La réalité et l'imaginaire de Gdańsk dans L'Été 80 (1980) de Marguerite Duras

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the relationship between reality and fiction in L’Été 80, a collection of journalistic chronicles by Marguerite Duras. The workers’ strike at the Gdańsk shipyards in Poland constitutes a central motif that particularly captures the writer’s attention in the work’s second half. The historical significance of this event, as well as its personal resonance for Duras, turns the passages devoted to it into a meeting point between objectivity and subjectivity, reality and fiction. Through her writing, Duras elevates the Gdańsk strike to the status of an event that is both historical and mythical, where the informative and the narrative, the concrete and the abstract, intertwine. It thus becomes clear that, in Duras’s work, the aim is not to distinguish reality from fiction, but to reflect on their constant and reciprocal interaction within a space where boundaries are deliberately blurred.