SOURCE: “The Cafe Duras: Mourning Descriptive Space,” in French Forum, Vol. 19, No. 1, January, 1994, pp. 45-64.

In the following essay, Reid discusses the ways in which the café setting represents an “ideal inner space” in Duras's fiction.

… écrire, c'est ça aussi, sans doute, c'est effacer. Remplacer.

(Emily 32)¹

The café, like so many places in Marguerite Duras's novels, is less a material than a mental space that her characters construct and deconstruct in their minds. Within this inner, and some would say feminine, space, or rather, within the descriptive space that makes the fiction of space possible, desire and narrative are born and die in a seemingly unending repetition outside time, history, and narrative.² However, unlike the other interiorized spaces discussed by recent Duras criticism (Willis 168), Duras's café is a space in which characters exchange words and desires, not only as lovers, but also as traders buying and selling commodities...