La valeur de l’ “impersonnel” dans Un barrage contre le Pacifique de Marguerite Duras: Analyse sémiotique du discours littéraire

Abstract

A dam against the Pacific is one of Marguerite Duras’s novels and is based on the author’s life. The story told traces the succinct panorama of Indochina in the 1940s. The novel is about a time when thousands of French families were leaving for Indochina for a better life. One of these families is the Duras family. This article is based on a semiotic analysis of an excerpt from the novel (Duras, 1950, p. 115-119) which is a description of the plain where the protagonists and the natives live. The long description of the Kam Plain, which is our corpus of analysis, draws not only a precise topographical space, but also the living space of the natives. Our analysis focuses on the recurring elements of the narrator’s discourse to reveal the semantic organization proposed by the general universe of the narrative. Our approach is that of semiotic analysis of literary discourse as it is elaborated and practiced in the work of A. J. Greimas, D. Bertrand and J. Fontanille, but also by linguists and narratologists J.-M. Adam and J.-P. Goldenstein. The analysis takes into account two aspects of the text: the statement and the enunciation. The discursive units frequently used in this description draw the isotopies of the corpus. The figurative and thematic elements allow us to address the profound organization of the meaning of the text.