Duras: The Sailor from Gibraltar

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Duras: The Sailor from Gibraltar

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1StevenTX
Août 5, 2013, 12:51 pm

The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras
First published 1952 as Le Marin de Gibraltar
English translation 1966 by Barbara Bray

 

The Sailor from Gibraltar is both a story of sexual obsession and an extended existential metaphor. The narrator (who never gives us his name) is a French civil servant on vacation in Italy with his girlfriend. Faced with returning to a meaningless job and living with a woman he does not love, he seizes upon the tale of a rich American woman whose yacht is anchored off the Tuscan coast. This woman, so the story goes, is sailing the world in search of her lost lover, a sailor from Gibraltar. But she takes on other lovers in the meantime, picking them up in one port, dropping them off in another when she gets tired of them. The narrator contrives to meet this woman (who turns out to be French, not American), sends his girlfriend packing, abandons his job and his luggage, and sails away with nothing but the clothes on his back as the new lover of the woman who is searching for the sailor from Gibraltar.

"Looking for someone is like everything else: to do it well you must do nothing else, you mustn't even regret giving up any other activity, you must never doubt for a moment that it's worthwhile for one man to devote his whole life to looking for another."

Anna, the rich woman, follows tips sent her by agents (former lovers) from all over the world in search of her runaway sailor. They crisscross the Mediterranean, then voyage to West Africa and finally the Congo on tips that he has been seen running a gas station one place, smuggling diamonds somewhere else.

Anna admits that she is almost relieved when each lead turns up false and the quest can go on. Does she even want to find sailor at this point, or is the search all that matters? "Sometimes it's not what you desire the most that you want, but the opposite--to be deprived of what you desire the most."

Passing at night into the Atlantic, the narrator muses, "We left the Rock behind, and with it the disturbing and vertiginous reality of the world... She turned at last and looked at me. 'Suppose I'd invented it all?' she said. 'All of it?' 'Yes.' 'It wouldn't make much difference,' I said."

The meaning of life--"God" if you wish--is never something we find, only something we look for. Life's purpose is only the journey, not the destination.

Anna asks the narrator at one point what he will do with the rest of his life, and he replies that he will write an American novel about their time together. Why American? Because in American novels they drink whiskey, and he and Anna are drinking it then. They both drink a lot, in fact, and the narrator's moments of sobriety are very few. In style, content and setting Duras's writing here much resembles that of Ernest Hemingway, and there are several references to Hemingway in the novel itself. I found even more similarity between The Sailor from Gibraltar and the work of Duras's American contemporary, Paul Bowles.