrating through writing

a reading of A dam against the Pacific, by Marguerite Duras

Abstract

In this article, we work on some points from the reading of A dam against the Pacific (1950), by Marguerite Duras. We started from questions about the writing of memory in works by the french writer that oscillate between the novel and the autobiography, which unfolded in an investigation about the voice, indicating important relationships between the voice and memory and between the voice and writing. Thus, we suggest reading A dam against the Pacific (1950) as a fictional structure that operates the truth, a construction that took place through writing, based on what was transmitted by ‘lullabies’. This operation also meant the construction of an imaginary universe that reappears later throughout the writer's work, as if the operation actually pointed to the construction of beacons in the immensity of the ocean of language.