In 1973, French writer and feminist Xavière Gauthier set out to compose a series of articles on women's writing for the newspaper Le Monde. Unlike her other interviews, the conversation she had with Marguerite Duras morphed into a long series of recordings, leading Gauthier to Duras's retreat at Neauphle-le-Château where the two spent an entire summer together, conversing and making jam. The recordings were ultimately compiled into a book, Les Parleuses, which opens with a discussion on the peculiarities of Duras's literary language. Here, Duras explains that her perceived departure from traditional prose and narratives—which would make her one of the most prominent figures of French literary modernism—might be a way to draw the reader's attention to what literature is actually unable to put into words. Her writing should be considered, she says, as an engagement with “blanks,” as an exploration of “the feminine” materializing an unvoiced female sensuality, marked by eroticism and pain. This aesthetic engagement with “the feminine” requires us to consider the sexual and emotional life of women alongside their material conditions since the depiction of women, Duras adds, must be a commitment to “the real” and even to materialism. To that effect, the textual embodiment of blanks is in fact one experimental technique among many that Duras uses to materialize the feminine, all the way to the most mundane details of domestic life, notably the preparation and consumption of food.

This chapter recasts the connection between literary experimentation and feminine matter/material experiences through the treatment of food, cooking, and gastronomy in two of Duras's early novels, Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinia (1953) and Moderato Cantabile (1958), in which the author, searching for her literary voice, explores ways to dismantle traditional narratives. Recent publications in Durassian scholarship have rethought Duras's engagement with matter by attending to the circulation of desire in her work, to her ethical commitments and to her depictions of mundane everyday life. This latter aspect, explored by Mireille Calle-Gruber in her 2014 monograph, Marguerite Duras: la noblesse de la banalité, is particularly interesting with regard to Duras's treatment of the silent, hidden, domestic life of women.