MEDIATED FACES. Although the face serves as a nexus of meaning throughout Duras’s entire oeuvre, perhaps the most well-known use of this image is in L’Amant (1984), a later novel that opens with a description of, ostensibly, the author’s face. In many of the initial critical responses to this novel, reviewers pointed to this face as proof that the text created a transparent link between the work and the author’s life: “enfin Xxxxxxxxxx Xxxxx raconte Xxxxxxxxxx Xxxxx.”59 As I have already discussed in the previous chapter, however, the visage in Duras’s works is distinctly not a site of identity and identification. Subsequently, the famous “visage détruit” of L’Amant does not merely challenge autobiography’s pretention to creating a true portrait, although this effect is certainly important. Instead, the allegedly autobiographical “destroyed face” provides a further, and perhaps more complicated, understanding of the centrality of the face in Duras’s works, certainly in connection to Lol’s, Stretter’s, and Aurélia’s indiscernible faces. While Duras might create her face as a permeable boundary between identity and non- identity like the visages of her female characters, Duras’s autofictive works focus more on how the corporeality and physicality of the face can still contribute to its dissolution in the text. Unlike the three women of the previous chapter, Duras’s autofictive characters’ faces emerge in the equalization of interior and exterior forces. 58 This quotation is taken from the interview “Duras toute entière…” in Le Nouvel Observateur. 59 In “Une femme sans aveu,” Xxxxxxxx Xxxxxx examines the critical reception of L’Amant, citing many sentiments that echo the one used here (4).
