Escrever a dor: Marguerite Duras e a escrita literária de si / Writing the Pain: Marguerite Duras and the Literary Self-Writing

In 1985, the writer Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) published the book The pain, which gathers many texts based on notes from several notebooks and diaries including a homonymous story. In this specific narrative, it is possible to recognize a great number of autobiographical elements from the writer’s life while she tells the pain of waiting for a husband captured during the second world war. The same event happened to the writer during the 1940’s, when her husband at the time, Robert Antelme, was taken by the German army to fields of forced work and extermination. Lately, the original texts, that is, Duras’ notebooks themselves, were organized and published in a new book, something that changed the way we used to read the narrative “The pain”. Therefore, and considering the later publication of the text exactly as it was written in the writer’s diary, the intention of this article is to confront the original text and the final book version of it. The main purpose is to investigate how the idea of self-writing gains different meanings when it faces a new process of fictionalization and publicization of the autobiographical writing, named in this case as a literary self-writing. Studies from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida are going to be used as theoretical background on notions that guide the process of writing (and rewriting) a personal experience.