Her very sympathetic doctor would visit her almost daily and offer to take her to the hospital, but only if she wanted to live. She said she drank because she knew God did not exist. Then they would start uncorking cheap Bordeaux and she’d drink two glasses, vomit, then continue on till she’d drunk as many as nine liters and would pass out. Just when people thought her liver or her kidneys would give out, she rose from her ashes and wrote The Lover (1984), a story drawn from her youth in Indochina that sold a million copies in forty-three languages and became the inspiration for a major commercial movie.īefore her cure, she was holed up in her château dictating one much-worked-on line a day to Andréa, who would type it up. She was very old-in her seventies-and very alcoholic, and her disintoxication cure in late 1982 at the American Hospital was much written about (not only by journalists-she wrote about it, and her companion Yann Andréa did as well in a book called M.D.). There may be more than one pertinent intertext: overdetermination provides multiple motivations for.Marguerite Duras was a huge presence in the 1980s and early 1990s when I lived in Paris. In the latter case the reader may not be knowledgeable of a specific intertext, but an intertext will be presupposed because of the deictic intertextual trace of ungrammaticality. For Riffaterre every ungrammaticality is a sign of grammaticality elsewhere: "the poetic sign has two faces: textually ungrammatical, intertextually grammatical displaced and distorted in the mimesis system, but in the semiotic grid appropriate and rightly placed" (Semiotics 164).įor Riffaterre an intertext may be aleatory (the reader may or may not enrich his or her understanding by bringing intertextual knowledge to the reading) or determinate (there is an intertext that is signaled by ungrammaticality, and which is necessary for comprehension of the text). Ungrammaticalities are understood through reference to other texts, termed intertexts, which may be conventional forms and styles, cliches and formulae, fragments of texts or entire texts. The second semiotic reading elucidates what Riffaterre terms "ungrammaticalities," anything unusual (formal or semantic) or which does not fit mimesis, in particular ambiguities, contradictions, and indeterminacies. If there are aspects that do not fit a mimetic reading, a second reading is made to gain an understanding of non-referential aspects such as tropes, ambiguities, contradictions, and sound patterns that create meaning. The text is first read in a linear fashion in which the referential or mimetic dominates. For Riffaterre there are two stages of reading: the heuristic/referential stage producing meaning and the retroactive/hermeneutic stage producing significance. Riffaterre is well known for his detailed and perspicacious readings of poetry, and for a theoretical framework explaining his practice of reading that seems to have been elaborated independently from work by other theorists. These processes are conditioned by the material and financial contingencies specific to cinema, and by ambient target culture discourses and ideology reflected in studio style, ideological fashion, political constraints, auteur's predilections, economic advantage, and evolving technology (Stam 68-69).Īs compared with Stam's notion of dialogism that conceptualizes a simultaneity or forward movement of evolving texts, Riffaterre proposes a backward-looking search for intertexts for the purposes of elucidation. Film adaptation can be conceived as the reproduction and transformation of intertexts through various processes such as selection, amplification, popularization, and reculturalization. Stam proposes the concept of "intertextual dialogism," whereby a film is conceived as a turn in an ongoing dialogical process such that it bears the traces of multiple intertexts (64). In the discussion of film adaptation the concept of "intertextuality" has served the useful purpose of transcending the moralistic statements often associated with "fidelity," although the latter notion remains important.
Riffaterre's theory thus provides a new and interesting way of analyzing film adaptations.
I shall show, however, how certain Riffaterrian "ungrammaticalities" in the film, inconsistencies and unusual elements, can be understood as approximating the subtle complexity of the novel.
The film has been widely seen as a seriously inadequate adaptation of Marguerite Duras's novel L'amant. In this article I shall use Michael Riffaterre's theory of intertextuality to re-examine the film The Lover.