Voices in novels and films of Marguerite Duras's “India cycle”

In this article the author focuses on “India cycle” of Marguerite Duras, included both novels and films, as a part of her intermedial experiment with the accent put on a specific type of characters - characters-“voices”. The origin of this type of characters is linked to Duras’s works in cinema, where she was able to contrapose visual and audial narratives, to divide it and to separate the “body” and the “voice” of characters, highlighting audial representation instead of visual one. The focus of this paper is on these characters-voices in novels and films of Marguerite Duras. In novels voices are represented as a part of audial narrative dimension, interacting with other types of sound (whispering, rustling, cries), voices are provided with a function of shattering the subject in Duras’s novels. Subject in her prose is surrounded by polyphonic, but anonymous and depersonalized space. In films characters-voices are literalized: by means of voices disruption of visual and audial narrative produces. Voices have no longer an accompanying function related to visual representation of characters, furthermore, now voices are acting subjects themselves, and their unique action is telling the story, unique event is a speech, linked very weakly to the visual narrative. No less significant becomes a pragmatic aspect of the film: a spectator finds himself in a situation, in which he or she is forced more to “listen” to the film, than to “watch” the film. Moreover, he is forced to correlate “seen” and “heard”, quite contraposed. In films voices are juxtaposed with a new type of characters (those on screen, silencing and not talking). By this means voices are regarded as a part of search of new aesthetic, of silence and of muteness.