Present Love and the Remembrance of Mythical Love in The Sailor from Gibraltar and Hiroshima mon amour

The Sailor from Gibraltar (1952), as Joëlle Pagès-Pindon points out, occupies an ambiguous position in the Durassian canon, especially when the author commented retrospectively on her writing. On the one hand, in Les Parleuses (1974), Duras highlights the ease with which she wrote the works from this period, which she regarded as “vulgar”, describing the writing style as naïve and overly “full”. On the other hand, in several interviews, she claimed elements of The Sailor from Gibraltar seem still contemporary to her, especially concerning the narrative flow. There are notable connections, e.g. the triangular relationship between the narrator, Anna and the sailor, similar to the triangulation between the French woman, the German soldier and the Japanese man in Hiroshima mon amour. This latter work, a milestone in Duras' writing, is often associated with Moderato Cantabile, but critical studies of Duras' works generally overlook the similarities between the 1959 screenplay and the 1952 novel. Therefore, this article aims to address the construction of this triangulation in both texts, demonstrating the constitutive aspects of The Sailor from Gibraltar as a precursor to Hiroshima mon amour and to the works Duras herself considered part of her mature phase.