Marguerite Duras’ the North China lover: music and its significance

Abstract

Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) is considered today as one of the most important French writers of the second half of the 20th century. Since she was unsatisfied with the cinema version of her novel The Lover, filmed by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1990, she decided to retake the history of her adolescence and wrote The North China Lover (1991). This is a unique text intended to be a screen play, but which was also described by the author as a “novel”. Reflecting on the concept of “listening”, Barthes (1982) defines it as something that is able to produce threatening or pleasant feelings to a human being. It is known that Music is mainly ambivalent and resembles to a language, being able to convey an intention (ADORNO). Following Kristeva (1969), who said the literary word is the result of a “crossing of textual surfaces”, in the present work, the crossing between the “listening” of the songs mentioned in the text by the characters and the written word, as well as their meanings not only as a backdrop of the text, but also as a part of it and even as a guiding thread of the “text-movie’s” plot.