The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras

First published:Un Barrage contre la Pacifique, 1950 (English translation, 1952; also as A Sea of Troubles, 1953)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1920’s

Locale: The Pacific coastal plain of French Indochina and the colonial city of Kam

Principal Characters:

• Ma, a struggling, widowed French homesteader
• Joseph, Ma’s frustrated and cynical son
• Suzanne, Ma’s daughter, a pretty but rough young woman
• Monsieur (Jo) Joseph, Suzanne’s suitor, the unattractive, wealthy son of a rubber planter

The Novel

The Sea Wall, which documents one form of colonial oppression by chronicling the intimate life of an idiosyncratic family, is a masterpiece of narrative strategy. The characters’ intense, often abusive relationships are shaped by spiritually debilitating cultural conditions and defy conventional moral expectations.

The narrative begins when Ma and her two children have lived on their land concession for three years and recounts the family’s history to date: Ma, widowed soon after moving to the colony, obtained the land from the colonial government with savings earned from many years of hard work as a cinema piano player. Her hopes of a comfortable income from rice farming have been worn away by the yearly floods on the land—the Pacific flooding which has driven several other families from the same concession. After the first flood, Ma gathered together the native plain dwellers and, with the halfhearted consent of the local land agents, planned and executed the construction of a great seawall to drain the land and make it arable. For all of their efforts, however, the annual flood came and destroyed the wall in a single night.

Since that flood, Ma, heavily in debt from her failed project, is obsessively preoccupied with building another, stronger wall and prevailing over the land agents, who will profit from her failure to cultivate the land by repossessing and then reselling it. Ma still maintains a subsistence banana crop, and her children have accommodated themselves to a bleak existence by entertaining passive fantasies in which a rich, attractive stranger of the opposite sex rescues them from the plain.

A stranger does appear on the plain, and while not attractive, he is rich and therefore desirable. Monsieur Jo begins his courtship of Suzanne in a seedy nightclub where he meets the girl and her family. This location sets the illicit tone which characterizes the whole relationship. Bearing gifts, the unpleasant man visits Suzanne alone in the family’s bungalow, with Ma strategically positioned within earshot but not in view of the house. Joseph makes no effort to mask his contempt for the vacuous Monsieur Jo, which stems from his disgust at Suzanne’s prostitution for the family.

Suzanne, increasingly aware of her body as a family asset and potential commodity, draws closer to her brother as her relationship with Monsieur Jo magnifies the economic and personal inequities already present between the two men. Comparing her aggressive brother to Monsieur Jo, she is repulsed by her weak suitor, who, although desiring Suzanne sexually, will not marry a woman of her low social position. Even after giving her a diamond ring, Monsieur Jo fails to seduce Suzanne. Instead, he is perfunctorily expelled from the family circle. Although, in obtaining the ring, Suzanne has executed the family’s objective with Monsieur Jo, she is beaten for her pains by Ma, who encourages but cannot accept the family’s moral debasement.

After the family has the ring, the scene of the narrative shifts to the colonial city where Ma, Joseph, and Suzanne travel to sell their acquisition. While Ma runs from one diamond dealer to another, desperately trying to get a higher price for the ring, Suzanne and Joseph separately wander the city, going to cinemas and fantasizing about what they see on the screen. Suzanne meets and rejects another suitor, Joseph Burner, an English wool salesman wanting a pure and submissive wife; Suzanne cannot sell a false representation of herself to a man who pales in comparison to her brother.

Meanwhile, Joseph disappears with a beautiful, wealthy woman, to whom he finally sells the ring—and from whom he returns, after a long tryst, with a sum of money and, bizarrely, the ring. Ma pays off her debts, only to suffer a great irony: No longer abjectly poor, she cannot give up the burden of her ambitions; she is now too solvent to justify acquiescing to the native’s poverty level. Grown ill and in despair, Ma returns to the plain with her children.

The trip to the city has profoundly changed the family. Joseph remains on the concession only long enough to gather his possessions and soon departs with his lover in a sleek automobile. While Ma’s health deteriorates, Suzanne achieves a certain degree of autonomy by taking a lover—the son of another homesteader named, not surprisingly, Joseph. The novel ends with Ma’s death, releasing the family from its futile struggle to achieve affluence. At the same time, the terms of the children’s psychological struggles are irrevocably altered. Their mother’s death signals a release from obligation—and a mournful recognition of all that the absence of that obligation implies.

The Characters

The main characters in this novel suffer, paradoxically, for both their closeness to and alienation from one another. Much of the dialogue appears banal, and frequently irrelevant, but these trivial exchanges invariably contain greater, emotionally significant meanings. The family’s inarticulateness prevents them from engaging in direct confrontations yet permits them to communicate in ways deliberately excluding outsiders. Thus, when Ma and her children first met Monsieur Jo, the family jokingly relates the story of the sea wall. He fatuously pronounces the family “formidably droll,” not realizing that their hysterical laughter masks deep frustration.

Comprehending the innuendo employed by Ma’s family requires an understanding of the characters’ values. Ma, whose plans to build and rebuild the sea walls are inspired by her faith in reason, suffers a profound sense of betrayal at the hands of justice. A schoolteacher before her husband died, Ma retains a sense of class position which is continually at odds with a perverse desire to give up and sink into acute poverty. After her debts have been paid and her source of capital is returned to her, Ma simply sobs, “I don’t have the strength to begin all over again.” Surrendering to the knowledge that her idealism has failed her, she no longer battles the land agents, because she finally understands that her failure is not an anomaly, but an effect of their corruption.

Suzanne and Joseph never face the same moment of surrender because, although they apprehend Ma’s sense of justice and class ambition, they do not share it. Born and reared after the days of the family’s good fortune,the children compensate for the rough conditions by living in a rich fantasy world fueled by popular concepts of romance. That the beautiful, wealthy woman of Joseph’s dreams does come to rescue him strongly suggests that the children’s sense of reality, more than their mother’s, is reflected in the novel. With a shift in narrative voice, Joseph himself tells the story of his affair with the woman in the city. By conceding narrative authority to Joseph, Marguerite Duras permits a determined unwillingness to adopt class pretenses to assume a dominant position over conventional bourgeois values.

Suzanne, like her brother, waits to be rescued from her mother’s failed dreams, but Suzanne must first overcome the worshipful attitude toward her brother which threatens to paralyze her. Her fascination with Joseph constantly borders on incestuous desire, an effect emphasized by a juxtaposition of events. After she spurns Monsieur Jo, her first thought is to find Joseph and go swimming with him; after seeing a romantic film in the city, she wanders the streets hoping to encounter her brother, who has been absent for several days. Suzanne’s fascination with Joseph is broken only when she takes a lover by her own will, desirable because “[y]ou might say he resembled Joseph.” Although perhaps only transferring her desire, Suzanne finally gains sovereignty over her mind and body at the end of the novel.

The other characters in The Sea Wall—Monsieur Jo, Joseph Burner, Suzanne’s lover Joseph (a liquor smuggler), and Carmen (a city hotel owner who practices prostitution to prevent boredom)—all serve to flesh out the portrait of colonial life and colonial enterprise. Honor never rests on the side of conventional legitimacy with these figures, reinforcing the reversal of conventional values which separates Ma from her children.

Critical Context

A prolific author of more than twenty novels, many plays and films, and several important essays, Marguerite Duras maintains an important position in twentieth century French and international literary and intellectual life. The Sea Wall, Duras’ third novel, was the first of her works to be translated into English, and it won for her wide international attention. It was made into a film by Rene Clement in 1967.

Unlike some of her later works, which defy standard generic classification, The Sea Wall is recognizably a novel, although its narrative structure, which lacks conventional characterization, plot development, and closure, is an important moment for surveying Duras’ developing technique. The themes of absence, memory, and longing for a past love, occurring in a politically and historically significant context, are continually present and under revision in her work. Frequently, Duras’ works make specific reference to one another (L’Eden Cinema, a 1977 theater production, contains specific plot and character elements also present in The Sea Wall). Transgressing generic lines, or reinscribing characters and plot, the core of Duras’ creative production is a fascination with the subject in process, which enables her works to be read as a reflexive continuum.

Duras allows personal psychic material to permeate and shape her work. Her childhood memories significantly inform the plot of The Sea Wall (like Ma, Duras’ mother was a failed colonial planter in French Indochina). Duras’ third-person use of autobiographical material in The Sea Wall suggests but does not yet achieve, the ambiguity of voice and blurred distinctions between self and other apparent in later works, most notably L’Amant (1984; The Lover, 1985).

Bibliography

Blake, Patricia, “The Stronger Bulwark,” in The New York Times Book Review. LXIII (March 15, 1953), p. 5.

Cismaru, Alfred, Marguerite Duras, 1971.

Kristeva, Julia. “The Pain of Sorrow in the Modern World: The Works of Marguerite Duras,” in PMLA. CII, no. 2 (1987), pp. 138-152.

Murphy, Carol J. Alienation and Absence in the Novels of Marguerite Duras, 1982.

Pierrot, Jean. Marguerite Duras, 1986.

Willis, Sharon. Marguerite Duras: Writing on the Body, 1987.