The basic theme of Marguerite Duras' novels, plays, and films is the interplay between love and destruction, conflicting drives which are often resolved in the violence of a criminal act. The fascination with the crime passionnel or love murder leads Duras naturally to a reliance on the detective story, a genre where murder is central and where the dual structure of crime and investigation offers a model for parallel movements toward violence, then communion. Duras shares the affinity of the authors of the nouveau roman for the themes and techniques of the detective story. Like Robbe-Grillet, Claude Ollier, and others, Duras' work adopts the basic detective story format: a mysterious crime followed by an intense effort at understanding. But where the nouveau roman focuses on the puzzle element of the detective story, Duras emphasizes the human drama of moral involvement in the mystery of another's criminal act….

Duras turns to the detective story along with the new novelists because she accepts its definition of reality as potentially violent and not immediately knowable. (p. 503)

Violent death, murder or suicide, is a central aspiration of all of Duras' heroines. This unconscious drive toward annihilation becomes unleashed through the dramatic confrontation with the crime of another. Duras' novels recount the transformation of an aimless, self-destructive woman into a purposeful detective. (p. 504)

The fundamental preoccupation is never the murder itself but its repercussions…. Duras' concern is with the irrational obsession of her heroine with the crime of another. The forward-going action of the traditional novel, which relates the adventures of an active hero, is replaced in Duras, and in the nouveau roman as a whole, with the detective story's reverse chronology which presents the story through the optic of the passive observer, the investigator, quite literally a "private eye" for the reader. (pp. 504-05)

Duras' women readily slide into someone else's drama because their own lives are so empty and devoid of action…. Duras' heroines have no existence prior to the crime; like the pure detective, they gain their identity through the investigation.

In the very earliest of Duras' novels, Les Impudents (1943) and La Vie Tranquille (1944), the pattern is set: the crime which is committed by a male—the brother—provokes the woman to action…. The early novels … develop the formula: the transformation of the heroine from witness of the murder act, to investigator, to victim in the sexual act. Lovemaking is seen as a kind of investigation, an effort to understand the violence of the criminal act. (p. 505)

The method of detection in Le Marin de Gibraltar is the one which Duras' future investigators will employ. All rational explanation of the evidence is discounted…. Physical proof yields to intuition; what is sought is not the "airtight case" against a suspect but the spiritual communion between hunter and hunted. Doubt is never entirely dispelled, even at the end of the inquiry. Discovery is a leap of faith, not an assertion of fact. (p. 506)

In Duras' novels, the intense heat, persistent intoxication, excessive sleep, and hypnotic dialogue provide a … dampening of consciousness so necessary to the detective enterprise. (p. 507)

The maid [heroine of Le Square] exhibits the need of Duras' other women and, indeed, of all criminals in detective literature to share her murderous aspirations. It is not enough to commit a crime in perfect safety; it is necessary for someone (the detective) to know. The criminal can only really exist when he or she is identified as such by the detective: the detective creates the criminal. The detective, too, is dependent on the criminal for he only comes into existence at the inception of an investigation. Thus, the detective/criminal team, as the criminal/victim team, offers a model for the study of the interdependence of the couple, a theme which is explored in the tense relationship between Anne Desbaresdes and Chauvin in Moderato cantabile.

Anne Desbaresdes is the archetypical dispossessed Duras heroine…. The absence of first-person possessive adjectives reveals her alienation from her surroundings. (p. 508)

The initial scene of the music lesson reveals much of Anne's character and introduces themes that will be reinforced by the contrapuntal episodes between Anne and Chauvin later. The sonatina itself is significant. Diabelli is best known, not through his own work, but through the Beethoven variations. And will not Anne and Chauvin essentially be playing a variation on the theme acted out by the first couple? Anne replays the lesson, this time with Chauvin the teacher and herself the pupil.

The sonata form contains, en abîme, the nucleus of the novel's structure with its three major movements of the music lesson, the crime, and the investigation. The sonata's return in the last movement to themes stated in the first is the very model of the detective story plot adopted by Duras whereby the detective reproduces the opening crime in the final confrontation scene. (pp. 508-09)

The men to whom [Duras' heroines] are attracted exercise the fascination of death. They are murderers, fugitives, outsiders: the representatives of death. Their function is to lead the women through the rites de passage, by means of endless conversations, to the point at which they accept the fate of the women who preceded them as victims.

The method of initiation is not the physical act of love, but dialogue, a ritual form of question and answer which resembles a police interrogation. Like a well-briefed inspector, Chauvin already seems to know a great deal about Anne. He seems, in fact, able to see through the walls of her villa and to describe the interior, just as he sees into the inner desires of her soul. Thus, he speaks to her in the God-like voice of the second-person plural…. The vous is the voice of the detective who relates to the criminal how he performed his act in a triumphant display of knowledge. It is the persistent use of the second person which elicits the confession, forcing the criminal to assume responsibility for his act.

In a similar way, Chauvin gains control over Anne by the sheer duration of the dialogue, by the hypnotic effect of the endless repetitions. His commands, "parlez-moi, continuez," do elicit the capital revelation that has been awaited from the beginning, the confession of identity between witness and victim. Anne and Chauvin must talk until the magic words are said, until they have achieved in words what the other couple accomplished in deed…. (pp. 510-11)

Anne and Chauvin adopt the notion of the participation of the victim in the crime with such force that this explanation must clearly be a projection of their own situation. They unravel the mystery gradually, not in a scientific attempt to get at the facts, but through sheer invention. Their investigation is not just a reconstruction but a creation of its own….

The key to a comprehension of the mysterious past is the detective's ritual of reenactment which brings the fusion of identity between one individual and another. To understand the suffering of another, Duras suggests, one must become him. (p. 512)

[L'Amante anglaise] is the most police-like of all of Duras' creations. We never see the actual crime take place, only its investigation by an anonymous questioner. The entire novel is built on the question-and-answer form of a police interrogation. (p. 515)

It is, in fact, a reworking of her own play, Les Viaducs de la Seine-et-Oise (1960). The change in title reveals Duras' interest—in the novel—in the mystery of Claire [heroine of L'Amante anglaise] and her capacity for invention. What intrigued Duras in the play was the fatality of the viaduct. In the novel, Duras shows the murder to have been as inevitable as its detection, yet fundamentally incomprehensible. As the gratuity of the title L'Amante anglaise suggests, no investigation will succeed in understanding Claire's private world of madness….

The notion of the viaduct reveals a definite conception of the world, where from disparate pieces of reality it becomes possible to reconstruct the whole. Despite the dismemberment and the geographical dispersion of the separate entities, each part cries out for the whole; an appearance of unity is maintained. The vision of the parts leaving and returning from the viaduct could be diagrammed as a group of concentric circles which corresponds to the obsessive forms which haunt other nouveaux romans, notably the "huit couché" of Le Voyeur or "l'as de trèfles" of La Route de Flandres. The recurring motif represents the attempt to impose a pattern on the chaos of reality, to seek in repetition a grand design in the universe—an attempt which fails in the nouveau roman as the very circularity of the form forces an infinity of interpretations. (p. 516)

The questioner in L'Amante anglaise may also be a writer: the novel is his project. Like so many new novels, L'Amante anglaise is an "anti-novel." The complete use of the question-and-answer form underscores the tentativeness of the writer's task. Duras has lost confidence in the straight narrative; the dialogue which was always a cornerstone of her work now takes over completely. The role of the author is not to explain, or even relate, but merely to ask questions and to listen. The novel ends without concluding. Duras has sent out various possible versions of Claire Lannes' crime, all going in different directions, much as the parts of the body all left on different trains. If they are to converge at a center, it is for the reader to determine the location. (pp. 518-19)

The anonymous questioner fails in his investigation, because unlike Anne Desbaresdes … he does not become the other, which would end the need for all questions. The failure of the questioner to exhaust the enigma of Claire Lannes compels the reader, like a Duras character, to take up the inquiry….

Claire Lannes is typical of Duras' heroines in her capacity for identifying with others. All of Duras' work leads toward this identity, whether it is the fusion of past with present, or the fusion of one individual with another. (p. 519)

The theme of involvement is very close to the notion of responsibility articulated by the authors of existential fiction. Duras may represent a bridge between the moralists of the earlier period and the current group of new novelists…. It is no accident that Duras is practically the only experimental novelist to deal with the couple and consequently to envision the possibility of dialogue….

The detective story for Duras opens moral possibilities. The investigations in her novels do not necessarily end in failure. A communion is achieved. The detective's fusion with his victim opens the way toward a wider moral involvement and enhances the opportunities for human understanding…. The criminal act is itself a love act, as if murder could transcend the excruciating separateness of the individual and bring one, for that privileged moment, into communion with another. (p. 520)

Erica M. Eisinger, "Crime and Detection in the Novels of Marguerite Duras," in Contempory Literature (© 1974 by The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System), Vol. 15, No. 4, Autumn, 1974, pp. 503-20.