The Crushed Nettle by Marguerite Duras
"The Crushed Nettle" by Marguerite Duras is a narrative that explores the tension between different social worlds through a brief yet poignant encounter between a factory worker named Lucien and a well-dressed stranger. Set against a backdrop of overgrown nettles and a partially paved road, the story symbolically juxtaposes nature and urban decay, reflecting themes of abandonment and loss. The nettles, described as an invasive force, serve as a powerful metaphor for the encroachment of nature on a neglected landscape, while also providing a stark contrast to the stranger's polished appearance.
The dialogue between Lucien and the stranger reveals a deeper struggle for connection and understanding, as both characters grapple with silence and the ineffability of their experiences. Lucien's simple yet profound statement about losing part of his finger becomes a moment of vulnerability that starkly contrasts with the stranger's mechanical responses, highlighting the emotional chasm between them. Duras skillfully captures the ambient sounds of their environment—voices, children crying, and the absence of meaningful words—underscoring the difficulties of communication across their disparate realities. Ultimately, the act of the stranger crushing a nettle symbolizes his painful attempt to engage with Lucien's reality, yet it emphasizes his limited impact on the broader context of neglect and suffering that surrounds them. The story invites readers to reflect on the complexities of human connection amidst stark social divides.
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The Crushed Nettle by Marguerite Duras
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: “L’Ortie brisée,” 1985 (collected in The War: A Memoir, 1986)
Type of work: Short story
The Work
“The Crushed Nettle” recounts a confrontation between a factory worker, Lucien, who is having his lunch, and a stranger who wears a light-colored suit and smokes English cigarettes. The story centers on two important symbols: the nettles and a hole. This story contains not only a symbol system typical of Duras’s work but also an important treatment of silence and the inherent tensions of conversation.
In the beginning of the story, the nettles are described as growing in the spaces between the paving stones and “against the fences around the wooden houses: an invasion.” The nettles claimed the spaces between the paving stones that had been brought there in years past, the city government apparently having abandoned the idea of paving the road. The nettles are also providing a feeding spot for the flies in the heavy and warm summer air. This backdrop frames Lucien, the stranger, the ten-year-old boy, and his baby brother, around noon, near a dump.
The road that is not completely paved leads to a hole “overgrown with a tangle of old iron and nettles.” The juxtaposition of nature and civilization is brought to the reader’s attention with the explanation, “The city ends where the weeds and old iron begin. The war has left it behind.”
Duras suggests that the stranger in the light-colored suit is like the city that has been left behind. The stranger is separate from the world of pain—of nettles—that is familiar to Lucien and the children. Duras repeats her description of the background sounds: “From the shacks there comes the sound of crockery, voices, the squalling of children, mothers shouting, no words.” The background noise of no words matches the difficulty in communicating experienced by the stranger and Lucien. The moment of crisis in the story occurs after Lucien explains that he lost part of his finger; the stranger (after an interruption in the conversation by the ten-year-old boy) expresses sympathy with Lucien and says, “And you went back to the same job.” The attempt to understand the life of Lucien leads the stranger into “speaking mechanically, of being silent, instead of dying. He has something shut up inside himself that he can’t say, can’t reveal. Because he doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t know how one speaks about death. He is confronted with himself just as the man and the little boy are.”
The stranger has been drawn to this road leading to a hole and has struggled to make a connection with Lucien. Duras’s commentary on the connection consists of describing the stranger’s grasping a nettle and crushing it in his hand, painful for him, but having very little impact on the whole clump of nettles.
Bibliography
Adler, Laure. Marguerite Duras: A Life. Translated by Anne-Marie Glasheen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Cohen, Susan. Women and Discourse in the Fiction of Marguerite Duras: Love, Legends, Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993.
Crowley, Martin. Duras, Writing, and the Ethical: Making the Broken Whole. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Duras, Marguerite, and Xaviere Gauthier. Woman to Woman. Translated and with an afterword by Katherine A. Jensen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.
Glassman, Deborah. Marguerite Duras: Fascinating Vision and Narrative Cure. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1991.
Günther, Renate. Marguerite Duras. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Hill, Leslie. Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. London: Routledge, 1993.
Hofmann, Carol. Forgetting and Marguerite Duras. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 1993.
Schuster, Marilyn R. Marguerite Duras Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1993.
Selous, Trista. The Other Woman: Feminism and Femininity in the Work of Marguerite Duras. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988.
Winston, Jane Bradley. Postcolonial Duras: Cultural Memory in Postwar France. New York: Palgrave, 2001.