A photo of the courtyard in the house in Hanoi becomes a symbol of the broken family: the father’s death and the mother’s descent into despair (31). The book is comprised mainly in “the light of haze and heat” as though we are seeing the story through a fogged mirror or tinted glass, as though we too are standing on the deck of a boat.Īs the story continues we come to more scenes that circulate deliberately around images. So you see it wasn’t in the bar at Ream, as I wrote, that I met the rich man with the black limousine, it was after we left the land by the dike, two or three years after, on the ferry, the day I’m telling you about, in that light of haze and heat -Marguerite Duras, The Lover, 27. The book both opens and closes with the image of the narrator leaving the island for France, and yet despite this indication of a closed circuit–a proper start and end date to their liaison–what happened in-between remains hazy: The writer–even when writing about the Self–is always creating art.
Duras implores us to question the possibility of ‘reporting’ the acts of emotional life. It no longer matters exactly what happened between the lovers, but rather what affect it produced.
Her past and present personas never not meld perfectly, and these frictions produce the story.Īs the novel continues we begin to question the veracity of the narrator’s recollections. The family breaks apart at the seams, but the writer-voice remains conscious of the difficulties in recording this trauma: “In the books I’ve written about my childhood I can’t remember, suddenly, what I left out, what I said” (25) Memoir is an imperfect landscape the narrator is still learning to navigate. The narrator is aware that her whiteness does not protect her from misogyny or from her abusive but obliquely described older brother. Through this theme of transgression–both familial and sexual–Duras explores the complicated layers of duty and honor complicated by the whiteness of a French family inhabiting an Asian island. The book therefore becomes an act of resistance and an act of personal defiance and declaration: the daughter speaks for herself as if to say: I am a writer and therefore a dissenter, a recorder of things past. She replies to the mother firmly that she wants to write “more than anything in the whole world” (22). Her body and her mind are still growing and they grow in opposition to any forces of control around her–whether those be societal, generational, governmental. But the daughter is young and alive: she is in a constant state of flux. The girl’s desire to write is of course complicated by another central figure in the novel, her mother, who remains “ignorant” of the affair for as long as possible and repeats that the daughter must get a degree in mathematics.
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