"Agatha and the Limitless Readings" by Marguerite Duras. The literary text and its filmic (irre)presentation

Abstract

The present article analyses the film Agatha and the Limitless Readings (1981) by Marguerite Duras as the final experience, together with The Atlantic Man (1981), of the so-called Durasian literary-cinematic coalescence, which began a decade earlier with Woman of the Ganges (1974). The fusion of both practices, born from the need to turn the literary text into voice refusing its mise-en-scene, generates a new filmic practice which is one of the highest materialisations of the time-image defined by Deleuze, characterised by the independence between the visual image and the sound image. In Agatha... the Durasian coalescence inserts a new semiotic and narratological strategy: the presentation of the literary text in the filmic image as part of its irrepresentation insofar as cinematic mise-en-scene. This new component of the visual image generates a literary scene opposed to the filmic scene that enables new metaphorical operations between image and sound, thus joining the network of irrational correspondences among the different elements of the sound image and the visual image that define this filmic experience as a poetics of invention, hypnosis and hallucination. In its final materialisation, the Durasian coalescence places itself at the epicentre of the problem of irrepresentability through the theme of incest. The showing of the irrepresentable, as a limit expression of the fusion between literature and cinema, is built through the relationships among their different elements, all of them defined by an absence that the author shapes.